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Learning is complex so is creating.
All observations are theory impregnated. Popper, (1996:86)
Learning can broadly be defined as ‘any process that in living organisms leads to permanent capacity change and which is not solely due to biological maturation or ageing (Illeris 2007, p.3)
Learning involves both internal and external factors. (Conole and Oliver, 20xx)
Human learning is the combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person – body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses) – experiences social situations, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person’s biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person.
(Illeris, in Contemporary Theories … 2009)
There are many different kinds of learning theory. Each emphasizes different aspects of learning, and each is therefore useful for different purposes. (Conole and Oliver, ) What matters in learning and the nature of knowledge. And how families develop their own practices, routines, rituals, artifacts, symbols, conventions, stories and histories. (Conole and Oliver, )
Identify the key components of a number of theoretical approaches. Briefly introduce, say what it is and highlight key concepts.
How these might be applied to learning design with technology.
Clear RQs that are clearly derived from specific theories.
Recommend which data collection processes would be appropriate.
Conole et al (2004) x 7: Behaviourism, Cognitive, Constructivism, Activity-based, socially situated learning, experiential and systems theory.
Cube Representation of model. (Should be those things you roll) ADD OLDS MOOC and/or H817open
Mayes and de Frietas (2004) x3 Associative (structured tasks), cognitive (understanding) and situative.
Beetham (2005) x4: Associative, cognitive constructivist, social constructivist, situative.
See x4 Learning Theories Mind Map
Edudemic (2013) x 4 behaviourist, cognitive, constructive and connectivism
Traditional Learning Theories
http://edudemic.com/2012/12/a-simple-guide-to-4-complex-learning-theories/
Etienne Wenger (2007 in Knud Illeris) x9: organizational, neurophysiological, behaviourist, cognitive, activity theories, communities of practice, social learning, socialisational, constructivist.
Community of Practice and Community of Interests
‘Practitioners and overwhelmed by the plethora of choices and may lack the necessary skills to make informed choices about how to use these theories’. (Conole and Oliver 20xx)
| Behaviourism | A perspective on learning (Skinner, 1950) reinforce/diminish. Stimulus/response. Aristotle. Hume. Pavlov. Ebbinghaus. | |
| Cognitivism | Kant, Gagne, Rumlehart & Newman. | |
| Activity Theory | Builds on the work of Vygotsky (1986). Learning as a social activity. All human action is mediated through using tools. In the context of a community. Knotworking. Runaway object. | Useful for analysing why problems have occurred – discordance. See Greenhow and Belbas for RQs. |
| Constructivism | Engestrom, Soctrates, Brown, Bruner, Illich, | |
| Connectivism | Bush, Wells, Berners-Lee. | |
| Humanism | Leonard (500 Theories) |
Learning Theories from Wenger and others applied to OLDS MOOC
Organizational, Neurophsiological, Behaviourist, Cogntive, Resistence to or defence learning, activity theory, communities of practice, accommodation learning, social learning, transformative learning, socializational, constructivist.
Conole x6 pairings diagram
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Formulate clear questions.
Amplification (Cole and Griffin) Amplifying as an increase in output – give a hunter a gun and they kill more prey. Give someone a computer and they write and calculate more. ‘Technology is best understood not as a static influence on literacy practice, but as a dynamic contributor to it’.
Learning and teaching: Behaviourism x3, cognitive theories x10 (including constructivism), humanisitc approaches, and others.
RQ
Quality not quantity
How these depend on the theoretical approach.
Strengths and Limitations
S – Situation, interactions, mechanisms can be more or less collaborative (Dillenbourg, 1999:9). Knowledge always undergoes construction and transformation in use. Learning is an integral aspect of activity. (Conole and Oliver, 2005). Communication is learning.
W – Across cultures, not just US and West. Caricatures/simplistic. Not a neat narrative.
O – Donations, Funding, Book promotion (MIT). The learner as a unique person.
T – Funding
REFERENCE
Conole (2007)
Conole, G; and Oliver, M. (eds) (20xx) Contemporary Perspective in E-learning Research. Themes, methods and impact on practice.
Crook, C and Dymott, R (20xx) ICT and the literacy practices of student writing. a
Edudemic. Traditional Learning Theories. (Accessed 19th April 2013)
http://edudemic.com/2012/12/a-simple-guide-to-4-complex-learning-theories/
Greenhow, C and Belbas, B (20xx:374)
Social Learning
This is a key concept of this theory is we learn through the observation of others. A theory that evolved from behaviourism though now has many concepts from the cognitivist camp included. It has been re-named by some to social-cognitive learning.
