Nicholas Bowskill

Hi Everyone,
Just from an instructional design perspective, one of the things we always found motivating in online work was organising work into groups and sharing group products. It's always interesting to see what others are doing and have done isn't it? It's part of why we join in these sessions.

I'm interested in perspective-taking and sharing experiences and products and practices is a way of understanding our own lives in the context of others. Firat, in some ways that's why *we* are self-directed on here. We participate because it resonates with our experiences and interests which we offer to others.

Judy, I think your point about feeling engaged and commited to the activity/learning also relates to this idea of relating others to ourselves through the ideas and objects that are shared. And Roseanne, I think this might be a way of providing some kind of measure - the extent to which there is evidence of perspective-taking - the way we do or are able to relate our lives to those of peers/colleagues etc.

So my answer to motivation is to 'do' perspective-taking. But that's from the perspective of someone motivated by PT as the basis for *all* learning.

Best wishes from a very snowed up UK (although from the perspective of Canada I suspect this looks a bit tame)

Nick

http://sharedthinking.info

Hi Firat and everyone,
This was a surprise. And a nice one. It is so much more interesting to me to think about educational issues first then technology second.

Motivation is an interesting topic and one that as I type I realise how problematic it is. Firstly, I thought about your comment on motivation as the power to step forward. That makes it sound like a noun - some kind of driver for learning perhaps? Something that can be thought of as a tool to bring into play maybe? I hadn't thought of it in that kind of utilitarian approach but maybe I should because we can bring it into play when we offer courses perhaps. Hmm.

I also noted on the front page of this event there was mention of measuring motivation. I guess in some ways this comes from the same language set. We have this 'vehicle' and we want to measure its 'performance' in different contexts. Do you see where I'm going with this? There is for me a very mechanistic corporate kind of mentality - a kind of instructional design or technical-rationalist mind-set coming into play here maybe. I'm not saying it doesn't have some validity in some contexts but I have a feeling there are other ways of thinking about motivation - more intrinsic perhaps.

For me I find it enormously motivating to come to this kind of open forum. I'm not going to be formally assessed and if I am its unlikely to have grave consequences for me. I just feel energised by the thought of a dialogue on educational issues and I have a sense that here are some people I can engage with in an interesting discussion.

What motivates me most -and online or offline really - is the ability to hear about and from others. Its the chance to share thoughts and practices in an open conversation. That for me is the motivation.

Nick


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Nicholas Bowskill,
Faculty of Education
University of Glasgow
Scotland

http://sharedthinking.info

Sylvia, group blogging is interesting. It could mean we all share blogs through a feed etc or it could be keeping a single journal together. A colleage wrote about this as our practice on an intercultural course working with China.

I'll dig out the chapter or ref if I can. Just on the school run right now

Nick

apologies for a long message

Glen, thank you for some wise words here. I not only agree with all or most of what you said about blogging in public, I would also relate the same points to the other tool for reflection that is so widely encouraged and hyped up - namely e-portfolios. They both often lack social context and ignore the value of the institution as a safe and supportive space to learn. Generating a narrative may be a learning process but it doesn't follow that it generates knowledge or an understanding of the self in the social/subject context. Its also reflection as performance - performance to others (known or unknown) and to those assessing performance. This is not the same as learning for understanding.

There is a breed of person, amongst what is called a 'learning' technologist, that often seems to celebrate and promote 'disruptive' technology and who seem to validate, to themselves at least, the whole idea of 'disruption' in general. They justify it on the basis that only by being disruptive will we somehow reach the promised land of 'authenticity' etc (as though some learning is other than authentic or that authentic learning is to be judged by others as authentic or not authentic).

What the learner really needs is stability, community and coherence. What the learner really needs is a safe place. They need a reflective conversation in which they can obtain the perspective of others in that safe space. They need a sense of 'belonging to' and being 'connected to' our heritage of knowledge and learning. All of this is supported in the aims of an academic institution that values such beliefs.

Filling up blogs and e-portfolios is indicative of the modern culture of individualism celebrated by learning technologists promoting disruption as a goal. Public blogging renders the learner potentially vulnerable to other agendas that may not be conducive to learning. Despite sounding like an old and deranged lunatic (i know and I agree), I would argue that learners need order and chaos in their efforts to synthesise different perspectives. Education is all too often disrupted, performative or aligned only to commercial ideals.

