{"id":234,"date":"2009-05-27T09:43:25","date_gmt":"2009-05-27T17:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=234"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:08:05","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:08:05","slug":"pedagogy-and-middle-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2009\/05\/pedagogy-and-middle-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Pedagogy and Middle Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
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Adapted from Flickr cc image by yewenyi<\/a><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Having begun reading Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards<\/a> (1999), with its trashing of the “Old School” pedagogies, I posted a tweet<\/a> this morning:<\/p>\n

not happy with the lack of middle ground between the PLE\/open “individualized exploration” and the LMS\/data-driven “rote content” arguments<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then, following a tweet from Dave Cormier<\/a> this morning, I discovered George Siemens<\/a>‘ slides from the Africa presentation<\/a> he’s giving today, apparently. Here’s Slide 15:<\/p>\n

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I noticed that if you took out the text in the middle, the process is very much the same as what I’d call Good Traditional Learning<\/em>. Certainly as a historian, this is what I do. In fact, there is even more interplay between aspects of the prospect, if you’ll forgive my doodling:<\/p>\n

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As a historian, I naturally assume that ideas are not really new, but just a revision due to circumstances. And certainly, in my various discussions of connectivist theory<\/a>, I hashed this out last fall.<\/p>\n

During the class and again today, I’ve observed the polarization of educational ideas<\/em>. On the one hand, you have the “Old School” hardliners<\/strong>, the “back to basics” folks, the ones pushing accountability, Student Learning Outcomes, data-driven models, etc. Industrialized education. Enlightenment social science gone mad.<\/p>\n

On the other are the highly innovative ed-techies<\/strong> who say schools are failing because we are failing students, unempowering them to learn. Kohn’s book, constructivist and connectivist learning theory, promoters of blogs and wikis and Personal Learning Environments. Edupunks (I’m proud to be one!), learner-centered, wired. Those who claim today’s students are different (you can put the technology horse before or after this cart), so they need different methods to learn<\/a>. Some even claim to be going back to a pre-industrial model, as in this article claiming that the grading system was created as a lazy and inappropriate way<\/a> to assess learning. Many in this crowd don’t like Marc Prensky<\/a>, with his idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, but others start with his ideas. For those not familiar with this view, Michael Wesch<\/a>‘s classic video should help:<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&w=425&h=344]<\/p>\n

The Middle Ground seems to be somewhat different, and I intend to explore these ideas further. I see a number of elements working against the polarization of educational viewpoints:<\/p>\n