I was thinking about [Diana Laurillard's] remarks on the insufficiency of "traditional" attending practices (lecture, reading) for a sound education and wondering why they seemed rather too critical to me.
When I think of my own reading in my discipline (law) it seems like a very "interactive" process, a series of questionings, formulation of hypotheticals, following arguments to their implications beyond the text, jotting notes which rework the author's words, etc. For the science disciplines I suspect this reading process also includes imagining "thought experiments" and the like. In other words, such attending seems to include much that might be called "practice" and "internal conversation" which I accept must be part of significant learning experiences. Why then isn't a steady diet of such attending good for students?
The answer I've come up with is that there is a difference between the attending practices of teachers ("experts") and students ("novices"). This is why perhaps it seems many teachers believe that such attending should be a good educational experience for students--since it is for the teacher. Experts, I suggest, often overlook the beneficial impact of accumulated disciplinary experience in helping them to get the most out of attending to the words of others (at least within their disciplinary discourse).
How then do we make such meaning-making experience available to students? How can we speed up the process of living, so to speak, to allow novices to become experts quicker? Is there a way to circumvent the "10 year rule" (see the writing of Herbert Simon in the field of artificial intelligence) which puts a minimum of a decade of disciplinary experience as the lowest threshold of expertise?
For Donald Schon it seems there is no replacement for life, except in the educational form of the "reflective practicum," the teaching clinic. For Laurillard technology may provide an answer in the form of "virtual experiences" which contribute to students' ability to practice and paraphrase theory.
The really hard tasks therefore seems to me to consist of first, discovering those key experiences which have contributed to teachers' "expertise" and then translating those events into forms that can be technologically embodied for presentation to students. Technology thus is not an answer, rather it poses the classic educational question yet again: how to facilitate self-realization through structured learning experiences.
Much difficult research, it would seem, needs to be done in the area of studies of expertise in all the disciplines in order to give us some ideas of what can be helpful experiences for students. Phenomenography has already given us some insight into novices' approaches to new information and ideas but I suggest we need to complement this with studies of experts' thinking processes as well. Such research should contribute valuable content to the media of instructional technology.