I believe these reflections on learning by Brian Alger and Sebastian Fiedler are especially important for professionals in the fields of instructional design and instructional support. The practice of setting up design teams with content experts and media experts can lead to further fragmentation of what it means to know and to learn. We risk having too many Campbell's soup courses and too few home cooked stews. Students need to know that there is a vital difference between mass-market, commercialized knowledge and knowledge creation. __JH
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"Perhaps we have placed too much emphasis on generalization and abstraction over the complexity and mystery of living. If we come to believe that our models can hold up under all or even most circumstances, I believe we are living a delusion. A delusion that can come back to cause discomfort and unhappiness. It is not so much that generalized models are in and of themselves a problem, but it is, perhaps, that we have become too close to them and biased by them. The very need to ask ourselves the question, "How do we capture the essential experiences of another person's life so that we can use that to build a better way for ourselves?" seems to indicate that we have already forgotten something. It is a question I continue to be interested in..." [Brian Alger]
 "Brian touches upon a number of issues in his lengthy post (make sure to read the whole piece...) that would all merit an elaborated response. There is nothing wrong with abstraction and generalization per se. In fact, I would say they are core processes for dealing with the flow of experience throughout life... right from the beginning to the very end. The trouble is that we condition ourselves to believe in the absolute power, or at least the superiority, of abstractions and generalizations that are presented and packaged in certain ways. The life histories of the people who actually constructed these abstractions and generalizations in order to solve some problem or to reach a new level of understanding are usually cut out of the picture. One of the striking examples that I remember from my studies in Psychology is the Abraham Maslows model of needs and his concept of self-actualizing. They way it is presented and taught leaves everyone with the impression that this guy was sort of drifting into some esoteric area, or his main insights remain completely misunderstood. Studying Maslow´s biography opens a whole new path of understanding and appreciation."
"We often present and treat codified 'knowledge' as if it is the product of some mystic process, well beyond normal life... that has nothing to do how we generally operate. Then students around the world try to memorize, for example, the 6 or 9 or 12 steps of the developmental model of some psychologist, without any intentional attempt to connect this abstraction to their own experiences, and without an evaluation of what this abstraction was meant for in the first place. Especially in human and social sciences this is a terrible failure. Disconnecting the abstractions and generalizations from the historic, social and biographical context of their origin creates indeed an delusion. Brian is probably right... years of training condition our way of operating and install a tendency to search for and to work with models we have hardly digested and connected to our own lives. Compared to these shiny abstractions our own experiences often seem so messy and other people`s accounts seem so inferior... "[Sebastian Fiedler] [Seblogging News]
9:45:34 AM 
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