Thursday, November 15, 2012

Supporting Self-Directed Learners


The fact that people can and do learn on their own, without the aid of an educator, is no secret. However, in the 70s and 80s, researchers began exploring the possibility of instructors facilitating self-directed learning among their students. This formalized self-directed learning (SDL) was pioneered by the educational theorists Malcolm Knowles, Allen Tough, and Cyril Houle. The methods within SDL that have developed over time have become quite popular in today’s institutions of higher learning. The goals of the person facilitating this learning are to help learners be self-directed, and to encourage transformation and social action (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007).
            A lot of self-directed learning is already going on in our society. So, what can we do more intentionally to direct that in our work and life? The answer to this question will vary from institution to institution and person to person, based on the roles and resources at your facility. One method is to simply ask the right questions. Part of the interior design of the facility and/or promotional materials can ask questions to stimulate people into reflective thought or conversation, such as “What do you want to be when you grow up?” or “ What do you still need to do to get from where you are to where you want to be?” or whatever practical or deep philosophical questions you come up with. Another option is to design student activities that allow the learners to make choices about what they want the goal of the activity to be and, then, challenge them to decide how they want to achieve it. This has been creatively done in middle schools in Bloomington, Indiana, with an activity that could easily be changed to suit a theme relevant to adult students. The activity is called Reality Store and is provided to the middle schools via The Franklin Initiative. Businesspeople from the community come to the school and work tables, each representing a different item adults spend money on (housing, groceries, child care, etc.). Students are given a certain amount of money based on their grade point average. They have to budget that money by getting all the things they need, and then, they can upgrade or buy extras if they have any money left over. It’s a powerful life lesson for the students. They can decide whatever life they want to have, but it has to fit into a realistic income potential for them based on where they are academically. How could you adapt this type of activity for the learners with whom you work?

References

Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., and Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Contemplative Education

Have you ever happened upon something interesting that has been around for a long time, but you had never heard of it, and that fact makes you feel really stupid? Well, this just happened to me as I was catching up on my Journal of Transformative Education reading and saw a couple of articles about contemplative education. I'm about to finish my masters in adult education, and I'm a big fan of transformative learning. I've also spent many years in the natural health field where Western and Eastern methods are blended and contemplative teaching is practiced without ever calling it contemplative teaching. So, when I read in Wikipedia (not scholarly, I know) that contemplative education has been in the U.S. since 1974, I thought, "Where have I been MY WHOLE LIFE that I have never heard of this"?

Apparently, contemplative education blends liberal education with contemplative practices such as meditation, tai chi, etc. If you are as interested in learning more as I am, here is a list of books on the topic available through Amazon.

Peace.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Informal learning is everywhere

If you read this blog, you will quickly discover that I am a HUGE fan of informal learning. Informal learning is the learning that just happens while you are out living life. It's not the formal education you get when you go to school. It's not the nonformal education you get when you take a ballroom dancing class. Informal education is the learning that happens when you read the newspaper or watch the news. It's everywhere!

I thought about that kind of learning often during the month of September. You see, September is a big festival month in my world. It starts Labor Day weekend when I usually run off to a nearby powwow. So much informal learning happens at a powwow. You can read about powwow etiquette in the program. During the powwow, the MC describes the different dances and regalia to the spectators. The traders explain the history behind their offerings to a potential customer. My favorite informal learning at powwows is what happens at the campsites. Groups sit around in circles and just talk. Some are usually working on craft projects or regalia, while the group gives advice and teaches new skills to others. Often there will be a point where everyone shows off what they have been working on over the past year. Everyone helps everyone else learn how to honor tradition and live within the cultural norms of the powwow.

In Bloomington, Indiana, there has been an art installation throughout town called The Brain Extravaganza. You can learn more about it here. There are giant brains all over town. Each has a plaque with different brain facts, and the different artwork on the brains tells a different story about neuroscience. People who happen to walk by a brain and decide to read the plaque just experienced informal learning.

Also in Bloomington was the Lotus World Music and Art Festival. You can find more about this event here. Now, some serious informal learning takes place at this event! This year was my first immersion into the Lotus Festival. People are not only introduced to new music and art, but through the music and art they are introduced to new cultures and places. I remember at one point my friends and I were talking about which artist we wanted to see next. We started talking about a Malian singer and dancer that would be playing. One of us said, "Where's Mali"? The rest admitted we had heard of Mali but really had no idea where it was. So, another lady pulls out her smartphone and looks up all about Mali and reads it to all of us. Now, we not only know where Mali is but the population and culture of Mali, as well. That is informal learning, people!

