Learning Objects and Instructional Design

my WebQuest link

So here we are at the end of the trimester and it’s time to think about teaching and learning activities and technology. In Ped II we saw a U-tube video from TechWatch of an interview with Cheryl Lemke about her review of studies on the impact of technology in learning. The paper is called Technology in Schools: What the Research Says. The research overwhelming shows that technology has a positive impact on learning in many areas. She spoke of the positive aspects of tools such as gaming, virtual dissection, and computer assisted instruction such as for reading. Over the last two trimesters I’ve learned about many new tools that could be used in different situations, but not all of them would fit in all situations. When I thought about teaching a totally online course, I realized that alone would be quite a lot of technology for many students at the community college level. So the tools within whatever Content Management System that I was using would probably be enough of a learning curve for them.

But I’d spent a lot of time reading about learning objects and then a lot of time trying to decide what kind of a learning object I might make for a totally online Women’s Studies course. There is no one definition of a learning object, but it is a discreet self-contained unit of learning that can be removed from one place and used in another. The terms includes such activities as discussion board and chat rooms, computer animated games and simulations, to workshops and seminars. Here are some excellent resources on learning objects. First from the American Society for Training and Development and SmartForce is A Field Guide to Learning Objects. This was a great general overview. The best overall document was written by Susan Alvarado-Boyd and published by the New Media Consortium and is titled A Traveler’s Guide to the Learning Object Landscape. From that guide I was able to read research and white papers, and visit learning object repositories on the web. If you are going to get into designing and making these objects I highly recommend Guidelines for Authors of Learning Objects by Rachel Smith (another document of the NMC).

For my final Web Design II project I decided to work on a WebQuest. WebQuests are a concept created by Bernie Dodge of San Diego State University back in 1995. A very basic definition would be an inquiry activity on a topic in which most or all information used by students is accessed via the World Wide Web. I looked at many examples and they applied to much younger students than mine would be. But I thought that this model would be an excellent way for me to think about the idea of using scaffolding as a teaching strategy. The National Resource Council says like training wheels, computer scaffolding enables learners to do more advanced activities and to engage in more advanced thinking and problem solving than they could without such help. By scaffolding I hope to free up the student’s research time – enabling them to essentially do more learning in a shorter period of time. Scaffolding out there in the work world is a temporary support for workers and in my case it is to support a student’s learning. Scaffolding needs to: provide clear directions, a clear purpose, help keep students on task, clarify assessment and evaluation expectations, point students to credible sources, reduce uncertainty and fear. In a short term WebQuest the instructional goal is knowledge acquisition and integration of a significant amount of new information. Somewhere I read an article by Tom March who reminded us to keep WebQuests rich, relevant and real. No small task at the community college level. So in my mind I was thinking: make a connection to learner’s own life, use multiple modalities, offer choices, ask students to think critically about the world, use constructivist problem solving methods, make it a self-guided tour, and explore a different way to bridge the gap between what they know and what they need to know, where do I begin?

The topic I chose for the WebQuest was the first wave of the women’s movement. As Dodge suggests there are five major areas of a WebQuest to think about. Each carries as much weight in the grand scheme as the others. First there is the introduction where I tried to make the topic intriguing and connected to background knowledge from the previous weeks. The task is the next step. Research shows that students will learn more if this task is sitting on the edge of their learning and if it is meaningful work. I chose to give examples of various types of magazine articles that they could relate to and ask them to write their own article from what they had newly learned. In the process section goes all the resources. It was hard to narrow these source possibilities down to a few – but I believe I gave them enough to support them where they are with the material. The evaluation piece is a rubric I designed to help them understand how I was going to evaluate them. I kept in mind a wise teacher who told me that anytime I’m going to make a rubric only chose between 5 and 8 things to focus my evaluation on. The conclusion ties the whole unit together, by clarifying for students the details of where their work will be posted and giving them extra sources if they want to continue their inquiry.

I had no idea when I began what I was getting into. By making this WebQuest I was essentially doing Instructional Design on a micro-level. I needed to do the design of the unit: goals and objectives, assessments and evaluations, and activities and resources. Then I needed to take the unit I designed and put it into an HTML document with easy navigation and clean code. It took me thirty hours to prep, design, and code a WebQuest that I was happy with from start to finish. It is essentially one unit of a fifteen week course, so it might not have been an economical use of my time, but as a learning experience it couldn’t be beat.

My biggest aha moment was a new and improved understanding of David Wiley’s article Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: a definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy. I didn’t really connect with it until I went through the lengthy process of actually making an object. Learning objects need what he calls purposeful use. By using instructional design strategies to make my WebQuest I made sure I wasn’t just trying to make cool bells and whistles in my course, but that my object clearly supported my student’s learning. And now I also understand his atomic theory metaphor. Having been taught the Tinker Toy model of atomic theory that is what I envisioned the first time I read his paper, but that’s a truly lousy model of an atom. My WebQuest is a self-organizing unit within my WMS1020 course. Within my WebQuest is a learning object from MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) and it is another self-organizing unit. Hmmm it’s becoming clearer and I appreciate the metaphor all the more! And I’m seeing how these little self-contained units are being used and reused and showing up in combination with other units all over the web.

