Welcome Students Near & Far

Catalina Laserna, DPhil Patricia Craig, PhD

toEDUC E-104 Theory and

Practice of Web Pedagogies

Agenda

Introduction of teaching team

The Four Elements

BREAK

Course Overview

Assignments

Readings Preview

Agenda: Lab

• How to post your introduction and learning goals

• Getting an account on the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT)

• Distance students

First Element:Community

• Community– Popular imagination and discourse

• Place or value based

• Normative• http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=community&image1.x=19&image1.y=8 (3:06)

– The social sciences• How do we distinguish types of community?

• Using social structure to explain and predict

• Where popular discourse and social science merge

• Empirical shift in community means need to rethink

Community

• Community (cont.)– Intentional communities: learning communities

• Culture of learning• Model is collective understanding• Diversity is valued and utilized• Learning belongs to a community of practice• In education, learning communities is the

culmination of community of practice concept

Community

• Community (cont.)– Elective communities: virtual communities

• Temporal and spatial gaps

• Strength of ties

• Power relationships

• Expansion of public space into virtual space OR

• Further breakdown of community

Second Element:Theory of Affordances

WHAT IS THIS?

Theory of Affordances

We perceive the typewriter as:

Write-able with?

Sit-able?

Throw-able?

Paint-able?

According to Gibson,Affordances are…

• Not in the object

• Not in the subject

• “Affordances” conceptualizes the relationship between the two

What’s the Key?

• It en-ables

• The verb “afford” existed

• Gibson made it a noun:

–“Affordance”

Affordances in this Course

• Learn to analyze technological tools terms of affordances

• Use the analysis to deepen transformative designs

MODES AND MEANS OF COMMUNICATION

Primary Orality

Learning by doing, talking

Literacy

Use of different kinds of “literacy” media

“Cybercy”

We made it up! Use of digital media

Permanency of message O L C

Talk vanishes

Words on Paper= immutable mobiles

Dynamic environments

Digital encoding

Transactional Distance O L C

Face-to-face Type-face Inter-face

Storage of InformationDistributed system

O L CBurden on Human Memory

Collective memory

“frees”

human memory

(Paradox of Rote Memorization)

Simulates RL (Real life)

Affords mixing of Symbolic Representations

Grand Social Theories O L C

The Advent of Language makes Culture Possible

-> Humans as Cultural Creatures

Writing affords the beginnings of

-> Human History

then Printing press

-> The Gutenberg Revolution

Digital Media and Computers

“Artificial Intelligence”

-> The Cybercy Revolution…

What is going on?

About the O/L/C Matrix

• O/L/C Ideal Types

• Needs to be situated in individual & collective experiences

• O/L/C is a very broad analytic construct

• O/L/C should “afford” good thinking

• Add value to each other

How Does O/L/C Relate to This Course?

• The Web? Collaboration?• Private/Public spaces and modes (e-mail, blog) • Tools such as “I’m confused” “I have a questions”

button O-> C• Reflect back on the course’s process as an

example of the practice of Web-Pedagogies.

Third Element: Teaching for Understanding

• Snapshots from the past

• Rote Memorization: the paradox of literacy in school

• Memorable Teachers

• What is understanding?

• Aim of the Project: practice and theory together

What is understanding?

• Two quotes from Piaget:

“To Understand is to Invent”

and

“Thinking is internalized action”

How can we make these insights shape educational reform?

Teaching for Understanding with New Technologies

• In what ways does the Web afford new ways of teaching for understanding?

• … the Generative Topic for this course

The Teaching for Understanding Framework

• Throughlines• Generative Topic• Understanding Goals• Understanding Performances• Ongoing Assessment

Fourth Element:A Systems View

• A Systems Perspective– Big picture

– Interrelated aspects of the environment

– Unintended consequences

– The policy view

A systemic view

Community

schoolclas

s

home

Public Policy

Technology

10 Minute BREAK!

Course Overview

Go to the syllabus section of the Course Website

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ext21979/syllabus/

Assignments

Go to the Assignments section of the Course Website

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ext21979/Assignments/

Readings Previewfor “Varieties of Communities”

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ext21979/syllabus/

Learning Communities in Classrooms

A Reconceptualization of Educational Practice

By Katerine Bielaczyc and Allan Collins

1. Reading Questions

2. Structural Preview

Analysis of Learning-Community Classrooms

Knowledge-Building

Fostering a Community of

Learners

Inquiry Math Classroom

Goals of the community

Learning activities

Teacher roles and power relationships

Centrality/peripherality and identity

Resources

Discourse

Knowledge

Products

Lecture Bibliography

• Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. U of California Press, 1986

• Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community. Touchstone, 1993.• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of

American Community. Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Reading Preview:Gemeinschaft

Revisited:A Critique and Reconstruction of

the Community Concept

By Steven Brint

Brint

• Sociologists took 2 paths in studying community; one (Toennies) was in a sense a dead end. Not analytically viable.

• Other (Durkheimian) produced structural and cultural variable that tell us something

• But in the process, community concept broken up; can it be put back together again?

• New Typology: communities as aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values and/or personal concern.

Brint

• Changing types of communities• Look at the basis of ties, reason for interaction, types of

interaction• Different structures produce different outcomes, i.e.

– Level of mutual support– Integration rituals– Role of identity– Conformity– Liberal or illiberal values

• Look particularly at his conclusion: what implications does his view of the possibilities for egalitarianism have for face to face learning communities?