What does it mean for an experience to be educative?
Mishra and Koehler say that technology does not automatically lead to learning. Let’s explore this claim a little by considering a statement that the educational philosopher John Dewey (1938) made in his book Experience & Education.
- Read this passage outloud at your table, pausing at the end of each section/bullet.
- What does he imply an experience must have if it is to be educative?
- Make a list of necessary ingredients.
- How does this perspective make you think about why Mishra & Koehler (2008) say that technology doesn’t lead to learning in and of itself – what does it need if it is to lead to learning?
- The belief that a genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are miseducative. Any experience is miseducative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. [pause]
- An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness. Then the possibilities of having richer experience in the future are restricted. [pause]
- Again, a given experience may increase a person’s automatic skill in a particular direction and yet tend to land him in a groove or rut; the effect again is to narrow the field of further experience. [pause]
- An experience may be immediately enjoyable and yet promote the formation of a slack and careless attitude; this attitude then operates to modify the quality of subsequent experiences so as to prevent a person from getting out of them what they have to give. [pause]
- Again, experiences may be so disconnected from one another that, while each is agreeable or even exciting in itself, they are not linked cumulatively to one another. Energy is then dissipated and a person becomes scatter- brained. Each experience may be lively, vivid, and “interesting,” and yet their disconnectedness may artificially generate dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits. The consequence of formation of such habits is inability to control future experiences. They are then taken, either by way of enjoyment or of discontent and revolt, just as they come. Under such circumstances, it is idle to talk of self-control. [pause]