Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. — Thomas Henry Huxley
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
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.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 1:55 am
I’ve gotten linked to John Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos a couple of times now, so this probably won’t be news for anyone. I’d kind of like to document it though for archival purposes so that, if nothing else, I can know when I discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer cut from the same cloth as Carl Sagan but with perhaps a more straight-forward rhetorical style and less in the way of overt poetics and classical invocation. More on him very soon, but first, of course, the videos.
At the time of this writing there are two videos on the Symphony of Science website, though there are apparently plans to make more.
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.
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. 