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Let me give you another example now at
a different kind of level to illustrate some other things about this object.
This is our Health Technology Innovation with
Limited Resources learning module created by Professor Jenny Amos,
here at the University of Illinois.
And here is the learning module.
There's an orientation, there's getting to know our community members and then Jenny
begins a number of
things which are actually interestingly different from a traditional lecture.
So she's got a bit of text here but then,
look, she speaks from it in the middle of the text.
Upon completing this course, students will.
This is at the very beginning and then she speaks a bit more for another minute.
The term "Global Health" really hasn't been around that.
And we scroll down and there are diagrams,
and there are images,
and there are videos and so on and so on.
And if we scroll all the way through,
this is the second topic in the course.
Now, this would normally be a lecture,
but you can see this is a quite a different artifact.
It's sort of like a lecture in that,
she's delivering a lot of very valuable content, data,
and ideas, and text and whatever.
But it's all in this format which is chunked for students interaction.
And finally, there's a project where the students
design a healthcare technology solution and this is
the rubric with which they're going to peer review
each other's work and then we can start the project.
Now, just to show you how this translates into practice.
This is the engineering 298 class.
She's done this learning module a number of times.
Of course, she can modify it but each time she uses it,
she's re-using a curriculum resource that she's already built.
So this is the activity stream of all the things that are happening in this community.
Interestingly, some of the students study in small class here on
campus and several of the students are actually in Sierra Leone in West Africa,
doing the course as if they were here on the campus.
And here is an example of one of these chunks of content
which is been posted into the activity streams.
You can see there, she's put in a piece of video from
a local health center which are like so,
she's put in some videos from Sierra Leone which she collected.
She's got a little bit of audio in there and here are all the students now
beginning to discuss that work that they've been involved in.
So you can see it's a very dialogical format
at the end of every section she's prompted dialogue.
This is the class discussion,
and of course to join the discussion I just have to add a comment.
But also importantly, the students are also asked to make updates.
There has to be knowledge producers and that's also part of the learning module.
Research different things, so
this particular student research hypothermia among newborns.
He linked to a website on this,
he linked to the World Health Organization.
He put in an example of one of
these very elaborate expensive devices which is not affordable in West Africa.
And then all the other students then discussed that.
So in other words, the students become people who are a knowledge resource,
who are researching things, who are looking things up,
who are contributing knowledge and contributing information.
And again, you can see this is an intensely social knowledge space,
even though it involves this extensive computer mediation.
To summarize, we have two different types of pedagogy going on here.
In the old classroom environment which was the environment of knowledge transmission,
we had a pedagogy that we called didactic mimetic.
Didactic means teacher sending, teacher telling.
The word didactic has a whole lot of heavy loadings on it in
English which it doesn't have by the way in other languages so much,
but in English it certainly does.
Which is teacher centered telling if you like,
teacherliness and a passivity on the part of the person receiving this.
Mimetic means about repetition,
about remembering, about getting things right and memory.
So what we're trying to illustrate here with the work we're doing in
scholar is what we call reflexive or ergative pedagogy.
By reflexive we mean lots of cycles of interaction,
and by ergative we mean the focus really is not on
thinking and it's not on what you can show you've thought,
it's on what you can do.
It's the artifact you can make.
So you feel like this is a set of contrasts now between these two types of pedagogies.
The old pedagogy is teacher-centered,
whereas the new one's learner-centered.
The old one, the learner is the knowledge consumer,
now the learner becomes the knowledge producer.
We move from knowledge transmission replication,
the knowledge as discoverable, critical discernment.
We move from long-term memory to device as a cognitive prostheses.
Remember my phone, remember the internet.
So, there's my phone, there's the Internet that I have
these cognitive prostheses where I don't have to remember things.
I can look things up and this is if you like a kind of social memory.
The apps on my phone are
places where I can do immediate calculations which are unequivocally right.
I just know I have to do the calculation.
I know I have to know which calculations are appropriate and how they work.
Knowledge as fact, correctly executed theorem, definition.
Knowledge is judgment, argumentation reasoning.
We moved from a focus on learning which is cognitive,
which is essentially what my brain can do
to a focus on knowledge representations or works,
which is this ergative notion.
We move from a focus to individual minds to social and dialogical minds.
And we move from long cycles of
feedback and feedback which is retrospective and judgmental in the form of
summative assessment to short cycle feedback which is prospective and
constructive which we call reflexivity recursive feedback formative assessment.
And here are a couple of places where Mary Kalantzis and I have
been talking at much greater length on these particular subjects.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
