More ranting about Koohang, Riley, Smith, & Schreurs

Learning assessment elements are integral to the learner-centered model for designing e-learning assignments/activities.

Erwin (1991) defines assessment as “…the systematic basis for making
inferences about the learning and development of students. More specifically, assessment is the process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to increase students' learning and development.”

 I'm not very comfortable with the way KRSS handle assessment either. Assessment is an area fraught with politics, as primarily assessment is the exercise of power. No-one really likes to deal with that, because it feels a little unpleasant to be a wielder of power, so plenty of protective rationalisations are undertaken to avoid dealing with the power issue. That doesn't stop it hanging around.

Where to start?

If knowledge is what the student constructs, which by definition it is for us (in the context of this article, which claims to be constructivist), we can't really compare the student's knowledge with some other knowledge, say, the teachers', without violating the principle that the student is constructing, rather than reproducing, knowledge. See point 8 from Murphy's 1997 list below. The whole question of making a clear distinction between constructing & reproducing knowledge isn't vaguely close to being answered, IMO, but assuming that it might be, if the knowledge that the student has to construct has to map closely to the knowledge that some other party has constructed to be deemed "well-formed" (which I don't think you can avoid with summative assessment; formative assessment is perhaps a different matter) then that is reproduction-by-construction. If other non-constructive methods of reproduction are available, how is it the teacher's right to direct the student which method to use, in a learner-centred paradigm?

That's a problem beyond KRSS, but they seem curiously unaware of it. In fact, what's even more curious is their choice of Erwin to elucidate their view on assessment. Erwin's words strongly suggest that assessment is used by teachers (I'm assuming a bipartite situation, student-teacher/assessor, rather than the tripartite student-teacher-assessor, which of course, can exist and is significantly more complex) to control students ("making inferences", "using information"). Again this discordance student-centred rhetoric & teacher-centred assessment.

Superficially it might look like self-assessment on the part of the student addresses these concerns. Leaving aside the grave political problems with self-assessment (which political party is likely to implement self-assessment for language skills any time soon?), in a truly student-centred model, whatever has been constructed will be a perfect representation of what could have been constructed, given that student. Comparisons with other knowledges remain invalid for as long as our goal is construction rather than reproduction.


This is getting a little bit out of hand & taking up too much of my time so I'm about to close it down with a bullet point commentary on the Murphy summary below:

Murphy (1997) presented an excellent summary of characteristics of constructivism learning theory
based on a comprehensive review of literature. These characteristics are as follows:
1. Multiple perspectives and representations of concepts and content are presented and encouraged.
 These "concepts" are somehow independent of the knowledge construction process?
2. Goals and objectives are derived by the student or in negotiation with the teacher or system.
Negotiable assessment?
3. Teachers serve in the role of guides, monitors, coaches, tutors and facilitators.
4. Activities, opportunities, tools and environments are provided to encourage metacognition,
self-analysis -regulation, -reflection & -awareness.
5. The student plays a central role in mediating and controlling learning.
Is there some paradigm where the student is forced to learn? As opposed to forced to attend class?
6. Learning situations, environments, skills, content and tasks are relevant, realistic, authentic
and represent the natural complexities of the 'real world'. Why put real world in inverted commas? And if it has to be qualified withou discusion, what use is it? IF there is a real world, isn't constucting knowledge a bit fraught with risk?
7. Primary sources of data are used in order to ensure authenticity and real-world complexity.
What the hell is authenticity? Is this data theory dependent?

8. Knowledge construction and not reproduction is emphasized.

9. This construction takes place in individual contexts and through social negotiation, collaboration
and experience.
10. The learner's previous knowledge constructions, beliefs and attitudes are considered in
the knowledge construction process.
11. Problem-solving, higher-order thinking skills and deep understanding are emphasized.
12. Errors provide the opportunity for insight into students’ previous knowledge constructions.
Define "error" in the context of constructed knowledge.
13. Exploration is a favoured approach in order to encourage students to seek knowledge independently and to manage the pursuit of their goals.
14. Learners are provided with the opportunity for apprenticeship learning in which there is
an increasing complexity of tasks, skills and knowledge acquisition.
15. Knowledge complexity is reflected in an emphasis on conceptual interrelatedness and interdisciplinary learning.
16. Collaborative and cooperative learning are favoured in order to expose the learner to alternative
viewpoints.
17. Scaffolding is facilitated to help students perform just beyond the limits of their ability.
No-one performs beyond their level of ability.
18. Assessment is authentic and interwoven with teaching.” (Murphy 1997)
There's that bloody "authentic" word again.

