Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 24 Feb 2016, 20:38
The 3
advances I’d like to think about may be more or less than 3 advances because of
the overlap potential. All 3 favour constructivist (although connectivism seems
appropriate in Incidental Learning Examples) methodologies, but clearly much
learning occurs in any learning situation that is explicable through cognitive
modelling and behavioural learning.
CONTEXT-BASED
Learning (joined to Cross-over learning)
It is difficult to distinguish these
forms of learning since ‘contextual’ learning always relaxes the pressures of
formalised settings, in a way that you might as well call informal. If
behavioural learning is to occur it occurs best within an informal
environment, where rewards and task are co-defined as aspects of a rich
environment. Behaviourism, in its classical research forms, is rarely
applicable because the rigid control of variables in such settings inevitably
creates environments that are by definition ‘reduced’ to minimal stimuli and
therefore not only impoverished but experienced as ‘unreal’ or alien
(ecologically invalid). Cognitive developmental learning, even in rats, is
reduced in impoverished environments as experiments later than Skinner’s
showed.
Context is multi-faceted, its
influences are multi-factorial. Hence they are thought by some to conceal
from learners important general truths under learning about local details and
thus to overwhelm, but this may be the reverse of the truth. In an un-distracting
environment, its very artificiality and alien nature can become the main
focus of attention and sometimes resistance, explain the long sad history of
the exclusion of working class children from schools ordered and regulated
under middle-class norms.
In any context as Sharples et. al.
show, learning involves an active agency in the learner themselves since they
not only learn to inhabit a context but to collaboratively co-create it with
others (and often very different others). The appeal of 'authenticity' is its
immediate appeal to relevance without making that a learning outcome to labour.
However, 'authentic' need not mean a ‘real’ context. Often the latter is too
unsafe an environment for a novice in some areas – beginning social work
students for instance who, unbeknownst to them, have the power to inflict
significant harm on self or others in the real world. Role-play can occur as
a means of diversifying discussion fora, encouraging a safe way to learn the
necessity of conflict and its resolutions by writing ‘in role’ to and of
someone else in role. Thus, you can teach psychology, history and sociology
or the dynamics of family. Visualization potential also attaches to such
role-play, either in examining the contextual genres of different kinds of
writing or in forming different modes of communication to supplement or
replace speech in parts of an OU Live session by using moveable objects,
drawing, and messaging.
It is possible that the use of avatars
might help here but such avatars are too divorced from some important
contexts – the limitations on the affordances (even though these can be expanded
in contextual learning) of physical bodies for avatars for whom flying (Second Life) is ‘no
problem’. However, visualizations of a tour of house can help trainee social
workers to spot risks to children or adults at risk that often go unnoticed
and, of whose existence, they feel untrained.
Embodied
Learning
This is linked because body is a
context of learning. Piaget shows how sensorimotor actions become the source
for cognition: we ‘grasp’ ideas just as babies grasp at objects until they
know how to ‘hold’ and absorb them. Ingestion and projection are based on
early behaviours, just as are the cognitions that become values – ‘trust’
Freud says is learned in the oral stage. We test a stimuli before we ingest
it, spit it out to reject it – from then on to introjection of concepts.
Our sense of space is important in
learning not only practical issues but academic physics or the meaning of a
gesture and its verbalisations in literature – try thinking about Lear
talking of his sullied hand in the storm: ‘Let me wipe it first, it smells of
mortality.’
Sound needs to be mouthed and heard in
lots of contexts, including the understanding of sentence structure and the
meaning of punctuation. Digital technology allows self to be replicated and
played back – where learning comes from body consciousness. We learn about
the relationships between concepts by being asked to create an artefact
expressing and communicating it to real others in multiple modes – sound,
smells, sight. Gestures like the choice of hand-shake or 'hug' style can teach
us about relative register in writing and its relation to context. We can
learn how to challenge and be challenged if we see it as divorced from
contexts where it is always thought to be threatening.
