Learning in a Digital Age: The myth and the reality

I recently gave a keynote at the eLearning 2.0 conference held at Brunel University, in West London. The presentation was a reworked version of one I gave earlier in the year in Tallinn, Estonia. In Learning in a Digital Age: The Myth and the Reality, I present a number of widespread beliefs about elearning, and challenge the provenance, reasoning and application of these theories. Learning styles, digital natives and immigrants theory, and the arguments that you cannot personalise learning in large organisations; or that SMS txting is dumbing down language; are all scrutinised and challenged. Brunel University did an excellent job of recording my voice and the slides, and synchonising them, probably using Camtasia or a similar tool. Here it is in full, for those who want to follow the arguments and discussion that ensued.



Learning in a Digital Age: The myth and the reality by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

(re)Designing learning in a digital world

(re)Designing Learning Spaces for a Digital World

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

My keynote speeches to academic staff at Massey University on the Palmerston North and Wellington campuses this week were accompanied by the slides above. I deliberately inserted a (re) in front of the Designing theme, because I wanted to make it clear that we need to redesign and re-engineer many of our current practices in higher education, including course design, assessment and student support. Things are changing, and so is the nature of knowledge. No longer is it enough for teachers to transmit knowledge to students - much of it quickly goes out of date. In order to prepare students for a coming world of work we cannot clearly describe, we need to instill a flexible set of transferrable skills that include adaptability, change management, creative problem solving, collaboration and a range of digital literacies that will enable them to meet any challenges head on.

In the keynote presentations I tackled some contentious topics, including the issuing of challenges to a number of long standing and widely accepted theories (or beliefs) about how learning occurs. Yesterday's post will give you some clues about my views of learning style theory, but I also challenged a number of 'digital age' theories, including Marc Prensky's notorious Digital Natives and Immigrants theory, Wim Veen and Ben Vrakking's rather more insidious Homo Zappiens model, and Don Tapscott and Anthony William's Net Generation theory. I also challenged Maslow's hierarchy model of motivational needs, and Neil Fleming's VAK modality model of learning approaches. Even Vygotsky's ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) was placed under the microscope as we travelled through a landscape of emerging pedagogies that are aligned to supporting learners in a digital age. Previous commentary by other more eloquent and eminent critics would be better to pursue than any I could possibly articulate here, but in the meantime, I hope these slides will serve in some small way to illustrate the key messages. If you were at either of the two presentations and wish to add your comments or questions you are most welcome to do so in the comments box below.


(re)Designing learning in a digital world by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A convenient untruth

What do you think is the teacher's worst enemy? Some would say lack of time. Others would say unsupportive leadership, or the dreaded government inspection. Rigid curriculum, lack of resources and bad student behaviour may also be high on the list for many educators. For me, the worst enemy is bad theory. Bad theory, when accepted without challenge, can lead to bad practice. It's insidious, because bad theory that is accepted as fact without a full understanding of its implications, results in bad teaching, and ultimately, learners will suffer.

One of the biggest myths known to teacherdom is learning styles. Time and time again, the belief that students can be placed into specific categories such as activist or theorist, or that they are predominantly inclined toward one modal category of learning (e.g. visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) is inserted into professional conversations as if the theories are fact. And time and again, such beliefs are the justification for placing students into a specific style of learning so that a class can be 'managed' more effectively. Such categorisation of students is an absolute nonsense and the practice of doing so should be challenged strongly. It is lazy pedagogy, and the only reason I see that such beliefs persist, is that it is a convenient untruth which allows some teachers to stay within their comfort zones.

In an excellent expose on learning styles, Riener and Willingham (2010) argue this:

"...learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it?)"

Clearly one of the problems that emerges when teachers administer a learning styles inventory or questionnaire to their students is that the result tends to become a 'self fulfilling prophecy' (See Rosethal and Jacobson, for more on this phenomenon). One of the most notorious (and vacuous) inventories is Honey and Mumford's LSI, which in essence is nothing more than a repurposing of David Kolb's earlier experiential learning cycle model. Another is Neil Fleming's VAK model (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic) which is basically a reworking of 'tell me I forget, show me I remember, involve me I understand'. Such learning styles theories are based on little more than anecdotal observations, and are akin to folk medicine. But the student doesn't know this, and simply trusts the teacher's judgement. The student then sees the results of the questionnaire which informs them that they are for instance predominantly a 'reflector' or that they are an 'auditory learner'. They then actively seek to maximise their 'learning style' by engaging in reflective activities, or visually rich media. This all progresses to the detriment of the other learning modes, which become deficient and atrophied. Result - the learner fails to gain a holistic learning experience, and misses out on the many rich opportunities to expand and develop their other sensory or cognitive skills. Worse still, as Barbara Prashnig explains:

"....it remains a fact that every human being has a learning style which can consist of contradictory components, often leading to inner confusion and uneasiness. Style mismatches between teaching and learning, physical learning environments not conducive to information intake and unmet physical needs during the learning process can lead to frustration, stress, learning problems, underachievement, low self esteem, discipline problems among younger students, and dropoutism in high schools."

