Ahhh!! Some interesting grist for the blog mill buried in a comment from dancingnancy33 on one of Traci’s posts!

Learning and How It Occurs
Many times the way I present information in different formats makes a big difference. While these formats may have worked out for me, there is still no proof out there to back them up.

THIS is actually a Good Idea and there’s actually some research out there on repetition of message that shows that the more times people hear a particular message, the more likely they are to remember it. Therein lies the dichotomy and probably the root cause of the confusion with learning styles.

The “Learning Styles” notion holds that you — as teacher — should find out what the various student’s learning styles are (Visual, Audio, Kinesthetic) and tune your message to that style in order to tap into a student’s preferred mode of learning.

That’s not what presenting “information in a different format” is. That’s just good practice. Sometimes you have to say things more than once for people to “get it” and it’s generally considered to be more effective if you vary the message a bit each time so that it addresses the point from a different perspective. This re-statement and re-iteration of the point has nothing to do with so-called “learning styles” because you are not catering to a particular style for particular students.

The difference is that for any give subject matter any given student may “get it” based on any of the following:

1. A particular explanation
2. A particular encoding
3. The repetition
4. All the above

Where the notion of “learning styles” falls down — and the reason that it will probably never be proven — is that you cannot tease out the message from the medium. The simple restatement of a message from one medium to another confounds the research because you can never be sure if it’s the change in medium or the change in the nature of the message needed to use that medium that has caused the change in outcome. Furthermore, any given student may “get it” based on one medium/message pair for one topic but a different medium/message pair for another. Yes, this is based on some characteristics of the student but not any given “learning style.”

Rephrased:

You do NOT put it in different formats and repeat it in order to cover the learning style continuum. You use different formats and repetition to attempt to find a representation of an idea that resonates with all the students through the use if repetition and variety. THOSE two constructs have been well established.

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Stevie Wonder sang it and made it popular in a Rolling Stones tour in ‘72:

When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way, no, no, no

We’ve talked about myths before and this is a good time to recap one that just came up on another blog — the so-called “Learning Pyramid.” (See Joe’s post for the background*). I left a link to the refutation, explanation, and dangers in using the information. Please note that the “Learning Pyramid” is *not* “Dale’s Cone” and that, while the two have been conflated, they are not related.

Compare that to the discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

What’s the difference between the Learning Pyramid or Learning Styles and Bloom’s Taxonomy?

None are predicated on any kind of valid scientific research. All three are organizational structures for thinking about how to arrange educational activities.

The difference lies in the “predictive” or “diagnostic” value of the various tools. Bloom’s Taxonomy only purports to be a way of organizing educational experiences without predicting or projecting any kind of causal relationship. Restated: Using Bloom won’t let you predict outcomes any better than not using Bloom. It *might* help you arrange for educational experiences that foster the kinds of content engagement you want but there is no causal relationship. With both the Learning Pyramid and Learning styles, the fundamental purpose alleges to relate activity to outcome — postulating causal relationship between the teacher/student relationship and the learning outcomes. Neither has any credible research to back up that claim of causal relationship.

Remember the Wizard’s First Rule

“People will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true.”

– Terry Goodkind

If your practice is based on opinion unsupported by research, then it’s Art. Scientific inquiry into Art makes as much sense as teaching a dog to talk. Yes, you may succeed, but the dog still has nothing to say.

* Sorry, Joe. I’m not singling you out. This is a commonly held belief. And yes, Traci. If Morehead is teaching you this, it’s crap.

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One of the theoretical constructs that’s been going around for the last couple of years, but remains under the radar of most educators is the idea of distributed representation. I wrote about it last year (and the year before).

Distributed Representation
One of the things I was trying to wrap my melon around was how this all related to Zone of Proximal Development and there doesn’t seem to be any conflict. If we stipulate that an knowledge domain has a set of potential connects then ZPD is represented by the relative proportion of those connects that have been realized. If an individual has realized all potential connections, that would define the condition of “known.” If an individual has realized none of the potential connections, that would represent “unknown.” Someplace in between would represent the zone of proximal development, that is, a place where new knowledge could be linked in. For the purposes of the network representation, that would be “the edge.”

