linarmstrong’s posterous


http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf


Many thanks to David Callaghan Learning Technologist (and teacher, and ICT consultant, and computer programmer) from Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK. He posted this paper onto his Moodle class="Apple-style-span" face="Symbol">  and first thing Sunday morning I was excited. For my study  I need to argue the connectivist stance I am taking for my research and this piece might give the evidence I have been searching for to balance the argument. After reading and mind mapping (might get time to get it to the blog with all my other scribbles) I have a few points to make and externalize so others might critisise and argue to help me clarify my position.

That said- here goes! Point 1.

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is often about the position of the learner being a novice with an expert teacher or peer (Vygotsky). In my study and a few papers such as “Their space education for a digital generation”Green and Hannon (www.demos.co.uk) it is the l16 year old learner who is the expert with over 1/3 being editors and creators on you tube and photoshop and the rest being networked to Bebo, Face book, using MSN Vohoo. All have mobile phones and Ipod /MP3s even the poorest families have at least 2 video cameras!  The digital divide may be not about having the technology but about having poor, old technology that has been outdated. The study I carried out at my college might not be generalisable but the level of literacy in this group is below entry level 2 for most in Literacy tests (Profiler) and they have less than 3 GCSE s at any level –never mind the government target of 5 at grade C. the intake area is on the list for poverty and school disaffection, I think its 5^th poorest in the country but would have to check this.

So my argument is literacy in terms of school subjects is poor so the learners are novices there in the world defined by teachers, governments and other stakeholders but in a world where they practice over and over because its of interest to them they are experts. The tutors survey in the same department (Child studies) did not show the same expertise. The use of e-mail for students to contact them was 2 people. The same 2 are on face book and can use MSN. The majority can not load their teaching Moodle and a third cannot use e-mail. The majority cannot check their wages on line or use EBS or Profiler to check student data. The learning support /teaching assistants do not know how to get onto Moodle and describe themselves as technophobes. Got to say who is the expert in networking when most tutors have no idea how to take photos on the phone.?

This brings me to a point that I feel like a visitor to a new world of learning so although I won't throw the baby out with the bath water –I will always use an elective approach with learning theories -I love the new one I reached due to the net. I can’t remember now but some link must have been sent to me. The majority of this connectivism course members seem to know all about this learning theory but I have never considered the learning is amongst the people connected. I can see it in the use of x box learning (not easy, I always get killed due to the multi-tasking I need to do to see my screen and their maps). So the theory for me isn’t flawed –my teaching has to harness the enjoyment of modern networks. This will keep the learner on the course, help their belonging needs their self –esteem needs (Maslow) and if I teach right the fun and laughter of making a sound pod sorry pod cast of “what did Mrs. Piaget say to Mr. Piaget at the breakfast table?” will be much more memorable for the exams than my transmition of facts about theories-as far as I have read them.

 paper 1 your position on connectivism. Due 6^th October 2008

Introduction;Connectivism  knowledge depends on perception not words it involves making a conceptual link between one premise and  another. Connecting with others will increase an individuals context- making tools in their own culture. But is this a theory of learning? If we look a the theories that are used to design learning and acquisition of knowledge we can see connectivism fits into them all from Vygotsky’s externalising individual’s thoughts to Banduras learning in social contexts.In this short paper I argue  that we need a new learning theory to fit today’s context an d  to encourage educators to join learning communities to keep up to date as much as possible.

We do learn by doing  but also by watching. We learn through interaction with a peer group and social situation . We learn in many ways but need firm hubs or maps to navigate when the learning must take us to a specified curriculum or common outcome  such as the knowledge required to do a task. To increase sense between the learner's personal view  and other meaning makers ,“aha” moments or findings must be recorded ,so others can see and criticize or add to it. The strength in learning theories are they fit for the culture and time they are used in. Dewey (1) was one theorist who would support  “real life” learning and in comparison with this great theory connectivism is just as progressive . The theory of multiple intelligences Gardner(2) changed the delivery and design of many college courses and I believe a theory is only as good as the help  it gives to the learner or network. Tony Buzan (3)  has a strong theory about how the brain  works and connects or maps things .This could not have been visualized before the development of theories about the brain and plastic brain studies .So how we learn as individuals  and context of the place / time /culture  are all relevant  when considering a theory to improve practice. The enlightenment connectivism gives to educators would be as revolutionary as other  theories.

