Talking about these two ideas (mine were emotion and authentic activity) really made me examine my thoughts, specifically how complex they get when you move into how to implement them into specific methods.
The most troublesome was the idea of emotion as a tool. Did I mean to say it was tool when I first brought it up? I'm not sure, but it gets pretty scary when you say it that way. I thought of some of my best emotional experiences in class, and they were always centered around good discussion or interaction, not usually engineered by a teacher. When a teacher engineers something to be emotional with the specific intent of using that emotion somehow, it's usually pretty transparent, and nothing is less emotionally effective (or more counterproductive) than transparent emotional manipulation. We came up with some pretty good examples of good use of emotion and bad uses of emotion. For example: a really engaging discussion can sometimes happen when a controversial topic is brought up. Students who might not have cared about a topic before are now personally involved. But what if it becomes contentious? (And I don't mean to say that anything critical or any sort of disagreement is contentious - I mean specifically the presence of malice) Then you've turned a really good emotional opportunity into a really negative experience, and probably just deepened participants into their trenches.
There's also the danger of sentimentality and cheap shots - playing on emotion in an artificially manipulative way.
But I still think that in spite of the dangers of excess, instructors need to be aware of and work with the emotional factors in the material. It's going to be there no matter what approach you take, and it will be worlds better if the emotional current in your classroom can be something somewhat more effective than "This is soooooo boring."
Monday, September 29, 2008
Two most important factors for learning
These past few weeks of research, both the literature we've been reading for class and a lot of the articles I've come across at work (I'm a research assistant currently working on a project on technology integration in the classroom), have really made me think about how we actually learn. It's easy for me to understand and give credit to a well-stated theory at the time that I read it; it's harder to come to a decision on what I actually personally believe.
I think that throughout all of the literature that we've studied, there are some recurrent themes that I keep latching onto. I hesitate to give any of them a name straight out of someone else's framework, but there are some concepts that come very close to what I would describe as my personal philosophy. These thoughts are indeed heavily influenced by what I've read and studied (especially a lot of Constructivist thought that I was exposed to as an undergrad), but when it came down to deciding how to articulate what I believe are the most important factors for how people learn, I had to rely mainly on my own experience. As a student, there have been experiences that have really resonated with me, and there have also been teachers and situations with which I've always felt a vague sort of frustration and consternation, even if I couldn't articulate what it was that I disliked. Drawing on those personal experiences and trying to distill them to their important basics, here are the two most important factors for learning I could identify:
Emotion
There is something vital about the connection between learning and emotion. Our most persistent memories are the ones that were etched onto our minds in times of emotional extreme. Emotion is the most direct tool we have to access and create memory and understanding. I find myself really drawn to the work of Damasio and his findings on the importance of emotion in Neurobiology.
All of my memories of school as a child have strong emotional connections. Who were my "best" teachers? Without fail, they also happen to be the ones with whom I felt emotionally safe. What are my clearest memories of things I learned? They always have an emotional connection. I may never forget the geography of Africa, because I remember a giant map of the outlines of the countires laying on the floor of my elementary school gym on "Africa Day." We had been studying Africa for a couple months, and Africa Day was the day we got to take a simulated trip (including a "plane" made out of rows of chairs and a boy in our class dressed like a pilot) to Africa, and we got to eat peanut soup out of wooden bowls and listen to Ladysmith Black Mombazo. It was emotionally exciting, compelling and interesting, and so I will always associate the fact that Kinshasa is the capital of Zaire with that pleasant memory.
Authentic Activity
Several of the authors we've read have spoken of the importance of authentic activity. I really liked the idea of the Cognitive Apprenticeship. But I think even in layman's terms, you will find almost universal interest in education that has real-life application.
As a high school and then a post-secondary student, the days where eating African food in the gym was an effective educational motive for me were past. (Though, come to think of it, I think it still might work. Maybe we can do that for class next week?) But other things got me motivated to work in the midst of an environment that was, frankly, usually pretty unmotivational.
