Step 1: Take notice and describe the experience
The feedback I received on my first learning object was very encouraging. The broader understanding that I have already developed of strategies to add meaning to learning (e.g. visual analogies – Anglin et al. (2004)) and to enhance the learners ability to process information (e.g. text conventions – Hartley, J (2004)) have been particularly useful. It’s satisfying to feel that I’m on the right track.
After submitting the Learning Object, I did some further testing on it and found that I should have been more mindful of screen size. I tend to work at a relatively high resolution which means that everything fitted on my screen easily but on monitors at lower resolution this wasn’t the case and some scrolling was necessary. I decided that the pages were good enough as they are but will be more mindful of these issues in future design.
I also found that Microsoft has now released an update for the Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox which resolves some of the display issues that had been a problem previously. I was less worried about this as issues of cross-browser compatibility are important for learners to be aware of but will look for some way to incorporate this information into the object. (Probably by adding a resources page).
In looking at the first learning object (and considering the second), I thought for a while that it would be great to have a learning object that consisted of a video with a set of sliders beneath which can alter various qualities of the video (bitrate, codec and file type) in real time to offer a live model of how changes affect video directly but this seems far too difficult.
I’m still working on producing resources for training sessions on using video at this stage. I’d like something a little more active this time around – most likely something that provides more feedback to learners in terms of formative assessment. This would probably take the form of a quiz or game revolving around multiple choice questions as tasks that the learner needs to answer to move on to the next stage.
We currently offer several simple, wizard based tools for creating simple games at CIT. Most of these are essentially dressed up self marking multiple choice quizzes put into a more interesting context such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I’d like to offer something that goes beyond this.
I’m interested in maximising the interactivity and exploring some principles of games in education theory (Prensky 2006) however time constraints may mean it’s a smaller project than I’d like.
Another area that I’m interested in focussing on is that of foundation I.T literacy skills. Apparently we have a small division of responsibility issue on this at CIT however (this area is regarded more as a task for the H.R department) so I need to tread carefully.
Step 2: Analyse the experience
My decision to leave the first learning object as it is was mainly on practical grounds – the time and effort required to make a change which is mainly aesthetic. My personal feeling is that scrolling should be avoided if possible but that most users are ok with it.
Adding a resources page to the first learning object seems like a useful approach to take in terms of providing support to learners. The majority of learners that I teach have low level technological skills and the complexity of video creation is challenging enough for them without being expected to figure out what else they need to know (and use) and where to find it.
I’m looking at the quiz/game idea as a resource to provide learners with reinforcement of their learning as this meshes well with my interest in the use of games in learning as motivational tools. The more I read about the development of higher level skills – particularly in regard to problem solving and the ability to transfer knowledge from one situation to another – the more a game based approach seems useful.
Step 3: Take action
I’ve learnt to be more thorough in my testing process and to try to empathise more with the likely needs of learners for easy access to resources.
I’ve also learnt that some technical issues can simply be beyond your control – the Firefox/WMP plugin compatibility issue namely – but it’s worth following I.T news as these are often the first sources for resolutions.
I need to focus some more attention specifically on game design principles and see what links I can make to educational strategies.
April 23rd, 2007
Driscoll, M.P. (2002). How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have To Do with It). ERIC Digest. ED470032
This is one of the best articles I’ve come across so far (and one of the shortest, which might help 
Driscoll provides a simple and effective overview of factors that influence learning and examines the ways in which technology can be used in each case. My comments appear in blue italics
Learning occurs in context:
- learners attempt to make sense of something new and unfamiliar by drawing upon their prior understandings and experiences
- offering new knowledge in some kind of context makes it easier for learners to apply appropriate prior knowledge
- real world contexts are generally the most widely shared and add relevance to content
- problem solving in the form of games, puzzles and simulations can be made engaging using multimedia technology
- adding complexity makes them challenging and even more engaging
- building skills through sequential exercises allows learners to transfer new knowledge to newer problems
Learning is active:
- Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand. (Chinese proverb)
- “When students become active participants in the knowledge construction process, the focus of learning shifts from covering the curriculum to working with ideas (Scarmadalia, 2002)”
- Technology tools provide “the means through which individuals engage and manipulate both resources and their own ideas (Hannafin, Land & Oliver 1999)” As opposed to pen and paper? Actually, computer tools would still be easier and more effective here, you’re right
- Other technology tools help to represent knowledge and facilitate communication – e.g. visualisation tools
- Simulations can enable learners to model complex ideas
Learning is social:
- Students benefit from hearing perspectives other than their own in group work. Importance of peer opinion - Just today the Beyond Blue foundation (for depression) was talking about teaching teens the skills to help depressed friends.
