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….