Rethinking Pedagogy - First four chapters

As I mentioned in a previous post the publishers of the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age have asked me to give suggestions on changes for the second edition. This is the first proper post looking at this.

In this post I am briefly going to look that the first four chapters. So here goes:

Learning and e-learning - The role of theory by Terry Mayes and Sara de Freitas 

This chapter looks at the place of learning theory in e-learning. It introduces the reader to three perspectives on learning theory - assocationist, cognitive, situative - which is useful. I think perhaps more on this is warranted as a lot of e-learning researchers find it hard to understand all the various learning theories and how they sit with each other. The authors introduce the idea that each perspective has its place in the learning cycle. It would be great if there could be a diagram included to depict the learning theory perspectives. Also a diagram on the learning cycle would be good in the second edition. 

An Approach to Learning Activity Design by Helen Beetham

This chapter considers the design of learning activities. A learning activity can be defined in terms of learning outcomes, learners, digital resources and technology, and interaction with others. This is a good concise chapter that captures the key aspects of a learning activity.

Designing Courses for e-Learning by Rhona Sharpe and Martin Oliver
This chapter takes a macro view of course design whereas the previous chapter takes the micro view looking at learning activity design. The chapter begins with looking at approaches to course design and the problems with using learning outcomes and constructive alignment where 'assessment always defines the curriculum' and learning outcomes become essentially a straight jacket for the learner. The chapter then looks at models for course design. To be honest I would have liked a lot more detail here - each model could be a chapter on its own. This chapter also notes that its not by virtue of any pedagogical affordances that technology is integrated into course design - its by necessity to deal with some of the challenges in the classroom like growing class sizes. The chapter finishes with a brief outline of how to go about course redesign. This chapter is a key one for me and I would like to see a lot more detail in two areas - the models for course design and on the process of course redesign - perhaps new chapters for the second edition?

Practices and Processes of Design for Learning by Liz Masterman and Mira Vogel
This chapter looks at what e-learning designers are actually doing in the field in designing courseware and learning activities. The chapter draws on 3 JISC funded projects one of which is centered around the tool support provided by LAMS. The chapter looks at how learning designs can be represented. The goal of this should be the sharing of good learning design, which the authors look at in one of the final sections. I think if this chapter was more generic, not discussing LAMS so much, it would be much improved.

That's it for the first four chapters. I should have the next four in a week or so. 

Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age - Feedback for 2nd Ed.

I received an email from the Routledge, the publishers of Beetham and Sharpe's Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age.

We are beginning work on a 2^nd edition of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age and I’m interested in getting your opinion on the need for and ideal scope of such a book.  I noticed you had reviewed the 1^st edition on your blog and we wanted to give readers the chance to informally provide feedback on the planned 2^ndedition.  Which chapters would you most like to see revised and which do you think should be dropped entirely?  What new topics do you feel should be added for a book that needs to be cutting-edge in 2013?  Any thoughts you wish to share will be appreciated. 

I have to say I applaud Routledge for looking to the readers and asking them what they want. Its been a while since I read the book but hey thats a good reason to revisit it and in doing so maybe I can give some feedback that Beetham and Sharpe can use for the second edition.

To do this I decided to maybe look briefly at each chapter and give my thoughts on that chapter. After reviewing each chapter I will go into what topics should be covered in the next edition that were not covered in the first edition.

The book is quite neatly divided into 16 chapters in two parts - Models of Learning and The practice of design. There is a third part containing resources that can be used by practitioners. Each resource is  covered in a chapter. In my whistle-stop review I will cover four chapters in each blog post and then another blog post will go into the cutting edge topics that I think the 2nd edition should look at.

If you have read the book it would be great if you could give your feedback on the appropriate posts I am going to pass on the posts to the publisher along with any comments that the posts receive.

Describing ICT-based learning designs

Chapter 5 in the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age book looks at describing ICT-based learning designs, by Ron Oliver et al. The authors make the observation that there now appears to be a proliferation of reusable learning resources available but little in terms of guidance or workflows of effective pedagogical practice in using these learning object and it is this that teachers in fact are craving.

These workflows are more generally defined as learning designs. Learning designs have four key elements - learner engagement, acknowledgement of the learning context, learner challenge and provision of practice, as defined by Boud and Prosser.

The chapter attempts to establish a framework for defining learning designs. A learning design topology is defined consisting of four key kinds of learning designs - Rule-based, incident-based, strategy-based and role based. Each of the learning designs are described first generally in terms of a Domain Specific Modelling Language and then shown how this language can be used in an example use case.

I think the ideas here are good - it is very similar to what people like Davina Hernández-Leo have been doing  with the IMS LD specification - creating best practice templates for specific pedagogical contexts.


Coming from modelling background I am still trying to figure out how this would fit into a metamodel hierarchy. I suppose it would have been good if the authors based their Domain Specific Modeling Language on some well defined generic language (e.g. MOF or BNF).

Learning and e-learning - Mayes & DeFreitas

Bad blogger, bad blogger. I have been a bad blogger of late, not posting anything in many months. I have been pretty busy with work and life in general. I needed something to kick start my blogging again - I think I have found it.

Last week I got a delivery from amazon, in it was two books that I really was looking forward to reading - the first one is Jay Cross's Informal Learning and the second is Rethinking Pedagogy in for a Digital Age by Beetham and Sharpe. In reading these books I thought - I really should practice what I preach and engage in a bit of reflection - so I turn to my trusty blog and I want to tell you all about the first chapter in the Beetham and Sharpe book - Learning and e-learning - the role of theory, written by Mayes and De Freitas.

The fundamental question asked at the start of the chapter is; 'are there really e-learning models or is the e of e-learning just a enhancement of traditional learning much like paper and pen was in the end of the nineteenth century?' e-Learning does bring some value to the learning process, providing for learning opportunities that would otherwise be impossible but is the actual way we learn different than say how we learned twenty years ago? Mayes and DeFreitas argue what we see with e-learning is a new model of education rather than a new model of learning.

One of the central messages of the chapter is that although there are a variety of learning theories out there, they are essentially complimentary. The authors nicely categorise the theories into the following perspectives:

• Associationist Perspective - learning through the gradual building of patterns of associations and skill components. This perspective encompasses associationism, behaviourism and connectionism. It is this perspective that Gagne's task hierarchy fits nicely into - tasks get increasingly complex and build on others. In the task hierarchy a learner doesn't move on from one level until that component is understood.
• Cognitive Perspective - This perspective sees knowledge acquisition as moving knowledge from a declarative form to a procedural form. As a learner becomes an expert the component skills become automatised - conscious attention is no longer needed to monitor low-level aspects of performance. Key activities here are interactions with material systems and concepts, and discussion with peers to develop understanding and competence. This perspective highlights that new knowledge must be built on something the learner all ready knows - educators cannot simply get the learners to memorise expert knowledge. Building knowledge structures from solid foundations must be done using problem-solving activity and feedback.
• Situative Perspective - This perspective embraces social learning and the fact that learning must be personally meaningful. 

The authors see these perspectives as complementary but a different perspective needs to be applied to a given e-learning context.  Each perspective addresses a different learning need as the learner looks to gain mastery in a given topic. e-Learning technology can support the pedagogical approach.

Okay so that is chapter one down. Hope to get a few more chapters done over the next week. Comments most welcome.