pedagogy
I’ve often found worthwhile food for thought at the Internet Time Alliance. A recent post by Harold Jarche mentions a distinction between Collaborative Learning and Social Learning. I wasn’t aware of one, so I looked at the definition by the Human Capital Lab:“Collaborative learning is ...
PowerPoint has been used, abused, and used again. Millions of people have made, viewed, and analysed presentations, so there’s a lot of existing wisdom about best practices. Also, PowerPoint is being increasingly used in e-learning development. So here's a look at what PowerPoint practices are applicable to courseware development.
#1: Questions to the audience
I’ve been reflecting upon learning theories, and it just came to me that ID itself is based upon sound theories. (We don’t usually think of “doing ID” as “doing science.”) Pretty obvious, I know. But in my defence, it’s been a long time since I thought of ID as a field of endeavour.
A long time ago, illustrations and photos—in magazines, newspapers, books—used to be pretty much a straightforward affair.
They followed one rule: Put in the picture that's needed here.
That is to say, they were descriptive, or of immediate value. A few examples:
Pedagogy is about teaching things differently: differently based on who is being taught, who is doing the teaching, what is being taught. I tried to look at it from a clean slate, but that got muddied by too many established conclusions — each of them useful, no doubt:
Rote learning, or learning by heart, got a bad name quite some decades ago. A Time Magazine article in 1986 showed Japanese schoolchildren in a classroom, with words and numbers in neat columns on the blackboard. The caption read, “...In Japan, rote learning is still emphasised...” The article implied that in the West, rote learning had gone out of fashion, having been replaced by critical thinking.
In military instructional institutions around the world, it is customary to begin lessons with a couple of minutes of jokes. This is done with military precision, so it might or might not have the desired effect of lightening up the audience — but the principle holds. You’ve probably come across instructors who spend a few minutes saying something goofy, cracking a couple of jokes, and then proceeding with the lecture. Why do they do it at all?