This weblog about facilitating lifelong learning in a digital age is maintained by Shanta Rohse. I created it to support a graduate independent study course I am taking at Athabasca University's Centre for Distance Education in Winter 2005. You can find out more about me from my personal web site.
AU CDE
Center for L3D
CIDER
E-LEN
OUNL Learning Networks
The Pedagogical Patterns Project
~ an application of the Tag It! pattern: recently tagged websites via del.icio.us ~
~ an application of the Extract It! pattern: a
real time boolean search via PubSub ~
It's from an old reading blanket that's incubated many a lifelong learning project.
visited *loading* times
The semester is over, and it's time to close down The Common Loon blog. This Way of the Blog has been one of my most demanding and satisfying experiences in graduate course work, and one I highly recommend if you are so inclined. I can unequivocally say that I was steered in the direction of patterns as a way to design for lifelong learning because I used a public forum, and because others have done the same. Here and here too.
But while this blog is ending, pattern exploration continues. Design patterns will be one of the four topics to be probed in this Fall's MDDE 663: Emerging Issues In Distance Education Technologies, an optional course developed and facilitated by Terry Anderson in Athabasca U's MDE programme. And there's more. Rory McGreal lends his expertise to this issue of copyright and free education. I'm putting my best dress on if this is any indication of the tenor of discussion. The final two topics, the next-generation LMSs and podcasting and radio link the new to the past, evoking the developing field of distance education, and offering (to me) a welcome reminder amidst the hype of new technologies that emerging always implies an emerged from. It sounds like a great Fall, doesn't it? Time to get new shoes to match that dress, me thinks.
This month was all about finding patterns for lifelong learners. Griffiths and Pemberton recall that Alexander claimed finding patterns is a hard as theoretical nuclear physics (Alexander, 1979, cited in Griffiths & Pemberton, 1997). (Good thing I didn’t read that in the promotional literature early on). So these are simply early observations about using patterns to capture lifelong learning design and their
I've added two examples of the Tag It! pattern on the left-hand column of this blog, using del.cio.us and Furl services to tag website and online papers, respectively,
You want an overview of a particular knowledge domain.
You want to revisit a source that you discovered previously.
You want to identify only the relevant parts of a complete document.
You don't know where to begin a search for a topic that is unfamiliar to you.
You want to distinguish a good online resource from a bad one.
This pattern is based Fischer’s (2002) call to learners to be and act as designers.
The technology that you are using doesn’t work the way you want it to.
You want to integrate multiple sources of information to better understand a topic.
This pattern is based on Bates’ (1989) Berrypicking model of information retrieval.
You want to search online about a topic that is unfamiliar to you.
(You need to be logged in to Mo'time for most of the following links to work. This is the price of community.)
This morning I've been seeing who shares my profile interests in the Mo'time community, taking advantage of Mo'times new user profile feature. With 14 members, travel seems to be the most common denominator, although none of us seems to blog specifically about travel. Five of us share an interest in coffee - and isn't it interesting that of the 5, 3 are involved in some way or another in academia? Hmmm. The learning interest lead me to Jean, who is also using her blog Musings to support her Masters degree in education, and prefers chocolate to coffee for her caffeine fix. And it lead to sentenceguy, who examines patterns in sentences in his blog Good Sentences - prompting me to search for a connection between his patterns and the lifelong learning patterns I've been writing about, and evoking Vygotsky's connection between language and learning. Besides interests, Mo'time also lets you indicate a geographical location in your user profile. So far, there are only four tagged Canadians among us, but I'm the only representative from Ottawa and Ontario.
I like people tags far more than the content tags with which I've been way too preoccupied about here, here and here. Perhaps it's their serendipitousness: you never know whom you are going to meet, but you are open to the possibilities. On the other hand, I have a purpose when I click on content tags, usually a problem that I need to solve, and for that need they continue to disappoint.
Updated April 8 with corrected links.
I've received two requests for more info on writing patterns. (Like all online resources that I use for this project, I've tagged pattern articles and websites in my Furl and del.icio.us archives, respectively. If I've missed some good ones let me know!). These are some of the resources I am finding particularly useful as I learn about writing patterns.
Patterns try to capture expert practice. Pedagogical patterns capture the expert practice of educators. Joseph Bergin and his collegues at the Pedagogical Patterns Project keep a wonderfully rich collection of pedagogical patterns and pattern language (they are now on book # 5). I find their compact, repetitive, highly interconnected form very....well, the word hypnotic comes to mind. If there were a musical equivalent, it would be polynesian drums.
This links to a diagram that shows lifelong learning patterns in the context of Candy's online learning model. I have about a half dozen more patterns in various stages of draft (i.e., draft, very draft, and just plain rough) that I'd like to add to framework. The basic concept of patterns is simple; writing them is quite difficult.
These patterns are for lifelong learners (not designers or educators). See the rationale here. I use a pattern presentation adapted by the Pedagogical Patterns Project, which I describe here and Bergin et al explainhere.
You want to assess the claims of a particular point of view before relying on it.
You are seeking out help or information from both experts and fellow lifelong learners.
