Limerick II: Armando’s Audacious Absquatulation

Posted by Danny on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 2:01 pm

Armando was in peril, verily,
By a gunman who chased him precariously
Down an alley untried,
Until cornered, he cried,
“Aw, shoot,” somewhat unnecessarily.

DC Phillips and the Continua of Constructivism

Posted by Danny on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:08 pm

One of the readings this week in CTL 1608 is a comparative, simplified overview of the divergent, often internally contentious body of learning theories that make up constructivism.  I read it about a day after articulating my theory of learning, which on reflection seems auspicious in its timing: if I’d read this article before talking about why I disagree with constructivism, I’d have seen how muddy these waters actually are and would probably have been paralysed, or at least enervated with intellectual timidity.  The ideas with which I’d hoped to tangle, I would have seen, comprised such a mass of writhing complexity that no vector of approach could be readily expected to engage them with relevance.  (I have also felt this way when accosted by self-proclaimed feminists on the charge of being hesitant to number myself among them.)  Instead, after developing my ideas against a shadowy, straw-man adversary, I now have an articulated sense of where I stand and can locate myself within a carefully, systematically revealed landscape of thought (albeit one, I maintain, populated by a large proportion of crazies).  This way feels like learning, like that sophistication of my ability to interact with stimuli, rather than frustration.  I wonder if this is a failing—I feel like most of my peers can do this more elegantly the other way: that they can see the whole landscape, or build it easily as they read work by the theorists, and orient themselves progressively as they go.

Phillips’ article, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism” is immediately sympathetic to me because he makes clear pretty quickly his bias against constructivism’s cult-like incarnations and frequently unquestioned adoption, but also suggests coquettishly that he has some “critical and evaluative” points he’ll raise in a subsequent publication which I’m probably going to track down.  For the time being, though, his approach is to define three dimensions of variability within constructivist thought, and then to place the major theorists within that space.  Herewith, therein, shall I narcissistically place myself.

Read more »

Learning as a Soulless, Private Joy

Posted by Danny on Monday, September 28, 2009 at 1:39 am

One of the assignments for my Constructive Learning and Design of Online Environments course is for us to put together a “theory of learning” at the start of the term and again at the end of the term to reflect upon our development and changes in thinking.  We’re asked to address the following questions:

1. What do you currently understand learning to be–for yourself as a learner and for your students if you teach?
2. Why (on what basis) do you hold those views, both for yourself and for your students? (If you are not a teacher think of a situation where you have taught somebody something.)
3. What role does knowledge play in learning?
4. What role do others play in your learning (e.g. peers, teachers etc)?

My response went a little long, but I’m not unhappy with it.  (I will be unhappy trying to match it for detail the second time, in December.)  If you’re interested, read on. Read more »

Dammit, Feynman!

Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:51 am

Stupidly, at some point, I stopped being a good sponge and started caring about what others saw me sucking up.  If everyone in the room seemed to have already sucked it up long ago, for example, the compulsion has grown for me to try to make a note of the thing, and then to pretend as if I, too, was a dead, turgid invertebrate successfully repurposed for carrying this particular popular effluvium.  (But the metaphor grows strained… mangled… finished.)

I really regret that I have sometimes—unthinkingly!—nodded my head in mature acknowledgement of my fluency with a name or other reference, uttered by a respected speaker, when that name or reference was at best only semi-familiar-sounding to me.  This is for two reasons: first, it adulterates my supremely laudable curiosity, wonder, and avid lust to understand everything about everything everywhere with petty social duplicity; second and more importantly, I am often ashamed into passivity rather than correction, and don’t bother to look up the thing afterwards and educate myself.

Sometimes I wise up and actually hunt down that thing I’ve been nodding my empty head to.  Richard Feynman’s come up in XKCD a couple of times, and elsewhere, and I finally looked him up a few months ago.  He was (for those of you who don’t know and haven’t looked him up yet but are willing to privately acknowledge your potentially uncommon ignorance by reading onwards) a legendary and beloved teacher of physics, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, a prolific writer of popular and theoretical scientific works, central to explaining NASA’s Challenger disaster, an amateur painter and bongo-player, and so on.  I listened with unexpected relish to his autobiographies as audiobooks, and have tried to follow some of his celebrated Lectures on Physics with mixed success.  All in all, it was one of my more rewarding admissions and corrections of pretention.

He did an interview/talk for the BBC program, Horizon, in 1991 (available on YouTube and embedded below) wherein he tells abridged versions of a number of the stories in his autobiographies.  If you have ten minutes, please consider giving the first video segment a shot—I’m happy I’m not missing this anymore. Read more »

Limerick I: A Mount Discounted

Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 12:27 pm

There once was a man from Peru
Who rode horseback six leagues on a gnu.
He called down to his dog,
“You’re a fine feathered frog!”
The cat said, « monsieur, vous êtes fou. »