Pedagogy, the art or science of teaching, initially referred to the teaching of the young (Greek - child leading). This led more recently to the coinage Andragogy to signify the teaching of adults (Greek - adult leading). Apparently  education is derived from the Latin educare meaning "to raise", "to bring up", "to train".  Closer perhaps to the greek derived terms is educere, meaning "to lead out" or "to lead forth". Therefore one possible meaning of education is also 'the art or science of teaching' but since it has many possible meanings pedagogy seems to be the preferred term.  And pedagogy, concerned with teaching, is distinct from learning theories. Presumably good pedagogy  depends upon and incorporates good theories of learning.

The question is, how do we connect good theories of learning through good pedagogy to the practical activities of good teaching (which facilitates effective learning in the students)? To paraphrase Jerome Bruner, picture the face-to-face tutor working with a tutorial group, the lecturer addressing 300 students, the on-line tutor working in an asynchronous discussion in a VLE, and ask what sort of theoretical knowledge would help them, both in the design of the teaching activity and in its delivery or execution.

Bruner talks of the most common 'presenting problem' for all teachers and students - how do teachers reach the minds of students and how do students understand what the teacher is getting at. One way or another, explicitly or implicitly, teachers and students deploy a range of more-or-less intuitive  'folk' pedagogies that inform their strategies and activities and impact upon the success or failure of the teaching and learning that is going on.  And, to quote from Bruner;

[...] in theorising about the practice of education [...] you had better take into account the folk theories that those engaged in teaching and learning already have. For any innovations that you, as a 'proper' pedagogical theorist, may wish to introduce will have to compete with, replace or otherwise modify the folk theories that already guide both teachers and students.

It is all very well trying to encourage effective learning on the basis of some learner-centred constructivist model of learning but if teachers and students both subscribe to the 'authority filling empty vessels' model of learning, then the proposed learning design and activity may seem unstructured, unfocussed and without any clear educational purpose or payoff. In fact, a waste of time and effort.

 

Ref: Bruner J (1999) Folk Pedagogies in Learners and Pedagogy Leach J and Moon B (eds) OU Press 1999

Andy Rush has a useful tutorial on how to videocast with YouTube and Wordpress. In his presentation he shows how:

[youtube=http;//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAIXMDFFxNw]

will embed the videocast into the Wordpress blog post. This doesn't work on Elgg but I would like to know what the code would be to achieve this, if there is any.

YouTube also gives code to embed a player and play the videocast:

I have tried pasting this in using HTML editing screen and it disappears on saving.

If anyone has any ideas I would be grateful to hear them. Also, is there a free video editing application that does for video what Audacity does for audio anyone has tried and would recommend?

The ground-breaking videocast I am experimenting with is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAIXMDFFxNw. Prepare to be amazed!

The OU Open Content initiative could be one of the most exciting things to happen in education for a very long time. The full description of the project is at http://oci.open.ac.uk/info.html. Of particular interest is Appendix K: Learning Support Tools for the Supported Open Content Environment.

The supported open content environment will be Moodle. It will be the same as the one available to registered OU students from May 2006 but without the management information relevant to their taught modules. Users of the open content repository will be able to create both personal and community areas and resources. The purpose of the support environment is to "actively support individual learners and educators and the self-organising communities which we anticipate will emerge".

The tools available to users will be in two broad groups, those to find and organise resources and those to enable community and collaborative activities. With these tools users will be able to search for content, create meaningful structures, engage with other users and create communities. These tools will also enable the importing and organising of resources from outside the OU open content repository. Organisations that use Moodle will be able to import OU OC materials into their systems.

For community building, communication  and collaboration the tools available will be forums, chat tools, wikis, weblogs (I don't think Moodle has weblogs but it is being integrated with Elgg), and Moodle's workshop tools (apparently a 'workshop' is, amongst other things, a structured framework within which a student can submit work for peer review).

Collectively the the tools will provide the means, individually or collaboratively, to locate and organise resources, to map knowledge and to engage in what the OU calls 'sensemaking activities' which I think is close to knowledge construction activity. They will also enable the development of 'social presence' and 'learning identities'. This goes someway beyond the usual profile information as (depending upon what access and privacy measure you invoke) it includes a developing summary of your activity, the resources you are working with and, intriguingly, a measure of 'reputation' (like on e-bay perhaps!). The system allows you to find (if they don't mind being found) peers with the interests and expertises that match yours.  But who can you trust? How do individuals gain reputation? The mechanisms by which this happens within fairly specialised areas of the blogosphere, e.g. educational blogs, is fairly well known, as is and e-bay's system, but how does this develop in on-line learning communities? According the the  OU "Reputation is increasingly critical in everyday experiences of on-line resource gathering: who do you trust?".

The OC initiative is closely coupled to a number of action research projects to explore and develop the use of all these technologies. A key objective is to explore and develop new pedagogies. Usefully each aspect of the OC intitiative has a clear pedagogical rationale. As the document says "Learning to think critically, argue in a scholarly manner, and collaborate to make sense of problems, are amongst the highest order skills that we we seek to instil in learners".

This will of course another massive publicity coupe for Moodle. The OC project is not entirely supported by Moodle as the intention is to integrate and use other Web 2.0 applications, particularly for reflective learning and community building, as appropriate. The OU is piloting the use of Elgg with its tutors and perhaps may consder Elgg as one of the emerging tools they will consider for their OC project. It will be interesting to see how the OC support environment develops over the next year or so.

Heard on Radio 4 (UK) this morning: Motorists who have 4 points on their licenses for being caught by speed cameras are 50% more likely to have been involved in an accident than motorists with no points for speeding. The 'clear message' of this according to a road safety organisation is it is irrefutable evidence that speed causes accidents.

Wrong. This is a prior theory (or wishful thinking) imposing a preferred but illegitimate interpretation on 'the evidence'. Given that most people that get caught by speed cameras didn't see them it is entirely possible that getting caught by speed cameras and being involved in accidents are both related to poor observational skills. In other words, fast drivers caught by speed cameras are exactly that, a sample of all possible fast drivers self-selected by their lack of observation. It is entirely likely that many drivers who speed (maybe even the majority) do not have accidents and are not caught by speed cameras because their observational skills protect them from both.

I would like to argue that it is inappropriate speed by non-observant drivers that causes accidents, not speed per se. Or, speed kills but mostly in particular circumstances.

If correct, what are the policy implications of this? Who knows, but training in observation may be part of the answer. For instance, the training for the Advanced Motorcycling Test, conducted according to the police rider's system, places great emphasis on observation and riding to a constantly updated 'riding plan'. Having had the benefit of following a number of fast experienced police motorcyclists it is clear that the fastest rider from A to B is the one whose observation allows the maintenance of optimum speed at all times, not the one that reaches the higher mph (and ends up with the hottest brakes and whitest hair and possible doesn't arrive at B at all). As a matter of interest research by insurance companies and road safety organisations shows that motorcyclists are significantly less likely to be involved in car accidents than non-motorcycling drivers, and advanced motorcyclists even less so.

Perhaps every motorist should be obliged to undertake advanced motorcycling training, although this might introduce an unacceptable Darwinian element into driving instruction.