Archive for the ‘Pedagogy’ Category
The Dance of Technology and Pedagogy in Self-Paced Distance Education
This paper describes the dance like relationship between pedagogy and technologies that creates distance education programming. Using a dance metaphor, the paper describes earlier generation of distance education and notes the evolving role of the self-paced learner as a focus of distance education. The paper argues that control of the learning sequence is an important pedagogical issue and that new tools of networked learning can afford opportunities for social interaction, while retaining self-paced programming control. The paper explores and defines connectivism as a pedagogical lens to look at both learning activities and technologies.
Self-paced instruction of the past century challenged older models of education based upon seat time in lectures. In this century self-paced instruction challenges both seat-based lectures and predominate group and cohort based models of distance education. Though disruptive to these older models it promises a model of education that maximizes individual freedoms and choice, supports participative course designs and thus is a an appropriate new dance for the networked era.
Three generations of Technology enhanced Distance Education Pedagogy
This paper expands on an earlier work, Three generations of distance education pedagogy, by describing the technologies and the synergetic results of using effective pedagogy in combination with emerging technologies – to create powerful learning opportunities. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education, which were based solely on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning and instructional designs. The three generations of technology enhanced teaching are cognitive/behaviourist, social constructivist and connectivist. The paper looks at recent developments in emerging educational technology and discusses the ways in which these tools can be used and optimized to enhance the different types of learning that are the focus of distance education theory and practice.
More pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1000 years – all driven by 10 technology innovations
Pedagogy – one of those words that’s used when people want to sound all academic. So let’s just call it learning practice. Of one thing we can be sure; teaching does not seem to have changed much in the last 100 years. In our Universities, given the stubborn addiction to lectures, it has barely changed in 1000 years. So what’s the real source of pedagogic change? Here’s my theory – the primary driver for pedagogic change is something that has changed the behaviours of learners. independently of teachers, teaching and education – the internet.
Asynchronous and online should be the default to argue against
12 signos que estás en un aula del siglo XXI
Realmente en mis días de colegio e incluso universitarios, nunca experimenté un proyecto de aula como éste, pero quizás van siendo más comunes en los centros educativos de España gracias a metodologías educativas innovadoras que aprovechan las TIC.
Sin duda, lo realmente interesante de este proyecto va mucho más allá del uso de las TIC. Se transforma el concepto de educación. Se generan oportunidades para desarrollar, lo que considero, las habilidades críticas para tener éxito en cualquier profesión del futuro: comunicación oral y escrita, capacidad de análisis de información, pensamiento crítico, creatividad, trabajo en equipo, resolución de problemas y responsabilidad personal sobre el resultado. Como dije a Madre Montserrat, les estaré esperando cuando acaben para que vengan a trabajar y a colaborar conmigo. Sin duda, con estos inicios también aprenderé mucho de ellos.
Pedagogy in a Box: Don’t Underestimate the Messiness of eLearning
This posting is a bit of a free flowing rant as I react to yet another attempt to place ‘pedagogy in a box’ in the context of technology-enhanced learning. I guess it’s human nature or a reflection of the Western condition to impose order on the ‘natural’ messiness of learning and I don’t deny there’s room for a little structure in academic thinking. And I need to self-disclose from the outset that I’m probably one of the most guilty on this front.
However, we need to be extremely wary of the dangers of reifying our abstract, conceptual and theoretical models as they’re rarely a good match with the messy reality of teaching and learning. Indeed, well meaning efforts to put ‘pedagogy in a box’ typically convey reductionist and instrumentalist views of teaching which oversimplify the educative process. These models and frameworks can potentially do great damage. For one thing many of them are constructed on flawed assumptions and lack of solid research evidence.
On that note it’s probably time to climb down from my soapbox but I have just one final point: I always remember as a student that some of my best, most challenging and personally rewarding learning experiences were during the worst taught and designed courses. The lack of explicit learning design actually forecd me to think and search for meaning as a learner. The point is not to support poor course design but rather reiterate there is no recipe or simple matrix that can capture the complexity, messiness and idiosyncratic nature of teaching and learning, and arguably many of the current course design aids and models are continuing to look for love in the wrong place.
