Notes taken at Distance Teaching and Learning Conference 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Presenters: Sarah Bryans Bongey, Diana Johnson
This presentation initially focused on showcasing a faculty professional development course on teaching to Gardner’s multiple intelligences. The course tries to model MI approach for faculty who are in the online course as students.
Example: Using a guest speaker for interpersonal intelligence
Shows detailed lists of course’s activities.
Some interesting options for participants: interview an online faculty, write a syllabus, etc.
What about a rubric? Faculty know how to write a syllabus. Seems like writing a rubric would appeal to logical-mathematical-strong learners.
All-in-all, the lecture approach to this presentation generally let me down. The second half was more engaging, as it showed explicit examples that purported to approach different learning styles. The hard part about teaching to multiple intelligences is (1) thinking of teaching strategies that will efficiently affect learning in the different intelligence strengths, and (2) finding or making materials or activities for each of those intelligence strengths. Another approach would be to teach students to find their own learning materials or activities online using search engines and repositories, but I fear too much time would be spent by students finding (and hopefully evaluating) the learning resources, not learning and applying the information.
Show more activities, like “podcast videos” (i.e. downloadable mp4s without RSS) for visual-spatial learners.
Listening to the presenters flounder at times with activity ideas for some of the intelligences makes me suspect that it’s at least untenable to teach any subject to all of the supposed intelligences. Thus, I have to ask if it might not be as useful in the long run to try to develop a few core intelligences necessary for learning through student learning skills training.
Show more activities, like online articles for linguistic learners.
Exit, Mr. Stein.
On a similar note, I read Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class this month, and much of it’s premise is based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory. Christensen suggests that online tutoring resources and tools will help education better address these intelligence strengths. His emphasis on disruptive technology makes it seem possible by suggesting MI approaches can only thrive through user-developed, user-networked access to these resources and tools. And, having recently authored a few pages of content for a learning module that bridges Disrupting Class with open educational resources and learning branches, I think I may have found a new presentation topic.