Beyond the programmed learning examples provided in Unit 2, are there other ways that a behaviourist approach is or can be utilized in an online learning context?
First, it is important to define what we consider "behaviours" in an online learning context. According to Nash (2007), some online behaviours would include:
"a) going to the site; b) contacting instructor and/or student; c) doing online research to make connections; d) applying knowledge to one’s life, then reporting on it (a paper or discussion board entry)."
Basically we measure the effects of the learning theory on the activities we are able to record about the learning participant.
A behaviourist approach would mean that students would receive feedback about their activities, it might be in the form of information about the quality of their responses, or regularly graded assignments. One immediate way, which would be a form of programmed learning, to receive feedback in an online context is to participate in pre-tests and post-tests (Saettler, 1990).
One way that we can use a behaviourist approach that we see used in Vista is the introduction of the (# new) links. Click on the link and the messages open up, hence we feel immediate satisfaction that we have accomplished a task, since we know that were we to reopen Vista, our message inbox would be empty. We can access our own statistical information in Vista, and find out how our forum participation is, leading us to improve our performance because of the feedback.
Another way a behaviourist approach is used in Vista is with the "time out" that occurs when we are posting to Vista and take too long to respond. Having Vista log one out after one has submitted a long response (and forgetting to save our response elsewhere) encourages both shorter responses, and more careful self-record keeping.
References:
Nash, S.S.(2007)., Behaviorism vs. Constructivism, as Applied to Online Learning, Retrieved from http://www.xplanazine.com/2007/09/behaviorism-vs-constructivism-as-applied-to-online-learning on September 30th
Mergel, B., (1998). Instructional Design & Learning Theory, Retrieved from http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm on September 30th
Saettler, P., (1990), The History of American Educational Technology
Archives (page 93 of 97)
I personally think people learn through an unconscious process very much like the scientific method. They hypothesize about how the world should work, collect data, compare the data they have collected to see if it fits in their theory, and then revise their theory if they feel enough evidence has been found. In this way, people construct an understanding of the world around them using what they know as a basis.
Each piece of knowledge people gain has to be fit into their personal hypothesis. At first, people will "bend" their hypothesis to make facts fit which seem inconsistent, but eventually if enough contradictory data is collected, people are forced to revise their ideas. This is part of the reason why students have so much difficulty learning topics for which they do not have any background; they are constantly required to create and revisit their hypothesis, and to build theories about the information they are receiving "from scratch".
It is crucial during this process that the learner feels comfortable to make mistakes. Instead of feeling pressure to have exactly the right answer each time, learners must be willing to work through the entire process of learning. Although it is possible that an individual learner will have a theory which fits all the facts as they are collected, it is much more likely that conflicts exist between their theory and the data.
In the classroom, this is when we normally say that a student has "made a mistake", which is unfortunate language. Rather than criticizing students who have a cognitive discord occurring, we should encourage more reflection of the learning process, and provide opportunities to establish a new theory which fits the given facts and can be worked into the learner’s personal theory of how the world works.
In my teaching, I infuse technology through-out my lessons. Although I have a deep interest in technology going back as far as I can remember, I hope I am using technology purposefully and appropriately. It is important to me that technology not just be a fancy add-on, but that it should be a tool with which to help students understand the world.
The purpose of using educational technology is to enhance pedagogy and enable students to learn. We have many tools we use as educators, and different types of technology are included in this toolset. The major benefit of using technology is that it can greatly expand the variety of types of lessons students can participate in.
In my experience students learn best by doing, rather than by watching. As much as possible, I try to have students work as participants in a collaborative guided investigation, rather than relying on direct instruction. William Glasser once famously said "We learn, …50% of what we see and hear, …80% of what we discuss and 95% of what we teach," modifying Edgar Dale "Cone of Learning." (Dale, 1969) Hence, in my classroom I try and have the students do, discuss, or teach the material they are learning. This style of instruction is aided by the powerful technological tools of today.
My strongest values in education are compassion for students, open-mindedness about what they are capable, and recognizing their differences. Educational technology allows me to be more compassionate, in that I can differentiate a lesson better, understand my students through their work, and provide more opportunities for student voice. One of the ways I provide this voice is using multimedia presentations and integrated technologies as summative of the students’ understanding. These types of activities assist students in remembering what we have learned.
I have recently begun to move away from lecturing to students and have this experimented much more with student led research. For example in my science 8 class each pair of students is researching one of the body’s systems, and presenting their work in the form of a website. Other students will be responsible for reading this material, then summarizing it in a short audio podcast. This way I will be attempting to improve the retention of the material, and moving ownership of the learning process to the students.