- Students may bring different strengths to a complex and lengthy activity
- Learning, then, amounts to increasing participation in and contribution to the practices of a social community
- Concepts such as knowledge building, apprenticeship, and mentoring become paramount, as learners are conceived to be under the tutelage of more experienced peers or instructors.
- A social view of learning focusses attention on making connections among students within a school and between students in the school and the broader community. What about quieter students though – shy ones and less literate ones?
- Students can use software to collaborate “by creating ‘notes’ to express their ideas or integrate outside information about a topic. Then they read and respond to the notes of others, all of which builds a communal database producing shared knowledge about the topic or problem” Like something between a blog and a wiki? More like a blog really
- This can provide opportunities for students to “improve their understanding and become more personally involved in explaining scientific phenomena”
Learning is reflective:
- “Learning is facilitated when students get feedback about their thinking whether that feedback comes from within, a teacher or a peer” Emphasis on source of feedback comes back to the material being taught to an extent
- “Then provided the opportunity for revision, students can achieve at higher levels and reach deeper understandings”
- “Many… technology examples… facilitate discussion in the dialogue that they promote among learners. Where dialogue or discussion is not inherent in the tool, teachers bear the responsibility of initiating and guiding it”
My general observations:
Driscoll has succeeded in helping me to get some key concepts of collaborative work – the usefulness of feedback from all sources mainly – that had been eluding me.
My personal feeling is still that group work is rarely shared evenly and can often cover up for learners who don’t understand everything by allowing them to emphasise their strengths in other parts of the project.
What about the use of competition in collaborative work /projects? Could be a motivator for some (possibly a turn off for others though)
Providing a structure for reflection (much like the one listed in my previous post here ) is important – and sadly I think that so is making it an assessable part of the work with clearly stated guidelines and expectations.
Great article though Marcy Driscoll, thanks heaps
April 22nd, 2007
Dede, C. (2005). Planning for neomillennial learning styles. Educause Quarterly, 28(1).
This article explores (in a slightly tech-evangelical but nonetheless interesting way) possible uses in education of emerging technologies including MUVEs (MultiUser Virtual Environments – ie Second Life), Wireless/Mobile devices and ongoing developments in online content.
It also looks at the way “neomillenials” – also referred to by some as digital natives – interact with current technology and ways that education may be able to (or indeed need t0) adapt to provide learners with more complete and satisfying learning experiences.
Emerging learning styles:
- Fluency in multiple media and in simulation-based virtual settings
- Communal learning involving diverse, tacit, situated experience, with knowledge distributed across a community and a context as well as within an individual
- A balance between experiential learning, guided mentoring and collective reflection
- Expression through nonlinear, associational webs of representations
- Co-design of learning experiences personalised to individual needs and preferences
Main points:
- Internet is reshaping information gathering/learning styles – more seeking, sieving, synthesising than before.
- Digital media encourages multitasking (instant messaging, websurfing, emailing, listening to music while reading)
- Too much multitasking might lead to cognitive overload
- New emphasis on customised, personalised environments – learners wanting to shape their own courses, decide what they learn and need for universities to cater to this
- Millenial students – those born after 1982
- Emerging media types foster deeper psychological immersion – particularly 3D spaces but also “augmented reality” created by the expanding use of mobile devices and networks
- Mobile Wireless devices (MWDs) can be used to access context specific information while out in the real world
- Potential for networked MWDs to create connections between people with common interests
- People have multifaceted identities – real world and online ones
- Enhances access to information across space and time
- Possible to create interactions in virtual space that are impossible in reality – eg dealing with a chemical spill in busy neighbourhood – scenario based learning
- MMOGs growing in popularity (apparently Second Life hasn’t quite hit the stands at the time of writing)
- Use of virtual interactive environments, modelling museums, labs, historical simulations
- Coming phenomena of ubiquitous computing – being networked everywhere
- Encouraging non-linear communication – e.g. authoring a simulation and creating a webpage to express understanding rather than writing a paper)
Suggested implications of these changes:
- need to redesign physical spaces – specialised spaces less necessary (e.g. library reading rooms)
- places and objects will have more information attached to them
- networked collaboration enhances accessibility
- new forms of assessment required – beyond written papers – which incorporate greater peer based assessment
- need for widespread wireless network infrastructure
- move to more personalisable learning experiences
- move towards more emphasis on knowledge sharing between students
- more “real-world”context based case studies in assessment
My thoughts:
Generally there are a lot of interesting ideas here and Dede is well aware that a number of the changes proposed would involve a significant reshaping of current educational practice and systems.
