A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS DEDE

Christopher Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He is also Chair of the Learning & Teaching Area in the School. Recently, Educational Pathways talked briefly with Dede about blended learning, or, as he calls it, "distributed learning."

EdPath: Broadly speaking, what is some of the research showing in relation to distributed learning environments?

Dede: One thing that we find in distributed learning is that there are very different patterns of interaction than in face-to-face education. We have found that students who were silent face-to-face and seem to be passive learners often find their voice when they are in some form of medium - sometimes it’s a threaded discussion medium that is asynchronous, or sometimes it’s a medium that is synchronous, like a multi-user virtual environment, or like a group-ware interaction.

So, using all of these - virtual synchronous, virtual asynchronous, and face-to-face - is a way of really getting the maximum amount of student interaction. Quite a few students do best in each of those, and yet typically education is set up in only one. This disenfranchises a fair number of students.

EdPath: How would you categorize faculty adoption of distributed learning environments? Is it a philosophical change or a change in which faculty must be induced to add on technology to their classes?

Dede: First, I don’t think that there is anything of value in and of itself in using technology, so I would not want to have a goal that faculty should use technology. I am not sure that would accomplish anything. . . I think that the benefit to faculty is if they can get higher student motivation, deeper content that students master, more powerful pedagogies that reach a wider range of their students - those, to me are goals. The question becomes can technology help me with any of those goals? Can technology help me with goals that I would have anyway, just in terms of my own teaching and in terms of the mission of the place that I work for?

In that sense, part of it is not a philosophical change, and part of it is a philosophical change. The part that is not a philosophical change is that if you are talking about taking objectives you already have and finding a more powerful lever to do them with, that’s not a philosophic change, that is just a change in strategy. However, in particular with pedagogy, if reaching more students involves unlearning a kind of pedagogy that you are accustomed to and instead learning a more powerful pedagogy to put in its place, that can be difficult for many faculty.

It’s easier to learn something completely new than to unlearn something and then learn a different way of doing it.

EdPath: So, do you think there is a lot of unlearning going on today with more faculty adopting distributed learning environments?

Dede: I think to get the real value of the distributed learning environment there can be a significant amount of unlearning, depending on how the faculty member was teaching before they started. In other words, you can do distributed learning by just banging up readings on a Web site and telling students to download them and read them. Then you can put quizzes up online and have students take quizzes. I suppose that is distributed learning in the sense that now you are doing some stuff face-to-face and some stuff at a distance. But, in fact, it is a form of distributed learning that is not really going to buy much of anything because it is based on a weak model of teaching - a model of teaching as presentation and student learning that is assimilation. What I’m interested in - whether faculty teach all face-to-face, or all across distance, or in the distributed learning mode - are methods of teaching and learning that involve active construction of knowledge by students. For faculty who may be used to a transmissive form of teaching, moving to an active knowledge-construction form of learning in their teaching can involve substantial unlearning, whether they do that all face-to-face or whether they use technology to help them do it, which then involves some mediated interaction across distance.

EdPath: What do you mean by knowledge construction?

Dede: I mean that we know how to transfer data from the mind of one person to another, and it is perfectly fine to do transmissive learning of data. But knowledge involves understanding, not simply the data that is part of information, but how information is interconnected, how information is applied in the real world, how you adapt different kinds of circumstances in your strategies for accomplishing things. That is not something that can be communicated as if it were a recipe. It involves students working through and making their own understanding of what the teacher may know but can simply transmit to them.

There is a huge body of research now that documents that this is how people understand anything that is more complex than simple factual recall. But our pedagogy in higher education often has not kept pace with that, in part, because very few people outside of schools of education have had any formal preparation in teaching as part of their preparation to be professors.

www.gse.harvard.edu/~dedech/