Greg Warman's Pages
Greg and Sam!
May 22 Free Write
May 15 Deliverable Readings
May 10 Deliverable Library Observation - Hoover Institution
May 1 Deliverable Readings
April 26 Deliverable Readings
April 19 Deliverable Readings
April 12 Deliverable Readings
April 12 Deliverable The International Spy Museum in Washington DC
April 12 Deliverable Visit to the Cantor Museum
April 5 In-class assignment What is learning?
April 5 Readings Learning Space Design | Theory and Practice
Even the attempt to build a practical guide for the design of learning spaces is worthy of praise. There are a few items missing from Malcolm Brown's guide however:
- Mapping of learning activity to 'traits leveraged' - right now the chart describes a room that resembles a hot dog...everything is thrown in. If one could determine which Net Gen Traits were most important for the learning activity at hand, then one could narrow the space and technology requirements.
- The emphasis on traits of Net Genners may be misguided - perhaps a more appropriate set of guiding principles would be related to the type of behaviors required to succeed in today's work environment.
Deb Kim "Thank you Greg. I appreciated reading your thoughtful reflection the M. Brown Table. I agree that the table could be enhance by looking at additional personas, approaches, characteristics. Please continue to tease this out as the quarter progresses. It will be quite useful in our final whole class project to create a more comprehensive."
Individuals, Generations, and Dynamic Cultural Communities
This reading demonstrated how the "bidirectional arrow" can advance academic theory! Individuals are not merely influenced by a static cultural environment - rather the two are mutually constituting and this necessitates conceptualizing the process of analysis very differently.
Visuals of boxes and arrows can constrain thinking. Using the combination of lens, a whole system view, and the conceptual approach of 'foregrounding' and 'backgrounding' it's possible to develop a more accurate understanding of learning in a cultural context.
Implications for designing learning spaces:
- ZPD suggests the space must accommodate interaction between experts and novices
- Learners should be afforded the opportunity to construct the environments in ways that facilitate pursuit of their objectives
- Learners should be afforded the opportunity to introduce and modify tools in ways that facilitate pursuit of their objectives
How People Learn - Executive Summary
Understanding expertise is important because it provides insights into the nature of thinking and problem solving
- Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
- Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized, and their organization of information reflects a deep understanding of the subject matter.
- Experts' knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability, i.e., it is "conditionalized."
- Experts are able to retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
- Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to instruct others about the topic.
- Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approaches to new situations.
The design of learning environments is linked to issues that are especially important in the processes of learning, transfer, and competent performance. Those processes, in turn, are affected by the degree to which learning environments are student centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. Learner-centered environments Effective instruction begins with what learners bring to the setting; this includes cultural practices and beliefs, as well as knowledge of academic content. A focus on the degree to which environments are learner centered is consistent with the evidence showing that learners use their current knowledge to construct new knowledge and that what they know and believe at the moment affects how they interpret new information. Sometimes learners' current knowledge supports new learning; sometimes it hampers learning.
People may have acquired knowledge yet fail to activate it in a particular setting. Learner-centered environments attempt to help students make connections between their previous knowledge and their current academic tasks. Parents are especially good at helping their children make connections. Teachers have a harder time because they do not share the life experiences of all of their students, so they have to become familiar with each student's special interests and strengths.
Knowledge-centered environments The ability to think and solve problems requires knowledge that is accessible and applied appropriately. An emphasis on knowledge-centered instruction raises a number of questions, such as the degree to which instruction focuses on ways to help students use their current knowledge and skills. New knowledge about early learning suggests that young students are capable of grasping more complex concepts than was believed previously. However, these concepts must be presented in ways that are developmentally appropriate by linking learning to their current understanding. A knowledge-centered perspective on learning environments highlights the importance of thinking about designs for curricula. To what extent do they help students learn with understanding versus promote the acquisition of disconnected sets of facts and skills? Curricula that are a "mile wide and an inch deep" run the risk of developing disconnected rather than connected knowledge.
Assessment to support learning Issues of assessment also represent an important perspective for viewing the design of learning environments. Feedback is fundamental to learning, but feedback opportunities are often scarce in classrooms. Students may receive grades on tests and essays, but these are summative assessments that occur at the end of projects. What are needed are formative assessments, which provide students with opportunities to revise and improve the quality of their thinking and understanding. Assessments must reflect the learning goals that define various environments. If the goal is to enhance understanding and applicability of knowledge, it is not sufficient to provide assessments that focus primarily on memory for facts and formulas.
Community-centered environments The fourth, important perspective on learning environments is the degree to which they promote a sense of community. Students, teachers, and other interested participants share norms that value learning and high standards. Norms such as these increase people's opportunities and motivation to interact, receive feedback, and learn. The importance of connected communities becomes clear when one examines the relatively small amount of time spent in school compared to other settings. Activities in homes, community centers, and after-school clubs can have important effects on students' academic achievement.
How People Learn - Chapter 2: How Experts differ from Novices
Experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects:
- what they notice
- how they organize, interpret, and represent info in their environment
- Experts notice features and meaningful patterns
- Experts organize content knowledge in a way that reflects deep understanding
- Experts knowledge is 'conditionalized' on a set of circumstances
- Experts retrieve info with little reflexive effort
- Experts are not necessarily good teachers!
- Experts are not necessarily 'adaptive'
- MEANINGFUL PATTERNS
- chess experts considered more sophisticated moves than novices
- with experience of a given field, abstraction is replaced by perception
- chess masters can chunk together pieces and moves into strategies
- important to provide students with learning experiences that specifically enhance their ability to find meaningful patterns in information
- ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
- experts organize content around key concepts
- e.g. Physics experts organize problems based on underlying concepts rather than surface features (novices tend to view physics problems as plugging numbers into a formula)
- strict testing of factual knowledge does not reveal expertise (e.g. ways of thinking about those facts in relationship to core concepts) and can result in curricula that is "a mile wide and an inch deep".
- CONTEXT AND ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE
- knowledge that is applied in the right cicumstances is "conditionalized"
- knowledge that could be applied - but isn't - is "inert"
- knowing when something is appropriate to use has implications for curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices
- FLUENT RETRIEVAL
- Experts may take as long as novices to solve problems, but for different reasons. Experts are attempting to understand a problem - however their subprocesses are often automatic and effortless as they sort through the material
- EXPERTS AND TEACHING
- Because so much is now automatic for an expert, they may become incapable of competent instruction of novices
- ADAPTIVE EXPERTISE
- ability to be highly proficient at one thing (routine expert) versus ability to leverage expertise to tackle novel situations (adaptive expertise)
- metacognition is important - the adaptive expert is able to recognize the limits of own knowledge and factor that into his / her response
- adaptive expertise in some ways is MERE CURIOSITY!
CAVEATS: 1) These principles do not operate in isolation (they are all integral to building expertise and must accommodate one another) 2) There are possible inappropriate applications of this information. For example, one should not try to teach novices a fully formed expert model of something - think about the knowledge and skills the learner is bringing to the task.