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kathleen johnson

Why Learning Should Be Messy | MindShift - 2 views

blogs.kqed.org/...why-learning-should-be-messy

disciplines

shared by kathleen johnson on 26 Oct 12 - No Cached
    • kathleen johnson
      kathleen johnson on 26 Oct 12
       
      They have always been interconnected. We just could not see it until we had the internet.
  • “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”
  • In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums
  • Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning.
  • School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating
  • the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.
  • first phase of the arc is called exploration
  • The second phase is expression
  • take the ideas to completion — within the deadline
  • The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.
  • “The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley.
  • “T-shaped” students
  • depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines.
  • David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges
  • The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 educatio
  • Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning
  • “Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development
  • At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term
  • The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity.
  • kathleen johnson on 26 Oct 12
     
    Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group.
anonymous

Modelling, not shaping - 4 views

www.jarche.com/...modelling-not-shaping

harold jarche modelling collaboration communities of practice networks

shared by anonymous on 10 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.
  • Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development.
anonymous

Own It: Social Media Isn't Just Something Other People Do - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...256212

social learning networks

shared by anonymous on 23 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • We look at a generation that has grown up online, and we worry about how "they" can't put down their iPhones, how "they" can't hold a real conversation, how "they" prefer distraction to presence. How will they form relationships? How will they learn to listen, or to be heard? The real and difficult questions are not about them, but about us. How will we choose to live online? How will we sustain conversations, build relationships, and cultivate genuine connection? And for those who are experiencing the kind of angst Turkle describes, an even more challenging question: How can I change when, where and how to plug in so that I actually like my life online?
  • We can have what Turkle terms a "big gulp of real conversation" -- through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the other side of the country. We can embrace the value of solitude and self-reflection, writing a blog post that digs deeply into a personal challenge -- perhaps choosing to write anonymously in order to share a deeper level of self-revelation than we'd brave offline. We can truly listen, and truly be heard, because online affinity groups help us find or rediscover friends who are prepared to meet us as we really are. These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception. We are making that digital shift together -- old and young, geeky and trepidatious -- and we are only as alone as we choose to be.
markuos morley

code-of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 1 views

www.arl.org/...of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf

copyright fair use arl library fairuse

shared by markuos morley on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • markuos morley on 14 Feb 12
     
    CODE OF BEST PRACTICES IN FAIR USE FOR ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES (pdf) US ARL
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

mooc - rheingold - 3 views

mooc.wikispaces.com/rheingold

change11 rheingold

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 04 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • It isn’t possible or practical to try to control the quality of content and conversation that people publish online -- if it had been possible, there would be no web, no YouTube, no Wikipedia today -- but I contend that it is possible to increase the proportion of the population who know something about what they are doing when they consume or create digital culture.
  • Although the word “literacy” traditionally refers to the skill of encoding and decoding messages or programs in some medium, the kind of literacy required in a world of mass collaboration necessarily involves a social element as well as a personal skill
  • Social media literacies combine the skills of coding and decoding digital media with the social skills necessarily to use online tools in concert with others
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We will look at facets of each of these five literacies and engage in learning activities that can both increase our own competencies and provide public useful public goods
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Learnlets » Learning Experience Design thru the Macroscope - 0 views

blog.learnlets.com/?p=2027

Clark Quinn learning #change11 design

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 20 Dec 11 - No Cached
  •  But with mobile technologies, we have the capability to truly start to deliver what I call ‘slow learning’: delivering small bits of learning over time to really develop an individual.
  •  Most of our learning comes from outside the learning experience.  But can we do better?
  • to develop individuals in micro bits over a macro period of time rather than macro bits over a micro bit of time (which really doesn’t work)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  •  We have pieces of the puzzle ( smaller chunks, content models) and we have the tools (individualized delivery, semantics), but putting them together really hasn’t been done yet.
  •  We still have to figure out what our design process would look like,
  •  It’s really trying to build a system that is more mentor like than instructor like.
  • You have more small chunks of content, and more distributed performance model.
  • The point is to take the fact that technology is no longer the limit, our imaginations are.
  • : "Are you trying to teach information or skills? Okay – a skill. Well, that will require practice.
  • that calling it “slow learning” gives the opposite impression of what it actually is
  • and one could argue that what you are describing could actually be FAST learning
  • “spaced learning”
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Learnlets » The 7 c's of natural learning - 2 views

