Apr 22

What would a 21st Century “Lesson Plan” look like?

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Richard

In teachers’ college, I was the Lesson Plans guy. I had blue-rimmed glasses, hair down to my shoulders, I wore sweater vests, and one of the first things I ever did on the Internet was to share lesson plans. One of the first collaborative projects I was ever part of—using what began as a Scarborough (Ontario) Board of Education software initiative and remains with us today as OpenText’s FirstClass—to create lessons to be tried, honed and re-shared by other teacher candidates. I quite enjoyed that activity, and I think it’s time to do it again, with the rest of the Internet.

There was collaboration on line long before words like “blog,” “wiki,” “social network were coined…”

But Intranets were closed, connections were slow, hardware was expensive and there weren’t a lot of people who owned technology—even fewer who used it well in classrooms.

We had a template, we discussed it together, tried them in our host classrooms adapted and applied it iteratively, worked lessons into integrated units, collaboratively, in practice. Master teachers contributed advice—or innovative projects to extend lessons into —but it was all entirely student-instigated, student-designed, and/or student “moderated.”

Our activities were facilitated by technology, but they were pedagogical activities.

We knew the Web had power, we wanted to be literate—we wanted to read and write the web.

Technology was there to support an idea or activity, and when an expert was needed to make the technology work it was “facilitating a situation” and “enhancing the learning environment”, not “directing technology.” In every situation it was student-centered. But we were also teachers: of the students in our host classrooms, often of our host teachers—always of ourselves, always of each other. We call reading and writing, “literacies,” and we generally expect to acquire them in great part by a process sometimes called “schooling,” but we see that it doesn’t always work, and in fact can often be gained by “learning” in other ways, generally not called “schooling.”

Fast Forward to the 21st Century

The Internet is open, connections are fast, hardware is less expensive and there are many more people who own technology—and still, we hear, too few who use it well in classrooms. This kind of learning is messy.

Video is ubiquitous… but not very interactive… they said

Teaching the Web in the 20-teens looks different in some ways, others not so much. Popcorn.js is an exciting set of modular scripts that add interactivity and creativity to web video.

Games and Gaming

Storytelling is a primeval human activity that is quite fundamental to pedagogy. All games tell stories. Learners persevere with games; learning happens. Gamification is an immensely important trend “as a means of motivation and learner engagement” and Conole quotes Gee, 2008: “The potential of gamification, however, goes beyond promoting healthy lifestyles and marketing strategies. Gamers voluntarily invest countless hours in developing their problem-solving skills within the context of games” and says 21st century learning will reflect Gee’s ‘situated and embodied learning,’ “…meaning a student is not just being taught inert knowledge, rather using facts and information as tools for problem solving in a specific context and solving the problem (Gee 2011).”

“There’s an app for that”

Educational apps and the platforms they run on have changed. Mobile is ubiquitous and it’s not as hard as you may think to make a web-based app, even take it to the next level, make it native. The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement is founded on “The belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint, […] However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.” Read the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

Learning design looks beyond instructional design

Learning design is defined as an application of a pedagogical model for a specific learning objective, target group and a specifc context or knowledge domain. The learning design specifies the teaching and learning process, along with the conditions under which it occurs and the activites performed by the teachers and learners in order to achieve the required learning objectives. LD is based on the metaphor of learning as a play instatiated through a series of acts with associated roles and resources. The core concept of LD is that a person is assigned a role in the teaching-learning process and works towards certain outcomes by performing learning activities within a given environment

—G. Conole, K. Fill (2005, pg. 5)

Learning design is an holistic praxis (Conole, 2014), the planning and executing of serendipitous situations within authentic contexts, that are controlled to enable the sought outcomes (Silver, 2011). Increasingly, the learner seeks the outcome. A learning design that includes multiple participants is increasingly expected to cater to individual learners (blogosphere, incessantly).

The Learning Design Toolkit has explored and created collaborative tools for designing active, situated learning. The short clip, (originally part of my contribution to a group presentation on cyberethics and Ursula Franklin) is meant to imply that the hard work of building shared understanding is generally worth the inevitable extra effort. Communication is a 21st century competency—why would the hard work to reform schooling be any different?

The methodology adopted

Work closely with practitioners to analyse their methods, when creating or re-purposing resources, and be guided by their requirements.
Enshrine good practice within the toolkit, such that it will guide and support teachers as they create, modify, and share teaching and learning resources.
Research, understand and apply what is going on in the learning design field, particularly evolving standards in the areas of sharing digital resources, interoperability, searching, re-purposing, and permissions.
Embrace new technologies, such as adaptive hypermedia and semantically structured metadata, to provide a tailored development environment, accessing heterogeneous data repositories across a grid service infrastructure.
Develop, test and evaluate a prototype toolkit with practitioners and then revise in light of feedback.

A series of interactive interviews with practitioners helps articulate the key components involved in their learning design processes and in particular helped identify areas where further support was required. Some of the activities enhanced existing courses, whilst others involved the creation of completely new courses. These discussions and detailed analysis informed the initial requirements analysis for the toolkit. But, quoting Hicks, Reid, & Rigmor (2001, p. 144) Conole & Fill tell us “quality depends on the way technology is used to provide access to relevant learning opportunities at the optimum time.” (Conole & Fill, 2005, pg. 4).

As step-by-step guidance to help practitioners make theoretically informed decisions about the development of learning activities and choice of appropriate tools and resources to undertake them.
As a database of existing learning activities and examples of good practice which can then be adapted and reused for different purposes.
As a mechanism for abstracting good practice and metamodels for e-learning

21st-century lesson plan learning design

I believe Aaron Silver, in his 2011 blog post The Fundamental design of learning activities, plotted a straight course from instructional design practices that seem overly prescriptive in the age of social networking and on-demand learning objects, to a more appropriate framework and in doing so reminded us, “learning is not a noun.” In a 21st-century learning design the activity must be at the center of everything. It appears you should start with a clear idea of what is to be achieved, and then create the situation in which that can happen, choosing participants and experiences that support the intended outcomes, and strategically placing them in order.

Graphic. Activity at the center of boundaries (conditions), content, context, and participation.

Source—Aaron Silvers (2011)

Even documenting such activity can be much different in the 21st Century. How do video, blogs, and photo sites affect the recipe? 21st century activities might look like Heidi Siwak’s blog—like this. But if the ‘this’ is a “messy” learning activity, do a on an ‘app’ metaphor, or the bubbles of mind maps offer some helpful closets to stash our ‘mess?’

Can organizational change happen quickly enough to allow teachers such as Heidi, and students such as hers to flourish, or will she have to wait 15 years as others have?

In my post, “CompendiumLD for Learning Design,” I showed a “mind mapper” that has collaboration tools built in. In “Can (messy) mind maps enable tidy linear strategies within messy situations?” I show the danger of getting too thickly into context (top right image) and what I believe Aaron Silvers’s simple graphic becomes when you start adding real activities and participants (see images 1-6, created with another mind mapper, designVUE).

Inspiration

Michael Faustino Deineka

The Faculty of Education at York University

Reference

Collins, Allan; Brown, John Seely; and Holum, Ann (1989a), Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator [PDF].

Conole, G.; Fill, K. (2005), A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities, Journal of Interactive Media in Education 2005(08). [PDF]

Conole, Gráinne (2014) Reviewing the trajectories of e-learning, blogged chapter from forthcoming publication. Or start with my shorter overview [HTML]

Silvers, A. (2011) The fundamental design of learning activities. [HTML]

Siwak, H. (2014) Creative solutions are no accident [HTML]

Dec 21

Can (messy) mind maps enable tidy linear strategies within messy situations?

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Richard

Graphic: a very messy mind map of a complex project. My research into educational, mostly open source software tools identified ones that have proven multi-tasking abilities within “authentic” learning situations (Conole and Fill, 2005; Conole, 2008). Among these, the so-called “Mind Mapping” tools stand out for what I think are several very good reasons. The image to the right, a “mind map” of a recent research project, shows the good, the bad and the ugly.

the rules common to all information systems do not cover the messy, ambiguous, and context-sensitive processes of meaning making, a form of activity in which the construction of highly “fuzzy” and metaphoric category systems is just as notable as the use of specifiable categories for sorting inputs in a way to yield comprehensible outputs.

—Jerome Bruner (1996 in Illeris, 2009, pg. 162)

It seems under-researched maybe, but I believe I saw indications, and I certainly have anecdotal evidence, that mind maps may lack meaning to people who for whatever reason(s) must solve problems in predominantly linear ways. In at least one case I’ve seen a mind map—the one of my research project at the top of the post—elicit genuine anxiety in a person with clinical anxiety disorder!

