أنشئ حسابًا أو سجّل الدخول للانضمام إلى مجتمعك المهني.
learning, teaching and design, around the issue of ambiguity. The concept of ambiguity occurs relatively infrequently in the literature on learning and teaching. A Web search intersecting “learning” and “ambiguity” reveals a certain dominance of the concern with ambiguity in the literature on learning algorithms. As regards human learning, the concept of ambiguity gets mentioned in connection with learning styles (some learners get turned off when confronted with too much ambiguity). “Tolerance of ambiguity” is a concept employed by theoreticians who deal with the learning of foreign and second languages. The concept also occurs in some of the literature on problem-based learning. It may also be linked to issues of a more philosophical nature, such as the question, “Can we really understand the world?” There are instances in which our ordinary (Aristotelian) logic is an insufficient basis for the advancement of understanding. Some of the literature on transdisciplinarity deals with this issue and proposes (e.g. Nicolescu,2002) a logic based on the “included middle” (as opposed to the excluded middle in Aristotelian logic). Another connection here is with what physicists have known – and had difficulty to come to grips with – since early in the last century – that at the level of description of nature that is incommensurate with the levels for which common language was developed there is complementarity of knowledge in the sense that, in order to know with precision one thing, like the speed of a particle, it becomes fundamentally impossible to know a complementary aspect, such as the position of that same particle at the same time. Yet another area of ambiguity occurs when people’s emotions lead them in a different direction than their cognition. This issue is well known to researchers who look into human behavior regarding the prevention of HIV/AIDS or smoking.
These are but a few areas where one can see that a discussion around the theme of ambiguity in learning and instruction could be highly relevant. The idea for the workshop wasn thus to look at ambiguity in the first place as a fact of life, rather than as something that should be avoided in the instructional context. If in real life we have to deal with ambiguity in its many guises all the time.
