This week, with the help of pMachine Services, I’ll be changing the site layout of e-Literate. The basic design will be based heavily on seriocomic, with some adjustments to fonts and headlines based on the findings of the Eyetrack III project. I’ll also be adding some show/hide code for the body of each post, so you can scan all the headlines and starting blurbs quickly without having to scroll through entire long posts.
Stay tuned.
In my last post, I agreed with Stephen Downes that we have to be careful not to take our analogies too literally and specifically pointed out flaws in the “learning-object-as-software-object” analogy. Sometimes the best way to make sure an analogy doesn’t get too deeply rooted is to counter it with another analogy that causes just enough cognitive dissonance to keep you from getting intellectually lazy. (The classic example of this is the light-as-a-particle/light-as-a-wave analogy pair.) I’m going to attempt to create that kind of duality by balancing my course-as-a-sentence-of-natural-language analogy with another one. (more…)
I’ve been looking forward to having the time and energy to respond to Stephen’s most recent response to the whole pattern language of educational experiences conversation.
Stephen writes:
Even so, [Michael] effectively finds the source of the tension: “I believe that the rules for re-using experience patterns and the rules for re-using content are respectively analogous to the rules of syntax and semantics.” I would say they are analagous in use, but they are not isomorphic – there is nothing, say, in the placement of an image on a web page, or the playing of an audio clip with some video, that corresponds to the rules outlines in Chomsky.
My initial reaction was that Stephen’s point is so obviously true that it’s almost not worth saying. But that initial reaction was wrong. Because the mistake that Stephen is warning about with respect to the language analogy is exactly the mistake that the majority of accounts of learning objects (especially the earlier accounts) have made with respect to the analogy with object-oriented software. (more…)
Lisa Neal and I have a new piece on attention and interactivity up on the eLearn home page. This is the first of what I hope will be many collaborations with Lisa.
I figured I’d start with this post, since it won’t strain my relatively addled brain today. I’ve been collecting links to (non-partisan, American) digital democracy sites. Here are a few worth looking at:
My consulting gig basically finished up yesterday and I have at least a few days before my next big endeavor starts, so I should be able to catch up on some posting. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to today since (a) I have a lot of errands to catch up on and (b) I’m a little fried from the week, but the posting should start in earnest by tomorrow at the latest. Some highlights of what’s to come:
Stay tuned.
Yesterday, Stephen Downes replied to my most recent post on educational pattern languages:
Michael Feldstein is on the right track, mostly, with his exploration of the applicability of pettern language to learning. In this brief item, he asks, “Can we deduce sort of generative grammar of educational experience that enables us to string together these building blocks into ‘sentences’ of educational experience that are complete in both the functional and the humanistic sense?” And I respond – where was it written that language must be composed of building blocks strung together?
The glib answer would be “Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, Noam Chomsky, 1967.” (I happen to live with a linguist, in addition to having taken more than a few linguistics courses myself.) But as I say, that would be the glib answer, because I’ve read enough of Stephen’s work to know that his position on learning objects is considerably more sophisticated than saying “Sorry, no such thing.” To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what Stephen’s objection is here, but I do have a suspicion, and it has to do with some ideas he laid out in his paper “Design Standards and Re-usability”.
