B/EN/Review
Every now and then you stumble into a source that may not give you that much of a new information to think about, but the overall content and conclusions it leads to will shed a light on concepts and information already encountered. For me personally, first three chapters of the book Digital Resources for Learning from Daniel Churchill did exactly that.
The main trait of this book is its instructiveness. Not published explicitly as a textbook (or I overlooked it), this publication offers quite a lot of information which can be treated as how-to’s. Churchill gives quite a few practical examples on theoretical concepts he states, and these include pictures as well. I must make a remark here: I found these examples to be very well chosen and described. They often deal with topic well-known and therefore close to my knowledge and in the case of Napoleon military campaign’s visualisation really did inspire me (you can check the map discussed in the book here!). In other chapters you can find bullet points lists, easy to be reviewed. For someone who wants to practically have the design of educational material being done, this book is a good source.
Churchill’s reclassification and core ideas
One of the main concepts being elaborated is that of digital resources classification. Whereas normally we tend to categorize resources based on their format (as it is assumed, and certainly not far from truth), Churchill offers another perspective. Instead of talking about resources as videos, podcasts, presentations or articles, let us take the point from which we view resources based on both the type of knowledge we want to educate and activity we want to introduce. As such, Churchill speaks about information display resources, presentation resources, practice resources, concept representation resources and data display resources. Each of these is meant to mainly address one of three knowledge types – declarative, procedural and conceptual.
What does concept representation resource mean you may ask among many other questions. According to Churchill, such is a concept representation resource, that represents core disciplinary knowledge or principles. It may be concept of gravity in physics, inflation in economy, cycle of fifth in music or data-information-knowledge hierarchy in Information Sciences. What makes this type of resource different from presentation resources (more suitable for declarative knowledge) is the emphasis on, ideally, ability to interact with these resources. Change the attributes, arguments and watch how causes and consequences change through affected relationships. The reason why I described this particular type is that author puts a lot of emphasis there as well. It’s one of the main „thesis“ of the book, if you want. Churchill explicitly states it at page 13: „This book holds this form of digital resources for learning as the most important category for learning-centered activities.“
Another main point or core idea is this learning-centered paradigm. It stands in opposition to teacher-centered practise, and says, that first there must be learning outcome considered. Then activities leading to these outcomes designed. And effective digital resources must be such, that they mediate learning activities. Churchill sees them as tools.
Little reflexion: grapes and bugs
As I already stated in the first paragraph of this review, the fact of connecting many different information in one text, information I already knew from diverse university lectures and texts, is the strongest overall impression. For illustration, Churchill works with theories from Vygotsky at page 39, about whom I read in information sciences lectures, information literacy seminars and others. At other place, page 51, he talks about blackboard learning management systems, type of educational information system – I wrote about similar one in information systems in education. Also, I guess, the practical guidance on how to design educational objects while taking advantage of ICT affordances is what deepened my understanding of whole EdTech branch of our department, a branch I do not focus on.
I genuinely appreciated classification Churchill came up with, the one I reproduced here. Little a-ha moment I’ve experienced while reading the text for sure. Honestly, how would you classify digital resources if you had to conceptualize it? According to what? Mine would surely be based on the format. Books. Articles. Podcasts. Graphs. To read Churchill’s attitude felt like new window opened. Especially now, after I got better in programming, I’ve suddenly realized, how could such objects be designed, prototyped and brought to life. /* By the way, Churchill writes about this processes too, just at the end of the text’s scope we were given to read. */
There were few things I could disagree with or at least argue. One thing is author’s striking ocularcentrism, which is extremely interesting for me, who basically writes his thesis about sound as a medium for perceiving the world. Here’s the thing: Churchill believes that visual form is the most powerful modality for every resource. As I’ve read some papers on this topic I do agree that vision might be the predominant sense. That being said, there certainly are cases where sound may be good, or even better medium. Speaking about concepts, how about acoustics? Or music? For educational object used for music, it’s hard to imagine visual form to be inherently better.
Another point I disagree is at page 24. Churchill states that „the most effective digital resources for learning activities might be those that integrate all informational content of a resource in a single screen presentable via a device.“ Sure, I’m the layman here, but this seems a little bit far-fetched. Depending on a concept, this might lead to a lot of clutter and demotivational complex monsters. Sources for this claim are not cited in this text passage. Also just few lines further he contradicts himself a little bit. For one, Churchill claims: „The internationalization of properties of external mediating tool – not the memorizing of content – and experiences of working on an activity leads to learning.“, only to write in the following box „Learning is not simply a process of internalizing information presented in a digital learning resource.“ I for one find this little bit clumsily written, if not factually then at least seemingly contradicting previous statement.
One practical implication..
