How to Maintain Interest

One of the tasks this week was to look at the techniques that TV documentaries use to maintain attention and interest. The audience is passive and not being involved in any activity other than watching and hopefully thinking and learning.

I watched 'The Plot Against Harold Wilson' as it was the next thing on. It's great when you start your homework and it tells you to watch TV, that didn't happen often enough when I was at school.

This documentary started by asking a question. People were asking why did he resign suddenly? This works well because the viewer has a focus and naturally wants to answer the question. In my own teaching, asking a question which is answered through the lesson is a way of grabbing attention at first and pulling the students attention back to the question from time to time.

The next technique that I noticed was the use of 'secret knowledge'. Wilson spoke to only a couple of journalists about his concerns about the secret services about the possibility of a military coup in the UK. This works by surprising you, and also presenting the information as something not many people know. To the viewer or student, this means that the information being given out is useful and few have had a chance to act on this knowledge making it more powerful.

Actors dramatise important scenes, and to be honest those scenes are the thing that I remember from the program. They act as a skeleton for me to hand the story and my memories of the program around. This keeps attention by making the story more human, and letting you see how this situation affected the people involved emotionally. Perhaps in teaching there could be informal acting out of situations, telling of stories and narrative.

Music is used quite often and is effective, but in teaching this would have to be done through playing (short) videos.

Other things I noticed were quotes from people involved, the narrator holding the story together, comedy clips, opposing points of view (twists) and the plot thickening, glamour and tension.

So that is the documentary. Another program that keep my attention isLost (mystery, links to past). Watching the LoTR director's commentry, I notices that they talk all the time about 'pace' and so many decisions are based around this. Finally Malcom Gladwell's Tipping point discusses a children's TV program called 'Blue's Clues' which was repeated 5 times per week. It was found that children watched for a while and stopped not when it was quiet (as many has thought) but when they didn't understand. Each day children would get further and further through the program as they understood more - so understanding of a program or lesson is vital if are to prevent students zoning out.

SoR on 'NSIN Research Matters: Effective Learning'

So how does this feed into my teaching.

AL - Active Learning:
This can start in the Do section of the Learning Cycle, because the student can (if the training is done well) follow the actions of the teacher. I guess that both Review and Learn sections of the learning cycle can be encouraged by the teacher. The learner paced nature of online training allows the student all the time they want to reflect. There can also be encouragement to plan to Apply what the student has learned in other situations.


CL – Collaborative Learning:
It is difficult with online Screencasting teaching to get the students working in groups. I guess that I could point them to online discussion areas, website and blogs where people discuss the things being taught. This would most likely fit in with the Review and Learn sections, leaving the Do and Apply sections.


LR - Learner Responsibility:
The fact that the online training is on demand and chunked, means that the learner is taking responsibity for their learning by just visiting the training. I can look at asking the student to review their learning as they go on, asking them to revisit sections if they struggle. Perhaps self assessed questions could help them? I can also challenge the way they have used software in the past to encourage them to Apply their new learning to their future plans and actions.

ML - Meta-Learning:
This is not something that I had thought about in the context of training to use software, but possibly fits in with the e-literacy strand of possible training. To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure how I would approach encouraging meta-learning in this area.

NSIN Research Matters: Effective Learning

Abbott, J (1994) defines learning as a “reflective activity which enables the learner to draw upon previous experience to understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape future action and formulate new knowledge”.

Dennison and Kirk (1990), Kolb (1984) worked on the learning cycle (Do, Review, Learn, Apply).

Biggs and Moore (1993) wrote of learning as a two way process and noted 6 elements:

1. Learner Characteristics

1. Ideally is conscious of incompetence
2. Learner’s ideas of learning affects how learning takes place
3. Ideally improving over proving
4. Learning styles: identify strengths and develop weak styles (activist, reflector, theorist, pragmatist)

2. Teaching

1. Learning facilitation or Knowledge transfer

3. Activities

1. Instruction: “she taught me…”
2. Construction: “I made sense of…”
3. Co-construction: “We worked out that…”
4. The five elements in reaching the goals of teaching activities change depending on which of those 3 ways you look at learning.

