Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [myNewWave] [this page]

Miscellaneous passages on educational ideas

Jump to section on lecture styles.

The first sections are three different responses that were prompted by a 2014 blog piece by Terry Elliott.

Terry Elliott's 3 X 5 cards and OMPs.

Terry's usage advances OMPs by two important steps. First, by having them done in a joined up way: always done to a similar question every session; and with the content (expectations) carrying forward to link sessions together. Joined up OMPs, then. We could call them the "One Minute Paper Trail" (or "One Minute Paper Chain").

Furthermore Terry takes a second step beyond the usual OMP: by getting each student both to state their expectations at the start of a session, and then to review those same expectations for met/missed at the end, he is getting what we might call student self-evaluation (self-assessment; self-feedback) in as well: the solo version of discussion and critiquing. Definitely achieving an additional educational point.

The other / additional view: of course, we can if we wish notice the similarity to Twitter: enforced brevity, the way that can really help people to write, when otherwise they might spend minutes thinking and stalling. But it certainly opens up the Learner → Teacher channel in classes; and in a way that has every learner (not just a few) "speaking" and being heard.

Fluid / fluent switches of audience in online thinking

Under the new gospel we should:

• NOT say that solo learning is the best and main or only mode (tradition)
• NOT say that social learning is the best and main or only mode (new and ridiculous over-reacting opposite view; often labeled connectivism, social constructivism, rhizomatic, etc.)
• BUT wake up to the fact that Aristotle was right and the golden mean, not the extremes, is where virtue lies. Or to come forward two millennia, but not on any account nearer than the 19th century, we want the synthesis, and not the thesis nor the antithesis.

BUT there is a further insight to add to this: that what we probably want is a fluid, fluent, and often very frequent switching between them: between solo writing/thinking, pairs, fours, class size groups, the whole internet as audience. We don't just need them all to cover some cases, but perhaps in every case. No current technology has grasped this, and been optimised to allow us to type once, and be able to re-use the text instantly to various sized audiences (including of course, withdrawing it: something the WWW is very, very bad at). On the other hand, some current tools aren't too bad at this. But the idea is to accept that (1) solo is good some of the time (90% of the time perhaps, in the light of some tiny studies a student of mine is running just now), and probably is ESSENTIAL. But (2) social interaction tends to add value in most cases. And (3) that the value depends on connecting these two modes, on relating the aspects of the ideas expressed with each audience.

So Terry shouldn't beat himself up about this, but ask when and how does social interaction help in learning and teaching. And still more: how do we support (and scaffold) frequent transitions, when we post something we wrote privately out to a larger group, .... So Twitter may let you cut and paste what you tweeted, but actually probably needs a post-tweet tool to collect your own tweets and thus recover solo material first written for a group. This latter is part of what Graeme Pate seemed to be suggesting. Students should write all their own lecture notes online; be able to (re-)use them for this solo purpose, but by having them visible to the rest of the class, have them also of some group (social) use.

Part of Graeme's insight is that, while it constitutes a strong critique of current ICT tool designs, it is also really what traditional students do in class internally. If you are learning in a class, you aren't just listening but processing; and that processing is solo and private, and must somehow be time-shared with attending to the teacher. We do a sophisticated job at switching from solo to social in class: it is somehow inherent in the business of listening and still more, of learning. (What does he mean? what does it mean to me? Without understanding both, you aren't getting it, and you aren't learning.)

Constructivism, not rhizotizm

To start with: like Sarah, I'm impressed by his cards, I want to hear more, I'm thinking about whether I should adopt them, whether they are the same or complementary to Graeme's ideas, etc. They are clearly good teaching, better than what I have ever done. What they do is get effective feedback from learners to the teacher; and do this once a class (not once a semester like standard surveys).

But this is the move from instructivism to constructivism. One simple way to define constructivism is to say that learning is like a journey, and a journey is not defined by its destination but by that plus its start. There is no "thing" that is the journey to London: the journey there from NewYorkCity and from Watford (a satellite commuter town on London's northern fringe) are radically different because the starting points are different. The teacher tends to define the destination, but the learners define the starting point. The cards get some much needed information to the teacher on the latter; and major adaptation may be needed as a standard good practice implementation of "the syllabus" in any particular case.

This can be elaborated if we talk about deep and shallow learning objectives. So the syllabus (ILOs, intended learning objectives) define the destination but may do so in many different ways. Shallow but common would be to list the facts, skills, and if you are lucky the concepts, to be learned. But sometimes you may articulate much more general ILOs. I used to have a friend, Richard Thomas, who taught (among other things) an adult education course on basic IT skills. As everyone who has ever learned programming or similar knows, there is really just one thing a beginner (and an expert) needs to learn: that unlike some other subjects (dancing, or Adorno's critical theory for me; Chinese for Terry), which many learners come to see as unlearnable, anyone can learn IT / programming; BUT every exercise will take them much longer than they expect (3-10 times longer). [This is true of gifted and experienced programmers too: almost no-one can estimate it right.] This is the only important thing for a learner to get; and it is a deep ILO. Richard ran his class like a full-on version of Terry's cards. Or to put it another way, his single ILO was for students to learn how to teach themselves ICT skills. Each week, they went round the table and each student would, in discussion, set themselves their own quite different learning goals for the week (basic WORD for one, Excel for another); and next week they would report on how well they'd done, share their war stories, and re-set their objectives. The social probably helped them; but the essence is the single ILO and discussion with the teacher: this would work in a class of one as well as of 20. This is constructivism taken seriously, and implemented by a really good teacher. It isn't rhizomatic because they wouldn't change each other's learning goals usually; and the only truly important goal was fixed in advance by the teacher.

So to my mind, Terry's cards are not rhizomatic at all (but they are seriously good teaching). What perhaps counts as rhizomatic is me being inspired by Terry's cards (I didn't even know this was something I needed to know, and Terry didn't set out to teach me — or any of his imagined readers — to use 3 X 5 cards), and by Graeme Pate's twitterized class, and by another talk that got me thinking about fluid and fluent shifting in and out of solo-social and then seeing the application of this notion to other things.

Rhizomatic metaphor