E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs

E-learning Curve Blog is Michael Hanley's elearning blog about skills, knowledge, and organizational development using web-based training and technology in education

End-of-year Moodle-ings: a chance to review (a book)

December 12th, 2008 · No Comments

The enhanced backup and restore features and new DB module will also assist management of my implementation, as I’m the kind of person who feels like they’re performing open heart surgery – without anesthetic – on a patient, on those occasions when I have to perform some sort of customization on a production system.

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Tags: e-learning

Teaching organizations how to learn. Part 2 – Conditions for learning

December 5th, 2008 · No Comments

As discussed in a previous post, Driscoll (1994) outlines five conditions for learning (p.382-3). Very much like the multiple approaches and interpretations that exist in constructivism, a number of conditions must be met for the approach to be implemented. The conditions are:

Providing complex learning environments that incorporate authentic activity. Constructivists argue that learners should learn [...]

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Tags: e-learning

Teaching organizations how to learn. Part 1

December 1st, 2008 · No Comments

Chris Argyris, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, has made significant contributions to the development of organizational learning theory and experiential learning.

Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment …must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it.

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Tags: Bruner · Constructivism · e-learning

Constructivism Pt.13: More Organizational Learning

January 17th, 2008 · No Comments

It could be argued that components of Argyris’s and Schön’s position do not conform to the constructionist tradition, and it is possible to discern a positivist aspect to their thesis, particularly in the exposition of their notion of theory-in-use, which in my opinion exhibits characteristics of behaviourist patterns – for example B.F. Skinner’s ideas on [...]

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Tags: Argyris · Schon · situated cognition

Constructivism Pt.12: Organizational Learning cont’d

January 16th, 2008 · No Comments

In Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective, Chris Argyris and Donald Schön suggest that each member of an organisation constructs their own representation of the actual, tacit, applied organisational behaviours, also called its “theory-in-use” (1978, p.16). Argyris and Schön modelled theory-in-use to investigate its three components:
Table 1 Components of theory-in-use (after Liane Anderson, [...]

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Tags: Argyris · Schon · situated cognition

Constructivism Pt.3: The principles of constructivism

December 28th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Bruner’s 1966 text Toward a Theory of Instruction described the key principles of constructivism (p.225):
Table 1 Principles of constructivism

Principle

Definition

Readiness

Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn

Spiral organisation

Structure.

The content must be structured so that it can be [...]

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Tags: Bruner · Constructivism · conditions of learning