William Cope
Adam P Rusch
Jason Berg
Duane Searsmith.png "Rita van Haren")
Rita van Haren
Eric Patnoudes
Maura Rodgers Brand
Jason Williams
Melanie Lamus
Heather A Ochmane-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
The Big Picture: A Course Map (Admin Update 1)
In this MOOC, we contrast two types of pedagogy, which we call 'Didactic/Mimetic' and 'Collaborative/Reflexive'. We can use educational technologies to support either or both kinds of pedagogy.
We don't want to criticize Didactic/Mimetic pedagogy. It has had its place, in its time. It has done it's job, sometimes appropriately, and in some circumstances it may still be appropriate. However, our focus in this Learning Module are the affordances offered by e-learning environments for Collaborative/Reflexive Learning. Not that the underlying ideas of Collaborative/Reflexive Learning are new ... in fact, many of them are quite old. It's just that they may now be easier to realize, with the application of a new generation of e-Learning technologies. Here's a diagrammatic overview of the 'seven affordances' we will be exploring in this course:
View the videos, From Didactic Pedagogy to New Learning and What's the Use of Technology in Learning? Introducing Seven e-Affordances.
Comment: What do you think? When is 'Didactic/Mimetic' or 'Collaborative/Reflexive' pedagogy more appropriate? Or when has/does the one worked better than the other? Speak from your own, personal experience
May be the link here in other conversation might be a good input as well.. https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profiles/new-learning/community_updates/16563
Ritwik Chattopadhyay -> second paragraphs of ur comment - I could not agree more.. it is the real learning.. learning by doing.. learning with social interaction .. learning with transparency..
It is like all coming back .. in a new dress of technology facilitated.
India, for centuries was looked upon as the holy grail of education. One of the most ancient and renowned universities - the Nalanda University - began and prospered here. It was the focal point of education during ancient times, attracting global scholars.
What made the education system at Nalanda so unique?
Can we draw parallels between the gurukuls of then and MOOCs today?
Where did we lose the plot and why is it that the harbingers of world education are today laggards?
Initial thoughts post week 1 - and yes, I joined the course late, so catching up :
- In the ancient times the guru or the teacher was not the epitome of knowledge; just a facilitator of knowledge. He created inquisitiveness among the pupils and let them figure the way forward. This sometimes led to conflict, wherein the facilitator managed the conflict through delegation, subordination and at times through an intervention. This uninterrupted ability to explore created opportunities to shine.
- Elearning - being both asynchronous and content agnostic - creates a perfect platform for making mistakes, unabashedly. Mistakes are the only way we learn! Our learning communities today penalize mistakes to the point where it stifles creativity. Be it through the hole in the wall experiment or through myriad such interventions, the ability of the learner to create solutions to problems is directly proportional to the allowance for error.
I think these are some of the initial thoughts on how the best from the past could be used to benfit future learning.
I'm not a professional teacher but I love to learn, so this can be taken as a motivated student's comment.
When the subject was brand new to me, I benefitted the most from one or two didactic type of lecture. In it I got a feel for the subject, what was and was not relevant. Afterwards, whether the tutor engaged us in a participatory way or not (some were better than others), it was easy for me to carry on by myself.
It would have been a lot harder if I did not have the first, very didactic classes. I took the model to work: when I'm supposed to get on with something new, I pester someone that knows about it (makes me look very lazy...) then start. A 30 min talk cuts about a week of finding out, at least in the initial stages.
We need different skills in order to thrive in the collaborative/reflexive environment. In some ways we need to undo our learning from didactic/mimetic environments. In the past I have taught in secondary schools where students are accustomed to being receptors of information from the teacher, they are uncomfortable and unpractised at working together. They are primed for competition. It takes some preparation and fostering of new learning behaviours in this new way.
If I may use a metaphor, it is like taking a factory worker and placing them in a design studio. There is some adjustment.
