Education

Thomas, D. & Seely-Brown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Self-published.p. 17: “Ironically, the relentless pace of change that is responsible for our disequilibrium is also our greatest hope. A growing digital, networked infrastructure is amplifying our ability to access and use nearly unlimited resources and incredible instruments while connecting with one another at the same time. However, the type of learning that is going on as a result looks so different from the kinds of learning described by most educational theorists that it is essentially invisible.” (tie to Connectivism as network-age learning theory?) (Toefler’s Future Shock)

Roxå, T., & Martensson, K. (2015). How Effects from Teacher-training of Academic Teachers Propogate into the Meso Level and Beyond. In Teacher Development in Higher Education Existing Programs, Program Impact, and Future Trends (pp. 1–36).

“…causal link between training and development of teaching is not straightforward.”

“These difficulties can manifest themselves as a lack of support and interest from colleagues or supervisors or as conservative attitudes on behalf of the students (Ginns, Kitay, and Prosser 2010).”

Xin, C. (2012). A Critique of the Community of Inquiry Framework. The Journal of Distance Education, 26(1). Retrieved from http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/755/1333

Thanks to Stephen Downes for pointing this paper out. I’m up to my eyeballs, processing data for my Community of Inquiry based MSc research, and could have missed this.

The Community of Inquiry model provides a framework for describing interactions within a community or classroom environment. It involves using textual analysis and coding of messages to interpret the type of interaction for each message – whether it involves social, teaching, or cognitive components. As I’ve been coding the data for my thesis, I’ve been adding as many types of “presences” as are appropriate – a message may include a number of things, indicating social, teaching and cognitive presences in a non-exclusive manner. I’m imagining each message having its own little Venn diagram for Social/Teaching/Cognitive component, as per the CoI model. It’s a simplification and abstraction, certainly, but looking at the coded output, I think it’s still got a fair bit of fidelity to describe the interactions at a high level. In my data, I’m also adding coding to describe the type of content (links, images, attachments, embedded media, etc…) as well as how involved the message is (is it a simple one-liner? a 2 paragraph response? a multi-page essay?) – and I’m thinking about how to include data on the timeline of the discussion (how rapid were the responses? staccato rapidfire conversation, or long drawn-out periods of silence?) I’m still thinking about how to represent that kind of data for an online discussion, but I think there’s something there, there.

Postman, N. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. Random House.

Dewey expressed that the role an individual is assigned in an environment – what he is permitted to do – is what the individual learns In other words, the medium itself, i.e. the environment, is the message. ‘Message’ here means the perception you are allowed to build, the attitudes you are enticed to assume the sensitivities you are encouraged to develop – almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn than because your environment is organized in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them.

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Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York. The Macmillan Company.

This book could be mined extensively for any topic. These are just a handful that are somewhat relevant to the paper I’m writing. I’ll probably revise this post later with more nuggets. 1916…

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.

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