Comments on: Learnable Moments

By: Teaching Carnival 3.3 « bomphiologia (verborum bombus)

Teaching Carnival 3.3 « bomphiologia (verborum bombus) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:27:46 +0000

[...] Alex Halavais meditates on teaching, academia, and the importance of informal, unexpected, collaborative learning. [...]

By: Glen

Glen — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:00:13 +0000

Very nice post, Alex. Two thoughts/comments. When I was an altar boy at age nine,, a priest used a racial slur in the sacristy. Surprised and stunned, I felt like I had been slapped in the face. I told him he had used a bad word. His reaction was not good. Up until that moment, I thought that “Men of God” were of better moral character than the rest of us. I already knew that nuns were no better or worse since I was taught by them each and every day. That priestly moment made me refocus the lens through which I viewed the Roman Catholic Church, and really was the beginning of my questioning about all figures of authority.

Second thought, Benson R. Snyder’s 1971 book, THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM, might interest you. One of my smartest and oldest friends, Nancy Barber, did her doctoral dissertation on “The Organizations as Curriculum: An Exploration of the Learning Implications of Organizational Culture and Administrative Practice in Colleges,” and Snyder’s work influenced her thought a good deal. There is a lot in Nancy’s dissertation about how colleges and universities teach students in unanticipated way lessons about success, work, achievement that are different from, often at odds with, an institution’s formal and conscious goals and values.

By: Amran Noordin

Amran Noordin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:04:56 +0000

Nice post. Reminds me of the literature of how Xerox photocopy machine technicians learn from each other at water coolers. Come to think of it some of the online discussion forums usually has a place called the “water cooler” or something similar for online learners to hang out and hopefully through some happy chance find some like-minded souls and they can exchange invaluable knowledge in the process. The informal learning environment is all too important to ignore.

By: Alex Reid

Alex Reid — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:48:34 +0000

A nice post on learning and teaching, Alex. I certainly share in the idea of teaching as a matter of constructing environments, with the attendant observation that classrooms are so often overdetermined. There is such a strong push to view pedagogy as cybernetic, steering students to predetermined, measurable/assessable, reproducible outcomes. So what does it mean to think of learning as unexpected? As happening in institutional interstices? As emerging from an intellectual affectivity or something like that?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:19:13 +0000

‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist,
You’re a spineless liberal……

I think you hit something on the note of surprise. Surprise is very important, it is shock, and a sort of pain/pleasure, and we know people learn from certain kinds of things. I remember the first time i thought about surprise in this light, it was in relation to to zen buddhism, when i was an undergrad. It was the surprise and little joys of the world that I took from those texts. There are ways of seeing and being in the world that I think we need to have a sense of, that is the process, and the passing reality of the objective view. We have to find those little joys in the processes, in the play, in the incoherence and surprise. I try to get people to find those little ‘tie ins’ with their life in my classes, sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but really the goal is to get the students to the point of no longer wanting someone like me to provide guidance, but to find ways for them to be comfortable with creating their own world through their reading/research/work etc.