Afterhours

Where does learning occur?

An interesting article in Change Magazine: In Defense of Lecturing, by Mary Burgan. Lecturing is difficult to defend nowadays, in the face of modern educational theories that decry “the sage on the stage” in favour of “the guide on the side”. I’ve written about this before – as the author of this article points out:

Teaching with Technology: how-to and why-to

An interesting book I've just finished reading: Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success, by A.W. (Tony) Bates and Gary Poole.

The book is both a theoretical and a practical guide to many aspects of online learning as it currently exists. I like it first for its open-minded approach to the foundations of learning (Part I); for example, it avoids dogmatic obeisance to a single theory or philosophy of learning and instead acknowledges that a variety of methods may be appropriate and work well in different situations.

If ... different approaches to learning need to be used in different contexts, we have to be careful to identify relevant approaches for specific learning tasks and groups of students, and then analyze how technology could be used to meet those needs. (p. 35)

The book also acknowledges the role of faculty as teachers in the design of online courses, and not merely as "content providers", an issue I've written about elsewhere.

Although we are both faculty facilitators, we deeply believe that the best ideas about how to teach a subject come from professors with a deep understanding of the subject matter. Our role has been to help colleagues see the potential of technology for their teaching, but the true test of good teaching is the extent to which it enlightens and challenges students, and this has to come from subject experts. (p. xviii)

There's much more - the book is a treasure trove of common sense. I like particularly that it is experience-based: its "best practices" are indeed practices and not, as is so often the case elsewhere, "best theories". (In my book, experience trumps theory any day.) It's a refreshing change from much earlier work on technology-based education, which often seemed more intent on portraying webspace as the ideal venue for the particular author's favourite educational theory than on actually building exemplars there. Few of those writers bothered much about concrete implementation details, bringing to mind the oft-quoted statement that "vision without implementation is hallucination". Both authors of this book, however, have extensive practical experience in actually implementing online learning, and are able to synthesize that experience coherently and readably. Combined with their ability to relate their experience to a multifaceted perspective on the theoretical foundations of teaching and learning, that makes for a very satisfying read.

Non-inductive interactive math

A few days ago, I put up a sampler of online widgets I'm designing for a linear algebra course. The impetus was a comment by Paul Tanner on the math-teach list:

Another point: Technology-activities-based math teaching and learning seems inescapably inductive in nature: It always seems to be about something other than algebraic/analytic derivation or proof. So the more one uses technology in teaching, the more inductive a teacher's pedagogy is forced to be. .... [much more]

I think he's correct here - most current development of math tech for teaching is of the discovery-learning genre. Me, I'm more of the "show-it-to-'em" school, and my widgets reflect that philosophy. I look on these widgets more as "interactive diagrams" embedded in a webpage of context/explanation than as independent learning explorations. The latter are much harder to design - or at least to design well. I've seen very few that I think really work.

Surviving Course Development Wars - the SME viewpoint

A "tsk tsk" Xplana article by Susan Smith Nash details the often less than cordial relations between faculty SMEs and instructional designers. Since the author saw fit not to present the SME side of the story, I thought I might take a stab at it.

In my opinion, a large part of the problem is that little three-letter acronym: SME.

Weblogs for Mentoring

These past two weeks I helped facilitate a discussion on using weblogs in education. Here's a repost to this blog of one I made to our discussion blog. The post was commented upon here.

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I don't use weblogs myself in teaching, as I don't really see an application for my subject (math) right now other than possibly as a simple course blog for announcements or some such. What did get me interested in the idea of weblogs in education a few years back was looking at Lloyd Nebres' The Internet Classroom and the Advanced Internet Classroom, part of UC Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program. (See AIC2003 for the latest version of the latter course, for example.) It's been written about before, so rather than re-articulating points already well articulated elsewhere, let me point you to the excellent 2000 article (originally called A Pedagogy of Nudges) by Laura Shefler. The whole article is interesting and relevant; please read at least the first page to see what I'm talking about in the following.

The Value of Passivity

... the title of an Oct. 10 post on elearnspace blog

When learning in a workshop or a lecture course, the Instructor provides some of the motivation to learn. Regularly scheduled sessions, lectures, presentations, all allow learners to absorb information...without having to provide all the effort. This may seem like a small distinction...but it is what I miss most about face-to-face learning.

Some days I'm just not motivated to read through multiple screens of text...analyze diagrams...experiment on my own...post my thoughts in a forum. All of these activities require that I'm focused on "getting my own learning". Sometimes, I like sitting back and listening to someone explain a concept. I like a certain amount of passivity in my learning.

This is a point of view some instructional designers would do well to consider. Listening to a well-prepared explanation can be a less stressful way of learning than a more involved and time-consuming series of activity/discovery/reflection/etc.. And provided the listener is mentally active and paying attention, it can often be more efficient than more "active" modes of learning.