Category Archives: Learning

CAL Monday noon

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OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. 

Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)


Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice… 

He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂  ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.

There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.

The paper focuses on three areas:

1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online  community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.

FirstClass as a tool

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Reading Guy Claxton on ‘Learning to Learn’. He’s taking a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) approach. He says that the student is:

‘learning in the context of, and with the aid of, a host of culturally constituted tools – books, symbols, computer graphics – which afford or invite certain approaches to the learning task and preclude others. The settings in which people find themselves – especiall those which they inhabit recurrently – thus channel the growth of their minds.’

Something to consider in the light of FirstClass, and of SecondLife.

Intuitive

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My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.

Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.

I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.

I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.

And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.

Different types of learning (7.2.06)

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Thought I’d posted this before, but can’t find it. It’s is my list against which I judge learning theories. If they don’t apply to everything on this list, they’re incomplete.

* Early Years – learning through play
* ACE (accelerated Christian education): children are assessed on entry and progress at their own speed, working through booklets and doing the tests at the end of each one before they can move on to the next. They work mainly alone, but if they get stuck they put a little flag up in their cubicle and a supervisor helps out.
* Learning through observation – Gerald Durrell in My family and other animals. Gerald spends all day alone in the wilds of Corfu and amasses an enormous amount of zoological knowledge. He rarely meets anyone who encourages this or is prepared to show any interest. The people he encounters mostly speak another language and are from a very different culture.
* Gaining self knowledge through retreat and/or contemplation
* Learning skills through apprenticeship
* Traditional sushi chef training. ‘All you do the first couple of years is observe. You watch how the master filets fish, and you learn how to cook rice.’
* Learning through reading
* Learning through searching the Internet
* Learning to play a tune on the piano
* Learning languages through immersion
* Education in Saudi Arabia until the 1950s: kuttab schools specialising in memorising the Qu’ran
* Tai chi – learning wordlessly through physical moves.

Learning as positioning (7.2.06)

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Is there something deeper here about identities and position (must sort out what the difference is)? Is learning a continual repositioning of yourself, and a changing of the positions open to you? Is teaching a focused way of helping people to position themselves in more knowledgeable/educated/informed ways?

This may be too generic, because as time passes, whatever you do, you will lose some positions and move to others. You go to bed positioned as someone exhausted and wake up positioned as someone refreshed. You wait for a bus for half an hour and end up positioned as someone cold, wet and bored. Umm, it would refer to inanimate objects as well. One minute it’s positioned as a rock, the next minute it’s positioned as a seat, or a leaning post, or a back scratcher.

And animals (and even plants, in some ways) can learn things, but I’m not sure to what extent they can position themselves.

Hmm. Needs more thought.

Sociocultural perspective (7.2.06)

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‘According to the sociocultural perspective, human learning cannot be fully undestood without understanding human activity. In studying learning, therefore, one should focus on how tools, mental and material, are used in human activity and how humans construct knowledge and understanding by the use of tools. Moreover, the physical and social environments are considered integral to the learning activity. This conceptualisation of learning implies that it matters where the learning occurs.’ (Ingvill, p5)

Ingvill takes this to mean, from the point of view of ICT, that the important things are how it influences communication and how information is organised, stored, retrieved and interpreted. But also important, for me, is how identities are established. I think this is also true for the sort of classroom use of ICT that Ingvill was examining – the children who identify as expert users, or competent users, or unwilling users, or the ones that never get a chance to use the keyboard.

Learning theory (6.1.06)

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I’m having trouble with learning theory. It looks good on paper, and then I think about what it means in practice and it often seems to unravel very quickly.

For example: learning is ‘a community process of transformation of participation in sociocultural activities’ (Rogoff , Matusov and White 1996). Sounds good, doesn’t it? Learning as participation, learning as community, learning as verb.

So, if I go out into a field and observe ants for six hours, that’s not learning (CF My family and other animals), but if I go into a pub and am initially quiet but then hit the man next to me, that is learning?

What I find particularly strange about this is that I was watching My family and other animals with the kids at Christmas and discussing why Gerry’s mother can’t recognise how much he is learning on Corfu. She sees him learning Greek and biology and taxidermy and feels he’s running wild and must be put in a classroom with a tutor and a book of problems in mathematics in order to gain an education. Her definition of learning ruled out sitting for hours on your own in a field, and I think Rogoff and White’s does too (though for different reasons).