Networked Learning - key points from Module 3 Topic 3.4

There are 6 broad areas within the pedagogic framework for networked learning:

1. 1.Openness in the educational process using a learning community
2. Self-determined learning in which the learner takes prime responsibility for their own learning needs.
3. Real purpose in the collaborative process using features such as problem based learning or action learning sets which promote positive interdependence. Outcome interdependence Relating to the group and task and means interdependence (the action needed to be taken by the member).
4. Supportive learning environment - encouraging and facilitating each other, intellectually challenging but able to work without fear.
5. Collaborative assessment of learning - self-peer-tutor assessment collaboration
6. Assessment and evaluation of the learning process is ongoing, learners can influence the structure of the programme.

Problem-oriented Project Pedagogy (POPP) is a pedagogical framework where problem and project-based learning forms the “pedagogical foundation for the integration of ICT (Information & Communication Technology) in a pedagogy of open–distance learning”. Some of the key elements of this approach are as follows:

1. Students have to go through different systematic stages: preliminary inquiry, problem formulation, theoretical and methodological considerations, experimentation and reflection
2. The learning content is related to the real world and to the learners’ experience
3. The projects are carried out in collaboration with companies and public institutions
4. Learning takes place by doing, and through dialogue, communication and collaboration in joint groups (this is facilitated by ICT)

Educational Digital Technologies and Learning

Passey (2014) Educational Digital Technologies and Learning.

Begins by explaining that many studies have failed to show that technology specifically enhances learning due to the many variable. But observes that 'inclusive technology enhanced learning' is possible if each person's difference is taken into account.

Learning can be:

• Neurobiological (the way that biological structure enables learning)
• Cognitive (processes that occur internally that constitute ways of learning)
• Emotional (approaches we individually take in understanding and being involved in our own learning, and short- and long-term interests we take in that learning)
• Social (ways that learning occurs in different social settings and circumstances)
• Societal (long-term interests and opportunities that drive our commitment to learning)

p.14: Learning is concerned with choice on the part of the learner; imposing learning through a singular approach or concept or theory may not do this choice justice. When educational digital technologies are involved, choice of learning adopted by the learner becomes not only more important, but provides for more potential - so long as those supporting learning can recognise the potential range of alternatives and options, and these are also made available to the learner.

p.20: Words used to describe learning can be groups into two taxonomies

• higher-level category termes 'aspects' of learning (referring to perspectives, aspects or domains, and
• lower-level category caned 'elements' of learning *referring to much more specific processes of learning within each aspect.

 

Aspects of learning

 

p.21 Megacognitive Concerns - leading to deeper and wider learning

This aspect of learning consists of elements becoming recognised as fundamental to developing 'expert learners', deeper and wider learning, concerned with learning that goes beyond the ability to just memorise facts or understand a topic range. These elements encompass abilities that enable learners to transfer their learning both within and across subject or interest domains, with applications of involvement in real and authentic learning situations.

Three key elements fundamental to effective learning (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000):

1. Knowing about the 'big picture' - having a sufficient overview of a field to understand how additional details fit within a wider canvas, being able to reposition understanding or ideas on the basis of comparison, contrast, match and integration with that wider picture and building it further.
2. Transfer of learning - recognising that learning in one setting can have potential value in other settings, being able to draw on previous knowledge through a 'past' transfer, or thinking about how to use learning in possible 'future' transfer situations/
3. Reflecting on previous learning - on knowledge and ideas, selecting and accessing appropriate mechanisms to do this, and considering the way new knowledge and ideas fit within an existing canvas, perhaps challenging, adding to or reinforcing previous details.

 p.22 Engaging learners in meaningful and authentic learning is also important (1997).

 p.23 Cognitive Concerns - Content and Process

This aspect concerns elements affecting impact of information or external stimuli on the internal mind, forms of sensory stimuli engaging learners, ways in which information is handled within an existing internal information context, and ways a learner can demonstrate or use acquired learning.

Three distinct areas in cognitive aspect (Childs, 1973):

1. Internalisation - how knowledge and ideas are engaged, and how they are brought into mind
2. Internal cognitive processes - active processes in mind, manipulating knowledge and ideas, allowing them to be considered in the context of existing knowledge and ideas already held in mind, and integrating into a wider learning canvas
3. Externalisation - ways the learner makes their learning known to others.

Internalisation: three fundamental elements:

• Attention - the focus on the activity, willingness to give attention to task, and level of focus on accessible knowledge or ideas.

