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There were a range of new technologies that we used during the process of this project. From LAMS and Edmodo to Freemind and video. However, LAMs and Edmodo were the 2 real ‘changers’ for us. Edmodo has introduced the openess of blogging into the ‘classroom’ resulting in 2 new groups being created for both my Year 11 classes that we have used to share information and questions while preparing for exams and to continue through until their HSC.
This is a practice that I intend to keep using in many ways but specifically I will be introducing blog-discussion groups for seniors. In the past ,we have used the traditional ‘read this and we’ll discuss this tomorrow’ technique to encourage student thought-processes but with this well-received blogging platform I am introducing a more responsive technique of read through and write up some of your thoughts and respond to others. My students have responded extremely positively to this platform – far more positively than others suggested, and the introduction of this written component with the freedom of a ‘blog’ I am will develop their understanding further.
The introduction of LAMs has, to me, resulted in a huge improvement in my students understanding of outcomes. I intend to introduce a LAMs session in each class I teach eventually to get this message across, in addition to developing LAMs programs myself to use in all classes. In fact I think an earlier inclusion of this, eg Yrs 9 or 10 would be benficial in teaching students how to process their thoughts and create more effective responses to outcomes.
It was interesting to see the development of student attitudes to these programs – many at first were quite resistant to their introduction, by the end of the project all but 2 or 3 say they found the experience extremely beneficial to their understanding of the topic AND, more importantly, responding fully to outcomes.
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Savery and Duffy in their 2001 paper
- Understanding is in our interactions with the environment.
- Cognitive conflict or puzzlement is the stimulus for learning and determines the organisation and nature of what is learned.
- Knowledge evolves through social negotiation and through the evaluation of the viability of individual understandings
How to design for understanding:
- Anchor all learning activities to a larger task or problem
- Support the learner in developing ownership for the overall problem or task
- Design an authentic task
- Design the task and the learning environment to reflect the complexity of the environment they should be able to function in at the end of learning
- Give the learner ownership of the process used to develop a solution
- Design the learning environment to support and challenge the learner’s thinking
- Encourage testing ideas against alternative views and alternative contexts
- Provide opportunity for and support reflection on both the content learned and the learning process
Read the full article: http://www.dirkdavis.net/cbu/edu524/resources/Problem%20based%20learning%20An%20instructional%20model%20and%20its%20constructivist%20framework.pdf
The role for teachers is to display genuine interest and curiosity in what the students are doing.
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When I work with students on the ‘Students as Learning Designers’ project we work together on a continuum of participation. Sometime the students creating things that just ask each other questions at other times they might ask each other to add a new piece of information to a wiki as a part of a collaborative activity. I believe this exponentially increases the students skills in areas that are of interest or benefit to them. For example a student my learn how to ask another student how to do something by being asked by another student to join in creating a wiki.
The article below from teachstreet summarises some of the elements of being a good online teacher including:
- Being knowledge
- Writing processes
- Asking and giving feedback
- Setting deadlines
- Being an ‘architect’
- Facilitation
- Sense of humour
- Technical know how
Aren’t these the types of skills that prepare students for knowledge work and life in general? Aren’t these the skills we want for students.
Hargreaves in Cultures of Teaching and Educational Change talks about the complexity of encouraging collaboration amongst teachers. He says that teachers may
‘perform brilliantly in some areas of collaborative work and poorly in others. Great team problem-solvers may be poor emotional supporters. Teachers who may be excellent in nuturing junior colleagues, may flinch when having to face conflicts with equals or superiors. It is impossible to capture these complexities and distinctions in a single scale of collaborativeness.’
I believe the quote applies equally to students, the complexity of their abilities and weaknesses in working collaboratively are evident in this project. Each student gets different things out of it but by providing very different ways of working collaboratively, both within a single project and across projects it is possible for students to identify areas they would like to improve. As student find role models within their peer group that demonstrate different skills they are need to improve on, they then try these ideas out. Sometimes with success, sometimes to be left to the next collaborative activity.
I think it is important for students to have a variety of opportunities to collaborate within a classroom both online and offline. Consider giving your student the opportunity to design collaboration tomorrow. Let them design online learning spaces, courses to share with their peers and to manage and facilitate forums and chats. You will be surprised what they can achieve with each other.
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- Question Asking – An Essential 21st Century Skill (angelamaiers.com)
- Image by nikko russano* via Flickr
The Wilderness Downtown an interactive video by the Arcade Fire and Google is why we are teaching kids to develop interactive things. Because they WILL be designers of interaction in the future. This beautiful music video incorporates:
- Me as a character in the video – using a very beautiful google maps
- Me doing things in character in the video – drawing a postcard to my younger self based on the feelings invoked by them film
- The computer and me drawing together – this is a perfect example of distributed cognition
- Innovative use of my screen space – multiple windows opening, creating a certain feel and tension
- Collaboration and community - the postcards we sent will be used in live shows
Check it out and get a glimpse into the near future.
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“… there are those who use blogs, wireless handheld devices, and podcasting not because these technologies address a specific instructional need or solve a challenging pedagogical problem, but simply because these tools exist and are currently in vogue.” (Sanders) However it is possible that just by using the technology we are forming a chain from very minimal impact to a fundamental shift in what we are able to achieve. For example if you look at the google googles video of their visual search function it might seem a little pedestrian.