SWOT - TEFL

TEFL is a massive complex area & I still haven't completely worked out how I want to narrow it down.

I would seriously welcome feedback on this.

 Basically I'm looking at 2 areas; PD for teachers OTOH and language acquisition OTO.

1.) To use an online learning environment for PD:

Opportunities:

For a complex of reasons, TEFL is not a particularly rewarding commercial proposition for a business. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the apparent massive demand, but in reality in the TEFL business margins are low & business failure rates are high. Many institutions run their TEFL programs at break even or as a loss leader to more remunerative educational programs (tertiary & VET, with their huge staff-student ratios and low number of contact hours are at least relatively low in labour costs). One side-effect of this is that EFL teachers are (outside the tertiary sector) generally extremely poorly paid, in an attempt to reduce labour costs, and very little investment is made in professional development, to reduce operating costs. Entry requirements to the profession are very low, so the typical EFL teacher is under trained, inexperienced and unsupported formally within the workplace. (And possibly a tad cynical). I'm looking at ways that we could, as an industry or as an employer, improve the development & support opportunity for staff to; improve their work experience, and potentially their motivation and commitment, both short & long term; to improve their classroom performance and consequently the learning experience of their students; to encourage and support debate of the ethical dimensions of TEFL.

Strengths:

if it is possible to great the sort of community energy that exists within certain, say, Facebook, communities, then the advantage an online system would have is the ability to knit together groups across multiple campuses & multiple shifts; also potentially across multiple employers, although then (see Threats) there comes the question of who is going to finance the network (if finance is required). A very large number of staff rooms in EFL-ville are not particularly happy places, for a complex of reasons within the culture& economics of the industry - see opportunites. Fragmentation of staff is common, as is the casualisation of the workforce; thus it's difficult for teachers to form relationships & leverage off them. When we review the large number of EFL communities that do exist online, they generally seem to function primarily as a clearing house for resources, rather than relationship-facilitators. I actually have observed first hand (at a large multi-campus school I managed in China) staff using Facebook as a way to establish and maintain community sensibilities, although admittedly for social rather than professional reasons.

Establishing communities goes to the core of motivation & long term commitment, but it also creates a platform for mentoring & PD relationships. Importantly, when an online platform for PD gives a great deal of potential for, is the re-use of mentoring & PD materials. Privacy, I think, has to be maintained in a mentoring relationship, but nonetheless, if a mentor creates sample work to illustrate a discussion, that work can be easily sued. The observation process is challenging for a lot of new teachers (and threatening wouldn't be too strong in many cases, having implemented an observation program into an ESL school where one had never previously existed), but videoing a class & posting the video for online discussion with a mentor is significantly less threatening. IN this case the remoteness of the online experience actually becomes a strength.

There is an enormous opportunity to develop learning support materials for online/digital use. I doubt that anyone seriously questions the potential of digital tools to do this; where the process usually falls down is that it more difficult/expensive to develop those tools than anticipated in project budgets. But, for example, pronunciation is very challenging to teach successfully & one of the main reasons is that actually the majority of teachers don't actually understand it particularly well. It's a complex subject glossed over in most teacher training. Visual tools & animations are tremendously helpful in both explaining the topic & exploring pedagogic strategies; an online PD environment is obviously well suited to such tools. Another advantage of the online environment is the possibility of fragmenting such training into what is specifically useful for a particular class - teachers feel themselves to be time-poor, and often resent resent PD as too remote.

Weaknesses:

Setting up an online community doesn't create one. The same reasons that teachers find it unnecessary to enter into a F2F community will militate against an online community. People will need to anticipate some tangible benefit. Non F2F relationships can, perhaps, more easily suffer from routinisation; the mentor who has a "standard message" which they email on a calendar basis to their proteges. As I've noted in a blog post elsewhere, online communication is actually slower & less responsive then F2F communication; this runs the risk of increasing alienation & anxiety in an online community over a 3D community.

