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.

Session 7—Situated Cognition and Cognitive Apprenticeship

When first thinking about using “apprenticeship” in education, I can only think of the subjects that need specific skills for concrete result such as crafts and cooking. I didn’t think this approach could be used in language teaching. However, after reading the articles, I realized that this is an effective way of teaching reading and writing in language education. I found that modeling doesn’t have to be limited to actions that perform a difficult skill; it could be presented in different forms, like think aloud or simply read and write (or whatever you want them to imitate) in front of students.

I especially like Palincsar and Brown’s “reciprocal teaching of reading.” It made me clearly understand how cognitive apprenticeship can be used in language teaching setting. In this approach, students can first observe an expert’s demonstration and learn from it before actually doing it, so I think it is a great way to ease beginner’s tension to learn new things. Besides, this approach asks learners to speak out his/her own reason of doing some action, I think this is a good way to allow students to articulate their own opinions as well as reexamine their decisions. Moreover, learning reading in this kind of environment can help students become sensitive of good answers when other classmates are answering the questions in order to help them either learn from others or become the role of teacher to help others. As a result, I think it is a very good way to engage students into the classroom activity, eventually helping each other.

For me, I think the difficulty for this approach is what cues or hints to give students. It is not easy to guide people without giving answers. However, I think it is crucial to help students to figure out the answer by themselves in the learning process. And I believe that this is a teaching process that needs teachers’ experience. Because teachers can learn from students reactions to see if the hint works, after a long period of experiments, the teachers can have a series of effective hints to guide confidently in class.

I think it’s possible to use this approach online for language instruction. For example, changing the form of conversation into the written form on the individual blog to answer the questions asked by the teacher like making a summary or asking questions to clarify, etc, and ask students to respond to each others’ blog entry. Or using virtual meeting to discuss these questions online. Nonetheless, I still believe that discuss face-to-face in class is the best way to give timely assistance and is easy for teachers to observe students’ progress by seeing their facial expression.

Session 6—Problem Based Learning

I think Problem Based Learning is a very motivating and interesting way for many subject areas, especially for professional skills. In PBL, students are given an authentic problem and go through the whole solving process within a group. They will definitely get familiar with knowledge related to the problem, learn how to work cooperatively, and gain research skills. However, I don’t think it is an easy job for teachers. Although teachers shift the control to students, that doesn’t mean the teachers get fewer work, for me, that means more jobs to do. Teachers need to have a well-designed problem and prepare a list of possible sources that they may need (of course, ill-structured one). Moreover, they must explain how PBL works explicitly to alleviate students’ anxiety about learning less as well as guide students to the next process or review current solution with constructive questions but never specify the steps. I think it’s a time-consuming process for teacher to design the course. Also, it’s very challenging for me to guide students with questions.

I am thinking that I can use this strategy the same way as what I thought of for Guided Design; the difference between these two strategies for my task is that Guided Design has specific steps for students to accomplish the task, and PBL asks students to come up with solutions themselves. So I think I can use the former strategy for beginner level class and the latter for advanced one. Also, I think that may be interesting to allow students to decide the question that they want to conduct research about it. I can give them a big topic such as Chinese history or culture, then students can think about what they want to know more and start the research. At the end of the course, groups can share their findings to each other, that way, every one cannot only learn from their own subject.

I think for this strategy, discussion is the most important part (between the group members and between group and teacher)! Therefore, I think Elluminate is the best tool for students to have meeting together since they can talk, type, and share the document or link with all group members. As to the resources that the teacher needs to provide, I think trailfire is a good way to show them the information.

Session 5—Cooperative Learning

I love cooperative learning! I like its ideas of learning by doing as well as learning in a community. It is exactly the same as language learning. Language learning shouldn’t be done alone. People must practice with somebody to see how it works. By using cooperative learning approach, students can practice the target language in front of a group of people that they feel comfortable with before saying it out loud to the whole class. Also, it is always effective when students have more opportunities to talk in such small groups. More importantly, when students learned how to learn from each other and communicate with others in the class, I believe that they can keep learning outside of the classroom.

When I try to apply this to my future teaching, I think of combining what I’ve learned in ECI 513 that I can have students in small groups to make videos together. I think it would be a great idea to let students have chance to write a Chinese script and then act it in Chinese! Or, I can even ask them to record each other’s pronunciation and compare the differences to the teacher’s/instructional tape’s pronunciation. I think that will be neat for them to see themselves speaking Chinese! I can’t wait to search more strategies that could be applied to Mandarin teaching.

Although I think cooperative learning will get the greatest outcome when people talk to each other face-to-face and sit in the same classroom surrounded by its safe and comfortable atmosphere, I still believe people can do it on the web, just like what we’re doing in this course. But when it comes to language teaching, I would suggest using web cam as well as headset to facilitate the communication process. It is always difficult for people who don’t have a mutual language to understand each other without seeing their facial expressions and gestures. In addition, I think that teach only one group of students synchronously would be better. I don’t believe that a teacher can monitor two or more groups’ discussion online at the same time without being disturbed by so many people talking at the same time. (Unless there is a computer program that you can switch from one group to the other, I don’t know one, but just think that there is always a possibility.)

