Old Cognitive Dissonance

The Stephen has done it again!

Stephen Downes: Are the Basics of Instructional Design Changing?

His comments on the current state of implementation in online education are exactly the kinds of things I’ve been telling people for years, but he does it so much better:

It’s like replacing a piece of wood with a shovel; a shovel may represent no advance over a piece of wood if it is used merely to, say, act as a fence rail or support an awning, but a shovel adds a whole new set of affordances previously unseen in pieces of wood, affordances that suggest a new practice, in this case, digging.

And the crux of this new theory is ‘distributed representation’ which cuts to the heart of all the noise about social softare, communities of practice, and the role of teacher

First, as mentioned above, and key to much of what follows is the idea of ‘distributed representation’. What this means is that there is no ‘place’ that knowledge resides in the first place. Rather, as George Siemens outlines in ‘Connectivism’, knowledge resides in the network as a whole - the physical network composed of learners, teachers and practitioners, and not in any given part of the network.

The communications approach presupposes (at least in part) that there is some entity, a ‘teacher’, in whom the knowledge resides; the process of learning is therefore a facilitation of channels of communication between teacher and learner (at a minimum). But if knowledge resides in the network as a whole, it is much less clear that there is sense to be made of the role of the ‘teacher’, much less of creating a channel through which the knowledge provided by a teacher can flow.

I’m awed.

I’m heading back to read it again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 10:53 am and is filed under Wanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.