Why do live-learning and educator-driven communities matter?
Knowledge can be roughly placed into two categories, either codified knowledge or tacit knowledge. The distinction is important and will help explain why we at Eduweave keep harping on empowering educators to guide the social process of learning and building their own communities of practice and application.
Codified knowledge, often referred to as "recipe knowledge", is the knowledge that can be replicated to its full extent and applied easily - just like following a formula or a recipe, it will work and can be applied by just following steps. Now MOOCs or just googling around will suffice for the diffusion of such knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is a tough one to explain but is well expressed by Michael Polanyi (1958), a Hungarian-British polymath - "We know more than we can tell." Tacit knowledge is hard to document and codify, it comes from personal, professional and academic experience - certain tools of the trade that can only be reciprocated and built up through practice and application led by a domain-expert well versed in it.
It takes a very long time for tacit knowledge to be diffused into incumbent education systems and MOOCs simply cannot propagate such knowledge because of the very structure of edutainment that it urges through its pre-recorded content, senseless assignments and the very fact that an educator is just reduced to a content creator.
Communities of practice and application that Eduweave advocates, driven by domain experts and educators, existing practitioners and creators of tacit knowledge, have the greatest potential to propel tacit knowledge and diffuse it into the world - effect meaningful change and progress in today's constantly changing world.
We keep harping on about empowering educators to drive the social process of learning, something MOOCs can't do, and "Zoom Universities" have just forgotten about. Eduweave is using social learning as pedagogical leverage to put educators and students at the forefront, to create active learning communities that actualise the Social Cognitive Theory when it comes to knowledge acquisition. For transformational learning to occur, we need communities that interact and generate knowledge spillovers. We need communities of practice and application.
When conceptualising Eduweave, we wanted to bring back focus on the two most important stakeholders in the process of learning - educators and learners. Educators must have a space free from any influences of entities with motivation, to decide what to teach and how to teach, while having full ownership of their students, allowing them to create a thriving learning community. We are not restricted by investments in redundant physical structures but have created an abstract structure to better house education in today's knowledge economy.
We want to enable expert educators to fill in the gaps that exist between academia, industry and the common public to create the necessary conditions to inspire and educate more people to build the future.
Reach out to us through our socials and be a part of this movement in redefining education for today's knowledge economy!