Creating Significant Learning Experiences With Moodle

Frameworks for Higher Ed

• Learning from a cognitive science perspective – what do we know know about the learning process that we didn’t before.
• Principles of good teaching.
• Principles of instructional design
• Goals of higher ed.

How People Learn

• Knowledge is constructed
• Importance of foundational knowledge
• Role of metacognition – understand the learning process, how to get the students thinking about their learning process.

Create Significant Learning Experiences
Establish foundational knowledge, that you then apply to higher skills learning as well as other aspects of life.

There is the human dimension where they care about learning and develip skills so that learning is a lifelong process.

Fink’s taxonomy is not hierarchical, all the elements are available and impact the learning process.

Examples

Journaling – Reading Reflections Exercise
Post questions on the reading for students to respond to:
Main point of the reading, what info you find surprising and why, and what is confusing and why?

Due at the beginning of class, not graded but give students credit for doing it. Allows you to adjust class time and address sticky points or focus on active learning activities.

Allows students to see how knowledge is constructed, assess their own knowledge.  Allows the faculty to see what’s going on in the students’ heads; increases student-faculty contact.

Journaling can also be used in the affective domain to establish community; also to help them set goals and create a map to achieve those goals.

Using RSS Feeds to Bring Current Events To the Classroom
Allows students to see the relevance of what they are learning to the external world and current events.

Problem-based Learning
Using Moodle facilitated problem-based learning. Creates a cyclical process where students work with each other on projects and problems to consider what they do and don’t know and construct knowledge on it.

Becoming Intentional Learners
The course is just a channel to help students learn how to become lifelong learners. Students, inherently, do not have a clear idea of what it is to be an “intentional learner”, they need a framework to get them there.

Create a “knowledge survey” to assess student’s prior learning/understanding of the material. Student’s don’t actually respond to the quiz question, they let you know if they know the answer, maybe some of it, or not at all. Can be used to assess their confidence in their prior knowledge of the material to be covered. Used to evaluate what students already know before coming into the course.

New opportunities for significant learning

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Haiku – A Web 2.0 Learning Experience

Haiku is a Web 2.0-centric learning management system from education software developer Haiku Inc. Compared to established systems like Blackboard and WebCT, or even open source options like Sakai and Moodle, Haiku is still in its infancy. In fact, going by the tour, it appears to be mostly an easy way to set up a course web site.

I took the tour to check it out and Haiku does have a few things going for it. The drag-and-drop interface makes it a snap to set up the course website with content and activities.  Skins allow you to customize the look and feel and the latest version includes enhanced discussion forums, drop box functionality, and an Inbox for messaging.

In terms of content, there’s the usual suspects – text, links, and files – but you can also add images from Flickr, audio from Odeo and video from YouTube and Google Video. All in all, Haiku looks like it might be an option for anybody who wants to quickly and easily build a course web site with a few interactive options.

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Of Students and Laptops

Results of technology surveys at the University of Virginia and Stanford sparked off some lively discussion among some of the Trinity faculty, a librarian and the instructional tech (yours truly) today. One faculty expressed fear of a future where every student has a laptop, I suspect because of the inability to blank their screens if desired, as is possible with desktops and some software today, even as he acknowledged that laptops in the classroom are changing the way faculty interact with their students.

On the flip side, another faculty member recognized that multi-tasking at a computer is inevitable today. In fact, it’s not unusual for non-Net Gens to be playing Free Cell, or shopping, or checking their email while at meetings and presentations. So why expect any less from the students when the difference is just that they are more likely to be on Facebook, MySpace,YouTube, or listening to their iPods. Her contention is that the future belongs to institutions, faculty, and developers who adapt to this changing environment. As for the laptops, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em,” is her contention.

What was interesting about this is that the instructional tech (yours truly) and the librarian had near identical thoughts. Here’s what he said:

We really MUST insert ourselves here.  I think it’s not just education that can become diffused or distracted by technology, but most aspects of life. We have to be the ones who find means to blend technology and education in such a way that education is still the focus.  Computer and online technology is ubiquitous for students today, and if we remove technology in order to focus on education, we stop meeting students where they are.  Too, we have to be the ones to critique technologies (and their uses) and we must encourage students to critique them as well, and they’ll need to be present to do that.