Threats:

Money, maintenance overheads, training, infrastructure failures, external communities threaten internal communities & vice versa, politics. (Nothing major :))

2.) Online language learning

Opportunities:

My particular interest in online language learning is actually political, although it overlaps significantly with economic arguments. The boom in the popularity of the "communicative methodology" for language teaching has meant a significant increase in class cost. For the price of a grammar-translation textbook a student is lucky to receive one communicative class. This increase in cost of language acquisition, at a time and in a world where keywords of economic success are "globalisation" and "English", results in the raising of a barrier to participation in the global economic community to an increasing number of people. The question is, can online learning increase access to, and participation in, global English-language-based economic activity.

Strengths:

There are two major strengths, and a potentially significant - but possibly difficult to quantify advantage to an online language learning methodology. The obvious one is economies of scale, meaning that materials developed can be reused an enormous number of times, amortising the cost of their production to the negligible. This can be simply & persuasively illustrated by comparing existing commercial computer-based language programs, such as Rosetta Stone (USD $999 as per their website on April 15 for English) , with the cost of pursuing an equivalent proficiency (IELTS 6.5) via face-to-face tuition ($360 per week, face price, Ability Education*, over 40 weeks, $14400). 

The second major strength is the possibility of exploiting technology to deliver very precisely student-targeted training,with a consistency that human teachers would struggle to emulate. Although the teaching of pronunciation is an ideologically fraught issue in TEFL, my view is that outside the TEFL industry itself, minimal accent speakers are more highly regarded, and that this regard translates into a general increase in estimation of a speakers ability (and, often, sadly & wrongly, the speaker's intelligence). Pronunciation is largely a mater of drilling, with consistent modelling & useful feedback. Given the idiosyncrsy of pronunication issues&the time it can take to tacklethem, it is notpractical fora human teacher to undertakeiton a classroom basis. However, repetiiotn & consistency are not problematic for a computer. There are many such potential areas where twchnology may provide better modelling &feedback.

The third.more nuanced claim, is that potentially online language training might be more ideologically neutral than actual language teachers. Language & teaching are both tools wielding power, and frequently, with inexperienced teachers, or teachers lacking insight, or, sadly, abusive teachers, this power is used to benefit the teacher and not the student. Teaching English is inevitably, perhaps, a kind of colonial action & it would not be possible to remove all power from any language program; however an online program has the potential for abuses to be negotiated out, or at least down, and the (presumed beneficial) outcomes of those negotiations to be instantly available to all students.

*I work there; in reality student pay between $220-$250 after discounts

Weaknesses:

I think it is a long time in the future that computers will be "communicative".Those elements of language acquisition that are deeply communicative, such as the negotiation of meaning, the setting and achieving of goals, the relevance of context and social relationships will be difficult to emulate in software. To the extent that these are indispensable, the online training program cannot hope to be complete.

It is not at all clear that the online infrastructure required to deliver this kind of program does, or can, extend far beyond the range of existing language classes, that is, a cashed up middle class.

Threats:
Software has much promise, but fulfilment is not so easy. Cost of developing programs that meet the goals of this project may be prohibitive. There may also be significant political objections to the extension of a globalising language process into communities that are perceived, or perceive themselves, as having cultural identities under threat. Finally, it should be noted that that CBT may not be able to deliver truly effective language training.

Yes, well, indeed, what IS constructivism?

This is my first attempt to grapple with the contradictions of constructivism, as generally espoused, which I find an odd thing to be doing as it is transparently obvious to me that knowledge is now and generally has been (seen as) "constructed". Presenting this as an insight of Dewey , when it appear to have been an obsession of Socrates some two-and-one-half thousand years previously confuses me. Or, I could pluck a quote out of the mid-nineteenth century: "To learn is not to know; memory makes the one and philosophy the other" (Dumas pere). Is it a coincidence that a Doctorate of Philosphy is the highest accolade of the academy?

Maybe it isn't fair to pick on Koohang, Riley, Smith, & Schreurs, but they happened to be standing in the door at the time.

