MrL8Nite goes back to school
"I don't mind change, I just don't want to be there when it happens." --Adrian Monk
Learning and Design: I
From the Syllabus...
This course is the critical foundation course of the program. It initiates the Year One discussion of central program ideas of “education” (as intentional learning) and “technology” (hmm, for now, let’s say chip-based stuff) and their intersection in the workplace, whether that workplace involves children or adults, formal or informal. This course will contrast cognitive and sociocultural views of learning, the implications of each for the design of learning environments and the role of technology in that design. The course runs two semesters. In the first, we will focus primarily on the theoretical constructs and how research is/has been done, with some consideration of implications for design. In the second semester design, itself, will move to the foreground. More advanced theory will be in play, though largely through discussion and application in design projects.
As a whole, this two-part course will introduce you to a sociocultural theory of learning and encourage you to use this lens to investigate and improve learning in your workplace. The role of technology is implicit in that remark. Whether pencils or streaming video, technology is always with us as we work and live. In this course we will, however, make the implicit (or tacit) explicit (or overt) in order to study it.
Professor: Dr. Linda Polin
Read Cultivating Communities of Practice - FIRST
When I first picked up the yellow Lave & Wenger book I couldn't believe it. Who in their right mind would title a book "Legitimate Peripheral Participation"? As I started to read the first few pages, it was as if my mind wouldn't even grasp the meaning of a sentence. I had to sit there with my American Heritage dictionary and look up word after word on the first few pages! The writing style was so foreign to me that I commented to the professor, "My brain is flashing '12:00'" -- like older VCRs when they were just recovering from a power failure. I trudged page-by-page through the first 30-40 pages. I really had no clue what this book was trying to tell me. Argh! Why is this so hard?
Eventually, it started to make just a little sense. Then I remembered what Lani, a student from Cadre 12, had told me, "Read Cultivating Communities of Practice by Wenger FIRST, then read the LPP book." So, taking her recommendation to heart (rather than to continue bludgeoning my brain with the dull edges of the small yellow book), I read the CCoP book. “Wow, he writes in English instead of academic-speak!” I actually understood the concept. I blasted through the first 2 chapters in 1 sitting. I flipped through several other sections of the book over the next day or two. THEN, I went back to LPP. Ah ha! Lani was right! It’s making sense now. I can even say things like “Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice is a learning process that demonstrates the integral and inseparable aspects of socially based educational practices,” and know what it means!
Learn Something New
Dr. Linda Polin (who was the Program Director of EDET when I joined) challenged us to "Learn Something New" and journal our learning. The idea was to use collaborative learning of a social activity and track our progress. We were to lean heavily on our newly acquired knowledge from Lave & Wenger's "Legitimate Peripheral Participation" book as key in our learning activity.What to do? Maybe ballroom dancing? (No, Derrel was doing that.) Maybe learning to race a car? (No, Rich was doing that.) Learn to play a sport? (No, I already know most that I would want to keep participating in.) Wine Tasting? (Don, got that one. lol.) Well, being a southerner and having a pickup truck, it finally occurred to me what I should learn...Hunting! Oops...Linda said we couldn't kill things, so I guess shooting deer, field dressing the carcass, and roasting venison was out. OK, I'll do a slightly more politically correct version of that same activity...Skeet and Trap shooting.
My cousin's kid competes in Skeet & Trap at college and in the Jr. Olympics, so I have access to a mentor when he comes home from school. Also, I'm already familiar with firearms, having competed in fixed-target shooting in my youth with a 22 rifle. So, while I had some basic understanding of guns and shooting, the skeet & trap activity would be new. I decided to get a little "formal" training with shotguns and a related activity called "wing shooting", taught by Orvis. This was mostly for safety reasons, since I didn't have any experience with shotguns, but also because Orvis used a group training model where you learned with peers under the guidance of a mentor by a type of trial-error model. (Hmmm...did I just say Legitimate Peripheral Participation?)
The all-day training and practice session at Barnsley Gardens, Georgia was useful and well designed. After firing a couple hundred rounds, my shoulder was aching from shooting so much. On the way home I contacted my cousin's kid and we planned an outing near home in a few weeks when he was home over a long weekend. Along with a nephew, the three of us spent several hours practicing what I learned. I was able to mentor my nephew (who had never used a shotgun until this day) and I also obtained some expert advise from my cousin as well as the firing range manager.I really enjoyed the activity and engage in it about once every 3-4 months. I assembled a video for class using Jumpcut (I can't afford the more expensive editing tools) and presented it at the start of Learning & Design II. Both the learning experience and the video-editing exercise put my LPP skills through the hoops.