The ‘quantified self’ forms an
engaging data set that, if compared across one body in two experiences, can
teach a lot about the effect of context on numerous issues – learning style,
communication style and so on. Ideas of self-control and self-regulation are
learned anyway in the body – quite incidentally, for instance, by people with
eating disorders. How much more preferable to compare feelings of
deprivation, inadequacy or being over-controlled by using an eating game –
gamification – alongside a role-play diary exercise.
Incidental
Learning (using the example of reading circles)
Incidental learning happens anyway.
Behaviourists point to the fact that ‘naughty children’ get the lion’s share
of teacher attention as a means of reinforcing (teaching) bad behaviour, for
instance. However, I think constructivist ideas useful here. Whittington
(2013:55) shows how the structure of online reading circles can teach not
only the content of a text, read for multiple purposes (private enjoyment,
social comparison and learning) but how to structure the roles we need to
enable reading to become a fruitful tool for learning – not least that the distributed
functions (realised as roles for different participants) that enable
effective and sustainable reading are multiple. The best chance of
internalising all those functions is the experience then of organising and
maintaining a ‘reading circle’ as a participatory exercise. Even skills in
picking the most salient passages in your reading are enabled by roles such as
‘Passage Picker’.
When I taught social work I used a
similar method using a novel By Pat Barker (‘Liza’s England featuring a young social worker in the midst of
his own parental conflict and coming to terms with his gay sexuality) and one
by Jenni Fagan (Panopticon 2013
which sees social workers through the eyes of a young female offender and
object of sexual abuse).
Passages could be discussed in asynchronous
forums in terms of tasks:
1.Prioritise the
social worker’s tasks for a certain day (including personal life tasks) – how
do they compare with his priorities as shown in a part of the novel etc.);
2.How do people
whose feelings aren’t described (a young social work trainee) in Panopticon become imaginable to you as
a reader. By using their own experience and querying text for its explicit
and implicit messages and the effect of metaphor for instance, the training
that emerged about ‘use of self’ in social work situations was deep.
Had I had OU Live I could have created
role-play conferences from the books involving the need to communicate with
speech, writing, picture, charts and even graphs in a synchronic situation.
Whittington,
J. (2013) ‘Literature Circles: A Perfect Match for Online instruction’ in TechTrends
57 (4) pp. 53 – 58.
H817: Activity 14. Innovations & Applied theory
The 3 advances I’d like to think about may be more or less than 3 advances because of the overlap potential. All 3 favour constructivist (although connectivism seems appropriate in Incidental Learning Examples) methodologies, but clearly much learning occurs in any learning situation that is explicable through cognitive modelling and behavioural learning.
CONTEXT-BASED Learning (joined to Cross-over learning)
It is difficult to distinguish these forms of learning since ‘contextual’ learning always relaxes the pressures of formalised settings, in a way that you might as well call informal. If behavioural learning is to occur it occurs best within an informal environment, where rewards and task are co-defined as aspects of a rich environment. Behaviourism, in its classical research forms, is rarely applicable because the rigid control of variables in such settings inevitably creates environments that are by definition ‘reduced’ to minimal stimuli and therefore not only impoverished but experienced as ‘unreal’ or alien (ecologically invalid). Cognitive developmental learning, even in rats, is reduced in impoverished environments as experiments later than Skinner’s showed.
Context is multi-faceted, its influences are multi-factorial. Hence they are thought by some to conceal from learners important general truths under learning about local details and thus to overwhelm, but this may be the reverse of the truth. In an un-distracting environment, its very artificiality and alien nature can become the main focus of attention and sometimes resistance, explain the long sad history of the exclusion of working class children from schools ordered and regulated under middle-class norms.
In any context as Sharples et. al. show, learning involves an active agency in the learner themselves since they not only learn to inhabit a context but to collaboratively co-create it with others (and often very different others). The appeal of 'authenticity' is its immediate appeal to relevance without making that a learning outcome to labour. However, 'authentic' need not mean a ‘real’ context. Often the latter is too unsafe an environment for a novice in some areas – beginning social work students for instance who, unbeknownst to them, have the power to inflict significant harm on self or others in the real world. Role-play can occur as a means of diversifying discussion fora, encouraging a safe way to learn the necessity of conflict and its resolutions by writing ‘in role’ to and of someone else in role. Thus, you can teach psychology, history and sociology or the dynamics of family. Visualization potential also attaches to such role-play, either in examining the contextual genres of different kinds of writing or in forming different modes of communication to supplement or replace speech in parts of an OU Live session by using moveable objects, drawing, and messaging.