i. Tasks
1. input output tasks
2. tasks for processing and understanding
3. tasks for generating knowledge

ii. Social structure
1. teacher to many
2. individuals, pairs, groups
3. changing groups, networks, linkages

iii. Resources
1. teacher chooses
2. student experience is seen as a resource
3. access to world of resources and experiences

iv. Role
1. Teacher as teller, organiser and judge
2. teacher an enquirer
3. teacher as learner too

v. Time and pacing
1. teacher controls: pace seen as key
2. Longer time blocks, student paced
3. Time seen as less relevant

4. Outcomes

1. Knowledge
2. Skills
3. Action
4. Feeling
5. Strategies and love of learning
6. Sense of self, others and community

5. Classroom context

1. The classroom is a unique context, requiring certain skills to work within it.

6. Wider context

1. Learning outside school is a different, less structured context.

For effective learning to take place, context and goals must be specified. Focus must be on knowledge generation with others and on ‘meta learning’.

There are 4 processes that feed into effective learning, ideally at all 4 stages of the learning cycle.

-Active learning
-Collaborative learning
-Responsibility for own learning
-Meta-learning

Do [AL = tasks designed for learner activity, CL = tasks in small groups who feed into a larger group, RL = learner chooses and plans approach, ML = learners notice aspects of learning]

Review [AL = learners stop to notice what happened, CL = Learners review group operations, RL = learners monitor their own progress, ML = learners describe and review their learning]

Learn [AL = Understandings made explicit, CL = Explanation of topic and group, LR = Identify factors influencing progress and develop appropriate strategies, ML = Further reflective inquiry encouraged]

Apply [AL = Plan further actions including other situations, CL = Include group and community learning in the plans, LR = Revise plans due to recent learning, ML = Plan to notice and experiment.]

SoR on Towards a Theory of Online Learning, Terry Anderson

How does this theory affect how we advise academics?

Look at the 6 forms of interaction (e.g. Student-Content). How can we enable and encourage these? What technologies would fit into each area, and which do we and could we support?

Start by identifying what we want the students to learn (Prensky 2000):

• If it is facts through drill and association, we can use memory techniques (Student-Teacher) or online quizzes (Student-Content).
• If it is creativity through playing, we can use games and simulations.
• Language is learned through immersion, imitation and practice so a foreign language environment (Student-Content/Community), audio and video (Student-Content) and Conferencing (Student-Teacher) could be used.

In conclusion a model would help us feel confident in advising tutors depending on what they want to achieve. We can more easily see what fits where, and when to advise that the tutors work face to face with the students.

Ideally a list of technologies showing which are suited for developing certain skills, would be a great guide to develop. Below is a very basic, incomplete list, based on the ideas in the article, with the technologies that might help in square brackets.

• Behaviours – imitation, feedback, practice. [video, audio, tasks]
• Judgement – review cases, ask questions, make choices, review feedback and coaching. [Cases could be watched beforehand but this might require interaction that is best done face-to-face]
• Observation – view examples, receive feedback [Video, Discuss thoughts, peer-review videos of self]
• Procedures – imitation and practice [Video, Coded simulations (student-content)]
• Systems – discover principles and undertake graduated tasks
• Reasoning – puzzles, problems, examples
• Skills – imitation, feedback, continuous practice, increasing challenge
• Speed/Performance – memorization, practice, coaching
• Theories – logic, explanation, questioning

Towards a Theory of Online Learning, Terry Anderson

A good theory helps us see the bigger picture, to see new worlds, and to help us build on what we already know (Wilson, 1997, 1999).

Bransford, Brown and Cocking (1999) listed some attributes of learning:

• 1) Learner/Learning Centred – It needs to take into account students existing knowledge and (mis)understandings. This can be difficult online.
• 2) Knowledge Centred – Knowledge is centred in the world view of the discipline. The internet widens the knowledge that can be accessed.
• 3) Assessment Centred – Assessment should be more formative than summative. This is more work for the tutor. Can online assessment/self assessment help this. Sophisticated LSA software might be able to help score essays.
• 4) Community Centred – Vygotsky’s ideas of creating new knowledge collaboratively. Lipman’s (1991) and Wenger’s (2001) ideas about the community of practice/enquiry. There are issues regarding the lack of participation (Mason and Hart, 1997).
• 5) Content Centred – There is increased access to materials, resources and community. Jonassen (1991, 1992) has looked at hypertext and learning. Hyperlinks give students control over how they order their learning.
  
  The web increases the possibility for interaction between the learner, the content, the teacher and the community.
  
