Learning

I appreciate the usefulness of open educational resources in supporting informal learning as much as anyone. I also care very deeply about the adoption and use of open educational resources in formal education settings. The kinds of things I lay awake at night worrying about differ depending on which of the two I’m thinking about when I go to bed. The more people I talk to, the more convinced I am that OER has failed to establish a digestible value proposition for formal education. For better or worse, many people caught up in the day-to-day vortex of teaching, advising, mentoring, and grading don’t have the spare time to problematize publisher-school power relations, realize the virtue of local control of curriculum materials, or fully appreciate the transformative benefits of transparency. ...

Champions of personalized instruction tend to fall back on the assumption that one-on-one tutoring is the most effective instructional approach but is not scalable (implicit in Bloom’s two sigma problem), and since “we all know” that group instruction is poor, we’ve no choice but to personalize using an automated computer system as our best and most effective path forward. Now, if you’ve ever taught, you know that many students love to talk. It seems that they live to ask questions, argue, and endlessly discuss. Now, I ask you: How can removing all possibility of engaging in their favorite approach to learning (by making the computer the only entity with whom they can interact) be said to be personalization for them? ...

The notion of teacher as DJ may have been implied when people started applying the “rip-mix-burn” metaphor to education, but lately I can’t seem to get it out of my head. The similarities were there even when teachers worked primarily with paper textbooks and printed research articles, but is even more pronounced now in the era of digitized resources. There are the obvious similarities… Both start with a collection of existing materials - acoustic resources like songs, sound effects, and samples, and educational resources like simulations, tutorials, and articles. Both sequence and blend these materials in interesting ways. Both do quite a bit of planning (think syllabus as playlist), perform in discrete blocks of time (think course meeting as set); and both have to make meaningful connections between the resources they choose to employ (think lecturing and discussion leading as beat matching). ...

Kurt Squire told me earlier today about U Wisc’s new minor in Games, Learning, and Society. Looks absolutely fabulous. Congratulations, Kurt! From this page I found Constance Steinkuehler’s course on Critical Education Practice on the Internet. Lots to read here…

Only in the Instructional Technology Department could two people who sit all day within ten feet of each other have an extended conversation about work via their blogs. Brett pushes back on my Gagne, Games, and Learning post with another of his own, lest we forget, learning is complex. It’s good stuff. ...

Reading Brett over on Rhymes with Purple got me thinking about the Gagne Assumption. The assumption is two part. First, there are different kinds of learning (e.g., learning facts is a different thing from learning to classify). Second, different conditions are most suited to bring about these different types of learning. If one buys into this assumption, which I do wholeheartedly, then a prescient question regarding games becomes - what type (or types) of learning are best promoted by game-like instructional conditions? ...

In Stephen’s notes on Wenger’s ALT-C talk, Etienne makes this absolutely wonderful comment: It’s a shift, from learning being viewed as a (vertical) relation between a provider and a recipient, to a (horizontal) peer to peer relationship of negotiation of multual relevance. Best definition of meaningful learning I’ve heard in ages. I’ve often thought that if a teacher can’t “convince” a student they need to learn a certain “required” subject (i.e., if they can’t demonstrate the relevance of material so supposedly important it was put into the core curriculum), they should not be allowed to teach it. Period. Of course, when the curriculum and assessments are set by the federal government, there is no mutual negotiation of anything. “Open wide,” says the omniscient panel of PhDs….