3 March-- assorted stuff On reflection (ironically, given what I said about reflection! I hope to finish my critique by next week) I think that despite all the stuff we touched on today, the principal take-away point was the one Sally prompted with a question, and the question from a reading group, "What's the point of all these categories (of learning--but it could just as well have been 'theories')?";

Your practice governs how you approach all these theories. They are tools. They are all useful for something (except learning styles, of course), but their usefulness depends on the task. Like all professionals you choose the tool according to the task (your practice), rather than select a tool and wonder what you can do with it...

(It's little bit more complicated than that, of course, but it is a good enough principle to be going on with.)

Most of what we talked about had been prefigured by the reading suggestions in the previous post. I was slightly surprised by the extent to which transformative/transformational learning rang bells with you, which is why I was slightly down on it in discussion. I still think there are ethical issues to be considered when transformative learning is an espoused aim of a programme, but the students/learners/punters do not know what they are letting themselves in for...

Here's a version of the transformative learning presentation:


The Ecclestone "Dangerous Rise..." reference was also in the previous post, as was a recommended reading on Deep and Surface learning (as well as my page).

Biggs and Tang's (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University Buckingham; OU Press/SRHE  includes an accessible account of Deep and Surface learning strategies.

I did not introduce Jarvis as planned--not a great loss, frankly. His model is indeed "better" than Kolb's; it includes the impact of the learning on the person, and acknowledges that the learner's engagement with the material and the process can vary in its intensity. But it's not as good a tool. (I was going to recommend his "Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning" (2005) so I went to Amazon to check the details. I saw that there was one review posted and checked it out. My sentiments exactly! Not surprising. I wrote it! I gave it 3/5)

Anyway, here is a presentation of the potential routes Jarvis identifies (based, it has to be said, on much informal research) through his learning maze. Key; visited points are gold. Re-visited points are dark gold.  The exit trajectory is green.


Next Week

Ed. tech. show and tell. It's up to you. The more you bring to the party, the less you will have to put up with my inane wittering.

My take will be based on  http://www.doceo.co.uk/rbl/stirrup.htm 
I don't know if we will get into the "reactionary" case, but Tom Körner's wonderful "In Praise of Lectures" is at; http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Lecture.pdf

• and more related to this at http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/micromathematics
  /2006/10/psychophysiology-of-blackboard.html

(Peripheral, but it has come up in previous sessions about the propagation of daft ideas on the net, is "Brain Gym"; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/mar/18/comment.badscience

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rH7kDcFpc&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjRhYP5faTU&feature=user

and of course those links say so much about the nature of access to information on the web. But is it learning?)

And if you have limited resources to access all this sophisticated technology, look up Johnny Lee's creation of an interactive whiteboard from a Wii remote. The video and links to his site with instructions are available at www.TED.com but I'm not going to tell you just where, because that would deprive you of the fun of browsing and serendipity on one of the jewels of the web! Of course, it's always possible you will never have time to attend another session of the course, but hey! So it goes...

  15:14