Messiness: the face of authentic learning

It’s certainly true that mind maps can get confusing. Connections become interwoven in admittedly “messy” ways—which, I argue, makes them particularly suitable to solving exactly the types of messy problems we increasingly face—although they often appear in ways that can understandably throw self-identified “linear thinkers” quite literally for a loop. It’s small wonder many people believe mind maps don’t, won’t, will never work for them. However, the same solutions cartographers have applied for centuries work in these maps too (Buckingham Shum and Okada, 2007), and are available in free tools with powerful multitasking abilities. Messiness is a fact of authentic learning situations (Collins, Joseph & Bielaczyc, 2004, pg. 19). Clinical settings and attempts to eliminate messiness can even be counter-productive (pg. 20). Describing the linear step pattern shown below in Fig. 1 (red line) Patricia Seybold says, “…we keep trying to shoehorn” Wicked Problems into that linear approach” (2013, pg. 3). I think what I’ll call linear imposition, the imposing of a linear framework or template on a non-linear situation, is at the root of Jean Lave’s “paradox” she says often causes institutionalized learning to fail (Lave, 1993, pg. 78). I believe ethnographers such as Lave have had an important impact on design thinking in education research and instructional design because of their “attempts to characterize relationships and events that occur in different educational settings. …ethnographic research produces rich descriptions that make it possible to understand what is happening and why” (Collins, Joseph & Bielaczyc, 2004, pg. 21). By “rich” descriptions Collins, Joseph & Bielaczyc mean “‘Thick,’ as in Geertz,” and by mapping these connections we contribute to the design of ‘thicker’ learning situations we hope result in deeper learning.

designVUE: lining up the non-linear

The problem is, while we may place things on lists and in lines to organize and sequence an approach, those things may have their own interconnections and internal organizations, especially if the “things” are groups of people with competing rights and interests. And so the line we draw prior to achieving full understanding of a problem is actually an imposition that changes the nature of the existing problem and causes new problems to arise. As Conklin has shown, solving problems is an iterative process.

How Humans Solve Opportunity-Driven Problems

graph plotting a linear step by step solution (red) overlayed by a process actually observed in practice (green)

Figure 1: From a 1980’s study at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) that looked into how people solve problems. Each peak in the green line can be understood as heading “back to the drawing board,” yet each return to the drawing board carries all the experience of the previous attempts. Source: Conklin, 2006 ©2006 John Wiley & Sons, 2013 CogNexus Group. For an excellent discussion, see also Seybold, 2013.

Mitigating Mind-Map Anxiety

Mind-map anxiety might be mitigated by applying well understood principles of cartography. Buckingham Shum and Okada (2007) say the analogy to cartographic representations of physical space is valid, providing “…an ‘aerial view’ of a topic by highlighting key elements and connections,” and calling mind maps “vehicles for summarising and negotiating meaning” (pg. 27). designVUE is one college design department’s enhancement of another university’s contribution to the open source software world and visual understanding. I think designVUE’s quick formatting tools and presentation mode lets us do some of the things map makers do. Some of these things are, or should be, in grade-level curriculum requirements—perhaps giving students hands on access to free tools like designVUE might support the teaching and learning of many.

Map coloring is the act of assigning different colors to different features on a map. There are two very different uses of this term. The first is in cartography, choosing the colors to be used when producing a map. The second is in mathematics, where the problem is to determine the minimum number of colors needed to color a map so that no two adjacent features have the same color.

—Wikipedia article

There’s nothing more linear than a time-line; as the first image shows, a mind-mapping tool makes it easy to display linear progression, so if this is the only objection, it soon crumbles. In designVUE you choose the colour scheme (“fill,” “line,” font “style”) and shape.

With the Quick Prototyping tool draw a line of bubbles in a quick succession of clicks…

Image 1. In VUE you can use the Prototyping tool to draw a line of bubbles with a directional arrow between, or with standard tool place the thought bubble on a line or arrow.

Any individual “bubble” in the map may consist of much messier activities. Brainstorming, for example, is a spiral of ideas, questions, answers, and arguments. In designVUE you can use colour to visually set an activity apart, but you can also create pathways that hide and reveal specific sets of bubbles—overcome cognitive overload. Or group bubbles within each other as I’ve done here with a question, answer and pro/con set that illustrate IBIS¹, a system that often goes hand-in-hand another highly successful application of mind-maps: “dialogue mapping².”

mind map bubbles of a new color added in a spiral

Image 2. Part of a brainstorming session suggesting a circular and iterative process, shown in a different colour. With “Pathways” you can hide entire sections and choose different sequences.

But wait! Yes, there’s more! In these days of collaboration linear thinkers and their strategies are as important as ever. designVUE has a presentation tool that allows teams to construct linear pathways through maps of even the most complex dialogues, in order to gain clarity, reach consensus, and explain decisions to others. designVUE also does metadata in OpenCalais, allows you to store resources and documents in the bubbles, share maps as interactive HTML documents, reuse the same maps in multiple other maps… I’m only scratching the surface.

Image 3. Showing Pathways in the workspace. Also shown are the IBIS icons for question, idea, pro and con arguments.

The Pathways panel allows you to create standard (linear) PowerPoint-like slides and bullet points, though not as effortlessly as the commercial product. VUE’s true power as a presentation tool takes some time to appreciate and master, but if your goal is to enhance a learning situation by creating memorable and meaningful visual connections between the content, and then using the same tool to convey those ideas to an audience this tool might be what you’re after.

Image 4. The Pathways panel allows you to show and edit more traditional PowerPoint-like slides. In effect VUE’s “Pathways” can be separate but related presentations, or audience-specific variations on a theme.

Panel closeup. The images can be sized, additional ones and text added to each slide that need not be shown in other views:

Image 5. Closeup of the expanded Pathways Panel. The order and whether it’s shown is determined here.

In Presentation mode, hitting Enter can shift to yet another view of the groups of ideas in the presentation. There’s definitely a learning curve but my early impression is this can potentially change the way you do presentations. I highly recommend this VUE tutorial for ideas and examples.

Image 6. In Presentation mode, hitting Enter can shift to yet another view of the groups of ideas in the presentation. See this VUE tutorial for examples (note the PDF for download beneath the video player).

Summary

The types of 21st century problems we increasingly understand need taming—as they defy solving by their very nature—are “wicked problems.” This necessarily includes nearly all matters of public education, indeed of public policy as a whole, where the conflicting and intersecting rights and responsibilities of multiple stakeholders is always …messy! Governments are coming to recognize this. See the Australian Public Service Commission site for one well explained example (Commonwealth of Australia, 2007). In Canada Quebec and New Brunswick have already discovered the importance of understanding certain problems’ ‘wickedness’ in these ways. “As distinguished from problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable, the problems of governmental planning—and especially those of social or policy planning—are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgement for resolution. (Not “solution.” Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again.)” (Rittel and Webber, 1973, pg. 160).

Mind mapping, undertaken thoughtfully and with purpose (see Jeff Conklin’s video: The Limits of Conversational Structure), has proven its value in all aspects of teaching and learning. As a teacher I used it much as John Budd did here, and as an instructional designer I use it as a graphic organizer. When mapping strategies are used to both record, and then map dialog to describe real situation, and when that’s done openly and collaboratively as in situations such as Conklin has described and reproduced in practice for years it can lead to shared understanding and conflict resolution.

I don’t think it’s fair, or rational, to presume that everyone is going to instantly drop PowerPoint and buy into a mindmap-based workflow, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. While dialogue mapping can handle wicked problems, it can also do meeting minutes, so consensus can be achieved and documented by the most mutually comfortable and practical means—and the cartographers have a single one stop tool to gather and document the entire process, or to communicate it to others.

Conlusion

If we embrace all the 21st century models, or “competencies” seen emerging, the primary and inescapable one at the base of many others is asynchronous collaboration via digital networks. Can it not simply be that the divergent thinkers map their thoughts in collaboration with linear thinkers who further delineate the why and how of their musings? Taking up perhaps the next most agreed upon 21st century learning objective, critical thinking, it seems likely we can seek solutions to simple problems and taming strategies for wicked ones, discerning the difference. Mind mapping tools are web enabled and metadata ready. A strategy for taming wicked problems that uses mind maps, argument mapping or Conklin’s trademarked Dialogue Mapping, keeps track of pros, cons, and rationale, and documents decisions making around simple problems, but offers a powerful tool for the building of the shared understanding that must precede consensus around the taming of wicked ones. Formal training can be found, but the VUE, designVUE and various Compendium software sites themselves, Conklin’s and YouTube are probably the place to start—to get an, ahem… visual understanding of what mind maps and mind mappers might bring to which ever debate you’re having.

Maybe “Can messy mind maps enable tidy linear strategies within messy situations?” isn’t the right question. In my experience it still requires steps and sequencing to deal with the issues, but the graphic organization—the visual understanding—provided by maps in programs like VUE and Compendium, in the right hands, can really help you get a grip on the situation. It very well may need both types of thinking, and that well may require collaboration. Maybe the question to be asking is, “Are there any concept and conversation cartographers in your workplace or your PLN?”

More VUE

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University

VUE is very well documented. The English user guide is here.

designVUE is a branch of VUE. It is an open source project based in the Design Engineering Group of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College London.

CompendiumLD is either fierce competition… or you can do as I do and use both! See the Learning Design-specific “stencils” in the screen shots. They’re easily ported to other Compendium flavours, and you could apply the concept in VUE with your own icons and very little extra trouble.