If this book is sort of textbook, let’s take a look at what could be transferred from the book to my study field? What practical suggestions could I recommend to teachers and our department?
Well actually, I think our department is generally not that bad overall. The rate and effectiveness of incorporating ICT’s in teaching, the diversity of learning materials and assignments, one can really gain considerable digital tool literacy here at KISK. But one thorn in my side is the heavy reliance on PowerPoint presentations. Observed in students across the university: open the presentation – which should exist as a prompter for speech during presenting – and learn from it for exams. It always felt off. Sort of non-academic… like.. Can’t we do any better? It leaves me wondering about if the default categorization is, based on Churchill’s book, format based? If teachers would look at these materials through the lens of Churchill’s categorization, maybe there would be less of presentations posted and more of conceptual resources?
How obvious it may be, I’m asking myself right now: in order for conceptual digital resources to be more exploited in learning, they have to… exist! To be more concrete, in the form of interactive learning objects as described in the book and demonstrated on the triangle’s relationships, to my knowledge there is currently not enough of such objects to shift the learning. After all, isn’t it the reason why this book is of practical counsel on how to create them? Here the question is: should teachers become more competent in building of such stuff? Given the need of coding and deeper technical skills apparent in the functionality of stated objects, hardly.
But could they become more skilled in the design of such learning experience? Speaking of object design via methods as wireframe – that’s more likely. Speaking of the learning experience design? Definitely! Despite the seemingly progressive nature of learning I’ve experience here at university, frontal mode of teaching would still be, overall, a little bit too much prevalent. In some subjects at least. Teachers would benefit from an effort to reshape this way of teaching. And meanwhile they would maybe come up with ideas for these conceptual resources and cooperate with some dedicated stakeholders to make them become real!
…and one forecast!
Let us now take a step back and think about the main topic from perspective of its mode, which is digital. The thing with all things digital is that they, thus far, evolve very quickly. Given how many information, technological details and links in the book are inherently bound to the here-and-now, valid question arise: How will education be different, let’s say, ten years from today?
Of course I’m gonna use the AI hype here to ruminate on. But that’s because they’re so interesting. AI. And hypes. 2017 is the publishing year of this book. It’s 2023 guys, so much has changed and chadGPT is rocking it like crazy! Come to think of it, it’s striking how outdated the publication can already seem to be. No chad. He has already changed how the picture will look like in the near future. First schools are giving up on final thesis, for the teachers cannot effectively detect AI’s work. Affidavits will be massively false.
But there is this thing with hypes. They draw sort of sinusoidal shape of emotional experience evolution. Both overly optimistic and pessimistic predictions will fall short. I envision the year 2033 as year when teachers still are the main authority in the education process. New x/z generations will generally bring fresh wind into how activities are performed. These teachers will be more skilful with digital technologies then their boomer colleagues, yet the youngest will still be somehow ahead, although the generation gap there not so wide as just few years ago. The paradigm itself, shift from teacher-centered to learning-centered, will be much harder to finish, yet the state of the art generally further. Classes will pretty much stay as they are, buildings with rooms filled with teachers and some amount of pupils. There is simply not enough „margin“ in infrastructure to change this. But the experiences with distance learning will be incorporated and hybrid plus asynchronous modes will be pretty normal.
AI will be strictly regulated and controlled in order not to be misused and potential harms prevented. These security principles will of course be breached and there will be lot of debates on policies to be implemented. Especially AI-based cyberbully. Huge case or more will be well-known and cited as the worst cases scenarios we’re trying to avoid. The hype, meanwhile, will start to dissolve. It would be now much clearer, that AI is just another tool, its potential benefits and drawback exponentially more serious reflecting the nature of its powerful abilities. Some school will not have the means to be up to the challenge and will be in crises. Another, more progressive and wealthier, will change the attitude towards it. Students will be lead and educated on the use of AI itself, they will be shown how to ask questions well, where AI still makes mistakes, and how to use it more ethically. For activities important to be AI free, seminars in smaller groups will be held, where control of misuse will be easier to conduct, some will maybe even forbid the devices altogether. At the same time counterculture will already start to form, acting upon the feeling of AI driven alienation forming groups of people rejecting these tools, seeking inspiration in early antique (as always) citing places like Plato’s academy to be the new model. In the end though, students will still need to work hard, that one’s given.
With all being said, I think this publication was interesting one to read in our seminar. Different from the first one, unsimilar to the second, relevant to edtech, wannabe explanatory stuff to non-specializing students and nice broadening for designers. What is your take on this actually? Would you have liked to see some of these things being applied to education during your high school era? Do you think these information could change the way you seek study sources? What do you disagree with in my ten years vision? How do you feel about it?
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