On the day before my hiatus last spring I responded testily to John Clare, who asked, in essence, how we know all this online learning mumbo jumbo actually works.
Over the last couple of days I've linked to some similar questioning from Tony Karrar about informal learning (or as it is sometimes styled, free-range learning (which always leads me to think of that cannibalistic Simpsons Halloween episode - but I digress). And pedagogical scepticism seems all the rage. Witness, for example, the growing popularity of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark's paper in Educational Psychologist, Why minimally guided instruction does not work. The recent study being held to conclude that laptops don't help learning. And meanwhile we have Joan Vinall-Cox wrestling with commentary from Rochelle Mazar questioning the efficacy of inquiry-based learning.
Now I know these criticisms are not all of the same thing, but they all take pretty much the same tack. And it seems to me the correct way to respond is found in Vinall-Cox's response. She writes, "When a theory becomes a phrase, and that phrase is defined differently by various 'experts', watch out!" Quite so - and it seems to me that what is being countered by these arguments is not a theory, but a slogan. As Harold Jarche responds, "there is no single methodology for informal learning." And as he notes, there's no simple outcome either.
"There are a lot of learning needs that cannot be addressed through instructional performance interventions. These include: Feeling and acting as a member of a team; Group learning from operational experiences (see post on Storytelling in the Army); Building morale. Informal learning systems may increase overall performance but these cannot be exactly measured nor quantified."
What I am seeing most often is the taking of a technology or a technique that should be most effectively used in a workplace or around a campfire (say), in a circumstance where the learner in fact is empowered, and testing it in a sterile, instructor-led and coercive classroom environment, tested by initiating a procedure where "the instructor does not lecture and does not impose topics, but instead stops, turns the lights around, and asks students what they want to learn."
But this isn't what is intended at all. When these technologies and techniques (and yes, they are related) are evaluated this way, they are evaluated out of context. As Miles Berry comments, the evaluators fail "to acknowledge much by way of a social dimension to learning - their comparison seems largely to be between content delivery led by a teacher and alternative approaches in which learners work things out for themselves. This seems to ignore the whole range of approaches in which learners are empowered to learn from other learners." They also fail to take into account what learners want to learn, why they are learning, and where they are doing the learning.
I mean, let's look at this another way. Millions of people, working with no instruction at all, have managed to learn and master complex simulations and game-based online environments, and to transfer this knowledge to the real world. Thousands - maybe millions - of people working with nothing but an online community and a compiler have taught themselves how to program computers. It is therefore not rational to conclude that people cannot learn without an instructor. Therefore, the statement of the problem is wrong. The empirical tests looking for "outcomes" are looking for chimera - it would be like the King and Queen of Spain demanding that Columbus show them pictures of the edge of the world - no edge, no demonstrated achievement.
Over the last couple of days I've linked to some similar questioning from Tony Karrar about informal learning (or as it is sometimes styled, free-range learning (which always leads me to think of that cannibalistic Simpsons Halloween episode - but I digress). And pedagogical scepticism seems all the rage. Witness, for example, the growing popularity of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark's paper in Educational Psychologist, Why minimally guided instruction does not work. The recent study being held to conclude that laptops don't help learning. And meanwhile we have Joan Vinall-Cox wrestling with commentary from Rochelle Mazar questioning the efficacy of inquiry-based learning.
Now I know these criticisms are not all of the same thing, but they all take pretty much the same tack. And it seems to me the correct way to respond is found in Vinall-Cox's response. She writes, "When a theory becomes a phrase, and that phrase is defined differently by various 'experts', watch out!" Quite so - and it seems to me that what is being countered by these arguments is not a theory, but a slogan. As Harold Jarche responds, "there is no single methodology for informal learning." And as he notes, there's no simple outcome either.
"There are a lot of learning needs that cannot be addressed through instructional performance interventions. These include: Feeling and acting as a member of a team; Group learning from operational experiences (see post on Storytelling in the Army); Building morale. Informal learning systems may increase overall performance but these cannot be exactly measured nor quantified."
What I am seeing most often is the taking of a technology or a technique that should be most effectively used in a workplace or around a campfire (say), in a circumstance where the learner in fact is empowered, and testing it in a sterile, instructor-led and coercive classroom environment, tested by initiating a procedure where "the instructor does not lecture and does not impose topics, but instead stops, turns the lights around, and asks students what they want to learn."
But this isn't what is intended at all. When these technologies and techniques (and yes, they are related) are evaluated this way, they are evaluated out of context. As Miles Berry comments, the evaluators fail "to acknowledge much by way of a social dimension to learning - their comparison seems largely to be between content delivery led by a teacher and alternative approaches in which learners work things out for themselves. This seems to ignore the whole range of approaches in which learners are empowered to learn from other learners." They also fail to take into account what learners want to learn, why they are learning, and where they are doing the learning.
I mean, let's look at this another way. Millions of people, working with no instruction at all, have managed to learn and master complex simulations and game-based online environments, and to transfer this knowledge to the real world. Thousands - maybe millions - of people working with nothing but an online community and a compiler have taught themselves how to program computers. It is therefore not rational to conclude that people cannot learn without an instructor. Therefore, the statement of the problem is wrong. The empirical tests looking for "outcomes" are looking for chimera - it would be like the King and Queen of Spain demanding that Columbus show them pictures of the edge of the world - no edge, no demonstrated achievement.
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