Comments on: Monday Broken ID Series: The Introduction

By: Clark

Clark — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:08:08 +0000

Steve, yes, I believe we need to consider what makes this learning important to the learner, if we’re going to have the best chance of having it stick.

Tom, I haven’t like Bernice McCarthy’s model, for two reasons: that it has a suspicious base (cf the UK report on learning styles including Kolb’s, and that she’s flogging what’s really just good learning design as a proprietary system. It may be a nice framework, but I much prefer looking across models and drawing in different useful bits. Of course, maybe I’m just jealous.

By: Tom Gram

Tom Gram — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:34:15 +0000

Clark;
Excellent guidance here especially wrt bringing emotion into the design. It’s not always an easy thing to do and i think you need to know your audience well. I like Bernice McCarthy’s 4Mat model because it has a first stage of “engaging” the learning and connecting the topic to what they care about through an experiential exercise. She grounds her model in Kolb’s learning styles which I’m suspicious of but don’t think you have to buy into the learning styles explanation for it to work. David Merrill borrowed from it extensively in developing his “first principles” framework.

I like the Broken Monday idea…See you next Monday.
Tom

By: Steve Sorden

Steve Sorden — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:35:00 +0000

I’ve been focusing on self-directed learning (and to a lesser extent, self-regulated learning) and motivation is obviously critical in both of these theories. Seems like no matter what the method, though, if you haven’t convinced the learner why the lesson is relevant to them personally and connected it to what they already know, then you are usually wasting your and their time.

I like the idea of asking yourself how the learner might be motivated before you write (or maybe as you write) the objectives and/or set up the learning environment.

Looking forward to future posts in this series.