Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thoughts from users at the University of Sheffield

By: James Dalziel

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But I think there is something in what you are saying Peter - the whole concept of Learning Design assumes the teacher has planned some student activities based on the teacher's knowledge of what content and activities can help students to learn. This starting concept can lead to very didactic/teacher-centred education, or to collaborative /student-centred learning depending on the way the sequence is constructed - you can build very rigid and very open sequences in LAMS depending on the choice and placement of different activity tools.

Personally, I don't think Learning Design is contrary to student-centred learning, but it does require teachers to think through a set of activities that is student-centred while at the same time providing some level of direction about what to do and when - and it can be tricky to get the right mix of student-centred and teacher directed/planned.

But even the very concept of *any* teacher-directed activities sounds "pre-Web 2.0", despite the fact that the "direction" might be to give students wide freedom in what they do and how.

So I think these ideas need more exploration and debate. I hope that future LAMS features like "floating activities" will help to discourage too much teacher direction when this is unhelpful to a particular pedagogical objective.

Having said all this, I'd really welcome suggestions on how LAMS could be extended to support more Web 2.0 concepts.

Posted by James Dalziel