OK, so, in the "E-Learning and Constructivism: From Theory to Application" article they define constructivism for us:

… The key idea is that students actively construct their own knowledge: the mind of the student mediates input from the outside world to determine what the student will learn. Learning is active mental work, not passive reception of teaching.


Do you think it's possible to passively construct knowledge? If it were, wouldn't it still be knowledge? After all, it would still have been constructed, and that seems pretty suggestive. What's the word "actively" telling us here?


Mind is a pretty loaded word too; it's certainly smuggling something into the discussion. I hate the word mind and its compounds. I don't trust them; I find myself letting the use of it pass for the sake of politeness, and suddenly I'm apparently committed to a whole bunch of bizarre stuff. Particularly I want to know, what is this mind that is not the brain, or the brain plus the neural network attached? Anyway, I'm letting it pass again (it would take weeks to pick through it), but making the point explicit. I remain uncommitted.

Mediates, I don't understand that word. Is there an implication that it is possible to turn the mind off, and let the "outside world" flood in unmediated? I have the germ of an idea that that is the basis of autism, so should I understand that there are two mind-states? Autism, and learning? Maybe three, asleep.

Input from the outside world? So, no input from the inside world? Maybe that's the mediation, the mind mediates between itself-as-inside-world and input-as-outside-world. Of course, that's what the brain is always doing; for example, information arrives in the form of photons with a wavelength of 650 nanometers. (That, BTW, is really "pure" information in a digital 1-0 it's-there-or-it's-not kind of way. When you talk about digital learning, remember that for all time sight has been digital in a very very deep way). They eye turns the photon (well, chunks of them) into an electro-chemical signal for the brain & your brain provides a mass of associated data in various contexts; that might include the word "red" in an english-speaking brain and the idea "sex" in a contemporary of the Wife of Bath.

So, was that bit of mediated input (colour processing) from the outside world, learning? It doesn't seem very active does it? Perhaps we should bar automated brain processes. Not "mind-y" enough. Hmm, OK. What about language then? Obviously I didn't start learning English (it's my native language) until I was 8 and started actively thinking about how it worked & how to use it. The 5 or 6 thousand words I already knew by then - hang, on, could I have known them if I hadn't learned them? - plus the several hundred grammatical features with which I was familiar (great language, there's a euphemism for everything, "familiar" = "know") were acquired without effort. So, to be a constructivist, I apparently have to hold that one's native language isn't learned, nor is it known. I'm glad I started writing this down. No-one has drawn that to my attention before.

I love the idea that I get to determine what I learn. Would that be the little homunculus in the brain that makes the decision? (When he's finished mediating, no doubt) I wonder why, every time I try to study French, he decides that I can't learn it? I am really startled to hear that one learns what one decides to learn. It's very annoying that I decided to forget all that stuff that I have forgotten & and only remember that I have forgotten it. I know sarcasm isn't the soundest foundation for an argument, but this kind of determinism makes me cross. I've just discovered that everything I thought I knew because I remember reading/discussing/seeing/(pick a sense-ing)it previously, isn't actually knowledge. I mean, I've always felt pretty stupid, but now I feel a whole lot more so.

Putting aside the emotion though, maybe this is just a requirement of the constructivist view; but like the requirement for "active" mediation which ruled out language acquisition as learning & therefore knowledge, this requirement for determinism (and let me just reiterate what a fraught concept that is in the 21st century) is going to rule out a lot of stuff as knowledge as well. That may be OK, but the other stuff is still around, and has to be accounted for. I haven't seen any discussion of this in the literature so far (OK, I'm a novice in it) but frankly, the limiting seems to be a bit stealthy. When I consider the rhetorical dross that occupies large chunks of academic writing to re-inform me of the blindingly obvious, I have to say that I wouldn't mind another line reminding me that constructivism as a view of learning/knowledge is a seriously narrow view that leaves out an awful lot of stuff that the unwary non-specialist might be inclined to assume was actually in there.

