Posted by Danny on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This post is written defiantly on paper, in green fountain pen ink, amidst the high-pitched whine of computer monitors and the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the building. My computer is dead. It won’t reach the BIOS so I can’t jiggle its software guts from the command prompt or safe mode, and I don’t have time to qualify myself to noodle around with the hardware where the real problem probably resides. My laptop is useless for accessing my online class, so I’m in the computer lab at OISE, contacting the people who need to be contacted, downloading my readings for the week, and gradually pushing through the shock of being without my personal computer into a state of giddy, Luddish novelty that will in turn give way to the awareness that my paper-crunch and correspondence and peripheral device-charging are going to take place in this room, probably for the next two weeks.
It’s a good room! The lights and noises are ugly, but I’ve got space to work, it’s clean, it’s got broadband, and it’s free. I could be so much more unplugged than I am, and the disrepair of my computer could be so much more devastating to me, my family, my education, and my prospects than it is. When my big paper for Student Experience in Higher Education is finished, I’ll have time to try and resurrect Caligula, and if my data is really gone, I’ll be able to panic and writhe then, responsibly. This is such a petty catastrophe.
The potential for online education to obviate barriers of finance and geography continues to drive my research interest, but it remains that for most of the people who stand to benefit from it, online distance education won’t be delivered to personal computers with big, bright screens in private rooms with lovingly-tailored sound systems and a clean bathroom and ready food only seconds away. It probably won’t even be delivered to computer labs as nice as this. I feel like that expectation could probably be planned for, pedagogically. When I’ve got time, I want to look into the design of public computer terminals and quantify the tradeoffs between (say) the savings on fluorescent lighting costs vs. incandescent on the one hand, and student comfort, tenacity, and health on the other. Is the present arrangement of computers and monitors in a sort of wall-less cubicle system ideal for students working in parallel, with screens blocking face-to-face interaction, or could other configurations benefit learning by fostering local collaboration that could subsequently enhance or transfer to work online? I’m not asking this rhetorically–it may be that face-to-face obstructions prevent more disruption than collaboration of a sort we’d deem valuable, or that instant-messaging interfaces will frustrate this kind of thinking entirely as they become more transparent to the way we communicate.
I wish I could make better use of my time and actually explore some of this stuff.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I recently attended my first research meeting hosted by Clare Brett, which concluded with a discussion about the problem of sustaining online communities that form around distance education classes after they’ve ended. It was mentioned that students often request the spaces and accounts remain open so that shared resources, links, and discussion transcripts continue to be accessible (and long-distance friendships continue to be facilitated), but inevitably and usually quickly, attendance dies away and the community effectively dissolves.
This might not be such a tragedy—these environments came into being to serve a particular purpose, as did the communities that formed within those virtual spaces, and upon completion the students who took part supposedly (hopefully) achieved the growth of skills, experience, and knowledge they came for. Nonetheless, even if everyone was given a complete transcript of all posts, chats, documents, and perhaps even the contact information of the other students, there would be a sense of loss when the doors finally closed. Without the physical infrastructure and associated costs necessary to maintain these virtual spaces, those doors probably could be kept open. So why, ultimately, isn’t this successful?
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Posted by Danny on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 12:34 am
In my final year of undergrad at Nipissing, I took a second-year American Literature course to round out my fairly pathetic spatter of regional and period coverage. As we approached the modern period and started reading modern poets, I discovered a deep sense of alienation from the text that was clearly not shared by (or at any rate, novel to) most of the rest of the class. Unlike earlier poetry, which had for me achieved its startling, evocative, or plainly gorgeous imagery and wordplay in tandem with its clear and compressed message, the poets of the 1920s didn’t seem to care about—yea, assiduously scorned—their audiences. Shock, originality, inscrutable faithfulness to the language of their inner voices, and subjective interpretability dominated our readings; after several months of strolling down welcoming galleries of meticulous and pleasing artifice and mastery, I felt myself a trespasser in someone’s contemptuously unkempt private room. This fed nicely my prejudice that the best poetry—the only poetry worth reading—was written before the end of World War I, and that the rest of the course would consist of this miserable dross.
Then, we were given Robert Frost. He was welcoming (famously), obviously conscientious of the comprehension of his audience, obviously sensitive to the expected rhythms and cadences of the old poetic forms even when he chose not to employ them—in short, he was my renewed hope for the poetry of Modernity and a balm for my gloomy, disappointed brain.
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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.
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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:
- What do you currently understand learning to be–for yourself as a learner and for your students if you teach?
- 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.)
- What role does knowledge play in learning?
- 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 »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 