I find it ironic that to this day I spend most of my academic energy in discovering and then constructing a way to fulfill the bare minimum requirements for courses that I take. Very rarely is it the actual material, the actual content that I end up learning. It's so easy to default to the "learn to the test" mode. I think that's a pretty common problem - American students are very good at figuring out what to learn to pass the school model and then spending their energy doing so. Too often, the actual content - the art, the math, the history - is a tenuously connected sidecar to "learning the system."
The times that I have really learned, really grown and really progressed have been the times that I was doing something real. In the workplace this happens almost naturally. 90% of my expertise on Adobe design software comes from the things I had to figure out to make an ad print correctly in the 4-color press or manipulate an image quickly for a picky poster client. Even though I spent four years in school learning the software, I never really learned anything until I needed to. This isn't limited to the "real world," however. Academia can become the real world and can prove extremely effective when the situations are right. As an undergraduate in an advanced French grammar course, I helped translate a website from French to English for a nonprofit humanitarian organization my professor worked for. She saw a real world need - a way for this organization to reach an anglophone audience - and combined it with our need to learn effective ways to translate. We were actually motivated to do a good job - to do more than the bare minimun - when we realized that our work was meaningful and real.
It's funny that this concept is driving me right now as well. Rather than simply reporting on two factors for learning to fill the requirements for my class, I'm aware of the fact that my mom and a friend from high school and who knows who else can access and read this blog, and so I'm being more conscientious in the way I write and present my ideas. Theory in action, ladies and gentlemen!
I think that throughout all of the literature that we've studied, there are some recurrent themes that I keep latching onto. I hesitate to give any of them a name straight out of someone else's framework, but there are some concepts that come very close to what I would describe as my personal philosophy. These thoughts are indeed heavily influenced by what I've read and studied (especially a lot of Constructivist thought that I was exposed to as an undergrad), but when it came down to deciding how to articulate what I believe are the most important factors for how people learn, I had to rely mainly on my own experience. As a student, there have been experiences that have really resonated with me, and there have also been teachers and situations with which I've always felt a vague sort of frustration and consternation, even if I couldn't articulate what it was that I disliked. Drawing on those personal experiences and trying to distill them to their important basics, here are the two most important factors for learning I could identify:
Emotion
There is something vital about the connection between learning and emotion. Our most persistent memories are the ones that were etched onto our minds in times of emotional extreme. Emotion is the most direct tool we have to access and create memory and understanding. I find myself really drawn to the work of Damasio and his findings on the importance of emotion in Neurobiology.
All of my memories of school as a child have strong emotional connections. Who were my "best" teachers? Without fail, they also happen to be the ones with whom I felt emotionally safe. What are my clearest memories of things I learned? They always have an emotional connection. I may never forget the geography of Africa, because I remember a giant map of the outlines of the countires laying on the floor of my elementary school gym on "Africa Day." We had been studying Africa for a couple months, and Africa Day was the day we got to take a simulated trip (including a "plane" made out of rows of chairs and a boy in our class dressed like a pilot) to Africa, and we got to eat peanut soup out of wooden bowls and listen to Ladysmith Black Mombazo. It was emotionally exciting, compelling and interesting, and so I will always associate the fact that Kinshasa is the capital of Zaire with that pleasant memory.
Authentic Activity
Several of the authors we've read have spoken of the importance of authentic activity. I really liked the idea of the Cognitive Apprenticeship. But I think even in layman's terms, you will find almost universal interest in education that has real-life application.
As a high school and then a post-secondary student, the days where eating African food in the gym was an effective educational motive for me were past. (Though, come to think of it, I think it still might work. Maybe we can do that for class next week?) But other things got me motivated to work in the midst of an environment that was, frankly, usually pretty unmotivational.
I find it ironic that to this day I spend most of my academic energy in discovering and then constructing a way to fulfill the bare minimum requirements for courses that I take. Very rarely is it the actual material, the actual content that I end up learning. It's so easy to default to the "learn to the test" mode. I think that's a pretty common problem - American students are very good at figuring out what to learn to pass the school model and then spending their energy doing so. Too often, the actual content - the art, the math, the history - is a tenuously connected sidecar to "learning the system."