Do we really need to label people and brand them in this way? Riener and Willingham again:

"...learning-styles theory is sometimes offered as a reason to include digital media in the classroom. While including multimedia may be a good idea in general (variety in modes of presentation can hold students' attention and interest, for example), it is not necessary to tailor your media to different learning styles. We shouldn't congratulate ourselves for showing a video to engage the visual learners or offering podcasts to the auditory learners. Rather, we should realize that the value of the video or audio will be determined by how it suits the content that we are asking students to learn and the background knowledge, interests, and abilities that they bring to it. Instead of asking whether we engaged the right sense (or learning mode), we should be asking, what did students think about while they were in class?"

The final nail in the coffin on learning styles comes from a report by Frank Coffield and his colleagues (2004) who reported that not only was the concept of learning styles so ill defined as to be virtually useless in pedagogical terms, the instruments used to 'determine' student learning styles were flawed. They failed to measure accurately what they were purported to measure (validity construct) and they failed to measure learning styles consistently over time (reliability construct). Probably the only reason some teachers (and many training organisations) hang on to the idea of testing learning styles is that it is convenient to do so, and that to ditch the idea altogether would leave them having to work harder with students.

We can conclude that in the selection of digital media (and any other learning resource) teachers should not be dictated to by the fallacy of learning styles, nor should they attempt to measure what turns out to be a moving feast of approaches to learning that are actually dependent more on changing context than they ever will be on any deep-seated human propensity. Would it not be better to simply acknowledge that all learners are different, and that all can benefit from a range of varied experiences that ultimately leads to enriched personal experiences? It may mean more work, but it would certainly be a lot fairer.

References
Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., and Ecclestone, K. (2004) Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. Learning and Skills Research Centre.
Riener, C. and Willingham, D. (2010) The Myth of Learning Styles. Change Magazine, Sept-Oct.
Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1992) Pygmalion in the Classroom, New York, NY: Irvington.


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A convenient untruth by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

It takes all sorts

This is a post for Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in technology and science. Today I feature three of my female students and some excellent research they have been doing...

You may have noticed that over the last few days I have been posting abstracts from my third year B.Ed Primary education students. You've probably guessed that I'm very pleased with the way they have applied themselves to the task of identifying key e-learning research areas, and then designing their projects as self-organised studies. They have been involved with the international Atlantis Project for the past year, which among other things took them to Cork in Ireland and Frankfurt/Darmstadt in Germany for 2 weeks, where they were engaged fully in international collaborative e-learning research. Well now it's payback time, and they are all preparing to present their papers in the special Atlantis Track of the Plymouth e-Learning Conference in two week's time. Today's blogpost features a paper from Claire Spiret, Elizabeth 'Tizzy' Logan and Catherine Moore which focuses on individual differences in young children's learning through technology. The title of the paper, A critical analysis of learner preference tests in children's use of ICT, reveals that they have not taken an easy road - they have challenged some of the assumptions we make when we attempt to categorise learners into learning preference modes. Learning styles is a controversial area of research and they have critically evaluated the widely accepted VARK model. Here's the abstract:

Over the years, several theories of learning preference have been presented, but many are aimed at adult learning (e.g. Kolb, 1984; Honey & Mumford, 1992), and controversy surrounds their validity and reliability (see Newstead, 1992). Arguably the most accepted and popular learning preferences model is the VARK model (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write and Kinaesthetic). VARK attempts to explain how learners differ in their approaches to learning, but unfortunately, it may also label learners with the result that teachers fail to provide them with full and varied opportunities to learn. Further, the environment(s) within which children learn change in context, a variable which the VARK model may fail to accommodate.

In this study, we have created a version of the VARK learning preferences test, which is specifically aimed at 5-11 year old children. We used this in 2 UK schools with children (n=60) on two occasions, eliciting 120 responses in our data set. To accomplish this, we tested children during both computer based learning, and non-computer based learning, repeating the test to detect any differences in learning preferences within participants. In this presentation we will discuss the findings from our research, paying specific attention to the varying learning environments and contexts, and how children changed their learning styles to accommodate these variables. We challenge the notion that learning preferences are set and immutable, and counsel that VARK and other learning styles models should be used with caution.

References
Honey, P. and Mumford, A. (1992) The Manual of Learning Styles. Maidenhead: Peter Honey.

Kolb, D. (1984) Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall.

Newstead, S. (1992) A study of two "quick-and-easy" methods of assessing individual differences in student learning. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 62(3), 299-312.

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