My sentiments exactly. We definitely are dealing with a new generation of learners here, but I suspect some time-tested strategies hold just as true for them, as they did for us. For instance, when my daughter needs to buckle down and get some writing done, she turns off her IM, shuts the door to her room, the music is still on, but she’s focused on what she needs to do. I suspect a lot of them work in a similar mode, we just don’t see it as often as their multi-tasking mode.

So, can we force them to listen by blanking out their computers? Maybe. Can we force them to pay attention by blanking off their computers? Perhaps. Yes, you’ve got to know when to hold them, and to that, I would say, you’ve also got to know “how” to hold them. Engagement doesn’t need PowerPoint presentations, fancy technology, or cool toys.

On the flip side however, we are also, to some degree, teaching them to think critically about what technology or tool is appropriate to the learning context at hand, or even if one is needed at all. Consequently, I would say the issue is also how does one teach them to recognize when it is essential that they turn away from their laptop or desktop and their email, Free Cell, Facebook, etc. to focus on what’s going on, to learn, to reflect. Perhaps what we the non-Net Gens, could, should, teach them, is how to disconnect and focus when the situation calls for it.

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OCulture – Educational Podcasts

Stumbled upon OCulture today. “Enlightened ideas and media. served up fresh” runs their tag line. Don’t know about the enlightened ideas as I haven’t really explored it in depth yet, but the site speaks to an academic audience from my quick peek at it, and the focus is primarily educational content including free courses from UC Berkeley and content from Yale.

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Educause SWRC Pre-conference:

What do Faculty Do With Technology Anyway? That’s the theme of the pre-conference, led by Patricia McGee (UTSA) and Veronica Diaz (Maricopa Community Collge System).

Some interesting anecdotal evidence just came to light: Students consider IM an important technology for learning, but prefer email to IM as a communication tool. CMSs ranked 17th on their list of top technologies and students couldn’t even articulate what faculty were really doing with it in terms of learning outcomes.

Another idea: Use Bloom’s Taxonomy Framework to create a faculty support model. One suggestion is to shadow the instrutors to see what really happens in the classroom. That does call for larger reserves of instructional techs and support staff than the single-person model more prevalent in smaller institutions.

A support idea: Keep one-page faculty profiles that includes information on their instructional materials that they use in their classroom and use that to provide tailored support. Question is: how do request a faculty member to provide their syllabus or their teaching scores, when their question is: How do I add my syllabus to “insert CMS of choice here”?

Maicopa Community College Systems prodacasting training: Podcasting Theory & Practice http://drcoop.pbwiki.com/PodcastingTheoryPractice

Teaching Style Taxonomy
Based on Grasha, a psychologist.

Five different types of styles, most of us ahve more than one combined style.

Expert: Know all, and here to transmit info to the learner, who becomes more competent under their tutelage. May not reveal the underlying processes/procedures that actually produce the knowledge. Learning objects, DBs, FAQs, can be ways for the learner to seek out more tahn is being probided.

Formal Authority: knowledge expert but provides feedback in a structured and standardized environment. Very specific and clear about their expectations.

Personal Modal: Serves as a role model. Provides personal examples and models correct behaviour. Downside is that often, students beleive they can’t live up the expectations being set.

Facilitator: Into teacher-learner interaction in a probing and interactive learning envrionemnt. Constructivist. Gets overwhelmed by the integration of technology if they start using many deifferent types.

Delegator: Desires that learner act autonomously with little input. Want the learner to be independent, but often misread student’s ability or desire to be independent.

Another thought that emerged: Higher ed is pretty resistant to change, and has survived as an instution, but should we adopt change theory to lead faculty/administration from resisting to wanting change, be it in the form of technology adoption, the way they design their syllabus, et al. A resource for change theory is John Carter’s eight steps.

DyKnow: Collaborative environment that is web based for tablet PCs and laptops.

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Teacher’s Buzz, November 13, 2006

Sung to the tune of “Oh What A Night”:

Oh what a night,

Late 2006 and Teacher’s Buzz was nigh

The crowd was mighty and the buzz was high

Oh what a meeting, what a night!

Well, ok, song parodies apart, Teacher’s Buzz last night saw the biggest gathering that I can recall. The primary focus was Second Life at the recently concluded NMC Regional Conference, but, as always, the conversation went in many directions, including a pretty cool demo of video and slide show screens.

