Clark Quinn wrote an extremely interesting post, X-based learning: sorting out pedagogies and design, on activity based learning. Wanting to see how these different models would interconnect on a mindmap, I started playing with them. That is when I noticed that one of the main difference among them is that some have a known answer and/or the goal is driven by the curriculum, while others have an unknown answer and/or the goal is directed by the learners.
It then struck me that the two primary branches should (could?) be the two main types of knowledge—explicit and tacit:
- Explicit Knowledge is normally easy to articulate to others, thus the models with known answers and/or driven by the curriculum would fall on this side of the branch.
- Tacit Knowledge is normally difficult to articulate to others, thus the models with unknown goals and/or directed by the learners would fall on this side of the branch.
This seemed to give the mindmap a real purpose, rather than just be formal vs. informal, social vs. self, or active vs. passive. Thus the map goes beyond activity based models:
For a larger map click on the image or here.
(note that you can hover your mouse pointer over each concept in the large map to learn more about it)
I'm not sure if I have all the concepts aligned correctly, thus I am wondering what your thoughts are?
Note: I used FreeMind (free of course) to create the mindmap. The document for the mindmap is here - Learning.mm - if you want to download it and revise it. If you have trouble downing it, this is the directory of all the files used to create the mindmap, pictures, and html file - http://nwlink.com/~donclark/learning/pedagogies/. Right click on the file you want to download.
6 comments:
Donald, interesting way to categorize, and potentially useful. Some quibbles:
I don't think I'd put metaphors under meta-learning; I think they go under explicit knowledge.
I would alter story-telling/narrative to be narrating your learning, or learning out loud.
I would put project-based learning under tacit knowledge, too.
I'm not sure if inquiry-based learning wouldn't also be tacit.
And having the learners active in designing the learning process smacks more tacit than explicit…
Where would Clark, Sweller, et al's Directed Learning fit (hate their straw man caricature of discovery learning, back as early as around '85 Feurzeig was talking about Guided discovery, and few support a purely self-exploratory model at least for kids.
Thanks for provoking some thought.
Clark, thank you for the feedback. As far as metaphors, I should probably use Nonaka and Takeuchi's label, "externalization", which includes metaphors, analogies, concepts, hypothesis, and models. They note it is used for articulating tacit knowledge in that it helps people to express what they know but cannot yet say.
However they note externalization is only an intermediate step in that people still have to do the "doing part" (internalization).
Nonaka and Takeuchi use the term "story-telling" to describe a tacit knowledge-holder telling a story. The people who listen to it not only hear, but also feel the realism and essence of that person's story. It seems to be more of a one-way street.
I'm not quite sure if I fully understand Dave Snowden's use of the term "narrative" but it sounds more like a two-way street in that both the listener and the story-teller learn by sensing what meaning people make of what happened.
I left out project-based learning as it seemed to be almost the same as Action Learning. However after looking at it some more it appears to cover shorter duration periods than Action Learning so I need to add it to the mindmap.
I agree with you on active learning, but it is perhaps the way I described it :-). From my reading, active learning seems to describe a method in which the learners actively participate, but the designers still mostly set the goals. Discovery learning takes a radical departure in that the learners set the goal.
However, I used Dugan Laird's description of it, who was way ahead of his time. He wrote about the best book on training, but while a lot of trainers read it, most seemed to discard it. In a 1984 Training Magazine survey, it was selected as one of the books that people would take with them if they were made CLO of the first corporation on the moon (they were only allowed three).
I need to either use someone else's description or do as you say and move it to the tacit side.
As far as directed instruction, it would go on the Explicit side under Performance Based Learning.
Mapping instructional design methodologies into your Mindmap of learning models, I can find plenty of models which go into the left hand side, but I find there are few design models that I can think of that map explicitly into the tacit domain. The key differentiator seams to be modes of assessment and evaluation of learning, assessment of tacit knowledge being either internalized by the student, or mapped into actualized performance in the real world.
Larry, I agree with you as it was easy to place examples on the left side, while I had to dig to fill in the right.
Donald I like your mind map of learning models and also agree that it is hard to find learning that can fit under tacit knowledge. I did come across on branch that you might be able to add to tacit knowledge, and that would be social constructivism. Social constructivism can be considered an alternative for your discovery learning because the learner will learn by sharing their different cognitive approaches in collaborative teams. I think you then could branch out from there and add things like collaborative learning and holistic learning; or a blended learning approach where the learning can learn from being immersed into a community of people who can help the learner learn the new information. These type of learning approaches are a form of social constructivism and could be filed under tacit knowledge.
How about Brain-Based learning? where would that be on the map? (it's also not on Clark's list)
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