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…)
Category: Pedagogy
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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Re-usable Learning Content Objects or Re-usable Learning Experience Objects?
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”.
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Pattern Languages as Human Languages
Here is the text of a speech that pattern language inventor Christopher Alexander gave in 1996 to The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA). There is a lot –a lot— in this speech that makes it interesting and fulfilling reading (and entirely applicable to online learning and knowledge sharing). I’ll give just one example here:
What, now, of my evaluation of what you are doing with patterns in computer science. (Bear in mind, as you hear my comments, that they need to be taken with a grain of salt; I’m ignorant; I’m not in your field.) When I look at the object-oriented work on patterns that I’ve seen, I see the format of a pattern (context, problem, solution, and so forth). It is a nice and useful format. It allows you to write down good ideas about software design in a way that can be discussed, shared, modified, and so forth. So, it is a really useful vehicle of communication. And, I think that insofar as patterns have become useful tools in the design of software, it helps the task of programming in that way. It is a nice, neat format and that is fine.
However, that is not all that pattern languages are supposed to do. The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.
I don’t know whether these features of pattern language have yet been translated into your discipline. Take the moral component, for example. In the architectural pattern language there is, at root, behind the whole thing, a constant preoccupation with the question, Under what circumstances is the environment good? In architecture that means something. It means something important and vital that goes, ultimately, to the nature of human life. Of course, there are plenty of people who will debate whether the question is objective. Some architects are still going around saying, It is all a matter of opinion. But that is a dying breed. The moral preoccupation with the need for a good environment, and for the living structure of built environment, and the objective nature of that question, is largely accepted. I do not know whether that sort of moral component exists in computer science, or in software engineering, or in the way in which you do things
Under what circumstances is an educational experience good? What are the signature characteristics of a useful, fulfilling, and above all, morally enriching educational conversation? Can we decompose that conversation into fundamental building blocks? 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?