Epimetheus

Still doing some reading on problem-based learning, but with half an eye on the final assessment too. I’m reading about concepts at the moment, and perhaps this is something I’d like to explore in my final reflection. I feel almost embarrassed to mention it, but I’m only just coming to think more and more about conceepts as the base building block of curriculum. I know that David Jonassen etc. talk a lot about concept formation (and expressing it through concept maps) etc etc, but I’ve only just started teasing through the distinction between concept and content. Again, it’s an act of stepping up out of the detail- in effect, is it finding an adjective or an abstract noun? E.g. epistemic fluency, learner centredness etc?? I really do feel embarrassed that I’m going back to such basics- although I’m reassuring myself that it’s “revisiting” the idea!!!

Thinking about the curricula I’ve been involved in this year, probably Marcus’ Enterprise subjects are the closest to concept-based, and problem-based learning. I’m thinking about the Finance and Accounting subject I'm doing at the moment, and I can’t for the life of me see the concepts in it- they’re too enmeshed with the content. Certainly, the material as we’ve written it doesn’t make the concepts clear. I wonder if Rod and Marcia themselves know what the concepts are????

This is reinforcing to me the importance of tying problem-based learning, or any pedagogy based on concept learning into realigned curriculum. It’s hard work re-thinking the whole concept of concepts!!!; time consuming; threatening. Not the sort of thing you’d throw at someone in the scrabble to get course guides written.

I’ve been thinking about the educational philosophy espoused at RMIT and the huge gap with practice at the coalface. Where does the disjunction occur? I think it comes at the point where people say “yes this applies to me”. I thought that comment was interesting in one of my readings where everyone seemed to think that PBL was a good idea except in their course!!

Rod surprised me yesterday. The Finance and Accounting course has not gone through course renewal, but as part of the accreditation process it needed to be framed in capability language, so someone had gone through and “capabilityized” it- i.e. inserted a capability table alongside the pre-existing learning outcomes. One of them was “reflective analytical practice”, and when I looked at the material Rod had produced for the Finance part of the course, I said to him “Look Rod, I really can’t see that we’ve addressed this anywhere.” His response was that “reflective analytical practice” was a program-wide capability, that he hadn’t signed off on that particular approach, and that other subjects dealt with it, not his.

Why was I surprised? Partially because I really like Rod, and thought that, as an educational designer himself (in an earlier incarnation) he was comfortable with the idea of overarching curricular intention distinct from content. And also because of the realisation of the obstructive nature of even the most innocuous academic- I don’t agree with that, so it doesn’t apply to me.

Is this why there is the gap between philosophy, high level pedagogy and practice? I look at the structures that have been set up to support the capability approach espoused from on high: course renewal, teaching awards, accreditation procedures that insist on framing curriculum in capability terms etc. etc. Where is there space to express resistance here? One way is to treat all this as “hoops” to jump through, and I think that the accreditation procedures are certainly treated in that way.

Another thought about Assessment 2: how “pure” should I be? Should I take a continnum approach (e.g. the 11 gradations of problem-basedness I found), or a purist approach which holds on to the fundamental concept and process basis of PBL as distinct from content- or discipline- based learning?

Been thinking about some of the comments that people have made on the Discussion Board. One person mentioned that some people seem to have more clout or presence right from the start- that their posts seem to spark off responses, whereas other peoples’ just die in the water. Interesting thought.

Someone else mentioned that they consciously refrain from using the Discussion Boards as a vehicle to complain about colleagues etc and their lack of progress in online learning ( a rough paraphrase). I’m trying not to be too defensive, because I think that this is a criticism that could be levelled against me!! But I’ve been thinking that, for me, I need to shuttle between two positions. One is to be very situated in my perspective- to look around me and thing “yes, _____ is an example of that”, or think about events and incidents that capture, in real life, something I’ve read about. I think of it as sort of “knitting in” what I’m reading about with my life as I’m living it. Perhaps it’s a form of story telling, but I don’t see it as completely a-theoretical.

The other position is to abstract myself even higher up out of the readings ,and I’ve found that some of the activities, particularly in the groups, that Glen has proposed have forced me to be even more abstract than what I would nornally be. For example, he has asked us several times to think about meta-definitions i.e. not the “thing” that is being defined, but the defining tool. (Sort of like when you’re inserting a table into a Word document, thinking about the header of a table, or the design of a table, rather than the information under the header). It’s not something that comes naturally to me, and I don’t know whether I really “like” doing it. At times, it has felt rather artificial and off-at-a-tangent, but then I found the whole exercise really useful when it came to writing the assignment- probably a good example of aligned assessment and activities, as Biggs would recommend. I think this meta-analysis is similar, although I may be wrong, to the sort of thing that Terry Mayes does? It’s a sort of disembodied, abstract conversation- not particularly natural- but which looks at the act of developing a construct, rather than the content.

When I first read Mayes’ task directed discussions, they seemed particularly barren and boring. I wonder if he kept the conversation at this meta-level, or whether he invited them to knit in their own experience? Or perhaps he did this elsewhere? It’s a bit like that Cognitive Display Theory or other forms strongly cognitive instructional design. There’s something I find a bit toe-curlingly contrived or behaviourist about these theories when you read about them- I think I need to have my concepts “lived- in.”

How much are you responsible to consider your audience in a discussion board? Is “reflection” a completely internal conversation with one’s self- or does reflection have a social purpose as well? Are the “whingeing” posts a form of story telling?