Session 4--Guided Design Process

Compare to PSI and AT approach, Guided Design Process includes more interactions and practices higher thinking level skills. For me, this approach is like a hands-on activity because students are learning by solving some real life problems. This concept is the same as what I think a foreign language teacher should teach her/his students. If students can apply what they have learned in class to their lives, students can retain the knowledge longer. When they face the similar situation, they will know how to respond to it. With the teachers’ guidance and the step-by-step process, I believe that students’ fear of learning new things will be eased and gain more confidence by completing the task.

When reading the articles, I came up with an idea using guided design process in foreign language instruction: Give students a scenario (maybe in a supermarket looking for specific product or traveling in China) and then ask them to discuss what kinds of conversation may happen. Which means students have to think about the possible Q&A as thoroughly as they can to deal with any situation. And ask them to actually go outside to see if their conversation works or come to the classroom for role-play. I love the part that students prepare first as a small group, compare their answers to other groups, and finally listen to what experts may do. I think after this whole process, they will learn more than the class that receives the traditional lecture. I am very excited about this idea and really want to try it out. In addition, I think this process could be easily applied to the online environment. It just needs more detailed description to give students appropriate guidance as well as timely assistance by the instructor. But as what I have indicated in previous reflections, I still believe that language teaching gets best outcome with face-to-face instruction.

I was shocked when I first see that foreign language was pointed out as one area where this approach is not effective. But after consideration, I think that might because of the inappropriate design of the activity or might because that the goal and process of language learning is rather obvious, the step-by-step process might be trivial to students and eventually lose their motivation. But these are just my guesses; I would like to read the detail of those two foreign language studies to find out what happened.

Session 3--Audio-Tutorial Approach

After reading the articles of this week, I have the same feelings as what Dr. Oliver indicated in Lecture 3—all the AT approach should and will be implemented on the Internet because it is way too efficient than the traditional Independent Study Session (No need to find a big place for learning carrels, to spend huge amount of money to print all the handouts, and to find people to stay at the learning center.). Besides, I really love the idea of Small Assembly Session (SAS). I agree with that, “one really learns a subject when one prepares to teach it,” it is really a good way to know if students have learned something as well as a great opportunity for them to learn from each other. I also like the idea of General Assembly Session (GAS). I am shocked that students did not like it at all. I cannot help but think that the activities in this session was not arranged appropriately because guest speakers and films that related to the course content should be very interesting and motivating. I even doubted that because the attendance is not compulsory, did the students who evaluated the GAS as useless actually attend to any one of the sessions? I believe the multi-sensory approach is appropriate for meeting students’ different learning needs and styles, so I would like to adopt SAS and GAS into my future courses for review or assessment purposes.

However, for foreign language teaching, I am concerned about some points of the AT approach. First of all, students have to be self-directed in the learning process. I have heard too many people told me that they tried thousand times to start learning a language in my life, but I seldom heard successful stories. Learning a skill that is not imperative to somebody’s life or that without a strong motivation plus no one to push you is very difficult. In addition, in my opinion, I always believe that language should be learned in an environment that you could actually use it. With no professionals to correct students’ pronunciation and no one to practice conversation with, the progression for them is limited. Again, I totally agree with the multiple approaches of the AT method, but I think these approaches should not replace the class meeting in school; they should be regarded as great supplemental resources.

Session 2--Keller Plan (Davis)

After reading the paper written by Davis et al., I am amazed that how fast distance education has progressed in just a decade. Lots of contents, which are about the efforts to overcome the deficiency of the program at that time, have been improved nowadays. Those barriers included that students had limited access to the learning package since it was only available to those on the UMR computer network or on CD sets and the recorded videos, which meant that the school had to mail those materials to off-campus students. That was definitely not an efficient way for both schools and students. Moreover, another deficiency was that those packages and videos were lack of instant interaction with colleagues and professors. After solving these problems, teachers and students alike can arrange their own schedule in a semester. Students will never have to worry about their different learning paces (no matter too slow or too fast) from others because the web-deployed course is completely self-paced.

Though the BEST TQM is not an efficient tool for off-campus students because of its availability, I like the ideas that it was used as a source of supplemental materials for the course. Especially, its CD format reminds me about interactive discs that broadly used for language learning recently. I think it would be great if I can design the content of interactive discs for my Mandarin students. That way, they cannot only practice the language at home whenever they want, but also learn in a fun way! Furthermore, for the younger kids who are not allowed to use Internet or students who has no Internet access at home, the interactive discs are more appropriate to them. In addition, Mandarin learning is getting more and more attention in the international society. If I could properly use the Internet-based instruction well, I can teach students all over the world in my office or even my home, and students can learn whenever and wherever they would like. How fantastic!

I think that lots of web-based course management system such as Moodle and Blackboard can solve the problems that the authors had faced at the beginning of the 21st century. I believe that Internet-based instruction provides the best environment for PSI.

Hi all!

Hey there,

This is a blog for the my reflections of ECI 517 Advanced Multimedia. I look forward to reading those articles and discussing with you all! Thanks for visiting my blog!