self-directing competence development in Higher Education April 23, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , trackbackYesterday I was attending a talk by Kai Pata from Talllinn University at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The title of the talk was: Designing E-Learning Experiences for Soft Competence Acquisition.
After the approx. 1 hour presentation (which by the way also included some insights into the recent iCamp field trials) a short discussion followed around the appropriateness of certain technological landscapes for specific professional skills teaching.
One of the questions brought forward was about the importance of teaching of competencies such as self-directing or collaboration – apart from factual knowledge and professional skills – at Higher University.
I think that this is a very important issue that Higher Education institutions (HEI) should dedicate more attention to. Although I am not working at any HEI I do have the feeling that it is currently the individual lecturer who decides how much he/she would like to support the advancement of students self-directing competencies, apart from the pure “content” teaching.
Challenging situations have to be created, students need to be able to experiment, but they also might need some guidance and scaffolds from the more experienced. This might be a challenge not only for the students but also for a lot of teachers, who may learn something as well during the process. This requires a certain attitude and openness from all sides.
Would be interesting to see how HEI have this competence development anchored in their teaching strategies.
Comments»
It was great to have you at the presentation. I think ther are even more issues what we don’t think enough, like ethics and the ETERNAL digital visibility when students or facilitators teach in open spaces.
Another issue what was raised was the competition between real canonized words of the domain and the use of folksonomies: it seems soe poeple really fear that folksonomy and tags may kill the professional language.
The issue of evaluating certain soft competences so that all the merits of specific social software were considered seems quite important. I think we need to use the new tools for totally new kind of learning activities and assessment, if we start copying some strategies from old systems, they are only accommodated but we may actually lose quite much of potential possibilities the tools provide in interaction with users.