The Zen Art of Teaching

Weblogs are one of the most discussed trends in business and education alike. From all these comments and publications it is clear that weblogs will have a bright future as a personal web publishing tool, but will they also invade the education and business areas? And more important: will their widespread use mean just another tool or a radical change? – The line of argument in this paper is twofold: On the one hand we will outline some major requirements for an advanced educational environment by showing that weblogs’ inherent features will map these pedagogical needs. On the other hand we will compare weblogs with other kinds of content management systems and we will strive to give evidence that weblogs have the intrinsic potential to revolutionise the organisational structure of traditional education. 1 Three prototypical models of education 1.1 To transfer knowledge (Teaching I) In this model the origin of students’ knowledge is based on knowledge possessed by the teacher. Teachers know what students need to learn and it is the teachers’ responsibility to transfer this knowledge into the student’s mind as easily as possible. The transferred knowledge is abstracted knowledge prepared in a special way (the so-called didactical preparation), so that students are able to capture the content not only fast, but also to memorise it on a long term basis. There are some links and relations of this model with behaviourism, a now outdated learning theory: The central tenet of behaviourism is that our behaviour is the product of our conditioning. So it claims that not our mental processes determine what we do. Learning is therefore a conditioned reflex which takes place through adaptation, a process in which the student’s behaviour (reaction) simply results from an appropriate stimulus. Searching for appropriate stimuli cause the main theoretical and educational problems according to this theory. These stimuli have to be supported by adequate feedback to emphasise the correct (=desired by the teacher) mode of behaviour. Behaviourism is showing no interest to the specific processes of the brain and considers the brain as a black box, which reacts to an input in deterministic ways. This model presents the brain as a passive container that needs to be filled. Behaviourism mainly focuses on steering behaviour and not on cognitive steering processes. And indeed: In occasions where we want to train some basic skills this model is very successful. The language lab based on drill and practice presents a typical example. A further example of such “brainless” training refers to finger exercises for typing skills.