To me, there’s an attractive teleological progression from Pedagogical to Andragogical frameworks, but I also think part of our job in HE is to make ourselves less relevant to the student in the long run. Knowle’s Andragogy still has a program of study outlined by the teacher, – it’s still teacher managed. So to me,…

Education has traditionally been seen as a form of transmission, of broadcast. It was always the teacher and the institution who decided what the learner needed to know, and how knowledge and skills should be transmitted. This is to be expected since Pedagogy concerned itself initially with teaching children- empty vessels to be filled. Although…

  “The Cartesian worldview of “I think, therefore I am” seems to be finally giving way. A next step, “We participate, therefore we are,” better captures today’s ethos, we think” John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray, Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice, and Technology (2003)  I first heard the term Communities of Practice (CoP) used in…

The business of Communities of Practice I found it interesting that Etienne Wenger was initially surprised to see that the first people who adopted Communities of Practice were Businesses and not Education. They saw that their typical learning strategies based around schooling- bundling people off to training courses- were not working. So I decided to…

One of the texts we were encouraged to look at as part of HEA ADAM was the TED talk “The maker mind” by Jen Ryan at TEDxDirigo Generate in 2013. I saw this in the same week I saw Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” and was struck by some connections. To Marx, class consciousness was needed…

I discovered early on that new students like lists. There’s something comforting in the fact you are reducing uncertainty of any domain into a finite group of steps. Of course it’s not only students. Education is the same- 5 minds for the future,  Seven Myths of Education, and even the Trivium whilst we’re at it! So…

In creative media courses these days, Bloom’s taxonomy, when expressed hierarchically like in the image below, (a la Maslow?) can look like a batenburg cake. I worry about the phenomena of “Bloom’s empty sandwich”, where students are remembering, understanding and creating, but have little time for the filling of applying, analysing or evaluating. This cauterisation of certain…

I’m a product of a career path that went from being employed by many education institutions who wanted me to help them marry industry practice with course content. I’ve been an intermediary between industry and HE- interpreting vocational practices and “levelling” them or simulating them. I’d written hybrid training/education courses (which I’d now label as…