Take a moment to bask in just how much information is easily available to you that was not available just a few decades ago. It is astounding how accessible learning is in this day and age. As you go about your week and find that you have learned something new, take a moment for gratitude.

Peace and learning to you all.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The Joys of Online Education

This blog post is in response to Mark Edmundson's Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on July 19th. Here's a link to that article.

Professor Edmundson has a poor perception of online education based on his experiences at the University of Virginia where he claims online education "came close to tearing the university apart." He describes a situation where administrators were essentially forced to create an online program. As a result, they hired an outside company to create the online courses for them, apparently in a hurry.

Throughout the article he shares a bit about his own philosophy of teaching and education when he mentions cringing when someone suggests he might learn something from his students. He apparently has a preference for lecture-based classes. In other words, based on the article, he sounds very teacher-centered rather than learner-centered. I'm not criticizing this, just making an observation that will be relevant later in my response.

He also makes several negative claims about online education. These include statements such as:
"Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor."
"It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue."
"The Internet teacher...can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms."
"You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning."
"Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely."

As someone who has been both a student and instructor of online education courses, I could not disagree more with Professor Edmundson's opinion. I am not familiar with the University of Virginia's online program, but based on this article, it sounds as if the introduction of online education for this university was rushed and filled with strong negative emotion as a result of the dismissal of the president. It does not surprise me, therefore, that the resulting program might have been below par. As for the online course from Yale he mentions, it sounds more like a video of a lecture than an actual online course. I would like to reassure the professor that this is not the reality of online education as a whole. It certainly has not been my experience in the MSAE program at Indiana University.

I would argue that the "trouble" is not with online education. It is in the design of the online courses. My experience with online education is that it is better able to engage multiple learning styles than face-to-face classes, making it far from one-size-fits-all. Most of my courses (those I've taken and those I teach) are mostly dialogue. They involve learner-content, learner-learner, and learner-instructor interaction. While much of this interaction is asynchronous, video chats and live satellite feeds provide ample face-to-face time, and you might be surprised how much you can glean about a student's mood and enthusiasm from the written word. I have also found my online courses to provide far more vital learning communities than any face-to-face course I've ever taken. A lot of bonding takes place and a lot of extracurricular sharing and topic discussion, as well.

I'm happy to say that I have only had two online courses that could be described as sterile and lonely. And, yes, they were miserable. If this is your experience, I feel for you. However, the problem was not that they were online. The problem was that they were taught by people who did not know how to teach online courses. It has been my experience that instructors who prefer teacher-centered, lecture-based education make poor online instructors. There is nothing wrong with that. There are people who are really great an online instruction, but who fail miserably at face-to-face interactions. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. The problem is when someone who is not well-suited to online instruction is forced to teach an online course. That is a management problem, not an online education problem.

My advice to Professor Edmundson is to read the following books and articles and to consider taking D525 - Introduction to Distance Education Systems through Indiana University's Master of Science in Adult Education program to experience what a good online course is like.

Recommended Reading:

              *Clark-Ibanez, M., & Scott, L. (2008). Learning to teach online. Teaching Sociology, 36(1), 34-41.  
               *Conrad, R., & Donaldson, J. A. (2004). Engaging the online learner: Activities and resources for   creative instruction (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

              * Gonzalez, C. (2009). Conceptions of, and approaches to, teaching online: A study of lecturers teaching postgraduate distance courses. Higher Education, 57(3), 299-314. doi:10.1007/s10734-008-9145-1  

              *Guri-Rosenblit, S. (2009). Distance education in the digital age: Common misconceptions and challenging tasks. Journal of Distance Education, 23(2), 105-122.  

               *Larreamendy-Joerns, J., & Leinhardt, G. (2006). Going the distance with online education. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 567 -605. doi:10.3102/00346543076004567
          
               * Liebowitz, J. (2003). Teach people skills totally online? College Teaching, 51(3), 82-85.  
               
               *Lynch, M. M. (2002). The online educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom. New York, NY: Routledge.  
  
               *Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  

               *Porter, L. R. (2010). Developing an online educational curriculum: Technologies and techniques. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.  
  
              *Selwyn, N., Gorard, S., & Furlong, J. (2005). Adult learning in the digital age: Information technology and the learning society (New edition.). New York, NY: Routledge.  
 