I really like the idea of knowledge as network. It gives us a view of learning that’s more process oriented than objective oriented. While it’s true that most people have some kind of objective in mind while engaged in learning activities (”how do I get a home loan?” or “how do fix the kitchen sink?”), it’s equally true that a huge proportion of learning falls into the “I wonder what *this* does…” category. The theory of distributed representation gives us an operational definition of learning that’s consistent with both notions — that is, learning is the process of adding connections.

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In reviewing my posts from the last couple of weeks, I realized that I’ve neglected to share my views on the role of teacher. Here’s what I said last year and I think I still believe this:

The Teacher
My thinking is that there really is only one role for teacher — to serve as a bridge between the learner and knowledge. There are other things that a person might do for/with a learner that, while part of the human relationship, are not part of teaching. While this may seem an unnecessary splitting of hairs, what I’m trying to accomplish here is a precise construction of Teacher.

Many of you have pointed out the various relationships between the person designated “teacher” and the person designated “student” and I have no argument with those characterizations. I would (and do) argue that these other relationships are not the relationship of “teacher to student” but confound our ability to clearly identify what the teacher does.

To illustrate, think of a cab driver. The role of cab driver is to drive you from one place to another for hire. That’s the role. Along the way, the cabbie may engage in conversation, out of a sense of “customer service” or boredom or whatever. He or she may offer you tips on what to do, where to go, or what to see while in town. They may provide information on local customs or upcoming events. All of these are good and interesting — even valuable — from the perspective of the person(s) in the back seat, but they are ancillary to the role of cab driver.

As I said in the post cited above, this may seem like unnecessary splitting of semantic hairs, but failing to do so confounds our basic understanding of the role of teacher.

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The pictures on ZPD appeared to be useful so please examine the pictures in this old post from my old Cognitive Dissonance blog.

On Context
A person exists within his or her own context which is, in turn, embedded in a larger global context. Each person has an archive that is both internal (memory) and external (artifacts) which help the person operate in context.

There have been posts about the notion of teacher as bridge between known and unknown in our discussion of ZPD, and this notion is echoed here altho perhaps not in the way you’re all thinking. As you consider ZPD, remember that it’s not something that “students have” but rather a general descriptive map of knowledge with the places where the fertile ground is highlighted. It’s not that some people have “high ZPD” or “low ZPD” but rather how much of a given domain is available to an individual. The irony here is that somebody with a very shallow knowledge base on a very large set content domains is going to be an ‘easier’ student to teach because their ZPD is going to be — for lack of a better term — wider and the teacher will have less bridging required.

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FINALLY!! I’ve been working all semester to get a rise out of you people!! Overlooking the disconnect between “distance education” and “distant learning” — remember there is no such thing as distance learning and all education is at a distance — this is an excellent question.

From a Comment on “Organizer.”
I sometimes am trying to figure out, am I in a Distant Learning Class in the area of Education Technology or am I taking Philosophy 101?

One of the problems we face as distance educators and educational technology is dealing *first* with Education. When dealing with teachers in general, the challenge is to break them out of complacency and to challenge well established systems of belief which are antithetical to the deeper understandings necessary to adopt and adapt to the world of “distance education.” This is not a criticism but an acknowledgement that the theories and practices established over many years — sometimes decades — are well established and deeply imbedded. This is important because dealing with distance requires a shifting of philosophical under-pinnings from those well established paradigms.

We’ve been dealing with those as we go along, starting with the notion of what constitutes distance while we dealt with the tools needed to overcome it and the historical foundations of the field. We moved on to a detailed exposure to the various tools from the simple to the most complex and ending that module with some ideas on how they might be combined. That week wasn’t as effective as I might have hoped, but some units just aren’t. We’ve been addressing the role of teacher this week as we look at roles and practice and we’ll be going to the role of student and some of the theoretical foundations. In the last instructional module, we’ll be looking at the larger issues of assessment and research in educational environments before we finish up with the capstone projects.