Alvin Toffler’s coming to mind: The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can not read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn…

Anthropomorphism

http://www.flickr.com/photos/input/228103142/

Haven’t we all had those events? A crashed computer…lost data…the most wonderful prose ever written just before the power goes out? The one I had several weeks ago I didn’t expect. I have an email account that I use for work, but I work in multiple locations and often travel so I had been leaving my email on their server so I could access it at any location. I was working on a project where I was gathering data from many people and waiting to actually do the work after everything arrived. Unbeknownst to me, my email provider deletes emails over 30 days old (bad Verizon, no donut!) so when I went back to start the work, the emails were gone. First of all I couldn’t believe that I didn’t notice this before now, I’ve used this email account for almost three years. Next I turned white as a sheet as realized I needed to get that material back, some of it sent over a month ago, from over twenty different people. I foolishly thought leaving my data on their server was going to keep it safe. I didn’t read the ‘manual’ to learn how the tool I was using works. I was using it for something it was not intended for, plain and simple.

Someone said to me last week that technology was not their friend. Hmmm I thought, why do we continue to anthropomorphize our computers? Technology is just a tool. We need to learn how it can be used. We need to realize that it is made of matter which will degrade and need to be replaced and plan accordingly. Save and backup, backup and save. And that’s about it. Our machine doesn't respond "fast" enough and we hit enter, over and over and over again and wonder why our screens are frozen. I too once believed that there were gremlins living in the computer and they were ready to pounce at any moment! But eventually I had to admit that they only pounced when I was bringing chaotic energy to them. If I’ve procrastinated on a project, then while procrastinating I’ve created unbelievable stress in my energy field. That stress causes me to use the tool incorrectly – or maybe even possibly it affects the electronic field of the computer. I am energy and I affect other forms of energy around me. The gremlin is I.

From the American Heritage Dictionary this definition of technology is from anthropology: The body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials. For me the important word in this definition is available, because as teachers I believe we have a responsibility to our students in this realm. Seriously, this next thought might be a bit simplistic, but probably some of the earliest cavemen feared fire and wanted nothing to do with it. Ignoring the technology just kept them in the dark and cold a bit longer…

Chaos and Pattern

click for large size

I've been seeing fractals everywhere lately...I think they are following me. This past weekend I was looking for a visual of the internet so I used Google images. I was expecting some sort of network to go along with my thoughts and instead found this wonderful image from Randall Munroe. It's an IP address map of the Internet that he made using fractal mapping on Flatland. Just awesome!

http://flickr.com/photos/75878210@N00/

The fractal map that Randall used reminded me of my trip to Mitla in Oaxaca Mexico where I saw the most amazing forms in stone on the ruins. I remember finding a quote on a site about the brain and learning what explains why I'm seeing these fractals eveywhere. In an online article Al Maxwell wrote how the brain determines importance of incoming information is thought to involve pattern recognition. If the brain determines that the new information matches patterns stored previously, then the information will have meaning.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/

This flickr photographer has a wonderful collection of fractal photos....which leads me to think of Pollock. This painting is called "Galaxy."

In Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos John Briggs defines these patterns. He states that a dynamic system's transition areas - the points at which the system moves from simplicity to complexity, from bright, stable order to the black, impenetrable gyrations of total chaos - were the most interesting places. Inside these transition zones and boundary regions, systems degenerate and emerge in patterns and ranges of a system's movement. Though unpredictable in detail, one can predict the patterns and ranges of a system's movement.

So in closing here's my very own chaos painting a la Pollock. You too can play with this fun internet tool. Just click here and drag your mouse.....

The Great Whole

These last several weeks of the semester have gone by extremely quickly. This week I’m thinking about Newton’s 2nd law – you know the one about acceleration. It states that the acceleration of an object is dependant on two factors: the force being applied to it and its mass. Objects pick up speed as they travel towards the goal they have been aiming for. We are closer to graduation than the beginning and we certainly have picked up a lot of momentum on the way! Unfortunately lately I have been totally immersed in technology, and my projects, and I’m not feeling too centered as a physical being. When I was coding my slideshow the other day to put in this blog it wasn’t centering either. I had a heck of a time with it, soon realizing that the player wanted to be embedded in a [div] tag in order for the formatting to work in the blog post. Okay I’ll try that for myself and see if that helps [div] karen [/div].

In Web Design II this week one of the students posted an AP news story written by Brian Bergstein about a new kind of online encyclopedia called Citizendium. Seems the founder of this new resource, Larry Sanger, is widely known as an early co-founder of Wikipedia.org. Sanger wants a new more accountable version that is written by experts in the field, experts who wouldn’t have to have the articles that they spent time and energy on able to be edited anonymously with a few keystrokes. “Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility – and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.”



Thanks to Randall Munroe (xkcd.com) for the cartoon. I like Wikipedia. I like the concept. I like the chaos. There are 1.1 billion internet users out there all over the globe. That number is staggering - 17% of the population worldwide! How fun is that?! As a teacher I have always told my students that any encyclopedia is a good place to start your search for information on a topic, but they better not list it in their bibliography as a source. So the criticism heaped on Wikipedia doesn’t make it any less valuable to me. I don’t think the criticism matters too much to Wikipedia either – it has a rather exhaustive page all about it. And quite frankly who are these experts that want control over all this information anyway? It is the same “they” that controls the hidden web? I am able to see only a skimming-the-surface fraction of what is out there. There is general agreement that the web that is hidden from me is 500 times larger than what I have access to. For every one I see there are 500 hidden! The hidden web is information that is kept locked behind passwords and sometimes available only if I can afford to pay for it. Knowledge as a commodity is a lousy model for a true democracy.

