Both of the articles for this week talked about the need to think about learning as a process that does not end when an objective/goal is reached, but that learning should be expansive in that it prepares us for doing new things in new situations in the future. Pea talked about this from an explicitly design perspective, emphasizing that working with tools does not only offload intelligence to tools and thus reduce what the user must know/do, but working with tools/resources also expands possibilities for what can be accomplished (quantities of knowledge in any given situation are not fixed). Branford & Schwartz talked about learning environments from a more analytical perspective, identifying qualities and framings of tasks/settings that elicit productive activity (as well as ones that constrain it). Both talked about how people's previous experiences (Bransford & Schwartz) and desires (Pea) affect what people pay attention to and thus accomplish in any given setting.
This raises for me the question of design versus use: Can we give people initial experiences or cues that attune their perception to the designer's hoped-for affordances? In line with Bransford & Schwartz, I agree that all instructional activities should begin with eliciting learners' pre-existing ideas and intuitions (even if they are "wrong"), but is this enough to spark interest in topics such as conic sections (math)? If people are always restructuring situations as they act in them (both articles) based on their previous experiences (and Dewey told us how diverse those can be), how can we productively predict what people will do and what they will come away knowing? This might go back to designing for specific users (identifying what they see as the problem, having empathy, prototyping, revising), but what about teachers who are trying to design curriculum for kids they haven't met yet? I know in teaching we always look for formative information that we can use to shape what we do in the future with our students, but the idea that the environment always changes under human inquiry seems to theoretically prevent designing anything. Furthermore, how can we design for future learning if our students have diverse interest-driven learning trajectories (what is the trajectory for learning that comes from learning about conic sections; also, Dewey's continuity of experience comes to mind)?
Maybe the answer to this is that we want to teach for disciplinary practices (knowing how to use what resources when based upon the situation and one's goals), since both authors talked a lot about the value of activity/doing rather than on the internalization/acquisition of specific concepts. But then we would need to design for practices, which means we would have to identify practices and why/when people might find them useful, and I know for mathematics the literature on this is sparse (CCSS Mathematical Practices are not satisfactory to me). HELP!
My Critique of Ayiti:
What students are likely to learn: How hard it is to keep a family healthy, happy, and with enough money to live in Hati, and how these things are interdependent.
How students are expected to engage in content: Students make decisions about whether to ignore health problems, rest, or treat them, and then they watch the family's statistics move in response to the students' decisions. This works for money and happiness as well.
Why particular design decisions right be more or less effective at supporting student learning: I think it would be more useful if players could see where there money was coming from and where it was going. It appears that a certain amount of money is spent every season, but other than illnesses, where does the money go? How much for food, etc? Why can mom be a market woman only some of the time? Is it harder to make/keep money in the rainy season? All of this is hidden in the general way money is dispersed. I am also not sure why I have to watch the year go by with the green vine filling up... It's boring. I just want to get back to my family and making decisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment