What’s new in educational change since 2001?

I started my quest to answer this question with Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope’s New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Port Melbourne, Vic: Cambridge University Press, 2008) referring as I read to their website newlearningonline.com

I finished Chapter 2 ‘Life in Schools’ this morning. The chapter surveys the last one hundred years or so of life in school in three phases: Didactic education: The modern past, Authentic education: More recent times and Transformative education.

The first Chapter outlined what is ‘new’ about New Learning under 8 Dimensions also: The social significance of education, The institutional locations of learning, The tools of learning, The balance of agency, The significance of difference, The relation of the new to the old, The professional role of the teacher.

The focus on teaching and learning makes this book an excellent starting point on my visit to recent work on educational change.

Reading this book before work in the morning and listening to the BBC world service reports of the UK riots each night, after two chapters, I suspect the writers are way too optimistic about two things: human nature and technology.

Research Student Support from Social Networking

This article in Melbourne's The Age gives interesting examples of the way postgraduate students are using social networking sites to support each other through to completing their theses.

Does Philosophy Matter?

Does Philosophy Matter? is the challenging headline of a recent New York Times opinion piece by Stanley Fish, a professor of humanities and law at the Florida International University in Miami.

Fish answers his own question pretty much in the negative, at least when it comes to whether or not philosophy matters outside the university seminar. He reasons that when it comes to big life decisions, for example, deciding to divorce a spouse, espoused philosophical positions do not influence action.

Fish’s piece is responding to a critique of moral relativism by Paul Boghossian, The Maze of Moral Relativism. Boghossian refers to an article Fish wrote in 2001, Condemnation Without Absolutes as an illustration of the failure of moral relativism. Fish’s 2001 article was prompted by a journalist who asked him shortly after 9/11; did the attacks mean the end of postmodern relativism? His essay explained that the question was not helpful in promoting understanding of 9/11 because “Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many interpretations of an event is the true one.”

Fish accepts Boghossian’s definition of relativism as “the denial of moral absolutes” and justifies it by arguing that there is no way of gaining “universal assent” to any possible moral absolute one might suggest.

After reading these opinion pieces I am left with a few questions to ponder – Is moral relativism nihilism? Are there absolute moral facts? Are moral judgements normative or relativistic? What about postmodernist empathy for the 9/11 hijackers?

But does philosophy matter? That is not a question on which I will spend my time thinking about. I disagree with Fish; philosophical problems are meaningful to most children, teenagers and adults.