The takeaway for me was the convergence of two ideas, that trigerred some reflection on the nature of the learning process in immersive environments like Second Life. One was the theme of mentorship, a recurring topic at Teacher’s Buzz, and one that showed up last night as well. The other was something Heidi Trotta mentioned at the presentation given by her and Danielle Sirliss, and that was the fact that despite our many efforts to provide documentation and other materials for orientation and scaffolding, students tend to ignore them. Question is why?

To seek a possible answer(s), I looked back at my own learning experiences within and with Second Life, and realized, they were all social experiences. I tended to ask somebody I knew, sometimes, even people I didn’t know, or check with Live Help, anything that facilitated interacting with another person rather than reading the Help section . The other aspect was that it was invariably a just-in-time scenario; I sought help when I needed it, no more, no less.

And so, how can we leverage this context of learning through social networking as it were for our own teaching and learning processes in MUVEs? I don’t know the answer to that one yet. Perhaps more time inworld will reveal the answer! Or perhaps, that just my excuse to finish this post

A New Trend?

The start of a new school year is imminent and chaos, stress, and fatigue is rampant in my world at the moment. Some of it is the same-old-same-old, and I should confess that as a former journalist, I do enjoy the adrenalin rush, not unlike what happens in the throes of sending an issue to press But one aspect was certainly new: I had two new faculty members, both in the languages department, contact me with requests for training on digitizing movie clips for classroom viewing and assignment purposes. Now, we’ve definitely seen an upsurge in both, the number of faculty digitizing video for classroom viewing and the number assigning video projects to their students, but requests for training even before the semester began, not ever before.

Much has been made in recent years on the need for information literacy classes on campus; we’ve certainly sen the numbers grow on our campus. To my mind however, this new development might be a signal that there might be need for media literacy classes as well. Whether it’s a web page or a video clip, for the faculty, it’s a tightrope act between the aesthetics, the production values, and the content. Meida literacy sessins might provide a reasonable solution in that they can call upon an expert to assess the aesthetics and production values, while they focus on the content.

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Boycott Blackboard

Outrage ran rampant on the Second Life Educator’s list in when members heard of the patent Blackbaord had been awarded. In response, they have set up a protest site where you can sign a petition and register your opinons on the matter.

Technorati Tags: blackboard patent boycott

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A Dry Spell

I’m not sure if something’s in the air this semester but my TEACHnology series has pretty much been a no-show scenario; three people attended the repeat session on social bookmarking. As it turns out, it’s not just me, the Library has seen attendance declining at its workshops as well. I’m pretty confident it’s not me , but it does merit the question “How do we inform, motivate, and facilitate (discussed on a previous post) if we can’t even get to the ‘inform’ phase?” Just-in-time support works really well, but it is usually focused on a specific task with a specific application. So how best can we accomodate the many demands on their time while still providing them a glimpse of what’s out there and what’s emerging on the horizon? What can we do differntly, or better? Points to ponder in the days to come!

Educause Southwest Regional Conference – Days 1 & 2

This is more reportage than blogging per se, but it’s been “told” that I’m blogging the conference, and so, here I am . I do hope to have a more reflective post at a later date when I’ve had the chance to step back and chew the cud on the experience, so keep your eyes peeled.

Well, the place is hopping. Cyprien Lomas and I led a pre-conference semiar on emergent technologies, and it was an eclectic group of participants. We had a couple of faculty, some It folks, and some library, library tech people in there with some great insights to share, and incisive questions to ask. It was my first pre-conference seminar – Cyp’s the pro – and it was exhilirating and intense and we’re still basking in the afterglow of some of the positive feedback ww’ve received.

This is certainly the year that’s seeing a greater influx of media in presentations, I’ve seen at least two today that featured video. PowerPoint of course, is still the popular presentation app, but there’s definitely been less “reading the slide” and more imagery on the slides.
The soul of any conference though is embodied in the attendees, and in that regard, this has been the best SWRC for me personally to date. I’ve had the chance to reconnect with old friends and colleagues, and make new buddies, and I mean that in every sense of the word since my IM buddy list has expanded considerably. I’m hoping this sense of community and relationships hold strong as we return to our regular, and usually busy, lives.