• Sensory stimulus - the form of accessible knowledge or ideas, and how the learner engages through one or more senses, in turn stimulating interest and interaction. Gardner (1991) identified nine distinctive forms of sensory stimuli:
• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinaesthetic
• Emotional
• Social
• Textual
• Musical
• Interpersonal - interaction between the learner and one or more others
• Intrapersonal - interaction within the mind of the learner, where discussion is internal

• Acquisition or reception - the learner recognises knowledge or ideas have impinged upon the consciousness, are accepted into the mind, in a form that can be taken further and handled through a range of internal cognitive processes.

p.24 Internal cognitive processes: can be defined through:

• Subject knowledge. The educational curriculum requirements across a range of different subject areas in primary and secondary education in England refers to:
• Searching
• Summarising
• Generating or developing ideas
• Hypothesising
• Imagining
• Gaining skills
• Gaining understanding

• Ways knowledge can be handled or manipulated. Using Bloom (1956), knowledge might be handled in six different ways:
• Acquisition
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation 

• Approaches to thinking and thinking skills.
• Creativity
• Enquiring
• Questioning
• Conceptualising - allowing ideas or knowledge to be shaped within a set of dimensions or criteria
• Comparing
• Reasoning
• Interpreting - allowing understandings to emerge not necessarily stated within originating material

• Elements concerned with memorisation.
• Rehearsal - abilities to consider existing knowledge and ideas, to recognise differences or additions that might be of interest or value, then access these from long or short-term memory.
• Retention - retaining knowledge in memory in appropriate forms, e.g. visual auditory, textual, emotional or social.
• Recall - abilities to recall knowledge and ideas from memory, through associations or hooks from mental schemas.

p.26 Externalisation: forms learners use to externalise their understandings include:

• Writing
• Reporting
• Speaking
• Presenting
• Drawing
• Completing
• Moving - using motor and manipulative skills to move items into order, or to move them into patterns of sequences that show knowledge and understanding

Metacognitive Concerns - Recognising How We Can Learn

This aspect includes elements concerned with ways learners learn to learn and know how to learn. It covers elements describing how learning strategies can be identified, adopted or chosen, or ways information or knowledge are transferred from one scenario or situation to another. Two broad areas and six specific elements (Presseisen, 2001)

• Monitoring task performance - recognising how a task is proceeding:

• Keeping place and sequence - identifying different stages, milestones reached
• Detecting and correcting errors - reflecting on work as it proceeds, reviewing what has been done, identifying errors and correcting them as far as possible
• Pacing of work - using concepts of time and scope, recognising an end point, and at any one time the effort that might be needed to accomplish the task and levels of detail relating to possible scope and quantity of feasible output.

• Selecting and understanding appropriate strategy - having a range of strategies to be drawn on, selected and tried out in the context of any learning task:

• Focusing attention on what is needed - selecting appropriately from a range of strategies, and matching needs of the task with strategies that might be used.
• Relating what is known to material to be learned - using previous experience, drawing on techniques used and applied in those previous situations.
• Testing the correctness of a strategy - recognising if a strategy selected is appropriate, whether a result appears to be feasible, reasonable or correct, and perhaps selecting alternatives allowing feasibility of outcome to be checked. 

Social Concerns - the Roles of Others

This aspect includes elements concerned with ways learners interact with others. Different forms of interaction allow different forms of engagement and output, allowing learners to access or use information, as well as share it, or work co-operatively with others. 

• Pask (1975) identified key roles of social interactions in developing understanding through discussion (where, in a series of interactions, the focus shifts as understanding builds)
• Vygotsky (1978) highlighted the importance of social integration for ideas and knowledge to become learned
• Lave & Wenger (1991) developed the idea of 'communities of practice', and the role that engagement with specific communities have, as well as the roles of discussions and interactions that take textual forms as well as those happening through spoken forms.
• Twining and McCormick (1999) identified 12 different forms of social interaction in which learners might be involved:

• Instruction: a teacher indicates what learners should do, how they should o it, and what is expected as outcomes

• Explanation and illustration: a teacher explains ideas or concepts, verbally, and may illustrate these with gesture, images or other resources

• Direction - a teacher offers overall ideas of what needs to be done, and what is expected, without giving precise detail

• Demonstration: a teacher provides a demonstration as an example of what happens, or what learners should do

• Discussion: a teacher elicits ideas from learners, picks up on specific points, and encourages other learners to contribute ideas or comments

• Scaffolding: a teacher provides a series of steps, or a number of interim stages or frameworks, to help learners approach an activity in a structured way

