Monday, November 10, 2008

Teaching by Design

Video and PPT by Peter Goodyear at a seminar in September: http://www.jcu.edu.au/teaching/JCUPRD_038072.html
Some scrabbled notes of the points that leapt out at me...
'the challenge is all about integration not replacement' i.e. meshing [thinks - as opposed to mashing(!?)] 'teaching as design' - the linear relation between time/place of a lecture and the potential for a learning task which may take a while to develop but is not so constrained.
@ 26 mins enriching, 'not content, not syllabus coverage, activity... what the learner does... technology should fit around that', 'learning how to think for a living', engage students in activities which lead to meeting desired outcomes - that may work (via ISD) for certain training situations (e.g. armed forces and industry) but not in HE, we want creativity as they work they develop competence in becoming autonomous, we dont know what students do with the tasks we set! Design is 'indirect' as we cant control everything
@ 38 need to pay attention to tasks, environment, tools, community - but in the end, the activity takes place in a space that is 'co-configured',
@ 46 TasD pedagogically neutral, interpretation of task is deeply influential and emergent activity shows that not everyone benefits from our TasD, Ron Barnett - students need space to get it wrong, but, their choices about technology, community, etc. have a huge impact on the effectiveness of the task. We should scaffold to guide, but the institution's culture also works against effectiveness so you get overworked students
sustainable innovation - has to be continuous and central to the university - a shared sense of how it fits in to this broad learning ecology - what information does the library need. Every business unit needs to see itself as a learning unit within a learning organisation - should be able to describe what good learning looks like and how they contribute to which part of that... but time to engage in these discussions...?
There was also some talk of research they had done which shed light on the 'digital native' concept. Students who were technology-savvy would still expect the university to know best regarding use for learning at university.