It's lifelong learning season in Ottawa. My mailbox is stuffed with offerings from the local school board and community centres, with lifelong and learning boldly stamped on most brochures. This season, I'm tempted by the promise of Curry Rendeng in the Malaysian Cooking Part 1 class. The brochures don't seem to promote the real reason I enjoy these classes, which is to discover the often fascinating lives of the people in my neighbourhood through our shared interests. One neighbour is a regular in the spring bicycle repair class, which she uses to prepare for the annual MS bike tour; she also has MS. My ballroom instructor gave Richard Gere dancing lessons for Shall We Dance. The couple down the street met in a Cantonese class, each with a desire to learn their parents' mother tongue. Their Cantonese is still rusty, but they've been married for 15 years. Then again, caught up in definitions as I am, this may be in fact what they mean when they say "learning for life."
Mar 12 - Mo'Time now supports tags, which Howard - "the host and (nearly) constant presence of mo'time.com" - describes as as "keywords that you apply to your posts, quite similar to categories in that they are both ways to organize posts by subject matter." The difference (in my mind, anyway) between tags and categories is significant because it reflects the difference between virtual and real searching and retrieval strategies. In the virtual world, a virtual post can exist as many different places as there are pointers (tags) to it. In the real world, a (paper) post can exist in just one place at one time (a category). Categories are an appropriate metaphor for the those metal filing cabinets next to our desk; tags are more appropriate for the everywhere and nowhere locations on the internet. Having said that, I still can't find anything of value using the lifelong learning tags in Technorati.
I followed Howard's adice that I tag all my posts with the separate single-word tags: e.g. learning, lifelong, etc. (more havoc for RSS readers - my apologies). Unfortunately, so far Mo'Time tags are not linked to the greater blogosphere. If I click on the news tag at the bottom of this post, I only retrieve all the other posts I've tagged news. So, they may not even be linked to other Mo'Time members, which really misses the networking aspect of tags. The difference between categories and tags is still quite academic. As Howard explains,"It's a shifting landscape and a bit technical, so it'll take a little while to figure out..." Can't disagree with that!
Some of the most interesting resources I've discovered address the critical question, what exactly should we be lifelong learning about? These include:
Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that we need different ways of learning - ways that let us come up with creative solutions to problems we have never seen before - to respond to the ways in which the world, and our lives, have become more complex. He calls this ingenuity, and the the critical gap between our need and our supply of ideas to solve complex problems the ingenuity gap.
Robert Sternberg and coauthors describe the concept of tacit knowledge - the knowledge that is not formally taught (and may not even be verbalized), but that we learn from our own experiences. It includes things like knowing what to say to whom, and when. Tacit knowledge is an indispensable element of expertise, and an important aspect of practical intelligence, without which we cannot survive in the world.
This past month has been about the context in which lifelong learning occurs. Social, demographic and economic trends point to the widespread changes that have, and continue to affect most aspects of our lives, including the opportunities to undertake all kinds of learning - formal, non-formal and informal. Our ability to cope and the fact that our perceptions are sometimes incorrect suggest that for the lifelong learner, there may be no substitute for experience. Thus, Philip Candy's model for online learning, which is unapologetically constructivist and consistent with theories that support lifelong learning, seems a good choice for examining the process of lifelong learning - the focus of the third and final month in this independent study course.
In trying to figure out how to do this, I fortuitously stumbled on and Terry reinforced the significance of the E-LEN project, which uses design patterns to identify and gather best practices (in their case, to build a network of e-learning centres; in my case to facilitate lifelong learning space). Drawing on architect Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages, the group identifies design patterns which explain a recurring problem and its solution. This just may be instructional designer nirvana - a means to bridge learning theory and learning practice - and I can't wait to try E-LEN's tutorial. They warn, "The first part of this tutorial will take 15 minutes. The second part (making an e-learning pattern) depends on your own effort." Well, then - I better make a fresh pot of coffee. Blut Banker's emphasis on locating and assessing information on the internet seems like an important place to begin a search for patterns since it is rife with problems, and maps very well to Candy's online learning model. So next month, the pattern hunt.
Philip Candy recently (August 2004) wrote a remarkable report for the Australian government in which he argues that the internet enables a great deal of self-directed learning if and when certain conditions are met (six of them , which he then describes in detail). His insights into the question of how best to incorporate ICT into educational plans and programs give the entire report an innovative air, and it was well worth devoting an afternoon to it this weekend, even if Spring is busting out all over here in Ottawa.
Two-thirds into the report, Candy presents his six-part model of online learning. Now, the model represents self-directed learning and not lifelong learning. Still it seems to be a single point at which all the theoretical perspectives I've outlined here and here converge. I've adapted his model, which Candy does not represent graphically but only in the text of the report, to show the relationships among the components (updated March 24):
Learning designers are practioners. We are supposed to identifiy relevant learning theories and put them to practical use in some sort of a course or program. (Although it seems we are easily distracted from this task! e.g., see Spector, 2000). Well, my intentions are good, so this post will try to present the rationale behind the theories of I've selected for this independent study,
It's interesting to see the subtle differences among the authors who answer this question. Together they paint a picture of motivated, independent, and confident individuals. Is this really so different from the pre-digital days? I'll keep adding examples as I collect them, and maybe come up with an answer:
John Seely Brown (2000). Growing Up Digital: How the web changes work, education and the ways people learn. In Change magazine.
