Session 14—Learning Objects

To be honest, after reading first two articles of the assigned readings, I was still confused about the meaning of “learning object” and the purpose of discussing about it in this course. But after reading a couple more, I found that I always know what the “learning object” is, I just don’t know what it is called. Learning object can be anything used to help people learn something. It could be a picture, video, text, audio, module… anything! I especially LOVE Bonk’s article! I enjoyed reading all the concepts about learning objects in it and amazed that there are so many wonderful resources out there on the Web but I didn’t know at all. Now, I feel so grateful to be a teacher in this age that I could provide my students interesting lessons including resources of all sorts. With the assistance of learning objects, learning doesn’t have to be boring anymore! Meeting students’ different needs and learning styles become much easier than a decade ago. I think the point is “variety!”

Although it is easy to get learning objects on the Web through browsing and downloading, it is still difficult for teachers to first, come up with a lesson plan; second, put useful information from different resources together to present a meaningful lesson; third, provide guidance in a timely manner when needed. Some say that now we have these useful websites promoting self-learning, so we don’t need teachers anymore. I don’t agree with it! I think teachers become more important because they need to integrate all kinds of information into one lesson to make learning as effective as possible. I doubt that any learner would do so for his own learning. After all, there are too many resources to find the perfect ones, even teachers are struggling with them, let alone a individual learner.

Beside, I think that it is good to have so many resources out there, but sometimes it is hard to fit the outside resources into one’s own teaching context. (I don’t know if this is just because I didn’t search for the wonderful sites that Bonk recommended, this is just my own experience.) I can’t help wondering that when facing this kind of situation, should we change our context to use the good resources, or should we made our own learning objects to fit our context? Which is better? Which is more effective? More efficient?

I definitely will go checking those sites mentioned in the articles out! And will try to think the possibility of using the resources into my future teaching when reading them. I think before having any lesson plan in mind, it will be a great chance to see the resources with an open mind so that the exploration may create more possibilities for future instruction.

Session 13—Cognitive Flexibility Theory

I’m really glad that I could have a chance to really experience a CF project as a student. Although I had basic concepts from the readings of this week as well as last week; however, I was still not so sure about how to design a learning module based on this approach. After this experience, I realized how “cases” work in the module, and how the knowledge of a case could be applied to another related case.

In Jonassen et al.’s article, they talked about lots of instruction was oversimplified in order to teach beginners the basics, but the knowledge could not be used in the complex real-world situation. I cannot agree more about this “normal” phenomenon in language classrooms. After 20 years, when being asked in English, “How are you,” I can still hear kids in Taiwan answer confidently, “Fine, thank you, and you?” But how many American people say so? At least, from the very first day I was here, I have never heard it even once. The English textbook for beginners were oversimplified the greeting situation. That is why I didn’t know how to answer the questions of “What’s up?” and “What’s going on?” when just arriving here two years ago. Thus, I think learning language within a context is very important, for instance, students should learn vocabulary and grammar in the context of a conversation or a situation instead of reciting list of vocabulary or a list of sentence clause.

I really like this approach because it included so many cases in one project that students can gain lots of insights and/solutions from other people’s experiences. I think learning from other people is the fastest way to learn things. Besides, the way how students apply knowledge from A case to B case is exactly the way how people using their prior knowledge to deal with new problems in the real world. Students cannot only learn the subject matter from the course, but also how to solve real-world problems. Moreover, this approach encourages learners to find the information they need in different cases and/or different kinds of sources, which allows students to learn by doing as well as thinking. Through this approach, I believe that what they learned definitely not inert knowledge.

The biggest barrier of this approach, undoubtedly, is that teacher needs to find or create a huge amount of cases that are all interconnected for instruction. In addition, I think the explicit explanation of how to use the module is extremely important for this approach. Students may have never heard about this approach, so they feel lost easily when seeing the unfamiliar interface of the computer system. If there is no appropriate guidance of this module, you will lose students’ interests of the subject even you have great content and representative cases. But I think it takes time to make students be familiar with the module; however, it seems like there is always not enough time for teaching all course content.

It’s obvious from our activity for CF activity that it is possible to implement this approach online. I really think the document viewer is very very cool! But I have no idea where did it come from and how it works, I think this is my extra homework to figure it out.

