authentic learning... a brief distraction!

What makes an activity Authentic?
Authentic learning is not about making or taking learning, necessarily to the real world. It's about providing students/learners with an experience which is meaningful for them, but also allows them to explore in a real life way. In particular I think that authentic learning lends itself to problem solving skills and the higher levels of learning (Blooms taxonomy again!).
This is why it sits nicely alongside cognitive apprenticeship. The idea of a master leading a student into a higher level of understanding. This is exactly like the activities I talked about in my own personal account of learning. The modeling, supporting and empowerment model - or scaffolding as it will come to be known.


What is the problem with making everything explicit in learning?
As Mr Bones says in my skit, taking things too literally would be extreme. If you make everything explicit, there is no room for the becoming - the using what you have acquired in a new situation or circumstance. Where is the exploration and discoovery? Where is the going wrong? The experience? I can easily see that some people could misinterpret authentic activity and focus too much on getting the context right, and thus forget the point of the activity in the first place. I have seen this a lot with First Aid training, where people get ingrossed in doing make up to make it as real as possible, rather than focusing on the signs and symptoms.


Do you think the divide between school and authentic activity can be bridged?
As I don't work in education, this is hard. My experience of education, was that there were a lot of authentic experiences to be had. But maybe I had good teachers. In one of the earlier papers I read, there was a point made about age and using concrete or abstract examples. There is part of me that still thinks that learners need to acquire the basics, through passive learning. Can this be contextualised to be authentic? Does this go back to the point about what learning is and what the aims of our schools are? Authentic activity happens all the time in life - because often we are experiencing as we are learning. In a formal context, there will be those for whom authentic activities are crucial - nurses, avionics, engineering....but making maths, english, history authentic is different.

So I guess the question is - in order to bridge the divide - we need to know what the divide consists of, and whether or not ther even is one. Maybe this is the reason why movements like TED exist.


Questions again...........
heres a good website on authentic activity.