How can we expect to creative true collective intelligence if the information isn’t free and available to everyone to build upon? We have an amazing opportunity in cyberspace. In Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Pierre Levy reminds us that the system for the production and distribution of knowledge doesn’t depend on the individual features of the human cognitive system alone, but also on collective methods of organization and the instruments with which information is communicated and processed (200). So here we are at another cultural revolution, the digital one. And we can do the whole chicken and the egg dance. Is technology creating us? Or did we create the technology? Although it may have seemed that little personal computer spores blew their way on the wind into everyone’s homes that is so not the case. Cyberspace is a reflection of us. And right now it’s showing itself to be a self-organizing system which scares those that want to have control. Think about this definition from Dr Nancy Andreasen in The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius...

A self-organizing system is one that is literally a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is defined as a system that is created from components that are in existence and that spontaneously reorganize themselves to create something new, without the influence of any external force or executive plan. Control over self-organizing system is not centralized. It is distributed over the entire system (62).

Instructional Models, Strategies & Methods

In Ped II, this is the week for pondering my approach to instruction, which in a sense I have been doing since the beginning of the semester in various ways. I’m using this conceptual framework which I developed when I thought about my personal style and chosen approach to teaching. I am designing a Women’s Studies course for the community college level which meets entirely online for one semester. The decision about my methods will take into consideration the course content, course environment, and the level of the students.

My instructional model is a combination of information processing and personal. I have content that I want the students to critically think about - and as they think, write, and talk I expect that they will inform their concept of self.

I don’t intend to use an instructional strategy, but rather a constructional one. In the constructivist classroom the activity is learner-centered. The teacher and students work in partnership, actively learning together, with the role of expert shared by both. Since we’re not trying to acquire facts, but are instead seeking to make connections, our queries will be made with open-ended questions. Open-ended questions encourage students to talk about what is important to them rather than encouraging a right answer. They promote rapport, help the teacher gather information, and increase a student’s understanding of material. Click here for excellent examples of open-ended questions from Murray State University. This constructional strategy will include indirect construction, interactive construction, and independent study.

Within these strategies are the actual methods I will use. I see indirect construction as self-guided inquiry, and I plan to use reading for meaning, research and web quests. The independent study aspect will include a research project, essays, and reflective journaling. To support cooperation and interactive construction the class will be using asynchronous discussion forums and a collaborative wiki.

Slideroll slideshow

We had a couple of cold days this week and they made me think of warmer climes, so I put his slideshow together on Slideroll. I uploaded my photos and then put them on a timeline, made some interesting transitions and got a wonderful calypso tune from Sonificfor the background. On the Slideroll website you can make the music and slideshow work in glorious harmony, but on this blog I refuse to have music that autoplays. How annoying would that be? To get the full effect, click the song button and then the slideshow button.

Wayfaring mashup

All the toys that we are playing with in Web II take a bit of time to get used to, but they have been fun and they are free! This is a map of beaches that I love along the New England coast. See my map at Wayfaring, my user name is kcase58. To see full size copies of the photos in my Flickr slideshow (on the sidebar), see user name stargazevt.

Critical Thinking and Metacognition

This is a tabletop that I am beginning to mosaic. I love to put pieces together in a coherent whole. During our f2f classes this past week the issue of blogging came up again and I’ve been pondering the relative ease with which I can do if for my coursework here at Marlboro. Mind you, I have no intention of ever putting myself “out there” for purposes of letting anyone know what I think about life or politics, but for making connections in an educational context, it makes perfect sense to me. At this moment it’s hard not to be grateful for the degree that I got at Vermont College of Union Institute and University, which I didn’t totally understand at the time. All I remember thinking was Wow, what a cool school to let me make up my own plan of study each semester…while deep inside I wondered where the lectures, texts and required courses were. I had to do so much writing, I was sick of hearing myself think. I came away with deep understandings and connections between geology, astro physics and creation/destruction mythology. I studied our frantic culture along with biological and seasonal time and quantum physics. The founding of our country was interwoven with study of the unheard voices who built it and a deeper understanding of class issues. Now I understand that I didn’t have ADD and those professors weren’t just letting me do my own thing. Can I take this opportunity to once again thank Dick Hathaway, Martha Vanderwolk, Howard Shapiro, Anastasia Kamanos-Gamelin and Frank Trocco? At VC this learning process was called critical thinking and here at Marlboro it is called metacognition. I see them now as a bit of the same thing. Metacognition is critical thinking all grown up.

I read an excellent article in Art Education (Jan 07) called Contemporary Approaches to Critical Thinking on the World Wide Web by Melanie Buffington of the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. I thought it fit in perfectly with what I was thinking about this week in Ped II and Web II and it had the extra added bonus of having been found in an Art Ed Journal! This notion of critical thinking is the crux of how we will all create, co-create, re-create and evaluate content on the web. In Buffington’s article she gives a history of the development of critical thinking in education and how that relates to theories and methodology. Phase I is the John Dewey era from 1910-1939 when critical thinking was in fact reflective thinking, research and the scientific method. Phase II critical thinking (1940-1961) had to do with learning to judge the accuracy of information based on the consideration of evidence, as in the work of Edward Glaser, David Russell and B. Othanel Smith who built on Dewey’s work. The theorists from 1962-1979 (Robert Ennis, Karl Buchman, R. Allen, Robert Rott, and Edward D’Angelo) were proponents of critical thinking as evaluation. They saw critical thinking as separate from scientific method, asking students to assess statement's veracity. The Phase 4 group from 1980-1992 (Robert Ennis, John McPeck, Harvey Siegel, Richard Paul) believe that critical thinking needs to include problem solving and evaluation of value statements. Unlike earlier authors, Paul highlighted the metacognitive aspects of critical thinking. In a recent work, Richard Paul and Linda Elder (2004) wrote, “critical and creative thought are intimately related. Each without the other is of limited use. Creativity without criticality is mere novelty. Criticality without creativity is bare negativity” (19).