Reference

Bruner, Jerome (1996) Culture, mind, and education in Contemporary Theories of Learning – Learning theorists … in their own words, Knud Illeris ed., 2009, NY: Routledge; Edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

Buckingham Shum, Simon and Okada, Alexandra (2007). Knowledge Mapping for Open Sensemaking Communities. In: Researching open content in education – OpenLearn 2007, 31 Oct 2007, Milton Keynes, UK.

Collins, Allan & Joseph, Diana & Bielaczyc, Katerine (2004), Design Research- Theoretical and Methodological Issues, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 1, Design-Based Research:Clarifying the Terms. Introduction to the Learning Sciences Methodology Strand (2004), pp.15-42

Commonwealth of Australia (2007) Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Perspective, [Archived]

Conklin, Jeffrey (2006) Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons., Ltd., 242 pp.

Conklin, Jeff (2006b) Dialogue Mapping Demonstration, [unspecified journal, citation incomplete] CogNexus Institute, pp. 249-251 [Demonstration PDF].

Conole, G. and Fill, K. (2005). A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities Journal of Interactive Media in Education 2005(08). [PDF: jime.open.ac.uk/2005/08]. Gráinne Conole and Karen Fill, University of Southampton. Page 1 Published 26 September 2005 ISSN: 1365-893X [uses CompendiumLD]

Conole, G. (2008). Capturing Practice: The Role of Mediating Artefacts in Learning Design. Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects. (Eds.) Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. ISR Press. [Pre-print of learning design chapter on using compendium].

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, Jean (1993) The practice of learning in Contemporary Theories of Learning – Learning theorists … in their own words, Knud Illeris ed., 2009, NY: Routledge; Edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (2012) Tackling Wicked Problems in the Built Environment: Of Health Inequalities and Bedbugs [Workshop details]

Rittel, Horst and Melvin Webber (1973) “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing, Amsterdam, pp. 155-169.

^ Seybold, Patricia B. (2013) How To Address “Wicked Problems” – Use Dialogue Mapping to Build a Shared Understanding and Evolve a Group’s Thinking, book review, [HTML | PDF]

Feb 19

Design Learning, Learning Design

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Richard

In 1981 “cognitive apprenticeship” was a nascent framework proposed by early researchers with an eye on computer-assisted design of computer-enhanced learning environments that are “situated.” This means “authentic”

The research on the tailors did not result immediately or even very soon in an alternative to the theory for which it offered a critique. It did impel me to go looking for ways to conceptualize learning differently, encouraged by those three interconnected transformations that resulted from the project: (1) a reversal of the polar values assumed to reflect differing educational power for schooling and “other” forms of education; (2) a reversal in perspective so that the vital focus of research on learning shifted from transmitters, teachers or care givers, to learners; and (3) a view of learning as socially situated activity. This work couldn’t replace existing theories, but it provided incentives to ask new questions about learning.

—Jean Lave (1996:155)

activities taking place in the context of, and with the full support of, a “community of practice.” In general the other participants are—for the time being—more proficient than the learner at the given craft or activity. Learners and practitioners interact in a wide variety of ways, often over considerable time, that can be characterized as strategies or phases—observing and practising, receiving scaffolded (progressively adapted by the practitioners) coaching until working independently. The overly-theoretical sounding name has mostly gone by the wayside, but the concepts and application have matured. Still employing ethnography to gather thick qualitative descriptions, there’s now stronger input from the fields of design and architecture. The new name is “Design Learning.” I see parallels in research into tool redesign conducted at Open University NE and Open University UK.

“computers … can make the invisible visible … they can make tacit knowledge explicit … to the degree that we can develop good process models of expert performance, we can embed these in technology, where they can be observed over and over for different details” (p. 125).

Allan Collins, 1991:125

In 1992 Allan Collins and Ann Brown built on their earlier research (e.g., Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989; Collins, Brown, Holum, Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, Holum, 1991) and conducted what they dubbed design experiments.; “Design experiments were developed as a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational designs based on principles derived from prior research,” i.e., cognitive apprenticeship. There is a direct line from the Cognitive Apprenticeship Framework to Design Learning, (Collins et al., 2004) and recent experiments in the redesign of learning design tools (Conole et al., 2007) (LAMS, 2008) (OULDI-JISC, 2012).

They built on the work of Herbert Simon (1969) who regarded the “design sciences,” such as architecture, engineering, computer science, medicine, and education, as the “sciences of the artificial,” that have been neglected because of the lack of rigorous theories. John Seely Brown and and David Kearns co-founded the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in 1986 and adopted ethnography—the description of peoples’ customs and cultures—as its main research method. The Institute forged new understandings of how individuals enter and join learning communities, achieve acceptance, then themselves grow and evolve as vessels of community knowledge. As they do so they often increase interaction and engagement—i.e., collaboration—with secondary networks outside their primary one (Lave & Wenger, 1991) (Lave, 1996). Does it sound just a bit like joining Twitter?

Ethnography attempts “thick descriptions” in the style of Geertz. One of the more fundamental truths of pedagogy spotlighted by this approach is its “messy” and iterative nature. The motto of instructors and learners alike may be “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” but it’s always with an eye toward improving on previous attempts.

Case studies are touted by a wide assortment of education stakeholders. They are used up front in planning, as course content, or as summary program assessment. A good case study can be a thick, descriptive ethnography of a situation.

By studying a design in practice with an eye toward progressive refinement, it is possible to develop more robust designs over time. […] Ethnography provides qualitative methods for looking carefully at how a design plays out in practice, and how social and contextual variables interact with cognitive variables. […] Design experiments are contextualized in educational settings, but with a focus on generalizing from those settings to guide the design process”

(Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004).

The Open University Learning Design Initiative have been working across several OU faculties and with 4 other universities to pilot curriculum design activities, identify and develop tools, and otherwise contribute to academic and practitioner research. If you’ve followed my Tweets or blog the past several weeks you’ve already heard of CompendiumLD. Follow the link to see more tools and other output from this prolific group.

All told these and associated authors (see also Conole, 2007, Conole et al., 2008) consulted close to 50 case studies, but they did not fall into a common pitfall of well-read academics: the automatic presumption of expertise. On the contrary, they embrace the messiness as evidence of authenticity and opportunity for iterative improvement. “The concept of a ‘learning design methodology’ has been integral …however, different readings of the term could, and were, made. …resisting a single definition has enabled us to connect more readily with diverse literatures and to orientate resources and tools towards user needs.” (OULDI-JISC, 2012)

I think that’s academic for, “There are no mistakes, only opportunities.” (—Tina Fey?)

Case studies and design experiments allowed these and other researchers to, among other things, map tools and strategies to the six instructional methods of cognitive apprenticeship and to develop a Scaffolding Design Framework to focus its use.

Reference

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18 (1), 32-41.

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S.E. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, Learning and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser (pp.453- 494). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Collins, Allan; Brown, John Seely; and Holum, Ann (1991). Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American Educator: The Professional Journal of the American Federation of Teachers, 15(3), 6-11, 38-46, [reprint available on line at http://elc.fhda.edu/transform/resources/collins_brown_holum_1991.pdf (PDF) accessed 2012-09-17] or from The 21st Century Learning Initiative http://www.21learn.org/archive/cognitive-apprenticeship-making-thinking-visible/ (HTML), accessed 2013-02-19.

Collins, Allan; Joseph, Diana and Bielaczyc, Katerine (2004). Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 15-42.

Conole, G. (2007), ‘Describing learning activities: tools and resources to guide practice’ in Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age, H. Beetham and R. Sharpe (Eds), Oxford: RoutledgeFalmer.

Conole, G. (2008), ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B. Harper (Eds), Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies.

Ghefaili, Aziz (2003). Cognitive Apprenticeship, Technology, and the Contextualization of Learning Environments, Journal of Educational Computing, Design & Online learning Volume 4, Fall, pp 1-27.

Geertz, Clifford (1973) Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, pp. 3-30, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, NY: Basic Books, 470 pages.

OULDI-JISC (2012) Cross, Simon; Galley, Rebecca; Brasher, Andrew & Weller, Martin, Final Project Report of the OULDI-JISC Project: Challenge and Change in Curriculum Design Process, Communities, Visualisation and Practice, Institute of Educational Technology The Open University, July 2012, www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/curriculumdesign/OULDI_Final_Report_instit%20story.pdf.

Simon, H. A. (1969) The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jan 19

Mind mapping for learning design

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Richard

UPDATED: when you’ve read this, see my latest update on Gráinne Conole’s latest contributions to these ideas, linked at the end.

Mind map of CompendiumLD showing Getting Started The past 30 years in education research has seen the influx of big ideas from computer science, social anthropology, design and even architecture. We now say learning is situated in authentic social contexts many call communities of practice.

This has had some pretty significant effects on research itself (e.g., ethnographic case studies, action research), and learning design tools, themselves designed to reflect this current situation, but for reasons I won’t waste any more time pondering, the uptake still seems relatively slow. Gráinne Conole, with others at the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University UK, looked into an idea/concept/mind mapping tool, Compendium, that was already under development there, and in yet another demonstration of the efficacy of open source, created CompendiumLD, Compendium “Learning Design,” allowing designers to visualize the many connections that exist within learning situations. I believe such tools will play an increasingly important role in the design, planning and implementation of learning experiences.