My personal theory is based a lot on Ausubel’s assimilation learning theory (Novak, 2007)which suggests that knowledge is retained and more useful when it comes from meaningful learning experiences rather than rote learning. I try very hard not to rely on rote learning in my teaching for I know how quickly students forget the material once they no longer need it. I also know that if you excite students about a subject, they will put tremendous effort into learning it, which greatly improves their retention. One of the areas I have made the most change is recognizing that teaching specific content is less important than teaching the skills necessary to learn and retrieve that content.
References:
Novak, J.D. (2007). Ausubel’s assimilation learning theory. In Custom course materials ETEC 512. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia, Bookstore. (Reprinted from Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations, pp. 49-78, 1998, Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum).
Dale, E. (1969) Audiovisual Methods in Teaching – Third Edition, Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, record retrieved from Eric database on October 18th, 2009
Cyber culture is the set of social expectations, etiquette, history and language used by the collection of people active on the World Wide Web. Just as the non-cyber world is separated into cliques and countries, the cyber world is separated into taxonomies and web spheres. The countries of the world are partially represented in cyberspace by the country domains, but more than ever people are less connected by language and locale and more by common interest. The importance of this cyber-culture to educational technology is that it is the ground upon which we should build our e-learning frameworks as it is rapidly becoming common ground for every connected person in the world.
Electronic mannerisms and customs have developed over the years the WWW has been around and now using the WWW carries with its own language, and its own cultural references. If you have ever chatted online about having your site ‘Dugg’ or sent a tweet to a friend, you have participated in the subculture of the web.
Every culture has its own language, and cyber-culture is not the exception to this rule. Not only does a rich vocabulary exist, parts of the cyber-language used on the web have their own syntax and grammatical structure. In fact the number of words is so great, an online dictionary, Netlingo.com, has sprung up to keep track of them.
Cyber-culture has its own areas of social interaction, and its structure is very much like that of the old market towns of Medieval Europe. The markets are represented by Ebay.com and Amazon.com and other analogous sites. The money lenders do business in the online banking world; social connections between people are represented by popular websites such as Facebook.com and Twitter.com.
Cyber society is divided into social status groups, where one’s ability to communicate online elevates your status, however these social status groups by and large follow the same groups which exist outside of cyber-space. An additional division in this online society is by topic, with a lot of the discussion forums mimicking (or in some cases replacing) real life discussions about what are often very important issues.
Over the years cyber culture has been changing rapidly. This is partially because the browsers and website are capable of so much more rich media than in the past, and partially because the internet is becoming ubiquitous in mainstream offline society. Everyone in the real world has to have a connection to the cyber-world we have constructed. Businesses can mark their success by the strength of their online brand. Some trends in use of the internet show that internet users have been decreasing in age, and that the ways these younger use the internet are much different than their parents.
It is not entirely clear where cyber-culture is headed, although it is clear it is here to stay. Will it under-go another upheaval when some new form of rich media becomes available online? Only time will tell; but the evolution will be determined by us.
I participated for the first time a couple of days ago in this #edchat phenomena happening on Twitter. Basically the idea is, everyone heads to the search page on Twitter and starts having a conversation through Twitter using the hashtag #edchat. The resulting conversation is recorded and has many people who can listen in on the conversation, and everyone is free to jump in if they want.
The Wordle (created on http://www.wordle.net) below is the result of our conversation topic – motivating students.
The reason why we used Twitter for our conversation is less obvious I suppose. We could have had a similar conversation using forum software or one giant chat, but both of these have drawbacks. First, a forum is an asynchronous form of communication with significant delay between comments. Twitter is a much faster mode of communication, and the ability to refresh to see more results in the search engine makes using Twitter closer to a real conversation speed. Twitter beats a chat application largely because you can follow the participants of the Twitter chat after the conversation, and a permanent(ish) record of the conversation continues to exist on Twitter for other people to find (and possible join!).
This conversation was fun and engaging and involved over 110 participants and over 800 comments made. That’s pretty impressive, and definitely shows me that Twitter is a very useful tool for personal professional development and collaboration. When was the last time you had such an organized conversation with so many people?
I created this project using a variety of different tools. I started by brainstorming with my wife some ideas about what I could do, and she helped me out by creating a sample story board. I liked a lot of her ideas and incorporated them into my final production.