Similarly even 'community' can seem individualistic when it means little more than displaying your wares in public (a.k.a. social networks). It should mean thinking with and about each other as a way of learning. It should mean placing our own goals in relation to those of others and being mutually supportive. In saying this, I am simultaneously aware of the irony of posting my views here as something that can also be seen as an act of individualism (and I must stop doing my own mind-spill all over the internet).

Sadly we live in an education system in which *competition* is the prevailing ideology. This is despite cooperative learning being evidenced in academic research as miles more effective for learning (see Johnson & Johnson for years and years of research and evidence that shows cooperation over competition in learning). I would argue that learning technologists, and individualistic views of learning, feed into further fragmentation and competition - evidenced at least sometimes by blogging and e-portfolios - which may not always be the most helpful way of learning.

I hope that if I *am* a deranged lunatic, (i think i probably am) I may also be promoting order, collectivism and safety as a process of empowerment rather than working towards the goal of subservience, through such a view. But that's a whole other conversation!

Best wishes,

Nick

p.s. what about authentic learning as a topic here?
or even disruptive technology?



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Nicholas Bowskill
Department of Education,
University of Glasgow

http://sharedthinking.info

Hi Everyone,
Paul thanks for leading an excellent discussion. I would however like to beg your forgiveness and raise issue in the friendliest way possible with the use of theoretical terms that are being attached to iPads. I've really just been following this topic rather than participating but then I saw "Is the iPad any use for constructivist learning?" I was a bit puzzled by the question. So, can I just stick my nose in on behalf of educational theory for a moment? iPads could be used for constructivist learning but as always it depends on what you do with it, what it does to you etc and what you understand Constructivism to mean.

Constructivism, to my thinking, does not mean just making stuff. You could create materials all day long and it may not fall under the heading of Constructivism (or it could). Such activity may cause no cognitive change at all. In search of a theory, you could put 'making things' under a heading of Constructionism if you wanted to locate it under Papert's theory (for example). That would be constructions as externalised thinking. But if it's *Constructivism* you're after then I believe it's more to do with building on and re-structuring your current understanding. It typically involves eliciting your current view for comparison and for work on resolving the inner conflict that may occur in an encounter with new information. The new experience or information may not initially seem to fit and that may prompt you to wrestle with it and possibly change your view. Anything can prompt that.

So, is ipad any use for constructivist learning is a very 'it depends' kind of question and that might account for the lack of response to the poll. It's the same as asking 'Is a filing cabinet good for constructivist learning?' It could be or it might not.

Equally the term 'authentic learning' is also problematic, to me at least. When is learning 'un-authentic' for example? Is learning only something that happens in the workplace and to be regarded in some special way? If the workplace changes, closes or the work moves out of town is learning still authentic? Well if it reflects actual practice maybe but that assumes a great deal about 'practice' , the situated/diversity of practices across time and cultures and life-long contexts etc etc etc. When everything is changing perhaps authenticity is something only you can decide - maybe there is no apprenticeship or its an imagined community. Nor is it to be always defined by others.

Dewey said words to the effect that 'Education is not preparation for something else. Education is life itself' - suggesting education and learning for its own sake is entirely authentic. Perhaps if we ask authentic 'when, to what or to whom' we might start to unpack some of the possible flaws in the concept of authentic learning and re-locate authenticity elsewhere or even drop the term altogether? There's a whole mountain of issues in the concepts of 'authenticity', situated learning, communities of practice etc that would invite further discussion.

Again, whether an ipad could be used for 'authentic' learning depends on how we understand our terms. If it helps you learn something which is 'authentic' to *you* then I'd say its authentic wherever or using whatever. I'd really say that all learning is authentic.

Sorry if this is me going off on a gentle rant. I don't mean to say against the iPad (bless it and all who finger their text on one). I just don't want us to believe its good on the uncontested use of certain terms. I think it is good but not much to do with the mind-forged manacles of learning theory uniquely supports or disqualifies only the iPad.

Yours in a state of eternal disequilibrium,
Nick

Faculty of Education
University of Glasgow
Scotland, UK