Epimetheus

It’s written a bit later (1998), and yes, I can see that he has become a bit less strident and doctrinaire in his old age (i.e. Constructivist Learning Environments are not necessarily appropriate for all learning outcomes (p.236) and objectivism offers different perspectives on the learning process (p. 217).

Some things he said that I like

• instruction should consist of experiences that facilitate knowledge construction. Yes- something other than just reading and answering the questions.
• The importance of the problem as a driver, rather than acting as an example of concepts and principles previously taught. This is how many of the academics I have worked with use cases. (I said this in my last entry too). The problem has to be ill structured- he compares this will textbook problems which require practice of a limited number of skills without shaping or defining the problem. I guess that this ties in with this section on scaffolding, because you don’t simply the problem necessarily; instead you provide tools to automate some sections of it. I liked that bit about how you find the problem by looking at what practitioners DO, rather than the topics in the textbook- thinking like a member of the community. Thinking about the MBA Finance and Accounting which I’m currently working on, the aim is not to think like an accountant, but to think like a manager talking to the accountant.
• I like the emphasis he has on narratives and stories. This picks up on Jerome Bruner’s stuff in Acts of Meaning where he says that we make meaning by weaving them into a story ( he’s not the only person to say this of course; there’s all that mythology and archetype stuff about making meaning through narrative.) I like that this can be used to support the multi-voiced element of learning- I wish I’d read this before I did Assignment 2!!! I like the way that he uses stories for memory and to put back in the complexity. Thinking about some of the “Cases” used in some of the management courses, they tend to be plonked there is one-off, isolated events, and not presented as stories with real consequences. Perhaps there could be some follow-up to the stories (what happened to the share price? When did this CEO get the chop?)
• He talks about visualising the problem; getting a visual mental image of it. I guess this is where mind-mapping could come in. Hmmm- might even be a reason for using it (I’ve never really been sure whether the effort in getting students to generate a mind-map is worth the effort).
• I liked his table on p. 231 which separated learning activities (what the student does) from instructional activities (what the teacher does). But is this ALL a teacher does?
• I thought that it was interesting that he used the expert for modelling out the task for judging performance against (p. 234) a la Taylor, but in actually modelling performance itself, use a skilled but not an expert performer. I find myself nodding.
• The coaching bit was a bit ho-hum; but I like the idea of the coach becoming “the conscience of the learner”. Sometimes when people ask me to describe my job, I speak of it as working like a teaching conscience. And the "perturbing learners models" I liked too- picks up on the learning conversation. This is all people stuff. The scaffolding part was less human: I can see how you could design those things into the computer-generated part of the learning environment.

Some things that I wonder about though:

• many of the problems he talks about sound like ‘sim’ type activities- Sim City, Sim Hospital- Sim ledger ? Is it always necessary to have these microworlds? Isn’t there something a bit the same about them all? It’s a bit like a platform game disguised as fantasy, war game, Mother Goose- it’s all about collecting things, battling, levels and mazes. Does action ALWAYS have an immediate response? He does temper this a bit on p. 223 where he says that it may be sufficient to generate a hypothesis and then argue for it. But I think that he’s more turned on by the microworlds.
• I have a similar problem with his “make a knowledge base” activity for collaboration. For one thing, making a knowledge base is more co-operative than collaborative (i.e. you could send individuals off to gather their own information), and wouldn’t it get boring after a while, producing knowledge base after knowledge base. A danger, too, that it would be information-base after information-base- which is not necessarily the same thing as a knowledge base. I was listening to Life Matters yesterday, and they had Kaz Cooke on (Hermoine), and she has published a new book about babies where, to reflect the fact that babies are all different, she gives about ten possible solutions to a problem (.e.g. why is the baby crying) and leaves the parent to either work through them all, or choose the one they want. Is this information, or knowledge (advice?).
• There is something a bit “set and forget” about all this. There’s intelligent agents creeping around in the shadows

I know that I am probably a closet constructivist- and that in my heart of hearts this is how I’d like to work. But the tyranny of the textbook and the deluge of content is so unrelenting. More emphasis on ACTIVITY- that’s what I want to work towards!!! And human activity as well- not just designed INTO the course upfront, but designed as part of the unfolding experience too. And tempered by the importance of INTENT as well.

Re-reading Jonassen again. It’s funny and rather frustrating- I find myself discovering new things each time I re-read articles. I’m not able to say that I have “done” Laurillard or “done” Taylor , because the reading of one informs the other. I have this dread of being stuck in a spiral- unable to move on!!! (Huh- one thing that always moves you on is the demands of an assessment).

Anyway, re-reading Jonassen (The Constructivism and computer mediated communication) one, I’m looking again at his distinction between symbolic reasoning and situated learning. He seems to be setting them up as an either/or dichotomy, whereas what I took from Laurillard recently is that the demands of academic learning (i.e. not situated, generalisable, abstracted) mean that it has to use symbolic reasoning as part of the intrinsic nature of the type of learning it is. Although, I note that she does use the words “symbolic representation” rather than “symbolic reasoning”. I wonder if there’s a difference? In other words, Laurillard suggests that symbolic representation is the method of choice in an abstracted, generalized learning environment, rather than a now-surpassed (inferior?) paradigm.