I've already had a go at "active", but now I want to look at "passive reception of teaching". Is the "passive reception of teaching" actually possible? If the authors didn't think it were possible, presumably they wouldn't be trying to contrast it with the active reception of teaching, but what do you thinkg that "passive reception of teaching" actually looks like? Be careful, it's not the passive IGNORING of teaching. Is it some kind of code to denigrate the (2500 Asian years old) practice of rote learning? Do you think the writers have actually every tried to do rote learning? It's not in the least bit passive. Or, does this definition of learning actually privilege rote-learning, because of its activity? Is the student who attends lectures, takes notes (is that passive?) or listens carefully (is that passive?) or stays awake (but passively) and then accidentally remembers the lecture, learning? Or what?

This whole statement is so problematic that it looks like a memorised and recycled mantra that has undergone precisely no critical thinking on the part of its recyclers. Does that disqualify it as knowledge? It does for me; within about a page this article has gone from potentially extremely interesting to pure cant.

And that annoys me intensely, because I am a constructivist, or at least I thought I was, and being compelled to associate with this sort of nonsense makes me feel dirty.

I was originally going to post an anlysis of the whole article here, but it might get a bit long. I'll close now by quoting again:

Honebein (1996) advanced a set of goals that aid the design of constructivism in learning settings.

Pardon me while I speculate whether the definition of constructivism just offered to us qualifies for the word "design".

Relationship of mind to world
Mediated	Unmediated
Learning	Autistic	Asleep

Acquisition Method	Found in brain?	Is knowledge
thought	no	yes
thought	yes	yes
talk	yes	?
rote	yes	?
reading	yes	?
listening	yes	?
unconscious	yes	no
accidental	yes	no

So, just a couple of closing remarks on the tables: the question of retention isn't actually canvassed by the definition, but I only highlighted that for "thought". It's possible to guess that "talk" will be constituted as knowledge, because when you read the rest of the paper you find lots of emphasis on social construction, but listening is not so clear. It may be social, but it's hardly active.

The morning jog

Idea the 1st

I had an idea when I was out on the morning run; sun, wind, freshly mown grass, pain, sweat, inability to breathe, etc, etc. I will have to come back & refine it later, but I wanted to jot it down in case it struck a chord.

I've been grappling a bit with the nature of research, in fact it might be fair to say that it's been a bit of a distractor, but it does seem to me in some way pretty fundamental to why I'm here.

Why do research? Because research is a way of gathering rhetorical tools/devices/weapons - pick the metaphoric framework you want to slide into, before I decide to try and control it myself later by reducing that list down to one item - that will be used in some discourse conflict. That covers a lot of ground I think, from persuading an assessor to pass your dissertation through to sating the deep emotional need to be purple-shirtedly videoed by random tourists outside St. John's College Oxford. (If you're not doing LX1 you may miss the point of that)

It's not that I don't like the idea of research to add to the world's store of knowledge; it's a beautifully romantic idea and I'm quite susceptible. I feel it, but I don't believe it. Research adds to the world's store of research, that's it.

Idea the 2nd

 The internet interferes with the operation of time, or at least the intuition of the operation of time and in quite non-trivial ways. People feel the interenet is fast, in some way, all this information, there at your fingertips in milliseconds. Well, sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. But.

Let's say you are leaping arond the internet collecting journal article for research. Great, in a day I can track down thousands of articles. Still, reading 1000's of articles isn't going to take any less time than it ever did (in fact, if I try & read them on a screen it will take longer), so I'm going to have to select a readable number from out of the 1000. That selection process is going to take a long time. And I still have to read the articles. Has the internet saved me time? Not really. It might have increased the range of materials, but if it is going to take me a year to read them anyway, there wasn't really that much hurry to find them all on day 1.

E-mail seems so much quicker than letters. Of course it is, but email is not the same discourse as letters. E-mail substantially maps onto a conversational discourse; you can't talk to your lecturers (as a random example) but you can email them anytime. A quick comparison of face-to-face conversation with email quickly shows that email is really really slow.  There are the mechanical issues; speech runs at around 250 words per minute; typing, say, around 100 (if you're good at it). There are the structural issues; conversation has multiple parts, including clarification & confirmation. Each of these requires a separate email and since most people chunk their interaction witt email into daily/twice-daily/thrice-daily periods, and it's pretty random whether your periods corresponed with your correspondent's, you're lucky to manage a partial exchange per day. It can take several days to conduct a 10 minute F2F conversation by email.