Looking up the term metacognition, it first seems to appear in the work of J.H. Flavell in an article in American Psychologist called Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry in 1979, right as we entered phase 4. Metacognition is not just thinking about thinking as I have often heard before. I like the definition from the Encarta online: knowledge of your own thoughts. In the metacognitive process the student actually begins to steer themselves through the cognitive process by planning, observing and assessing the learning that is going on for them. The notion is antithetical to what I had learned growing up about education, but I couldn’t help but look at the development of critical thinking and the development of the human being at the same time. In the early years of elementary education, the research and inquiry of Dewey make sense to me. As a student goes through the middle and high school years the judging accuracy and evaluating the truth thinking of Phase 2 & 3 critical thinking is valuable. So although some metacognition obviously happens before a student enters post-secondary education, it seems to me that the other phases lay down a foundation for metacognitive processes to take hold as a human matures.

Social Bookmarking and Connectivism

This past summer I was lucky enough to have attended the Wild Turkey Feltmakers Shibori and Nuno-felting retreat in the Finger Lakes region of New York. The photo I’m using to illustrate connections this week is a Shibori dyed piece of silk that a participant in the workshop made. While it looks like what we in the West call tie-dye, it is as opposite from that as it is similar. Shibori is a Japanese technique which starts with an intricate and even meditative folding and ironing of a large piece of fabric. Once the fabric is folded and ironed into a small geometric shape there are many ways the fabric is prepared again before the dye is applied. It can be sewn, tied, bound to an object, or items can be attached that will prevent the fabric from receiving dye such as chopsticks, clips, etc. The fabric is then dipped into dye or the dye is painted directly onto the fabric and when the fabric is unbound the results are breathtaking. Patterns, patterns, patterns, my how we do love to seek out and find patterns.

It wasn’t hard to find the patterns and connections this week between our Pedagogy II class and Web II. Both instructors led us down the quantum physics road, Will with social bookmarking and Elaine with Connectivism. What I’d like to think about for this entry is the dual nature of reality that we perceive as order and chaos. This notion embodied to me in the glorious work of Jackson Pollock. Drips on canvas of an outrageous alcoholic you say? No, not quite. Computers have looked closely at them and determined that they are fractals, the order in the chaos. The Internet has an order inherent in the network structure with each node connecting to others. But the chaos lies in its dynamic nature. Who really knows where anything is. It is never the same river twice.

But all of the folks who make up the Internet are indeed self-organizing, just like sytems like to do, on sites such as del.icio.us and furl. They are creating folksonomies all by themselves. Del.icio.us is a place where you can organize the sites you want to bookmark as dynamic links (you will see the updated version of the website when you return). I don’t know how I got along without this site before, it keeps me personally organized. At Furl, you can actually save a static page of the website as it is right now. I don’t see weakness in these folksonomies, because I have a general trust of the populace and a general distrust of those who say they are the keepers of knowledge. There is just no way that anyone can keep pace with the exponential growth of knowledge and I see the Internet as a way to democratize knowledge. Will did an experiment in Web II class to prove that the theory of the Wisdom of the Masses does indeed work. He brought a jar of beans and asked us each to try to guesstimate how many beans were in the jar. Answers were tallied and were all over the map. End results: the person who guessed the closest was off by 34 beans, the average of the group was only off by 17! This is the thesis of James Surowiecki in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds", but what he reminds us it that there needs to be several things in place for the theory to work. What he has found is that there needs to be diversity of opinion, individual independence, decentralization, and a method to aggregate results. It seems as though those things exist currently on the Internet. Where did I hear the phrase The Answer is in the room…?

This leads me to George Siemens learning theory for the Digital Age – Connectivism. So in this dynamic network structure of the digital world how do we navigate learning? Through all of the connections: people to people, data to data, people to data, networks to networks in glorious dynamic chaotic harmony. The learning may be outside ourselves, and when we make the connection to that outside learning our own knowledge grows. The connection points in a network are called nodes. One definition I found said each node is a portal or link to other networks or spaces of knowledge as it’s termed in learning theory. Spaces of knowledge that are different from the brick and mortar buildings filled with the keepers of the knowledge? Amazing, exciting, omnipresent, and face it, not going away. Here are the principles of Connectivism as outlined by Siemens:

*Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions
*Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources
*Learning may reside in [technology]
*Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
*Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning
*Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill
*Accurate up-to-date knowledge is the intent of all connectivist learning activities
*Decision-making is a learning process and what is right today may change tomorrow

Ultimately the role of the teacher in higher education will shift dramatically as this new theory takes hold, because content is no longer privileged. The empty pail waiting to be filled with information metaphor is long past. The students looking up at the lecturing professor are not impressed and want more than to regurgitate tired old tidbits that were valued and important in decades past. On the Experience Designer Network Brian Alger’s weblog states: This perspective is opposed to traditional curriculum design in which knowledge, skills and attitudes seem to be frozen communication. Connectivism does not seem to be trapped by the curricular technology. So the teacher’s role needs to be to show students how to become discerning, think critically, and ask the right questions. Siemens states: Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decision made yesterday is also critical.

