I’m just going to try to cherry-pick the parts of this article (and the other ones as well I guess), taking interesting or useful quotes and ideas. There are points in here that I think are poorly argued or which tend to kowtow to conventional theory without being backed up but at this stage I’m more interested in the useful parts. I’ve separated quotes by alternating between italics and plain.
“Currently, modern education theory is moving from the traditional recall of facts, principles, or correct procedures into the areas of creative thinking, problem solving, analysis and evaluation.”
“the constructivist learning mode describes a learning process whereby students work individually or in small groups to explore, investigate and solve authentic problems and become actively engaged in seeking knowledge and information, rather than being passive recipients. In this process, the learners must play an active part in their learning process and be autonomous learners who are actively engaged in constructing new meaning within the context of their current knowledge, experiences and social environments.”
“Generally, constructivist learning places emphasis on the learners and proposes that learning is affected by their context, their beliefs and their attitudes. Learners are encouraged to find their own solutions and to build upon their prior knowledge and experiences. In a constructivist learning environment, students learn by fitting new information together with what they already know and actively construct their own understanding. In doing so, they gain a deeper understanding of the event and thereby constructing their own knowledge and solutions to the problems (Duffy & Jonassen, 1991; Jonassen, 1994).”
“Constructivist learning is categorised mainly into cognitive constructivism and social constructivism. Cognitive constructivism is based upon the works of pyschologist Jean Piaget (1952) and later, in educational computing, of Seymour Papert (1980).”
“It describes a theory of development whereby learners build their own knowledge by constructing mental models, or schemas, based on their own experiences. These schemas are then developed, modified and made more sophisticated over time. Cognitive constructivism focusses on the individual’s mental construction of knowledge, whilst social constructivism enlarges that view by placing more emphasis on the social context of the learning environment.”
“Based on the works by Lev Vygotsky (1978), social constructivism emphasises Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which argues that students can, with the help of adults or more advanced students, master concepts and ideas that they cannot understand on their own, and states that, “What the child is able to do in collaboration today, he will be able to do independently tomorrow” (Vygotsky, 1987; Hung, 2001). In other words, students learn by interacting with their more capable peers, teachers and experts in a collaborative learning community.”
“By incorporating digital media elements into the project, students are able to learn better since they use multiple sensory modalities, which would make them more motivated to pay more attention to the information presented and better retain the information.”
March 21st, 2007
http://uow.ico5.janison.com/ed/subjects/edgi911w/resources/heuristics.htm
In spite of the fact that the guide to writing heuristics itself says that collecting them isn’t “academically respectable”, they are evidently worth investigating as convenient summaries of “the truth” of a theory or body of knowledge.
This is what the guide has to say about writing them:
Structuring your heuristics
Use the following structure to set out each heuristic:
Heuristic statement
- State the issue in a single, active sentence.
Explanation
- Provide an explanation in support of your statement of up to 500 words for each heuristics covering the following:
- Expand on your statement above to explain what it means in more detail
- Explain the background to the topic by including references to the relevant concepts from the literature using the correct referencing style
- Explain what the heuristic means in practice and give examples if appropriate
- Explain why this is a useful heuristic in your context as a learner, teacher or designer
- Explain why the issue is important to you, in other words why did you choose to write about it
- Offer any practical suggestions you might have for other practitioners trying to implement the heuristic
References
- List all the references cited in your explanation as per the convention.
I have four of these bastards to do, God help us all 
March 21st, 2007
Neo, K. (2003). Using multimedia in a constructivist learning environment in the Malaysian classroom. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 19(3), 293-310. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet19/neo.html
Extract: In recent years, the infusion of multimedia into teaching and learning has altered considerably the instructional strategy in our educational institutions and changed the way teachers teach and students learn.
The traditional teacher-centric method of teaching used for decades in our educational system has been modified and enhanced. Currently, modern education theory is moving from the traditional recall of facts, principles, or correct procedures into the areas of creative thinking, problem solving, analysis and evaluation. These are skills which are very much needed in today’s knowledge based economy.