There are three variables to the social learning theory; environment, person and behaviour which influence each other.
Close relation to Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory and Lave’s Situated Learning Theory.
Advertisements and TV commercials are good examples of social learning.
Useful website http://www.texascollaborative.org/Learning_Theory.htm and http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/index.html
Openness in Education WK1 MOOC
Get comfortable with the technology
Look around
Set up a blog if you don’t have one and use the Blog Aggregator with #H817open tag
There are badges in Cloudworks if you like this kind of thing
Think about the priorities.
This is how I start a post in my Open University Student blog which I have posted to most days since 6th February 2010. I put in bullet points and notes. I just get the thing started then add to it. My own private wiki. It isn’t a fixed thing. Months even years later I may add to it – there are no rules on blogging, no guidelines worth following. Anything goes today as it did in the 1990s.
Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide
Need
Theoretical
Practice
Shared education as courses
Traditionally through text books, wall maps and charts, videos and DVDs.
Save money, improve content.
Objects and object–orientated design
Hand rolled bread or a supermarket loaf? Are you a connoisseur or simply hungry?
Open scholar – shaped by digital and networked.
Positive feedback loop between openness and creativity.
Alongside more learning at uni, lifelong and flexible learning.
I may try to write a piece that is journalistic, or more like an academic paper, or just record an event, jot down an idea. Rough rather than smooth, where other can tread and find traction, if only to correct, add to or develop the thinking here and take it somewhere esle.
After a paper and a SlideShare and generally following the conversation asynchronously as it occurs I then do the first activity. I should originate a mind map or spider map, but having dwelt on this so often over the last few years in particular I find myself recreating the same kinds of things: the water cycle, Engestroms fungi as an ecosystem, swirling ink or Catherine-wheel like fireworks all in an effort to visualise what open learning looks like.
I use Picasa Web Albums and have some 135 folders.
Each folder tops out at 1000 images. I am onto e-learning II and have 1250 images across the two – this is my e-learning world as much as 1500+ blog posts here and perhaps 2000+ in my OU student blog. When I get a good scanner and Mac in a few weeks time I will digitize some thirty years of diaries and fiction writing too – and ‘stick it out there’ so that it can compost in cyberspace rather than a lock-up garage.
For now here are a set of images that I have used in the past to describe or illustrate e-learning and for the purposes of this activity ‘Open Learning’ as a subset, or overlapping beast of e-learning, contained by the universe of ‘Learning’.
This last one from Dion Hinchcliffe
Related articles
- Openness in Education WK1 MOOC (mymindbursts.com)
- Martin Weller and the MOOCers (mymindbursts.com)
- Me, openness and education (egrommet.net)
- Olds Mooc Narratives (mymindbursts.com)
- Who Needs Harvard When There Is Always a MOOC? (clarissasblog.com)
- Lost in the clouds in an OLDS MOOC 2013 (mymindbursts.com)
The New Learning Architect
Well worth the read – cover to cover, taking notes, highlighting key ideas, sharing online through Twitter and indue course here and through various Linkedin groups.
When are you most likely to agree? Would you use the following knowledge to you advantage?
Fig 1. Daniel Kahneman
People go with the flow and chose the easy option of agreeing when they are:
- working on something else that requires a lot of effort
- in a good mood
- low on a scale of depression
- a knowledgeable novice in the subject rather than a true expert
- powerful, or are made to feel powerful.
From Daniel Kahneman (2011) ‘Thinking, fast and slow’. pp134
This gives you pause to wonder about the complexity of what takes place in a social learning environment where people are offering their ideas. You want to hope that falsehoods will be knocked down while truths will be agreed upon, however, depending on the people and how the discussion is moderated you could theoretically end up with the opposite going on. Not only should students in such spaces be advised on how to behave in order to get the ‘right’ learning outcomes from the experience, but it is vital that the subject matter expect/moderator plays their role scrupulously.
Questions:
- Is the learner who is an unhappy, powerless expert likely to offer the more objective response?
- Is a grumpy, depressed subject matter expert who may run a cold class of greater value as an educator than the new college kid who is full of ideas and bounces around like Tigger?
- And if the happy, succesful novice is heard more often and supported by the community how do you make room to hear from the less confident, sad geek?
