In this series of videos,
is doing a more detailed analysis
of each of these forms of pedagogic, diegetic, authentic,
transformative/reflexive using eight dimensions,
and the first dimension is architectonic spatial.
How's the space arranged?
So, we know what a traditional classroom was like,
and what I'm going to do now is I am going to take you into a classroom,
a real classroom, and I'm going to mention
the names of the the people in the place because they deserve credit.
I'm going to take you into a school in Kettle Moraine Wisconsin where one
of my master's students in the College of Education is a teacher,
and the teacher's name is Jessica Aroon.
And in a way, it's a kind of a parable of what's possible in
terms of reconfiguring the space of learning.
And while I'm talking about this,
you'll see some images going past,
some slides going past which show you this classroom.
So anyhow, Kettle Moraine was and has been
a conventional school with classrooms and distinct spaces,
one teacher in each classroom with 30 kids kids.
And what they have been doing over a number of years is
creating a second school within the school.
So, the second school is called Create,
which is aspirational about a new kind of learning,
and the original school is now called the Legacy Classrooms.
And what's kind of clever about this school is that
the kids and the teachers can choose to move from one school to another,
and gradually becoming a bigger part of the school.
And one of the parents is an architect.
And as they create this new Create School,
they've been literally taking down the walls.
So it's a big structure which had all these walls and corridors in it,
and they've been gradually taking these walls down.
And in this space,
is a space where a couple of hundred students can interact in small groups,
with little quiet rooms, reading spaces.
The staff room for the teachers is
a glass room in the middle which can look over the whole thing.
The teachers are wandering around the classroom.
And here are number of aspects of what's happening.
Firstly, a high degree of informality,
150 students in the one space,
but also highly structured.
So it's highly structured around.
Everybody working on their laptops,
being connected to the wireless,
working autonomously in a self directed way
on various learning activities, various projects.
The teacher can keep an eye on everything that's going.
They can wander around and talk to an individual student.
They can get a group of students together and they can talk to them.
But one of the important things is
the learning does not actually have to happen in this space
because exactly the same process can happen overnight, or over the weekend.
And in fact, learning in the sort of social forms
can then extend into other parts of the day and other parts of life.
So this is idea of ubiquitous learning.
But also, what's interesting
is a degree of responsibility for the learning amongst the learners,
a degree of autonomy.
And in fact, we have another little video
which we've shown elsewhere on the site where the students
themselves talk about the kinds of people that need to operate in this kind of space.
The other question really is one of duty of care which is it would be possible.
So these students are in the same space, they're all visible.
But in fact, this is not the case here.
We've got another school where we talk about this called
Discovery One in New Zealand in the website little example.
The kids can actually go out,
and take their mobile phones,
and be visible in terms of GPS,
and do projects in the community where even though
they're not physically in the same space,
it's possible to keep a track of not just what they're doing,
but where they are at any one point.
So classically what the school was,
the traditional directive school,
was about putting kids in the classroom, and they're all visible,
and they're all under control,
they're all within a line of sight.
But now there are these new ways of developing metaphorical lines of sight;
via GPSs, via internet connections,
via engagement measures, and the like.
And what we have increasingly is a phenomena we call learning analytics.
So, whereas in a traditional classroom,
you could see everybody in their classroom and you could know what they were
thinking and doing until the word got handed in,
now it's possible to analyze that work and to think about
that work and see that work all along to keep a comprehensive view.
And one of the ironies of this is that allows you to free up
the space where work happens and also the times where work happens as well.
So, this is one example
of the kinds of architectonic shifts that happen in this new kind of environment.
The second dimension that we've looked at
across the different paradigms is what we call discursive.
So, what we have in those environments is complex scaffolded lateral P2P interaction.
That's what we have in these kinds of environments.
So, classic classroom discourses,
read the textbook, memorize it.
A teacher ask questions,
students put up their hand and answer a question.
Again, a kind of a hub and spoke model of
classroom discourse and the content of curriculum.
But now, what we can do is we can have
these very complex scaffolded peer-to-peer interactions,
discussion boards where everyone participates, for example,
or peer reviewed works where everyone gives each other feedback.
These are actually very complex things to manage which all of a sudden,
these complex discursive forms become more manageable.
As by the way, we have
complex discursive P2P participatory discourse
happening in new media as well, sort of kind of similar.
So, what happens in these kinds of environments is
the vertical command discourse where the teacher tells you knowledge,
and tells you to do things and where you complied with those commands,
gets displaced or replaced to some degree by a horizontal dialogue.
But the important thing is it's often very highly
structured horizontal dialogue around peer review rubrics,
around prompts which expect certain conversation, and so on.
So it's not as if it's a free for all where everybody's talking.
And also, a free for all where everyone's talking in a conventional classroom is chaos.
It's unmanageable because you can hear what everybody's saying, and it's noisy,
whereas this can be highly scaffolded, highly structured.
And it becomes not chaos,
it becomes something which is functional.
So what we also have discursively is a shift from
a media regime which is one-to- many,
textbooks to students, teach lecture to students,
to one where alternately,
the teacher is going round the room working one-on-one with a student or one-among-many.
When a students work get published to a portfolio and other people comment,
when they make a discussion or comment on a discussion board, and so on.
So we have quite a big shift in the forms of media in those classrooms.