I’m just looking at the Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments section, where the design of the software or procedure provides a form of scaffolding. I really like the idea of scaffolding through conversation (ie. human mediated). Am I as comfortable with software mediated (i.e. no human mediation)? I guess that the goal of both forms is to demonstrate and push students into using particular tools and routines as part of thinking- does it matter if it’s demonstrated by a person or by the software?

I just had a thought. All those questions at the end of the chapter of any textbook that we always had to answer when we were at school- there was nothing wrong with the questions often, it was just the tedium of “read the chapter, then answer the questions”. For example, questions about a short story often used to ask about plot, characterisation, narrator reliability, language, metaphors etc.- all the things that the unscripted discussions in the online bookgroups I am in do as a matter of course or range across in some way as part of the discussion. Certainly, most of the people in these online bookgroups have gone through a similar educational experience where these sorts of questions were the common fare, so perhaps we are falling back on established routines. But also, these are the things that (expert) readers look at; these are the areas that are ripe for discussion and debate. They WERE scaffolds; they were just boring scaffolds- and presented as if the answer were the important thing, and not the question.

Being able to frame the question- the central thing. I read somewhere that politicians like it when the people are asking the wrong questions.

Case based learning environments. Some of the subjects that I work with academics on make a big deal about case study as the principal form of instruction. If I am being cynical (and oh dear, I find myself being cynical more and more) but I don’t think they’ve deconstructed what it is about a “case” that brings about the learning. Too often it’s a matter of finding a couple of case studies, putting up links to them, but then not asking the students to DO anything with them. The textbooks they use have lots of case studies too- but again, followed always by a number of questions that leach the life out of the case study rather than use it as a springboard. Or else, the “case” (i.e. the particular) is left sitting there by itself- it’s not connected to anything- or if it is, it’s just an illustration of the point just described in the textbook, but again, the students aren’t asked to DO anything other than make the connection. There’s such a cut-and-driedness about the cases- they are all “achievable” and “discussable” within one lesson, and never referred to again (except as an example of a particular concept). They’re not recycled and rethought ( not like I’m doing with this article)!

I’m now up to the Cognitive Tools for Knowledge Representation and Construction section. He claims that students cannot use these tools without thinking deeply about the content they are studying. The word “deeply” triggered off for me thinking about Ramsden et als distinction between deep and surface learning. (They argue that the decision to approach a subject in a deep or surface way depends on the learners’ priorities, buy-in and what the curriculum rewards.) Jonassen is not talking at the curricular level (although he does acknowledge this in the final paragraph) - he’s talking more from the activity level. I wonder if you can use a cognitive tool in a surface way?

• Laurillard
• Vygotsky- his idea of the Zone of Proximal Development was one of the best things I’ve read
• Bruner- Acts of Meaning: about the social ly-mediated “stories” we need to make sense of things
• Kuhn- paradigms
• Piaget- paradigms again but on an individual level
• Wenger- community of practice- “the way we do things here” and Lave and Wenger- legitimate peripheral participation- that you can just watch.
• Schon- his swamp of professional practice
• Biggs, Ramsden – constructive alignment of assessment and intentions

I was wrong! How wonderful!!!! Actually, a bit of a boring game in the end- strange how the Grand Final often ends up being such a one-sided affair. I went to the St Kilda Grand Final in 1966 and can still remember the power of the roar that greeted the players as they came onto the ground. I noticed the relative quietness of the crowd, even when Collingwood was making its belated recovery in the final quarter (when, admittedly, a number of Collingwood supporters may have left). I think that corporate seat-buying has robbed the Grand Final of a lot of the excitement. I noticed in the short film clips from the qualifying and preliminary finals for that competition where you voted for your favourite finals moment (or whatever), that the crowd was a lot louder.

We went to the Heidelberg Theatre Company last night (a local repertory group) to see Moliere's "The Imaginary Invalid". I think that 17th century French farce must be an acquired taste (lol)- lots of dressing-up and disguises and slamming doors!!

Did I tell you that Steve and I are trying to brush up on our French by reading Le Monde? Steve did first-year French at uni, so he's quite fluent whereas I puddle along, mis-reading and misinterpreting everything I read! If I ever cite anything I read in Le Monde "By the way, I read in Le Monde the other day.....", then disregard EVERYTHING I tell you because I probably got it all backwards! Although I was quite chuffed the other day to quickly get the gist of the front page article about that French guy who ended up in Villawood Detention Centre because of passport irregularities- that's obviously what it takes to end up on the front page of Le Monde!

I hope to go to Heide gallery this afternoon to catch the Wesfarmers exhibition before it closes. I do this all the time- there's an exhibition on for months and I keep saying "I must go see that" and end up on the last possible day queuing up with all the other laggards who did the same thing! Heide was the home of John and Sunday Reed, and the artistic base of Sydney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester etc. They've restored the original home, and it has a lovely garden, which Sunday Reed took a lot of pride in. It's across the river from where I grew up, but I was never particularly aware that it was of significance.