New Learning MOOC’s Updates
Technology-Mediated Learning: Between Didactic and Transformative Pedagogy
Does technology-mediated learning necessarily change things? Consider the ideas in following two chapters, and also this community update.
Comment: Mention a stand-out idea, or new thought prompted by this material. Use @Name to speak with others about their thoughts.
Make an Update: Parse an e-learning technology or practice. To what extent and in what ways does it reflect Didactic/Mimetic, Authentic/Synthetic, or Transformative/Reflexive Pedagogy?
Ý tưởng hay!
I think I can apply these things to life
I think I can apply these things to life
New technologies offer new possibilities. But it is only a tool we can use and may only be a new form of the same old way.
For e-learning, the field that impresses me the most is game-based learning and gamification. This technology provides intrinsically a clear purpose, comprehensives goals, direct feedback and awards.
The gamification and digital game usage may be a tremendous change in education both as a technology and a real support for transformative pedagogy.
The paper of J Lee & Jessica Hammer suggests that this will become a reality for everyone soon but must be accompanied by meaningful assessments.
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/main/gamification/gamification-in-education-what-how-why-bother.pdf
In 2013, LevelUp Learning (http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/jgcc_leveluplearning_final.pdf) a national US survey was conducted on 700 K-8 educators from across the United States to see the usage of digital games in education. The survey findings include that digital games are broadly used (nearly 74% of respondents) but are still used poorly in short formats adapted to existing constraints and without real innovative integration to change the pedagogy used.
Rebecca Koza, a 4th grade educator in The Arts Based School in North Carolina designed a game-based learning unit to change their perception of the U.S. government.
http://gamingthroughgovernment.weebly.com/
The goal for the player is to advance from an intern at the white house to a more important job (until President). The first goal of Rebecca Koza was to study and prove that digital gaming is an effective pedagogical strategy.
Throughout the game-based unit, students earned points by playing digital games and also producing written reflections. To assess learning and gain a level, students have to pass a quiz.
This initiative is a good form of game-based learning but fell to didactic pedagogy and expected good answers.
On my side, as an adult, I tried a small game named The Good, the bad and The accountant (https://jplusplus.github.io/the-accountant/#/).
This game puts you in the shoes of the general manager of a city and asks you to communicate with others (citizens, suppliers, politics…). Based on your actions and their impact, you learn the basis of anti-bribery laws and the complexity of its application.
This game is really engaging and fun but falls again into a didactic pedagogy because you will learn the rules and apply them, along with your choices and its consequences. Even if the game lets you play for the good of anti-bribery or as an evil moocher, you are still doing this alone and understanding the impacts on your own without discussion with others. A peer discussion with others may have offered a more immersive way to discuss the details of the law and the implications.
In the future we may see more games and initiatives creating real learning spaces and connecting people with each other to produce content.
A study from the University of California explore the affordances of online gaming environments for second language learning with two spanish learners on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft
https://education.uci.edu/uploads/7/2/7/6/72769947/affordances.pdf
This study concludes that these games “provide unique contexts for language learning and socialization that are a marked contrast to the insulated communicative environments of many language classrooms”.
I look forward to see more good usages of video games to serve a true transformative pedagogy creating connection with a large number of players (students, teachers, others) to reflect, exchange and produce on different topics to build a new set of usable knowledge for themselves and the others.
Thanks!
New institutional learning environments and conventional learning settings that are being changed by educational technology are the two kinds of e-learning environments. Traditional learning environments are also changing, with one-to-one schools giving every student a gadget they may take home and blended and ubiquitous learning expanding the scope of traditional classroom interactions beyond the physical classroom and class periods.
The discursive forms of didactic pedagogy are not particularly ancient in terms of human history, but they predate large organized education. Plato's Academy of Athens, where instruction was essentially dialogical (Socratic dialogue), rhetorical, and argumentative, may serve as our point of comparison for contemporary education.
What in e-learning ecologies has the potential to be novel and transformative? We have two nothing responses for.
New institutional learning environments and conventional learning settings that are being changed by educational technology are the two kinds of e-learning environments. Traditional learning environments are also changing, with one-to-one schools giving every student a gadget they may take home and blended and ubiquitous learning expanding the scope of traditional classroom interactions beyond the physical classroom and class periods.
The discursive forms of didactic pedagogy are not particularly ancient in terms of human history, but they predate large organized education. Plato's Academy of Athens, where instruction was essentially dialogical (Socratic dialogue), rhetorical, and argumentative, may serve as our point of comparison for contemporary education.
What in e-learning ecologies has the potential to be novel and transformative? We have two nothing responses for.
Technology plays a great role nowadays in education. It has wide range of uses worldwide unlike few years back. Today it makes it easier to compute the grades by using software and or programs, sending tasks during online classes and many more to mention. It is really amazing how the technology evolves from low to high tech, innovate and continuously improving from time to time.
Technology plays a great role nowadays in education. It has wide range of uses worldwide unlike few years back. Today it makes it easier to compute the grades by using software and or programs, sending tasks during online classes and many more to mention. It is really amazing how the technology evolves from low to high tech, innovate and continuously improving from time to time.
Reflexivity: Towards New Learning
In the New Learning, we suggest a reflexive approach to pedagogy and curriculum that builds on and extends the insights of mimetic and synthetic approaches. Relations between expert knowledge sources (teachers and authoritative texts) and novices (learners) are reconfigured. Agency is rebalanced. More than mere copying or mimesis, and more than synthesis, which pulls presented knowledge apart in order to put it back together again in a more or less predictable way, a reflexive approach creates a dialogue in which students move between different knowledge processes.
Dimension 1: Pedagogy
Pedagogy is series of activities consciously designed to promote learning – the creation of knowledge and the development of a generalised capacity to make knowledge. The shape of pedagogy can be identified by tracing its sequence of movements.
See Reflexive Learning Case Studies.
Mimetic pedagogy teaches facts and theories assembled into disciplinary shape and unveiled to learners in a fixed sequence. Synthetic pedagogy emphasises experiential learning – through action, demonstration, experimentation or immersion.
Reflexive pedagogy is a more varied and open-ended process of knowledge making, moving backwards and forwards between different ways of making knowledge or knowledge processes. It is a to-and-fro dialogue between learners and teachers, peers, parents, experts and critical friends. Following are some of the main characteristics of learning activities in a reflexive pedagogy.
Position the learner as the knowledge creator. The ‘answers’ are not necessarily pre-determined – the ‘answer’ in the textbook or the teacher’s head. Reflexive knowledge making links personal and local experience to more general bodies of human knowledge, such as biology or history. These balance knowledge that is part of a broad social heritage with the learner’s particular local situation and personal motivations. The learner is an agent in the knowledge-making process. They are always making new knowledge that connects broadly applicable concepts with their local realities. The concept may be life cycles, for instance, but ponds vary considerably. The Second World War was an event on a global scale, but different communities or families were affected differently. Learners need to be positioned as knowledge designers, using conceptual and informational resources provided to them by disciplinary frameworks, but always reframing the world in the modulations of their own voice and connecting with their own unique understandings and experiences
Such a great ideas!