Reality is dependent on the Observer or the "I." Truly we each individually create our own order out of the chaos around us. In "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", Zukav states: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle demonstrates that we cannot observe a phenomenon without changing it. The physical properties which we observe in the external world are enmeshed in our own perceptions not only psychologically, but ontologically as well. When we become active participants in this “distributed cognition” in the digital world we constantly change it and are changed by it.

On Snack Food and Learning Theory

I work in a small office where two out of three of us are in grad school. We got to talking and realized that we were having some similar physical symptoms. Not only did we feel that we had roots that attached us to the chairs we read and did work in, but our brains were full and couldn’t hold anymore…which leads me to the reason that I chose this week’s photo. The analogy that I often use to explain learning to students is that when we connect something we’re studying to something else it makes tiny !pop! of learning. Hence the popcorn…massive quantities of popcorn…

And if my brain feels like it’s going to explode it’s no wonder. In the February issue of Wired, Kevin Kelly quotes Hal Varian of UC Berkley as stating that worldwide information is increasing at 66% a year… The paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers mean even more questions, expanding not only what we know but also what we don’t know. Every new tool for looking farther or deeper or smaller allows us to spy into our ignorance (124).

The brain is an amazing three pounds of matter. In 1999 the mother of two of my students was in an accident which caused traumatic brain injury. I watched as the long arduous healing process began and she needed to relearn even the smallest facets of life. But she did learn and her brain rewired itself and she wrote an amazing memoir called “Gifts from the Broken Jar.” Just months after reading her book my 22-year old son had a seizure and was diagnosed with an astrocytoma brain tumor. Through his surgery and treatment I was able to hold onto the fact that I knew the brain could construct new wiring. It in fact did, relatively quickly and my son is in remission.

Learning appears to be this constant new construction of our networking on a neurological level. So our brain is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled up as the behaviorists thought and this is a new paradigm for education. One where the learner plays the central role in education and the teacher plays the role of guide on the side. I resonated with the quote in Chapter 2 of “How People Learn:”

Teachers found it useful to replace their previous model of “answer-filled experts” with the model of “accomplished novices.” Accomplished novices are skilled in many areas and proud of their accomplishments, but they realize that what they know is minuscule compared to all that is potentially knowable. This model helps free people to continue to learn even though they may have spent 10 to 20 years as an “expert” in their field.

I think this way of looking at being a teacher brings the learning experience to one of collaboration where peers are learning together. This constructivist theory where learning happens as a result of the construction of new ideas built on one’s already existing knowledge means everyone brings something valuable to the table. Obviously the teacher is still the class authority, but not an authoritarian.

I pondered the question of how this new paradigm shift will take place within education because I still struggle sometimes with the blurred roles of teacher and student. I love learning and so have no problem taking responsibility for it, but last Ped II class I told Elaine I was uncomfortable being part of the process of deciding how my final project would be evaluated. In her thesis “Constructivism in Practice,” Kim Osberg quotes Cunningham, It is a difficult and subtle discrimination to decide when to intervene and when to let students struggle with the construction process…In my experience, some students are unable or unwilling to assume responsibility for their own learning. Those who are unable should be coached. Those who are unwilling need to be persuaded.

Next week I will be trying to understand an emerging theory called Connectivism. It ties learning theory to quantum physics and chaos theory. I found this graphic in Brenda Mergel’s paper called “Instructional Design and Learning Theory” and felt it tied in well.

I began to understand a bit more why this grad school process was really making me feel so different. In “The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius,” Nancy Andreasen tells us that neuroscience makes us aware that experiences throughout life change the brain throughout life. We are literally remaking our brains – who we are and how we think with all our actions, reactions, perceptions, postures, and positions – every minute of the day and every day of the week and every month and year of our entire lives. Your brain is being changed by the process of reading this (146). This discovery of neuroplasticity or the ability of the brain to change its structure is a new field of science, but a fascinating one full of potential for education. In the January 29, 2007 issue of Time Magazine, Stephen Pinker writes about “The Mystery of Consciousness:” As scientists probe the limits of neuroplasticity, they are finding that mind sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world. The brain can change as a result of the thoughts we think! That's real food for thought.

Embedding audio in a web page

LINK TO DRAFT OF FELTING TUTORIAL

I worked on another project for Web II today because I want to learn the various ways of embedding audio in a web page. I made my six audio files with the free Web 2.0 utility Odeo, and editted them with Audacity. I found the code to embed a player at O'Reilly and used that on the website for users to play the files. Great fun! When I was a little girl there was this stuff called reel-to-reel tape to record voice. The tapes in my dad's stereo were the size of a dinner plate! My how times have changed.

I had an experience in class this week that I thought a lot about on the drive home. We were having one of our lively discussions in Ped II, and Elaine our instructor, said something about having the ability to sense where people were at and how they were doing. I asked her how I was doing and everyone laughed as it may have appeared to be a snarky comment on my part. But it was not meant in that way. I truly wanted to hear my teacher’s voice…not the like in these two audio projects I made for Web II, but her inner voice and thoughts on the material we were covering.

So I thought about what modern theorists said about the role of a teacher in the classroom. Dewey said teachers should have the knowledge and ability to guide students through a very learner-centered process. The teacher’s role was to create authentic learning experiences. Piaget believed that knowledge was not just imparted orally, but that it is constructed and reconstructed by students. Vygotsky believed that teachers and students were collaborating in an effort at making meaning. Are all of these theorists building on the same sort of principles? What was coming up in the reading about teaching in the new electronic age?