Session 12—Case-Based Learning Methods and Case-Based Reasoning Environments

When I finished this week’s readings, I felt huge “flexibility” of this approach. Teachers can use cases as merely stories to tell students something they should know or as incentives to motivate students to find answers by themselves. The teachers can also design well-structured cases, ill-structured ones, or one represents anywhere between this two extremes, according to students’ abilities and needs. Moreover, they can decide to use this approach for the whole semester or just a part of a course. In my opinion, CBL is the most flexible approach so far in this course.

Because CBL includes so many theories that we have learned in ECI 517, I cannot help thinking it combines all those approaches advantages in it, such as allowing students to learn in an authentic context, which makes learning more engaging and more fun. Also, it also has the disadvantages of those theories such as huge workload for teachers to design a course. Besides, because of the characteristic of CBR is to help students to activate their prior experiences that similar to the problem in hand, the biggest challenge for me is to find ways to provide appropriate experiences when students don’t have any in their real lives. In my imagination, since this is the first time I’ve ever heard about this approach, I think I need to find a great amount of resources in different levels in order to meet different students’ understanding levels. Of course, I’m also thinking that if my students are old enough to conduct research by their own, I can shift this work to them. That way, not only they can learn more through the researching process, but also I can reduce my own work.

In addition, I really like CBR’s 4 REs and the idea of case library. I think if I could have my own case library for my courses, that would be awesome, but I feel a little bit pressure at the same time because it seems a lot of work. But you’ll never if you don’t try it out, so I think I’ll definitely give it a try in the near future. Like many context-based theories we have learned, I think many web tools can help design this approach. Maybe use simple web pages for case library and use multimedia can be used for story telling, maybe opposite! Since it’s flexible, I think I can be creative! ☺

Session 11—MOST Environments

This approach seems like remedial education (Am I right about the name? Not sure about how you call it :P) since its target is at-risk students; however, as a language teacher, I strongly agree that using images to introduce a new vocabulary and concept to learners is an effective way of teaching! It’s a shame that I used to be a “basic-first” teacher in my early teaching years. I didn’t know how to teach Pinyin (the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin) or Chinese vocabulary in other ways except directly telling them the meaning in English. And I deeply believed that only when students and I got through the boring basic learning process could they enjoy the following interesting parts of learning (contextual learning). However, late is better than never! (What else can I say…☹) I’m glad that I know that I could use technology to help me make learning interesting/meaningful from the very beginning of the language learning process.

In addition, I like the “retelling” idea of this approach. In language teaching, ask students to retell a story or explain a words meaning is very important because the retelling shows clearly that if a students understand the text. Capturing the silent scenes to record students’ own narrations to the stories not only makes retelling process fun, but also introduces tools (technology) to help students’ learn. For retelling, I think VoiceThread and Viddler are very good and easy Web tool for students to record their voice of retelling the story directly on the website.

Besides introducing a whole new course content, I also think MOST can be used for reviewing or assessing students’ understanding of the target language. Teachers can use analogous clips that similar to the subject discussed earlier in the unit and ask them to retell the story to see how much they understand about the subject. While learning the content knowledge, students also have many opportunities to practice their speaking skills in the target language, which I think is extremely beneficial to language learners.

For me, I think the barrier is the difficulty to create multiple analogous videos. Creating stories is always not easy to me, let alone make it a video. But I think like Dr. Oliver mentioned in the lecture of this week, we could use still images or some other broadly defined clips to make this process a little bit easier.

Session 10—Star Legacy

I like this approach very much! It is very similar to Anchored Instruction that we have discussed last week, but more organized and easier to understand for both teachers and students. Besides, I also think it is similar to Guided design that students follow the steps created by teachers to complete challenges. For me, I think this approach is the most feasible one so far in Context-based Instruction & Multimedia section because of its layout’s clarity and its flexibility. I like its flexibility a lot because it is coincide with my belief that instruction must be adjusted to meet students’ needs and learning styles. If the learning software or system is unchangeable once after being created, it can’t be an effective teaching material. Using this approach, teachers can change/add any element they wish to meet the needs of a group of students. In addition, I LOVE the idea that ask students’ initial thoughts first and reflect back later to see how much they learned. Students really have seldom chance to see how much they learned, so they seldom appreciate school education. This step allows students actually see their growth in a subject by reading their own notes, I believe they’ll have very strong impression on the knowledge they just learned and retain it for long.