Continue reading →

Dec 13

Mind mapping, concept mapping—making the relationships between ideas visible

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Richard

In his 2004 article published in The Journal of Economic Education John Budd describes an in-class exercise “…in which small groups of students each create a Mind Map for a specific topic.” He says creating mind maps is “…an example of an active and collaborative learning tool that instructors can use to move beyond “chalk and talk” …and incorporate diverse learning styles.” The author presents ideas for mind map topics for a wide variety of economics courses, and several lovely examples of students’ maps, drawn freehand and collaboratively. “hierarchies and associations flow out from a central image in a free-flowing, yet organized and coherent, manner.”Mind Maps can be lesson planners, lesson plans, and lessons First page of article, Budd (2004) about Mind Maps

There is now a good selection of mind- or concept-mapping software educational experience designers may find very helpful in making thinking visible, by offering ways to illustrate the connections between ideas. Nearly all of them are built for Internet collaboration. My goal in this post is just to share an inkling I’ve been getting that such software can find a role in lesson planning, lesson plans, and as John Budd and others have found, in the lessons themselves.

I wrote about one such program, Compendium, back in March, and I’ve tried my hand at mapping an understanding of cognitive apprenticeship. First I simply listed the pieces of the Collins, Brown and Holum (1991) framework, assigning symbolic icons to imply their role, positioning them visually so as to reflect their hierarchy. Then I use colour-coded arrows to indicate relationships between them. In the software these objects can all be opened as dialog boxes, which can store further details. “Mouseover” or “rollover” effects (anything the software does in response to a user placing their mouse pointer over something on the screen) let you peek inside.

UPDATE: I learned 2012-12-15 in Compendium Institute Newsgroup Digest #1389, that Compendium will receive a long overdue overhaul, and the source code seems to be finding its way to more friendly repositories. This recording of a Compendium developer meeting contains details, and may also be of interest to see how Compendium is used to add idea-mapping to the task of recording minutes. The recorded meeting demonstrates another technology-based approach to making thinking visible (and audible).

attempted Mind Map of cognitive apprenticeship

Fig. 1—Mapping the Cognitive Apprenticeship Framework
Trying to cover all the bases: making thinking visible while designing a lesson. Icons, positioning, colours, arrowhead direction have meaning, follow the designer’s logic… (cont…)

Two close-ups of the maps within (neither completed):

Map of Sociology of a learning experience

Fig. 2— Sociology
…general priorities and strategies unfold: coloured arrows illustrate relationships to and betweenthe ideas; each item can become a map of future brainstorming. Big questions asked here, “Have I planned for this?” “Who are my experts?” get deep answers at the next level… (cont…)

Fig. 3—Content
…where you can be clear and specific about content, methods, and activities. Compendium and similar software let you add lists, links, video, documents, and to publish the results.

These maps list the parts of the framework. In Compendium you can draw additional items as you brainstorm and you can put terms “inside” other items, for example double-click the Content->Questions icon and find the actual questions stored inside. You can label the lines, change the directions of the arrowheads or put arrowheads on both ends. You can also export an interactive version in HTML [also here and here] and other formats.

Wikipedia has a list of free and proprietary mind-map and idea mapping software. I’d like to try it all at some point but thus far I looked at “VUE,” or Visual Understanding Environment, a project at Tufts University. I found it to be very intuitive, it has a large and versatile set of features, produces a result similar in many ways to that of Compendium, and it can be used as a unique and powerful presentation tool. Also like Compendium they have a user community and a gallery that will tell you far more than I possibly can.

Budd points out some very significant differences between the mind map and the traditional, linear outline and states these have powerful implications for learning:

…note that each branch is captured by a single key word, not a phrase or sentence. Using single words reduces ideas to their core. Important ideas are not obscured by extraneous words, and new associations are not limited by more specific phrases. …The central point in the Mind Map must always be an image because the brain is drawn to an image more …differences in the size of the branches and the associated words are used to reinforce associations and to add emphasis. …the use of color is important in creating Mind Maps. …many Mind Maps use one color for each major category to aid in organization. …These differences can make Mind Maps powerful tools. …Research on memory and learning emphasizes the importance of associations, and the radiant structure of a Mind Map with explicit branches promotes associations. The use of color for different categories can also make more powerful associations. The use of emphasis in a Mind Map, for example with thicker main branches and larger printing, can also help the recall of information. The focus on using single key words can foster more expansive connections, and confining the entire Mind Map to a single piece of paper allows one to see the entire picture at once and perhaps stimulate additional associations.
(Budd, 2004:37-8)

Budd (2004) fig. 3 Student-produced Effects of Labor Unions

I should note that John Budd’s article is accompanied by samples of hand-drawn maps that, in my opinion, also reveal how far technology still has to go to match humans’ capacity for expression. Neither Compendium, nor from what I’ve seen so far VUE, has the ability to vary the width of connecting arrows, let alone supply the “branches” of a map with bark [n.b. Since first writing that sentence I’ve seen many others that do thicknesses (still no bark). See “Vic’s list” at the end of this post]. Educators can do much to influence the design of software by engaging directly with software developers and designers on social networks like Twitter. You do not need software to use mind maps in lesson plans.

Mind Maps can be used to add active and collaborative learning to courses. Students are engaged in active learning as they wrestle with ideas, associations, and categories in creating a Mind Map-they are creating their own Mind Map, not simply looking at one created by the instructor. The exercise is collaborative because the Mind Maps are created as a small group effort. A collaborative relationship between the instructor and students can also be established as the instructor helps with the constructions of the Mind Maps, but as a “guide on the side” not as the “sage on the stage” (Budd, 2004:42).

Because of the reliance on hierarchies, says Budd, concepts or classroom exercises that do not fit traditional outline structure are probably not good candidates for the creation of a mind map. Even in early explorations of collaborative concept mapping software I’ve noticed, in forum discussions and newsletters, a common motif that points to another criticism: mappers often say things like “this works for me” while maybe the internal logic isn’t quite as apparent to everyone. I believe such criticism can be overcome by perseverance, collaboration and openness to feedback.

I’ve experimented using Compendium to take notes in meetings, for sorting research, choosing between possible software solutions, and for planning (Conole & Fill, 2005). I’m now very interested in presentations using VUE. When it comes to mind mapping software I now often find myself saying, “This works for me.”

SOFTWARE SITES, in their own words:

The Compendium Institute (Open University and others) is an open forum for the ongoing development and dissemination of the Compendium methodology and software tools. Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data. http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institute/

•

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. https://vue.tufts.edu/

•

What surely must be the definitive list, “Vic’s compendium of software that supports knowledge management and information organisation in graphical form. Includes mind mappers, concept mappers, outliners, hierarchical organisers, KM support and knowledge browsers, 2D and 3D.” http://www.mind-mapping.org/

Reference

Budd, John W., (2004) Mind Maps as Classroom Exercises, The Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 35-46. [Available on line but missing accompanying graphics
www.legacy-irc.csom.umn.edu/faculty/jbudd/mindmaps/mindmaps.pdf, retrieved 2012-12-10]

Cognexus.org, recorded meeting 2012-12-12, Compendium Developer meeting, http://www.cognexus.org/Compendium_Futures/2012-12-12_C_Developer_Meeting.wmv, retrieved 2012-12-16.

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., and Holum, Ann (1991), Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator, [1991 reprint available on line at http://elc.fhda.edu/transform/resources/collins_brown_holum_1991.pdf accessed 2012-09-17].

Conole, G. and Fill, K. (2005), A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities, Journal of Interactive Media in Education 2005(08). [jime.open.ac.uk/2005/08].

McLeod, S. A. (2010). Kolb, The Learning Style Inventory. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html 2012-12-03

Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer (2009)

Nov 04

Cognitive Apprenticeship and the 21st Century Web Application

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Richard

In my previous post I (literally) talked about a long historical need to provide more information than a written document can physically hold. I pointed out how footnotes have accomplished this, how these and such familiar devices as front-page headlines and teasers have evolved, and continue to evolve in the modern web-browser. I’m doing this to demonstrate how Web browsers and the three main (and open) technologies—HTML, CSS and JavaScript—can support Cognitive Apprenticeship’s goal of “making thinking visible.” Ultimately I hope to encourage classroom teachers to leverage this generation’s immersion in technology in new ways that lead not only to their own empowerment but that of all who become involved in 21st century learning environments that can stretch past boundaries of space and time.

I began to show some actual code¹ [to see my “footnotes,” press the number; to close them, click or press Esc] which creates a style that can be applied at the paragraph or section level to assign an icon signalling its content or relevance to the document. I used narration, in the form of recorded audio, with pictures timed to coincide with words—a concept that is the basis of almost all elearning software, TV advertising, documentary film, even political propaganda—to explain and demonstrate what I was thinking about the topic and the technology. If you’ve followed this Cognitive Apprenticeship from the beginning I hope you can start to see now how I’ve intentionally set out to contrast a traditional academic style with an increasingly Web-enhanced one.

