The reusability paradox - WTF? | Damo's World - 4 views
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Learners construct new knowledge, upon their own existing knowledge. This is very individualised, and based on each learner’s past experiences, and ways of thinking.
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djplaner on 17 Aug 16From a NGL perspective, I'd say that what people know is a network of connections - both internally in their brain and with the tools and artifacts they use. To learn is to make a new connection with that existing network. It's easier to make that connection when what you are learning is closer to where you are. The more it has in common with you.
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Learning designers have some tricks to help deal with such diversity, such as researching your cohort, conducting a needs analysis, and ultimately categorising learners and focusing on the majority.
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A major flaw in this approach is that it assumes that people fall into these categories. You are this type of person, you have this learning style which ignores the true variety of people. By spending a lot of time categorising you feel like you're trying to understand complexity, but never do. The book "The End of Average" touches on some of the problems with this. This type of approach doesn't work if you see the world as "complex, dynamic, and consists of interdependent assemblages of diverse actors (human and not) connected via complex networks"
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three approaches
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Damien misses two additional possibilities here - Personalised learning - the use of Artifical Intelligence so that the unit of study is smart enough to respond to the individual student. But the problem with this approach is that it can generally only do this within a pre-defined body of knowledge. It doesn't work well with motivation and other forms of context - Personal learning - you put the agency back into the learner and allow them to be in charge of their progress through. The issue with this is that it assumes that the learner has the skill, knowlege and motivation to do this. It is also not a model that fits well with standard educational institutions. This links to the dual-layer pathways design aproach - http://www.edugeekjournal.com/2016/06/14/evolution-of-the-dual-layercustomizable-pathways-design/ And perhaps choral explanations and federation.
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meaningful for everyone
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These technologies become so complicated to use, that people simply don’t use them.
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While I agree with this trend, I wonder whether there is anything that can be done about it. e.g. I think part of the problem here is the opaque nature of digital technology - https://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/the-nature-of-digital-technology-part-2/ Perhaps the problem with the workshop activity is that it's model is not readily apparent to the people who use it. The abstraction that has been made isn't communicated to the people using it, so they have to go through trial and error and generally fail. -- The Ben-Ari and Yeshno (2006) quote on the above link is good for this.
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“the system does this, but I want to do that.”
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I really like Kay & Goldberg's (1977) - that's right 1977 - 40 years - quote any attempt to specifically anticipate their needs in the design of the Dynabook would end in a disastrous feature-laden hodgepodge which would not be really suitable for anyone Reference on this page https://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/what-if-our-digital-technologies-were-protean-implications-for-computational-thinking-learning-and-teaching/
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Perhaps that quote explains what students see when they see a course that relies on material that's been shared amongst various different STEM contexts When you can't connect something directly into your understanding and context, it becomes a feature-laden hodge podge that you just can't figure out how to connect to your practice and understanding.
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What if a technology is so specific, it’s designed for just one person – yourself?
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Which comes back to the option of providing the individual with the agency to make the learning personal to them. Giving them the agency to make connections into their networks. Of course, this approach isn't just some pancea. It has it's own challenges (especially when trying to concieve of it within existing mindsets/institutions) and also it's own weaknesses. The question is how to overcome those weaknesses and challenges in meaningful ways that addresses the resuability paradox.
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Damien is a ed developer at CQU. In this post he struggles with some of the common problems faced by that type of position and tries to understand them in the context of the reusability paradox. Some of this is inspired by my own thinking, hence it resonates with me. It also resonates with me because I see the possibility of a network perspective offering a useful way to look at these problems. I'm hoping to illustrate some of this via annotations. Whether this will be useful to you is another matter entirely. A lot of this is thinking out loud by both Damien and myself.