Archives For Authentic Learning

Writing Doesn’t Have So Be So Hard

Dwayne Harapnuik —  May 29, 2023 — Leave a comment

Getting Back to Regular Writing
In the past 6 months, my family and I have experienced 3 major traumatic events that have consumed our lives. During this time, I have not been able to do much more than keep up with my workload and the new challenges that I am dealing with. While I have managed to keep up with my instruction and other responsibilities I have in running the Applied Digital Learning Masters, unfortunately, my writing, publication, content creation, and other development tasks have been severely limited. Even though the impacts of these challenges are still present I have learned to live with the changes and am moving forward. I have also gotten to the point where I am able to share the lessons I have learned and over the past few weeks have started writing again. As I move forward I hope that the new stories I am about to share will help others. The following are some of the key points that I will be focusing on as I move forward.

It’s About the Story/Purpose
In the post Sharing Stuff That Sticks and Want to Change the World: Tell a Good Story I make the argument that good stories or a good narrative can have a huge impact. Unfortunately, academics, teachers, and students often forget this simple fact and get caught up in the mechanics of writing, and lose sight of the purpose of the writing.

I am not alone in my thinking about writing. In Why Academics Stink at Writing – Steven Pinker’s article Why Academics Stink at Writing is a must-read – https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/duncan.hasell/engl1302/academic-writing/Why%20Academics%20Writing%20Stinks%20-%20The%20Chronicle%20of%20Higher%20Education.pdf

Eliminate Passive Voice and Us Active Voice
Consider how difficult the following statement is to understand:

It has been observed in a frequency all too significant that students upon submission of their written assignments have been inclined to have chosen a manner of composition that is too often far from one that is direct enough to be understood as conveying meaning in a fashion that is most expedient.

You will find the interpretation of this statement as well as an assortment of resources and links on how to avoid using passive voice in the post How to Use Zombies to Kill Passive Voice.

Primary Sources
In the post To Get the Real Story You Need to Go to Primary Sources I point to the fact that YOU have the responsibility to verify what you read by reading critically and thinking analytically while looking at the evidence. I have also argued that the notion of trusted sources is something that we cannot rely on anymore, at least not completely. I will go as far as to suggest that there are some sources that I may be more inclined to initially trust but I would still verify.

Whom can you trust? Trust yourself. You need to do your due diligence and look at all the facts and make an informed decision. There is no quick fix. The most efficient way is to go back to the primary sources and see what is really being claimed. Please keep this in mind as you do your research for your writing.

Literature Review – What Does the Data Say Tips
Even if you have to write for a very specific academic purpose like a literature review remember that purpose or story behind what you are looking to the literature for support. Make sure you take some time to review the Literature Review tips on the ADL/EDLD 5305 Tips & Perspectives page –

Going Deeper
Please remember that the following sections of my website/ePortfolio will have a wealth of information that will help you Change the World One Learner at a Time by adopting a Learner’s Mindset and sharing that journey.

In Authentic Learning, Learning, Writing , , , , ,
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Are You Asking Enough of the Right Questions?

Dwayne Harapnuik —  November 20, 2018 — Leave a comment


A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with my boys and their friends at a biking industry party at a local bike shop that sponsors my boys and other professional racers. I took advantage of this time to ask a racer who my older son raced with earlier in the year in the Enduro World Series (EWS) races in Chile, Columbia and Whistler… what was the biggest lesson he learned this year on the EWS circuit? He stated that he the noticed that fastest racers didn’t always take the fastest line down the mountain—they seemed to take the most fun line or the line that allowed them to flow down the mountain. Instead of hitting the hardest and fastest lines they seamed to be having the most fun and were simply flowing down the course. He also stated that it took him the full season to finally accept this and it wasn’t until this last race that he stopped trying to go the fastest and simply went out to have some fun and enjoy the day. When you race for 6-7 hours each day its is foolish to try and run at 100%. You not only destroy your bike you destroy your body. He argued that when he stopped looking for the fastest line and simply went out to find the most efficient or most fun way to come down the mountain he ended up being much faster at the end of the day and posted his best results. It wasn’t until he started looking at the bigger picture and started asking different questions that enabled him to look at his racing different that finally led to his best results. His major regret was that he didn’t come to this realization and start asking a different questions until his final race of the season. He also wished that he would have learned this lesson many years earlier.