In so doing I used technology to solve some problems—and predictably introduced several more, demonstrating another potential technology holds, one I suspect we all have experienced. Software often contains bugs; preparing a lesson plan using pen and paper, or presenting using a comfortable and familiar paradigm such as a slide show with handouts one often feels more in control. It’s often too easy for the technology to become the focus, and not in a good way. But while many classroom teachers tell me anecdotes that conclude with a student fixing something, far fewer tell me they’ve learned to embrace that as a strategy, and are willing to jump in the deep end head first, with ample faith that together they’ll tackle whatever obstacles arise. It’s my personal goal to foster that confidence and empower educators to create such environments. Indeed, I feel there’s a certain urgency, not just for individual teachers or the profession, but for the future of public education itself.

Ursula Franklin, in her famous 1989 Massey Series lecture, noted the changing role of technology and important ways it was changing the role of technologists, distribution of labour, and the balance of power, while in her view shrinking the public sphere.

The situation in the classroom at the interface between the biosphere and the bitsphere is but one facet of the situation in the workplace within the same realm. In fact, often even the designation of workplace is no longer appropriate. Not only do new technologies, new ways of doing things, eliminate specific tasks and workplaces… but the remaining work is frequently done asynchronously in terms of both time and space.

— Ursula Franklin (1992:172)

Her distinction between what she identified as prescriptive approaches² versus holistic³ ones led to a concern that not working together in the same space causes “opportunities for social interactions, for social learning and community building [to] disappear.” (Franklin, 1992:172). A neoliberal market model of education is paired with a neoconservative social model that work together to “change people’s understanding of themselves as members of collective groups” (Apple, 2009), a course at odds with public education’s heritage of citizenship-, character-, and democracy-building. An aggressive and well-funded movement is under way that “supports marketisation through its clear preference for incentive systems in which people are motivated by personal, not collective, gain rather than by the encouragement of social altruism. Yet, the tradition of social altruism and collective sensibilities has roots just as deep in our nations, and its expression needs to be expanded, not contracted.” (Apple, 2004; Apple, 2009).

Neither of the above authors in the works cited alludes to what I believe can only be described as a new literacy for the 21st century: fluency in coding and code. At Occupy Wall St. the techies “[built] websites, put out messages, manage[d] the ebb and flow of information about the occupation on the Internet.” (Judd, 2011) A year later “TechOps,” as the New York contingent of web-developing occupiers call themselves, built and maintained the website for the Sept. 17 anniversary events. They put together a whole host of other underlying technical infrastructure… TechOps-built database software sits behind a system to match people who needed a place to stay during the demonstrations with people who had space to offer […and built…] what has become a broad suite of web tools built specifically for Occupy activists. Using their own flavor of WordPress’ multi-site functionality, TechOps can facilitate sites like S17NYC.org and allow individual movement groups to maintain their own web presences themselves.” Those who code may have a special understanding of the saying “free as in beer, but not free as in speech” (Judd, 2012).

Franklin, in 1989, was perhaps just a bit too early to fully anticipate the complex socio-politico-economic forces that would result in Twitter, a commercial start-up, empowering the Arab Spring. But Apple’s 2009 essay describes in full the motives and methods we see manifesting in high-stakes testing and redistribution of public resources to private concerns that are part of many ed “reform” efforts. I believe there’s a need for further research into the roles of social networking within emerging communities of practice, but also its influence on communities of practices’ emerging. In the meantime, code literacy is something that’s fun and beneficial to pursue, which you can leverage within many learning environments to help create the kinds of authentic, situated opportunities for discovery and knowledge construction project- and inquiry-based learning models are touted for. And while you probably don’t have the next Dimitri Gaskin in your class, you almost certainly have more expertise available than you’ve imagine or tapped.

All of the jQuery JavaScript scripts I’ve used so far are my own—and all of them contain flaws that were part of my learning process. Currently my Footnotes script works with this WordPress theme (or any theme that uses <article> elements for posts), I simply hit the HTML tab on my WordPress editor and create a element of class=”footnote” and down below a numbered (“organized”) list of class <ol class=”footnotes”></ol> and it automatically creates a rollover/keypress on the number. In this version I have to hard code the numbers in the tags… so if I move a list item or add one in between I have to manually renumber. One of the first tasks for a group could be to improve on that. If a classroom or school has a blog or web page, and they use it for student writing, and they encourage using such common conventions as footnotes, then it might be an intrinsically motivating project to design and implement something that facilitates and modernizes the process in a way students can own.

My footnotes script is part-way to becoming a jQuery plugin. You may or may not know what that is, but I’ll wager you know someone who does. It’s only part-way done because I’m trying to think more like a programmer so I’m learning about design patterns and building in stages. The Smashing Magazine article in that link contains links to all the information one needs to finish it. In my next and hopefully final instalment I’ll talk about a project I have in mind that I think holds benefits for classroom teachers who are still tentative about technology and/or looking for creative ways to include it, one that demystifies programming and the coding culture, and hopefully creates space in the classroom for activities and knowledge that may already be taking place informally outside, extending access and creating new opportunities.

/* Script (c) 2012 Richard C. Fouchaux 
 * this script is a learning thing, licensed under a 
 * Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. 
 * */ 
var settings = {}; 
settings.wrapperAttrs = { 
 class : “myFnWrap” 
}, // TODO: dynamic positioning-above/below-left/right 
settings.wrapperCSS = { }, settings.onShowFootnote = function() { 
 console.log(‘Showing footnote’); 
}, settings.fnSupClass = ‘footnote’, /* was ‘myFn’ */ 
settings.fnListClass = ‘footnotes’, settings.fnAnchorPrefix = ‘footnote_’; 
// ^end vars
/* JavaScript */ 
(function($) { 
 $(‘article’).each(function(i) {// NB: This version is ol list based, not sup based
 var myId = this.id, $myFns = $(this).find(‘ol.’ + settings.fnListClass), 
 $myLIs = $myFns.find(‘li’), myListSize = $myLIs.size(), 
 $mySups = $(this).find(‘sup.’ + settings.fnSupClass), 
 mySupsSize = $mySups.size(), 
 isReady = myListSize === mySupsSize ? true : false, 
 $fnList = {}, 
 showFootnote = function() { 
 // TODO: build it here 
 settings.onShowFootnote.call(this); 
 // fire callback 
 }, $fnPopup = {};
// DEBUGGING console.info( ‘$myFns.size()’,$myFns.size(),’\nmyListSize’, 
// myListSize,’\n$mySups.size()’, 
// $mySups.size(),’\nmySupsSize’,mySupsSize ); 
 if (isReady) {// loop through list elements, assign text to hidden div 
 $myLIs.each(function(i) { 
 var n = i + 1, myFnId = myId + ‘_’ + settings.fnAnchorPrefix + n, 
 htm = $(this).html(), txt = $(this).text(), // not using this anywhere 
 tmp = ”, messg = ”, 
 $mySup = $mySups.eq(i).attr({ 
 id : myFnId 
 }), // TODO: accesskey: n has no effect. onKeyup? 
 $wrapper = $(‘
<div />‘).attr(settings.wrapperAttrs); 
 // DEBUG console.info(n+’. ‘,myFnId);
 $wrapper.appendTo(‘#’ + myFnId).html(‘
<ol start="' + n + 
 '" style="list-style-type:decimal;margin:1px 9px 3px 18px;">
<li>‘ + htm + ‘</li>
</ol>
‘); 
 $myFn = $(‘#’ + myFnId + ‘ .myFnWrap, #’ + myFnId + ‘ .myFnWrapToLeft’);
 // Sets it to show on sup mouseenter, hide when popup is clicked 
 $myFn.hide().attr({ 
 “aria-expanded” : “false” 
 }).parent().on({ 
 mouseenter : function(e) { 
 var pos = $(this).position(), 
 forceLeft = (777 – pos.left < 216) ? true : false; // values theme dependent

if (forceLeft) {// console.info('kEWL! forceLeft is',forceLeft)
                $(this).find('.myFnWrap').removeClass('myFnWrap').addClass('myFnWrapToLeft');
            } else {
                $(this)
                 .find('.myFnWrapToLeft')
                 .removeClass('myFnWrapToLeft')
                 .addClass('myFnWrap');
                // console.info('Aww... forceLeft is',forceLeft)
            } ;
            $(this).find('.myFnWrap,.myFnWrapToLeft').attr({
                "aria-expanded" : "true"
            }).show('slow');
            },
            click : function(e) {
            $(this).find('.myFnWrap,.myFnWrapToLeft').hide('slow');
            }
        });
        });

} else {
        try {
        tmp = mySupsSize != 0 ? tmp + mySupsSize : ' no';
        messg = 'You have ' + myListSize + ' item' + (myListSize == 1 ? '' : 's') + 
         ' in your "footnotes" list, but' + tmp + ' sup element' + (mySupsSize == 1 ? '!' : 's!') + 
         '\nThese numbers must be equal in order for ' + 'the footnotes script to work.';
        alert(messg);
        } catch(err) {
        console.error(err.message);
        }
        //   console.warning( messg ); //
    }
    });

