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by j45 2 days ago
It's not an oversimplification of it at all.

I just took the conceptualization of it away from the sufficient experience I have with LMS to do the same with it:

Learning management systems are rarely about learning. Too often, they're first about about managing learning for the learning manager, and teh priorities of the learning manager (maintaining compliance) and that's what the software and sales process aims for.

The learner, actually learning, or being a central focus is a second or third class citizen in such tools.

1 comments

Yep. Literally every EdTech idea is a rehashing of the same flawed reasoning: we just need better monitoring and metrics to manage everyone’s learning process! No. Learning comes from repetitive deliberate practice in the zone of proximal development. For essentially all knowledge-based skills, what’s missing is the core foundational skill progression that leads to actual mastery.

How many different personal training styles do you see for competitive sports? There’s variation, but only at the margins. Nobody deviates from the essential training core because doing so leads to poor performance and competitive failure. And yet we have a total free-for-all in knowledge disciplines where we just throw untrained PhDs in front of a classroom and assume they’ll produce results. Oh, and we also provide zero tangible incentives for them to improve learning outcomes.

How to teach, and how to learn, and how to learn how to learn are for sure different things.

With post secondaries, one thing I see is the obsession with pedagogy, which makes sense on one hand, where teachers who teach K-12, learn how to teach children, for the unfamiliar - peda is children, and gogy roughly means "how to lead".

If our teaching is rooted actually or inaccurately using a word that is rooted in a practice of how to lead children, it doesn't surprise me that the learning experiences of non-adults, including young adults, are so hard.

I've got to work in K-12, Academia and Industry training/certification, and where they work, they do not share as much as each of the categories would like to think.

Thus, when someone takes a K-12 framework or approach and applies it in industry, it's feasible that it might not work, but the takes on why seem to get ignored.

Fundamentally skills and the ability to use your skills change and evolve and fixes curriculum that takes 1-3 years to change one sentence doesn't really work in more and more places. This is more a fundamental change than a short lived irritant.