Aggregated musings, news and stories, mostly about learning and technology
Dave Cormier is a wonderfully sideways-thinking writer, such as in this recent discussion of the myth of learning styles . Dave’s post is not mainly about learning style theories, as such, but the nature and value of myth. As he puts it, myth is “a way we confront uncertainty” and the act of learning with others is, and must be, filled with uncertainty.
The fact that stuff doesn’t have to be true to be useful plays an important role in my latest book , too, and I have an explanation for that. The way I see it is that learning style theories are (not metaphorically but actually) technologies, that orchestrate observations about differences in ways people learn, to attempt to explain and predict differences in the effects of different methods of teaching. Most importantly, they are generative: they say how things should and shouldn’t be done. As such, they a