// Key access
 $(document).on('keyup', function(e) {
 var $mySups = $('sup.footnote'), $fn = $('.myFnWrap,.myFnWrapToLeft'), 
 myKey = e.which, fnOpen = $fn.size();
 if (fnOpen && myKey === 27) {
 e.preventDefault();
 $fn.trigger('click');
 } else if (myKey >= 49 && myKey <= 57) {
 switch(myKey)// TODO: this is weird over multiple article elements.
 {
 case 49 :
 $mySups.eq(0).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 50 :
 $mySups.eq(1).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 51 :
 $mySups.eq(2).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 52 :
 $mySups.eq(3).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 53 :
 $mySups.eq(4).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 54 :
 $mySups.eq(5).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 55 :
 $mySups.eq(6).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 56 :
 $mySups.eq(7).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 case 57 :
 $mySups.eq(8).trigger('mouseenter');
 break;
 }
 }
 });
})(jQuery);

For example, if you provide the path to a 36×36 pixel image representing a rubric or video:
.bg-rubric {
background: transparent url(“..path_to/rubric.png”) no-repeat 3px 3px; padding:3px 9px 3px 36px;
}
.bg-video {
background: transparent url(“..path_to/video.png”) no-repeat 3px 3px; padding:3px 9px 3px 36px; }
See for example, Harvard Business School’s aggressively disruptive, top down, market-model for education reform in Christensen et al., 2009
See for example, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s “Beyond the Bake Sale: A Community- Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools,” (Warren et al., 2009), PDF available from The Logan Square Neighborhood Association http://bit.ly/nYwbjK accessed 2012-11-03

References

Apple, Michael W. (2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Apple, Michael W. (2006), Understanding and Interrupting Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism in Education, Pedagogies: An International
Journal, 1:1, 21-26

Christensen, Clayton; Johnson, Curtis W.; Horn, Michael B. (2008), Disrupting Class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw Hill, 288 pages.

Judd, Nick (2011). #OWS: Tech-Savvy Occupiers Hope to Open-Source a Movement, http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/ows-tech-savvy-occupiers-hope-open-source-movement, accessed 2012-11-03

Judd, Nick (2012). How Free Software Activists are Hacking Occupy’s Source Code, accessed at http://techpresident.com/news/22867/how-free-software-activists-are-hacking-occupys-source-code 2012-10-23

Osmani, Addy (2011). Essential jQuery Plugin Patterns, http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/11/essential-jquery-plugin-patterns/, accessed 2012-11-03

Franklin, Ursula. (1992, rev ed. 1999) The Real World of Technology. (CBC Massey lectures series.) Concord, ON: House of Anansi Press Limited, 206 pages.

Kreiss, Daniel and Tufekci, Zeynep (2012). Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics (September 17, 2012). Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13:3 (Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2147711

Warren, Mark R.; Hong, Soo; Rubin Leung, Carolyn; Uy, Phitsamay Sychitkokhong (2009). Beyond the Bake Sale: A Community- Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools, Teachers College Record Volume 111, Number 9, September 2009, pp. 2209–2254

Nov 01

21st Century Cognitive Apprenticeship: 4 Ways We Make Thinking Visible

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Richard

Back in 2005 Dorian Peters posted a summary of Mayer’s Principles for the design of Multimedia Learning I’ve visited frequently. I read it again today through the lens of cognitive apprenticeship and made some connections. Two essential components of apprenticeship models and multimedia design are narration and its timing, which is probably why software applications like Adobe Captivate, PowerPoint, or PowToons contain various ways to synchronize the appearance of objects with audio, visuals and text. The framework and principles can help form a checklist to improve the Who, What, When, Where, and How of choosing what to include in learning environments, all of which illuminate two distinct aspects of the Why — a given that someone wants to learn the stuff, and our ability to assess that including something in specific ways — or not — helps achieve that goal.

Mayer (2001, 2003, 2005) presented research-based principles for the design of multimedia messages. His fundamental principle is the multimedia principle itself: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. Peters has organized the principles into sets:

Principles for managing essential processing more»
- Segmenting principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
- Pre-training principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
- Modality principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
Principles for reducing extraneous processing more»
- Coherence principle: People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
- Redundancy principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on on-screen text.
- Signaling principle: People learn better when the words include cues about the organization of the presentation.
- Spatial contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
- Temporal contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
Principles based on social cues more»
- Personalization principle: People learn better when the words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
- Voice principle: People learn better when words are spoken in a standard-accented human voice than in a machine voice or foreign-accented human voice.
- Image principle: People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.
“One last principle,” the Individual differences principle. more»
Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners. Design effects are stronger for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners.

More about these in a moment. These principles illustrate a point of mine: that what Collins, Brown, Duguid, Newman, Holum et al. (see my posts here and here) bring with their theory of cognitive apprenticeship is a practical framework by which to apply such good principles. Conversely, the principles can guide the how, when, who, where, and why of specific situations. Consider the statement that teachers (who may often be more generally deemed “designers” of learning experiences) should show the processes of the task and make them visible to students (Collins et al.., 1991:). The common root of processes and processing reveals the relationship. The set of essential processing principles informs the design and planning stages, with a strong nod to individualization. Extraneous processing are filters and fine-tuning strategies. Both sets speak to content, method and sequence in Collins’s language. The fourth member of that set in cognitive apprenticeship lingo is sociology, and Mayer offers guidance here as well.

I’m going to apply Mayer’s fundamental principle now and try to enhance this communication with narration and pictures. Maybe you’ve never thought of footnotes as technology before, but they are a highly developed device¹, designed to make an author’s thinking visible.

I use this icon to exclaim or assert something. I assert that this is one way to make thinking visible. For a web site, it’s easy to use CSS to make a set of icons. available, as I’ve done for this one. Of course the meanings of the icons must be communicated throughout the community and a common understanding shared by those who use them. Press the letter N to open this “Note” showing my growing list. The letter U opens my Audio narration^{in which I discuss 4 simple things we’ve done within documents to make thinking visible, and how each can be enhanced with the 3 main Web technologies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.}

Icons Used Here

Assertion
Argument
Audio
Decision
Web page
Idea
Issue
List
Idea Map
– Con
Note
+ Pro
Position
Rubric
Video

This icon is not in the original Compendium set. I added it because I thought it filled a need.

Using icons is another thing on my list. It’s not a new idea, but applying it specifically when managing essential processing, thinking about segmenting and pre-training (prerequisite knowledge?) while imagining and planning authentic environments, or striving to reduce extraneous processing throughout demonstration and coaching phases. A consistent icon set provides coherence by signaling and providing cues about the content. For more ways, roll your mouse over the list icon, or press the L key to open my List. Press N to open a Note displaying the list. Press U to open my Audio narration for this content.

Icon sets
“More »” links more»
More links reduce extraneous information and communicate which points you think are important.
Footnotes²
Narration & animation

Footnotes:

Anthony Grafton, in The Footnote: A Curious History (1999) points to men like Pierre Bayle, who “…made the footnote a powerful tool in philosophical and historical polemics; and Edward Gibbon, who transformed it into a high form of literary artistry. Proceeding with the spirit of an intellectual mystery and peppered with intriguing and revealing remarks by those who “made” this history, The Footnote brings what is so often relegated to afterthought and marginalia to its rightful place in the center of the literary life of the mind…” (cover notes).
With JavaScript the eye never has to leave the main text. It can count them for you, too!

References

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2003). E-learning and the Science of Instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning New York: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge Hanbook of Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grafton, Anthony (1999). The Footnote: A Curious History, Boston: Harvard University Press, 241 pages.

IDEO (2011). The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators, http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/, 94 pages.

Peters, Dorian (2005). Mayer’s Principles for the design of Multimedia Learning, blog http://designerelearning.blogspot.ca/2005/09/mayers-principles-for-design-of.html retrieved 2012-10-10.

Oct 14

Situating Cognitive Apprenticeship

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Richard

“Experiential learning” “Authentic learning” “multiple intelligences” “learning styles” …

Schooling

The context in which cognitive apprenticeship itself is situated deserves consideration.
We can start by considering some of the contemporaneous nomenclature: the “edubabble” of the day. Some biggies of the era are still with us today, here are four examples.

…the great waste in school comes from his inability to utilize the experience he gets outside while on the other hand he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of the school–its isolation from life.

—John Dewey, 1916
quoted in Mims, 2003

The term experiential is paired with learning since the 1970s or earlier (Keeton, 1976) (Weil and McGill, 1989). Mark Smith (2001) provides a very helpful summary of the literature and reports there are two general descriptions being applied: ‘direct encounter with the phenomena being studied…’ (e.g., Borzak 1981: 9 quoted in Brookfield 1983). and ‘…direct participation in the events of life’ (Smith , 2001 quoting Houle 1980: 221). Traditional apprenticeship certainly presents us with both opportunities, but does Collins et al.s’ cognitive? I think we’ll find it does when we design for it.

Frankly, if at first simply over semantics, I’ve never been fond of the term “authentic learning.” For starters, learning is not a noun¹ (Silvers, 2011). and I guess I’d just strive for higher precision where it’s the title of my philosophy of education. When Collins et al. use the word they refer to authentic contexts. This is not to dismiss the school of thought the name represents; practitioners who embrace the concepts and techniques seem to automatically transliterate it to enabling learning within authentic contexts., which I grant is fairly awkward. I believe it has the same meaning as situated learning, which is another term used with cognitive apprenticeship (Brown et al., 1989) (Collins et al., 1989) (Collins et al., 1991) (Lave, 1996).

