Making connections to personal experiences

I came across this website on Pedagogy which describes it as the "art of teaching." What I like about this definition is its orientation towards teaching practices in the classroom as opposed to a theoretical perspective. In terms of learning, I  read through the article and trying to relate the definition and description to my own personal experiences.

Pedagogy does matter

A great article on putting pedagogy ahead of technology

http://fno.org/sept03/pedagogy.html

Fleeting thoughts in learning

Image via WikipediaSometimes we learn in fleeting thoughts when we make connections in the unlikely places and time. As I was taking a shower, I remembered not seeing the Furama hotel in Chinatown. Earlier in the day, a colleague asked me about the Furama being in the Havelock area. I told her that it is in Chinatown to the best of current knowledge. Then it dawned upon me that I did not see the hotel there in Chinatown and perhaps it has moved to the Havelock location. My colleague could have been right. I checked the internet and found that there are two Furama hotels in Singapore - one in Chinatown and another in Havelock. This is a short episode of learning. How did the learning happen?

1. I had prior knowledge of the location of the Furama hotel from my personal experiences.
2. I thought that maybe I could be wrong as I have not noticed it in my last trip. It challenged my prior knowledge.
3. I tried to make a connection to my previous conversation with my colleague about the location. Maybe I was wrong and the hotel may have moved.
4. I checked my hunch and verify it on the internet to see if I was right.
5. I found that there are two hotels which caused me to modify my understanding to create new knowledge.

Do we define seams?

Image by The Bees via FlickrI was just thinking about seams. I asked myself that if I am not a student in school would work be considered a seam if I want to separate it from what I do at home in my private time. Now let say I am part time student, worker and my time outside of these times, what are my seams? The seams can be the role I play in current life. So, is there an informal and formal seam? What is formal learning? Is it what I learn as a student and at work? No, I can be learn something on my own as a student or at work. As a student I can learned what is planned or designed by the instructor. At the same time, I can learn fr
om emergent process that is unintended by design or plan.

Learning about seamless learning

This exploration to find out more again about seamless learning started when I was working on the video. I found it difficult to find some clear evidence of how learning occurs across the boundaries we have. I discussed with my colleague and she remarked that it was the main difficultly we have in writing the papers. How can we show that learning occurs seamlessly? So, how did this exploration of learning occur?

• I find myself challenged in my thinking about seamless learning. I had my notions of seamless learning but could not find evidence to support my own thinking.
• I discussed with my colleague to find similar thoughts which confirmed my challenged thoughts.
• As a result, I found that this is something worth pursuing to understand the matter further.
• I asked lots of questions and reflect on the questions. 

Seamless Learning

I have been working on a project to study the notion of ?Seamless Learning over the past three years where we looked into the role of technology in mediating learning across the boundaries. When it came to creating a video, I found it so difficult to create a video capturing the seamless learning that we were studying the children. I knew it was happening with the anecdotes we have and experiences we had with the students, but why is it so difficult to show a clear seamless learning example? Is it because we did not able to capture everything in video? Or is it the very nature of seamless learning that does not lend itself to be captured? How do we know seamless learning has happened? I have some questions on the Seamless Learning to re-conceptualize this notion again:

What are the seams in seamless learning?
How do we know these are the seams?
What learning moves across the seams? What does not move?
What are the conditions for learning to move across seams?
Is informal learning and formal learning in school a seam? Should we put a seam between them?

What are the conditions in the classroom for emergent learning to occur?

 Can we design for emergent learning to occur?
What are the design tradeoffs for structure in planned learning and emergent learning to happen?

To answer some of these questions, I am going to record my learning experiences in this blog to understand how I learn in the emergent. I am starting to think that maybe learning is learning whether we learn in school or out of school.