The cartoons in the video were created using Bitstrips.com, a very cool site where you can create custom comics. Very easy to use and lots of flexibility, although I had to edit a couple of the comics using the GIMP photo editor.
The music I downloaded from Jamendo.com, which allows you to listen to music for free, and download many clips. I don’t know if any major artists are on it or not, but I’ve found some great music here, and even better, licensed under a creative commons license.
There is a clip from the first Star Trek movie I’ve included. I think this will be okay in terms of copyright under a fair use for education clause. It isn’t that long, and totally not necessary, but I thought including it might spice up my otherwise slightly dry video.
You can watch it below!
I’m working on my second media production and have decided on a topic related to cybernetics, and the future of learning. If you read the comics below, I think the idea is pretty clear.
The plan is to link these together, along with some relevant images and create a video from it. I think I’ll add some voice-over this time and some futuristic sounding music. Video to follow in a further post. I’ve converted these slides into a Prezi presentation which you can check out below.
Below is a copy of my media assignment for ETEC 531. I was working on something much better using Adobe Premier Pro CS4 but at the last minute couldn’t get past some weird export errors. Very frustrated, I decided to redo the project using Microsoft Photostory 3, which is incredibly easy to use. Unfortunately ease of use usually translates into inability to make real customization, and that certainly occurs here. Wish I had more time to work on this, but it’s due today!
Note that the photos from this video are from Wikipedia Commons (and are licensed in the public domain) and the music is from http://jamendo.com (which is licensed under a Creative Commons license).
So I’ve started two new courses this semester which will bring my total number of courses taken as part of my Masters of Educational Technology degree up to 6. If taking two courses works out well, and I don’t end up estranged from my family, I’ll probably do the same both semesters next year, and finish off my degree quickly.
In any case, one of these courses is requiring us to set up a blog on the UBC web servers, which some of the students in the course have objected to, given that a lot of us already have external web hosts with our own blogs, and wish to gather our stuff together, rather than spreading it out. I’ve already got three blogs, why should I start another?
This situation caused me to reflect on my own practices, and to look at why I have multiple blogs, and whether a blog which only used for a short term, for a single course, is really useful.
I have 3 blogs right now. Obviously one of them is this blog which you are reading. It’s intended for generating discussion around my professional practices as an educator, and as part of my professional portfolio. Write down what you think as a professional, and if people agree with it, you get recognition. It’s not a lot of recognition, but it helps and I am sure it is part of the reason I’m employed full-time next year in what seems like a difficult market for teachers, British Columbia.
Another one of my blogs is for my coding experiments and work. It’s meant to be a record of what I have learned since I started my foray into web programming 4 years ago. It hasn’t been updated in a couple of months, largely because I haven’t been doing any programming recently. I go through fits and spurts, which you can do when it’s a hobby and not your profession. I’ve actually started to get some work as a result of this blog, in the language with which I have the least experience, which is interesting.
I also have had a blog associated with my school which is expressly for disseminating information to my students, and to give my students a bit of playground with which to create their own summaries of what is happening in class. I have no idea if anyone outside of my class is reading this blog, mostly because I’ve disabled anonymous comments on the blog. It isn’t really meant to be a public discourse with the whole world, although it is publically visible.
Each of these blogs has its own purpose. They live separately from each other because of this. People who are interested in what I think about education aren’t necessarily going to care about my programming or summaries of high school mathematics lessons. The same is true of the other two blogs.
Since I have so many blogs already, I don’t really want to start a new one just for this course. It’s a lot to keep track of and keep updated. So my plan is to create the blog as requested, update it for this course (the next 13 weeks) and then migrate all of the content over to this blog and remove the course blog once it’s no longer necessary. Sounds like a plan?
Google Docs has a really cool feature I’d like to try out. The idea is that I have a presentation on Geogebra that I would like to host. There was a lot of interest before, and unfortunately I had to cancel, but I’d like to try again. I’m not a Geogebra expert however, just an enthusiastic intermediate level user. I’d like to create a presentation for beginners to use, but don’t want to miss anything important.
That’s where you come in, if you are interested. The idea is, I’ve created a presentation, which you can access at:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhkzc87c_7g8r8cz83
You can contact me through an online form at https://davidwees.com/contact and ask for permission to edit the presentation, and I’ll send you an invitation. You’ll have to start by creating an account at http://docs.google.com, but that’s pretty easy to do. Once you have the invitation, you can edit/add to/delete from the presentation. I’ve started with a basic structure, but there’s obviously lots of room for improvement.
Here is what we have so far: