The Big Picture

This photo of my house was taken last fall from Hunger Mountain, a part of the Worcester Range here in Central Vermont, a week before grad school classes began. As of this moment, we’ve just completed our third f2f class and our fourth week of work this trimester, and I am finally seeing the big picture. I will be able to work these f2f classes into one project - the design of a 15-week online Women’s Studies course. This course design is the goal, and the objectives along the way will take place in the f2f class projects. In Pedagogy II I will be doing the instructional design, in Configuring Network Learning Environments I will create a Moodle course for the material to reside, and in Web II I will learn to make a few learning objects (with cool and inexpensive software and hardware).

I tried to get back into the Moodle site I created yesterday in class and there seems to be a cookie-acception problem (even though I can see the cookie in Firefox), which leads me to my vocabulary word for the week, GLITCH. Provided there are none of these, or I overcome them, I will get to my goal. The dictionary says a glitch is a minor malfunction, mishap, or technical problem; a snag. The etymology of the word is probably from a similar Yiddish word, glitsh, meaning “a slip.” I will have to remember these minor technical problems will happen to my students too.

In Web II we read an article titled Connecting Learning Objects to Instructional Design Theory: A Definition, a Metaphor, and a Taxonomy written by David A Wiley. Wiley changed the metaphor for learning objects from Legos to atoms. He best sums up the whole article with the following quote, It should be obvious… that a person without understanding of instructional design has no more hope of successfully combing learning objects into instruction than a person without an understanding of chemistry has of successfully forming a crystal. In Ped II Elaine spoke of the art and science of teaching, which is essentially the same thing Wiley’s saying. Freedom (art) comes from knowing the rules (science).

In Ped II it was Bloom’s taxonomy that I was the most interested in this week because I am fascinated by the cognitive process. How is it that we learn? How is it that we make meaning? I came across this quote from an article called Why Pedagogy by writer David Lusted in Screen magazine, 1986:

Knowledge is not produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is offered so much as the matter that is understood. To think of fields or bodies of knowledge as if they are the property of academics and teachers is wrong. It denies an equality in the relations at moments of interaction and falsely privileges one side of the exchange and what that side "knows" over the other.

Why is pedagogy important? It is important since, as a concept, it draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the ‘how’ questions involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but also in its production. Indeed it enables us to question the validity of separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and through what means we ‘come to know.’ How one teaches is therefore of central interest, but through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and crucially, how one learns.

I have all my classmate’s blogs coming to my Bloglines aggregator. It is so much fun to see the different styles of writing. Blogs have an interesting past, with only 23 known in 1999, today a new one comes into existence every six seconds! What I remember when I saw my first blog, was that they were sort of pre-screened internet material. I counted on others to just give me the tidbits on any given subject. Although that is still the case on some blogs, they have lately become online journals. A quote from Rebecca Blood in Weblogs: A History and Perspective:

Lacking a focus on the outside world, the blogger is compelled to share [her] world with whomever is reading. [She] may engage other bloggers in conversation about the interests they share. [She] may reflect on a book he is reading, or the behavior of someone on the bus. [She]might describe a flower that [she] saw growing between the cracks of a sidewalk on [her] way to work. Or [she] may simply jot notes about [her] life: what work is like, what [she] had for dinner, what [she] thought of a recent movie. These fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.

As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.