Asking enough of the right questions isn’t only a challenge in professional EWS racing it is a challenge in our educational system and more specifically in our learning environments. In the words of Ken Robinson, our educational systems are all too often focused on finding the right answer, which is usually at the back of book, and that we shouldn’t look at. Robinson is using humor to lesson the devastating foolishness of our practice and to spur us onto to acknowledging that we have a serious problem. If we just go along with the status quo and accept that our systems of education are primarily focused on conditioning students to find the right answers for the exam then we are missing the fact that our students are not learning because learning is not about finding the right answers it is about asking questions. Learning is the process of making meaningful connections and we can’t make those connections without asking questions— lots of questions from different perspectives. If we only focus on finding the right answers Clayton Christensen argues we will trap ourselves into marginal thinking because someone can’t be taught until they are ready to learn. Asking questions is how we open ourselves up to learning. Christensen argues that:

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.

Unfortunately, as I have stated above and pointed out in the post Foster Inquisitiveness Rather than Rebuild It our educational system focuses on right answers as opposed to starting with the pursuit of questions. I am not along in my assertions. In his book, A More Beautiful Question Warren Berger points to fact that our education systems reward rote answers over challenging inquiry. Berger uses research data to that shows that our children are filled with curiosity prior to going to school and by the time they are in their teens they have little curiosity for anything to do with the curriculum. He points to the correlation between the ages that children lose their curiosity and a number of questions that they ask.

Why have we created an educational system that quenches our learners curiosity and creativity? While the answer to this question is much more nuanced than I can deal with in this post but it is fair to suggest that our current system of education addresses the question of how we prepare large numbers of students to meet the needs of the industrial age. The problem we face is that we have moved beyond the industrial age into the digital information age and we are still operating on a educational system that asks questions related to problems from an earlier era. We have to start pushing educators to start questioning conventional or industrial age thinking about teaching and learning, the educational system, their schools and classes, and their process and methods so that their minds are opened up enough to the point that they want to know how to do things differently. To explore these idea further check out the video or podcast in the post Are You Preparing Your Learners for Life or for the Test?

We need to create significant learning environments that will help to open up spaces in our educators minds for new ideas to fit. If we don’t purposely design our learning environments to address the questions and problems of the digital information age we can easily remain mired in marginal thinking and the status quo. It is very easy to maintain the focus on standardized testing, on covering the content, on checklists masquerading as rubrics, and the need to regurgitate the right answer. Maintaining the status quo is much easier then creating a significant environment where giving learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities will lead to making learners struggle with the anxiousness that comes with facing the challenges of deeper learning. We have to remember that authentic learning has never fundamentally been about spouting off the right answer; it has always been about making meaningful connections and to make those meaningful connections you have to start with the questions. The type of questions that open up the spaces in our thinking and motivate us to want to know and to make those meaningful connections—only to have the whole process start over. This is learning—this is life.

Perhaps we need to start asking:
Are You Preparing Them for Real Life or Just the Test?

References
Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Fried, J. (2012, September 25). A Conversation with Innovation Guru Clayton Christensen. Retrieved September 7, 2016, from http://www.inc.com/magazine/201210/jason-fried/a-conversation-with-innovation-guru-clayton-christensen.html

Robinson, K. (2010, Oct 14). RSA ANIMATE: Changing education paradigms. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U

In 21st century learning, Authentic Learning, Learning , , , , , ,
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The Human Mind is a Story Processor, Not a Logic Processor

Dwayne Harapnuik —  April 10, 2018 — 2 Comments

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1920

Whether or not the short and impactful six-word story was penned by Hemingway there is no denying that it evokes a great deal of emotion. It is almost as if there is something in us that makes a connection beyond the six simple words that we read.