In fact for many decades educators have observed a gap between life within and outside of schooling. (Dewey, 1916; Dewey, 1933; Piaget, 1974; Gardner, 1992; Boud and Miller, 1997; Mims, 2003). While my familiarity with the literature is insufficient to judge the degree to which his point “b” is true, I share an antipathy towards uncritical use of the phrase “real world” (and the advice of those who use it) with John Shindler, who warns, “…a) the real world is rarely defined by adages that include the phrase the “real world,” b) the use of the term the “real world” usually indicates a world-view that has been jaded and is fundamentally dysfunctional, and c) students are likely paying the price for it” (Shindler, 2009:Appendix J). I believe point “c” is a common destination, if by other paths, with at least one of Freire’s who, having said “…Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire, 1970) said elsewhere, “The educator with a democratic vision or posture cannot avoid in his teaching praxis insisting on the critical capacity, curiosity, and autonomy of the learner.” (Freire, 1998).

The ideas of multiple intelligences (Gardiner, 1983) and learning styles (Kolb and Fry, 1975) are related. While it’s impossible to ignore their effect on teaching over subsequent decades they have naturally both been criticized at very deep levels. Again, Smith (2001, drawing on Jarvis, 1987 and Tennant, 1997) summarizes those pertaining to Kolb very well, they centre around extravagant claims and lack of empirical evidence. The latter flaw is also claimed of Gardiner’s theory, along with disconnect from findings from the field of psychology (Wellingham, 2004) (Visser, Ashton and Vernon, 2006a) (Gardiner, 2006) (Visser, Ashton and Vernon, 2006b), yet the ideas persist and some practitioners attribute successes while passionately defending their use in the classroom².

Social Anthropology’s view of Learning Communities

I strongly suspect treating cognitive apprenticeship as a framework for experience design sidesteps much of the conflict. Cognitive apprenticeship’s heritage, as the others’, traces back to activity theorists such as Vygotsky and Leontiev but charts its course via the social anthropology of Jean Lave and socially situated, community of practice-based learning she explored with Etienne Wenger (Brown, Collins, Didiuk, 1989:41 footnote 1) (Lave & Wenger, 1991) (Lave, 1996). Apprenticeship in general, and cognitive apprenticeship by design, attempts to make thinking visible, illustrated using exemplary case studies (Collins, Seely and Holum, 1991). Cognitive apprenticeship models reject models that value the results of traditionally formal learning (e.g., schooling) over informal ones (e.g., apprenticeship). From an apprenticeship perspective, the assumption that teaching necessarily precedes or is a precondition for learning, or that absence of teaching calls learning into question, is a false one (Lave, 1996:151).

Although my aim is to name specific technologies and methods for employing them that make learning visible, the perspective is that of the experience designer, the focus is on the process. The steps to enabling social interaction, placing suitable tools within reach and empowering participants to engage, according to the cognitive apprenticeship model, are quite clear.. The designer’s tasks (emphasis mine) are

show the processes of the task and make them visible to students;
situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, so that students understand the relevance of the work;
vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn.

If we look within the six stages of the method³—Modelling, Coaching, Scaffolding, Articulation, Reflection, and Exploration—specifically for ways to diversify participant entry and engagement, and we can turn technology on itself in effect by using polls or remote testing, for example, to question participants directly, gauge relevance on an ongoing basis, remain agile and reflexive, adjust, review, refine and revise the implementation. It may in fact end up that for some participants none of our preliminary technology picks and strategies are suitable or engaging. When we design the situation to make thinking visible we must also build into the process the ability for all participants to see and report what they’re seeing, and to maintain access to the things they need to make the experience worthwhile. This brings to the foreground an important aspect of design I’d guess is still better understood by Web designers than by most instructional designers, the separation of content and presentation. This is a concept having implications for communication (Clark, 2008⁴) I’ll elaborate in a later instalment, but you can see a good, concise discussion of the basics by designer Sarah Horton on her site.

Summary

In the preceding paragraphs I’ve looked at the origins of cognitive apprenticeship and started to employ and apply vocabulary from the Cognitive Apprenticeship Framework. I’ve situated this framework relative to some other modern theories of learning, and we begin to see how focusing on the well-defined environment it provides—the content taught, the pedagogical methods employed, the sequencing of learning activities, and the sociology of learning—allows us to expose, nurture and tap the diversity of talent found within every community of practice. Whether we are in the role of apprentice or expert we need tools and interactions that make the processes of constructing knowledge visible and enable a variety of communication styles and media to be used between participants. I hope I have exhausted the theoretical foundation without exhausting the reader!

The next instalments will start to link this theory to practice. I’ll enter from the sociology side of the environment, using social networking, but I’ll use some technology from the start. My thinking is that to find out what is being said I want to go where the discussion is taking place. Twitter is one place to start, and I have learned over time that many educators use Twitter’s “hash tag” feature to find others talking about similar things, so I loaded 24 hours worth of Tweets that contain the hash tag #edchat into Firefox, and then used the Firebug extension to get the tweets from the timeline using a Web programmers’ technique known generically (by which I mean one can take different steps using different tools to achieve the same result) as scraping^?. I then removed a set of words I know are outside the scope of my investigation, and from the rest create the following “Wordle.”

A graphic representation of the words culled from edchat on Twitter, larger or smaller by frequency

Words found on Twitter #edchat from a single 24 hr period sized in proportion to frequency (www.wordle.net/create)

In my next instalment I’ll demonstrate the steps involved in creating such an image and make suggestions for researchers who might want a more robust, reliable and comprehensive approach to getting such data based on similar techniques. In so doing one important result will be an example of a technology-enhanced learning environment …in the state of emerging. I’ll further show that many if not most tools we see today stay in such emergent states indefinitely, and that by applying a framework like the one proposed by Brown, Collins, Duguid, Holum we do much more to help them reach maturity.

Comments are open and encouraged!

« Somewhere along the journey, as we became focused on making these models and standards more efficient and effective, “learning” went from being a verb to being a noun. If you actually think about what learning is and that it is intrinsic to the individual, how could it possibly be delivered? But that’s precisely how learning is perceived by those buying “learning” and, hence, influencing how it is designed, developed, and “delivered.” » —Aaron Silvers (2011). I recommend this article widely and often, probably in part because I felt it both vindicates some feelings I’d been having about ADDIE and offers viable ways forward.
See, for example, the comments section of Daniel Willingham’s criticism of Gardiner’s theory posted on the EducationNext blog.
I explained these methods in an earlier post.
Because they “…create philosophical and cognitive dissonance for technical communicators trained to think of information as content that is inherently linked to presentation.” (Clark,2007:36)

References

Boud. D. and Miller, N. (eds.) (1997) Working with Experience: animating learning, London: Routledge.

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning.” Educational Researcher, 18(l), 32-42.

Christensen CM, Marx M, Stevenson HH. (2006) The Tools of Cooperation and Change, Boston: Harvard Business School Online http://hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=R061 retrieved 2009-12-19

Clark, Dave (2007): Content Management and the Separation of Presentation and Content, Technical Communication Quarterly, 17:1, 35-60

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., and Holum, Ann (1991), Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator, [1991 reprint available on line at http://elc.fhda.edu/transform/resources/collins_brown_holum_1991.pdf accessed 2012-09-17]

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.), New York: Free Press.
Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think. A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process (Revised edn.), Boston: D. C. Heath.

Freire, Paulo (1998) Pedagogy of freedom : ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, 144 pages.

Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, Herder and Herder, 186 p.
Freire, Paulo (2000) Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary ed., New York : Continuum, 184 pages.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (2006). On failing to grasp the core of MI theory- A response to Visser et al. Intelligence (34:5) 503–505

Gardner, Howard (1992) The unschooled mind: why even the best students in the best schools do not understand, [PDF]

Houle, C. (1980) Continuing Learning in the Professions, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Keeton, M. T. (ed.) (1976) Experiential Learning, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall. 256 pages.

Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, Jean (1996). Teaching, as Learning, in Practice, Mind, Culture, and Activity (3:3) pp149-164.

Martin, Jane Roland (1982), Two Dogmas of Curriculum, Synthese, Vol. 51, No. 1, Questions in the Philosophy of Education (Apr., 1982), pp. 5-20

Mims, Clif (2003), Authentic Learning: A Practical Introduction & Guide for Implementation, Meridian: A Middle School Computer Technologies Journal, Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2003, Raleigh, NC: NC State University, http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2003/authentic_learning/ retrieved 2012-10-10.

Piaget, J. (1974). To understand is to invent: The future of education. New York: Grossman.

Shindler, John V. (2009), Appendix J: Examining The Use of the Term the “Real World” of School, College of Charter School of Education, web page associated with the book “Transformative Classroom Management,” Hoboken: Jossey-Bass, 384 pages.

Silvers, Aaron (2011) Fundamental Design of Learning Activities, blog post http://www.aaronsilvers.com/2011/02/fundamental-design-of-learning-activities/, retrieved 2011-08-10.

