Week 3: Theoretical and Tacit Knowledge (Unit 2)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Inglis, Ling, and Joosten’s differentiation between theoretical knowledge and tacit knowledge. The authors also describe “action-oriented learning” as a way to gain tacit knowledge. This is not any sort of earth shattering revelation, but it’s making me think hard about how the difference gets woven into the tapestry of adult education practice.


I see it every day in my “day job” of managing and overseeing the development, fundraising and compliance for my employer’s continuing medical education (CME) programs and activities. Physicians need to have a lot of theoretical knowledge as background, but of course they must then use it as experts. The authors describe experts as those who “act appropriately in all situations they encounter in working in the field, including novel situations”. So they must have both theoretical and tacit knowledge.

Some questions this raises then are:

• how do we teach both types of knowledge?
• how do we do this in a distance setting?

These are not rhetorical questions—my own organization is trying to figure this out right now. I am responsible for working the clinical experts to figure out how we can do this. Lots of ideas come up but we have rejected many!

Aside from my main employer, I have had experience teaching both theoretical and tacit knowledge through action learning in my grant writing course which involves an internship in which students partner with a nonprofit to write a real grant proposal. In class and the readings from the text, students are getting the theoretical knowledge. In the internship experience, students get practice acting as experts working with the nonprofit.

My specific class could be easily adapted to a distance setting. The nonprofits where students intern do not have to be in any one place—the same issues and concerns will arise no matter where they are. Students could develop theoretical knowledge also through reading and class discussion on discussion boards.

But what about other content areas? How are both theoretical and tacit knowledge developed? And how would this work in distance settings?

I would love to hear from others your thoughts on this.

Links to Mezirow Reading (Unit 1)

This fall, while I am taking ADTED 531, I am also working on an independent study on Mezirow and transformation theory in adult education. I have been fascinated by this theory since I first read about it.

Last week I was reading A Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education (Mezirow, 1981) and was struck by part of this article, Mezirow's "charter for andragogy", and how many of its concepts were similar to points Dr. Moore made in his two audio podcasts on the characteristics of DE. I don't think it matters whether one accepts the term 'andragogy' and how it might have been meant at the time.

Mezirow says that adult education "must be defined as an organized and sustained effort to assist adults to learn in a way that enhances their capability to function as self-directed learners" (sic, italics his).

Mezirow then lists some things that adult education must do. Here are some of the things adult ed. must do (according to Mezirow) that resonated with Dr. Moore's points:

• progressively decrease the learner's dependency on the educator
• help the learner understand how to use learning resources--especially the experience of others, including the educator, and how to engage others in reciprocal learning relationships
• assist the learner to define his/her learning needs
• assist learners to assume responsibility for defining their learning objectives, planning their own learning program and evaluating their progress
• foster learner decision making

There are additional points that relate to adult education in general and that Mezirow puts forth in relation to transformation theory.

But the five items above clearly relate to Dr. Moore's points about learners being a "manager" of their own learning, a characteristic of distance education as he describes it.

I previously read Tait's chapter in the 1999 book "The Convergence of Distance and Conventional Education: Patterns of Flexibility for the Individual Learner". While Tait was sounding a warning about this convergence and its consequences for the DE learners, I think the larger point made right there in the title--that traditional and distance education are merging--was prescient and is coming true.

This I think is one of the lessons of the link between Dr. Moore's comments on DE and Mezirow's discussion of adult education in general.

What do you think?


If you want to check these texts out, here are the citations (sorry I cannot get them to format correctly per APA guidelines):


Mezirow, J. (1981). A critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education Quarterly, 32, 3-24.


Tait, A. (1999). The convergence of distance and conventional education. In Tait, Alan and Roger Mills (Eds.), The convergence of distance and conventional education: patterns of flexibility
for the individual learner (pp. 17-38). New York: Routledge.

End of Week 1

I am here at the computer exhausted from attending a midnight release event for Halo Reach, a video game my teenage son is extremely excited about!

We made it through our first week of ADTED 531--lots of setting things up. I appreciated what Will posted on the course web site:

The course is not primarily about technology, but about the ways in which educational and training systems can apply technology to offer better quality programs, to a wider constituency at lower costs.

In a course about distance education delivered at a distance, the teaching and learning processes employed are themselves valuable resources for understanding the teaching-learning and administrative issues.

This emphasis on applying technology to adult education is what I am looking forward to. I have a good amount of experience teaching adults through DE. Most of my past experience has involved a course web site (through systems like Angel and Blackboard) where I post materials, student submit assignments, and where my students participate in class discussion just as we do.

Despite this experience, I have never used any of the technologies we have started setting up this week. Even at this early juncture I can see how some of these could be useful. I could see adding a blog or having students use them. I absolutely love the Google docs function (I have used it for work but never a course) and of course can understand the value of adding video and audio through podcasts to a course package (wherever it is housed). And since sometimes I have groups working on projects together, I can see the value of Skype for group interaction at a distance. The one thing so far that I am really not sure about is the use of Second Life. I am reserving judgement on that one!

Overall, the first week was a good introduction, and now I am looking forward to delving more into the substance.

How about you?

Hello Everyone!

This is the first week of ADTED 531 and I am very excited to learn about the "web 2.0" technologies we will use in this course. But I must confess that when I mentioned this to my 16 year old son, he laughed at my use of the term 'web 2.0'. Apparently that struck him as old-fashioned. I gather that acknowledging a web 1.0 is what made me sound old (Oh Mom, that is so 2002).

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well with this first week. I have uploaded some material from a class I had this past summer, EDTEC 449, which taught me a lot about using video and other media for instruction.

Take care,
Dierdre