If theories are only useful in a certain contexts a big consideration in deciding if we need  a new theory for a digital age is to assess if the digital learner/tutor is a reality for every classroom. Is networked learning a reality for the college students I work within the poorest areas of Warwickshire,England?

 in his paper” little boxes” Barry Wellman article suggests glocalisation to networked individualism is  a reality for at least 50% of the population. Each learner and their family could be somewhere along the gradient of living in a group society to joining in a networked society.

If only one theory was required for any situation fthe learner who does not use the internet and has one house phone the would tutors use one learning theory that suggests learning is to do with holding onto knowledge and building up memory as an individual? Of course no ,the tutor would try to stretch their use of IT to gain links at college. For learners all hooked up with xbox MSN and Facebook ,a lap top and mobile for every familiy member  would tutors  use another learning theory? No ,from  experience  I  know they get Moodleäand the use of Google no matter what course level or family background . Some would  condem the tutors and say the learners needs are not being met because tutors are not from “the digital age”  the offer is dumbed down. Some would ban face book and MSN as playing not real learning. This is about the lens of what is knowledge and who constructs it and what is it for. The fact is there are never too many learning theories .We all use an eclectic approach -choosing the most exciting designs at times just because we like the style  ourselves or because the systems require a certain type of knowledge .Connectivism resonates with me because it solves the problem of tutors and learners differences in IT use to connect socially and to learn is all in the same package.The difference is not an issue in a learning community that relies on less hierarchy and more co-operative methods of sharing knowledge. I agree and support the description of connectivism by Downes (4) as a “way of understanding” so its not an epistemology but an anthology, knowledge not as knowing but as being-so all learning can be from individulas with their own world view as part of a network.

If the knowledge we want the individual to create is to increase the chances of becoming employed the information given or collected has to be specific and remain in learners heads for exams to gain qualifications. Some educators believe learning by rote will increse the chances of neurons connecting properly on the day of the exam this brings me to the question still to be tackled by me as a new user of the theory. How do you get knowledge as a commodity-something the steakeholders need to see as an exam result in order to pay the individual worker.A distributed system of complex learning has to be facilliatated carefull and controlled –but can it be if the learning is in pipework between individuals? The role of education is to connect all in an inclusive way to formal and personal social learning .Connectivism would lend itself to this. This means the learner is not just a product of education but also a consumer of education. a wider and more ethical stance is needed to prepare the learner to take a full role in civic society, to be included on their own terms and accepted for their contributions.

Connections and reconnections between neurons can be proven and the plasticity of the brain that can relearn connection’s and grow organically is of particular interest for learners with a childhood learning difficulty such as dyslexia. I like the idea the college could solve some literacy problems by using a different theory of learning, one that doesn’t rely on individual ability of memorising and making connections but on ability to connect and join in a learning community .To join one zone of proximinal learning to another  but there still needs to be a control or hub or the links could get muddled and be regurgitated for exams in the funniest ways. What we’re talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence. Meta-cognitive learning styles would be supported by the new connectivism as the activity would serve to change behaviours and lift information through short ,manageable bursts of information from various medias-some constructed by the students themselves would ensure a better future exam result for every student. Recognising patterns and links is sometimes a gift of dyslexia and lots of students love to bri-collage until they become fonts of knowledge on all sorts of interesting things. The learning theory is another tool to help every learner to reach their individual moment of cognition or understanding a shared meaning as it offers different approaches and layering of information.

