The Dance of Technology and Pedagogy in Self-Paced Distance Education

Philip shared an article this week “The Dance of Technology and Pedagogy in Self-Paced Distance Education” by Terry Anderson – his blog can be followed via this link.

The key elements can be seen below:

• The technology sets the beat and the timing. The pedagogy defines the moves.
• Siemens (2005) describes the following characteristics of connectivism:
  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions
    • This diversity and abundance of resources in multiple formats is excellent for our learners as we can cater for their preferred learning style and also interests. While on one hand this diversity in options makes a teachers role easier, it can also make it much more difficult as the decision making required to scaffold the ‘cull’ of resources for the students.
  • Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources
  • Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
    • IMHO – we need to continually talk to our students about lifelong and lifewide learning. I was talking to my Yr 12 class today (they are starting to ‘clock off’ given the end of the year is near and their major assessment is approaching – one would think that they would be ‘head down’, but no…they are only seeing the end). We also reiterated how if they are not learning they wont be contributing members for our society. I made this blog post a while ago about lifelong learning. I have recently been showing students that new advances in technology mean that the jobs they will fill are not in existence and the problems they will solve, we do not know are even problems. I find it interesting that Google are developing a self-driving car and also artificial intelligence – does this impact the future job economy for our students massively?…a self-driving car – does this potentially eliminates jobs like Taxi, Bus, Train, Truck?…interesting…artificial intelligence – that is just mind blowing.
  • Decision-making is itself a learning process.
    • This is one of the key elements for connectivism for me…deciding what is important and what is not.
  • “The near infinite potential of dancing with anyone, anywhere, anytime coupled with the vast sound tracks and light shows (open educational resources) accessible on the Net, demand that learning be an experience of connecting and applying resources, rather than memorizing particular tunes or steps. The art of improvisation, of learning to dance, becomes the life learning skill – accumulating static data or memorizing scripts becomes obsolete.
  • Critical to finding each other is the concept of presence. Social software allows learners (and teachers) to find each other by the traces they leave of their activity (blog, wiki and Twitter postings) and through their visible presence in chat rooms, immersive environments and in resource data bases.
  • Research on the value of reflection to apply, contextualize and deepen learning is extensive.
    • This has definitely been evident in the blogging process that we have undertaken and a number of us have commented on this (Annelise, Musette, Paul). “If you write about it, you have to think about it”

Talk soon

Brendon

 

Anderson, T. (2009). The dance of technology and pedagogy in self-paced distance education. Paper presented at the 17th ICDE World Congress, Maastricht. Link to article can be found here

Siemens, G. (2005). A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Instructional Technology and Distance Education, 2(1), 3-10 Retrieved September 2014 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.