I have enjoyed this week's talk by Simon Buckingham. It is refreshing to hear people talk optimistically about improving education, collaborating over borders, and -very important- empowering learners and teachers. None of that moaning of students are lazy and stupified by games, teachers aren't educated well enough and are only interested in lots of holidays, or there's no money for innovation anyway.....
Inspiring enthusiasm. Thanks!
Last night, awake in bed, I was thinking about using OLA communities to improve education. What is puzzling me is the role of local context.... My fundamental problem is that I just do not think that one way of learning or teaching is better than another, what works for us will not necessarily work for you and vice versa and there are many possible reasons: content, student population, capacity of teachers, available resources, you name it. We do PBL in Maastricht, but I would be the last to say that PBL is the best option everywhere. Taking that thought further I am wondering whether anyone can sensibly interpret an analysis of data without knowing the local context. One of the difficulties of educational research is that research articles almost never contain enough information about the context or concrete implementation of an educational design. Lack of space, but also lack of awareness, probably. Over the last 10 years I have heard quite a number of people trying to bridge that gap by developing educational ontologies.... As far as I know, they've all failed. We just can't get a grip on this. More and more I am inclined to think that it is qualitative research that we need to solve this and not quantitative... Not to say that no quantitative research can be useful, of course.
Will OLA also work for qualitative research data?
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