I enjoyed the Richardson articles for a whole swathe of wrong reasons. It was easy to read (oversimplistic?) and seemed like commonsense. But, when several members of our tutor group discussed the paper in an Elluminate session it soon became clear that there were some rather insidious assumptions and an embedded philosophy that not everyone was in agreement with.
I struggled to find an explicit 'argument' in the paper on first reading. It seemed to me a bit like a literature review. But embedded in the paper, I think there is an ideology, as in the Sfard paper and others, that active (participative) learning is deep learning and deep learning is good learning. Whereas 'surface' learning is passive learning which is unengaged and therefore bad learning. For a start that assumes that there is a 'one-size-fits-all' best way to learn. Maybe that is why the SOCIAL sciences are intrinsically different to the physical sciences. Consciousness and autonomy complicate things a bit.
We discussed these concepts in the forum with regards to H800 and concluded that H800 (thus far) has provided us with a case in point of the erroneousness of this argument. We discussed the volume of content in the course, in relation to the acquisition metaphor (Sfard).
We discussed the number of activities and the structured nature of the assessed participation. And the impact that assessing forum contributions has had. And we concluded that both of these things limit the course in terms of collaboration. This 'packing-in', structuring and assessing of the forum activities appears to encourage active participation without collaboration. There's scarcely time to work through the individual reading/activities, formulate answers to the structured questions, post them in the forum and then analyse and comment on everyone else's. Participation without collaboration - could that be an example of the apparent anomaly of active surface learning?
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
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Hi S, I find both your posts on the Richardson (2005) experience useful and interesting. I LOVE the cartoon!
ReplyDeleteWhat I take away from our Elluminate meeting, reinforced by your blogs, that participative learning doesn't necessarily equate to deep and desirous, and that what is sold on the Saljo scale as passive isn't necessarily passive and also doesn't necessarily equate to surface learning either. I skimmed over these issues rather too easily and without enough critical thought!
I so agree with you that the reality is much messier than suggested by the overly simplistic and reductionist representation of the models provided in the paper which just suggest a linear process.
Gabriele