on Lesson TWO-The Big Assumption

--by courtesy of http://roseskitchen.wordpress.com/2007/01/11/kueh-lapis-legit/

So Lesson Two of this module has come on. Wow, big words (and acronyms that follow like shadow)--Self-Directed Learning (SDL) & Collaborative Learning--have come to haunt...

I never liked these coinages, it's like conjugating an already comprehensive term, in this case, the term "learning". Won't you say that "learning" means self-directed efforts to pick up skills and knowledge, to harness resources, to create, to probe, to discover, to initiate, to collaborate, to communicate, to work as a team as much as an individual, to drive and to be be driven?

But here I am, at where I am, for what I am to be. Maybe I should take it this way, layers of meaning upon layers of meaning, like kueh lapis, as a whole it's a kueh, but each layer makes up the kueh. So what is the kueh without its layers, just like what is "learning" without its definitive terms to specify its compounded meaning.

So much clearer now with this analogy. So yes, self-directed learning and collaborative learning, two no-easy goals to achieve.

The Big Assumption
During lesson time, we watched two video clips, one on a U.S example of self-directed learning, where students row their boats about a lake near campus where they observed and measured sights and sounds of nature. The other was a U.K example of role-playing in the air traffic control room where teamwork and collaboration was crucial to the mission accomplishment.

The examples cited are situational. They were real-life scenarios, and the motivation came from the excitement to paddle on water and to have in their hands, the fate of air traffic . It was a small class size, and the resources were available ( a suitable lake for the activity, a pseudo-control room). There was much talk about how the students enjoyed themselves, how engaged they were, how wonderful learning had become, but, there was little highlight about how the learning was made possible.

Where does the motivation come from?
Perhaps a more urgent question, to address the issues of the two concepts of learning really would be: Just where does the motivation come from in the first place. How to generate interest and drive. If there was little interest in the activity, say, the students were asked to record and measure sights and sounds at the school's little ecogarden in a small corner on campus, or the students were asked to do a role-play in class instead of in a control room, how would the learning process have become, how would the students have engaged or disengaged themselves.

Let me ponder on this a bit more, while i chump on my kueh and tea.

Lesson Two of QED 527 was held on 12 Aug 2009 0830-1030.