A Clueless Moment
“What the heck have I been doing?”
This question comes via Barbara Ganley and gsiemens
Ganley’s quote from gsiemens’ connectivisim blog got me interested, and got me thinking. Here’s the fire starter:
“Instead of designing instruction (which we assume will lead to learning), we should be focusing on designing ecologies in which learners can forage for knowledge, information, and derive meaning. What’s the difference between a course and an ecology? A course, as mentioned is static - a frozen representation of knowledge at a certain time. An ecology is dynamic, rich, and continually evolving. The entire system reacts to changes - internal or external. An ecology gives the learner control - allowing her to acquire and explore areas based on self-selected objectives. The designer of the ecology may still include learning objectives, but they will be implicit rather than explicit.”
The ideas that got me thinking:
1. Instruction vs. Ecologies where learners forage.
I love this, and yet I find myself wondering…how to create such an environment in my classroom, where my English students can forage and hunt down what they want. Does it apply even if you don’t have net access in your classroom? The knowledge is developing rapidly outside the disconnected classroom, but what happens to the teachers and students stuck on the inside? How can we create learning ecologies? How can we encourage foragers?
Is it the “teacher becomes the net” scenario? Do we, the teachers, need to tap into our student’s passions and interest and hunt down “now” information related to it…and bring it in for students to explore?
I could say I could encourage my students to forage outside the classroom, outside the office, but to me…that’s a joke. My students are… well…slaves. They work so much that they never do homework…because they are hardly ever home. Could a learning ecology survive in such an environment?
2. An ecology gives the learner control to explore around self-selected learning objectives.
3. What got to me the most: The designer of the ecology may still include learning objectives, but they will be implicit rather than explicit.
What is an implecit objective?
wordnet at Princeton U - via google, describes implecit like this: “implied though not directly expressed.”
And from the same two sources, “explicit” is something:”precisely and clearly expressed or readily observable; leaving nothing to implication.”
I’m left scratching my head. What do implicit learning objectives look like? How are they conveyed and known by the parties involved?
How does this cross over into my esl classroom? What does a learning ecology look like there? While I totally agree with all the points listed above and in the blogs I’ve linked to and quoted from, I’m left with a mighty big question mark.
How does a teacher, in my case, an esl teacher, begin to deploy such learning environments?
The strange thing for me is around the use of objectives - and the apparent alteration around their use that siemens is advocating. I feel tension around the whole implecit vs. explicit deployment of objectives.
Up to this point in my teaching career, objectives have been drilled into my head as something every responsible, effective teacher should be doing - setting up objectives that are measurable, that make use of the right verbs, and that break out of the classroom and into the reality of my student’s lives. That demonstrate the teacher’s effectiveness at helping learning to occur. It also gives students a way to measure their “learning.” - now I’m even starting to feel cautious around using the word “learning.”
And now…I feel like I’m being asked to unlearn what I have learned. Is that a right conclusion to take out of this conversation?
What should my classroom look like? I know I’ve been practicing the following, and now I’m not so sure I should be…
“Educators are a conflicted group. The intended outcome of our activities is a nebulous concept we define as “learning” (some type of change of state or potential in the learner). We assume that through pushing buttons and pulling levers in an intricate process we call “instruction”, we will be able to “create” learning. The best we have been able to do to date is create a series of guidelines and conditions in which learning might occur. Vygotsky, Bruner, Chickering, Bloom, Gagne, and others have sought to pry open the door of “making learning happen” through checklists and best practices. In the end, most educators will admit that we are really rather clueless about the whole learning thing. And we should be. We have taken the wrong approach. We are trying to achieve a task (learning) with a tool (teaching) in an artificial knowledge construct (courses). It’s all about us.”
I feel clueless at the moment. This conversation is open, and I throw it out to you. What does this all mean? Should these ideas be informing our teaching practice, and if so, what does that look like?
