The big idea in Being There, one with lasting impact in embodied cognitive science, is that minds are not for thinking, traditionally conceived, but for doing, for getting things done in the world in real time. Rather than developing “walking encyclopedias”, robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s was starting to focus on the dynamic interaction between body and world. Clark drew out affinities between this shift in the conception of intelligent action in computational systems and the emergence of the idea that cognition was scaffolded, embedded, and extended.

Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/embodied-cognition

“Internalization can be understood in one respect as “knowing how”. For example, riding a bicycle or pouring a cup of milk are tools of the society and initially outside and beyond the child. The mastery of these skills occurs through the activity of the child within society. A further aspect of internalization is appropriation, in which the child takes a tool and makes it his own, perhaps using it in a way unique to himself. Internalizing the use of a pencil allows the child to use it very much for his own ends rather than drawing exactly what others in society have drawn previously.”

Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky#Cultural_mediation_and_internalization

Questions:

If this is the case for example with driving bicycle or learning manners, where does the following list of videos stand and what could this mean for a society, for research and for learning processed used in education?

One example below:

Available from http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1934/environment.htm

Questions:

• How does this relate to using social media or other technology with social affordance for collaborative learning and knowledge construction?
• How does it affect learning and possibly what else, when these technologies have a built-in asynchronous affordance, that allows us to stop in the middle of a conversation, reflect (use inner speech) and continue a discussion (external speech)?
• How should we take this to account when designing instruction?

Oh, here are the presentation slides. Although this is against my beliefs on how much value they bring without the presentation itself.

Also cool Sketchnotes from @oniitamo (he also tweets in English as @niitamo) here: http://saurau.posterous.com/sketchnotes-eli-visumuistiinpanot-marko-terak

Knowledge acquired in decontextualized contexts, for example, tends to be inert and of little practical utility (as cited in Jonassen & Land, 2012, p. 10).

Or William Outhwaite about Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (PDF):

“Our understanding of a text arises out of our position in a historical tradition, and this is in fact our link with the historical effectivity of the text itself (Gadamer 1975a: xxi). Understanding is not a matter of forgetting our own horizon of meanings and putting ourselves within that of the alien texts or the alien society; it means merging or fusing our own horizons with theirs. (p.25)”

How about The Allegory of the Cave?

Might the following video be presenting similar ideas?

Check out also the whole post James Gee: What Do Video Games Have to Do with Project-Based Learning? As a gamer myself, I like the following part of the post, although I don’t fully agree it representing reality in all possibile contexts:

…no gamer ever reads the manual before playing the game; it’s boring and doesn’t make sense until you’ve played, then you might use it just as a reference. Sort of like reading a textbook; we have to put students “in the game” so they will comprehend and care about what they’re learning. The game = the project.

There are also some interesting comments after the post, for example from a reader “Neil” who suggests that

A minority of young people experience the latter through MMOs, but where else do they develop this? And, although more communictaion is becoming virual, young people need to be able to engage in face-to-face collaboration. School is a good place to do this and, in my experience, it is not something young people like doing. Yes, they may want to collaborate with friends on “raids”, but adult life also involves collaborating with people you don’t like around activities you’d not particularly choose.

I agree with the substantive point that many educators don’t have skills to teach these things directly, but I do think we can create environments in which they can emerge and be developed. You suggest a narrow range of contexts in which young people practice these skills, but I think we still need to address the issues of transfer and generalisation.

I think it is healthy to question these matters and also keep an ongoing discussion fruitful. Also what is actually critiqued should be clear. Is the point of the writer that

• It is useless to embed the 21st century skills to “formal” education, or
• Education and learning environments should be changed in a way where relevant skills and models are embedded in the learners’ lives
• Nothing at all should be done.

I’m not actually sure what Donald then suggest we should do; keep the schools and educational institutions like they generally have been, get rid of all the teachers or get rid of even thinking about “teaching” the 21st century skills?

