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Initial thoughts on MA research module
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p. 2
the purpose of this document is to outline the origins of my thoughts on the subject of digital learning dialogue to put into context questions that will be forming the basis of research and to form the basis of a living evolving record of my own learning it s a place for thinking out loud it s a way of expressing pre-conceived ideas hypotheses and suppositions before they get clarified confirmed or otherwise by the research i will be doing it s not what i will hand in as my research proposal but will inform that proposal.[close]
p. 4
learning is relational we learn from others we listen we watch we build relationships it s not a solitary activity not a spectator sport its something we need to join in with if we are to benefit from it as teachers our aim is to have engaged the learners in our class mercer suggests that knowledge is a social entity not a personal possession is it like the man in the forest if he says something and no woman hears him is he still wrong is learning like that if we have it within ourselves but never express it in some form or other verbal written with others do we truly have that knowledge one size does not fit all in learning we need to meet individual needs personalisation if you factory farm learners you get factory fodder if you nurture free-range learners you get empowered problem solvers but differentiating work 30 ways within a class sounds overwhelming for teachers practical ways that also actually fit with what we know about how children learn best mean empowering pupils to become leaders in their own learning and to become creators/synthesisers of their own learning bloom s taxonomy higher level thinking skills collaborating with a range of others peers teachers other adults other learners can lead to supported directed focused socially co-constructed learning which harnesses natural curiosity creativity and sociability personalised learning means that scaffolding of learning vygotsky-style comes in a range of guises the ways in which this can be achieved are a real challenge for educators but sugata mitra has shown just how powerfully learners can construct their own learning my own interest arose from the working without walls project that involved the use of wikis forums and web 2.0 tools with primary pupils.[close]
p. 6
we learn in zone of proximal development as vygotsky asserted but we need the right balance of stress and security we need push ourselves to edge of our comfort zone in order to move on with our learning how are we pushed to the edge of our comfort zone it might be by problems we come across by questions we are asked by what others assert that makes us re-evaluate our own thinking levi strauss suggested a bricolage type of learning which reminds me of lego blocks we need the foundations before we build the towers but we can build towers in collaboration with others co-construction just think of children playing cooperatively with lego and how they can negotiate with each other to build some amazing structures we need to not knock out that natural creativity/cooperation when they are learning in school scaffolding happens just as sometimes more effectively with peers than with a teacher outside learning agents also the contribute to the scaffolding the expert may/may not be a teacher may/may not be an adult may/may not be known personally in real world in the working without walls project the experts were the other children who lived in the rainforest went on the trip and shared their learning with us bruner talked about how scaffolding can reduce the degree of freedom in carrying out a task so the learner can concentrate on the difficult skill to be mastered makes the task manageable and prevents information/choice overload the role of the teacher in learner-led personalised learning is in part to help manage the process rather than impart their own knowledge.[close]
p. 8
campfire learning is the oral story telling tradition that has long featured in different cultures aboriginal dreamtime stories are a great example of this children learnt skills apprentice-style alongside adults in the days before school became the norm in the industrial revolution paper based literacy became the norm mass education became the expectation and learning became book-based success was now dependent on what you wrote and this has been reflected in our own education system until relatively recently when there was a push to include skills of speaking and listening oracy learning has evolved as we have understood more about how people learn piaget vygotsky etc helped people question what was going on in formal learning but we are post-industrial revolution now and there is a return to campfire learning it s just that the campfires are in cyberspace david thornburg social networking has become a part of life for our learners tools such as facebook twitter msn are just part of it just look at how a normally uncommunicative teen can be transformed when playing a game online via a pc or console with others across town across the country or even in other countries suddenly they become articulate problem-solving collaborators digital literacy has been considering how we teach the skills to use computers to access information to handle information to be discerning to be safe participants in the technological age but now something is shifting we need to learn from what is happening in informal online interactions if we are to develop our use of tools to enhance learning.[close]
p. 9
digital learning dialogue the interactions that take place using tech based tools that have an impact on learning[close]
p. 10
i believe that effective digital learning dialogue is what will make the difference in moving learning forward so we harness the potential of new tools and not just the tools how we harness the skills our learners are developing outside the formal classroom that would benefit their learning digital learning dialogue is not dependent on the tool or the software platform or whether it is handheld laptop pc phone it s not dependent on the software whether it is google docs or windows live or primary pad collaborative writing whether it is skype livemeeting wimber ustream coveritlive whether it is a wiki forum blog with comments whether it is web 2.0 like voicethread dialogue may be typed or spoken with or without the added benefit of being able to see the person you are speaking to it transcends boundaries borders and makes the world smaller the working without walls project touched on how this could happen dialogue has been recognised by e.g coomey and stephenson as being part of learning using ict over 10 years ago but there hasn t been much mention of it in the research since certainly that i have been able to find in my own hunts through the literature so far i haven t heard the term digital learning dialogue before i tried it out on my own blog in february 2011 and mentioned it at a teachmeet in manchester around that time it seemed to get positive feedback as an idea from others including an itt lecturer and an la ict advisor they hadn t heard anyone else using it before either i m still wondering if that was the first instance of the term being used![close]
p. 11
it is evolving based on how we do face to face dialogue developing its own language informal and social dialogue will develop formal learning dialogue will follow[close]
p. 12
we use the ways of conversing we already know as the starting point of our online interactions does that mean that people who are good f2f face to face communicators are going to be good online communicators increasingly using the digital world is using its own terminology eg navigating around a web page sounds like sailing terminology we learn from the informal use of language online then take that into our more formal situations does this help in the process of building confidence certainly it helps in building skills of developing/handling online relationships we know online relationships are different there aren t the visual clues we get in f2f conversations those uses develop before they are harnessed by teachers which is why i say follow though i think there is a lot of formal digital learning dialogue that runs parallel as social uses inch forward learning uses in forward alongside them has informal social digital dialogue evolved from the way people are using digital dialogue in business or higher/further education to an extent the ways and language of interacting now will develop over the next year or two or five or ten in the same way that language has evolved from the time of shakespeare to now what terminology will be in the oxford english dictionary in a few years time that isn t at the moment what definitions will change which words will now have multiple meanings?[close]
p. 14
this was a term i started to use at the european innovative education forum in march 2010 to explain why i thought the children and i got better at using wikis and forums for effective learning as we moved from one stage of the working without walls project to the second i believe that the children learnt about how to communicate with each others and others outside the classroom in the earlier part of the school year using wikis for sharing spellings helped us all learn how to use the tools when we collaborated with singapore we made mistakes such as overwriting each others work but learnt how to get the work back we made less mistakes by the time we collaborated with the school in brunei we were used to the tools and so we could focus on the learning i think that is a bit like having wallpaper up for a length of time you stop noticing it once we get to the not noticing stage of using the tech tools we can focus on the quality of the learning that is taking place once we are past the novelty factor of using something new we can find start to focus on the learning.[close]
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