So in conclusion do we need a new  learning theory for the fast flowing digital age? It would justify the fun design and social life needs of the learners. It supports differentiation would be a valuable inclusion tool but the role of the tutor in connecting up ideas that are constructed by learners in the outer fringes of knowing what’s needed for a course that has exams. It is a theory because it can be used to teach  how people learn but is more because it links the whole person their inclusion needs and their learning styles to the course design.

The major concern in colleges today is voiced by the Leitch report as the ability of the educated school leavers to meet the growing needs of the employer and to be in the top of the league tables of countries skills for competitive practice in the world economy. The new 16-19 Diplomas are one of the English government’s drives to ensure all are employable and useful members of society. The rapid change in college funding,managerialism,curriculum and expectations on the tutors are all features of the current context of FE  in England. Beside the expansion of younger ,more needy and less academic students into college is a pressure of  the constant testing and measuring of skils in classrooms .On top of this is a theme that tutors are not able to do the job of changing the british economy- reports by JISC and government research support the theory that tutors In colleges have very poor IT skills and worrying low levels of literacy generally.

The stage at English colleges is we are at the very beginning of using IT for teaching and learning. The greatest stumbling block  is  is a fear of lifting bans on face book ,  msn wikipeadia and other social networking sites  . The tutors feel  the students will abuse the time they have for studying by using the net. There is certainly a need to rethink formal educations networks and tools in order to engage learners in their own culture and spaces. With real spaces becoming less and less as the college fills up with the younger learner and we are luck to get a classroom each week   the virtual spaces might become a place to network and learn .

The learners joining college today have rich digital lives and have been exposed to multi-tasking and have skills of making you tube videos ,photos on a phone ,texting and using the net for social spaces. The role of the tutor can't be to provide the same level of technology at college. Students don’t seem to expect the educational offer to be up to much. Coming from  schools where they were more aware than the teachers they now flood colleges where the videos have bad hair from the 90s played on tvs on trolleys and the Moodle Is full of tutor’s notes. 

The truth is young students do not expect and certainly do not get blogs, wikis, podcasts ,on line videos or virtual worlds at college. There is a distict divide (as there always has been ) between youth culture and education.Moving the tutors  from believing there will be bulying and abuse if they do not control the virtual  environment to less hierarchy will be a task for myself and my team this year.

The blog is so new to me ,I made one for the course. I loved writing as if references and grammar did not matter. It was my space to muse,to put my reflections on the reading so I never lost them . I really would encourage anyone to have a blog as I learn such a lot from others. love the course ,love the readings and spent hours mind-mapping and jotting but only a small part comes to the blog as writing takes so long. I love being connected across the world what a buzz when a line was taken from my blog to the hub.

Now I find CF has been appointed to view and critique the blog..I never had the instructions on how to insert high grade stuff! CF,who i must admit up to now I thought was a plant, was probably paid by Stephen Downes to create a lot of distention so the course had its own East Enders theme/ Ramsey Street ...cant think of an American version... but think soap set up for viewers to watch in disbelief. The ratings would go right up as CF slags off the content and theory in such a high brow way it would count as academic review not cyber bullying. Well CF rate my blog as whatever but don't expect a Christmas card from me!

So far i feel i use an elective mix of learning theories to design and present learning opportunities to the group of adult learners. The constructivist approach sits well with me,the learners constructing their own meanings by making neural connections in their  brain.The personal meanings can be called constructs "mental models" or "personal concepts". the exam  papers showed just how the concepts are rarely uniform or perfect in any way.It feels like herding sheep at times as all in the class has their own lens. the teaching for year one was to set activities which make students create their own meaning and then check these. active methods where learning is applied not just recalled. where students must use constructs to make decisions , analyse choose ,evaluate. their work will demonstrate their learning errors and these can then be corrected.

