TEL-lingit like IT is

I've submitted a response to the current Productivity Commission exercise considering aspects of the New Zealand tertiary education system. Unsurprisingly it has an explicit focus on innovation, which seems a key theme right across higher education providers at the moment. My current role sees me responsible for a fantastic team of dedicated learning and teaching innovators, and I'm proud to be able to say that their ideas really rock my world from time to time. I'm even prouder to say that I am actively encouraging them to make me uncomfortable. My interest in innovation goes back to - I'm embarrassed to say - last Millennium , when I studied entrepreneurship as part of my BMS at Waikato University. I was greatly influenced by reading the late, great Peter Drucker and encountering the theory of Joseph Schumpeter . The lessons from these classes, innovation in the context of entrepreneurship, have guided my interest in online distance education right from the start....

We don't just store bits of knowledge as stacked Lego bricks. Instead, we assimilate new knowledge within the stream of what we already know. In turn, the newly assimilated knowledge influences the stream of how we interpret new knowledge. In Making it stick , Brown, Roediger III and McDaniel define learning as "acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so [one] can make sense of future problems and opportunities" (2014, p.2). Learning, then, is a process of assimilation and extension. Sort of like a smudge.  The process of learning is often described in terms of a developing schemata   (Wikipedia article again highly recommended!) whereby what we already know both determines and changes as the result of what we learn. Such development might be equated with transformative learning , whereby an education doesn't just shape what we know; it also fundamentally changes our view of the world. It is here that the cognitive sciences ...