An interesting article from Canadian George Siemens, dealing with how technology supports "off-loading " human knowledge.
Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn. United States Distance Learning Association. Jan05_01
Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.
Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology.
Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
A central tenet of most learning theories is that learning occurs inside a person.
Additional concerns arise from the rapid increase in information. In today’s environment, action is often needed without personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our primary knowledge. The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.
We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections.
Butterfly Effect - “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” profoundly impacts what we learn and how we act based on our learning."Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.
Conclusion:
The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.
Pedagogy First? Whatever. In dealing with faculty and instructional designers, a series of almost default phrases are vocalized once technology is mentioned: "We need to start with pedagogy"..."It's pedagogy first".Posted by cmwillis at July 11, 2008 12:16 PM | TrackBack
Or, whenever I'm in a meeting and someone says "pedagogy first", the apparently genetic instinct to nod viciously is enacted by everyone around the table. "Yes, that is right. We need to have priorities here. Let's tame technology and focus instead on what we already know and are comfortable with. Let’s ensure that technology does not get away from the tried and true method of containing innovation and new approaches.”
Let's abandon the somewhat silly notion of pedagogy first and recognize
that the choice of technology is driven by many contextual factors and
therefore context is what we are evaluating and considering when we
first start talking about possible technology to use. Then, after we
have selected technology, we can start talking about pedagogy. Pedagogy
is just not a practical starting point for deciding the technology we
should use.