Subject: Comment on "Curriculum, Instruction and the Internet "
From: Andrew Seaton (aseaton@tpgi.com.au)
Date: Sun 16 Jan 2000 - 05:33:08 MET
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 15:33:08 +1100 From: Andrew Seaton <aseaton@tpgi.com.au> Subject: Comment on "Curriculum, Instruction and the Internet "
List address to send message to everyone: ifets-discuss@LISTSERV.READADP.COM
Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Muhammad has certainly raised some important issues in his discussion paper.
I'd like to make some comments on a few of them. I'll start with Muhammad's
fourth question: "Is there a rationale for the Internet to provide and
enhance curriculum and instruction for classroom and training environments?"
I don't think there is a coherent rationale yet, but important beginnings
have been made. Certainly, policy makers in my part of the world
(Queensland, Australia) are keen for teachers not to see educational
technology simply as an aid to doing the old things better, but as an aid to
doing new things. On the other hand, in practice the former is generally the
case.
A number of writers have commented on the incompatibility of information and
communications technologies and traditional school culture (see for example
S. Hodas, Technology Refusal and the Organisational Culture of Schools,
v2.3, http://www.review.com/steven/techrefusal/techrefusef.html and L.
Cuban, Computers Meet Classroom; Classroom Wins at
http://www.edweek.org/ew/vol-12/10cuban.h12). In particular, Hodas sees the
empowering effect of educational technologies as incongruent with "...the
institutional and organizational values of knowing, being, and acting on
which the school itself is founded: respect for hierarchy, competitive
individualization, a receptivity to being ranked and judged, and the
division of the world of knowledge into discreet units and categories
susceptible to mastery".
It's not only educational technologies which are incompatible with
traditional school culture, but also the increasingly wide consensus
regarding how people learn (ie. by 'constructing' understandings as their
prior beliefs, theories and perceptions are challenged by further
experience). The 'information transmission' model of teaching and learning
is no longer adequate to describe desirable or effective educational
environments, or to accommodate the potential benefits of educational
technologies. This points up what I believe to be a crucial inadequacy in
the definition of curriculum as "subject matter content". Pre-determined
outcomes and highly specified subject matter content are antithetical to the
principles of constructivism. Curriculum consists of all that learners
experience (and are unable to experience) in a school environment. Even
leaving aside the important 'content' of the 'hidden curriculum', formal
curriculum statements which give priority to "subject matter content" are
out of step with contemporary understandings of how people learn and of what
constitutes valuable learning. They are also out of step with the
implications of the 'information age', where gaining access to information
(subject matter content) is least among people's worries. Further,
curriculum statements which give priority to "subject matter content" are
out of step with the ethical/political values of the post-modern era, which
recognise the importance of respect for individual difference, autonomy and
choice.
New curricula being introduced in Queensland, for example, emphasise the
most valued curriculum outcomes, not as mastery of subject matter content,
but as 7 attributes of a life-long learner:
* knowledgeable person with deep understanding;
* complex thinker;
* active investigator;
* creative person;
* effective communicator;
* participant in an interdependent world;
* reflective and self-directed learner.
The difficulty is that education is still in the stage of transition between
the old paradigm and the new.
Muhammad's fifth question was: "In a theoretical sense, how should the
Internet be used to promote and enhance curriculum and instruction?"
What would a technology-using, constructivist pedagogy (instruction) look
like, where subject matter content was no longer the dominant characteristic
of curriculum? Xiaodong and The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt
University identify five key principles that can be used as we attempt to
design and develop efficient, constructivist learning communities. Such
communities would provide students opportunities to:
1. plan, organize, monitor, and revise their own research and problem solving
2. work collaboratively and take advantage of distributed expertise from the
community to allow diversity, creativity, and flexibility in learning
3. learn self-selected topics and identify their own issues that are related
to the problem-based anchors and then identify relevant resources
4. use various technologies to build their own knowledge rather than using
the technologies as "knowledge tellers", and
5. make students' thinking visible so that they can revise their own
thoughts, assumptions, and arguments. (Xiaodong, et.al., 'Instructional
design and development of learning communities: An invitation to a
dialogue'. Educational technology. September-October. 1995:59)
Muhammad's discussion paper presents a view of education as the transmission
of knowledge, and of the Internet as a "knowledge teller". Consistent with
this view, the WebQuest and Walden's Path strategies, whatever their merits
in other respects, suffer from the theoretical and practical limitations
that they keep the teacher in control and have learners "jumping through
teachers' hoops" to master prescribed curriculum, in principle in much the
same way as in traditional guided research projects. They also require more
access to computers than many classes enjoy.
Rather than seeing the Internet's contribution to curriculum as being the
provision of "topic by topic and subject-by-subject" information, it might
be helpful to see it more as a 'door to the real world', breaking down the
traditional isolation of the classroom, opening up information, presentation
and communication avenues, and facilitating learners' pursuit of 'real-life'
activities they see as meaningful and purposeful. (See 'Opening School Doors
to the Real World: A Review of Literature on Computer Mediated Communication
and its Role in the Creation of Constructivist Learning Environments' at
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/aseaton/philosophy/review.htm). Muhammad
mentioned some of the activities promoted by Judi Harris, which would seem
to be heading in this direction. However, much of the reported use of such
Internet activities in schools does not reflect a substantial shift to
constructivist principles of learning and teaching. The increased use of
collaborative groups, for example, is a commonly observed concomitant of the
use of information and communications technologies, but as Savery and Duffy
point out, "...the real issue is what the goal is in using collaborative
groups, since that determines the details of how they are used and how they
are contextualized in the overall instructional framework" (Savery & Duffy,
'Problem Based Learning: An Instructional Model and its Constructivist
Framework'. Educational Technology. September-October.1995:32).
Muhammad's second question was: "What specific strategies can teachers and
trainers use with the Internet to provide and enhance instruction, in
addition to the few such strategies already in existence?"
Problem-based learning activities can provide a meaningful, experiential
basis for
studies and activities in a wide variety of curriculum areas, and have the
potential to fulfil the demands of student-centredness, while at the same
time satisfying the need for appropriate assessment and accountability. A
website I have developed for students and teachers, called KidSolutions,
provides a framework, and resources support, designed to assist teachers to
coordinate such activities, and to assist students to get the most benefit
from them (see http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/aseaton/kidsolutions).
The learning activities promoted at KidSolutions involve students in
choosing, defining and exploring a real-world problem, and in developing,
evaluating, explaining, and where possible pursuing, a solution or position
on that problem. Learners are engaged, because the task is meaningful to
them and they have a higher level of self-direction. With the provision of
many genre guides and resources for students, the teacher role can more
easily shift from 'sage on the stage', to 'guide on the side'. Learning
takes place out of a need to know, students construct knowledge rather than
absorbing it, learning occurs in a real-world context and has value beyond
the school. In solving the problem, students develop skills of higher order
thinking, independent learning and collaboration, and achieve deeper
learning. While the fullest benefits of such an approach may not be realised
until more flexible and student-centred curricula are introduced, the
KidSolutions website shows teachers how many aspects of prescribed
curriculum can still be covered through this student-centred, integrated
approach. An additional advantage of this approach is that little or much
use can be made of educational technology, according to the resources available.
Cheers
Andrew
------------
Andrew Seaton
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/aseaton
---------------------------------------------------------
Forum website: http://ifets.ieee.org/
Forum's contact person: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz
Info on Join/Leave List: http://ifets.ieee.org/maillist.html
---------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Sun 16 Jan 2000 - 06:23:32 MET