Maria's Curriculum | Talks | Black Swan Society

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Aaron 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 617

During #lrnchat last night, Maria and I hung out at a Thai restaurant while she was in-town and talked about what's been going on. She was at a Futurist Society convention here, and she had begun some pretty comprehensive sketching of a new curriculum design for community college -- but something underlying it I think is very profound. Maria gave a couple of examples (I hope she doesn't mind me sharing): * Rather than teach to the fundamentals of writing and grammar, teach to the needed literacy skills of writing a good blog post; succinctly capturing a thought in 140 characters. The rules of grammar, spelling, traditional literacy will be reinforced as applicable knowledge. * Rather than teach to Physics and Chemistry in a lab setting, teach about the effective use of energy -- which will reinforce those topics in conjunction with an ingrained understanding of conservation and environmental sciences. * Mashup disciplines: Students are generally required to take an Ethics class, but it's generally sterile on its own as a discipline. There's an opportunity to teach Biology and Ethics not as an advanced course but as a primer -- so that there's room for "science" which can be a community-shared knowledge and the ethics, which is subjective to the learner and allows each learner to craft a model on how to approach their understanding of both subjects. From our discussion last night, I've been really tooling on about the following notions: * The Mashup of disciplines is a very consistent approach to the world most Gen X and younger experience in their lives. * The teaching through the applications of knowledge, rather than teaching "to" the subject matter itself, makes the experience of learning more accessible to disenfranchised learners, and doing so acknowledges/embraces the applicable realities of life. Certainly true for college/adult education and training. Potential implications on K-12. What do you think?

John Schulz 12 months ago
ActivityRank: 22

Hmmm, ... First, I'm literally running out of the house but wanted to drop some thoughts into the discussion before they disappeared from my head completely. As such, don't take my comments as a negative reaction - I just don't have the time to clean them up properly at the moment. Second, as I tweeted last night, I've been reading Why don't students like school?, by Daniel Willingham - so my reactions are based on what I've just read regarding how recent findings in cognitive science can improve education. I'm still chewing on the implications myself, so I may not be completely on target yet. The couple items from the book that stand out as I read your message were: Regarding a mashup of disciplines: Willingham notes that knowledge is a tricky thing. But storage of facts and processes into long term memory is only accomplished when people think about the particular subject matter. And thinking about the subject matter is complicated by difficulty of the task, and the meaning instilled while thinking about it (both elements highly subjective to the learner). If the subject matter is too difficult (or too easy) the learner tends to stop thinking about it, and doesn't store the information. And, it presented in specific context, the learner may have difficulty recalling for later user (i.e. unable to transfer to learning to similar problems). So, for example, your example of biology and ethics could work well assuming the learners were all biology majors. those who weren't, or who may switch majors later, may have difficulty transferring that learning to a new domain. Part of the reason for this, according to Willingham, is that most people tend to get stuck on the surface structure of a problem. Even though the underlying deep structure is the same, they can't typically see the patter of the problem (the deep structure). Which brings me to my second point regarding teaching the application of knowledge; Novices and experts think differently. Experts implicitly see the deep structure and ignore the surface structure. So getting people to a point where they know enough to apply knowledge takes time. In addition, his research has interesting implications for tools like performance support (which is causing me some mental dissonance right now because I love performance support). People must have some baseline knowledge in order to become experts - meaning all of the trivial stuff can't be off in a support system somewhere. At some point people must internalize, and make automatic, certain building blocks of their domain. If they don't then they overwhelm the capacity of their working memory and can never move beyond a level of competence towards expertise (see the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition). So, again, not negative comments - just that there appear to be cognitive challenges that must be addressed by a thorough analysis of these domains, and a really strong design. Gotta run - more later!