In “A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning” L. Dee Fink speaks of active learning which is described as involving students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. I remember reading “The Virtual Student” last year. In it Palloff and Pratt suggest that in the learner-centered environment, the instructor is no longer the key content expert…the instructor in an online class moves to the side and allows student expertise to emerge. Wow, that is a shift in the whole paradigm of information delivery! And truthfully, this shift demands more of the teacher. In “What the Best College Teachers Do,” Ken Bain says that he found that effective teachers have something in common. They were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved. In other words they were themselves, life-long learners, practicing what they preached. The key is to be flexible and willing to do what the group needs for the learning process. In this way, the students and their learning remain the focus of attention (Palloff & Pratt, 127). A teacher can not just rest on their laurels. Tomlinson & McTighe in fact tell us that: Professionals in any field are distinguished by two characteristics: (1) They act on the most current knowledge that defines the field, and (2) they are client centered and adapt to meet the needs of individuals (11).

All of the above is brought together beautifully in a quote from Kinetic connections: Bloom’s taxonomy in action - Teachers scaffold learning so that students can assume a more active role in their own learning. This means that lessons are in fact more carefully constructed to guide students through the exploration of content. Teachers’ instructional arsenal contains a greater variety of instructional techniques and knowledge of instructional design. Their role has evolved from the limited didactic form of lecturing once held as the standard view of an effective teacher. And while I can intellectually understand these concepts, I still have the nagging question – where do I hear what the instructor thinks of the material?

Audio tutorial using Wink

Introduction to Fine Crafts E-classroom Tutorial

This week I needed to create an audio file and "deploy" it to the web for Will's Implementing Powerful Web Tools class. I decided that I wanted to try a free Web 2.0 software utility called Wink. I made a tutorial using screen shots as I lead my class through the details of our E-classroom site. I chose to add the audio after the screen shots were ready. So after I had all the shots in order, I proceeded to record text for the frames that I wished to add audio to. All audio editting could be done on the fly. I was also able to add text to each frame and buttons that enable students to go through the tutorial at their leisure. What Wink produces is a Macromedia flash file attached to an htm file which I have sitting on zonorus. Then I embedded that address information into this blogger post. It is very large file so be careful if you have dial-up.

Assessment and Evaluation

This week’s photo credit goes to my daughter Angela for this gorgeous windblown shot from the shores of Lake Champlain. Although we jokingly refer to that area as Vermont’s Banana Belt, when the wind comes whipping from the North that is so not the case. This past week we had a record-breaking storm and my little neck of the woods which is a bowl east of Bolton Mountain and south of Mount Mansfield (Stowe) received 30 inches in 24 hours! I am blessed that I only had to shovel it and not drive in it.

This was the week to ponder assessment and evaluation. Assessment is an ongoing process that as Elaine says is taking a pulse…appraisal. I resonated with these definitions in Assessing Open and Distanced Learners:

Assessment is a human activity, involving interactions aimed at seeking to understand what learners have achieved. Like any social interactions…there is nothing definitive or exact about the outcome. Assessment may occur in formal or informal ways, and it may be descriptive rather than judgmental in nature.

The primary purpose of assessment is to increase students’ learning and development, rather than simply to grade or rank students performance. Naturally one cannot grade student performance without first assessing it, but it is implied that grading is a secondary activity to the primary goal of helping learners to diagnose problems and improve the quality of their subsequent learning.

From Pathways to Good Practice at Southern Cross University I appreciated the list of reasons why you want evaluation of your courses. You need to see:

• how well your teaching is received by students and why
• whether the students find your learning materials are helpful to their learning
• whether aspects of the unit delivery are satisfactory to students and help them to learn

While the storm was dumping the white stuff, I took myself on a bit of a TANGENT. This word with Latin and Greek roots is mathematical in nature. The first part tan, coming from Latin and meaning touch or reach; and the second half came from Greek and having to do with a corner or a bend. It was not until the early 1800’s that the word was used for the meaning I have implied – a divergence or path slightly connected with the subject. From the Greek and Latin roots dictionary puns section: Old mathematicians never die, they just go off on a tangent. The trail I went down was a study of the SOLO (the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy coined by J B Biggs and K F Collis in 1982. It is a further development of Bloom’s taxonomy which Bigg’s described as a framework for understanding understanding, which for me makes the job of assessing student responses ever so much easier: As students learn, the outcomes of their learning display similar stages of increasing structural complexity. There are two main changes: quantitative, as the amount of detail in the student’s response increases; and qualitative, as that detail becomes integrated into a structural pattern. The quantitative changes occur first, then learning changes qualitatively.

I think that the reason I find this so helpful is that I currently teach mostly art and history and I find it difficult to assess learning when the answers students give are somehow so subjective. I am not looking for content-based outcomes. I am looking for how the students integrate the content and make connections with it. In The Experience of Learning, while writing about the "Quantitative Conception of Knowledge," Dahlgren calls SOLO an attempt at empirical classification of levels of outcome in a form which has wide applicability (31).

In the Quantitative realm there are three levels: prestructural, unistructural, and multistructural. On the prestructural level answers seem to miss the point, or contain bits and pieces of information. The unstructural level may answer part of the question, but be an oversimplification. On the multistructural level the answer may make several connections, but not see the whole. In the Qualitative realm the two levels are relational and extended abstract. In the relational realm the answers show the knowledge of the parts and the whole. And in the extended abstract the student begins to make connections outside the area under discussion.

