REAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN LINE WITH ICT
Authentic
learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages
students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world.
Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, they nurture and provide
the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to
accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side
or an event manager, a facilitator not a dictator. Processes become the
predominant force and the content collected is organized appropriately into
portfolios.
Learning a trade or profession
cannot be learned without practical experience and training.
That has been known in (vocational)
education for ages. The common wisdom, however, was that one needed an
extensive theoretical introduction and knowledge base before one could go to
practice. Moreover, it was mostly explicit learning that dominated learning,
even in practical training.
Nowadays, however, both of these
ideas have less adherents. Learning in relatively complex and rich practical
environments should be introduced as soon as possible and large parts of learning
is implicit learning, where there are no clear learning goals before hand and
where the learning strategy emerges unconsciously in the context of work
practice. The possible outcomes of learning cannot be foreseen and will sometime
remain totally invisible.
Moreover, learning is much more seen
as a social process of enculturation in a work practice.
The difference between the old and
the new way of thinking can be described in terms of two metaphors: the
acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor.
According to Bruner (1996) the basic
assumptions of this metaphor are that
a) Knowledge of the world is treated as the
objective truth that can be transmitted from one person to another:
b) A medium, such as a teacher or a
book is needed to transport the knowledge of the one person who “knows” to another
person who does not;
c) Learning has to be institutionalized
in a building (school).
The alternative assumptions of
social-constructivism and social learning theory (Wenger, 1998), called the
participation model (Sfard, 1998), and assumes that:
1. There is no objective truth and
knowledge is constructed in social-interactions between people;
2. Learning should be done by people
themselves; at most they can be helped with this; we cannot do it for them;
3. Learning is gradually becoming a
member of a community of practice (or a culture, or a profession, or a field of
science); this happens for an important part outside of institutions and tacit
knowledge and skills play important roles in it.
Probably learned in social practice
and thus related to the participation metaphor.
Why is authenticity important?
Authenticity of (and in) learning
environments is not only important because of the new recognition of implicit
learning (certain things can only be learned in practice), and because of the
recognition of the social nature of learning (learning is the process of social
enculturation), but also because of motivational reasons. One aspect is that
learners feel more engaged and can follow their curiosity and their own
interest when learning authentically. The recent research based positive
psychology movement (Deci and Ryan, 2000; see also
http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/)emphasizes
three basic needs of humans: autonomy (feeling of some sort of control),
competence (feeling of contributing with one’s knowledge and skills) and
relatedness (feeling of being connected to some other people). Authenticity contributes
to autonomy because people can be in control. It strengthens the feeling of competence
because people can contribute to something that is important for them. And authenticity
contributes to relatedness because authentic learning is social learning, most
of the time.
What makes learning authentic? In my
view (see also Kearsley and Shneiderman, 1998) there are three main ways to
make learning authentic: through relations with other people (relating), through
certain kinds of activities (creating) and through real audiences (extending
the audience). These three fit quite well in the positive psychology basics:
relating and extending the audience are similar to relatedness and creating
relates to competence and autonomy.
How can one create authenticity
through ICT?
How can ICT contribute to relating,
creating and extending the audience?
1) Relating
Through ICT learners can be in
contact with all kinds of other people in (other) organizations, companies,
museums, other schools, other countries, etc. Moreover, ICT can have important roles
in the organization of collaborative learning, both inside learning
environments (less noise; better structure) and outside learning environments
(with learners in other learning environments, international collaboration,
learning communities). One important Dutch guru
(Geurts, 2003) especially promotes a
change from passive, receptive, little participative work places towards
learning working communities, with authentic participation of learners strongly
supported by an electronic support system. Electronic discussion forums offer
new possibilities for the exchange of ideas. Although it is by no means easy to
interact virtually (because one misses important non-verbal and personal
information) it can become an important new way of interacting that supplements
(instead of replacing) other forms of discussion. New forms of peer-assessment
and peer-feedback become possible through ICT.
One particularly important
development is computer (CSCL) supported collaborative learning. CSCL is
important because learners learn to construct new products, to build knowledge
together (Bereiter, 2002). In this way they learn to be part of innovation and research.
2) Creating
Five ways to create knowledge can be
organized with the help of ICT: learning through problem solving; learning
through decision making, learning through inquiry and research, learning
through design activities and learning as meaning construction. All five ways
gives the learner a more active role.
In solving problems, learners search
for the best (or the only) solution for a problem. In decision-making there is
no best answer. It is more a matter of opinion. Advice should be formulated and
legitimized. In inquiry or research activities, learners try to answer
questions and to test hypotheses. In design activities the task is to make a
(new) product that fulfils certain criteria, for instance a website, a poster
or a manual. Meaning construction pertains to critical reflection about central
concepts and principles. Through discussion learners construct new (collective)
meaning. Hakkarainen (1998) proposed a model that is a good example of
“creation”: the progressive inquiry model. It simulates the way knowledge is
created in scientific communities.
Progressive inquiry engages members
of the community in a step-by-step process of question- and explanation driven
inquiry. An important distinction (or addition) with other problem solving
cycles is the emphasis on the development of shared expertise. Making use of
the distributed expertise of the community members, the aim of this model is to
support the collaboratively problem solving process resulting in a shared
understanding.
The successive elements of
progressive inquiry are:
Creating
the context
.
To be able to explore the problem
more deeply, members have to get familiar with it. A context needs to be
created to clarify why the issues in question are relevant and worthwhile to
investigate (Hakkarainen, 1998). This way the community develops a body of
understanding that serves as an anchor for the formulation of the problem
statement or research question.
Setting
up research questions.
The next step is to set up questions
that guide the process of inquiry. Scientific inquiry can be seen as a problem
solving process. Initial questions guide and direct the search for information.
Constructing
working theories.
Once the community has agreed on an
initial research question, the members are invited to construct their own
interpretation. Construction of personal working theories guides the
participants to use their background knowledge to offer an explanation for the
problem. A first knowledge base of the communities understanding of the problem
is being created.
Critical
evaluation.
This knowledge base or inventory of
distributed expertise needs to be evaluated. Critical evaluation is important
to assess advances in the theories or explanations being offered. Through
evaluating whether and how well the working theories explain the chosen
problems, the community seeks to assess strengths and weaknesses of different
explanations and identify contradictory explanations, gaps of knowledge.
Searching
deepening knowledge.
Considerable advances of inquiry
cannot be made without obtaining new information. By examining prior problem
statements or working theories with the help of new information, the community
may become aware of their inadequate presuppositions. New information may help
them to reconstruct their conceptual understanding of the problem.
