True poetry

It has been a while since I posted to this blog but the course director of the Education Media Design and Technology masters program at Full Sail Dr. Ludgate shared this on the program blog and I thought it very relevant and impressive. We will be doing some "puzzle poems" in my classes sometime in the next couple of weeks and I think this may qualify. In any case, it is certainly worth a look and something that I hope is shared by many.

With online learning, pedagogy is still the key

No guarantees

With the advancement in authoring systems, the wide array of web content creation tools, and the variety of available Web 2.0 applications online lesson creation is within every teacher’s grasp. But just as the fact that a teacher is given the material and steps into the classroom does not guarantee learning will take place, the ability to create a lesson and post it online does not guarantee success. Several factors play a key role in e-learning and educators must understand how those factors relate to the lesson that is intended. In a meta-analysis that was conducted using over 650 empirical studies which compared distance learning that involved media with traditional learning, the findings concluded that achievement was more strongly correlated to pedagogy than it was to the media itself (Handley et al, 2008).

It’s the content AND presentation

The ability to post class notes, a presentation, or even an audio or video lecture online has existed for some time. But “there is a delicate balance between promoting technology tools and encouraging teaching and learning with technology” (Little & Page, 2009). Research has determined that several principles enhance online learning:

• Learning and retention improve when the material is presented with words and pictures and not words alone (Clark and Mayer, 2008, p. 74).
• Images are relevant to the instructional purpose, not decorative (Clark & Mayer, 2008, p. 74).
• Relevant images and text should be presented near each other (Clark & Mayer, 2008, p. 95).
• Use audio narration or text to explain on-screen graphics, but not both (Clark & Mayer, 2008, p. 130).

Understanding of these principles will help educators develop effective lessons, ones that take advantage of the multimodal approach through e-learning and may even be better for student learning . Handley et al (2008) state: “Students engaged in learning that incorporates multimodal designs, on average, outperform students who learn using traditional approaches with single modes” (p. 13).

Go where reluctant teachers are - at first

With a vast array of tools and applications available for educator use, it can be overwhelming and intimidating to go forward and online. Little and Page (2009) state: “Keeping faculty one step ahead of emerging technologies—and providing them with the support to manage what often feels like a rising tide of new tools and learning research—can indeed be difficult. Managing the widening gulf between early adopters and less technologically savvy faculty can be downright frustrating” (p. 16). The trick may be to approach resistant teachers with a language they can understand and relate to. Lee Lefever (2009) suggests: By taking technology out of the picture in the beginning and speaking in recognizable terms, you can prevent your audience from throwing up their hands and saying ‘I don't get technology!’ Instead, you're offering an invitation - an introduction to the subject that speaks in their language and lives in their world” (“Explainer Tip: Stop Talking About Technology”). Once they have a grasp of what it is and how it relates to what they already know, they may have the motivation to make it their own.

References

Handley, C., Wilson, A., Peterson, N., Brown, G., & Ptaszynski, J. (2008). Out of the classroom & into the boardroom. Retrieved August 1, 2009, from www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/educause/docs/EducauseWhitepaper.pdf

Lefever, L. (2009, July 28). Explainer Tip: Stop Talking About Technology - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation. Retrieved August 1, 2009, from http://www.commoncraft.com/explainer-tip-stop-talking-about-technology

Little, J., & Page, C. (2009). Charting the Course and Tapping the Community: The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges 2009 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE. Retrieved July 29, 2009, from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/ChartingtheCourseandTappingthe/171775

miniCMS - my course websites

As I begin to study Course Management Systems (CMS) for a class in my Masters program at Full Sail University, I can't help but see a connection between the large scale CMS programs being discussed and what my students and I can create (and in some cases have created) for my course using a blog and a wiki. In a way, the course sites have become a personal version of a CMS.

The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) identified five learner-centered principles (http://net.educause.edu/nlii/mappingthelearningspace/2954) that lead to "deeper learning" in the learning experience: social (feedback and interaction between learners and instructors), active (peer and expert feedback), contextual (learner-centric design), engaging (individualized learning), and student-owned (some degree of self-control).

Through a comment section and added chat window, the site can become social and active for my students. It is contextual in the fact that students can explore the links and information in any order but it has also allowed me to build a visually interesting and somewhat interactive site. This also makes it more engaging for many of my students, although I do not think they are given multiple paths to all of the information. Finally, with a connection to the wiki the site is student-owned in many respects.