Who are you talking to ? Currently in conversation around the globe
Fig. 1. My iPad world clock – all I need now is a Pin and a clickable face of the people in a threaded conversation
As I blog I have always been a sucker for analytics – they impact, for better or for worse. Currently I am intrigued by the coverage of the blog, read in 50 different countries spanning four continents every day. What about conversations though? Synchronous and asynchronous group talk, webinars and hangouts have me starting or contributing to discussions from New Zealand and Australia, west to Singapore and Hong Kong then on to United Arab Emirates and South Africa, picking up Turkey, Germany, France and the UK before crossing the pond to New York, Boston and on the west coast San Diago and San Francisco.
What amazes me here, as I have found in tutor groups with the Open University postgraduate course I am completing, is that when a topic goes hot it comes alive and is kept alive over 24 hours as it is picked up by others getting up or coming in from work. We live in extraordinary times.
The current hot topics in relation to e-learning are:
- Curation
- Augmented Learning
- Virtual Worlds
- Video Tagging
- Accessibility
- Open and Free Learning
Join me on Linkedin (various e-learning groups) for more.
What’s going on in there? A look at the brain and thoughts on the mind
Fig. 1 Intracranial recording for epilepsy.
Robert Ludlow, UCL Institute of Neurology
First the Royal Academy, meeting with the author of ‘Exploring the World of Social Learning’ Julian Stodd having made the connection on Linkedin a couple of weeks ago, so – read the book, met the author and now we pick over each other’s brains – how we learn is a mutual fascination.
Fig. 2. A doodle of Medusa‘s severed head in the hand of Perseus
A second viewing of ‘Bronzes’, this time with a drawing pen and pad of cartridge paper – photography not permitted. I wanted to see if my hand was ‘in’ or ‘off’. Most of my time was spent circling the decapitated body of Medusa.
Fig. 3. Icarus – far smaller than I imagined (see below for the publicity shot)
On then to the Wellcome Foundation. In this instance I’d taken one snap on the iPad and was approached and politely advised that photography was not allowed.
A guide book for £1 will serve as a suitable aide memoire.
Fig 4. Aleks Krotoski
Only yesterday I was listening to and enthusing about Aleks Krotoski on ‘The Digital Brain’ on BBC Radio 4 and blogged about the series so it was with considerable surprise when I overheard her familiar voice and found her at my shoulder about interview the exhibition’s curator. I guess therefore that I listened in on part of the content for a future broadcast.
Upstairs I watched an operation to remove a cancerous growth recorded in real-time from the surgeon’s point of view, then Project 22 in which a woman photographs everything that she eats as she eats it for one year and one day – age 22.
Once again fascinating.
A selective record of a year. Can a record of an entire be undertaken with some degree of necessary selection? Or could a software algorithm sort it all out for you if a memory enhancing device records everything that you do and experience.
Other than the £1 guide, unusually, I have not come away with bags of books though I would recommend the Blackwell’s bookstore at the Wellcome Foundation for bizarre stocking fillers – I Liked the ‘blood bath’ – blood-like bath salts offered in a surgical drip bag, or highlighter pens as syringes.
Agreeing or disagreeing with the flow of an argument in social learning …
From Daniel Kahneman (2011) ‘Thinking, fast and slow’. pp134
This gives you pause to wonder about the complexity of what takes place in a learning environment where people are offering their ideas. You want to hope that falsehoods will be knocked down while truths will be agreed upon, however, depending on the people and how the discussion is moderated you could theoretically end up with the opposite going on. Not only should students in such spaces be advised on how to behave in order to get the ‘right’ learning outcomes from the experience, but it is vital that the subject matter expect/moderator plays their role scrupulously.
Is the learner who is an unhappy, powerless expert likely to offer the more objective response? Is a grumpy, depressed subject matter expert who may run a cold class more valuable than the new college kid who is full of ideas and bounces around like Tigger? Will the the happy, succesful novice be heard more often and supported? How do you ensure that sad geek who knows their stuff is heard too?
Learning vocariously and gregariously online – does it work? Why shouldn’t it?
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| From My Mind Bursts |
The Open University constanly ameliorates its vital student and tutor forums – I even remember them as a bulletin board called ListServ in 2001. Several kinds of space are offered now: the closed tutor group forum, typically the tutor and his 12 or so students; a general or cafe forum for the entire cohort to mix and related to these, but providing very different affordances, this space – the OU blog that is less than an individualised blog space, but more than a bulletin board – it is an odd hybrid that is quite restricted, but all the better for that – it is easier to get your head around and because every new post is stacked one on top of the other you are guaranteed a readership.