The times that I have really learned, really grown and really progressed have been the times that I was doing something real. In the workplace this happens almost naturally. 90% of my expertise on Adobe design software comes from the things I had to figure out to make an ad print correctly in the 4-color press or manipulate an image quickly for a picky poster client. Even though I spent four years in school learning the software, I never really learned anything until I needed to. This isn't limited to the "real world," however. Academia can become the real world and can prove extremely effective when the situations are right. As an undergraduate in an advanced French grammar course, I helped translate a website from French to English for a nonprofit humanitarian organization my professor worked for. She saw a real world need - a way for this organization to reach an anglophone audience - and combined it with our need to learn effective ways to translate. We were actually motivated to do a good job - to do more than the bare minimun - when we realized that our work was meaningful and real.
It's funny that this concept is driving me right now as well. Rather than simply reporting on two factors for learning to fill the requirements for my class, I'm aware of the fact that my mom and a friend from high school and who knows who else can access and read this blog, and so I'm being more conscientious in the way I write and present my ideas. Theory in action, ladies and gentlemen!
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Thoughts on Situatied Cognition and philosophical underpinnings
First of all, I appreciated the comment Dr. Graham made on Monday that we be careful not to confuse underlying philosophies with instructional approaches, or even instructional theories with learning theories. After reading the Schuh and Barab article (Schuh, K. L., & Barab, S. A. (2008). Philosophical perspectives. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. van Merrienboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 67-82). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [paper]), I think I was a little prone to simplify and think - "Oh, if I used a situative cognition approach, I would have to be a relativist, and I'm not a relativist." So it was nice to be able to separate that out, and to realize that there are still various philosophical camps even within these broad categories.
I really enjoyed the Brown article (Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42. [online]) It seems so intuitive, and so vital, even though it's a little different than the way our educational institution is used to making things work.
I'm going to appeal to Rousseau again, because I am fundamentally a French major and will always remain such. :) O
ne of the most seminal works I ever read was for a course on philosophy of the Enlightenment era - a French Department course. Among the many Rousseau works that we studied was his revolutionary book on education, Émile. Émile is the name of a boy, and the book is a hypothetical look at his life. He is raised by conscientious parents who want something different for their son - he has a tutor, and rather than attending school and being instructed in the classical pedagogical model, he spends his days doing real-life tasks, taking walks, buying groceries, all of this being guided and facilitated by his tutor. Through this hypothetical child's life, Rousseau shows us what a real education, a situated education, can do for a child.
After I had read Émile, I was left with that fantastic fuzzy feeling, and then brought back to cold hard reality. Who could possibly afford a private life-long tutor for each of their children? How could an education like this ever be feasible? After having read these most recent articles, I have some ideas. (Brown might call Émile's experience a cognitive apprenticeship, and explore "methods [that] try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident - and evidently successful - in craft apprenticeship.")
I've also been reading a couple other heretical books of late. One is John Holt's How Children Learn. Long admired by homeschool advocates, Holt is of a rather situativist viewpoint. In fact, some of what he wrote in 1962 is a pretty clear rebuke of the then-common Cognitive viewpoint:
Am I promoting that we pull all our kids out of public school? No. (Well, maybe, on some days. But I can't do that and continue in my line of work.) I do strongly believe, though, that institutionalized education, by adopting some of the philosophies of the Situated Cognition advocates, can approach what Roussau and Holt were aiming for. I think that cognitive apprenticeships are possible. There's no way we can afford a private tutor for every student, but there's no way a single tutor would have the expertise desirable for every subject anyway. So why not expose students to a variety of coaches (experts, facilitators) who can conduct mini-apprenticeships throughout their experience? Why not be more flexible on which skills need to be masters at which grade level and instead let students explore the various disciplines through their own natural curiosity into avenues of interest? A student who doesn't naturally enjoy math but does like to cook is going to recoil at a worksheet full of equations, but will find himself deriving and using mathematics of his own accord if he has to half a recipe. These same principles we find in the Utopian texts of Rousseau and Holt are perhaps not too far-fetched if we are willing to re-examine our existing paradigms.