The Big Picture

This photo of my house was taken last fall from Hunger Mountain, a part of the Worcester Range here in Central Vermont, a week before grad school classes began. As of this moment, we’ve just completed our third f2f class and our fourth week of work this trimester, and I am finally seeing the big picture. I will be able to work these f2f classes into one project - the design of a 15-week online Women’s Studies course. This course design is the goal, and the objectives along the way will take place in the f2f class projects. In Pedagogy II I will be doing the instructional design, in Configuring Network Learning Environments I will create a Moodle course for the material to reside, and in Web II I will learn to make a few learning objects (with cool and inexpensive software and hardware).

I tried to get back into the Moodle site I created yesterday in class and there seems to be a cookie-acception problem (even though I can see the cookie in Firefox), which leads me to my vocabulary word for the week, GLITCH. Provided there are none of these, or I overcome them, I will get to my goal. The dictionary says a glitch is a minor malfunction, mishap, or technical problem; a snag. The etymology of the word is probably from a similar Yiddish word, glitsh, meaning “a slip.” I will have to remember these minor technical problems will happen to my students too.

In Web II we read an article titled Connecting Learning Objects to Instructional Design Theory: A Definition, a Metaphor, and a Taxonomy written by David A Wiley. Wiley changed the metaphor for learning objects from Legos to atoms. He best sums up the whole article with the following quote, It should be obvious… that a person without understanding of instructional design has no more hope of successfully combing learning objects into instruction than a person without an understanding of chemistry has of successfully forming a crystal. In Ped II Elaine spoke of the art and science of teaching, which is essentially the same thing Wiley’s saying. Freedom (art) comes from knowing the rules (science).

In Ped II it was Bloom’s taxonomy that I was the most interested in this week because I am fascinated by the cognitive process. How is it that we learn? How is it that we make meaning? I came across this quote from an article called Why Pedagogy by writer David Lusted in Screen magazine, 1986:

Knowledge is not produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is offered so much as the matter that is understood. To think of fields or bodies of knowledge as if they are the property of academics and teachers is wrong. It denies an equality in the relations at moments of interaction and falsely privileges one side of the exchange and what that side "knows" over the other.

Why is pedagogy important? It is important since, as a concept, it draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the ‘how’ questions involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but also in its production. Indeed it enables us to question the validity of separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and through what means we ‘come to know.’ How one teaches is therefore of central interest, but through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and crucially, how one learns.

I have all my classmate’s blogs coming to my Bloglines aggregator. It is so much fun to see the different styles of writing. Blogs have an interesting past, with only 23 known in 1999, today a new one comes into existence every six seconds! What I remember when I saw my first blog, was that they were sort of pre-screened internet material. I counted on others to just give me the tidbits on any given subject. Although that is still the case on some blogs, they have lately become online journals. A quote from Rebecca Blood in Weblogs: A History and Perspective:

Lacking a focus on the outside world, the blogger is compelled to share [her] world with whomever is reading. [She] may engage other bloggers in conversation about the interests they share. [She] may reflect on a book he is reading, or the behavior of someone on the bus. [She]might describe a flower that [she] saw growing between the cracks of a sidewalk on [her] way to work. Or [she] may simply jot notes about [her] life: what work is like, what [she] had for dinner, what [she] thought of a recent movie. These fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.

As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.

Connections

I took this photo of a spider web covered in frost on my way to work in October. It seemed an apropos connection to various classes and events of the week. I finally understand the networking stuff from our Configuring Network Learning Environments class. While I’m not sure how this information will relate to using Moodle in a Linux environment, I’m up for that challenge too. In the meantime this information has allowed me to understand the web of cables, routers, and devices strewn along the walls of the small non-profit I work for. Because we had a bit of down time in the Web II class this week I got into researching the history of computers and the Internet. In my links section see the really cool blog called An Incomplete History of Personal Computing.

Every once in a while I do a ‘catch up’ week of making connections with the people in my life: old friends, family, and business networking that I’d been putting off. The net result is I have a date on valentine’s day with a dear friend and her four month old baby, reconnected with an old colleague who is teaching in inner NYC, found out my sister’s job went kaput after 23 years, and my parents were thankfully just outside the area where the tornadoes hit Florida this week. John Perry Barlow, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted as saying: The central purpose of technology is to connect ... to make contact. To wake up, shocked by the voltage of increased interaction between the properties of humanity in my heart and those in yours … I had a business communication over this week that taught a great lesson about email. I was working on a project with one group, and forgot that I had not covered all my bases with another group over said project. I was in a hurry and wrote and sent off an email that I did not re-read…big mistake! I found out later that my email, which in my view was just an objective stating of facts, could in fact be read from a whole different perspective…and was. I said something like a second planned meeting was cancelled last minute…forgetting to mention that the other party was at home with the flu. Overall I apologized, but I wasn’t really sure whether to say sorry I blew it or thank you for letting me learn that mistake from you...

In Ped II we began reading Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. It seems to be a combination of sound instructional design connected with a desire to make the curriculum accessible to multiple needs. What hit me the most while reading was the quote: Even the best curriculum delivered in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion will be taken by a few and left by too many (18). These authors clearly state that this is not really a methodology, but a way of thinking (10). At CCV, this has been known as Universal Instructional Design. UID principles include: getting concrete (goals, syllabus, assignments, feedback), varying teaching methods (to meet learning styles), allowing for options (makes output accessible and real), and using technology. I don’t really like the term UNIVERSAL though. I still think it connotes a one-size fits all approach. Looking at the Latin roots of universal it literally means like one turn: UNI (one, single) VERS (bend, turn) AL (pertaining to, like, of the kind, belonging to). We should change the terminology to MULTIVERSAL – belonging to many turns….