What I personally feel and seen is important, is teacher education. It has been done and changed before to suit the needs of that current society and should be gradually changing again. As if we still think teacher are important, which I think they are, we should think about how their education is organized.

So, I was asked, “What happens then if Google servers go down?”. Aren’t you afraid of that?

To a question like this, it would be easy to answer something like If Google goes down, well, most likely something more drastic has happened in the Web anyways, or, Which one do you think is more secure; Google servers or your small organization’s servers? Which one has more professional people checking all the time that everything goes well and develops? Which one has their share prices to watch and keep their shareholders happy (which is a big carrot to make sure everything goes well)?

But I did not, and do not, want to use these arguments, as it goes around the thing that is actually important: What is learning and where it happens?

When you combine the idea that we all actually learn different things all the time (this is an undeniable fact), with the fact that the half life of knowledge is very fast, you understand that rigid static repositories are in many ways history. But I do not want to use this as an argument either.

But, what I would like the people to understand is, that at least in our context (faculty development of teaching in higher education), the activities that take place, are more important, not the content (which sometimes for example acts as a spark to engage an inquiry around a topic).

The activities itself, at least we would like to see them doing it, change the behavior from perceiving information as something to be merely consumed and “learned” to something actively questioned and developed progressively forwards. If we want innovation in any field, no matter if it is education or developing cars, this is simply behavior that we need, and it can’t be learned otherwise than doing it from the start.

The Web is full of new research, ideas; content as such. It is abundant and we should question it all. We are never going to run out of it. Because of that, we don’t need a place to organize that, as such. The Web is the place. So the problem of Google going down, is not important in that sense.

Also, if we think about social media, what does it do best? One of its most important affordance is acting as a tool for people to interact and collaborate. And when you genuinely interact with people, you interact with yourself. You learn.

If Google goes down permanently, yes, some history of the activities, i.e. interactions, might be lost. But you are still in yourself. And if we want to continue interacting through the Web, we merely change the tools or the platform.

Still in many conversations, it is an ignored fact, that for example Facebook started as a tool through which students interacted with each other. Not “just” for fun, but also for learning. A lot of, I’d almost say, zero sum research is conducted to “find” this same fact that community and trust are the cornerstones of online collaborative learning. We should not break something as natural as that with badly designed LMS’s or most importantly, inefficient pedagogical methods. Unfortunately a lot of formal education does just that.

So what happens if Google just disappears? Something that has always happened, I think: We evolve and move on. The world and the Web is a learning environment in itself. Tools and learning activities are not the same thing.

More interesting ideas around this conversation for example in Teemu Arina’s post “Cloud Learning as Universal Primary Education”.

If you have a class polling system, what new does that bring? Instead of negotiating meaning of some topic, instructor introduces a question (stimulus) and see who has the right answer (response). What does this imply? How does it change anything when you compare this to the regular “raise your hand if you think this is the right answer”?

In conclusion: The instructor is in front, in control, deciding what is meaningful to learn (actually to teach) and what in itself, is important at that time.

Once again the process, from which learning actually consists of, is destroyed meaningless. The learning is still understood as the chunk of content which the instructor delivers to the receivers (learners). Only now, coated too often with lousy user interfaces, bad usability (which creates frustration) and more importantly, wrong pedagogy.

What (video) games can actually teach us? Directly, indirectly?

Compare e.g. Civilization’s “you can win by destroying your enemies” and “the state has the power to survey and command their people, and they should do as they are told.” In what ways can we use this, and other game situations and contexts in learning?

Paul Kim

Learnings from the field around the world (India, Ruwanda, Palestine): Simplify things (e.g. user interface).

SMILE: People in all ages can ask questions, answer them, rate and evaluate them. No textbooks. The students take pictures around them.

Findings:
Hardware, software and pedagogy must be all integrated as a cohesive whole.

Grand challenges:
Rigid instructionism: We still think we need to teach.

Research must look at ecosystems, not just technology.

Conclusion:
Remember unique local clock speed. People often go back to teach the way they were taught. Sustainability.