I really enjoyed the Brown article (Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42. [online]) It seems so intuitive, and so vital, even though it's a little different than the way our educational institution is used to making things work.
I'm going to appeal to Rousseau again, because I am fundamentally a French major and will always remain such. :) O
ne of the most seminal works I ever read was for a course on philosophy of the Enlightenment era - a French Department course. Among the many Rousseau works that we studied was his revolutionary book on education, Émile. Émile is the name of a boy, and the book is a hypothetical look at his life. He is raised by conscientious parents who want something different for their son - he has a tutor, and rather than attending school and being instructed in the classical pedagogical model, he spends his days doing real-life tasks, taking walks, buying groceries, all of this being guided and facilitated by his tutor. Through this hypothetical child's life, Rousseau shows us what a real education, a situated education, can do for a child.After I had read Émile, I was left with that fantastic fuzzy feeling, and then brought back to cold hard reality. Who could possibly afford a private life-long tutor for each of their children? How could an education like this ever be feasible? After having read these most recent articles, I have some ideas. (Brown might call Émile's experience a cognitive apprenticeship, and explore "methods [that] try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident - and evidently successful - in craft apprenticeship.")
I've also been reading a couple other heretical books of late. One is John Holt's How Children Learn. Long admired by homeschool advocates, Holt is of a rather situativist viewpoint. In fact, some of what he wrote in 1962 is a pretty clear rebuke of the then-common Cognitive viewpoint:
Everything I learn of organisms, including what these people [Cognitive Theory advocates] tell me, leads me to conclude that they are not like machines at all. one famous experiment with rats showed that their behavior changed markedly for the worse in almost every respect when they were crowded into a small space. Other experiments with rats showed that their performance on tasks could be strongly affected by how their human handlers felt about them; rats who had been described to their handlers as smart performed better than identical rats described to their handlers as dumb. Do machines get nervous and break down when we put a lot of them in one room? Do they work better if we talk nicely to them? Some might say that we could someday design computers that would do that. I doubt it very much. But even if we could, the fact that we might make certain machines a little more like animals does not prove tin the least that organisms are, or even are like, machines.(Ibid., 11)Holt began his work as a teacher and sought to reform the education system, but after years of promoting his theories, became disillusioned and promoted homeschooling, or rather, a line of thought that he called unschooling, which is not, when you look at it, all that different than Rousseau.
Am I promoting that we pull all our kids out of public school? No. (Well, maybe, on some days. But I can't do that and continue in my line of work.) I do strongly believe, though, that institutionalized education, by adopting some of the philosophies of the Situated Cognition advocates, can approach what Roussau and Holt were aiming for. I think that cognitive apprenticeships are possible. There's no way we can afford a private tutor for every student, but there's no way a single tutor would have the expertise desirable for every subject anyway. So why not expose students to a variety of coaches (experts, facilitators) who can conduct mini-apprenticeships throughout their experience? Why not be more flexible on which skills need to be masters at which grade level and instead let students explore the various disciplines through their own natural curiosity into avenues of interest? A student who doesn't naturally enjoy math but does like to cook is going to recoil at a worksheet full of equations, but will find himself deriving and using mathematics of his own accord if he has to half a recipe. These same principles we find in the Utopian texts of Rousseau and Holt are perhaps not too far-fetched if we are willing to re-examine our existing paradigms.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Radical Behaviorism
Reading the Driscoll chapter (Driscoll, M. (2000a). Radical behaviorism, Psychology of learning for instruction (2nd ed., pp. 31-70). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. [ereserve]) on Radical Behaviorism was very interesting. I think the fact that I read it directly after having read the Schuh article on the philosophical perspectives of learning styles really affected the way I looked at the presentation of Behaviorism.
