I was listening to the always-excellent Song Exploder podcast in the gym the other day when I came across a bit that really made me stop and think.
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If you fast-forward to about 3:04 you’ll hear the artist RJD2 talk about his approach to song writing being influenced by studying Mathematics in college. Fascinatingly, he talks about music in spatial terms – suggesting that, like me, he may be mildly synaesthetic. RJD2 imagines music as being like a game of Tetris where you can dictate the shape of any of the pieces.
As an educator, I find this intriguing. If we imagine the falling tetris blocks to be the things that learners have to assimilate, then it’s easy to see how problematic it can be to neither being in control of their ‘shape’ nor the speed at which they come at you.
What if we handed that over to learners? And what if each block was a badge along a learning pathway?
Image CC BY-SA s. bär
![Learning Pathways: Descriptive or Prescriptive? [DMLcentral]](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/dmlcentral-pathways.png)
My latest post for DMLcentral is up. Entitled Learning Pathways: Descriptive or Prescriptive? I riff off something my former colleague Carla Casilli posted a couple of years back.
A sample:
In this post, I want to dive deeper into learning pathways, dividing these types of pathways into broadly two groups. There are those kinds of pathways that are descriptive and those that are prescriptive. Neither of these labels is pejorative, as each could be appropriate given a particular context. This way of looking at learning pathways has often come up in conversations around Open Badges:
Click here to read the post in full
I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to add yours on the original post. Please do consider doing this as it engages the wider community in what I think we all consider to be an important issue.
In related news I’m currently writing a new Webmaker whitepaper around learning pathways with Karen Smith. It should be available by the end of March! 🙂
My latest post for DMLcentral is up. Entitled Scaffolding Web Literacy Through Learning Pathways, I discuss the difference between training and learning, as well as ways in which we can scaffold the development of web literacy.
Read the post here
I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to comment over there. It’s a great encouragement to hear your thoughts – however brief! 🙂
