13/09/2020

From Agriculture to Communication to Medicine to Painting to Zero Waste Management – Rethinking Learning When All The World’s In A Daze

 

A Civil Service Professional, I educator can see that Education Secretary Leonor Briones has already embraced this new world:

Education Online.

Unfortunately, our teachers have shied away from it. Even our journalists have kept distance from distance learning!

White-haired Miss Leonor is almost 80, born 16 October 1940. Almost thoroughly white-haired, I am myself almost 80, older by 30 days. She is Secretary of Education; I am a Civil Service Professional teacher myself –

Both educators, we are living proofs that
Nobody is too old to learn something new!

But the Method of Teaching must fit the Material being Taught. Above, I superimposed the image of a girl studying Literature[1] (from WikiHow) by handwriting her notes – this is Very Old School. This is going backward in education.

By the way, I teacher am a self-taught digital man – today, I research via digital, take notes digital, write digital, read digital, rewrite digital, finalize digital. No sweat, because I taught myself to be a blogger, an earnest one since January 2007 when now PH Secretary of Agriculture William Dar was still Director General of ICRISAT (he was DG 2000-2014), and he enlisted me as an international consulting writer, work from home.

Above, I featured as the main image Miss Leonor because she is the First Learner in the World of Digital Education in the Philippines.

From the article written by Bonz Magsambol (10 September 2020, “Briones Says Modular Learning 'Expensive,' Has 'Big Effect' On Environment[2],Rappler.com), I can see that Miss Leonor’s thinking is holistic, meaning “Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts[3]” (American Heritage Dictionary). She has been thinking of the whole world of Education, from a common table at home to a whole school building – and realized that one needs only a little space to learn, not “a whole environment conducive to learning,” which schoolrooms are supposed to be.

“Modular learning” is “expensive” and has “big effect” on the environment. She explains that modular learning requires paper for printing.

May implikasyon ang dependence sa modular learning dahil baka uubusin natin ang mga puno natin sa kaka-produce [ng learning modules]. 'Yung demand for paper [is high]... malaki ang effect sa environment.

(There are implications of our dependence on modular learning because we might exhaust our trees just to produce those learning modules. The demand for paper is high… this has a big effect on the environment.)

I did not know Miss Leonor is also worried about the natural environment – which we all should be.

Since I consider Agriculture as the Handmaiden of National Development – aka Economic Development – I am now thinking about learning any and all of Agriculture online.

I am thinking of my alma mater, UP Los Baños, as the initiator of the new Digital Movement. Eventually, this will filter down to the farmers in the field who can receive instructions via their own cellphones. Then we will have digital farmers.

Digital is the way to go!@517



[1]https://www.wikihow.com/Utilize-Winter-Break-for-Studying
[2]https://rappler.com/nation/briones-modular-learning-expensive-effect-environment
[3]https://www.thefreedictionary.com/holistic

No comments:

Post a Comment

This Writer Sees, “When Farm Groups Go Up, Up Goes The Nation!” Kadiwa Is A Godsend – Whose Idea Do You Think?

National recovery is a prime concern of the Du30 Administration, and this is visible in the latest joint move of government agencies to gene...