e-poche.net

Nathan just clued me into Stephen Downes‘ latest post entitled, Are the Basics of Instructional Design Changing? Downes writes:

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.

And he follows with this:

The theory of distributed representation has a profound implication for pedagogy, as it suggests that learning (and teaching, such as it is) is not a process of communication, but rather, a process of immersion. Put loosely, it suggests the idea of teaching not by telling or even demonstrating but rather through the creation (or identification) of an environment into which a learner may be immersed.

This suggests that the role of the teacher is to facilitate learner immersion into a network - a semantic social one at that. Learning may indeed result, but does immersion train the student to think critically? I don’t see a necessary relationship between immersion and learning to think critically. In opinion, the role of the teacher is not only to facilitate network immersion, but also to monitor that process and find ways of stimulating the critical faculties of learners throughout during their immersion. Critical thinking is vital to a person’s education, so in most cases, teachers need to be present in order to aid in its development. As immersion is experience, activities that encourage reflection on that experience are an ideal first step.