OU blog

Personal Blogs

Design Museum

vs. Dependency

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 6 Jul 2014, 07:57

You'll never learn a thing if someone else does it all for you.

There are the extremes of course of 'looking at someone else's notes', to reading their essay, to collusion where someone assists you big time. Then there is cheating where someone else writes the paper or sits the exam. What I'm talking about is 'taking the plunge'. No video or e-learning course will teach you to swim; you have to enter the water and take your first strokes.

But somethings we like others to do.

I am rubbish with cars. I have put diesel in a petrol car and added oil to the screen-wash. I can check the oil (now), do the screen-wash and check the tyres. Little else.

When it comes to blogging the beauty of this OU Student Blog is that it is straightforward and has been simplified and clarified in various ways over the last couple of years. 'Out there' you can have yourself an equally simple blog, say on WordPress. Fine, until you venture a tad further and want your own domain name (.com), or to add credit card payments (to sell stuff and to invite donations - we're all poverty stricken students right?). It is too easy to become overwhelmed, to fear clicking on the wrong thing. I have deleted a blog. And I have paid for a fancy theme and some other knobs and whistles that I didn't really want. So you find someone else to teach you, but there is a fine line between being taught and having someone else to do it for you.

Struggling to get ww.mindbursts.com in the right place I booked some time with a guy I'd already done some short courses with. He's great, but in some respects like a concert organists who knows how to pull all the bells and whistles with ease - what makes more sense, for him to spend two hours trying to show you how or to do it for you in 15 minutes?

I called early for 30 mins and he was on another call; three minutes later, following some simple instructions I'd done what I was going to ask him to do sad I just have to commit, just have to jump in, get my hands dirty, find out, make mistakes (so long as they aren't expensive).

 

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Design Museum

The danger of spoon-feeding learners

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 9 Mar 2013, 23:57

At what point in e-learning design do you feel that by spoon-feeding learners that you are doing them a disservice?

That learning is better achieved as a result of effort, even through making mistakes.

How, with all these increasingly versatile and 'easy' tools therefore, do we ensure that effort is applied, that learners remain engaged?

We show, we test; they read, they write; they work alone, then as a group; they make mistakes and try again. They do something new, they see something in a different way.

The other day I was about to print off a recipe for a chocolate cake that my 12 year old son and a friend were willing to make.

Enlightened by a piece on the use of dreadful fonts in learning and how effective it can be to make information stick I printed out not in Arial or Callibri or Times Roman in 16 point, but in some swirly imitation of Edwardian handwriting in 10 point ... beige.

They said nothing. The cake was a success.

Did it the lesson stick?

Perhaps I'll try again today. Can they make the cake without referring to the recipe?

One aspect of this is slightly disingenuous, my son and I did make this cake together a couple of months ago in a more nurturing, assisting manner in which I played the role of 'the talking recipe' with demonstrations on how to melt the chocolate, split eggs, whisk egg-whites and fold the ingredients together.

It helped that my son could teach his friend.

How does this apply to the safe storage of Uranium Trioxide underground or dealing with an asthma patient? Or handling a customer who is complaining of the smell of sewage along their street? Or making a subject choice decision at A' Level? And how about in the creative industries, as an art director or copywriter, even in Fine Art?

There are environments, clearly, where making mistakes is part of the learning process ... but if you learning to fly commercial aircraft or reprocess spent rods in nuclear power, best to make the mistakes in a simulation.

 

 

Permalink 2 comments (latest comment by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 15 Feb 2011, 19:30)
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 11294235