blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for learning
May 6, 2007 at 9:50 am · Filed under distributed learning, learning
Are you Ready for Mobile Learning? a recent article in Educause.
The idea of mobile learning has been circulating for several years now. It’s one of those catch-all terms, like e-learning, or podcasting, that has a dozen descriptions. It’s a phenomena; it’s has instructional, institutional and strategic implications; it’s the future; it’s here; it’ll pass, etc, etc.
One of the ways to talk about these things with each other is to describe our experiences and share our opinions.
Using the digital native/immigrant descriptive framework, we forget that business people have been working and learning mobil-ly for more than a decade and that many young people are very bound to traditional methods of learning, which for purposes of this post, are not the kinds of learning strategies, skills and characteristics a successful mobile learner would need. I’m thinking of self-direction, independent as well as interdependent, motivated, manages time well, is organized, technologically literate and connected (involves tools and money). None of these ideas are new but exist in the literature of distance and progressive education dating back to the early 1900s.
If we draw a bit from the corporate world, we see that mobility, tele-commuting and similar ideas stemming from the ubiquity of ICT, have not delivered as expected. For all but a few progressive companies, whose business plans designed teleworking, such as Jet Blue, organizations want to keep an eye on most employees. People I’ve spoken with have said they couldn’t and wouldn’t want to work at home because they “don’t have the discipline;” going to a workplace with co-workers and colleagues provides a structure.
Mobile learning provides little structure, or so it appears from an orientation stemming from traditional, time/place specific, teacher-centered learning. It’s not for everyone nor for all kinds of learning.
I can’t read a dense passage for deep understanding in a noisy airport nor do I believe a “digital
native” can either.
February 18, 2007 at 5:05 pm · Filed under informal learning, learning, ways of knowing
What makes Foucault a challenging read? The complaints I’ve heard most often are his long and winding, illustrative sentences. That’s exactly it. He fills his sentences with illustrations and explications that intellectually ornate. He’s utterly French, even in English. The trick, I’ve found, is to know that’s what he’s doing, to fast-forward ahead, then circle back, summarizing along the way.
What a workout.
January 3, 2007 at 7:00 am · Filed under Personal Reflections, learning, multiculturalism
I understand the different now. You can spend a lifetime never really understanding what a word means. Sometimes it’s because you don’t understand or know enough about the context(s). Sometimes it’s because people around you don’t understand or use the word accurately.
It becomes more complex across languages, which is what I love about languages, the discovery of new ways of thinking. Yesterday I was talking with a German friend about the word Zuvertrauen which usually translates as confidence; faith and trust (religiously). The word has another meaning for her that isn’t captured in any of these meanings, each of which has a German equivalent. Because she’s a writer words and meanings matter to her.
Words and meanings matter to me because I rely heavily on them to understand the world. At the same time you can’t afford to be closed off to others’ meanings, particularly because meaning making through language is a political device.
Equity=fairness
equality=sameness
October 26, 2006 at 6:55 pm · Filed under educational technology, learning, trends, ways of knowing
I was recently at a webinar about a next generation learning environment, epsilen.com. I’m always excited about the potential of next generation ideas, the built-stuff that follows them is usually disappointing.
Learning objects sounded like it had potential in 2002 when I first started looking into it. When SCORM hit the pavement running, I became uninterested, not only because the US Department of Defense created the standard, but that no one seemed to mind. I still like the idea of learning objects; I don’t think they’ll be used by most instructors in higher ed, at least not in the near future. The term is too hyper-modern, the notion too abstract for most faculty.
The same is true of the term and notion of an intelligent agent.
By and large, I ignore the intellience in Amazon. And I recently noticed the intelligence in emusic; I’ve already started ignoring it too. I may actually see if I can disable it; I spend enough time there to justify the effort.
Intelligent agents are one of those cool ideas. The ones I’m aware of, like the Paperclip in Word, Amazon and eMusic-like vendors who remember what you’ve done, are more annoying than not. They get in the way of my experience. They structure; they categorize; they further dehumanize by acting as if they “personalize” an already impersonal experience.
Vendors are about commerce and there are rules of commerce. Since I don’t follow them for the most part, the agents don’t work.
I use help menus extensively now and have acquired a certain intelligence about them. If I’m stuck, it’s often because I don’t have the language to find the answer. The paperclip can’t give it to me either.
The missing links of intelligent agency are linguistically and contextually bound, utterances and contexts are infinitely unique and profoundly human.
August 27, 2006 at 10:12 am · Filed under learning, trends, ways of knowing
“Pay as your throw”, that is, charging households for disposing of non-recyclable waste is what the Brits are currently discussing.
Julie Hill of the Green Alliance was quoted “… I think that’s a much more rewarding way of going about it than say, for instance, compulsory recycling and the threat of penalties.”
