Gretel Patch's List: Theory-Supported Social Networking

• While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons
• While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons
• While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons
• While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons
• within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways
• education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual.
• education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens
• societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat
• groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part
• The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.
• education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy
• the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be
• how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated
• liberal education and vocational education
• personal development or education for citizenship
• distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination
• education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims
• whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education
• relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the) agent of social change
• These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like.
• for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like

19 more annotations...

• Learning is how we acquire knowledge
• goal of education, and the product of experience
• ways in which technology can expand the limitations of a learners mind, while articulation and reflection are processes that can be performed by the learner to help incorporate new knowledge into existing knowledge resulting in support of learning
• Cognition is about how our brain works or how our mind works
• What to teach and how to teach
• instruction as anything done for or with a learner or the learner’s environment to help them acquire new knowledge or learn. Some of those things will be very direct and some will be indirect
• something one person does to help another person learn
• theory is a hypothesis that describes, speculates, or defines a relationship between a set of facts or phenomena through a body of principles, policies, beliefs, or assumptions
• more prescriptive. It clearly suggests steps you should follow in trying to support someone while learning. This does not appear to be a theory, but rather a strategy
• dividing concepts into categories and hierarchies of ideas
• A model is an example, description, or analogy that helps a person understand what is not directly observable
• Instructional strategies structure instructional theories for direct application in the learning environment
• They provide the instructor with a plan for implementation and are considered more prescriptive, yet flexible enough to accommodate the dynamics of any learning environment.
• Creating learning communities is an intentional process of redesigning curriculum and bringing faculty and students together to create more coherent and collaborative learning environments.
• -so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning enterprise”
• students more control over their environment with the potential of leading to improved results and more efficient decision making practices.

14 more annotations...

• Learning involves participation in a community of practice
• people learn from observing other   people
• Attending to a behaviour; remembering it as a possible model or paradigm; and playing out how it may work for them  in different situations (rehearsal) are key aspects of observational  learning
• Learning is, thus, not  seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of  social participation. The nature of the situation impacts  significantly on the process
• • It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or  general.
   
   
   
  • New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in  communities
• Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the  various conversations of which they are a part.
• there is a need to explore the  extent to which learning (or intelligence) lies in the resources to which people  have access
• while the individual is significant, psychological  analysis should focus on the joint, socially mediated activity in a cultural  context

6 more annotations...

• learning involves a deepening process of   participation in a community of practice has gained significant ground in   recent years
• assumption that learning is something that individuals do. Furthermore, we  often assume that  learning 'has a beginning and an end; that it is best separated from the  rest of our activities; and that it is the result of teaching' (Wenger 1998: 3).  But how would things look if we took a different track
• 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing  activity, though often unrecognized as such
• Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in  a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour
• Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion  for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly
• The fact that they are  organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a  sense of joint enterprise and identity
• Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of  knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social  relationships – situations of co-participation
• It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the  world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning  involves participation in a community of practice
• understanding of the nature of learning within communities of  practice, and how knowledge is generated allows educators to think a little  differently about the groups, networks and associations with which they are  involved
• Problem solving and learning from experience are central  processes (although, as we have seen, situated learning is not the same as  ‘learning by doing’ – see Tennant 1997: 73). Educators need to reflect on their  understanding of what constitutes knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important things to  grasp here is the extent to which education involves informed and committed  action

8 more annotations...

• cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy
• explore distance education systems as they have evolved through three eras of educational, social, and psychological development
• requirement for distance education to be technologically mediated in order to span the geographic and often temporal distance between learners, teachers, and institutions, it is common to think of development or generations of distance education in terms of the technology used to span these distances
• first generation of distance education technology was by postal correspondence
• second generation, defined by the mass media of television, radio, and film production
• interactive technologies: first audio, then text, video, and then web and immersive conferencing
• less clear what defines the so-called fourth- and even fifth-generation distance technologies except for a use of intelligent data bases (Taylor, 2002) that create “intelligent flexible learning” or that incorporate Web 2.0 or semantic web technologies
• repertoire of options available to DE designers and learners has increase
• Many educators pride themselves on being pedagogically (as opposed to technologically) driven in their teaching and learning designs
• two being intertwined in a dance: the technology sets the beat and creates the music, while the pedagogy defines the moves
• To some extent, our pedagogical processes may themselves be viewed as technologies
• none of these three pedagogical generations has disappeared, and we will argue that all three can and should be effectively used to address the full spectrum of learning needs and aspirations of 21st century learners.
• Behavioural learning theory begins with notions of learning which are generally defined as new behaviours or changes in behaviours that are acquired as the result of an individual’s response to stimuli
• Although learning was still conceived of as an individual process, its study expanded from an exclusive focus on behaviour to changes in knowledge or capacity that are stored and recalled in individual memory.
• The locus of control in a CB model is very much the teacher or instructional designer
• It is notable that such models gained a foothold in distance education at a time when there were limited technologies available that allowed many-to-many communication. Teleconferencing was perhaps the most successful means available but came with associated costs and complexity that limited its usefulness. The postal service and publication or redistribution of messages was very slow, expensive, and limited in scope for interactivity. Methods that relied on one-to-many and one-to-one communication were really the only sensible options because of the constraints of the surrounding technologies.
• Cognitive presence is the means and context through which learners construct and confirm new knowledge
• Later developments in cognitive theory have attempted to design learning materials in ways that maximized brain efficiency and effectiveness by attending to the types, ordering, timing, and nature of learning stimulations
• Learning was thought of as an individual process, and thus it made little difference if one was reading a book, watching a movie, or interacting with a computer-assisted learning program by oneself or in the company of other learners
• reduction of the role and importance of the teacher further fueled resentment by traditional educators against the CB model of distance education
• While appropriate when learning objectives are very clear, CB models avoid dealing with the full richness and complexity of humans learning to be, as opposed to learning to do
• People are not blank slates but begin with models and knowledge of the world and learn and exist in a social context of great intricacy and depth.
• technology became widely used to create opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions between and among students and teachers
• Social-constructivist pedagogy acknowledges the social nature of knowledge and of its creation in the minds of individual learners.
• Teachers do not merely transmit knowledge to be passively consumed by learners; rather, each learner constructs means by which new knowledge is both created and integrated with existing knowledge
• The locus of control in a social-constructivist system shifts somewhat away from the teacher, who becomes more of a guide than an instructor, but who assumes the critical role of shaping the learning activities and designing the structure in which those activities occur
• social-constructivist models only began to gain a foothold in distance education when the technologies of many-to-many communication became widely available, enabled first by email and bulletin boards, and later through the World Wide Web and mobile technologies
• Cognitive presence also assumes that learners are actively engaged, and interaction with peers is perhaps the most cost-effective way to support cognitive presence
• It remains challenging to apply learning where it can blossom into application and thus demonstrate true understanding
• Social interaction is a defining feature of constructivist pedagogies. At a distance, this interaction is always mediated, but nonetheless, it is considered to be a critical component of quality distance education
• the educator is a guide, helper, and partner where the content is secondary to the learning process; the source of knowledge lies primarily in experiences
• teaching presence in constructivist pedagogical models focuses on guiding and evaluating authentic tasks performed in realistic contexts.
• Constructivist distance education pedagogies moved distance learning beyond the narrow type of knowledge transmission that could be encapsulated easily in media through to the use of synchronous and asynchronous, human communications-based learning
• learning is the process of building networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems. Connectivism was developed in the information age of a networked era (Castells, 1996) and assumes ubiquitous access to networked technologies
• Connectivism also assumes that information is plentiful and that the learner’s role is not to memorize or even understand everything, but to have the capacity to find and apply knowledge when and where it is needed.
• It is noteworthy that connectivist models explicitly rely on the ubiquity of networked connections between people, digital artifacts, and content, which would have been inconceivable as forms of distance learning were the World Wide Web not available to mediate the process. Thus, as we have seen in the case of the earlier generations of distance learning, technology has played a major role in determining the potential pedagogies that may be employed.
• learners have access to powerful networks and, as importantly, are literate and confident enough to exploit these networks in completing learning tasks
• exposing students to networks and providing opportunities for them to gain a sense of self-efficacy in networked-based cognitive skills and the process of developing their own net presence
• Connectivist learning is based as much upon production as consumption of educational content
• The activities of learners are reflected in their contributions to wikis, Twitter, threaded conferences, Voicethreads, and other network tools. Further, social presence is retained and promoted through the comments, contributions, and insights of students who have previously engaged in the course and that persist as augmentable archives to enrich network interactions for current students
• learners and teacher collaborate to create the content of study, and in the process re-create that content for future use by others
• stress to teaching presence is the challenge presented by rapidly changing technologies

40 more annotations...

• Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process
• Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity -- that is, a shaping into the standard form of social activity
• A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account
• We might as well try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions
• he social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow
• Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step

4 more annotations...

• The theory of Connectivism provides new insight into what it means to facilitate learning in the 21st Century
• The application of Connectivism to teaching and learning requires a thorough rethinking of the educational process and the role of the teacher, student, and technology in that process
• diversity of opinions
• connecting specialized nodes
• non-human appliances
• Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
• Nurturing and maintaining connections
• see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts
• accurate, up-to-date knowledge
• Decision-making is itself a learning process
• This learning theory is so new and revolutionary that there is little written about it. There is even less research being done on the ways in which it can be implemented and supported or about how it actually affects learners

9 more annotations...

• Great resource, especially coming from an administrator. I wonder if teachers were given more support/encouragement/time to develop their own PLN, if more would do it and do it well. - Gretel Patch on 2012-09-06