All entries for Friday 21 May 2004

The World of the Tavern in Early Modern Europe

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergrad/modules/hi390/

I've just been mooching around the History Department website prior to doing an e-learning review of it. Not only is it a good site, it contains information on what has to be one of the most interesting modules in the University, The World of the Tavern in Early Modern Europe, taught by Dr. Beat Kümin.

It even includes a fieldtrip to Burford in Oxfordshire!

It is of course quite a serious subject. My own research into the pubs of Thame in Oxfordshire, based on the book Thame Inns Discovered , reveals just how central they were to society and the economy.

Robert O'Toole : 21 May 2004 14:35 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Self–organization and avoiding over–designing learning

Follow-up to Viable Systems Model from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I am still slowly working my way through the Liber and Britain document on e-learning environments, a large and complicated report. It first gives some good ideas about what we should be looking for, and then goes on to evaluate most of the available systems. There are some valuable insights, particularly relating to what they term as "self-organizing behaviour". For me, based on my experience as a student at Warwick, that self-organizing behaviour is most important, both as the only way in which learning at that level can really occur, and as a valuable set of skills. Indeed they highlight that:

Education is not a commodity that can be transferred by some mechanistic process. It requires self-transformation, and often involves deep personal struggle if it is to be meaningful. It needs to be nurtured and appropriate supporting facilities need to be provided.

Consider for example the process of understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. No two people, no matter who they are, have the same understanding of it. Getting a perfectly formed and true understanding isn't the point. You engage with it from your own unique starting point and it affects you in a unique way. The general tendency will be the same, it opens up a critical mode of thinking about time, space and subjectivity, but no one expects every student to have the same understanding or even useage of that tendency.

The traditional approach to teaching philosophy, I believe, is to provide the students with some priming, and then set them off together to find their own direction, with appropriate guidance and feedback where required. The aim is that they will become more skilled at that kind of self-organized behaviour, with the role of the tutor dropping away.

The problem with the currently available Virtual Learning Environments, as my quick scan of the document shows, is that they tend toward learning that is far too over-designed and over-determined, when what we really want is to provide frameworks for learning that are highly responsive and adaptable to the individual self-organizing behaviour of the students. We can do a lot to assist the students to achieve this, and E-lab are currently inestigating quite simple methods of doing that, especially with regard to helping them recognize useful key skills and study methods.

But for most of the VLE's currently available, as the document demonstrates, supporting self-organizing behaviour is a bolted on after thought.

Robert O'Toole : 21 May 2004 11:34 |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Viable Systems Model

I'm currently reading the recent Cetis report A Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of eLearning Environments by Sandy Britain and Oleg Liber (more on that soon). They use Laurillard's Conversational Model to show how real learning behaviour is complex and emergent, and that e-learning systems need to be able to cope with that complexity. As a tool for evaluating whether current VLE's meet that requirement whilst performing their institutional roles, they use the Viable Systems Model, which I think is useful as it takes into account emergent self-organizing behaviour and managed structures. They give a good simplified diagram of the model.

Look at this model in relation to John's diagram of the e-learning architecture. It has some obvious similarities, demonstrating I believe that we are thinking about the architecture in the right way.

Robert O'Toole : 21 May 2004 09:22 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem