Well, the penultimate topic for EL30 is on the subject of experience.  I wasn't quite sure, when I started watching that week's recorded chat, what I would get from the week, but unsurprisngly I had a few "AHA!!!" moments.

From the course page: "It is a truism that we learn from experience, and yet creating a role for experience in learning has been one of the most difficult problems in education. And so much of education continues to rely on indirect methods depending on knowledge transfer - reading, lectures, videos - rather than hands-on practice and knowledge creation."

One of the first connections that came to mind was a connection to an overall curriculum.  When someone attends your school, or even your program, should there be  a requirement to go out in the field and do something?  Let's say for my department (we educate applied linguists who aim to be language teachers), should everyone be required to do a practicum as part of their degree? Right now a practicum is technically required but it can be waived if  a student has teaching experience already. Anecdotally I can say that about 90% of students waive that requirement.  However, even if they are experienced teachers, what would happen if we asked them to go to someone else's classroom instead? What can they gain by experiencing something outside of they "regular" way they do things as teachers? What if they step out of their own boundaries to experience something new?

Another connection that came to mind comes from my own teaching experience. As some might know, I also teach part time in a graduate instructional design program. Over the past six or so years I've been in conversations with fellow ID professionals about instructional design and our own learning experiences.  Invariably a topic comes up where an IDer says "we didn't learn X in class" or "they don't teach you Y in school".   Substitute "X" with some software and substitute "Y" with some soft skill.

This really connected for me when Stephen asked Amy: "Transitioning from A to B; how to you do that?" and  Amy responds: "by doing it!"  It is a little surprising to me, as someone who works in higher education, that we don't prepare our learners (mentally) for the fact that a plan of study (an MA or MEd degree for example) is a finite period of time in a student's life. It is not possible to teach everything that everyone needs to know to be a respectable professional in such a finite time. This mindset also assumes that knowledge is finite and that what we teach today is valid forever and always.  We should be encouraging students to go out there and just do it if there is something in particular that they want to learn. We should be designing into our courses space for experimentation and self-learning (not just guided learning). For example, if someone wants to learn Adobe Captivate or Articulate, they should hit up some tutorial on youtube, lynda (in the US this might be free with a public library subscription), or the help pages of the relevant software.  Assuming that you will learn Adobe Captivate (or other such eLearning authoring tool) in a graduate course, and by extension you will master certain eLearning authoring packages through a graduate course is a waste of a graduate course in my opinion :-). This kind of knowledge gets outdated quickly.

Some other ideas that bubbled up throughout the chat:

A hashtag for every book chapter or recipe for activity.
Amy's created a hashtag for each of her chapters in her book.  This way people can report back when they try something in a learning activity book, or engage in a discussion around the content of a given chapter.  This way you make the book a living book enriched by the thoughts, ideas, and mods of others who are part of that community of reading that book or chapter.

Amy: creativity is best achieved when there are constraints
I agree wholeheartedly!  I remember a time, before mLearning took off in the US, that I was trying to convince my fellow instructional designers that we should be looking at mLearning.  How can we provide learning through non-smartphones?  That was exciting to me. One of my colleague looked at me straight in the eye and quite seriously said that they wouldn't invest in learning about mLearning until Flash was available on the iPad. An entry level model for an iPad 2 at the time cost $500 (and Flash never came to the iPad 😏). This was incredibly short sighted of my colleague, but really telling. This person had no constraints - elearning authoring packages were provided to them, obviously iPads and smartphones were provided to them, so they designed in abundance.  When you design in abundance you can't necessarily think creatively!


I like Amy's approach of doing things in small chunks.
The rationale to do this is that it increases motivation and decreases stress of getting started.  It' sort of how I composed this post (over 4-5 days if you include the viewing time).  I will be the first though to acknowledge that  I am also pretty bad at going with this advice ;-) I'll do it, but I always feel that I should be doing more.  I guess I should get comfortable with going "at the right pace".


Amy: Propose a project for students in the next semester
I love the idea. I liked it since I first came across it in DS106!  I need to start looking for ways to make it happen in the courses that I teach :)


Amy: it's ridiculous that we silo things in education. 
I agree.  One of the things that I have noticed in academia, from my own back yard, is that there are neither good collaborative relationships between academic departments (mixed degrees, cross-functional learning, joint offerings), nor good collaboration with instructional designers and faculty. At the moment the relationship between entities feels the different parties involved feel like it's all a zero sum game.  We need to break down the silos both between academic units, and between academics and support of various sorts.



OK, that's my take from this week.  Thoughts?