#Change11 #CCK12 Student Owned Learning Engagement Model

This Student Owned Learning Engagement Model sounds useful.

Simon Atkinson elaborates in his paper:

“Expectations of systematized pedagogical planners and embedded templates of learning within the institutional virtual learning environments (VLEs) have, so far, failed to deliver the institutional efficiencies anticipated. In response, a new model of learning design is proposed with a practical, accessible, and freely available “toolkit” that embodies and embeds pedagogical theories and practices. The student-owned learning-engagement (SOLE) model aims to support professional development within practice, constructive alignment, and holistic visualisations, as well as enable the sharing of learning design processes with the learners themselves.”

The SOLE model’s (Atkinson, 2010) original development goals were threefold:

1. to embed pedagogical guidance regarding constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2007) inside a learning design tool easily accessible to staff;
2. to produce a practical model that captured the lessons to be learnt from Laurillard’s representations of conversational learning processes (Laurillard, 2002);
3. to enable the development of a practical toolkit which would make patterns of learning design shareable and transparent to students and colleagues (Conole & Fill, 2005).

I have been thinking about how learning engagement could be supported and evaluated under MOOC.  As the current MOOC (based on connectivist model) has a focus on individual learning goals (and outcomes), rather than course learning outcomes, this learning engagement model would need to be adapted to provide a flexible framework for participants to work on.

How to use the toolkit for evaluating and assessing the learning in MOOC?  The breakdown of elements of “learning” might be useful if the individual learning and development plans, the personal learning process and connections are linked to the toolkit.

A Digital of What?

Social Media and Academia

In this post on social media’s slow slog into the ivory towers of academia:

“we assumed these kids already know, and we don’t teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don’t. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?”

Assumptions, assumptions after assumptions, that is why I think we need to question those assumptions behind, especially when we have little ideas about the background knowledge, skills and experience of the kids.

Digital Natives and Digital Migrants

It seems unhelpful to mark and distinguish the students/learners basing upon the labelling of digital “natives” from digital “migrants”.

How about the users’ behaviour? This report  published by JISC on the digital information seekers provides a comprehensive account on users’ behavior.   Refer also to this Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies  on the use of library facilities, resources and technologies.

Visitors and Residents

Another way of looking into users’ behavior is based on Visitors and Residents, as shared by David White.  See this post on Visitors and Residents for further details.

Downside of Social Media

What are the downside of social media based on an information over-abundance?  This post may strike a chord for many people who found information abundance an issue. There are concerns on the impact of internet on our attention and cognition.

 Nicolas Carr’s influential article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for the Atlantic suggested the Internet was sapping our attention and stunting our reasoning.

How about the use of digital resources by students and staff?

In this Disappearing of digital resources:

“It wasn’t surprising to find that students were Googling for anything they could get their hands on but the extent to which academics are doing this as well was unexpected. The difference between the groups was that staff have the expertise required to critically evaluate what they find while the students are nervous about waiting-time using resources which might prove to be off-topic.”

So a digital of what?  Residents and Visitors, and a blend of them.

Postscript: An excellent paper on Visitors and Residents.

An interesting post here relating to Digital Native

Creative Learning Theory

I will be working on a paper on Creative Learning Theory soon.

Why creative learning?

In this article on wikipedia on Creative thinking:

Some see the conventional system of schooling as “stifling” of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children.^[88][89][90] Researchers have seen this as important because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate and creative problem solving will be needed to cope with these challenges as they arise.^[90] In addition to helping with problem solving, creativity can also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so.^[88][89][91] See the Waldorf School as an example of an education program that promotes creative thought.

Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake.^{[89][90][92][93]} To promote creative thinking educators need to identify what motivates their students and structure teaching around it. Providing students with a choice of activities to complete allows them to become more intrinsically motivated and therefore creative in completing the tasks.^[88][94]

Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it.^{[88][89][90][92]}

Several different researchers have proposed methods of increasing the creativity of an individual. Such ideas range from the psychological-cognitive, such as Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, Synectics, Science-based creative thinking, Purdue Creative Thinking Program, and Edward de Bono‘s lateral thinking; to the highly-structured, such as TRIZ(the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving) and its variant Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving (developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller), and Computer-Aided Morphological analysis.

The MOOC and many other network learning based on Web2.0 experiences reveal the importance of creativity as a pedagogical framework, where teaching and learning is based on the creation of networks and artifacts, and the subsequent remixing and re-purposing of artifacts, and the adoption of tools and technology to aid in communication and learning.

I have been thinking about the title:

A theory on Creative Learning at a digital learning era.

I would like to consider research into the creative learning that relates to past MOOCs, the present eduMOOC and Mother of MOOC that is forth coming.

I would likely start with a Google Document or wiki for documenting the research and writings.

This would be an open research project, and I hope any one interested in this would build on the theory.  Creativity is all about us, not just the creator of the theory. That is my proposition.

More to come at a later stage of my writing.