Although Star Legacy keeps mentioning the importance of flexibility, the step-by-step cycle is easily misunderstood as a rigid format to follow. That is also the reason why I think it is similar to Guided Design. Therefore, I think it is very important for teachers to remind their students that you can always revise/switch the steps when you find it’s better for your own research process. Besides, like other approaches in this section, the biggest barrier is the huge workload that added to a teacher. Teachers must have a clear vision of the cycle(s) and prepare the transcripts for the necessary videos/audios as well as resources. Nonetheless, probably because I always need clear and explicit information about the theories, I don’t feel as overwhelmed or panic toward this approach as previous two approaches. I believe that when having enough time to prepare all the essential information, I can definitely apply it to my future class.

I think there are lots of website can be used for presenting this module, like Moodle, Wiki, and creating web pages. I even think that using online environment is better than the original software format since students’ comments or thoughts can be saved immediately online so that both teacher and students can easily track students’ progress.

Session 9—Anchored Instruction

While reading the articles of this week, I got headache because this approach is very similar to many previous approaches but different in some ways. I usually think through how to apply an approach while reading, however, I had a hard time this week because I couldn’t help come up with ideas that seemed not belong to this one approach. (I know in the real life I don’t have to try to fit in just one approach, but I’m trying to come up with ideas for our next project.)

I like the way that Anchored Instruction creates an authentic environment for instruction, in which question and information for solving the question are all embedded in a story. This makes learning not only more fun and engaging to students, but also very similar to the real world. Students can benefit largely by learning the subject and high-level thinking skills at the same time. Besides, this approach makes learning much more meaningful to me. In my past learning experiences, there were many subjects that I had asked thousand times that “Why do we need to learn this?” But I didn’t get the answers. So I assumed I learned it to get good grades on the standardized exams. I had no passion and desire to know more about the subjects, and undoubtedly, I threw away all I learned of those subjects soon after the exams. Though I admit that I found the meaning of learning some subjects afterwards (sometimes long after graduation), I still don’t think that’s a good thing since the learning process was painful. I think it is teacher’s responsibility to design a curriculum that is related to students’ lives and make the knowledge non-inert.

Just like GBS, Anchored Instruction has so many things to prepare for a teacher. And it is more challenging for students as well since the materials are not presented in order; learners need to find the question and answers mainly by themselves. Therefore, how to assist them but still need to allow them to struggle seems difficult to me. But I think it is worth trying, so I hope I can come up with more ideas to create a lesson based on this approach in my future class.

I think that like GBS, the elements of Anchored Instruction can be presented by multimedia that embedded in many existing websites, such as embed a video for story or a page of text for story. It’s hard to design software by a teacher, but I think we don’t have to; we can try to use what we have to reach the same goals of this approach.

Session 8—Goal-Based Scenarios

When I first read this approach, I was overwhelmed. The examples on papers look like well-designed software that was sold for teachers, I really doubt that I can do the same product as they did. Besides, those systems in the papers seem to have many experts work in one scenario, how can I have others to work for my classroom? However, after thinking over and over again to search for the possibility in my classroom, I came up with an idea that is co-teaching with other teachers probably in my own school, that way, we can all provide our expertise in the same subject but different subtopics in the task. Also, it will make the designing process of this approach easier when having other teachers involved.

I really like the idea of learning by doing, I agree with that students will retain more skills and be more motivated by this approach than traditional lecture way. I like its flexibility to be used for individual learners as well as group learners. And it combines lots of approaches that we’ve learned so far, for instance, when the mission is completed by one student, its self-paced learning characteristic reminds me of PSI; when it’s completed by a group, it is similar to situated learning and PBL, which makes the mission more plausible to me. But exactly because it’s more complicated just like the real life situation, there are so many things need to be planed and lots of information need to be provided by teacher. It can be intimidating for a teacher to do all these for one course plus other schoolwork. So as I mentioned earlier, I think working within a group of teacher can solve this problem, and teachers can learn from each other as well! Also, after seeing the “Moving Day” example of Dr. Oliver’s former student, I think all these can be designed in a simpler way on a teacher-made website. Although the website still needs lots of planning, but I think it at least looks not so intimidating as the software in the readings.

I haven’t come up a concrete plan for this approach but I would keep thinking to make it feasible to my future classroom. I think that many existing websites can be used for this approach for multimedia access such as videos and hyperlinks, etc. I believe that this will be a great learning experience for students as well as teachers.