John Seely Brown calls the web a transformative learning technology that is changing our ability (especially those of us between 10 and 40 in 2000) to learn, reason and act in the digital age as follows:
"Want to get ahead today?" asks Daniel Pink in this glimpse of his soon to be published book. "Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age." In the coming decades, jobs that depend on routines and rules - aka those held by knowledge workers such as accountants, tax attorneys and radiologists - jobs that used to be the path to the middle class - will be replaced by those that require some degree of artistry and creativity such as inventors and designers or some degree of empathy and emotional intelligence such as nurses and caregivers. The Information Age is over. The Conceptual Age has begun. The excerpt is a little scare mongeringish for me, but his description of the new right brain skills is interesting because he invokes John Naisbitt's notion of high touch:
High-concept means the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft satisfying narratives, to detect patterns and opportunities, to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High-touch means the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in the pursuit of purpose and meaning.
How can you not be optimistic about a future in which it is recognized that, for a change, empathy and emotional beauty are requirements for economic survival?
(Source: Helen Barrett, who has put together a very useful collection of resources and ideas for creating e-portfolios that support lifelong learning)
The Drs. Eide who specialize in neurological approaches for children with learning disabilities suggest that blogging is good for the brain because "neurons that fire together, wire together." Given all my recent reading on complexity, I found this observation about the ability to promote creativity especially interesting:
[Pioneering molecular biologist Max] Delbruck's "Principle of Limited Sloppiness" states we should be sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can't find out that it did. Raw, spontaneous, associational thinking has also been advocated by many creativity experts, including the brilliant mathematician Henri Poincare who recommended writing without much thought at times "to awaken some association of ideas."
There is definitely a kind of brainstorming aspect to blogs, but I am not so convinced that it is the result of neurons that fire together conspire together. Blogs are still a very individualized undertaking. Bloggers acknowledge their influences through links and words, but the posts are by and large a record of their personal creativity. In situated learning theory, Lave and Wenger (1991) emphasize that acquisition of knowledge is a social process where people can participate in communities of practice. They position learning as a process well beyond the intrapsychic processes of the individual. My sense is that in emphasizing the post over the relationship, blogs still favour the individual over the group. But they are definitely a step in the right direction.
(Source: Clive Thompson who writes about the wierd and wonderful in pop culture.)
Feb
28 - I've refined the categories I use in this blog so that they better
reflect what this blog is about. Yes, it is about "lifelong learning in
the digital age;" but, more precisely, it is about "designing for
lifelong learning in the digital age." Sorry to put a slew of old
posts in your RSS readers! The new categories are:
About - why this site exists
Context - the digital age and digital learners
Designing for lifelong learning - pedagogical, learning technological and organizational considerations
Resources - other people's concepts
News - milestones and announcements so I can stay on track!
Monthly reviews - a review of the previous month's posts so I can see
what I've done and what I still want to do! A little more reflective than "News," but also designed to keep me on
track!
Updated May 30
A complete list of posts by category and title
Terry Mayes and his colleagues (e.g. 2000) offer a useful framework for mapping kinds of learning onto types of learning technology. They distinguish three different types of courseware: primary courseware includes all the basic building blocks of understanding (conceptualisation); secondary courseware consists of those tools which learners use to work on the primary material (construction); tertiary courseware are the tools that support dialogue and meaning-making among learners and experts (dialogue). In the diagram, I've flattened out their framework slightly so that I can better map the technologies I am using for this independent study course. But it still represents a cycle, not a linear path.
Mapping it out this way shows why weblogs are pedagogically important to this project (and lifelong learning): they support all three learning stages. They support conversations in which references to concepts or people can be supported by explanatory content, where questions are matched with answers, or where we view similar converstion have led in the past.
Ever wonder why you over commit - that is, make a promise to do something that you'll never be able to keep? Buy a book you'll never read? Take on a learning project that you'll never finish? According to Zauberman and Lynch (2005, in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology), we over-commit because we expect to have more time in the future than we have in the present. When tomorrow arrives, we discover that tomorrows are just as busy as todays. However, we don't suffer the same irrational exuberance about money; we are much more accurate about predicting how much money we'll have in the future. The authors suggest that this is because money is more tangible than time: “Barring some change in employment or family status, supply and demand of money are relatively constant over time, and people are aware of that. Compared with demands on one’s time, money needs in the future are relatively predictable from money needs today (p. 25).”
I've always suspected that time spent locating and evaluating resources on the internet is in some way qualitatively different than other kinds of time. The non-linearity of the web always brings together information from very different contexts, environments and even paradigms. It's all very unpredictable. On the one hand it's great to have multiple perspectives; on the other, its a challenge to integrate all the perspectives. And it always takes more time than you think it will.
(Source: Lifehacker, an addictive site that also successfully distorts my notion of time)
Last updated by Shanta Rohse May 30, 2005 |
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