What would Pixar do with elearning?

The short film that precedes Toy Story 3  - Day and Night – is a fabulous example of how filmmakers can make the most of the opportunities that are inherent in 3D.

While it’s a bit hard to appreciate this in 2D on your computer, this clip, and the making of Day and Night, show how 3D affords a depth of field that accentuates the differences between the two characters in the short.

And, if Pixar were elearning aficionados, I think they would be looking at tools and technologies to identify those very opportunities (affordances, if we must) that would make their use absolutely right in a given moment, in a teaching experience, in a strategically planned unit. So, for example, the collaborative nature and the tracking of history of a wiki must surely be the prime reasons why this tool is chosen as a channel to support shared, developmental writing. And to not use its features, is to miss an opportunity and risk the use of a tool or technology being ‘busy work’….

The technological-pedagogical-content-knowledge (TPCK) approach captures this idea - but I think Day & Night presents a neat analogy.

Sssh…it’s the ‘s’ word

What did you say? Your subject is English? Tsk, tsk. Don’t you know we not allowed to say ‘subject’ now? How very siloed and partisan of you. ‘Subject’ is now a forbidden word, something only to be whispered when no-one can hear you. For now we live in the days of cross-curricular, integrated learning in which the Key Competencies are king, and studying your favourite ‘subject’ has been relegated to the dusty halls of the past. Three raps on the knuckles….

Clearly, I’m being facetious, but it’s an interesting idea to toy with. A recent talk from the MoE reps involved in Schools Plus looked at the way schools, among a plethora of ‘solutions’, could timetable more creatively, and break down the barriers created by ‘subject areas’. One speaker actually chastised himself, mid-flow, for using the dreaded ‘s’ word.

I found this intriguing. It’s as if, just by saying (or not saying) something, just by giving a concept voice, it will happen, emerge blinking into the light, fully formed and breathing. The implication is that, if we talk about our ‘subjects’ as secondary level, we will automatically be shutting ourselves off from a more integrated world, in which pedagogy and shared learning are crucial.

I don’t disagree with the concept of integrated learning - in fact, I’m often actively pushing for it in conversations with schools. What puzzles me, however, is when people make comments like, “We shouldn’t use the word ‘subject’ anymore,” as though that will somehow offer a verbal band-aid to the issues of dis-engaged students and NZ’s ‘long tail’.

It is exactly this idea – that somehow, knowledge has been sidelined in the favour of process (this resonates with Mary Chamberlain’s unfortunately-misinterpreted comment made last year about students as ‘little knowledge banks’) – that will ensure that it is the teachers, not the students, who will dis-engage from the MoE’s, very important, messages.

So let that be a (integrated) lesson to you…