At my school, teachers were challenged to engage our students in deep reading this past year. I felt my students' panic as I handed them a story, and without ANY background scaffolding on my part (okay - my panic, too) had them tackle it. Because they were able to work with partners and small groups for the reading, they arrived at logical understandings of theme and historical context within the group. Students who were usually least engaged, were most engaged with this problem, and students who listened in got it. It was very similar to the hole in the wall experiment results that Mitra got. I have no doubt that all of my students comprehended that story, and I skipped the comprehension questions. Assessment just became much trickier.
I love the idea of the Twitter-esque environment where everyone can answer. One of my grad school professors did this in his class and there was resistance from the students, who were primarily teachers. It challenged their way of thinking about teaching; how it's supposed to be done. Great experience that really stuck with me.
I constantly have to ask myself, am I clinging to didactic methods because they are best for me? Fundamentally, I don't think education requires any didactic teaching and I would like to eliminate it from my toolbox. This requires collaboration with my students, as Mooznah pointed out very early on, and a great deal of effort for all of us!
I think more often than not a collaborative/reflexive approach to education allows the learning experience to be deeper, more meaningful, and more authentic. While there are still situations that a didactic approach would be appropriate, most of the time students will be better served through a more student-centered pedagogy. Some situations that call for a more didactic experience would be remedial direct instruction or cases where procedural knowledge is the goal. Specifically focusing on one “right” answer and how to achieve it could be communicated through a didactic means and could arguably be the simplest way to achieve the desired outcome. Others could argue that taking this approach would only limit a student’s learning in that applying this new knowledge, procedural or not, to a new situation would be more difficult as the teaching only focused on one “right” way.
Encouraging and supporting students in discovering solutions, creating questions, evaluating procedures for tasks, all through a collaborative environment with other students, will not only help students develop the content knowledge, but also the cognitive processes for analyzing problems, determining viable solutions, and evaluating which one to use. Taking this approach in education affords students to develop the knowledge in addition to skills that will prove more transferable later on in higher grades, careers, or life situations.
One way that I adapted an activity from a didactic approach to a more collaborative approach involved the watching of a movie. Traditionally, when students view a video or movie in class, the teacher provides a worksheet or series of questions to guide students in gleaning important information from the visual media. This can also serve as a way to keep students focused and on task. Instead of taking this approach, I used a Today’s Meet chatroom to set up a backchannel during the video. I posted questions or comments along with the students. Students could participate in the backchannel and essentially have a conversation, without interrupting or distracting other students while viewing the movie. At the end, I could look at the transcript of the chatroom, and that was my formative assessment piece. Without the 1:1 technology in the classroom, this activity could not work with a backchannel. However, such a situation affords a learning experience that is more collaborative and engaging.
I think about my students, they study in the computer field (most of the courses I teach are about programming languages at the university). There are several milestones in a programming course. At the beginning students must learn new lexical, grammar, syntaxes, semantics of a particular programming language to solve some problems. I believe we can use either Didactic or Collaborative pedagogy, or a mix of them; all depends on the circumstances in which we are (physical, communicational, and knowledge architecture) and the learning objectives that we aim.
In my experience, when students start learning how to program, it is a good option for them to use programming's simulators to let them practices in a controlled development environment (preferable working in pairs), so they can explore and analyze the programming language by themselves. Sometimes, for example, when a student demonstrates some expertise in the programming language we are working on, I diagnose that student with some on-line quizzes in order to know his proficiency, and if the student has a good programming skills, I allow him to work by himself in a not controlled development environment, and I let him to use a week-by-week learning management system for a couple of weeks. Afterwards, I incorporate that student in the final programming project of the class.
Most of my programming classes concluded with a programming project, which is built by everyone in the class (including the professor who is the project manager). Students work in small groups (2 o 3 students) completing small tasks, where communication and feedback between the small groups and the whole group is fundamental (some of the learning objectives in these kinds of classes are: applying effective techniques for collaboration, and problem-solving within groups; and demonstrate an ability to assemble and orally present technical work to different audiences).