Smith, M. K. (2001). ‘David A. Kolb on experiential learning’, the encyclopedia of informal education. Retrieved [enter date] from http://www.infed.org/b-explrn.htm.

Visser, Ashton and Vernon, 2006a Beyond g: Putting multiple intelligences theory to the test, Intelligence (34:5) 487–502
Visser, Ashton and Vernon, 2006b g and the measurement of Multiple Intelligences: A response to Gardner, Intelligence (34:5) 507–510

Weil, S. Warner & McGill, I. (eds.) (1989) Making Sense of Experiential Learning. Diversity in theory and practice, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Willingham, Daniel T. (2004), Reframing the Mind: Howard Gardner and the theory of multiple intelligences, Education Next, Vol. 4, No. 3 http://educationnext.org/reframing-the-mind/ retrieved 2012-10-10.

Oct 10

Cognitive Apprenticeship: an idea whose time has come (back)?

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Richard

When someone is reading silently and then they ask you to define a word, do you ask them to read the entire sentence? This, said Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), is because “Experienced readers implicitly understand that words are situated.” Building on Miller and Gildea’s (1987) work teaching vocabulary Brown et al. similarly rejected “the assumption that knowing and doing can be separated,” saying it “leads to a teaching method that ignores the way situations structure cognition.” They came to believe that all knowledge, like language, is intrinsically linked to the situations and activities that produce it—like Web sites, concepts are always under construction (p32). Collins and Brown, with Newman (1989) and Holum (1991) see this idea of “Situated Knowledge and Learning” within the traditional apprenticeship of ancient times—a master practitioner showing the apprentice how something is done and then helping them do it. Modern schooling, by contrast, has amassed great bodies of conceptual knowledge, yet at the same time hidden or removed the thinking behind it from the situation of would-be learners. These authors proposed a synthesis of schooling and apprenticeship they call cognitive apprenticeship. The fundamental goal of cognitive apprenticeship is to “make thinking visible.” (Brown et al., 1989) (Collins et al., 1989) (Collins et al., 1991) (Miller and Gildea, 1987).

Collins et al. define a learning environment as “the content taught, the pedagogical methods employed, the sequencing of learning activities, and the sociology of learning” (1991:1). It’s my assertion that modern technology has direct applications within each of these four elements. I further suggest that an updated¹ understanding of the categories, strategies and insights Collins et al. put forth in the early nineties combine with technology and current practice to form a potent framework for instruction and learning.

Cognitive Apprenticeship (CA)

Let’s list the 4 elements, ordimensions, of every learning environment, and what they entail (1991:12-15):

content: knowledge and strategies
- Domain knowledge: concepts, facts, and procedures explicitly identified with a particular subject matter
- Heuristic strategies: effective techniques for accomplishing tasks, e.g., “tricks of the trade”
- Control strategies: how and when to select among possible problem-solving strategies
- Learning strategies: for learning any of the above; learning how to learn.
method: opportunities to observe, engage in, and invent or discover experts’ strategies in context
- Modeling: expert performs a task (verbalizing/illustrating their knowledge and thinking)
- Coaching: expert observes and facilitates
- Scaffolding: expert provides supports
- Articulation: expert encourages learners to verbalize/illustrate their knowledge and thinking
- Reflection: expert enables learners to compare their performance with others
- Exploration: expert invites learners to pose and solve their own problems
sequence: tasks that structure learning yet preserve meaningfulness (i.e., “situate” the tasks)
sociology: social characteristics of learning environments (i.e., “situate” the learner)
- Situated learning: the context of working on realistic tasks
- Community of practice: communication with other practitioners
- Intrinsic motivation: personal goals to seek skills and solutions
- Exploiting cooperation: working together (cooperative problem solving) to accomplish these goals

There are three important distinctions between traditional and cognitive apprenticeship: in traditional apprenticeship the process is easily observable; in traditional apprenticeship the tasks arise and emerge in the workplace; in traditional apprenticeship the skills to be learned are inherent in the task itself. To translate the model of traditional apprenticeship to cognitive apprenticeship, experts need to:

identify the processes of the task and make them visible to students;
situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, so that students understand the relevance of the work;
vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn. (1991:3)

Above is a framework, not a formula (1991:17). Already people were exploring technology’s potential as a coaching and scaffolding strategy, for example “…an interactive video display can mobilize the natural ability of a child to learn from context” (Miller and Gildea, 1987:94).

Current practice

Today there is ample evidence and virtually unanimous agreement that, more often than not, traditional schooling fails to engage a majority of learners or to provide meaningful long term strategies for solving real world problems, and almost no consensus on what to do about it (Freire, 1975) (Christensen et al., 2008). Most intrinsic motivation in our society today revolves around the desire to generate very large amounts of money in very short amounts of time, and in education this has manifested in a reform movement that is often outright hostile to research (NZARE, 2012), negligent of neighbourhoods (Frankenberg et al., 2010), and partnering indiscriminately for expedience and personal gain (Jazzman, 2011), while remaining highly supportive of tools and models that appear to fit specific niches in the above framework. These often involve a “supply chain” model involving high-stakes testing and the textbook industry and are designed above all to be easily monetized (Christensen et al., 2008). Educationalists are expected to design and deliver compelling learning experiences regardless of such distractions and competing interests. I believe that, in the hands of designers and pedagogues firmly committed to the end user’s learning experience, this framework can contribute to modern technology’s effectiveness at keeping designers and participants on task and focused on learning.

Several of the cognitive apprenticeship framework strategies associated with sociology, method, and content can be easily identified in a technological innovation that was only in its embryonic stage when Brown, Collins et al. first conceived such a framework—social networks. Communities of Practice may consist of many Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) of just plain folks (JPFs (see Brown et al. 1989)) who are intrinsically motivated (or extrinsically, perhaps in response to issues discussed in the previous paragraph) to incorporate new tools and strategies. They may chat on Twitter, and blog on sites like Blogger. They are seeking out experts and collecting domain knowledge about heuristic strategies even as they share their expertise on other topics and hone their own control and learning strategies. Some have seen the potential of Facebook and refined it to Edmodo, or Twitter and evolved to Tappestry, which tracks formal and informal learning using the new TinCanAPI. They may use a tool like Adobe Captivate to sequence tasks, or a platform like Google Docs. They share strategies such as project-based-learning (which may already have much in common with CA) and the flipped classroom, both of which can be rich in applications of technology.

The notion of cognitive apprenticeship has by no measure slumbered since the early 1990s. Aziz Ghefaili (2003) in particular has made notable contributions to relating the theory to the use of computers. I’m very interested in such efforts, but my focus is praxis—moving theory to practice in ways that induce change (Freire, 1986)². In the weeks ahead I’ll attempt to map all of the elements of the framework listed above to specific technologies, platforms, and strategies for using them. I welcome input at every stage… please use the comments section.

I’ll elaborate further in the next installment, but the first “update” I wish to make to Collins et al.’s view, situated as it was in the 1980s and 90s, is what I see as a blurring line between teacher and student. [citations]. Collins, Brown and Holum (1991) themselves acknowledge this (p17) even though their language consistently presumes otherwise. Where the authors said “teacher” I have substituted “expert;” for “student” I have substituted “learner.” In some settings the terms “designer” and “participant” might be appropriate.
See for example what is praxis? at infed, the encyclopaedia of informal education

References

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning.” Educational Researcher, 18(l), 32-42.

Christensen, Clayton; Johnson, Curtis W.; Horn, Michael B. (2008), Disrupting Class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw Hill, 288 pages.

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., and Newman, S.E. (1989). “Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Craft of Reading, Writing and Mathematics! In L.B. Resnick (ed.) Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

Duncan et al. (2010) Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning – A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development Policy and Program Studies Service, http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf retrieved 2011-11-10.

Frankenberg, E.; Siegel-Hawley, G.; Wang,J. (2010) Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards, The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/choice-without-equity-2009-report retrieved 2012-10-07.

Freire, P. (1972) Cultural Action for Freedom, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, 91 p.

Freire, P. (1986) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Ghefaili, Aziz (2003). Cognitive Apprenticeship, Technology, and the Contextualization of Learning Environments. Journal of Educational Computing, Design& Online Learning, Vol. 4, Fall, 2003. PDF at http://coe.ksu.edu/jecdol/Vol_4/Articles/pdfs/Aziz.pdf retrieved 2012-10-10

Jersey Jazzman (Saturday, August 20, 2011), Rupert Loves Rhee Loves Bradford blog post, http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.ca/2011/08/rupert-loves-rhee-loves-bradford.html, retrieved 2012-10-08.

Miller, G. A., & Gildea, P. M. (1987). How children learn words. Scientific American, 257, (3), 94-99.

New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE, 2012), Thursday, 2 August 2012, 11:03 am press release: New charter school model ignores findings of research, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED1208/S00011/new-charter-school-model-ignores-findings-of-research.htm retrieved 2012-09-21

Rittel, Horst and Melvin Webber (1973) “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing, Amsterdam, pp. 155-159.

Säljö R (1979) “Learning in the Learner’s Perspective: 1: some commonplace misconceptions” Reports from the Institute of Education, University of Gothenburg, 76.