 
  


Saturday, June 16, 2012

Wish Granted

On May 9th, I lamented that professionals in adult education tend to focus on formal learning and ignore nonformal and informal learning. Well, either I am quite the trendsetter, or it is time for me to eat a little crow. The latest edition of Adult Learning provides an article on Implementing Writing Support Circles with Adult Learners in a Nonformal Education Setting: Priority, Practice, and Process. Then, I was checking out the workshops for the AECT conference coming up this fall and found at least one workshop that seems dedicated to informal learning. Granted, these are just drops in the bucket compared to what all is out there, but it makes me hopeful to see that there are some out there giving these topics some attention. After all, the great bulk of what adults learn in a lifetime comes from nonformal and informal sources.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Excellent Book on Objectives

Preparing Instructional Objectives by Robert F. Mager (1997) is the best book on the topic I have ever read. Not only does Mager provide excellent advice about writing instructional objectives, but he also makes what could possibly be a boring topic actually fun for the reader. The book reminds me of the adventure books I used to read as a child. In those books you would be given a scenario and a choice between multiple actions. Each action would have a page number to jump to in order to finish your adventure.

Mager uses a similar approach to allow for formative evaluation throughout this book. You test your knowledge, jump to the page of the answer you believe is correct. If you are correct, move on. If not, you will be directed to additional pages about the topic in which you are having trouble. Then, you can test your knowledge again to make sure you've got it. What a great idea!

The process made the book easy to read, not to mention efficient. I hope anyone who has to write objectives will pick up this book.

Mager, R.F. (1997). Preparing instructional objectives: A critical tool in the development of effective instruction (3rd Ed.). Atlanta, GA: The Center for Effective Performance, Inc.

You can find it on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Preparing-Instructional-Objectives-Development-Instruction/dp/1879618036/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337218849&sr=8-1

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Learning Theories Exposed

I just had one of those wide-eyed, jaw-dropping experiences.

This website covers 54 different learning theories:

www.gwu.edu/~tip/index.html

For the love of informal learning

Sometimes, I sit back and reflect on just how much informal learning I acquire in a day. The amount is truly astounding. There's the information picked up from family, friends, and neighbors throughout the day. Then, there is all the great information on all my social networks, Google Reader, LinkedIn Groups, etc. I'm in the process of selling my home, renting an apartment, and purchasing land on which to build. Let me tell you, there is a LOT of informal learning going on in that process. Then, there's the learning that comes from observation, from watching the world work around us.

Education professionals spend most of their time talking about formal learning and a little bit about non-formal learning. Informal learning tends to get the short end of the attention stick. Yet, people will almost always describe informal learning as the type of learning that impacts them the most. For my bit, it is definitely the largest percentage of my overall learning.

If we really care about lifelong learning and learning communities, we cannot ignore informal learning. What do other educators and learners think about informal learning? What do educators need to know about informal learning? How is informal learning to be studied?

Sunday, May 6, 2012

What kind of teacher are you?

Ever wonder if you are a liberal, behavioral, progressive, humanistic, or radical adult educator? One way to explore this is by taking the Zinn Inventory. You can access it here: http://www25.brinkster.com/educ605/paei_howtouse.htm 

What I find interesting about this particular inventory is that it appreciates the shades of grey. Instead of getting "You are a humanist!" as a response, you receive scores for each category. This tells you just how much of each you are. After all, we are each a little of all of them. Aren't we?

Enjoy!

