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.