It is possible that the use of avatars might help here but such avatars are too divorced from some important contexts – the limitations on the affordances (even though these can be expanded in contextual learning) of physical bodies for avatars for whom flying (Second Life) is ‘no problem’. However, visualizations of a tour of house can help trainee social workers to spot risks to children or adults at risk that often go unnoticed and, of whose existence, they feel untrained.
Embodied Learning
This is linked because body is a context of learning. Piaget shows how sensorimotor actions become the source for cognition: we ‘grasp’ ideas just as babies grasp at objects until they know how to ‘hold’ and absorb them. Ingestion and projection are based on early behaviours, just as are the cognitions that become values – ‘trust’ Freud says is learned in the oral stage. We test a stimuli before we ingest it, spit it out to reject it – from then on to introjection of concepts.
Our sense of space is important in learning not only practical issues but academic physics or the meaning of a gesture and its verbalisations in literature – try thinking about Lear talking of his sullied hand in the storm: ‘Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality.’
Sound needs to be mouthed and heard in lots of contexts, including the understanding of sentence structure and the meaning of punctuation. Digital technology allows self to be replicated and played back – where learning comes from body consciousness. We learn about the relationships between concepts by being asked to create an artefact expressing and communicating it to real others in multiple modes – sound, smells, sight. Gestures like the choice of hand-shake or 'hug' style can teach us about relative register in writing and its relation to context. We can learn how to challenge and be challenged if we see it as divorced from contexts where it is always thought to be threatening.
The ‘quantified self’ forms an engaging data set that, if compared across one body in two experiences, can teach a lot about the effect of context on numerous issues – learning style, communication style and so on. Ideas of self-control and self-regulation are learned anyway in the body – quite incidentally, for instance, by people with eating disorders. How much more preferable to compare feelings of deprivation, inadequacy or being over-controlled by using an eating game – gamification – alongside a role-play diary exercise.
Incidental Learning (using the example of reading circles)
Incidental learning happens anyway. Behaviourists point to the fact that ‘naughty children’ get the lion’s share of teacher attention as a means of reinforcing (teaching) bad behaviour, for instance. However, I think constructivist ideas useful here. Whittington (2013:55) shows how the structure of online reading circles can teach not only the content of a text, read for multiple purposes (private enjoyment, social comparison and learning) but how to structure the roles we need to enable reading to become a fruitful tool for learning – not least that the distributed functions (realised as roles for different participants) that enable effective and sustainable reading are multiple. The best chance of internalising all those functions is the experience then of organising and maintaining a ‘reading circle’ as a participatory exercise. Even skills in picking the most salient passages in your reading are enabled by roles such as ‘Passage Picker’.
When I taught social work I used a similar method using a novel By Pat Barker (‘Liza’s England featuring a young social worker in the midst of his own parental conflict and coming to terms with his gay sexuality) and one by Jenni Fagan (Panopticon 2013 which sees social workers through the eyes of a young female offender and object of sexual abuse).
Passages could be discussed in asynchronous forums in terms of tasks:
1. Prioritise the social worker’s tasks for a certain day (including personal life tasks) – how do they compare with his priorities as shown in a part of the novel etc.);
2. How do people whose feelings aren’t described (a young social work trainee) in Panopticon become imaginable to you as a reader. By using their own experience and querying text for its explicit and implicit messages and the effect of metaphor for instance, the training that emerged about ‘use of self’ in social work situations was deep.
Had I had OU Live I could have created role-play conferences from the books involving the need to communicate with speech, writing, picture, charts and even graphs in a synchronic situation.
Whittington, J. (2013) ‘Literature Circles: A Perfect Match for Online instruction’ in TechTrends 57 (4) pp. 53 – 58.