Principles and Goals of Learning
The pedagogy reflected in our assignments puts students in a particular relation to learning, characterized by the following experiences:
- Active Learning
My pedagogy evolved from lecture/testing through Socratic dialogue/essays to experimental problem solving. The purpose of posing assignments as semester-long projects, couched as problems to be solved, asking students to produce kinds of work with which they are unfamiliar, is to create a condition in which it is nearly impossible to be a passive, regurgitative learner. One must take responsibility for figuring out how to do the assignment. - Collaborative Learning
Students are not abandoned to their own devices. They all are in the same situation. Assigned to a creative team (band), students collaborate on the production of a method for meeting the requirements of the assignment. Each band takes turns presenting the results of its brainstorming to the class. The class email list is used as a collective journal in which individuals report on the progress they are making including articulation of methods and description of their plans. Each individual may extrapolate from these discussions to his/her own widesite. - Independence from Instructor
The role of the instructor is to set up the course as a controlled experiment. The contract or promise is that if the students use the assigned materials to carry out the required assignments, the end result will be a meaningful, learning experience. The course has the potential to wean students from reliance on teachers by showing them a method for using the resources of the discipline for solving problems encountered in their work. The method is heuretic rather than hermeneutic. We are not so much interested in what books, films, photographs, websites mean, but how they are made, how they create their effects. The project is a controlled experiment which means that any task the student is asked to do is modeled or demonstrated in some way in the supporting materials (readings, tapes).- The students are active in that they must extract from these materials the operating functional features.
- Further, since the assignment is not simply to imitate a given work, but to apply its features to meet the demands of a specific assignment (the widesite), students must learn to extrapolate from the model to their own needs and personal materials.
- Creative Discovery
A commonplace of education is that there are at least two major dimensions of knowledge: one of discovery, and the other of validation. Education in the era of literacy has emphasized validation, proof, the transmission of what is already known and confirmed. The process by which knowledge is invented is acknowledged to be dramatically different from how it is confirmed, but this discovery stage is widely considered to be unteachable and is therefore left out of conventional education.- Our assumption is that creativity may be taught, that it is a mode of reasoning amenable to method, and that new media technology is especially supportive of this mode. In any case, creativity like anything else requires practice. If one is expected to be creative in the workplace, then one must have had some experience with the process during one’s education. The widesite project as a controlled experiment is designed to simulate the experience of creative discovery, just as conventional literate education simulates the experience of proof. Obviously both kinds of experience — Eureka and Q.E.D. — are essential for a complete education.