Really Useful Knowledge: Orlando

I got to go to a conference in Orlando. I blogged it elsewhere. Here are the links:
EISTA at Orlando
The trouble with…
Orlando weather forecast
Peer assessment
Technology
Our presentations
Low end ICTs in teacher education in S Africa
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando II
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando III
Final post from Orlando - on the effect of conferences

Really Useful Knowledge

Early in the nineteenth century some more enlightened business owners started funding teaching for their workers. They realised that workers were more productive if they understood what they were doing. This was the beginning of things like the Mechanics' Institutes, and the knowledge that men learned there - maths, physics, engineering - was called "useful knowledge". It had to be "useful" of course or there was no reason to pay for it.

Later in the nineteenth century the workers began to demand a different kind of learning. They wanted to know about why it was that businesses worked the way they did. They wanted to know about their place in the world. They wanted to know about their relations to other peoples and about the human condition. They wanted politics, economics, philosophy. This was the birthplace of organisations like the Workers' Educational Association, which still carries on that philosophy today, both nationally and internationally. And ultimately they were ancestors of the Open University and its open admissions policy.

To distinguish this knowledge from the knowledge they learned on their bosses' behalf, they called it "really useful knowledge".

Really Useful Knowledge

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Orlando

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