Ryan Randall"Teaching and Learning in an Era of Information Abundance" forum with Dave Cormier starting in 10 minutes! #openEd #pedagogy #higherEd
https://shindig.com/login/event/cormier
Edit: #FTTE is apparently the hashtag for these Future Teaching Forums!
Paraphrasing Dave Cormier: we as educators were trained to teach & learn under conditions of scarcity. So we tend to treat information as fixed, static content (static content is easier to handle under conditions of scarcity).
How do we change to better operate under new, open, conditions of knowing and doing that assume abundance? #FTTE
Nice pragmatic perspective from Dave:
Any space where information is distributed & knowledge is being created is a place where we have a degree of responsibility to participate as educators—within the bounds of each of our individual degrees of privilege. (It's far easier to work in the open as an old white dude than people multiply marginalized, for instance.)
Dave (again, my paraphrase):
In some ways, his recent work is an attempt to recast his earlier rhizome / edupunk work in a more storyteller mode, aiming to be more approachable and less framed through resistance or postmodernism.
Here's the new book, by the way: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12862/learning-time-abundance
There's an information management challenge facing librarians & other educators:
how to get very task-oriented learners to know sufficient context to be able to form useful research questions?
We still haven't caught up to how changes in search have altered research, teaching, and learning.
The older, less efficient search strategy—poring through 25 "un-useful sources" before finding a "useful" one—was the work of gaining context and seeing how communities do or do not establish consensus around claims, rather than seeing things as simple "okay, so what is the 'truth'?"
Edit: Apparently I broke the thread. (The multitasking is a lie!)
Here's the rest: https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/112174851503234624
Ryan for a permanent ceasefire (@[email protected])
My poor paraphrase of Dave: We're past the point where instructivist vs constructivist model is a relevant discussion. Constructivist approach is the only thing that really is feasible; the only way to get students to invest in doing the work is to get them to care about the work they're doing—but that's not the model we have. Formerly, we could punish people for not doing the work. But now we can't. We should take the radical, dangerous approach of treating students as humans.
My poor paraphrase of Dave:
We're past the point where instructivist vs constructivist model is a relevant discussion.
Constructivist approach is the only thing that really is feasible; the only way to get students to invest in doing the work is to get them to care about the work they're doing—but that's not the model we have.
Formerly, we could punish people for not doing the work. But now we can't.
We should take the radical, dangerous approach of treating students as humans.
Dave shared a teaching strategy he's used to demonstrate the potentials & failures of AI technologies: he has students use AI to generate claims around "learning styles", then to do it again by adding a negative word such as "hate" or "fail."
The second results will wildly diverge from the first—and students will understandably ask "which is true?".
One other professor prefaced a question by framing that as a sort of "gotcha pedagogy" inclined to exacerbate cynicism—which I consider an unfair interpretation.
Out of context, it could be interpreted as an avant-garde attempt at forcing a rupture—but a careful educator could frame this activity, as well as the whole of the course (or even of learning, broadly) as a search for consensus and an examination of how communities take multiple perspectives on shared experiences, terms, or facts.
We can work to create spaces for learning as community and liberation, even though our neoliberal institutions were not designed for this.
We can conduct teaching and learning through a mode of agonistic disagreement, although since at least Reagan/Thatcher, our societal mode has hewed ever closer to pure antagonism of "each against each" rather than "e pluribus unum."
We can learn from the "teach the controversy" moment of the 90s and update that instead to "teach the community, teach the consensus."
This approach would ideally—to the degree we've been able to establish confidence, care, trust, and community with our students—mitigate against the ongoing ascendance of cynicism, skepticism, and instrumentalization within and beyond our spaces of learning and knowledge creation.
Clearly I need to figure out how to turn some of these thoughts into a blog post or other type of essay…
…maybe it'll also help to use N. Katherine Hayles' examination of "information is" vs "information does" in this context?
Anyways, it was a great, generative forum, and as always, lovely to think along with Dave's ideas.
Here's his site, if you've never encountered it before: https://davecormier.com/edblog/