Group items tagged

Our pedagogical imperative is to let a course unfold according to the whim and determination of the group — to replace teacher-as-content with learning-community-as-content-maker.

This is at the heart of what Freire calls “co-intentional education,” in which “Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.” The collective knowledge of a group of students will almost always exceed the expertise of one instructor.

Technology has a way of making people lose their marbles — both the hype and the hysteria we saw a year ago were ridiculous.  It is good that society in general is hitting the pause button. Is there a need for online education? Absolutely. Are MOOCs the best way? Probably not in most situations, but possibly in some, and, potentially, in a future iteration, massive learning possibilities well might offer something to those otherwise excluded from higher education (by reasons of cost, time, location, disability, or other impediments).

Also, in the flipped classroom model, there is no cost saving; in fact, there is more individual attention. The MOOC video doesn’t save money since, we know, it requires all the human and technological apparatus beyond the video in order to be effective. A professor has many functions in a university beyond giving a lecture — including research, training future graduate students, advising, and running the university, teaching specialized advance courses, and moving fields of knowledge forward.

My face-to-face students will learn about the history and future of higher education partly by serving as “community wranglers” each week in the MOOC, their main effort being to transform the static videos into participatory conversations.  

Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis. We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately.