Subject: re prediscussion paper
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 10 Nov 1999 - 01:33:20 MET
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 10:33:20 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: re prediscussion paper
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It may be bit early but since the timetable in Australia kind of preceds
the dates of other countries, I decided to follow the biological clock and
post my answers to questions included in the prediscussion paper.
> Pre-discussion paper:
> One issue that occurs to me while pondering collaborative online
> strategies is the following: if, in decreasing transactional distance,
> we provide strategies to increase dialogue and adapt or decrease the
> structure of the instructional material, is there a point at which the
> dialogue takes over and the original learning objectives are
> compromised?
If the objective is the dialogue itself, then the answer is no. If the
objective is to teach people to pronounce English correctly, then it may
be that dialogue about the techniques of pronouncing may not take us far.
> Are we back to discussing whether constructed learning
> is of first importance?
No: we are discussing whether dialogue is of first importance, so it
seems. Constructed learning has not yet been touched upon. Instead, a
structured learning model, in a form of a dialogue, has been proposed as
the structure for structuring (not constructing) the learning experience.
> What about content that must be learned in
> order to satisfy some criteria: do strategies to increase dialogue
> move the student away from the instructional design of the material,
No, because the assumption is that dialogue as a magic bullet can deliver
all that we need. Otherwise why would we be on the bandwagon of the
dialogue in the first place? I have not seen as yet a problematisation of
dialogue as a means of learning.
> or is it the job of a skilled facilitator to carefully control the
> dialogue to serve the ends designated by the curriculum?
It seems that it does not matter: the dialogue as a magic thing should do
the job we assigned to it, whatever the job and context. It may well be
that we grew to trust the dialogue because we can track our learners at
each step (or moment as someone put it) of their learning process and get
them on the right track when they step out. But then educational model of
this kind talks more about the concept of feedback as teachers need it and
less about the concept of feedback as learners truly need it.
Ania Lian
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