User:Mfetters

A priest might well feel that sitting in a Gothic cathedral induces a sense of the numinous, but he would not expect it to teach a believer the religious practices necessary for salvation. Nor more would a baseball coach expect that sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers would improve a player's batting skills.

Reflection on osmotic learning, Andrew Abbott, May 2006(1)

Osmotic Learning

Osmotic learning and learning by osmosis are terms in both non-medical (2,3) and medical literature(4-6). Biggs describes the theory of osmotic learning as the assumption that if a novice is placed in close contact with an expert, by a process of osmosis, expertise will flow from expert to novice.(2) While closely related to passive learning, a distinction can be drawn as follows. Passive learning suggests that the learner himself is passive and non-active, while osmotic learning implies that the learner has been forced into a passive, non-active existence by the socially constructed environment and educators. This distinction is important for emphasizing why the student is non-active–osmotic learning implicates the cause for not being active as a force external to the student, and implicates the institutions responsible for teaching. The term osmotic learning includes a social criticism of faculty or other supervisors and implies the learner’s treatment as a simple, one-cell organism that possesses little more capacity for intelligence than an amoeba. In the literature active and passive learning are often contrasted as opposites. In contrast, osmotic learning is contrasted with experiential learning.

(1)Andrew Abbott. THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY http://www1.lib.uchicago.edu/e/about/abbott-report.pdf. May 2006.

(2) Biggs, J. (1994) The research context, in G. Gibbs (Ed.) Improving Student Learning. Oxford: Oxford Brookes University. (Biggs, 1994, p. 1).

(3) Andrew Cleminson a; Simon Bradford. Professional Education: the relationship between 'academic' and experiential learning. Journal of Vocational Education & Training Online Publication Date: 01 January 1996

(4) Dally P, Ewan C, Pitney WR. Assessment of an Australian medical internship. Medical Education. 18(3):181-6, 1984 May. Published Online: 7 Dec 2005

(6) Bicknell DJ. Current arrangements for teaching medical ethics to undergraduate medical students. Journal of Medical Ethics. 11(1):25-6, 1985 Mar.