Learning in my classrooms has been affected by Blooms taxonomy...not  just recall where students are required to memorize but explain and use multi-sensory tasks to aid recall and understanding.

ok so now i come to year two. its an easy job to set the second years onto the global module they have to pick a country and research and analyse the early childhood issues. i am going to develop a wiki with them ,ask them to sig p for google alerts and make a blog and all share with other colleges in their child-studies departments so they will be networked.(I have never felt so connected since i started this connectivism course,,,so many papers and viewpoints that i seem to learn easily through connections . love blogs where there is no need for conventions of references and accademic writing.Yeah ! )

 i will send every learner a link to the connectivism course so they can actually talk to people in their chosen country. i have designed the first three sessions to explore the idea of community as curriculum. Each will help to design the course.i can help them to load moodle with any slides,u-tubes,papers etc that they find to teach each other about childcare in other countries.   Then we  will experience the learning as connectivism. i will get a film crew -other college students- to shoot lesson 2 and propose to use this as my final submission on the connectivism course---with a few words or a copy of the lesson plan and a short update of wat ways i feel it adds as well as problems.

I am so excited about creating a space for the second years to create their own knowledge for their own context.The year will probably start slowly as learners gain the idea of a new perspective of decentralisation of knowledge,peer review and a new way to form the curriculum from the groups weekly work.  Hey !, what a shift from knowing to being -will update the blog as the epistimology changes to oncology!

Must also get the scribble from all the reading I am doing onto this blog before I loose it!!

Connectivism is a learning theory that insists the knowledge is not given to the learner, nor created in the individual brain alone.Due to the massive amount of knowledge on the net the knowledge changes and grows rapidly so we need a new theory that takes account of how the internal individual worlds and external connected worlds come together ,connect to give knowledge.

After making a few notes about the paper Connectivism :Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past ?Adrian hill and Rita Kop    I did an hours work using mindmap pro then I saved it as a jpeg...what a learning curve but now i know how i will try to do less scribble and more maps.

Apparently I now have to make an account in photobucket .com to up load the map!!!!

To reflect on how hard it is to make an assignment work i will post the try 1 for short paper 1 then amend and amend till I answer the question. This is to give an example of the effect dyslexia has upon course work

Ask the learner to write about their father and the subject starts fine but would end up with links to outlying facts such as father has a shed ,in the shed is a spade ,at the end of the spade is a worm so the majority of word s are used to talk about the worm...never really answering the question!  The other problem is where did all the references go? 

Short paper 1 your position on connectivism. Due 6^th October 2008

We do learn by doing  but also by watching-Lurkers according to someone's research must find it. (OR Bandura's social learning theory. We learn through interaction with a peer group and social situation .Vygotsky. We learn in many ways but need firm hubs or maps to navigate when the learning must take us to a specified curriculum. To increase sense between the learner's personal view  and other meaning makers aha moments or findings must be coagulated and recorded so others can see and criticize or add to it. If we always forget our history of development we will always repeat it Dewey was a great theorist for recording and creating connections with learners. The strength was in real life learning and in comparison with this great theory connectivism is just as progressive for the age and stage of some developed countries as Dewey was in his day.. 

The theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner) changed the delivery and design of courses and helps learners to feel they fit –a theory is only as good as the help  it gives to the learner. Tony Buzan has a strong theory about how the brain  works and logs things and has developed mind maps ...this could not have been visualized before the development of theories about the brain and plastic brain studies and neuro-linguistic programming also would not settle easily in past times .So how we learn  and context of the place and time culture and individual learners all need relevant theory to improve practice.

so  we need a new learning theory to fit today’s context and encourage educators to join learning communities to keep up to date as much as possible.

If theories are only useful in a certain contexts a big consideration in deciding if we need  a new theory for a digital age is to assess if the digital learner/tutor is a reality for every classroom. How do people really learn? Is networked learning a reality for the college students `I work within the poorest areas of Warwickshire? in his paper” little boxes” Barry Wellman article suggests glocalisation to networked individualism is  a reality for at least 50% of the population. Each learner and their family could be somewhere along the gradient of living in a group society to joining in a networked society. For the learner who does not use the internet and has one house phone for the in-laws weekly chat  wold tutors use one learning theory that suggests learning is to do with holding onto knowledge and building up memory as an individual?  But for learners all hooked up with xbox MSN and Facebook ,a lap top and mobile for every familiy member  would tutors  use another learning theory. This is about the lens of what is knowledge and who constructs it and what is it for. The fact is there are never too many we all use an eclectic approach choosing the most exciting designs at times just because we like the style  ourselves or because the systems require a certain type of knowledge.

