Bransford presentation in Second Life
Dr. John Bransford gave a talk inside Second Life yesterday on Virtual Environments as ways to Reorganize Thinking about Research and Education. See also Rik’s post and pics and Jeremy’s transcript. Here is a PowerPoint presentation I put together with Jeremy’s pictures and Rik’s edited version of some of the comments – released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
I wrote up a brief parsing (my interpretation) of the Bransford talk and transcript and wanted to share it here in case it is useful but also to continue the discussion:
- Transfer is the important goal
- Bransford compared cumulativity of Airplanes/Aerospace industry (flimsy airplanes to jet airliners) over past 100 years with education which simply does not have that cumulativity.
- Adaptive expertise as the possible key to help make this happen, what that is and how it works is not fully understood.
- Inquiry (slow/less efficient in short term, faster/more efficient in long run)
- Efficiency vs. Innovation
- Indicated it could be possible to structure tasks to promote inquiry/innovation over efficiency, e.g., structure school learning as such this way…
- Experience vs. Description
- Portrayed an experiential –> descriptive –> experiential chain, and that a “right combination” of the two types of learning would be optimal for transfer
- Also called these at various times (experience/implicit learning/informal learning/exploration); and (explicit learning/introduction of formal structure/description)
- Expressed that instruction could be blended with Second Life (experience) –> Real Life (description) –> Second Life (experience) combinations
- Stated that MUVEs are a place for collective inquiry and action
- Expressed surprise at creativity of graduate students and seemed convinced that we need more opportunities/rewards for collaboration within the academy
- Need mechanism to reward distributed expertise
- Need to be able to give credit for those who design, and those who learn from that and improve the work of others
- Made a contrast between off-the-cuff interpretations (based on culture) and in-depth inquiry (same efficiency/innovation dichotomy)
Links to two interesting papers:
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