What you really need to learn - some thoughts
Posted by: Rob Wall in learning, reflection, presentations, communicationI’m letting myself take a distraction break from marking and entering numbers into the grading program (Good old numbers … what would school be like without them?). In OLDaily Stephen has posted about his presentation “What you really need to learn“. Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the audio.
Here’s a tasty little morsel from the presentation that started some neurons to flicker:
Rather than memorizing form (the old way) multimedia teaches to look for signs in the environment (the new way)
Literacy, if I may paraphrase, is not about memorization of facts. I think we all take that as a given. Literacy is also not about finding facts, a notion that I find interesting although it is at odds with what I usually conceive of as information literacy. Literacy, of any type, is about pattern recognition, about seeing how art is like physics is like literature is like dance is like architecture is like …
Literacy is not about knowing where the dots are. Literacy is not about finding dots about which you may not know. Literacy is about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture that emerges.
Well - enough intellectual stimulation. Time to get back to judging students on how well they know where the ecology dots are.
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June 4th, 2007 at 04:41
“Literacy, of any type, is about pattern recognition, about seeing how art is like physics is like literature is like dance is like architecture is like …Literacy is not about knowing where the dots are. Literacy is not about finding dots about which you may not know. Literacy is about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture that emerges.”
Yes. Exactly. This is a very key point.
Put this in context (this came up in a discussion a few days ago)…
When we think about ‘what being a physicist is’ or ‘how we know a person is a qualified physicist’:
- these are (crucially) not redicible to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions (we can’t find a list of copentencies, for example, or course outcomes, etc., thast will define a physicist).
- the way an examiner knows whether a students is a qualified physicist is not by measuring whether they have succeeded, but rather in recognizing that they have succeeded.
(That’s why we do not want to collapse the individual data points in a ‘team’ - why we don’t want to define a ‘common goal’ - because this obscures the pattern in the team membership, and prevents us from recognizing things that are important resulting from the interactions of the members).
June 4th, 2007 at 04:49
“The way an examiner knows whether a students is a qualified physicist is not by measuring whether they have succeeded, but rather in recognizing that they have succeeded.”
… and the reason for this is that the measurement is an inaccurate abstraction - it consists in identifying a few (salient) features of ‘being a physicist’ and elevating these to the position of defining being a physicist.
But this abstraction:
- is not the same as ‘being a physicist’ - it will typically include things that (in certain contexts) are unimportant, and leave out things that are important
- is not an objective account of ‘being a physicist’ - it reflects a skewed perspective that reflects the biases and prejudices of the person doiung the defining (this is especially apparent in a rapidly changing field, where a person may be ‘recognized’ as being an authority even though he/she does not satisfy traditional ‘criteria’ (competences, outcomes) defining an ‘authority’