| « b2evolution bulk user import script | To open source or not? » |
As a learning professional I get a lot of material written by companies that want me to buy or recommend their products. I wish, though, there was a little bit more reality in the descriptions and a lot less hype and FUD.
As an example, here's an excerpt from a recent Learning Magazine. (NB. Other sources are just as guilty!)
[Major elearning company] unveiled a global survey that shows roughly seven out of 10 workers have been asked to accomplish tasks without receiving proper training beforehand. Within IT ... the problem is even more pronounced.
The "problem"?! Why is it a problem? It's only a problem if you believe that you have to fill people up with knowledge before they can do anything. Isn't that a rather old-fashioned view of what learning is all about? Do we train our children to walk before they are allowed to take their first steps? No! What we do is give them support and coaching in a safe environment - where failure is OK. To be honest, I quite relish being given a task I've never done before. It gives me something new to learn.
Then we get onto the buzzwords like SCORM. It sounds great in theory, but is often worse than useless in practice. (See: SCORM Warning)
And what about about all those articles that reference the pseudo-scientific concept of "Learning Styles"!
For example, the VW case study which talked about some consultants that "found" that apprentices were enthused in the workshop and not in the classroom. They wrapped it in some learning style mumbo-jumbo and redesigned the classroom learning to include more hands-on stuff, more pictures and more reference to popular figures (eg. David Beckham). That's nothing to do with individual learning preferences. It's all about knowing your audience and the sorts of things that they respond to.
The problem with the learning style approach is that it leads you, if you're not careful, into pigeonholing people, based on a questionnaire they filled in some time ago. In reality, individuals may have different ways of learning that depend on the context, on their emotional state, on the subject covered, on the time of day it is etc.
Good teachers know that they need to vary how they approach things. How they do that will take into account all those factors. (Just compare how children respond on a Monday morning to a Friday afternoon!) It's not rocket science. (See: Heterodoxy: Learning styles don't matter)
4 comments
Kia ora Mark!
We are living in the post-age-of-discovery, when the hype was about the discovery of genuinely useful things, like electricity, the ultra-microscopic, the cosmos, the computer and coffee.
Most of that is old-hat now, but I fear the hype mentality is still with us. as a result, there remains the need to find something, anything, to hype about.
The field of learning is new ground for hunting for more hype, and it is found, anywhere and everywhere we look. It’s like the after-burn one gets from staring at the bright Moon through a low power telescope. You see it no matter where you are looking, even when you’re not looking through the telescope.
The hype is as prevalent as the acronyms we find peppered throughout literature about learning. I say get rid of the hype and get rid of the acronyms and everything will be SFG, it’s not true :-)
Mark, You stated that (modifying instruction to fit the audience) was ” not rocket science.” Well, perhaps not - However, it is not commonly understood either! Time and again, I visit classrooms or participate in workshops where no consideration of ‘the audience’ is apparent.
For me ‘individual learning preferences’ and ‘knowing your audience’ are two ways of saying the same thing.:)
I believe it is easy to become too caught up in the semantics of the theories rather than understanding what the underlying principles are. Also, in my experience, what I understand as common knowledge is rarely so - For example, as a child I learned to spell with a process of “saying the word, spelling the word, then saying the word again". I ‘thought’ this was common practice, until my children were in elementary school and one of their teachers wrote home a note saying they learned this exciting new way to teach kids how to spell!! You guessed it - the ‘new’ way was “saying the word, spelling the word, then saying the word again"….something I had done twenty some years earlier:))
I never take for granted that people have a common understanding of anything:)
Thanks Marsha,
I take your point: ‘individual learning preferences’ and ‘knowing your audience’ can be two ways of saying the same thing. But too many people treat learning preferences/styles as something that is fixed and unchanging, and they therefore become a semi-official label to be attached to the person concerned. That’s what worries me.
I’ve found that education (and workplace learning) is very much guided by what’s in fashion at the time. Like clothes, the fashions come around again!