However the interlocking pieces of the puzzle such as the ability to access a database using something other than text, the ability to view database information in a natural context may provide affordances. As Kerawalla talks about in her experience of using technology in the science classroom. ‘It also affords the demonstration of spatial relationships and the interactions of elements within a 3D space (e.g. Shelton and Hedley2003) whilst providing the potential for seamless interaction between the real and virtual worlds (e.g. Billinghurst 2003; Shelton 2003). Examples of this type of augmented reality can be seen here in the form of an augmented smartboard and below with the drumkit.
This is interesting in terms of Sanders article where he states that a possible distopian view of technology as taking us away from the real contact. ‘Tomorrow’s students might be able to isolate themselves from human contact and simultaneously be more connected than at any previous point in history.’
Potentially it is only the affordances we can see right now that lead us to these view of technology. It may be that as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated it enables a world that is both data rich and face to face with affordances that are hard to conceptualise right now. Providing an opportunity for a future that is rich in human contact and provides all the technological affordances of the most creative sci-fi visions.
Kerawalla L, Luckin R, Seljeflot S and Woolard 06, “Making it real”: exploring the potential of augmented reality for teaching primary school science, Journal of Virtual Reality V10 N3-4, p163-174
Fernandez, De Lera, Valverde and Almirall four user experience writers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain provided me with a small but highly relevant insight into the way we need to be thinking about designing for interaction. They talk about the fact that other sectors that use technology such as gaming and entertainment design for emotion but that sometimes the education sector or e-learning neglects this area. They also indicate some best practice for affective design:
- Apply the notion to all area of design
- Intro interfaces that are based on natural movement and expression
- Focus on senses
- Incorporate play
- Incorporate the internet into objects
- Clearly articulate values such as ‘collaboration
- Use an interdisciplinary approach
- Innovate – artificial intelligence might change they way we respond to computers
- Collect as use affective data by creating surveys and providing visual data - continuously improve the ways that you gather data
Fernandez, C., de Lera, E., Valverde, L., Almirall, M. & Villarejo, L. (2010). Changing the way we think: fromHCI to HCR (Human Computer Relations). In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2010 (pp. 542-545). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/34690.
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Students enter school multi-literate, they probably always have. A colleague of mine was discussing her son and the fact that at 7 years old her son was able to search for youtube videos to help him solve problems in games. Very young children are creating multimodal interactive texts such as those on Ben10 and are able to share these with their friends via email. Highschool students may be creating sophisticated places for sharing such as ‘pages’ that are designed to rally their friends around an idea whether it is ‘sleeping in’ or ‘fighting for equality’. They are conceptual thinkers and designers that use technical fluency to manipulate their social worlds.
Wyatt-Smith and Kimber distinguish the elements of this type of multimodal literacy as being either:
- Using existing knowledge texts or materials
- Create and share new knowledge texts or materials
However if we look at the example of kids creating Ben10 games or facebook pages there is a higher level socially constructed element that requires a different skill set, that links these two elements. It is about building environments and activities for participation and interaction. It requires new literacies that ‘almost all involved social skills developed through collaboration and networking.’ (Jenkins, 06) This is the part that we are still developing understandings around. Student participation and socially negotiated design for, sharing, remixing and responding to. This element lifts multi-modality text into a new realm of communication that is about the interchange, interaction and engagement that students create.
Designing highly complex systems as Jonassen talks about ‘when students build knowledge bases with databases, expert systems, or semantic networking tools, they must analyse the subject domains, develop mental models to represent them, and represent what they understand in terms of those models. It’s hard work.’
The students of today will be using highly sophisticated interaction design skills in their work. We can see the start of this type of revolution in designs like those at this interaction design school, api mashups, interactive TV like the ABC’s Bluebird and even these beautiful data visualisations.
The hard work won’t be in the complexity of learning HTML or other coding languages. The hard work will be using higher order thinking skills as pattern recognition, seeing connections and relationships and visualisation. They will also need to understand the interplay between computers and people. How to build online relationships and how to engage others in online activity.
I believe this participatory element is essential to an effective education system for three reasons:
- Working in ways that provide the a maximum number of role models who are in the ‘zone of proximal development’ means that students have a better chance of increasing their own skills by finding appropriate models for their own level of development.
- Providing students tools to augment their own cognition through the use of tools enables them to solve more complex problems.
- Providing students with an opportunity to collaborate across locations and times to solve problems allows for a better chance of solving problems.
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- Camden Haven_rich_taskstudent_rubric
- Image by Jordanhill School D&T Dept via Flickr
The students at Camden Haven have just created a rubric to support their design process. This rubric is a remarkable thing for a group of Year 7′s to have produced. It includes concepts such as:
- Giving effective feedback to groups on sequences
- Creating a well organized mindmap of their information
- Providing information that was in their own words and included a bibliography
- Creating a sequence that addressed their key question fully
- Was at a student level while still giving a challenge
- Connects all the elements of the sequence
- Is easy to read, uncomplicated and provides interesting information
- Is colourful and has fun links to go on
I am so proud of them for coming up with this list, I think it shows that they are beginning to understand some relatively complex concepts of learning and teaching. I think that the next difficulty the students will come up with is that it is hard to identify what is a fun link, what is effective feedback and what does a great example of all the elements being connected look like. That is where teachers might use something like annotated work samples to help them work out what is excellent and what still needs more work.
This assessment website by Education Services Australia provides many examples of annotated worksamples. Do you think it would be possible for our students to provide annotated work samples? Would the students enjoy building a website that provides lots of examples of the types of interactions that students think show good thinking?
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- http://www.assessmentforlearning.edu.au/assessment_tasks/assessment_tasks_landing.html
- Great resources on new forms of assessment – What You Wanted To KNOW About Student Blogging (theedublogger.com)
