Sometimes when we’re in the thick of facillitating learning often via community exchanges (which are draining and intense sometimes) it is so easy to forget why we really promote learning, we can get lost in a haze of day-to-dayness. Sometimes its good to pause and realign with what causes us to pursue such elements as personalisation, autonomy, elearning. In effect for me personally this realignment is a return from criticality which was specifically sought for a better understanding and a more honest personal acceptence of the values that are embedded in both my practice & research, a full circle return back to the values and the rationale with which I started, though with them more firmly routed within myself for having explored them more deeply. 

Listening to a presentation by Professor Bob Fryer I was fully reminded of the wider elements and forces that underpin the changes that I as a practitioner and researcher am involved with. Briefly and knowingly undersold here … Prof. Fryer showed the changes in society towards risk and complexity, disorder. He explained that knowledge was the currency for survival in ways which transcend the bounds of education; through life length, life style & well being. He explained how the complexity of the world around us and the changing nature of the world needs quite different forms of knowledge than in the past rationale world (Weber’s world). It needs knowledge which can handle change, handle swathes of knowledge and to keep a competitive edge can continue to learn. In effect learners must know how to learn (and re-learn), we must become competent knowledge handlers. The challenge for education is how to move from the rational order of provision of knowledge to empowering creative competent knowledge handlers for the new order*