Day 5

Learning styles – how do they interface with a Web2.0 approach to learning? Is the digital medium just a means of communication, an electronic replacement for the paper medium? If so, it facilitates our reading/writing learners, but the auditory & kinesthetic learners would be left frustrated.

Exploring the VARK Questionnaire brings us back to a recognition of at least 4 learning styles – Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic.

Traditional schooling relied heavily on aural skills, with a teacher lecturing from the front of the room, and read/write skills, with students being directed to print media to learn. So often the kinesthetic learner was left out. He/she was the ‘trouble maker’, the ‘restless child’.

Recognition of this has led to development of interactive, creative forms of teaching, with classrooms incorporating the environment, moving students into community as they learn.

Then we introduce computer technology and web2.0 as the key learning tool of the ‘digital natives’. Are we confining our kinesthetic learners to the desk? Are we limiting our aural learners to a digitally created imitation of sound? Are we confining the expressive writer to the repetitive restriction of a keyboard?

The VARK guide to learning styles advises those with a kinesthetic preference to use all senses – sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing; to use laboratories, field trips, real-life examples, hands-on approach, collections, exhibits, samples, solutions. The computer is an excellent tool to add in to this – but it at best will give incomplete learning if relied on as the key teaching medium.

I did the VARK questionnaire, and scored a multimodal learning preference – which, according to VARK, accounts for 60% of the population.

The majority of us need a variety of learning styles to capitalize on the varied learning preferences. Digital education may be innovative, but at the interface with the needs of a multimodal learning population, there are many gaps which, I would suggest, can never be adequately satisfied within the digital media. Web2.0 should rather been seen as the perfect adjunct to any good teaching program, to consolidate and add to the learning experienced through all other life means.

Are you also multimodal?
http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire