So what was this pedagogical session all about?

I'm glad you asked. A key emphasis was the need for change in conventional curricula. Maggi talked about current styles of education tending to be rigidly outcome-based, prohibiting creativity. She proposed that PBL (particularly SL/PBL) needs to be 'liquid'... which, as I understand it, means it needs to be malleable, adaptive, and free to flow in the directions it takes.

Here's where I get a tad hazy on some of the specifics. Liquid learning does sound like a great way to learn, where it is the skills and the approach to learning that is important. I assume that some direction and focus must still be maintained, given that "problem-based" suggests there is a particular problem to learn to resolution for. However, I am also wondering what happens to areas where very specific knowledge is required. If I'm travelling by aeroplane, then I would prefer that the pilot has previously satisfied certain key outcomes in his training, such that he can officially be deemed 'competent'. Perhaps 'liquid' learning is only supposed to apply to some areas?

Learn to Learn
Moving on, the responsibility of learning was covered in the session... students need to be responsible for their own learning. That definitely strikes a chord with me, and reminds me of an earlier session about "Schome" (not School not Home), where the underpinning of the education occurs via trust over coercion. I believe wholeheartedly that a willing student is far better than a forced one. Learning by rote is, of course, no good... you can't memorize the solution to every problem in life. Rather, as I like to put it, you have to "learn how to learn"... it is a globally transferrable skill!

The Wrong Focus
Maggi presented another great point regarding curricula, and how they are very much content-centric and how educators become like 'knowledge patrollers'. Students become dependent on the VLE or the textbook or whatever to provide every answer, instead of tackling the problem themself, filtering the information, and structuring their own learning to suit the problem as they see it. I have seen this myself, where students do not take notes, and even a lecturer who told students not to take notes, on the basis that the notes are in the textbook or the lecture slides were on BlackBoard! I filled screeds of notebooks in my 3rd and 4th years as an undergraduate, and my results relative to everybody else's showed this fact. (I'm not being arrogant here... I was the only 1st Class Honours student!)

The Alternative
So what alternative to content-centric, knowlege-patrolled teaching was proposed? The answer: focus on the learning rather than the teaching. Perhaps easier said than done, but the need is self-evident. As I said earlier, you can't memorize your way through everything. Several ingredients were suggested: action, knowledge, reasoning, reflection. I notice how little people are willing to really grapple and reason with things, and how much less they want to reflect upon the experience. Is it a fear of learning? Unfamiliarity? Unwillingness? Possibly just laziness? Or is it a symptom of an education system that breeds 'knowers' instead of 'doers'?

Philosophy Break
Here's a great point from the session that I noted down in my scribbles: "teaching should change society in substantive ways". I agree! Education should produce useful fruit, not merely expert automatons who can look up Wikipedia for every answer to life!

Growing Pains
It was emphasised during the session that the change to introduce PBL will be a somewhat painful one (Maggi equated it to learning how to snowboard... you fall down a lot at first!). I can well imagine it will be painful (PBL that is, although I'm sure snowboarding is too!). Everything is about outcomes. Administrators and heads-of-department and managers and so on all want to see quantifiable results. "Show me on paper!". Introducing a more liquid approach will undoubtedly cause such people major headaches, and learning to administer assessment in new ways, and to sufficiently guide the whole educational process to reasonable conclusions (without choking it) will take time, and probably mistakes too.

Liquidity
Some key points of liquid learning were given: emancipation, reflexivity, flexibility. Furthermore, that knowledge and knowledge boundaries must be contestable, and always on the move. Yikes. This means you can't plan every square inch and every moment of your classes, step-by-step. The educators need to know enough about the subject, and themselves be flexible enough, that they can move and shift with the class and its knowledge boundaries. Sounds like a true learner's dream... but how many people are willing to be that flexible?

My Conclusion

Maggi put forward the new focus as being on the problem-orientedness of knowledge. I've never been a fan of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Without useful application (no matter how abstract that application might be) it just seems pointless. For example, I never could master matrix mathematics fully until I had to program linear algebra for 3d graphics... and then it all just came together nicely.

Most of the experience I can bring to bear here is as a student. I've only been doing any teaching at all for a few years, and even then it's mostly been church Bible studies, and more recently, virtual 101 classes about the Sloodle project. However, I can see soundness in the theories, and a very rational philosophy underpinning the whole concept of PBL.

In fact, I don't think I've ever thrived so much in my learning as I have when I got stuck on a particularly challenging (or "troublesome") area. (Maggi referred briefly to the concepts of "stuckness" and "troublesome knowledge"). Sure, it always took a fair dose of hard work to push through the sticking point, but it was always worth it. I didn't always reach a solid resolution mind you... but I always made something productive of my efforts.

The real difficulty will always be in encouraging students to engage with the troublesome areas, rather than running away or ignoring them. Second Life presents a great range of creativity regarding the presentation of subject matter, and provides an interesting environment for exploration and collaboration. Bringing students together to share the learning experience, creating what will hopefully be a self-driven collective curiosity, sounds like a worthy field!