>I have a bad feeling about where this is going. It looks to me like this:
>any activity that I don't, or won't, engage in without being paid (more or
>less literally) to do so by another person, can't possibly be called
>"learning".
Tauno Kekale, an adult educator from the University of Vaasa Continuing
Education Centre here replying, hello everybody. This week's digest was
full of interesting things but paying for learning was the thing that
caught my attention the most.
IMHO, the things to consider is our assumptions about the nature of 1)
human beings and 2) learning. The cognitive view to human beings, which I
think should be prevailing at the time being, says that we are always
interested in learning more whenever we notice something that doesn't fit
our current world view. "Older" views (theory X) state that human beings
don't do anything, not even learn, if you don't "motivate" (control) them.
If this simplified definition of our will to learn holds true, then it
wouldn't be possible to steer or better learning by paying someone some
dough ???
On the other hand, the assumption about what learning is (this must
certainly be defined before paying anybody; the motivating effect of bonus
payment is smaller than the irritating effect if somebody else feels one
has got a bonus for some unfair or unclear reason). If we have a Pavlovian
look at learning, then learning happens only when action is reinforced -
we have to pay. If we think that some learning happens all the time, be it
conscious or unconscious, personal or organizational, of immediate use or
to be of use later, then we are getting really big problems in defining
what learning is to be paid for and how much (the payment should bear some
relation to the thing learned ??)
Just my 2 cents (about 9 pennies Finnish) worth
regards, Tauno
-- _______________________________________________ "Everybody has some kind of disability. It's what we want to do with our abilities that matters"(Diane Golden) _______________________________________________ Tauno Kekale University of Vaasa Continuing Education Centre P.O.Box 297, 65101 Vaasa, Finland tel. (int)-358-61-3248 385, fax (int)-61-3248 488, email tauno.kekale@uwasa.fi