blog.learnlets.com/?p=1203

Clark Quinn learning #change11

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 20 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Yesterday I talked about the seeding, feeding, and weeding necessary to develop a self-sustaining network
  • Choose: we are self-service learners.  We follow what interests us, what is meaningful to us, what we know is important. Commit: we take ownership for the outcomes.  We work until we’ve gotten out of it what we need. Crash: our commitment means we make mistakes, and learn from them. Create: we design, we build, we are active in our learning. Copy: we mimic others, looking to their performances for guidance. Converse: we talk with others. We ask questions, offer opinions, debate positions. Collaborate: we work together. We build together, evaluate what we’re doing, and take turns adding value.
  • With this list of things we do, we need to find ways to support them, across both formal and informal learning. 
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In formal learning, we should be presenting meaningful and authentic tasks, and asking learners to solve them, ideally collaboratively.
  • While individual is better than none, collaborative allows opportunity for meaning negotiation.  We need to allow failure, and support learning from it. We need to be able to ask questions, and make decisions and see the consequences.
  • I think there are 8 elements!! I miss Collate, this is not the same as Choose, it is about organising anbd structuring what we learn, (constructing our emergent uderstanding) as opposed to the selection of a direction.
  • However, real learning involves research, design, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, experimentation, etc
  • the intersection of 1) self-organized learning and 2) online collaboration is what I consider should be a primary focus of organizational learning professionals
  • Common web 2.0 practice is to link back to what has been copied, a form of collaboration or perhaps cooperation.
  • in informal learning, we need to create ways for people to develop their understandings, work together, to put out opinions and get feedback, ask for help, and find people to use as models.  By using tools like blogs for recording and sharing personal learning and information updates, wikis to collaborate, discussion forums to converse, and blogs and microblogs to track what others think are important, we provide ways to naturally learn together.
  • informal learning is NOT, by definition, manageable
  • just trying to raise awareness that what we typically do formally is not well aligned with how people really learn, and that supporting some of these activities is the key to unlocking organizational innovation.
  • but instead to provide a conducive environment and encourage them
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Avoiding the Trap of Clicky-Clicky Bling-Bling - 1 views

elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm

#change11 design technology

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 20 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • "All that is clicky-clicky bling-bling does not make for an effective learning experience."
  • s a load of elearning junk
  • It's just shiny wrapping paper covering up a pair of crummy socks with holes in them.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • " Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer in the industry classic e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, explain that seductive details are "interesting but irrelevant material added to a multimedia presentation in an effort to spice it up
  • Seductive details are those elements in a program that draw you in, attract the eye and engage the brain. They seduce your interest, but distract from the main point.
  • It's interactive! It's intriguing! But it's exhausting, and let's face it"—there's no point. Fatigue sets in and you move on
  • This is the premise underlying the arousal theory, the idea that entertaining and interesting embedded effects cause learners to become more emotionally aroused and therefore they work harder to learn the material.
  • . Designers who don't understand the basics of effective instructional design are committing what Clark Quinn of Quinnovation calls "instructional design malpractice.
  • CCBB design shines and sparkles wildly in the sun
  • When we force learners to practice without context, they've memorized facts but may not be able to apply them correctly in context.
  • Too much clicking can lead to learner fatigue, is distracting to the learner, and doesn't promote deeper understanding
  • We need to provide more contextual opportunities for drill exercises that will help the learner both retain and apply the knowledge they are practicing.
  • "Well-written, multiple-choice questions teach and assess knowledge within the context of a game. Poor questions simply allow the gamer to play the game without learning.
  • that the addition of interesting yet unimportant augmentations can divert learners from learning the main points that are being made
  • . You're best served to spend your time designing the right type of course and spending less time looking for ways to 'jazz it up'"
  • . Now, take a look at the screen and see where your eye lands first. Is it the flashing Next button in the bottom right corner? Or is it the important content bit at the center of the screen? Ask an objective outsider to take a look, too
  • Pilot your program with some test learners
  • heck in with them immediately afterwards, one week, three weeks. See what they remembe
  • , don't take this to mean that elearning shouldn't look good.
  • What about your LMS? At Kineo, where I work, we love using Moodle and Totara as an LMS solution for our clients, not only because of the great features and the fact that it's open source, but always because we can make it look like almost anythin
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Stanford's open courses raise questions about true value of elite education | Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

