why we learn

LeBoskey (2007) provides the reader a concise and coherent summary of self-study, a inner-directed, interactive form of research focused on improvement of self as it relates to education. The goals of this type of research are founded in the goal of enrolling both colleagues and students in the endeavor, as they serve as critic and pupil. The author emphasizes the ways in which self-study differs from reflective practice, conceding that the precepts of the later can be found in the former, yet pointing to self-study’s inclusion of other viewpoints and a bias towards divergent rather than convergent outcomes. That is to say that those indoctrinated in this methodology tend to actively avoid closure, or settlement and choose instead, to continuously transform themselves as educators and professionals.

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Rogoff¹ on Vygotsky and Piaget’s views on intersubjectivity²

For Vygotsky, shared thinking provides the opportunity to participate in a joint decision-making process from which children may appropriate what they contribute for later use. For Piaget, the meeting of minds involves two separate individuals, each operating on the other’s ideas, using the back-and-forth of discussion for each to advance his or her own development. This discussion is the product of two individuals considering alternatives provided socially, rather than the construction of a joint understanding between partners (p. 149).

Very interesting. Rogoff goes on to describe her interpretation, that these two process are not mutually exclusive, that instead they are useful and utilized in different contexts

1. Rogoff, Barbara. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking. New York: Oxford University Press

2. an exchange between conscious minds; shared by one or more conscious mind

I’ve just finished reading Learning Together by Barbara Rogoff, Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, and Leslee Bartlett. I purchased this book only because it was very cheap and written by an author (Rogoff) who wrote the book that I had actually set out to buy, Apprenticeship In Thinking. Fortunately, sent out Learning Together a couple of days before Apprenticeship In Thinking, which forced me to read it first. I’m very happy I did.

Learning Together is a compilation of the thoughts of various members of an “open school” with a rather long history located in Utah. Current and former parents, administrators, students and teachers take turns chronicling their experiences at the school. Collectively, the contributors’ words crystallize the potential power of democratically collaborative schools, yet they also honestly address the arduousness of approaching education in this way. The schools’ philosophy is summarized as

instruction that builds on children’s interests in a collaborative way, where learning activities are planned by children as well as adults and adults learn from their own involvement as they help children learn (p. 3).

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The wiki has been billed as a collaborative tool. Over time the content changes was people add and or edit existing information. This is a truly powerful facet of the wiki and educators are beginning to implement them in this way. This collaboration doesn’t happen in real time; it’s not synchronous. There are tools that allow for synchronous collaboration. I’ll mention two, one free and the other a shareware application for the Macintosh.

• SubEthaEdit
• Google Docs

My first exposure to a collaborative editing environment was via SubEthaEdit, an exceptional writing program for the macintosh platform. It’s one of the few programs to receive five stars from the Macworld magazine. The collaborative text engine is now being used by Panic’s new web development application Coda. Although it (the text engine) is being used primarily for writing code in this case, it works just as well for any other writing purposes. So, if students want to work together on a report they can all do so via the internet. The restrictions, of course are that they each have a macintosh computer and a licensed version of the software.

That isn’t the case for Google Docs
Google Docs is web-application that basically writes data to a database continuously. It also allows multiple users to edit the same document at the same time. And, unlike SubEthaEdit, the only requirement is that you have an internet connection and a Google Account. I haven’t used Docs in this way, but I can tell you that for basic word processing, it does fine. Which, of course has Microsoft worried. They might be even more worried after the latest update and word that Google will soon be adding support for PowerPoint. Regardless of how Microsoft feels, these Google web applications are free and easy to use, even in a collaborative setting. And for those of you that would like to collaborate on a spreadsheet (yuck), Google Docs allows you to do that too.