Dawn on the River Lea, Hackney
I am much taken with Diana Laurillard's model of learning as a conversation between learner and teacher. Formerly Professor of EdTech here at the OU and head of the government's eLearning Strategy Unit, Laurillard is now Chair of Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education. Her model of learning in HE is set out in her influential 2002 book Rethinking University Teaching, where she describes the teaching-learning process as a two-phase interaction between learner and teacher:
1) a discursive phase in which the teacher presents a new concept and students enter into a dialogue with the teacher, trying out the idea and its corresponding language, questioning and clarifying.
2) an interactive phase in which students engage with teacher-constructed tasks, attempting to put the new concept into practice, adapting their practice in response to feedback, and reflecting on their learning.
Building on the social constructivist learning theory of Vygotsky and Piaget, Laurillard describes this conversational framework as a “a continuing iterative dialogue between teacher and student, which reveals the participants’ conceptions and the variations between them… There is no escape from the need for dialogue, no room for mere telling, nor for practice without description, nor for experimentation without reflection, nor for student action without feedback.” (Laurillard, 2002)
The idea of learning as dialogue is not in itself new of course: it goes back to Protagoras and Socrates in the fifth century BCE. What is both new and highly relevant to eLearning course design is Laurillard's articulation of the dialogic learning process into five stages, each one associated with a distinctive type of learning technology.
The initial stage of learning, for example, she describes as apprehending; this is when new material is presented to the student, and corresponds to narrative forms of media such as print or video. The next stage - exploring - necessitates more interactive technologies such as a library or the web; and so on... The full typology is shown below.
Learning experience Technology types
Apprehending Narrative (eg print, video)
Exploring Interactive (eg library, web)
Discussing Communicative (eg seminar, online conference, blog)
Practising Adaptive (eg modelling/simulating/enacting a learning object or event)
Articulating Productive (eg outputting a learning object or evidence of learning)
It has been suggested (see Mayes and de Freitas, p34) that Laurillard’s model of a continuing, iterative dialogue between teacher and student may be hard to sustain in the context of online/distant learning. I would argue that such a dialogue is at least as important in eLearning as it is in location-based higher education. And I know it is possible, because I have experienced it while a student on H808, The eLearning Professional.
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References:
Laurillard, D, 2002, Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edition, London: RoutledgeFalmer
Mayes, T & de Freitas, S, 2004, Review of e-learning theories,frameworks and models: JISC eLearning Models Desk Study, Stage 2, available online in pdf format from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/ (accessed 26/05/2007)
