Random quotes of Don Norman talking about learning

Exploring recent elearningpost links:

‘Besides avoiding travel, the only reason to use technology is to enhance learning’ says Don Norman.

I fully agree.

He also speaks about accretion, tuning and restructuring components of learning – I’ve heard about this theory, but didn’t have time to go for more details. I guess I should do it now: I would like to look for connections between restructuring and knowledge creation. I think that there are some.

In another interview Don distinguishes between activity-driven and content-driven learnining. Interesting… As a trainer I used to think about learning design in terms of activities first (of course, after objectives :), and only then about content to support them. Now I’m examining my own (informal) learning: in many cases it’s content-driven (e.g. reading mailists). Something to think about.

Something else, on edutainment:

The problem is this: We do not want the gaming industry to go into instruction. The gaming industry knows nothing about pedagogy and learner-centered design. But what we want to do is to capture the excitement and concentration of those into playing games. We want to that in the same way when we are learning. But we haven’t made much progress in this regard.

And about on-line and classroom instructor:

First I think the classroom instructor is better than the online instructor. The major role of an instructor is to give guidance and encouragement; to be a mentor and guide. These are as much social issues as they are instructional. And being physically in the same place really helps.

There are situations where you cannot be physically together. So here we must use online instructors. Here too, we do not believe that online instruction is very good if the instructor gives a lot of reading material. We believe that the online instructor should also be a coach and a mentor. This can work well, but the tools that we have available today are not very good. So, I feel that although online instruction is essential in online courses, it is still better to meet your instructor in person.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/30.html#a200; comments are here.

• Integration of tools for learning?
• More on connections between learning and teaching
• Course as a playground for KM instruments

Tagged as: e-learning, informal learning