{"id":61878,"date":"2017-12-13T16:48:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T21:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=61878"},"modified":"2017-12-13T16:59:18","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T21:59:18","slug":"from-dsc-my-reflections-from-catching-a-cup-of-coffee-with-an-experienced-wise-elderly-learning-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2017\/12\/13\/from-dsc-my-reflections-from-catching-a-cup-of-coffee-with-an-experienced-wise-elderly-learning-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"From DSC: My reflections from catching a cup of coffee with an experienced, wise, elderly learning expert."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><em>From DSC:<\/em><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\"> I sat down for a cup of coffee the other day with <em>an experienced, wise, elderly learning expert.<\/em> He was virtually a walking encyclopedia of knowledge around matters related to training, teaching, and learning. <em>It was such a gift to learn from his numerous years&#8217; worth of experience and his hard earned knowledge!!!<\/em>\u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I rarely use the phrase <em>learning<\/em> <em>expert<\/em> because it&#8217;s very difficult to be an expert when it comes to how people learn. But in this case, that phrase works just fine for me.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">This elderly gentleman had years&#8217; worth of experiences involving instructional design, coaching, teaching, and training behind him. He mentioned several things that I want to record and relay here, such as:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">In terms of higher education, <strong>we need to move from a <em>content<\/em> orientation to a <em>process<\/em> orientation<\/strong> &#8212; <strong>i.e., helping our students learn how to learn<\/strong> (i.e., providing some effective methods\/best practices such as <a href=\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/mindshift\/2017\/11\/22\/a-better-way-to-study-through-self-testing-and-distributed-practice\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this article<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/stoken\/rbtfl\/Z10jaVH\/60XQM\/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this study<\/a> discuss for example).<br \/>\nWhile <\/span><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I agree that this is a good call, I still think that we&#8217;ll need some level of content delivery though. As Daniel Willingham asserts in his book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Why_Don_t_Students_Like_School.html?id=8SDs8LZl41EC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why don&#8217;t students like school?<\/a>,<\/em> students still need to have a base knowledge of a subject so that they can recall that information and integrate it into other situations. Per Willingham, we can&#8217;t expect learners to become experts and think like experts without that base level of knowledge in a subject. But if they never had that information in the first place, they couldn&#8217;t recall it or bring it up for application in another context. That said, I highly agree that students need to graduate from high school and college having a much better idea on <em>how to learn<\/em>. Such a skill will serve them very well over their lifetimes, especially in this new exponential pace of change that we&#8217;re now experiencing.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Speaking of contexts, this wise gentleman said that <strong>we need to move from being <em>content<\/em> driven to being <em>concept<\/em> driven and <em>context<\/em> driven.<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/span><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The trick here is how to implement this type of pedagogy within higher education. It&#8217;s hard to anticipate the myriad of potential contexts our students could find themselves in in the future. Perhaps we could provide 2-3 contexts as examples for them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>Students need to <em>interact<\/em> with the content. <\/strong>It won&#8217;t have any sort of lasting impact if it&#8217;s simply an information transmission model. This is why he practiced (what we today call) active learning based classrooms and project-based learning when he taught college students years ago. This is why he has attendees in his current training-related courses apply\/practice what they&#8217;ve just been told. Along these lines, he also likes to <strong>use open-ended questions and allow for the process of <em>discovery<\/em> to occur.<\/strong><br \/>\n<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>The point of teaching is to make learning possible.<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>Learning is change. No change. No learning.<\/strong><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\">An interesting, bold perspective that I appreciated hearing. What do you think of this assertion?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">For each educational\/training-related item, he asks 3 questions:<\/span><\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">What does it mean?<\/span><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Why is it important?<\/span><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">What am I going to do with it?<\/span><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">There was soooooo much knowledge in this wise man&#8217;s brain. <\/span><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I reflected on how much information and expertise we lose when instructional designers, teachers, professors, learning theorists (and many others) retire and leave their fields. <strong>I asked him if he was blogging to help pass this information along to the next generations<\/strong>, but he said no&#8230;there was too much on his plate (which I believe, as he was highly energetic, driven, and active). But I find that when one finally gets enough knowledge to even being close to being called an expert, then it&#8217;s time to retire. We often lose that knowledge and people end up reinventing the wheel all over again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Again, <\/span><em><span style=\"color: #800000;\">it was such a pleasure to talk with an older gentleman with <\/span><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>years of experience<\/strong> under his belt &#8212; one who had clearly put a great deal of time and effort into his learning about learning. <\/span><\/em><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong> In an age when America discards the elderly and worships youth, there is an important lesson here.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">In an age when organizations are letting their older, more experienced employees go &#8212; only to hire much younger people at 1\/2 the former wages &#8212; we should learn from some of the other nations and cultures who highly respect and lift up the more experienced employees &#8212; and the elderly &#8212; and who <em>actively seek out<\/em> their counsel and wisdom. Such people are often worth every penny of their wages.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">&#8212;&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">What do you think? Am I off base on some of my responses\/reflections? How do these things strike you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">&#8212;&#8211;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From DSC: I sat down for a cup of coffee the other day with an experienced, wise, elderly learning expert. He was virtually a walking encyclopedia of knowledge around matters related to training, teaching, and learning. It was such a gift to learn from his numerous years&#8217; worth of experience and his hard earned knowledge!!!\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472,110,174,127,115,302,72,343,347,71,150,178,3,419,119,102,7,431,279,173,305,50,188,118,214,299,445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-learning","category-blogs-blogging","category-career-development","category-collaboration","category-colleges","category-community-colleges","category-daniel-s-christian","category-education","category-education-reform","category-faculty-staff","category-formal-learning","category-generational-differences","category-higher-education","category-ideas-teaching","category-instructional-design","category-learning","category-learning-ecosystem","category-organizational-change","category-participation","category-pedagogy","category-project-based-learning","category-teaching-learning","category-teaching-online","category-training-corporate-universities","category-universities","category-workplace","category-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61878"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61908,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61878\/revisions\/61908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}