e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Academics & Academia

The “Academics and Academia” category covers topics related the ways in which colleges and universities function that are relevant to technology-supported education. One key aspect covered here is pedagogy—how people teach—and how technology impacts teaching and learning.

But this category also includes more institutional aspects that are relevant to technology-supported education, such as how campus leadership supports (or doesn’t support) new initiatives, politics and bureaucracy that impact these efforts, and so on.

Finally, “Academics and Academia” covers commercial and non-profit services that provide support for technology-supported education initiatives, such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies.

  • "Signature Pedaogies" = Educational Pattern Languages?

    Chris Correa has a thought-provoking post on something called “signature pedagogies.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, shared some of the preliminary results from the foundation’s studies of professional education (including the education of lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others). He introduced the notion of signature pedagogies, or (as I understood it) the unique and prevalent ‘rules of engagement’ in the education in each of these domains.

    For example, there are certain activities and patterns of discourse that law students engage in that differ from the patterns experienced by medical students. In a law school lecture, a professor might begin a lecture with a “cold call” and ask a student to summarize and analyze some text. This process might be repeated several times so that students are summarizing other students’ contribution and generating their own analysis. This is one element that makes up the ‘signature pedagogy’ in the field of law.

    This sounds an awful lot like educational pattern languages to me. One thing I like about this approach is that it focuses on discipline-specific differences. Disciplinarity is one factor that absolutely should influence the educational patterns employed. (Learning styles/preferences, age level, and skill level are a few other factors that might have an impact.)

    Anyway, good stuff.

  • Small Tools/Big Ideas: Integrating Technologies for Teaching Art and Art History

    FIT will be hosting a great conference this October on teaching visual topics online using tools that afford social learning. The conference is just a bit of a misnomer, since much of the content will be relevant and valuable to a more general audience than just art and art history instructors; it’s really about teaching visually and socially at the same time. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the conference coordinators, have done a great job of assembling a stellar program. If you can possibly make it to NYC this Fall, I highly recommend attending.

  • "An excess of teaching presence will limit student-student interaction"

    Joe Ugoretz has a provocative piece out in Innovate regarding the importance of letting students start worthwhile tangents in online class discussions. (Registration required.) It would be easy to flatten his argument into a “guide on the side” bromide, but I think Joe provides both more meat and more subtlety than that. (more…)

  • Learning Activity Management Systems

    SUNY has a home-grown Lotus-Notes-based learning management system that has some truly remarkable features. I’ll be posting about some of these innovations over the coming weeks as I get to know the system better. What I want to focus on in this post, though, is a feature that I have only ever heard of one other LMS providing in a meaningful way, which is providing a fundamental course organization structure (i.e., a user interface to the course) that focuses on the temporal sequence of learning activities rather than the more typical interface that simply organizes the course based on types of functionality and content resources (e.g., course notes, discussions, etc.). In previous posts, I have referred to this idea in terms of learning experience objects, but the folks at Macquarie University in Australia have built a system based on the same principles that they call a Learning Activity Management System (LAMS). (more…)

  • Ethnoclassification, Pattern Languages, and MERLOT

    Something clicked for me when I saw the reference on elearningpost to Peter Merholtz’s piece on the bag of keywords approach. The word Maish highlighted was “ethnoclassification.” This made me think of how you could unearth pattern languages in a learning object repository like MERLOT, MLX, or Pachyderm. (more…)

  • Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part II

    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…)

  • Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part I

    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…)