Jonathan Haidt argues that “the human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” (p. 328). Haidt points to the work of the psychologist Dan McAdams who is recognized for identifying that we each have a story of ourselves that we use to reconcile our place in the world. McAdams argued that psychologists must connect the qualitative data that they gather on their clients with the qualitative perspective of the narratives that people use to make sense of their lives.

We go to movies, binge watch TV series on Netflicks, read fiction, and sit around the campfire listening to our friends and families stories because we just like stories. Why? In their essay Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson argue that “stories about one’s experiences, and the experiences of others, are the fundamental constituents of human memory, knowledge, and social communication” (p. 2). They posit:

  1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences;
  2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories;
  3. The content of story memories depends on whether and how they are told to others, and these reconstituted memories form the basis of the individual’s “remembered” self”.

Connecting new experiences with old experiences or in this context “old stories” is central to the notion of making meaningful connection which is foundational to the constructivist definition of learning. Stories help us to make meaningful connection which means that stories help us to learn. We can use stories in our learning environments in several ways of key ways. The most effective way is to create a significant learning environment in which a learner is given choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. This referred to as the CSLE+COVA approach and The authentic learning opportunity or a real-world problem that the learner chooses to resolve can provide the story and the context for learning because it requires that learner to face a sequence of real-world situations. As the learner works through the real-world or authentic learning opportunity they are challenged to develop knowledge, skills, and abilities that are necessary to address the challenges that the authentic learning opportunity present.

If an authentic learning opportunity is not available then using Roger Schank’s Story-Centered Curriculum (SCC) is the next best option. SCC is a:

carefully designed apprenticeship-style learning experience in which the student encounters a planned sequence of real-world situations constructed to motivate the development and application of knowledge and skills in an integrated fashion. A realistic story, at the core of each SCC, provides a meaningful, motivating role for the student, designed to ensure that the student faces exactly the right progression of challenges to stretch and build his or her abilities (Shank, 2007).

While the SCC can provide an effective simulated model the power of choice, ownership and voice will have a more significant effect on the transformative effect of the learning and should be the first choice. This is especially important if we want to have a lasting effect and really enable our learners to learn how to learn and not just work through a simulation.

Stories help us to make sense of the world around us and enable us to make the meaningful connections that can help us also make sense of our lives. It only stands to reason that stories that will come from real-world or authentic learning opportunities will also help us make meaningful connection and help us to learn. Are you taking advantage of this in your learning environment?

References

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by religion and politics. Pantheon, New York.

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. Guilford Press.

Schank, R. C. (2007, April). The story-centered curriculum [Blog]. Retrieved from https://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=1266881

Schank, Roger C. & Abelson, Robert P. (1995) Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story. In: Robert S. Wyer, Jr (ed) Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story. Hillsdale, NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1-85. Retrieved from: http://cogprints.org/636/1/KnowledgeMemory_SchankAbelson_d.html#fnB0

In Authentic Learning, EDLD 5304, EDLD 5305
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Power of the Continual Practice of Authentic Learning

Dwayne Harapnuik —  January 29, 2018 — Leave a comment

Fail Forward

Failing forward is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.
— John C. Maxwell

I overheard a short part of a conversation my two boys had the other day that confirmed the importance of authentic projects, failing forward and having the willingness to explore multiple iterations in the pursuit of a specific goal. Let me give you the backstory…

