Positions on Learning

Most of us have our “individual” positions on learning. It’s not strictly individual—that is, we don’t necessarily create these positions, but most of them are already available to us from a drop-down list. Here are a few of them:

• The empirically proven positions (as opposed to “relativist” socio/philosophical positions)
• The constructivist positions (as opposed to “reductionist” behaviorism)
• Learning by doing positions (as opposed to “passive” learning by reading and listening)
• E-learning 2.0 or learner-generated content positions (as opposed to “unidirectional” ID/SME-generated e-learning 1.0)
• Scientific instructional design positions (as opposed to “faddish” learning theories)
• Informal learning positions (as opposed to “top-down” formal learning)

It looks as though you cannot take a position without being anti-something. There’s nothing wrong with taking positions as long as we remember that a position is not an inflexible, pre-defined template. (Would anyone consciously want to take a frog-in-the-well position?) A position should be like an adaptive template, constantly adding and removing elements, in a perpetual quest for the ever evading truth. And we should have no shame in discarding this template the moment we realize that it was an inappropriate template to begin with.

* The words in inverted commas are accusatory terms used by the opposite camp.