The Schuh article, and our current cultural context in general, presents Behaviorism as the Big Bad Antiquated Giant. There aren't too many B.F. Skinner proponents writing and speaking out there these days. But reading the chapter on Behaviorism opened my eyes to how prevalent Behaviorist assumptions really still are.
I think that the Behaviorist viewpoint is pretty universal still in the realm of animals. (Unless, perhaps, you've read Temple Grandin.) The way we treat our pets is almost completely based on Behaviorist principles. And this is because most of us look at animals like black boxes. We have no idea what's going on inside. We know that we can't appeal to a dog's ability to reason, so any sort of instructional principle that would rely on reason would fail. So instead, we swat them on the nose with a rolled-up magazine. But there's something deeper there - even within animals - that we can see and sometimes it's a little bittersweet that we can't touch it. You see your dog reacting out of sheer fear, and you want to just reach out and make it understand. "It's not because I'm mean! I just can't have you chewing on my throw pillows!"
It gets even more difficult to swallow when it's applied to humans. To what extent is a child like a dog? There is something creepily dehumanizing about the military and other situations that routinely use Behaviorist principles to "train" humans. That's what Behavorist instruction is fundamentally - it's training rather than teaching.
However, there are certain facets of Behaviorist instruction that we use every day. Most fascinating to me was the example given in Driscoll's chapter about using Behaviorist training methods (Frequency Interval for rewards and suchlike) to discipline yourself. When grading papers, for example, after every 15 papers, you get to take a break and have a snack. I think this would be a very helpful method for me, who tends to have to force willpower on myself with systems of self-reward. So why, if I think it a dehumanizing, impersonal principle, do I use it on myself?
I think maybe the only answer is that there are certain tasks and behaviors and stages in life for which these types of approach are fitting, even appropriate. There are types of information that has to be learned in a drill-and-practice way. I've found that myself in studying character-based language. There's no amount of intuitive reasoning or creativity or group work that will help me read Japanese. That's a situation in which what's going on in my black box doesn't actually matter.
But how do we keep it relegated to the domains to which it belongs? Where do we draw the line between humans and animals? How do we keep ourselves from letting it take over our view of what human beings are and how they work? That's where we have to differentiate and use careful study of the theory in our practical applications.
The Schuh article, and our current cultural context in general, presents Behaviorism as the Big Bad Antiquated Giant. There aren't too many B.F. Skinner proponents writing and speaking out there these days. But reading the chapter on Behaviorism opened my eyes to how prevalent Behaviorist assumptions really still are.
I think that the Behaviorist viewpoint is pretty universal still in the realm of animals. (Unless, perhaps, you've read Temple Grandin.) The way we treat our pets is almost completely based on Behaviorist principles. And this is because most of us look at animals like black boxes. We have no idea what's going on inside. We know that we can't appeal to a dog's ability to reason, so any sort of instructional principle that would rely on reason would fail. So instead, we swat them on the nose with a rolled-up magazine. But there's something deeper there - even within animals - that we can see and sometimes it's a little bittersweet that we can't touch it. You see your dog reacting out of sheer fear, and you want to just reach out and make it understand. "It's not because I'm mean! I just can't have you chewing on my throw pillows!"
It gets even more difficult to swallow when it's applied to humans. To what extent is a child like a dog? There is something creepily dehumanizing about the military and other situations that routinely use Behaviorist principles to "train" humans. That's what Behavorist instruction is fundamentally - it's training rather than teaching.
However, there are certain facets of Behaviorist instruction that we use every day. Most fascinating to me was the example given in Driscoll's chapter about using Behaviorist training methods (Frequency Interval for rewards and suchlike) to discipline yourself. When grading papers, for example, after every 15 papers, you get to take a break and have a snack. I think this would be a very helpful method for me, who tends to have to force willpower on myself with systems of self-reward. So why, if I think it a dehumanizing, impersonal principle, do I use it on myself?