The study of CMS has lead me to further examine what I do with my own web presence for my students and courses. This will also be valuable to me as I develop my media project in the coming weeks. Keeping the sound CMS principles in mind will help guide me to a stronger and more powerful learning environment. Hopefully, one that leads to deeper understanding of the content.

What I Learned - Part 2

There were several specific things I learned in relation to my media project this month. My intention was to find out as much as I could about displaying videos and video segments on a web page and add some sort of interactivity. Some of the things I learned:

1. embed video (from another site) in a blog or other website
2. embed a portion of a video (from another site) using begin and end points
3. using a program called embedr, I can set up a display list of videos segments
4. a website on Wetpaint is easy to set up, looks nice, and incorporates video nicely
5. Wetpaint only incorporates video from YouTube, Google video, and Hulu, which rules out my hopes to use embedr!
6. Animoto may be a good presentation tool for parts of my project, keeping things interesting and varied.
7. taking a clip from a DVD and incorporating it directly into a web page

While these are some of the specifics, I did get a much better overall sense of what I want this media project to be. Through my experiments and exploration, I have ideas that will be usable in the project and any other media related projects the future holds.

What I Learned - Part 1

I thought that this final project for the Media Asset Creation course as part of my Education Media Design and Technology masters program at Full Sail University was going to be easier than the "Show me what you know" project from week #1 because it only covered this month while that project covered eight months. I was slightly mistaken! In looking back, there has been plenty that I have learned, discovered, and explored. Between looking for relevant tools, reading for my thesis, writing blogs posts, and going on MANY tangents, I feel that I have learned much and hopefully become better prepared for my students come this fall.

Caution - Wetpaint (Wk 4 #5 EDM613)

One of the programs suggested to me for development of my media project was Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com). It is a wiki that has more functionality and design options than pbworks, which has been the wiki of choice for my classes. The reason Wetpaint was mentioned is my need to incorporate video and it did not disappoint. It is easy to update text and add video, as long as the video links are to YouTube, Hulu, or Google video. I typically use Safari but Wetpaint works better with Firefox, allowing more functionality.

The "practice" project I am developing using Wetpaint is actually a real site for the faculty at my school. I have started a summer technology institute for faculty and hope to create a page that corresponds to each of the sessions. My hope is create an organized, easy to use, and non-overwhelming site for faculty to reference. I have found that many of those teachers not using these technologies need a gentle nudge as to WHY, WHAT, and then HOW. I want the site to answer all of these questions.

The organization of the site is important to its usefulness. Many of the "veteran" teachers (myself included in age!) still crave the linear learning method and I want this to be possible. At times I have been feeling overwhelmed with the number of tools and sites that are available and I know this may keep some people from delving in. A simple, modular approach giving a brief description and a few links and videos is what I am going for. As opposed to a final destination, I would like it to be the jumping off point (should have called the site the Admiral Benbow) for their foray into Web 2.0.

Although it is it in its early stages, I would appreciate any input. SocraTech Dialogue website.

Outside Outside Reading (Wk 4 #4 EDM613)

I began reading Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? last week (while I should have been writing my thesis) but I thought that I could justify the outside reading for a few reasons. I came across the book through one of my feeds as part of an online discussion forum with teachers from all over the world. I had never participated in a discussion of this sort and thought it would be great to learn and share with teachers in this way. The second justification is that the book probably contains something I could use in my thesis so it would not be a total detour. And finally, I figured I was learning some new ideas about teaching and the classroom and it sounded like it would work well with Zander's The Art of Possibility. All was not a total loss.

After having read just the first two chapters, I have come across several ideas and practices that will be very useful as I think about my teaching for next year. An idea that Willingham discusses concerning engagement (Zander's "enrollment"?), "our curiosity is provoked when we perceive a problem that we believe we can solve. What is the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer" (p 16)? He states that a teacher's ability to discover that question for each topic will help determine student engagement. The first part of the quote speaks to the problem itself. We must frame the problem so that it is neither too easy or too difficult or the engagement will be minimal. We have all experienced those two ends of the problem spectrum and both are frustrating in their own way.

I have also found several ideas on learning similar to those mentioned by Jensen in Brain-Based Learning and even some arguments against the approach to Gardner's intelligences. Both will be useful for my thesis (which I hope to begin writing real soon!). As for the online discussion with educators from all over the world, I was to write some entries in a community blog and share ideas with my group. Not surprisingly, I did not find the time to complete that activity this past week. But that is okay because I have still been learning and collaborating and commiserating with some of the best educators I have ever known. The same ones I have been working with since October.

Sources
Jensen, E. P. (2008). Brain-Based Learning: The New Paradigm of Teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.