Assignment4DelanyTamabayeva

Assignment4DelanyTamabayeva

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• read Fischer, G: "Lifelong Learning - More Than Training", Special Issue on Intelligent Systems/Tools In Training and Life-Long Learning (eds.: Riichiro Mizoguchi and Piet A.M. Kommers), Journal of Interactive Learning Research, Vol. 11, No 3/4, 2000, pp. 265-294. http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/lll99.pdf
• reflect on the following statement about Lifelong Learning:
  • "If the world of working and living relies on collaboration, creativity, definition and framing of problems and if it requires dealing with uncertainty, change, and intelligence that is distributed across cultures, disciplines, and tools-then education should foster transdisciplinary competencies that prepare students for having meaningful and productive lives in such a world."
• in your statement, address the following issues:
  We are asking "YOU" questions - use this as an opportunity to discuss your individual experiences among the members of your group → you can answer individually or find the largest common denominator

Part 1

• do you agree with this statement?
• what does the statement mean for YOU?
• do you prepare yourself to be a lifelong learner? what are your most important activities you undertake?
• does your education at CU prepare you for being a lifelong learner?
  • which activities are most important for this objective?
  • which activities are "in the way" to achieve this objective?

Part 2:

• which support from Information and Communication technologies (or: which Digital and Social Systems) are most important for lifelong learning?
  • describe requirements for them
  • describe your personal experience with them

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Daniel Delany, Diana Tamabayeva

2. Statement Part1

Nice work but somehow incomplete?

#bubblec("I agree", "who is I? And what does the other member of the group think?") with the statement about lifelong learning. To me, it's all about the idea that we're currently using static teaching methods in a very dynamic world, and expecting what we teach children to be applicable forever. However, the truth of the matter is that, in many domains, 'factual truths' simply do not exist, and even when they do, they may be obsolete in a matter of a few years. The fact that the technological and social landscape of our world is not only continually changing, but changing faster and faster (see Toffler, Kurzweil), is well-acknowledged. Therefore, it is becoming more and more imperative that we embrace a new educational style which does not only provide an answer for a question the student is expected to come across in his/her 'adult life,' but one which sustainably and continuously helps them learn methods for solving their own increasingly unanticipatable problems.

However, I believe that sometimes, Fischer does get a bit overzealous with his approach to reforming learning, implying that we need to completely overhaul our methods and replace them with these new "lifelong learning" methods. Just as there are many things to be learned from apprenticeship, the practice which dominated our previous era of learning, the teaching era offers many lessons and techniques which we shouldn't ignore simply because they're "dated." I think that many domains, including technical parts of subjects such as math or grammar, may be better suited to the traditional classroom learning model. While it may be one's immediate reflex to shun the old "teacher as expert" model, sometimes the teacher is an expert with important factual knowledge to impart on students.

In general, my past education, not just at CU but K-12, has not used the lifelong learning model, and therefore has not truly prepared me for lifelong learning. Classes with long lectures, textbooks (which are an inherently static source of information), and the traditional homework model (without collaboration or even necessarily understanding) have contributed to a very classroom-based school career.

However, while widespread changes in the education system take a long time to propagate, I constantly prepare myself for lifelong learning in a variety of ways; mostly by using the internet to keep up on developments in my field, connect with other like-minded computer scientists, outsource rote knowledge such as syntax and built-in functions when programming, and contribute to self-motivated projects.

3. Statement Part2

Life-long learning should allow us to explore new possibilities in the ways we learn, work, do any kind of creative activity. It is hard to achieve that with only paper and pencil, because these tools do not facilitate any help relevant to the field or topic of study/discussion/project. We must create innovative new technologies so that creative work will be more collaborated, structured, and productive. There are five requirements for a new media and technology that Fischer stated in "Life-Long Learning - More Than Thinking":

1) to provide pieces of information relevant to the task at hand 2) to maintain consistency between different representation automatically or semi-automatically 3) to generate different external views dynamically from one complex internal structure 4) to create links between static description and dynamic behavior 5) to link action and reflection spaces.

Since the time the paper was written, there appeared a lot of technologies that attempt to fulfill these requirements. Most of them are implemented through the use of internet. Internet provides an environment of interactive learning, for example learning from each other (forums, blogs, wiki, etc.) I use these technologies over and over during the day. Whenever I have a question or an opinion I want to share, I go to the internet, and find any relevant information that I want to use. Using wiki, we can update each others pages, add new information, so that we can be always updated on what people around me are doing. Life without these tools seems to be unproductive in terms of collaborative works. These technologies provide us with possibilities to be more productive in both our collaborative and individual work.