www.insidehighered.com/...out-true-value-elite-education

Change11 stanford courses MOOC

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 15 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Search form |  Follow us: Get Daily E-mail Thursday, December 15, 2011 Home NewsAssessment and Accountability Health Professions Retirement Issues Students and Violence Surveys Technology Adjuncts Admissions Books and Publishing Community Colleges Diversity For-Profit Higher Ed International Religious Colleges Student Aid and Loans Teaching and Learning ViewsIntellectual Affairs The Devil's Workshop Technology Blog UAlma Mater College Ready Writing menu-3276 menu-path-taxonomy-term-835 od
  • This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)
  • MOOCs question the value of teaching as an economic value point.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Based on the success of Norvig and Thrun’s experiment, the university’s computer science department is planning to broadcast eight additional courses for free in the spring, most focusing on high-level concepts that require participants already to have a pretty good command of math and science.
  • It raises the question: Whose certification matters, for what purposes?
  • For one, the professors can only evaluate non-enrolled students via assessments that can be graded automatically.
  • it can be difficult to assess skills without being able to administer project-based assignments
  • With a player like Stanford doing something like this, they’re bringing attention to the possibilities of the Web for expanding open education
markuos morley

iterating toward openness - 2 views

opencontent.org/blog

David_wiley blog opensource iterating learning education david wiley

shared by markuos morley on 26 Sep 11 - Cached
  • One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.
  • However, because the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers, any meaningful badges demonstration project will have to operate in this space.
  • We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The bolded items above really represent one version (and certainly not the only one) of the complete package – open content, open learning support, and open badges that help you demonstrate competence to an employer.
  • • Combine these and other business models to generate enough revenue so that (1) the marking service can be free in addition to all the badge related materials being openly licensed and (2) employers will respect and recognize the badges resulting from the process.
  • - An initial list of OER (e.g., OLI courses) and Q/A services (e.g., StackOverflow.com or OpenStudy) which will help individuals develop the skills necessary to obtain the badges
  • If a digital artifact released under a CC BY license is posted on a public website it would qualify as an open educational resource for everyone with internet access. However, if a teacher downloaded a copy of the OER and placed it inside a learning management system it would suddenly cease to be an open educational resource – even though the resource hadn’t changed.
  • The efficacy ideal is not realizable in practice. Intuitively we would want the ideal OER to support the educational goals of every user, and some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A resource considered very high quality by an English speaking undergraduate might be very low quality for an English speaking primary school student or a Spanish speaking undergraduate.
  • While everyone wants the OER they use to be high quality for them, it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user.
  • markuos morley on 10 Oct 11
     
    David Wiley's Blog
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

David Wiley ~ #change11 - 2 views

change.mooc.ca/237

#change11 david education learning

shared by Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen on 10 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • I worked on “learning objects,” which can be characterized as educational materials designed with the understanding that they will be reused in a broad variety of contexts
  • humans are too “expensive
  • the “reusability paradox.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • – a great resource that is essentially impossible to reuse, or a really poor resource that you can easily reuse
  • an interest in providing teachers real-time suggestions about the best way to use their next 10 minutes, are relatively new areas for me.
  • • Online Self-Organizing Social Systems. http://opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf
  • I would like to invite students to reflect on the practical impact on people they would like to their educational technology / educational research work to have.
Rob Parsons

Digital Resilience : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 1 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-014.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • George Siemens (2010) has argued that academia should take ownership of the open education debate before it is hijacked, and given the above history, I would agree.
  • The loss of ownership of some of these core academic functions occurred not because of the technology but rather because the scholarly community failed to engage with it
  • commercialisation of education did indeed occur, but not because academics went along with it unwittingly but because insufficient numbers engaged with the technology itself.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • So what does engagement with technology mean? First, I would suggest, it acknowledges that the changes afforded by new technology are not peripheral but fundamental to all aspects of scholarship.
  • In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as ‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’.
  • Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education and open education in particular.
  • It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education.
Rob Parsons