I can offer several examples of when things work and when they do not. A recent change in layout of the VLE has sidelined all but your own tutor group so the other offerings are moribund – these worked best when we had a ‘big name’ from the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology chairing and seeding discussions – I think it was during H800 a year ago. Another time when five or six of us just like to catch-up and share ideas often – triggered by the absence of our tutor for a few weeks and one of the group showing how we could take it in turns to post the week’s activities and moderate. Serendipity. I’ve been in a group where 75% of the group took no part at all …
Can lengthy posts be an issue? You don’t have to read them whereas if that person were talking you’d have to hesr them out. Lengthy posts were moderated, though not very well – an answer for a period was to write at length and provide a link to your OU Blog but this quickly fragmented as some people abandonded their OU blog for WordPress or Blogger. A fix has been to provide a prominent collapse ‘-‘ button and ‘+’ expand.
Like all new things it takes a few stabs at it to understand the ‘community rules’ and from personal experience recognise that as a learning activity this is effective – an early opportunity to apply what you pick up and for it to be useful would be an incentive to keep coming back? Or simply feeling part of something? Being supportive and supported too?
Social Learning when it works – a convenient means of critical evaluation and discrimination of these ideas.
From Chapter 1. Educational Implications
Gagne (1970 pp29-30) suggests that instruction in an organized group discussion develops the use and generalization of knowledge – or knowledge transfer. Oxbridge tutors contend that the ‘Oxbridge Tutorial’ – a weekly, structured micro-meeting of two or three people, achieves this. One student reads out a short essay that the tutor and students discuss.
‘When properly led’, Gagne continues, ‘such discussions, where the knowledge itself has been initially mastered’, not only stimulates the production of new extensions of knowledge by students but also provides a convenient means of critical evaluation and discrimination of these ideas. Gagne (ibid).
Forty years on from when Gagne wrote this there are what are meant to be or hoped to be learning contexts where this kind of knowledge transfer through group discussion can still work – or may fail to work – either because the degree of subject mastery between students is too broad or there are too many students, or the wrong mix of students. For example, in the Open University’s Masters of Open and Distance Education (MAODE) between 12 and 16 postgraduate students meet online in a series of structured online tutor forums – some of these work, some do not. As these meetings are largely not compulsory and as they are asynchronous and online, it is rare to have people in them together – the discussions are threaded. What is more, in any tutor group there will typically be a mixture of students who are on their first, their second, third, fourth or even fifth module of the Master’s – some of whom, given the parameters offered by flexible and distance learning, may have spread these modules over five years. Then there is the task and how it is set, whether the participants are meant to work alone or collaboratively – the simplest and most frequent model online is an expectation to read resources and share notes and thoughts. However, personal experience over five such modules suggests that the committed engagement of say six people, working collaboratively on a clear set of tasks and activities with a time limit and climactic conclusion of delivering a joint project, works best. Too many of these online tutorials drift, or fizzle out: too few posts, posts that are two long, fragmented posts linking to pages elsewhere, the indifference of participants, the lack of, or nature of the tutor involvement, excessive and misplaced social chat, or discussing subjects that are off topic … It depends very much on the mix, inclinations, availability and level of ‘knowledge mastery’ as to how such online tutorials work out. As well as the eclectic combination of students the role, availability, online and other teaching skills, even the personality of the tutor and of course THEIR knowledge experience and mastery matters.
Just reflect on how such workshops or seminars may work or fail face–to–face – the hunger for knowledge on the topic under discussion, the mix of personalities and the degree to which their experience or level of understanding is the same, at slight or considerable variance, let alone any differences of culture, background, gender or in a business setting – position and the department they have come from.
Ideally the workshop convener, or what the French call an ‘animateur’ should, assemble or construct such groups with great care, like a director casting actors to perform a piece of improvisation. Different contexts offer different opportunities. As a graduate trainee in an advertising agency six of us were repeatedly assembled, the various departmental specialists and directors playing roles at specific times – bit players in these scenarios. On reflection, stage management by a team in the HR department had been vital. It is therefore ‘stage management’ that I consider of significant importance when trying to construct such collective learning experiences online in a corporate setting.
CONCLUSION
Know your players, cast with care, give direction, record what goes on and step in to nudge, re–kindle, stop or start conversations or activities.
REFERENCE
Gagne, R (1970) The Conditions of Learning
ADDITIONAL LINKS
The Nine Events – from Kevin the Librarian
Various Models of learning – Illustrated
Mind Bursts 