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Philosophy of Learning


My philosophy for learning and education incorporates multiple theories.  When considering how and why adults learn, my view includes aspects of both the humanist and social cognitive learning theories.  The theories of Bandura, Perry, and Knowles have influenced my views in particular.  When considering adult development, Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems Theory stands out to me. 
I resonate with the humanist idea that the goal of learning is self-actualization.  I treasure both freedom and dignity, and I hope that comes forth in my own teaching.  For the most part, I believe people have control over their own reality and destiny and, therefore, have great potential. I also agree with the humanist belief that our own self-actualization carries with it the responsibility to help others on the path.  I appreciate the camaraderie between teacher and student in the humanist tradition.  While I believe a humanistic approach is ideal for many areas of adult education, I do not believe it is ideal for every situation or for young children.  A humanistic approach combined with other compatible approaches can be effective in these areas.  The one area of humanism that I defend most strongly is the belief that perception affects behavior.
Unlike behaviorists, I do not believe behavior can be predicted.  People often respond differently to the same stimuli, as can be evidenced in the marked behavior differences among siblings.  I believe perception makes the difference, and perception cannot be controlled by stimuli. As in the social cognitive orientation, I believe learning involves interaction with others and with the environment.  Bandura separated observation from imitation, and I think that makes the difference between learning as an infant and learning as an adult (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007). 
Following Perry’s Developmental Scheme, infants are in the first stage where the authority figure is always right.  Thus, they imitate the authority figure.  As a person’s cognitive development progresses along the stages, he or she observes others and the environment and, then, makes judgments based on those observations.  The results of those judgments will determine whether the person chooses to imitate what has been observed or reject it by acting in opposition to it.  This is often seen in families. My sister and I were raised in the same household with the same parents, yet we are as different from one another as night and day.  We observed the same authority figures, but made different judgments about what we witnessed.  She imitated what I rebelled against, and vice versa. 
As a good humanist, I believe that people have the ability to determine their own destiny, and human nature is ultimately good. People want their needs met, but they also want to improve themselves.  Knowles recognized this when he developed his list of learning outcomes for adult learning. These include such outcomes as:
*Adults should develop an attitude of acceptance, love, and respect
toward others.
*Adults should acquire the skills necessary to achieve the potentials
of their personalities.
*Adults should understand the essential values in the capital of
human experience (Knowles, 1955).
Knowles obviously expected adult learners to develop into the best versions of themselves.  It is because learners seek positive change that they will imitate those behaviors, beliefs, and teachings they perceive will meet their needs, including that of self-improvement.  Because people vary according to their perceptions and values, they also vary according to behaviors (imitation vs. rejection). Returning to the example of siblings, my sister and I chose different strategies for meeting our needs because our values are different and because we tend to perceive the same situation in different ways.  Still, we are both attempting to improve ourselves and our lives.
As far as the social environments on which adults are basing their observations and judgments, Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems Theory provides a good model.  He provides a good overview of the social environments affecting adult development throughout the lifespan. “Each system contains roles, norms, and rules that can powerfully shape development” (New World Encyclopedia, 2008). Yoonkyeung Nah (2000) provides a good example of this idea in practice in the article Can a Self-Directed Learner be Independent, Autonomous, and Interdependent?: Implications for Practice.  In this article Nah explores the results of self-directed learning based on culture.  She states that self-directed learning promotes the American values of independence and autonomy, but other cultures do not value those qualities.  She explored the results of self-directed learning on Korean women and found that they approached their learning from an interdependent perspective because interdependence is a quality valued by their culture.  Thus, the layers of their environment influenced the results of their learning experiences, namely the choices they made regarding imitation or rejection with regard to their careers.  They chose to adapt their learning to their values.
Therefore the humanist and social cognitive theories influence my personal philosophy of learning and education. Learning occurs through a person’s interaction with his or her environment.  What separates adult learning from other learning is the separation of observation from imitation. The effect of the learning on the person’s life is determined by what will aid the person’s self-improvement.  The purpose of education is to support people to that end.

References
Knowles, M. S. (1955). Informal adult education: A guide for administrators, leaders, and teachers. New York: Association Press.  
Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  
Nah, Y. (2000). Can a self-directed learner be independent, autonomous, and interdependent?: Implications for practice. Adult Learning, 11(1), 18-19, 25. Retrieved from http://www.aaace.org/mc/page.do?sitePageId=66286&orgId=aaace
Urie Bronfenbrenner. (2008, April 2). New World Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Urie_Bronfenbrenner?oldid=678460.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Personal Learning Networks





Today, I've been exploring the world of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). My personal learning network is broken up into two major categories: Physical (for the hands on, face-to-face learning opportunities) and Virtual (for the technology-based learning opportunities). Each of these is separated into social and solitary learning environments. Based on my perception of myself as an introvert and on the fact that I have been largely homebound for the past two years, I expected the virtual and solitary sections of my PLN to bear the most weight. I am surprised to see all four categories are mostly balanced.


What is missing from my PLN is an indication of the amount of time I spend on each activity. If time were to be taken into consideration, I would have to say that the scales would tip deeply in favor of virtual tools, which means that technology-driven learning is vital to me as a learner. I spend hours on the computer every day and very little time on the direct contact learning tools. While I would certainly like to spend more time doing activities in the physical solitary category, especially reading real books, I find myself relying more and more on technology.


I cannot say whether my experience is common or an anomaly among learners. My Personal Learning Network may have no bearing whatsoever on the state of adult learning in general. Still, the effects it will have on my own lifelong learning are considerable. Technology has made learning more accessible and easier than ever. From my own personal experience, I have seen how it can enrich the lives of people with disabilities by providing them access to learning communities. These formal and informal learning communities have the capacity to flourish in virtual environments, increasing exponentially the demand for more technology-based tools. Who knows what the future of technology-based learning will be? I just know I look forward to finding out.