Richardson (2005), ‘Students’ approaches to learning and teachers’ approaches to teaching in higher education’.
This short, clear, bulleted article is the most straightforward and possibly most valuable text I’ve come across in the 14 months of the Masters in Open and Distance Education that I have thus far done.
No doubt its clarity is in part a product of my improved understanding and more extensive experience gained during this period; it slots into place.
Learning a foreign language (French) I described fluency being akin to a fog lifting; it became clearer and intuitive. I wonder if I am approaching that point with online learning? Not that certainty is possible,
I’ll return to Richardson often.
The assignment at the end of May draws on learning methods (theory) based on learning practice in Block 2. This is a valuable opportunity to return to theories on learning activities (Engestrom) which I interpreted as a complex game of chess, setting it up with Lewis Chess pieces on a large piece of MDF. It’ll also mark a return to ideas of metaphor in learning (Sfard).
Within the Masters in Open and Distance Education there are tailored loops and returns to core content; just as well, otherwise I’d sign up to revisit modules I’ve enjoyed so much and from which I want to get so much more. 14 months on I am not the postgraduate of February 2010 whose learning methods were 1970s/1980s A’level and undergraduate surface learning rather than deep learning.
Passionate about the 2011 publication ‘A new culture of learning’ from John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas so much so that I’m exploring new ways to engage with content in an e-reader. Clicking through the pages in reverse (as I read the Sunday papers) is one. By selecting a larger font the information is presented in bite-size chunks, almost like a set or cards. The other trick is to take a key word and step through each time this is covered – play, a key part of the thesis, occurs over 160 times. For e-learning design the mantra is ‘activities, activities, activities’, for web2 2.0 it ought to read ‘play, play, play’.
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