If the knowledge we want the individual to create is to increase the chances of becoming employed the information given or collected has to be specific remain in learners heads for exams to gain qualifications. Some educators believe learning by rote will increse the chances of neurons connecting properly on the day of the exam

The role of education is to connect all in an inclusive way to formal and personal social learning .Connectivism would lend itself to this. This means the learner is not just a product of education but also a consumer of education. a wider and more ethical stance is needed to prepare the learner to take a full role in civic society, to be included on their own terms and accepted for their contributions.

Connections and reconnections between neurons can be proven and the plasticity of the brain that can relearn connection’s and grow organically is of particular interest for learners with a childhood learning difficulty such as dyslexia. I like the idea the college could solve he literacy problems by using a different theory of learning, one that doesn’t rely on individual ability of memorising and making connections but on ability to connect and join in a learning community .to join one zone of proximinal learning to another  but there still needs to be a control or hub or the links could get muddled and be regurgitated for exams in the funniest ways. What we’re talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence. Meta-cognitive learning styles would be supported by the new connectivism as the activity would serve to change behaviours and lift information through short ,manageable bursts of information from various medias-some constructed by the students themselves would ensure a better future for every student. Recognising patterns and links is sometimes a gift of dyslexia and lots of students love to bri-colour until they become fonts of knowledge on all sorts of interesting things. The learning theory is another tool to help every learner to reach their individual moment of cognition or understanding a shared meaning as it offers different approaches and layering of information. So in conclusion do we need a new  learning theory for the fast flowing digital age? It would justify the fun design and social life needs of the learners. It supports differentiation would be a valuable inclusion tool but the role of the tutor in connecting up ideas that are constructed by learners in the outer fringes of knowing what’s needed for a course. It is a theory because it can be used to teach  how people learn but is more because it links the whole person their inclusion needs and their learning styles to the course design.

The paper by Cromier 2008 makes me reflect on the idea of connectivism and my experiences at college. Before e- learning, ILT ,the web or on line learning developments in college the educational model was the tutor is the expert and if a good learner follows the lesson plans and handouts they will hold an answer to the course work that will pass!
.Simple ,easy, no brainer! Harder if the learner has dyslexia since the speed of the connections and inferences backed up with written materials could be logged somewhere and organized to the back of a file and by the time the questions had to be answered the actual possession of the knowledge is forgotten .Memory shelf failures lead to a distinct "ground hog feeling'. repetig and contextualising until a portion of the course theory is available inside the learner.

Now with knowledge being so fluid and knowledge creators are amongst the class members not the tutors domain totally...hmmm.
To pass the course there still needs to be a beginning and a goal as determined by awarding bodies.So are we thinking structures to examine the learner have to change before we can seriously use this style or believe the theory will be accepted as a new negotiated curriculum ?
personal knowledge creation will be depending on the number of net works hit, sites discussed,pap ers read...again how can the person with dyslexic learning style remember the way back to the paper they were reading yesterday? will the sociable learner spend hours reading and updating social profiles and miss entirely the course central hub? Will a level 1 learner's comment so influence the other students (see getting on the band wagon or social proof article somewhere where ever I read it!) they highlight cut and copy the basic thought to their own work? Will English language suffer as we drop spelling /capitals and engage in text talk and sociable emoticons? Hmmm..this is indeed a specialst role .Controling the way the moving target of knowledge actually hits some relevant spots in the syllabus.limiting the habitat with weed killer to keep the rhizone plants on their own patch.