Page 107 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

Back to our example: (Stage 2B: QUESTIONING & IDEAS)
In our holiday example, I may want to ask the question, “Was the weather forecast for the town of Ronda predicted by an independent person or was the forecast predicted by the person who runs the hotel that I am staying in?” Socratic questions such as this one, assists us to interrogate our own, as well as others, assumptions. The ability of the learner to ask the right type of question is a critical competency. The type of question required may be one that is simple, through to one that may be rich, open or closed, Socratic, or involve high-order thinking across each of the question types. Questioning our knowledge helps us build ideas.131
Another example of an idea can be seen below, with the variables highlighted in black. The example is only an idea because the two underlined variables are only related to one context – ‘Australia.’
Building on cutting edge work at Oxford University, new analysis by PwC shows that 44% (or 5.1 million) of current Australian jobs are at high risk of being affected by computerisation and technology over the next 20 years.132 PwC; A Smart Move
Creating ideas in a short timeframe is not uncommon. Ideas are an extension of knowledge, however ideas do not allow us to predict accurately how that idea may be expressed in other contexts. If we attempted this, it would be more of a guess than a prediction. A guess is when we suggest a possible outcome for another context when we have only experienced or understood that idea in one or two contexts. Ideas help us guess, but they do not help us predict with any surety.
In the poster for learners that follows, we can see that the Learning Process is gradually unfolding. It is important that learners do not see the Learning Process as a linear process, but rather, a process that is dynamic, continually transitioning from needing more knowledge to build a new idea and then more knowledge again to create another idea and then interrogating those ideas across a range of contexts to see whether there is an underlying pattern that might give rise to an underlying concept. The Learning Process is an unpredictable cycle of numerous sub processes.
He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. Elie Wiesel (Author of ‘Night’)
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131 Primary questions: The initial primary question – open/closed/fertile, rich, high-order thinking, Socratic, etc. Secondary questions: Questions that help unpack the primary question.
Tertiary questions: Questions that help find the most appropriate information resources.
Quaternary questions: Questions that help synthesising and distilling the research.
See: http://www.marktreadwell.com/products – ‘The Competencies’ for full reading on this topic.
132 PwC (Australia). (2015, April). A Smart Move. PwC STEM Report. Retrieved from http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/government- public-services/public-sector-research-centre/australia/smart-move.html