I often get the feeling when reading educational theory – particularly of a constructivist bent – that it is either somewhat divorced from chalkface reality (overly theoretical) or conceived with motivated post-graduate university students in mind, rather than secondary or early tertiary students.
In the VET context, we work with learners with more basic foundation skills in learning (adolescents fresh out of high school or workers reskilling themselves) and some of the principles about student directed learning and customised courses seem quite irrelevant to learners – and highly impractical for teachers.
I question the assumption that until now learners have only taken information from narrow channels such as a textbook or two or their teacher – this fails to give teachers any credit for ingenuity at all. Multimedia in one form or another has been used in classrooms for more than 100 years.
Information processing is definitely an important skill in this age – we have access to more of it than ever before. Neomillenials may well have more effective skills at processing this and this is something to consider in designing their learning – the dangers of cognitive overload should also be taken seriously as well though.
Do neomillenials really take in and comprehend all the information that they process or is it taken more superficially?
Do people (we) have shorter attention spans now and what does this mean to learning?
I appreciate the business imperatives of providing more personalised and customised content as well – this is certainly going to be appealing to learners – however I question the assumption that learners always know what they don’t know and also what they need to know.
Research has indicated that learners don’t always get in right when deciding what they need to know and that more often than not they get it wrong when determining the best way to learn things that they want to know. Sometimes that topics that seem the least interesting to a learner are the most important in terms of actually being able to use a set of skills or knowledge.
When courses and curricula are designed by “experts”, these are people who are able to bring valuable experience to the process and know better the things that learners need to focus on. It might be worth allowing learners to shape the order in which content is presented but the body of the content is probably something that they should be prepared to accept as coming from someone who knows more. If you don’t enter higher education to know more than you currently know, why go there at all?
The matter of administering and assessing such systems (unless we are dealing with chunks of knowledge) also seems to have been brushed aside but is a key consideration in making these changes actually happen. Teachers don’t want to do more work than they are already doing – often times they simply can’t – and will vote with their feet if a system is imposed on them. (Such as one revolving around personalised learning packages)
How can employers make considered assessments of a qualification if it’s significantly different to everyone elses?
Let’s not make learners too important in the process of figuring out what they have actually learnt – just because they feel as though they know enough about something doesn’t necessarily make it so. If a team of medical students successfully completes an operation, are we sure that each student can do it all?
Looking at education another way, if the knowledge of the world (the developed world at least) is at our fingertips, do we need to learn anything more than how to access it and understand it? (Of course, if the access to this info breaks, society could be in trouble)
Human adoption of technology systems that put people in contact with random strangers sharing common interests (in terms of mobile wireless devices) has been hyped for a few years now but really hasn’t taken off. People do make connections online more freely based on common interests – is this because it is a less threatening environment? I think that people are naturally cautious about strangers and prefer the online buffer. This may differ in a learning environment – I’d like to hear some ideas for ways that this might work though.
Notions of access are very powerful and encouraging – current technological developments certainly offer great promise for involving more people in education who have been disadvantaged. We shouldn’t forget those who are technologically disadvantaged as well (The One Laptop Per Child scheme is encouraging here) as this is a key divide.
Simulations that go beyond what is possible or practical in reality are very encouraging – one of the things I regularly discuss with teachers is that if using technology doesn’t add something to a learning experience that wasn’t already there, why use it? The possibility of developing resources and simulations that mean you can do something new – such as a massive chemical spill in a big city – are tremendous.
I suspect that many of Dede’s suggestions for implementations (particularly large scale ones) are designed as ambit claims – things like getting rid of computer labs and reading rooms in libraries work on an assumption that 100% of learners want to go down this path. If we are going to talk about providing personalised learning, what about these people?
This is more about provoking thought and discussion and is fair enough.
I read a comment recently (no idea where) which made the point that computers should simply be seen as another classroom resource and that we don’t talk about taking the students to the pencil lab. (Although isn’t that the Art room?). This is true, although I’d say that if pencils cost $1000 each, it might be a little different.
Personalisable learning – worth considering RSS feeds and related widgets, still not sure what personalised learning environments are or how they work but I guess this comes into the picture.
This article is definitely worth a read, I just wonder if it isn’t a little divorced from chalkface practice – or putting it more nicely, a little idealised.
April 22nd, 2007
