Personal Blogs

Habits are hard to change. 

11 years on I still feel that by putting content here I will be able to find it next week, next year and my AI doppleganger will be able to feed off it to and give the impression that I am still posting content at the age of 105 when in fact I will be totally occupied with my role as the 'Bastard Duke Norm of Williamdy' down the road at Battle to recall the conquest of these islands by the quas-civilised third generation Vikings from France. 

I'm engrossed in the UCL FutureLearn Diana Laurillard Blended Learnning MOOC. I need this stuff because I've eleted to work on the front line. I'd like to feel like i'm the urologic surgeon at Guys hospital who is working in A&E support because of Covid - I am the 'bookman' wannabe academic who has taken his head out of his books to teach. 

Anyway, believe me. I at least will run around like a Medusa eyeing down anything that might help. This does:

• Learning through acquisition > listening to the teacher, watching a video, demo, reading a book, a website.
• Learning through inquiry > going to the teacher, library or internet to find something out. 

And the more active learning processes.

• Learning through discussion > asking questions or answering questions, exchanging ideas. Listening, responding, articulating, arguing …
• Learning through practice > teachers set up task goals, to  generate an action, interpret feedback.
• Learning through collaboration > working together on a project to produce a shared output.
• Learning through production > creating something for the teacher to evaluate.

However, what I do in an observed or demonstration class will surely differ to what I may deliver over a week or term? And differ again when it is done online? I have seen and taken part in excellent online asynchronous provision - I have also suffered awful classes too - maybe even delivered some myself.

Going anywhere? Not yet, never entirely.

I come here to get down a first draft which rarely gets reworked elswere - so at least I've captured it. I do keep a weekly review though, a single doc where I chuck in everything that week, which for me is usally just four days, but with evenings (and nights) thrown in can equate to a heck of a lot of input.

It could be the subject of of PhD Thesis

Metaphor is the essence of learning, of knowledge transfer, of transmitting ideas, of ideas themselves, of innovation and creativity.

We labour it

Reading Sfard and various other authors/academics and philosophers ... and a neuroscientist I draw my own conclusions in relation to learning in general and e-learning in particular.

The first image is from Gareth Morgan. The explanation of how metaphor is used, and potentially abused (or simply confused) is clear. 'Man is a lion. He is a lion because he is brave.'

We permit poetic licence

We then move on to the idea of what I am calling (for want of a metaphor) Stage 1 Learning, that necessary first step where the person learning needs to acquire 'stuff,' where knowledge is imparted or experienced. This might be a lecture, a talk, a video, a book. Acquisition for me is not the metaphor, it is the description of what is occurring. I cannot see 'acquisition.' I can see someone at a supermarket check-out 'acquiring' goods, I can even visualise the 'sausage machine' concept/cartoon of information/knowledge being ground out of books and deposited in a person's head.

Moving on to Stage 2 Learning (though it could be any stage 2 through to infinity) we have a tool of learning, 'participation.' Here, once again, I understand an adjective describing actual participation, as demonstrated in the John Seely Brown lecture, of students working together at a table (round of course), with those on the 'periphery' taking part tangentially while those in the middle are the primary 'actors.' THIS is learning in the Congo Rain Forest to get honey from the top of a tree, this is learning above the Arctic Circle to cut blow-holes to harpoon seals ... this is how 'man' has always learned. a) where's the new thinking? b) is 'participation' a metaphor, or simple an adjective?

For me participation is the end of term play, the Christmas Panto, working on a student newspaper, blog or TV magazine show.

To use metaphor suggests improving communication of ideas and doing so in a persuasive and memorable way. There are cliched metaphors. They lose currency through over use. Educators appear to be stuck in a rut on this one, regurgitating old ideas.