February 13, 2005
I know of relatively few descriptions of innovative blended teaching coming from Art & Design programs. Examples may exist, but they are dwarfed by the case histories emerging from Liberal Arts or Business School courses. And then I stumbled upon this:
http://research.the-bac.edu/sva/index.htm - Sally Levine and Warren Wake’s 2000 presentation to the National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. They titled their presentation, Education of Artists, Hybrid Teaching: Design Studios in Virtual Space, and delivered it on October 20, 2000 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City – about 5 blocks away from where I live.
They begin their paper with an appreciation of hybrid teaching and an acknowledgement that it is poised to become the standard for future college education - the classroom remaining, however, the strategic site for teaching and learning. (Justifying this statement, they pull a 1998 quote from Saskia Sassen, the University of Chicago Professor of Sociology and globalization theorist: “there is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully (digitized industry,” that even “sectors that are highly digitized require strategic sites.”)
(more…)
February 12, 2005
What is it about this image, other than the fact that it is a visual representation of my del.icio.us tags, that is so compelling to me? Imagine each of these tags as an active link that connects me to my bookmarks and the bookmarks of others using the same tag. Imagine that this is not a series of tags at all, but a clickable navigational map of course content in a course entitled Ideas & Methods in Education, and that the words assume their hierarchical presence according to students’ contributions to the “discussion/conversations.”
February 10, 2005
New tools resemble old tools - not necessarily in design or purpose or function - but in how we use them. And how we use them is more often than not determined by our comfort with custom and our need to maintain predictable levels of control in our lives and our work. So we use word processors like typewriters, eschewing their unfamiliar and complicated attributes.
Some tools appear to be new, but in practice replicate the paradigms of the tools they were designed to replace. Antonio Dias de Figuereido, Professor of Informatics Engineering and Information Systems at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal put this forcefully in a 2003 call for chapters of a book he was editing, MANAGING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL SETTINGS: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT.
(more…)
February 4, 2005
What is, apart from the obvious time and space conveniences, so instantly appealing about a blended learning environment?
What does this question assume? What are its underpinnings?
- familiarity with face-to-face and online instruction (synchronous and asynchronous), and belief in the legitimacy (though not necessarily equal legitimacy) of both
- learning goals differ in kind and require different approaches to instruction
- learning is multimodal - it occurs within and on many fronts - and is enhanced as access to those fronts expand
- true assessment of learning requires that students be given multiple opportunities and venues to express what they’ve learned
- instructional theories are not religions, and a versatile environment(s) can accommodate their amalgam
- teaching requires bridging subject matter and student
- learning is most effective with that bridge in tact as well as others that connect student to teacher, student to student and student to community
- interconnections are more valuable than exclusivity
- tailoring instruction is beneficial
- synergies between the ways students live and the ways they can learn are worth exploiting