My two boys are young professional athletes in the emerging sports of Down Hill, Freeride, and Enduro mountain racing. They are also entrepreneurs who are exploring ways of getting paid to continue pursuing their passion of extreme riding, extreme sports, and the extreme performance lifestyle. They share a garage which is not only their biking workshop, but also their workshop where they explore a wide assortment of other ideas that they are experimenting with to support and fund their biking, travels, and lifestyle. Levi recently purchased a dual sport motorcycle to save money on fuel cost while driving around town and to explore opportunities in adventure tourism. The bike needed a fair amount of work to get it to a reliable driving state so he needed the workshop during the repair stage. Caleb also uses the workshop to design and fabricate components for his import sports car which he has also been able to sell to other members of the sports car clubs and to the tuner subculture that revolves around modifying imported cars. Some of these ideas are taking off and Caleb has sold multiple copies of some of his creations and is now exploring manufacturing options. Levi has been accepted into the Enduro World Series (EWS) and has two Enduro races in South America this spring he has to train and prepare for and also fund. The list goes on and on. When you consider all that my boys are doing, life around our household is forever changing and there is no shortage of projects, activities, and experiments that happen in a limited shared space.

Due to the extreme housing costs in North Vancouver, we all share a 3 bedroom house and attached garage so my boys not only work and train together they live in close proximity and it is not uncommon to hear them talk about their projects. It is also not uncommon to hear them resolve the use of the workshop that they share. Caleb has been working on prototyping a new canard (a small bumper wing designed to provide downforce on the front end of the car) with hopes of creating a template for a carbon fiber version for which his tuning community is looking. Since the boy’s workshop isn’t that large they must coordinate its use and Levi was checking on the status of Caleb’s latest prototyping project to see when he could get some space back to work on his latest motorbike modification. This finally leads me to the recent conversation in which I overheard Levi asks Caleb:

…when are you going to be finished with the all the fiberglass work you are doing… I need to get my motorbike into the shop.

Caleb responded:

This current prototype isn’t working out so I am going to give up on it and try something different… you can use the shop once I clean up the space.

Levi responded:

Hey! Remember you never give up on anything you just shift your focus to a new direction. He laughed and added… a good general never retreats he just advances in a different direction.

There were some additional exchanges and laughter between the boys and when Levi came down for dinner I thanked him for reminding and encouraging his brother to always frame failing forward in a positive context. Both of my boys have been exposed to and use aspects of the Design Thinking process so the notion of ideation, prototyping, and testing is a very common part of their lives as they continue to explore ways to create new things and solve problems. While it easy to talk about the iterative process and state the importance of failing quickly so that you can find the right prototype that will finally work, it is much more difficult to live the process. I have watched both Levi and Caleb struggle persistently on projects for long periods and there is no denying that weeks or even months worth of failure in ideation, prototyping, and testing can become discouraging. Therefore, hearing one of my boys encouraging his brother to not view his experience as something that he was giving up on but rather a shift in focus assured me that my boys are going to be OK.

As I have stated in other posts, the continual practice of authentic learning and the lessons learned from all those years of authentic projects have prepared my boys to make their way in a very challenging but exciting world. You can’t teach persistence or grit but you can create the environment in which it will grow. You have to create a significant learning environment in which your learners are given the choice, ownership, and voice through those authentic learning opportunities where the continual iterative process of failing forward and repetition of ideation, prototyping, and testing will bring out that grit, persistence, and determination. It also doesn’t hurt to have someone else around who can remind and encourage you to not give up but to shift your focus to a new direction.

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Are You Preparing Them for Real Life or Just the Test?

Dwayne Harapnuik —  October 23, 2017 — Leave a comment

This is what riding looks like when it works out…

The following posts should confirm that the authentic learning opportunities, inquiry based learning and taking ownership idea that I talked about in the video are ideas that I have been exploring for a long time:

Why Authentic Learning Converts Into Lifelong Learning (2017)
In pursuit of the better way – the learners mindset (2016)
The Gift of Intrinsic Motivation (2013)
Why Student Engagement Plummets in High School (2013)
Difference Between “Doing Projects” and “Project Based Learning” (2013)
You Learn What You Live (2011)
Creating Significance to Foster Learning (2009)

In Authentic Learning , , , , ,
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