EDUCAUSE | metacognition

ELI Annual Video: Teaching Metacognition

gbayne — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:29:48 -0600

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.

ELI Podcast: Teaching Metacognition

gbayne — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:31:11 -0600

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.

Against the "Relevance" of Educational Technology

catherine — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:19:26 -0500

One of the arguments for integrating technology into the curriculum is that it is “relevant”. I’d never deny that technology awareness (and skills) are useful. But can we please ditch this discourse of “relevance”?

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t favour, and have never favoured, the idea that an educational curriculum, of any flavour, ought to be based on “relevance”. For two reasons: democratic and historical. First, who gets to define what is relevant? The notion of “relevance” puts too much power into the hands of too few. It’s dangerous. Second, definitions of “relevance” are irrevocably tied to the social and technological present in which we find ourselves. And our social “present tense” rapidly becomes the past. Surely the purpose of education is to help prepare individuals for their future, not our present.

I am NOT arguing that ICT is “impossible” in the educational context because of the phenomenon of obsolescence. What I principally object to is the way that the language of “relevance” consistently reduces the philosophy of education to an instrumental point of view. Notions of educational “relevance” are invariably tied to a definition of education as an instrumental process, in which an individual is inculcated with specific competencies and/or skills. Skills are utterly situational. They are tied to specific technologies and work practices.

However, ICT “competence” or an ability to operate in the knowledge society is of course much more than a matter of tool use. And the more we think in terms of learning as an ongoing process, the more we approach an ideal of education as metacognition and “learning how to learn”, the more we may broaden and deepen our conception of ICT to encompass socio-cultural perspectives. That will help us to understand how, and why, our technological artifacts are bound up with human activity and sense-making in the broadest sense.