• Questioning: a teacher asks questions, and elicits responses from learners, either to closed or open questions

• Speculation: a teacher offers a scenario, together with different ideas about outcomes or implications

• Consolidation: a teacher reviews a previous topic or activity, exploring the extent to which learners appear to have remembered details or grasped concepts

• Summarising: a teacher pulls out key points, messages, or ideas, providing an overview as a summary of a topic or activity

• Initiating and guiding exploration: a teacher introduces a topic or activity, and indicates possible ways to explore, with ideas of how to begin or approaches that might be taken

• Evaluating learners' responses: a teacher provides feedback to learner responses, and indicated features concerned with quality of those responses and how improvements might be brought about

Societal Concerns - Long-term Drivers and Purpose

This aspect includes elements concerned with reasons why certain information is selected or recognised as being more fundamentally interesting or useful than other information; reasons concerning how information is perceived in terms of its longer-term interests and potential usefulness within particular societal, cultural or wider environmental contexts. McFarlane (1997) highlights the importance of meaningful and authentic learning, and the need for learners to consider how their learning relates to situations they regard as real, not only in the immediate but also in the longer term.

• Lipman (1995) describes ways learning might relate to learners' concerns abaout caring, defined through five distinctive elements:

• Appreciative - of caring or being cared for
• Active - involving positive action concerned with caring
• Normative - caring thinking considered as a norm or standard
• Effective - feelings or emotions aroused in relation to caring
• Empathetic - empathy (such as agreement, belief, or understanding) associated with caring

• Moseley et al (2005) described four overarching long-term concerns which thinking might be contextualised by learners:

• Education - relevance to other aspects of or longer-term concerns for further involvement in education, or concerned with education in the wider sense
• Citizenship - implications for ways in which people live, relate, or behave within a wider society
• Work - concerned with the realm of work, either in the present, or potentially for the future
• Recreation - related to outside interests, hobbies, or games, concerned more with recreation than with work

 

p.31 Using a Learning Framework to identify where specific elements of learning are located

By detailing the range of elements of learning within each of the broad aspects, and bringing these together into a single framework, the taxonomic representation produced can be used as a way to record elements of learning where evidence indicates uses, outcomes or impacts when certain digital technologies or resources are used, or when a learning activity takes place.

Learning framework showing hotspots reported by teachers when online resources supporting curriculum-wide needs are used to support learning and teaching (Passey, 2011)

Week 8: "Isms" in information science: constructivism, collectivism and constructionism

Talja, S., Tuominen, K. and Savolainen, R. (2004)

Constructivism, collectivism and constructionism differ in their views of knowledge and language.

• Constructionism takes discursive practices as its research object and perceives the production of knowledge in discourses as the primary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Collectivism takes professions and knowledge domains as its research object and sees the information and communication practices of professions and domains as the promary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Cognitive Constructivism takes individual searchers and their interaction with information retrieval systems as its research object and takes the view that work tasks provide the primary context for information behaviour.

Constructivism: a view in which an individual mind constructs reality but within a systematic relationship to the external world (Gergen, 1999) e.g. Piaget.

Social Constructivism: while the mind constructs reality in its relationship to the world, this mental process is significantly informed by influences from societal conventions, history and interaction with significant others (Gergen, 1999: 60). e.g. Vygotsky and later works of Bruner.

Cognitive Constructivism: sees knowledge production as the creation of mental models. HUmans cannot be 'given' information which they can immediately understand, instead they must 'constructu' their own knowledge. An information user is not a passive information processing system but actively makes sense of the surrounding reality and attaches personal meanings to information.

Social Constructionism: the primary emphasis is on discourse as the vehicle through which the self and the world are articulated. (Gergen, 1999: 60) e.g. Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Foucault. Constructionism sees language as constitutive for the construction of selves and the formation of meanings. Constructionism speaks of discourses, articulations and vocabularies, and replaces the concept of cognition with conversations. We produce and organise social reality together by using language. The main assumption of constructionism is that the boundaries of social knowledge are set by discourses that categorise the world and bring phenomena into view.

Collectivism: the core assumption of collectivism is that it is a mistake to psychologise issues like relevance and user needs as users are social and cultural beings. Collectivist approaches emphasise that information processes should be seen as embedded in social, organisational and professional contexts. hey shift attention from individual knowledge structures to "knowledge-producing, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-consuming communities" (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Activity theory: suggest that an individual lives within a world that is at once physically, socially and subjectively constructed, and that living and actin in this world constitutes knowledge (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Table 1: Major features, influences and representatives of cognitive constructivism, collectivism & constructionism

Taylor (1986: 35) stated that it is predominantly "organisation that provides the context and establishes the tasks and responsibilities form which problems, and hence, information needs, are generated". He argued that different professions are socialised into their own world views, i.e. CEOs define and solve problems in the same way in Miami and Helsinki, and that the information behaviour of teachers is similar in Pretoria and Portland (Taylor, 1991: 227). According to Taylor professions are the builders of their specific information universes.

"Knowledge is formed through a dialectical relationship between a community and its members... mediated by language and influenced by the history of the specific [domain]" (Hjorland and Albrechtsen, 1995: 407).

Table 2: Major fields of application of cognitive constructivism, collectivism and constructionism in Information Systems:

Axiology - the theory of value

Definition: the philosophical study of goodness, or value, in the widest sense of these terms.

• Instrumental value: what is good as a means, being good for some purpose

• Intrinsic value: what is good as an end

• Technical value: being good at doing something

• Contributory value: being good as part of a whole

• Final value: being good as a whole

What is intrinsically good?

Hedonists say it is pleasure; Pragmatists, satisfaction, growth, or adjustment; Kantians, a good will; Humanists, harmonious self-realization; Christians, the love of God. Pluralists, such as G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, Max Scheler, and Ralph Barton Perry, argue that there are any number of intrinsically good things. Moore, a founding father of Analytic philosophy, developed a theory of organic wholes, holding that the value of an aggregate of things depends upon how they are combined.

Whereas such descriptive sciences as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and comparative religion all attempt to give a factual description of what is actually valued, as well as causal explanations of similarities and differences between the valuations, it remains the philosopher’s task to ask about their objective validity. The philosopher asks whether something is of value because it is desired, as subjectivists such as Perry hold, or whether it is desired because it has value, as objectivists such as Moore and Nicolai Hartmann claim. 

Ontology, Epistemology, Methodology, methods and sources

Ontology:

What we believe constitutes social reality. This helps us to understand how different scholarly traditions embedded in fundamentally different cultural contexts can have different views of the world and different assumptions supporting their approaches to social enquiry. Grix (2004) in his book “The Foundations of Research” argue that Ontology is prior to Epistemology.

Ontological problems mainly concern with the nature of social entities: Whether or not social entities can be and should be considered objective (and therefore external) to social actors; or whether social entities could be constructed based on the actions and perceptions of social actors (Bryman & Bell, 2007).

Epistemology:

Epistemology is concerned with the theory of knowledge, especially in regard to its methods, validation and ‘the possible ways of gaining knowledge of social reality’. It is about ‘How what we assumed to exist can be known’

Epistemology focuses on the knowledge-gathering process and is concerned with developing new models or theories that are better than competing models and theories.

Epistomological issues concern the questions of what is (or should be) regarded as acceptable knowledge in a discipline: Whether or not the social world can be and should be studied according to the same principles, procedures, and ethos as the natural science (Bryman & Bell, 2007)


Therefore, each step of these consider different viewpoints:

• Epistomological considerations: Positivism vs Interpretivism. Since Nafeth did mentioned about this, I have no way of improving his explanations

• Ontological considerations: Objectivism vs Constructionism

Objectivism implies an ontological stance that social phenomena confront us as external facts that are beyond our reach or influences.

Constructionism advocates that social phenomena and their meanings are continually being not only built up based on the social interactions but also revised constantly.


Following are two examples of ‘contrasting’ epistemological positions:

• Positivism: this is an epistemological position that advocates the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond

• Interpretivism: an epistemological position that believes that a strategy is required that respects the differences between people and the objects of natural sciences and therefore requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action

Choosing one of these epistemological views will lead you to employ a different methodology than you would if you choose the other.

If Ontology is about what we may know, then Epistemology is about how we come to know what we know.

Our research questions are normally shaped based on our ontological and epistemological positions. This can be thought of as what is explained in the following diagram:

Based on the steps listed above, we can conclude that choosing our methods is based on the research questions posed and the sources of data collected.

On the other hand, some researchers believe that research can start at any of the stages that are listed in the diagram above. For example, a researcher might choose a favourite method and then work reversely through his methodology, epistemology and ontology. This may work, but with extreme care to make sure that all of these components are logically compatible with each other.

Some researchers prefer ‘question-based’ research (using the steps listed in the above figure) while others might opt for ‘method-led research’. You could argue that choosing a research method before having a research question is not logical...