With all our wedding guests departed I have left the garden for a few days!
I have been looking forward to thinking about design and pedagogy.
I started Week 7 CCK08 readings and listenings with Gráinne Conole‘s
Social Networks and Learning Design and followed up with her New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies. The key messages for me in her papers are:
- Affordance (Conjecture: I noticed in the New Schemas paper a reference to trial-and-error learning. I wondered if affordance was better supported by trial and improvement and dynamic evaluation pedagogy?)
(Diversion: Affordance, afford, James Gibson, Donald Norman, perceived affordance, neuro-esthetics)
- Effective application of web 2.0 principles can provide a means of addressing the lack of uptake and sharing of learning and teaching ideas and design.
- The fundamental gap between the rhetoric of the potential of technologies and actual practice is a central challenge in current learning design research.
- Understand, visualise, guide, share are important verbs in the design process.
(Diversion: Jyri Engeström, social objects, sacred objects, Martin Weller, “The most important word on the internet is “Share””)
- Cloudworks is designed to apply the best in web 2.0 principles to encouraging sharing and reuse of designs, so that the site can have critical mass and be sustainable through end-user engagement and contribution. The site is made up of a range of ‘social objects’ associated with learning design – which includes learning designs but also tools and resources associated with the design process and creating learning activities and profiles of individual users and communities.
(Diversion: Fred Stutzman, ego-centric networks, object-centric networks)
- Find mechanisms to connect communities, so that the drive and momentum is around the communities and the technology is a seamless interface.
(Gráinne’s presentation from the Elluminate session this week is here on SlideShare.)
I followed up Gráinne’s papers by listening to George’s
Instructional Design and Connectivism presentation. His train analogy provided a journey for me that encouraged me to think about attributes of learners, interconnectedness, ecological validity and viability, context, effort and distributed approaches. I spent some time thinking about patterns, wayfinding and sense making whilst contemplating Slide 16.
(Diversion: Martin Weller’s PWLLE. Leigh Blackall’s Digital Network Literacy, Eliot Eisner, Artistry in Teaching)
My thinking about this week’s readings is focusing on time. George includes this in part in Domain 1 in Slide 16. I think Gráinne alludes to this throughout her papers but explicitly in the drive required to build learning communities. The diversions I refer to in this post have helped me ground my thoughts about time and the role designers have in distributed approaches.
My thinking is that affordance, trial and improvement are essential ingredients of dynamic learning environments. I realise that I am strangely attracted (in a chaos sense) to making time to mash social objects to create my own personal learning environment that might enrich the learning experiences of others. This week’s readings have encouraged me to think how I develop a wiki for a sporting community that embeds social objects for those who have teachable moments and are ready to learn.
I am looking forward to Thursday’s (Australian time) Elluminate session with Gráinne. Australian time is a good context for thinking about time. The collected readings in Gadi Mirrabooka point out that:
The Dreaming stories are not specifically related to time, as time was not important for the story to become part of the oral tradition. The important issue is the event, which occurred and affected the people, the land and the culture.
