Teaching and Learning and Learners

Check out this innovative series of multi-site symposia, organised by the Australian Council for Educational Research and education.au, which runs until 12 June. Mark Pesce's key note, 'Those Whacky Kids', will raise your eyebrows and make you think.

The symposia theme is "to explore and illuminate the possibilities and the realities of the implementation of the Digital Education revolution (DER)." Now, I think I get it with regards to the digital revolution, but I have to say, "DER" strikes me as a somewhat pointless acronym, and an unintentionally humorous one at that. More creative thinking hats, and more collaborative events like this one, please -- and less acronyms.

The EDUCAUSE Live! Spotlight on Identity Management series is a six-month series that will feature one or two speakers from a campus that have analyzed or solved a problem in a way that many people will find instructive.

The meaning of "student" is evolving at Duke University in response to many institutional and faculty outreach efforts. This trend is mirrored at many of Duke's peer institutions. In this free seminar on April 18, The Evolving Definition of “Student”: Identity Management at Duke University, presenters Klara Jelinkova, Director, Computing Systems, and Lynne O’Brien, Director, Academic Technology and Instructional Services, Duke University, will discuss the issues, concepts, and solutions surrounding identity management proposed and implemented at Duke University.

This 13 minute podcast features a conversation with Thomas C. Reeves, Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Georgia. Our discussion took place at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, where Professor Reeves presented a plenary session entitled, "Technology and the Conative Learning Domain in Undergraduate Education".

Video and slides of this presentation can be found here. The speech is by Marsha C. Lovett, Associate Research Professor & Associate Director for Carnegie Mellon University, and is entitled, "Teaching Metacognition". It was delivered at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

As educators, we teach students “content” but also want to help them develop as learners. Metacognition—the process of thinking about one’s own thinking processes and strategies—is essential to both goals, and yet instructors often feel they lack time or expertise to teach metacognitive skills. In this session, Lovett discusses recent research on teaching metacognition, including a Carnegie Mellon program where metacognitive instruction is integrated into first-year science courses.

In this 61 minute podcast, we feature a speech by Marsha C. Lovett, Associate Research Professor & Associate Director for Carnegie Mellon University, and is entitled, "Teaching Metacognition". It was delivered at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

As educators, we teach students “content” but also want to help them develop as learners. Metacognition—the process of thinking about one’s own thinking processes and strategies—is essential to both goals, and yet instructors often feel they lack time or expertise to teach metacognitive skills. In this session, Lovett discusses recent research on teaching metacognition, including a Carnegie Mellon program where metacognitive instruction is integrated into first-year science courses.

The Internet and a variety of emerging communication, visualization, and simulation technologies now make it possible to offer students authentic learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem solving. Explore authentic learning, what it is, how technology can support it, what makes it effective, and why it is important in Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, by Marilyn M. Lombardi, ELI scholar-in-residence and director of the RENCI Center and senior IT strategist at Duke University. This piece is part of the ELI white paper series.

In this podcast of the presentation "Generation G and the 21st Century," Richard Van Eck, associate professor of instructional design and technology at the University of North Dakota, discusses the theory behind the effectiveness of games in teaching and learning; what the past can teach us about if, how, and when to implement digital game-based learning; and what this will mean for colleges and universities.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27-28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

Some thoughts on PLEs, in response to the recent ALT-C Conference, in Edinburgh.

I didn't blog during the conference itself, but took notes, pondered, and waited for it all to sink in and for my thoughts to coalesce a bit. There were too many competing strands and ideas flying around for me to try and make sense of it at the time. It's probably worth noting that the following notes and criticisms relate to my take on what I would term the "personalisation agenda", not necessarily to personalisation per se.

PLEs would appear to sit neatly within a  "consumer" model for education. Perhaps too neatly. I am not entirely comfortable with the vision of institutions as "providers" and students as "clients" or "consumers." I get nervous when institutions become too corporate- / market-friendly.

How do the personalisation agenda and the consumer model for education challenge our vision of the social and charitable dimensions of education?

The personalisation agenda appears too individualistic to me. It appears to fit well with a vision of the student as an individually-motivated, strategic high achiever. Yet by adopting the language of personalisation to address the specific learning needs of individuals, are we losing focus on a key aspect of learning -- the ways in which individuals learn not in isolation, but in communities? Surely Lave and Wenger's work on Communities of Practice was designed to address just this problem? Are we now taking a step backward, and returning to an individualistic model for education -- a New Cognitivism, perhaps?