{"id":134,"date":"2006-03-22T22:09:12","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T03:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/2006\/03\/22\/authenticity\/"},"modified":"2006-03-22T22:09:12","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T03:09:12","slug":"authenticity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/2006\/03\/22\/authenticity\/","title":{"rendered":"Authenticity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Petraglia, J. Reality by design: The rhetoric and technology of authenticity in education<\/em>. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.<\/p>\n

This book has been on my shelf for some time. I don’t think I was ready for it, but it seems to be a natural next text for exploring the ideas I’ve been tinkering with such as constructionism and constructivism. I’ve only made it through the introduction, and I’m still trying to grasp his argument. Here are the threads I’m following:<\/p>\n

Educators talk about “student centered” and “authentic” learning without really being clear on what they mean. Petraglia uses the example of a colleague who shows the egg carton contraption that his students to designed to fight aliens. While certainly a student-centered project, Petraglia wonders about the fact that “no one in the room seemed to notice or care about the vagueness and contradictions in the discourse on authenticity and reality” (p. 2). For Petraglia, getting at the meaning of authentic learning is essential to an understanding of contemporary education. I’m not sure I have a good definition and I reference authentic learning every time I show people the enGauge Range of Use model. One of its axes deals with the authenticity of learning and it goes from artificial to real-world context. No one has ever asked me what that means; we seem to have a general idea. <\/p>\n

Educational technology and constructivism come together in support of authenticity. Certainly, notions of contextual learning pre-date computers, but there seems to be a natural linking of technology and authenticity, according to Petraglia. He also goes on to suggest that authenticity is “the most interesting of the possible arguements for investment in educational technology both for its imperviousness to empirical investigation and for its rhetorical force” (p. 6). If we use authenticity inaccurately, we run the risk of focusing on the technological tools rather than the power of those tools. Petraglia believes, however, that educational technologists have made “compelling arguments” for technology contextualizing learning.<\/p>\n

Finally, he makes the case that if implemented correctly, constructivism “deprives us of the foundations on which Western education rests” (p. 7). But, we’ve chosen to ignore its antifoundationalism and thus have “domesticated” it. Here, Petraglia reminds me of Cuban and his argument that the power of technology is often similarly domesticated. He also gives a pretty wide definition of constructivism, calling it a metatheory that is “an ecumenical and eclectic approach to learning” in which people from Montessori to Dewey to Geertz would feel comfortable. He suggests that it at its base, constructivism “alludes to learners’ active roles in learning and the diversity of path to knowledge” (p. 9). Under this definition, most educators are constructivist.<\/p>\n

And…I’m tucking this away for my 604 final paper: “The essentially epistemological dilemma constructivism poses remains before us, for as Berlin and Inkster (1980) note, it is impossible for educators to have a theory of learning without a theory of knowledge” (p. 7).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Petraglia, J. Reality by design: The rhetoric and technology of authenticity in education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This book has been on my shelf for some time. I don’t think I was ready for it, but it seems to be a natural next text for exploring the ideas I’ve \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p31UVs-2a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}