The organization is actually fairly logical as we move from the foundations level, to the tool level, to the person level, to the system level, and then put it all into practice in the final module with your application of the knowledge during the last 3 weeks. At each step, during each week, I’ve given you a set of tasks to do. The tasks expose you to different aspects of the domain. What I have *not* done — and what a few of you find objectionable — is explain what it is I want you to learn. I appreciate that this violates several of your long-standing and well-established beliefs. It’s also a valid strategy and very effective for getting complacent students out of their comfort zones.

I will share an objective with you at this point:

The students will be exposed to, and be given practice in an online delivered environment that demonstrates the opportunities for consistent engagement with the content base. This will be accomplished by creating an online learning environment that engages the student several times a week for relatively short periods of time, by using a variety of tools and techniques to engage the students with the content, with each other, and with the instructor, and by demonstrating valid educational strategies that are not commonly used in classroom based environments.

One of those strategies is ‘learner centered design’ and another is ‘discovery or exploratory learning.’ Many of you are thrown off by the fact that I refuse to tell you what I expect you to learn because that violates your understanding of what a teacher does. But if I *were* to explain it — in detail and in advance — then you lose the opportunity to shape your own understanding in ways that are significant to you.

Rephrased - If I explain it to you, you begin to think like students and not like learners.

In a certain sense you *are* taking Philosophy 101 because learning to deal with these technologies requires you to reset a your understanding of what you believed education to be in order to be effective — not only online, but in every environment where education is at a distance.

And remember that all education is at a distance.

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In the discussion of creator vs organizer, the majority miss the reality that you are not in the process of “creating” or even “discovering” new knowledge. The rules of math are the rules of math. Nothing you do as a teacher has any effect on the Associative Property. Grammar is grammar. Adverbs modifiy verbs and you’re not charting new sentences that have never been seen before. Only the language changes syntactical rules, not the teacher. You are not discovering new geography nor are you producing insight into the socio-economic realities of the world at large.

Those of you who think you’re creating new knowledge in the students are missing the reality that the knowledge exists whether the students know it or not. You’re only making the knowledge available to them. You are not creating anything new in terms of the content domain — although you may be breaking new ground in how to organize it. To the extent anything *new* is created, it’s the students — not the teachers — who are creating their own new connections to the knowledge which existed but of which they were not aware.

In this class I’m not creating new knowledge. The sum of the content domain will not be changed by what I do as a teacher here. Nor will it be modified in any way by your participation in the class. While it is true that I *may* discover some tool, technique, process, or paradigm in teaching you, the reality is that my activity as teacher is not having any effect on the field as a whole.

Logically, therefore, I cannot be a creator of knowledge.

My role as teacher is to organize the domain. My job is to figure out how the pieces fit together and to line them up for you to deal with. My task is to find the order, granularity, and level for this knowledge domain to permit you to operate in your ZPD — not so little that you don’t get into the zone, not so much that you’re overwhelmed beyond your ability to cope. This is the process that every teacher does for every subject for every student. It’s the identical process for math, and language arts, and history, and science. There are speciaized encodings and activities that work better for some subject matter than others, but the process — what it is that teachers do — is organizing an existing content domain to facilitate the learner’s ability to bridge the gap between not-knowing and knowing.

The “trick” part of this trick question is that I am not only a teacher, but a researcher. As researcher, this class is my lab. In a sense, every student is a subject because every teacher strives to improve his or her understanding of the processes involved in the teaching. Through the sum of that activity, new knowledge may well be created — but not in the subject areas of the courses so much as knowledge about the relationship beteween education and learning. This gets a little bit reflexive when you consider that the knowledge domain here is distance education so some of the knowledge *I* gain from teaching you may increase the general understanding of the domain as a whole, but generally speaking — not.

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For those who are still confused about ZPD, maybe this article from last year will help clear it up.

\ZPD
Zone of Proximal Development is one of those buzz phrases you hear bandied about a lot in ed psych. It’s often mis-understood and probably needs some clarification.

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The Question of the Week.

Discuss.

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