Following on Anne Marie’s question yesterday regarding why you would use distributed models over centralised ones, I just had a thought I want to explore and throw out for discussion. I made an initial attempt at articulating my thoughts on the matter via a Seesmic comment, but having spent some more time thinking about it since then I believe there are additional ways we could explore this question in a much more detailed and structured way.
UNSW has released a document called the Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching at UNSW, which is a series of concepts discussing the way students learn the most effectively and is intended to provide a basic framework for instructors to consider when designing their courses or activities.
From the website:
“The Guidelines are designed to support and assist staff in reflecting on and improving their teaching, in order to enhance the educational experience we offer our students. “
These guidelines are not specific to technology, but rather aim to provide a holistic view that should be considered during any endeavour that aims to foster or empower learning.
The thought that occurred to me is that this framework could be a valuable starting point for discussing the efficacy, affordances and effective implementations of different technologies and seek to address, in a systematic way, the fundamental questions that Anne Marie asked.
In the case of the discussion on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) like Blackboard and Moodle versus Personal Learning Environments (PLE) such as blogs or Twitter, as a workshop activity for example, you could distribute an empty table (such as the one below) that detailed each guideline on learning in the left column and then ask groups of participants to assess the capacity or ability of a different technology or framework to facilitate each guideline – or alternatively perhaps how you could incorporate the guideline into implementation of the technology.
Once this process was completed the resulting matrix would enable you to compare the results, the relative effectiveness of one framework versus another, or perhaps begin to evaluate effective ways of working with the tools.
It seems to me that such an activity would serve to address a couple of points:
- Inspire exploration of the strengths or weaknesses of each technology and the opportunities they may (or may not) afford learners;
- Instigate discussion on effective or creative uses of learning technologies;
- Expose participants to new, innovative ways of working
