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Wednesday, 30 August 06 ::
Freire, and Wenger
i had a great conversation with my aunt tonight. (hey s!) it was helpful just to wrap my head around the past 2 days, the ups and downs.
anyhow, we were talking about freire -- pedagogy of the oppressed -- and she reminded me that she has a quote from him at the bottom of her email:
"Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through
the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in
the world, with the world, and with each other." ~Paulo Freire
and it made me think of this one, at the bottom of my email:
"Meaning exists neither in us, nor in the world, but in the dynamic relation of living in the world." ~Etienne Wenger
and then there's john seely brown and paul duguid in the social life of information. i don't have an exact quote here, but they talk about information vs knowledge and how information doesn't have context, and how knowledge is something you build and carry with you.
they are all saying essientally the same thing -- we have to interact with the world, in order to build something from it.
hmm.
i'm doing this work that is about open courseware. online learning without interaction built into the experience, unless: by chance there are others who are or have gone through the same course you are going through (and there is social support attached to it), or unless you are going through it at the sametime. this is the kind of thing i came here to study -- an informal learning environment where people are self motivated to find the information and make meaning of it on their own.
hmm.
i guess i have questions. what kind of learner does it take to really be able to make meaning out of online content? i mean, can you just take any learner with a mild interest in a subject and stick them in front of a piece of content? probably not. but sometimes good teaching can help motivate a user to use the content. what does good online teaching look like? and what does it look like without a teacher? if you find good online content can you just remove the teacher part? and then i go back to meaning. i take all this back to meaning, and what meaning and knowledge look like.
what does good online open courseware look like? and, does it look different to other people? i mean, i love this course. and not just because the content is interesting, but because the tone of voice entertains me, and keeps me interested. then one day i went to this course because all my then co-workers spoke spanish besides me. i wasn't too excited about it, i didn't spend a lot of time in the course. i got frustrated and left. what made one more valuable, more meaningful, to me than the other? was it familiar content vs not? but with the unfamiliar content i had a whole support network of people in person. why is it that i built meaning out of one and not the other? what made the content effective for me, and how can i translate that out to other pieces of content in an audience that isn't me?
hmm. interesting question? what does interaction with the world look like that we can build knowledge and meaning with? and can that be a piece of open courseware?
----
another, kind of related note. notes for myself.
could i look at the efficacy of a particular piece of ocw and then later look at the delivery method? could i look at why this piece of ocw was effective or not? looking at how it was designed, the particular audience? who was this piece of ocw designed for the audience we're taking it too? or .
i need to remember what i was told. a piece of ocw won't be effective if someone isn't motivated to look at it. having people who are only motivated by me asking them is different than a set of people who are motivated because of the content.
i guess it goes back to a question. what does good, stand alone, online course look like? what makes one better than another? hmm. what makes it good, and is our course good?
hmm. i wonder if i can do something with this in my performance systems class.
posted by brooke at August 30, 2006 09:06 PM