The Medals of Our Defeats : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 1 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-013.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Nicholas Carr's (2008) article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ struck a chord with many people. Carr's (2010) argument, which he fleshes out in his book The Shallows, is that our continual use of the net induces a superficiality to our behaviour. He says this is felt particularly when trying to read a complex piece:
  • The issue of quality is perhaps more keenly felt when we consider teaching. I raised the idea of pedagogy of abundance in Chapter 8, and in such a pedagogy the content will vary greatly in terms of quality.
  • the question is not whether some people produce poor quality content, obviously they do and the majority in fact, but whether as a whole this system can produce high-quality content.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • As neuroscientist Joshua Greene puts it, ‘the Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads’ (Gerschenfeld 2010).
  • Whether there are social and behavioural impacts of operating online is a serious question, however. Just as the television had serious social impacts, we must accept that computers and Internet will also have consequences. These will undoubtedly be a mixture of positive and negative, but I would argue that using pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address these issues.
  • For educators there are two main issues; the first is the extent to which they help students manage their online identity, and the second is how they manage their own boundary between personal and professional life.
  • The over-adoption of tools can lead to what has been termed ‘creepy tree house’ syndrome (Stein 2008) when authority is seen to try and invade a young person's social space.
  • There is strong resistance from students to universities and lecturers making formal use of social networks as this is seen as an invasion of their social space (e.g. Madge 2009).
  • For the teaching function of scholarship then the question is ‘How can educators utilise the potential of these tools without destroying what makes them valuable to students?’
  • I would suggest the following as the most challenging for digital scholarship: Moving beyond the superficial – many successful Web 2.0 services essentially allow a very simple function, for example, sharing a photograph. Can we use the same techniques for deeper, more difficult tasks?
  • Understanding quality – this is not just about maintaining current quality, as this may not be appropriate in many forms, but appreciating when different levels of quality can be used.
  • Managing online identity – there is a tension for scholars and their students in gaining the benefits of a social network, which thrives on personal interactions, while not compromising professional identity.
  • Ownership of scholarly functions – there is also a dilemma regarding how much of scholarly discourse and activity we give over to cloud computing services and whether the benefits in terms of widespread use and (often) superior tools outweigh the potential risks.
Rob Parsons

Reward and Tenure : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 0 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-011.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • you have to do social media to get social media. Given that many senior managers and professors in universities are not people who are disposed towards using these tools, there is a lack of understanding about them at the level which is required to implement significant change in the institution.
Rob Parsons

Network Weather : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 0 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-010.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • the use of digital, networked open tools and approaches will have an impact on some areas of scholarly practice, which in turn will affect all scholars, regardless of whether they themselves use the technologies or not.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Network weather
Rob Parsons

Openness in Education : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 3 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-009.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Anderson (2009) suggests a number of activities that characterise the open scholars, including that they create, use and contribute open educational resources, self-archive,
  • From my own experience I would propose the following set of characteristics and suggest that open scholars are likely to adopt these.
  • Leslie (2008) comments on the ease of this everyday sharing, compared with the complexity inherent in many institutional approaches:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • citation levels of articles that are published online versus those that are in closed access journals. Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles across a range of disciplines and found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36 and 172 per cent. So publishing in an online, open manner aids in the traditional measures of citation.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Openness as a working method, and openness as a movement, with a definable set of values.
  • This section will look at the most concrete realisation of the open education movement, namely that of open education resources. In particular I want to revisit the notion of granularity and how changes in this, afforded by new technologies, are changing scholarly behaviour.
  • Zittrain (2008) terms ‘generativity’, which he defines as ‘a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences’. Little OERs are high in generativity because they can easily be used in different contexts, whereas the context is embedded within big OERs, which in turn means they are better at meeting a specific learning aim.
  • Big OER projects have a variety of models of funding, and Wiley highlights three of these demonstrating a range of centralisation: a centralised team funded by donors and grants (such as MIT), linking it into teaching responsibilities (as practised at Utah State University) and a decentralised collaborative authoring approach (e.g. Rice Connexions, http://cnx.org).
  • The reasons for this are varied, including technical complexity and motivation. One other reason which the OpenLearn team suggest is that the ‘content provided on the site was of high quality and so discouraged alteration’.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      I wonder how much of a barrier the final integration of the material is - in a well structured object internal integration is high so the cost rises of extracting part or repurposing even the whole.
Rob Parsons

References : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 1 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...849666275-bibliography-001.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Link doesn't work. Copy and paste the url - the document's worth reading.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Rennie and Weller
Rob Parsons

A Pedagogy of Abundance : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice : Bloomsbury Academic - 0 views

www.bloomsburyacademic.com/...-9781849666275-chapter-008.xml

scholarship

shared by Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • If we use this perspective to examine education we can consider how education may shift as a result of abundance. Traditionally in education expertise is analogous to talent in the music industry – it is the core element of scarcity in the model. In any one subject there are relatively few experts (compared with the level of knowledge in the general population). Learners represent the ‘demand’ in this model, so when access to the experts is via physical interaction, for example, by means of a lecture, then the model of supply and demand necessitates that the learners come to the place where the experts are located. It also makes sense to group these experts together, around other costly resources such as books and laboratories. The modern university is in this sense a solution to the economics of scarcity.
  • As a result, a ‘pedagogy of scarcity’ developed, which is based around a one-to- many model to make the best use of the scarce resource (the expert). This is embodied in the lecture, which despite its detractors is still a very efficient means of conveying certain types of learning content. An instructivist pedagogy then can be seen as a direct consequence of the demands of scarcity.
  • It may be that we do not require new pedagogies to accommodate these assumptions as Conole (2008) points out: Recent thinking in learning theory has shifted to emphasise the benefit of social and situated learning as opposed to behaviourist, outcomes-based, individual learning. What is striking is that a mapping to the technologies shows that recent trends in the use of technologies, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 echoes this; Web 2.0 tools very much emphasise the collective and the network.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Though i think it is true that students learn collaboratively, and always have done, they don't act as if they do (any more than teachers act as if they do, and quite often less). Perhaps our students still come from experiences that value authority and, whatever is said, do not value constructivism and collaboration.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Any pedagogy of abundance would then, I suggest, be based on the following assumptions:
  • Jonassen (1991) describes it thus: Constructivism … claims that reality is constructed by the knower based upon mental activity. Humans are perceivers and interpreters who construct their own reality through engaging in those mental activities … What the mind produces are mental models that explain to the knower what he or she has perceived … We all conceive of the external reality somewhat differently, based on our unique set of experiences with the world.
  • Given that it has a loose definition, it is hard to pin down a constructivist approach exactly. Mayer (2004) suggests that such discovery-based approaches are less effective than guided ones, arguing that the ‘debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favoured a guided approach to learning’.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Interesting, because my immediate reaction was that there's no contradiction between guided learning and constructivism. Just don't expect that your students will always go where you guide them.
  • When Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) claim, with some justification, that ‘the epistemology of a discipline should not be confused with a pedagogy for teaching/learning it’ that only highlights that the epistemology of a discipline is now being constructed by all, so learning how to participate in this is as significant as learning the subject matter of the discipline itself.
  • However, the number of successful open source communities is relatively small compared with the number of unsuccessful ones, and thus the rather tenuous success factors for generating and sustaining an effective community may prove to be a barrier across all subject areas. Where they thrive, however, it offers a significant model which higher education can learn much from in terms of motivation and retention (Meiszner 2010).
  • Abundance does not apply to all aspects of learning; indeed the opposite may be true, for example, an individual's attention is not abundant and is time limited. The abundance of content puts increasing pressure on this scarce resource, and so finding effective ways of dealing with this may be the key element in any pedagogy. However, I would contend that the abundance of content and connections is as fundamental shift in education as any we are likely to encounter, and there has, to date, been little attempt to really place this at the centre of a model of teaching.
    • Rob Parsons
      Rob Parsons on 09 Oct 11
       
      Agreed. Great conclusion. At the moment, if I had to single out one key point Martin makes, it is this.
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