But is it? The chain of production, consumption and waste is complex and can’t be successfully addressed in its last links, so to say.
In Rubbish 101, we learn about the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Changing habits of reducing and reusing results in overall less rubbish, recyclable and not, and from a behavorist perspective that might be all that’s needed to improve the situation. Is that enough?
How deep into the subject does the average household need to go to be informed enough? How much do we need to know and who decides? Seatbelt wearing became compulsory; cigarette smoking will eventually be outlawed in most public places. Most of us know relatively little about either, but we know enough to decide what we’ll do and for the most part, why.
Interestingly, many people still smoke, knowing what we do about it, suggesting perhaps that simply knowing or being informed isn’t enough to learn. There must be other ways of knowing–socially, emotionally, intellectually conjoined knowing, to effect some change in behavior. There’s also evidence suggesting that one’s beliefs play a significant role in one’s understanding.
For example, many people, including me, incorrectly think that as we back away from a mirror in which we can only see our upper torso, we see more and more of ourselves. Even after the fallacy was illustrated in an experiment, I still went back to my office, to prove it to myself with my little mirror. I did not want to or could not believe it. Why?
June 4, 2006 at 12:45 am · Filed under learning
If we think in terms of teaching habits of mind, using the tools of a field and understanding its culture then yes I agree, we’re teaching students how to learn in our field. Those are very different foci than covering content.
Read more
June 3, 2006 at 11:09 pm · Filed under distributed learning, educational technology, informal learning, learning, social computing, web2.0
This paper is chock full of ideas nicely pulled together:
informal/formal learning, bricolage, peripheral participation/lurking, social software/learning management systems to name just a few. I’m increasingly intrigued by conversations that distinguish issues of learning from issues of teaching.
May 28, 2006 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Students, jobs, learning
I appreciate George Siemens posts, they’re often filled with lots of food for thought. His white paper Learning in Sync with Life: New Models New processes got me to thinking again about non-formal learning and metacognition.
How do learners accumulate their learning and demonstrate competence and capability?
How do learners understand and perceive their own learning, acquired competencies and capacity? I read some years ago that the skills and knowledge a “homemaker” accumulates from the myriad of duties she attends to to keep a home running, equal or exceed those of a middle manager.
I’d guess that most people have little interest in how they learn, but rather in how their skills can be transferred and applied to various situations. Resume writing and preparing for job interviews are a great vehicle for synthesizing and summarizing our competencies.
I’m not sure we can create a culture of life long learning without exposing our beliefs about what it (learning) looks like, when it happens, and how.
And I’m wondering too as I write this, that perhaps some of the fears of obsolescence educational professionals have, might be justified. Tools, games and connections continue to become more sophisticated technologically, socially and politically. We need to keep up enough to be able to guide students’ attention and co-construct what’s going on. This process might make it possible for us to model and facilitate non-formal learning and metacognition.
May 18, 2006 at 8:02 am · Filed under community of practice, learning, social computing
When I “discover” something what I’m often saying is that I had the time/decided to take the time to snoop around an application. That often happens when I’m doing somthing else on the computer, and I need a mental break. Sometimes though I actively seek out what else the tool can do because I’ll want to be able to show and tell others.
And sometimes I’ll be using a tool, like Writely, and I’ll have a problem to solve and I’ll see if Writely can solve it. Or visa versa, I’ll be working with a tool and wonder what other affordances it allows given the task I’m doing. In these examples, the former happens more often than the latter. I was talking with our intern about allowing ourselves time for these kinds of non-formal learning experiences. My latest discovery was Networks in delicious. I knew Jim Julius had a delicious account and I kind of thought there should be a way to get easy access to that other than stumbling on our shared Tags. Then I saw the Network link, emailed him asking what his user name was, and now he’s in my network. So by going to http://del.icio.us/saurilio, you’d also be able to get to http://del.icio.us/jjulius.
Many edubloggers have their del.icio.us bookmarks linked to their blogs. I’m supposing then that I could add them to my network to. Overwhelming? Well that’s where tagging and bundling come in.
May 17, 2006 at 7:51 am · Filed under News, learning
From About Memorandum: Online news is changing. Increasingly, stories are broken and analyzed in near real-time and away from established news sites.
memeorandum offers you a window into this new world of news, focusing primarily on U.S. politics and current affairs.
It auto-generates a news summary every 5 minutes, drawing on experts and pundits, insiders and outsiders, media professionals and amateur bloggers.
I don’t read my Memeorandum feed too often, about once every 2 weeks or so, primarily because it’s focuses only on current events in the US. But it’s a great device for accessing several to many sides about an issue, which can then be used in a variety of ways with students.