  How we learn influences our decisions. We can start by asking what are we trying to encourage the students to learn? What technologies will support and encourage this? The web can contain everything that could be supplied face to face, except that richness of interaction with people.
  
  The article also mentions Educational Modelling Languages and The Semantic Web.

Contructivism and Online Education, Doolittle, 1999

Constructivism argues that learners construct their own knowledge and meaning from experiences. While reality exists it can only be known through the filter of someone’s experience, meaning that everyone sees reality differently.

Von Glaserfield (1984, 1990) put forward three points:

1. Knowledge is not passively accumulated, but the result of cognitizing.


2. Cognition’s function is to make behaviour more viable in an environment.


3. Cognition tries to make sense of ones own experiences, and is not necessarily a true representation of reality.

Doolittle adds:

1. Knowing has biological construction and social based interactions.

Doolittle identifies 3 types of constructivism, which accept various combinations of these 4 points:

1. Cognitive constructivism – Focuses on information processing (1 and 2), and sees knowledge as an accurate interpretation of reality. This has led to developments in understanding how the mind works. [This pedagogy could be used for subjects where “accurate mental constructions of reality” are important to build?]


2. Radical constructivism – This argues that we make mistakes in constructing understanding and sensing the world around us. Therefore we cannot know reality, and it is constructed through both our experience and social interactions. This adds considerations about our understanding of meaning to cognitive constructivism. [This could be use in subjects or areas of teaching in subjects where we need to discuss meaning. It is looking at the construction of an experiential reality.]


3. Social constructivism – This gives the social side of developing knowledge and understanding a larger role in constructing an “agreed upon socially constructed reality”.

Finally he chooses 8 core design principles that will be valid whatever form of constructivism you choose.

1. Experience needs to be in real world environments.


2. Learning needs to involve social negotiation and mediation.


3. Content and skills must be relevant to the learner to build into existing knowledge.


4. If the learning facilitator can understand the learner’s prior knowledge and understanding, mistakes in understanding can be corrected better.


5. Assessment should be formative.


6. Metacognition: Students should be encouraged to be self-aware and be able to plan and evaluate their own learning.


7. Teacher is a guide not an instructor.


8. Multiple perspectives must be involved.

Relating some of these to my Camtasia teaching:

1. The vocal guidance should allow students to follow while they are doing rather than just watching. The instruction needs to be good enough that you guide them where to click verbally.


2. Social negotiation – this relates more to the eliteracy sections, and could involve the instructors sharing their own experience and thought processes.


3. Relevant – Existing knowledge… we are assuming that the students have all the skills in the earlier categories. If they are watching this they should have watched all the earlier videos or have those skills anyway.


4. Mistakes – These will have to be presumed related to mistakes in thinking and understanding of IT that we have come across previously.


5. Assessment – This will really be “can the students do this”. If not they will watch again, but we might need somewhere for students to give feedback and we might need to think hard about assessment and how we could make it formative? Perhaps the skills audit before and after will play a part?

Back to work

Not been doing much on the course recently, but feel more like it again now, and should get a bit of time at the weekend.

OPML Reading Lists

With all the talk about reading lists in the Postgraduate Certificate course I'm doing, I was interested in looking at how OPML reading lists would fit into this.

OPML reading lists are lists of blogs that you could pass between different blog aggregators (e.g. Bloglines). You might want to export a list to a new piece of blog aggregation software that you want to use, or could pass it between people.

If there are several blogs related to an academic subject, a tutor could keep a reading list on for example Bloglines for thier own use. They could export the file and pass the list onto students to add to their Bloglines account.

An example of an OPML file can be found on the BlogBridge site. This could be imported into a blog aggregator like BlogBridge (needs installing on your machine) or Bloglines (available online). This file could easily be made available through WebCT for students to use, or perhaps displayed somewhere in WebCT?

In case you are interested in the technical information, OPML stand for Outline Processor Markup Language and is XML based.

Session 3

Hmm, this seems ages ago now, but basically we got into groups and drew a picture of how we saw our teaching. Our group had a wheel, in which the spokes were the different things we use to support learning, working together as a whole.

I enjoyed this discussion and felt part of it. The people in this group are freindly, and I feel more confident of having something to contribute than 2 and a half years back when I started the old version of the course.

Next weeks session is cancelled due to the strike.