Surprise

Sometimes the surprises in life come from out of nowhere. I’ve been a gardener forever, both indoors and out. I’ve tried to grow both camellias and gardenias for a decade and never had them actually open the tight little buds that they set. But this is the camellia blossom that greeted me at the beginning of the week. I wasn’t expecting it, had no idea it was coming, but ahhhh what perfection. The same thing happened in classes this week when Sheila reappeared in First Class saying, Where’s my desk! And then Susan, just two weeks out of leg surgery, surprised us and brought herself to the grad center for classes this week.

Elaine said we could have fun learning so I’m choosing a word she used in class as my vocabulary word for the week. SPOONERISM means to swap (transpose) the sounds in a sentence. The American Heritage College Dictionary uses the example: Let me sew you to your sheet for Let me show you to your seat. But I will explain how I wrote this entry by saying that I’m simply pulling a habit out of my rat….I mean, pulling a rabbit out of my hat…surprise!

There was a lot of conversation this week about the use of blogs. I was surprised to find that very few of us are comfortable in this realm. But, I reread my blog from Introduction to Online Teaching and found that I wasn’t comfortable the first time either. In fact, that was the biggest obstacle I had with that course, but in the end I thanked the instructor for taking me out of my comfort zone. Now I’m pretty comfortable with blogging and I had a wonderful time changing this template with tricks I learned from Jen in Web I. In a course I’m teaching I use the VARK (visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic) Inventory Questionnaire as a tool for helping students to understand their learning style. It’s a quick online way to learn how one prefers to take in and give out information. I was prepping for class next week and thinking about my own results from this questionnaire. According to my results, I prefer to learn by reading and writing, which means for intake I like readings, notes (yours are awesome Meaghan), textbooks, essays, and teachers who use words well. To study concepts I like to rewrite and reread notes, put stuff into charts and diagrams, and rewrite ideas and principles in other words. For output I like to write…it even says I like to arrange words into hierarchies and points. Small surprise - this blogging assignment is right up my alley.

I have two lingering questions from our work together for the first two weeks. When Elaine asked at the end of class what the situational factors informing instructional design were I could not remember the teacher as one. It seems as though the teacher is not just a little part of this jigsaw, but the one putting the whole thing together. Did anyone else have that thought come up for them? The second question came up when Jack spoke about a static and a dynamic classroom (which was a great tie-in to the network IP address stuff we’re learning). How can I create an online classroom that does not feel static?

The view

Along with the first week of classes this trimester came an ice/snow storm that brought power outages for many, and left us all with two whole days without the Marlboro server. There was no email. There was no electronic library. There was no First Class and there was no Moodle. So I chose this photo of the view out my front door this past Tuesday to illustrate how it felt midweek. I could not see clearly. It is amazing how much we count on the internet to be our eyes. And it’s amazing how much we use it.

What are the different views of Instructional Design? The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers has six steps: assess needs, analyze learners, write objectives, select instructional strategy, develop materials, and evaluate. The Dick and Carey model gives us ten steps: determine instructional goal, analyze goal, analyze the learners and context, write performance objectives, develop assessment instruments, develop instructional strategy, develop and select materials, evaluate, revise instructions, conduct summative evaluation. The Fink model begins with the situation factors such as the students and their prior knowledge as a springboard into the triad of goals, assessment, activities. To me they all seem to cover the same key points. None of the designs seem to be lacking anything. I resonate with the Fink model. I like it for two reasons: first that the situational factors inform, but are not an integral part of how the course will be taught. And secondly because I can work on one area and check how it affects the other two; as Fink states, What is distinctive about this model is that these components have been put together in a way that reveals and emphasizes their inter-relatedness.

Favorite vocabulary word of the week: UBIQUITOUS. Will (our teacher in Web II) loves to use this word to describe the web. Definition: omnipresent, everywhere.

So what’s the current view of the web? The buzzword is Web 2.0 or Read/Write, what Tim O’Reilly calls a web in perpetual beta. Folks are no longer just consuming the web, they are creating the web. Social activity is happening in cyberspace because people are linked together and collaborating on a global scale. It is these regular folks that are controlling the content on the web; and they not only make it and use it, but they recycle it and reuse it in other ways.

According to the Digital Media & Learning Fact Sheet from the MacArthur Foundation, Youth live media saturated lives, and make use of new media and technology. More than half of online teens have created content for the Internet. For example created a blog, personal web page, or shared artwork, photos, stories, or videos online. As teachers, we are going to have to keep up, and there are amazing new services to help us create content. On Gabcast.com we can record using VoIP, make audio greetings and add them to blogs, host conference calls, and create podcasts. On Odeo.com we can get Mp3s and audio channels, which can also be added to websites. Yackpack.com is for talking as a group, and with Skype.com we can “call” someone for free over the internet. With eyespot.com’s help we can combine video, photos, and music. It’s truly what Will Richardson says in "Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts", More and more the “code” to teaching and learning that schools once held dear is disappearing, creating open-source-type classrooms in which everyone contributes to the curriculum.

There’s a lot to keep up with in the online world and things change fast. But there’s a certain playfulness about it all too; if you use it as the tool it was intended to be, and don’t take it too seriously. Goodnight, I’ve got to go and feed my Neopet….