day2 elearning africa
DESCRIPTION
Presentation delivered to workshop for Elearning Africa, 2009. Dakar, SenegalTRANSCRIPT
Social Networking Technologies for Teaching and Learning
Transformation
May 27, 2009Dakar, Senegal
Review of Day One
Information and Society’s Institutions
Institutions mirror informationMcNeely & Wolverton
Universities map reality
Frank & Gabler
What happens when the primary elements of education change?
The gatekeepers
Institutions
Curriculum designers, educators
Assume to know what learners will need later
We fundamentally relate to information differently
Not created by select few
Learn lesson from news, media, music industry
Not controlled by select few
Learn lessons from PR, marketing, and politics
What are information trends?
IntuitiveGrowth Fluidity Impact on authorityImpact on certainty Technology
Big changes change big institutions
Participatory sense making
Our world makes sense through our interaction with information and others
....(and in turn, their interactions with information and others)
De Jaegher, Di Paolo, 2007
Requires new approaches to making sense of abundance
“Significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential”
Vannevar Bush, 1945
Associative trails between information
Associative trails between people
“All the knowledge is in the connections”David Rumelhart
Information becomes knowledge through connections
Undiscovered public knowledge
When connections are weak…not more research, but better connections
Undiscovered public knowledge systems of information that are similar but
distinct or not normally connected(Don Swanson)
By design, today’s institutions & systems serve to handle information
of a different nature
“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual...”
Institute of Education, London, 2007
Emergence and tradition
Social Learning
“The major responsibility of education is to arm every single person for the vital combat for lucidity”
Morin, p 12, 13, 1999
New challenge: sensemaking & wayfinding in abundance
What is our mind like?
Black box
Computer
Social, cultural
Modular
Ecology…and a network
“What aspects of learning are obscured by one theory may be illuminated by another”
(Driscoll)
Behaviourism
Concept: Learning is a change in behaviour…mind is a black box
Figures: Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson, Skinner
B.F. Skinner
Cognitivism
Concept: information processing, metacognition, thought process, knowledge is organized
Figures: Bruner, Ausubel, Gagne, Piaget, Vygotsky
Cognitivism
Motivation– Attribution– ARCS• Attention• Relevance• Confidence• Satisfaction
Constructivism
Multiple camps: cognition, interaction, context
Broad influence: Dewey, Von Glasersfeld, Kuhn
“Knowledge constructed by learners as they attempt to make sense of their experiences” (Driscoll)
Piaget
Piaget: – Process of development– Stages of development
“I think that all structures are constructed and that the fundamental feature is the course of this construction: Nothing is given at the start, except some limiting points on which all the rest is based. The structures are neither given in advance in the human mind nor in the external world, as we perceive or organize it.”
Social Constructivism
Vygotsky– Language– Social and cultural context
Constructionism
Concept: people learn through making things – “creative experimentation”
Learning vs. Teaching“find ways in which the technology enables
children to use knowledge”
Seymour Papert
Connectionism
Concept: Learning - neural networks, not symbol processing
Figures: – Early: Thorndike (behaviourist)– More recently modular models of learning
(Minsky), Bechtel, Abrahamsen, Pinker, Churchland, Hebb
Situated Learning
Concept: “learning as it normally occurs is a function of the activity, context and culture in which it occurs”
Figures: Lave, Wenger
Activity Theory
Concept: “More than ever there is a need for an approach that can dialectically link the individual and the social structure”
“Transcending Context”
Figures: Leont’ev (based on Vygotsky)Engeström (in current iteration – expansive
learning)
Biological views of learning
“It appears that complex and distributed systems of neurons are implicated in learning, with some systems centrally involved with the development and representation of a memory trace, and others peripherally involved in the expression of learned behaviour”
(Donegan & Thompson)
Biological views of learning
Brain-based learning approachesNeural architecture & neuroscienceEmotions
“Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.”
(Time Magazine)
“To the neuroscientist, learning is a whole-person/whole-brain activity what confounds received organizations”
Theodore Marchese
Learning in relationship to knowledge and mind
Distributed – Hutchins – Not “in skull”– Spivey et. al. – “not always inside brain”– Bereiter – “knowing outside the mind”
Externalization – Wittgenstein, Vygotsky
Socialization – Papert, Piaget, Bruner, Bandura
Ethical/moral obligations…structures – Freire, Illich, Papert, Dewey
Cognition and mind as social phenomenon:
Mind/self created through social participation
Practices/tools/language are social constructions
Power fashions practices/toolsGarrison, 1995, p. 737
“The intelligences…are distributed…across minds, persons, and the symbolic and physical environments”
Roy Pea
Fifth Estate: Reshaping “communicative powers of
individuals and groups”W. H. Dutton, Oxford, 2007
Complexification of knowledge reduces individual capacity to apprehend its unity
“The major responsibility of education is to arm every single person for the vital combat of lucidity”
...New problem: access to info, skills to organize info
Morin, p 12, 13, 1999
New media adds new opportunities for connections/relations, enacting latent ties
Haythornthwaite, 2002
“Gossip, people-curiosity, and small talk...are in essence the human version of social grooming”
Zufekci, 2008
Individual knowledge possible due to social practices of engagement
Tsoukas, 1996
Participatory Pedagogies(Collis & Moonen, 2008)
(Askins, 2008)(Harvard Law School, 2008)
Networked Learning
Co-evolution of individual and related networkLazer, 2000
Stages of development: networks in education
1. Physical infrastructure
2. Merging with other fields
3. Theoretical and transformative views of learning, cognition, knowledge
4. Popularization of networks
5. Integrated learning/knowledge/education networks
Depth and diversity of connections determines understanding
Frequency of exposure
Integration with existing ideas/concepts
Strong and Weak Ties
Determining understandingDetermining understanding
How attributes of connections reflect learning
The primacy of the connection
Framework of Emerging Technologies
What do different technologies do?
1. Access
2. Presence
3. Expression
4. Creation
5. Interaction/co-creation
6. Aggregate our fragmentation
Thinking about tomorrow
Where are we going?
Given the changes in how we interact with content and each other, how should we change the educational process?
Open Teaching
Alec Couros Stephen DownesLeigh BlackallDavid Wiley
Learning design?
Thin walls
“by creating space and place, we create ourselves”
Cannatella, 2007, p. 632
Spaces are themselves agents for change. Changed spaces will change practice
(JISC, 2006)
Away from hierarchies and classrooms
To
Networks and ecologies...
Schools as a single node in networks of learning
Bigger shift than that from a Ptolmeic to Copernican view of the solar system…Self-organization is the way the relevant sciences are heading.
Carl Bereiter (2002)
Architecture of participation powered by network effects
“Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places”
John Brinckerhoff Jackson
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