Candidate Pattern: Use my stuff

Summary	Use learner supplied artefacts as raw materials for new learning activities.
Status	alpha	Confidence	3
details...		Group	Planet team

Problem

As a trainer or teacher you want to bring together small groups of learners and create a coherent and meaningful training/learning experience. You need to understand the needs of the learners.  The learners need to understand why they need the skills and how they apply to their daily work based activities. But often learners are not motivated by the learning examples being used.

Context

This applies particularly to work-based training or CPD, where people are using 'tools' to create artifacts in their daily routines. The tool (from the training perspective) is not domain specific e.g. Photoshop. It also works with less vocational courses where students are demonstrating generic or tool-based skills.

Solution

Get learners to contribute materials from their work or areas of interest and negotiate use of these in demonstrations and assignments, so that they are more motivated to engage.

One example of this is in work-based learning:

• Ask participants to provide a range of artifacts or source material from their daily routine and things they are planning or interests.
  • Artifacts may be iterated by holding a workshop with the participants
• Review and map the artifacts to the skills that the participants need to attain (trainer) -engage in a process of negotiation of these learning goals with the key players (participants and the organisation as appropriate)
• Design demonstrations and assignments for training

(Diagram from: http://www.websequencediagrams.com/)

Another example was seen in CETL ALiC in an Information Handling module. A previous prescriptive assessment was replaced by inviting students to create a video tutorial on a subject of interest to them. Subjects were proposed by the students and approved by the tutor at each stage in the assessment. The difference here is that the student's assessment is adjusted rather than the training materials.

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

Takes time therefore an issue of scale is present in this pattern.

Participants may bring sensitive artifacts with them (for example we may find proto-type designs or similar).======= Rationale ========
Working with ‘ordinary’ artefacts from the workplace as a source of CPD or professional learning is an idea proposed by Eraut (2000) in his theorization of informal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work. Eraut insists that tacit knowledge is ‘central to important, everyday action’ of professional practice, but can be difficult to elicit and to know its value. The ‘capability to tell’ (Eraut 2000, p. 17) is central to formative processes which centre on working with such things as artefacts as part of professional education. This capability is vital to ‘meta-learning’. Eraut’s research (2000) argues that people are able to talk ‘more explicitly’ about their knowledge at work when a ‘mediating object’ or representation of it is used as a catalyst within the learning process. Eliciting talk about ‘what lies beneath’ is vital to this process and is implied in this pattern.

A related example was used in CETL ALiC where students were asked to create teaching resources about an interest and create a video of it.
======= END Rationale ========

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.