Learning Design – Topic Four

The process of learning is more like jumping in a mud puddle than we might like to imagine. I mean, think of all the smart books written by all the famous learning theorists! The ones we read in college. The ones I have one foot away from my hand as I type this. I do think there is truth there, but like any good religion, there is also mystery. And I think there are buckets full of mystery. Buckets of mud.  

At least that is what I have learned to think about learning. It is not that I am not committed to some parts of many of them. I mean who can deny the application of ideas from Dewey, Bruner, or Montessori! These ideas all intersect into one another making a big ball of mud. And I am committed to that ball of mud.

I would never deny someone’s current understanding about learning theory and learning design any more than I would say my understanding of “the facts” related to learning theory are fixed. They depend on far too many external factors that I cannot observe or express. While we all travel through this life on earth, no one of our loves is the same. And that is the great wonder. The beauty of it all. Why then do we try so hard to classify and divide and understand? Well, hopefully to improve the lives of others here with us. And there we can have a school. And it has sort of worked. Sort of.

The topic of these last two weeks has been Learning Design and AI. Thankfully we seem to have agreed that AI is just too big of a mud puddle to jump in given we are also looking at learning and the design of experiences for others. That is a big enough topic for two weeks.

I believe our challenges around working collaboratively as a group are many and our success are many too. As I shared last in our last meeting, we have some Zoom meetings where we engage with each other and ideas, but our connections are weak. A bit of face time of Zoom does not make a community. It makes for a bit of face time on Zoom.

One of my favorite learning theorists is Antonie St. Exupéry 🙂  He reminds me that what is important is not often what we can see, but what we feel. He reminds me that caring for someone, or even something, is what makes it important. And that even after something is gone, it remains. We need to tend to and care for each other. We are creating a bond with one another. This is the learning. This is messy, muddy learning. And it is enough for me.

Below is an AI generated video about a class I taught last year and I used numerous resources about learning design and theory, as well as a lot of feedback from students. So, I sneak in the AI part of the topic and address the topic of learning design. While I am not a huge fan of this thing, the class was fun to jump around in, and it seems people learned stuff. I prompted the thing to, “specifically, how the course addressed “networked learning.”