Check out this fascinating blog post (and great discussion) from Lisa Galarneau whom we met a couple of weeks ago at ULearn.
From Lisa’s comments
“… But one of the big problems, as I see it, and one of the main contributors to problematic usage, is that some people develop socio-cultural fluency in-world that they aren’t able to transfer to RL, over time building a marked dichotomy between their abilities in the two spheres, causing them to retreat even more fully into the one they inhabit most successfully. I think this is both a big issue and a huge opportunity… how do we help people transfer that literacy into RL?”
The discussion about transferability is the important one that we need to have. I remain unconvinced that any one is able to automatically transfer the skills that they learn in one situation to a new one.
I agree that this is, though, a huge opportunity for further thinking and research.
Related posts:
That comment quote is hilarious
What she means is “Some people spend too much time online” and her choice of language would indicate she is closer to that too.
Jargon – bad bad bad.
Test… my comment was eaten I think..
Fixed it. I hope
Podz has a point … the excess of pseudo-academic jargon and lack of clarity is perhaps what irritated Kim Hill.
I think conferences bring out the worse of this kind of thing – Paglia’s sentiment that at conferences we don’t get to connect with new learning or even inspired interpretation nails it for me – She claims that true scholars are time travellers not space travellers – you will know them by their books not their keynotes for a scholar builds for the future not the present. “The conferences are light weight shuttle cock scholarship, where the divorced can trawl for new spouses and where people meet in an airless bubble to confirm each others false assumptions and certitudes.” p221 Sex Art and American Culture
As regards to transferability stuff I am never sure what I believe – on one hand you have claims like
These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
On the other there are so many abilities that we transfer effortlessly – perhaps it comes down to what is real (like brushing your teeth or reading) and then the interventions that help trigger connections for what is trivial, help clarify generality etc – and that this is the significant role of the teacher