This shift in focus on learning has presented Malaysian educators with serious challenges as well as opportunities in restructuring their curriculum to meet the rising demands of the knowledge based society, which is currently being initiated by the Malaysian Government.
In this paper, we focus on designing a course which is oriented towards a constructivist based paradigm by using multimedia as an instructional tool, and where students are active learners, involved in constructing their own knowledge in the learning process and determining how to reach their own learning outcomes.
A survey was carried out to ascertain the reactions of students enrolled in an interactive multimedia course in the Multimedia University, Malaysia towards this constructivist based learning mode. The results indicated that these students reacted positively towards this study mode and improved their interpersonal and collaborative learning skills.
My first response to this paper wasn’t a particularly positive one. As you can see from the extract, it is about the experiences of students in a constructivist situation (one where the learning is “built” by the student in a situation where they are presented with a problem as their assessment and make their own decisions about what they need to learn to solve it.)
It is also very much about how the use of multimedia is meant to slot into this constructivist model, with the students using audio, video, animation, interactive flash, images and more to create a final product that brings together everything that they have learnt.
The students then complete a questionnaire providing feedback on their enjoyment of the learning experience and how valuable they felt that using multimedia was in constructing their knowledge.
The problem here is that these are multimedia students at a multimedia school – this is a field that they want to work in and one which the Malaysian Government (and it seems the author of the paper) is very keen to develop in Malaysia.
Using students trained in the use of multimedia to determine the effectiveness of using multimedia as a learning tool seems an entirely questionable place to start in this instance. (Unsurprisingly, the students all felt that using multimedia helped them to learn).
In addition to this, the paper seems heavy on pro-constructivist rhetoric and light on concrete examples of how or why this practice actually supports learning.
Language such as “students obediently listen to the lecture” in describing conventional “chalk and talk” teaching seems slanted – the word “obediently“grates in particular as something regressive, something to be judged.
On the other hand, descriptions of the Constructivist model are all glowing and faultless – “students work individually or in small groups to explore, investigate and solve authentic problems and become actively engaged in seeking knowledge and information, rather than being passive recipients.”
(My personal belief is that a Constructivist approach can be highly effective and that learners will connect more strongly with knowledge that they have found – particularly after they have identified their own need to have it and found ways to relate it to their existing knowledge.)
The fact that learners were taught in a seemingly more conventional manner how to actually create the multimedia projects in the first place is quickly glossed over in a sentence – <blockquote> These students have no a priori knowledge in multimedia authoring and authoring tools and, therefore, were given lectures and tutorials to provide them with basic skills in multimedia application development. </blockquote>
I believe it is a rare occasion that an exclusively constructivist approach would be used in a classroom and while problem based learning is a great approach for autonomous learners and group-based learning, most students still expect a reasonable level of support from their teacher and for their teacher to be more knowledgable about the subject than they are.
Having students create multimedia resources to examine the usefulness of multimedia in a constructivist approach makes a lot of sense but seems to get too “meta” when the students are creating multimedia resources for the sake of creating multimedia resources. Their knowledge of the subject matter of the aforementioned multimedia resources apparently went up, which is certainly encouraging but given that the learning outcome was more focussed on the students developing product management and design skills, this seems somewhat irrelevant.
However
I’m meant to develop a Heuristic based on this article – not that I’m overly sure what a heuristic is meant to do – from the examples I’ve seen, it seems like a concise headline summary of a larger (400 words approx) summary of an idea contained in the article. The finer points of what a heuristic is, what it is for and so on appears to have been covered in the face to face classes of this subject -however as a distance student, I missed out. (The last time I asked a question about concept maps I was advised to google it on wikipedia – which I had already done incidentally – so I’m somewhat reluctant to ask again).
This leads me to the question – if I disagree with the approach to a subject that is covered in a paper, can I still pull a reasonable opinion/position from it which takes the shape of a heuristic.
The article has some interesting things to say about the purpose of the constructivist approach, I think this is the place to begin.
Update - ok, so there is actually a pretty reasonable looking guide to writing heuristics tucked away in the course content.
I might just post quickly about that too.
March 21st, 2007