I think maybe the only answer is that there are certain tasks and behaviors and stages in life for which these types of approach are fitting, even appropriate. There are types of information that has to be learned in a drill-and-practice way. I've found that myself in studying character-based language. There's no amount of intuitive reasoning or creativity or group work that will help me read Japanese. That's a situation in which what's going on in my black box doesn't actually matter.
But how do we keep it relegated to the domains to which it belongs? Where do we draw the line between humans and animals? How do we keep ourselves from letting it take over our view of what human beings are and how they work? That's where we have to differentiate and use careful study of the theory in our practical applications.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Personal Learning Environment
- What is a personal learning environment (PLE)?
- What elements make up a PLE?
- How is a PLE different from a Learning Managment System?
- What are some examples of PLEs?
- What is an RSS feed?
- Find 2-3 RSS feeds related to Instructional Technology that you would like to follow throughout the semester.
A Personal Learning Environment is basically an organizational tool that allows you to customize your online resources. I am using blogger - it allows me to follow other blogs and feeds as well as post my own thoughts and responses. It also allows you to communicate and interact with other students, peers and instructors.
According to Learning Technologies Centre, the elements of a PLE exist on both the desktop and the web. These elements include production tools (Wikis, blogs, YouTube), collaboration tools, communication tools (Skype, IM), storage tools, aggregators, social networking sites and more.
These differ from Learning Management Systems in that the latter are software programs designed and implemented by an outside sources. The PLE is self-centric, and specific to each individual user.
The RSS feeds that I'm using as part of my PLE can be found in the "blogs I'm following" and include the Journal of Educational Psychology and Learning and Instructional Design.
Friday, September 5, 2008
On My Blog Title
It's hard not to be pretentious when you're writing a blog. The very act of creating it is telling the world "My everyday thoughts are so profound that you should read them." The fact that my whole culture and especially my generation thinks this way doesn't help. The fact that I try fruitlessly to kick against the pricks - to try to transcend my dang generation - only makes me sound like a snob. So to soften the blow of publishing my ego in yet another format (I'm afraid I exist in numerous incarnations online. Numerous.), I've appealed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the title of my blog.
Rousseau was egotistical, but he was brilliant, so we forgive him. His Confessions was presciently postmodern in expecting the readership of the world to care about, much less accept his justification for, his moral shortcomings. But, to be fair, he never intended it to be on the discount rack at Barnes & Noble either. But when you read enough of him, you really do soften to the guy. Émile just tugs at your heartstrings. And perhaps his most endearing work of all is his Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire - the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. The guy just liked to go on walks through Paris when he was getting old. And there's nothing egotistical about the random errant genius liking to take walks.
So I'll strive to keep the thoughts expressed in this blog appropriate to the spirit of the Rêveries. The title sounds a little morose, like I'm bemoaning my solitariness. Nothing of the sort. I live with a French girl who likes to talk about love, culture, and Gene Kelly. I work with fantastic, compassionate colleagues. And I also have a lawn gnome named David who travels the world with me. No - the solitude of my existence is only for literary effect.
Rousseau was egotistical, but he was brilliant, so we forgive him. His Confessions was presciently postmodern in expecting the readership of the world to care about, much less accept his justification for, his moral shortcomings. But, to be fair, he never intended it to be on the discount rack at Barnes & Noble either. But when you read enough of him, you really do soften to the guy. Émile just tugs at your heartstrings. And perhaps his most endearing work of all is his Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire - the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. The guy just liked to go on walks through Paris when he was getting old. And there's nothing egotistical about the random errant genius liking to take walks.
So I'll strive to keep the thoughts expressed in this blog appropriate to the spirit of the Rêveries. The title sounds a little morose, like I'm bemoaning my solitariness. Nothing of the sort. I live with a French girl who likes to talk about love, culture, and Gene Kelly. I work with fantastic, compassionate colleagues. And I also have a lawn gnome named David who travels the world with me. No - the solitude of my existence is only for literary effect.
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