This is about it. This class is coming
to a close rapidly.
This week's reading included two
chapters, the first of which, chapter 29, written by J. V. Dempsey
and Richard N. Van Eck, is titled “E-Learning and Instructional
Design”. I've been asked to reflect upon my own experiences in
this course in relation to what the chapter said, and three points
stood out to me.
First, I can tell from my experiences
this semester that Brian Horvitz, the instructor of this course, has
done this before. The class is extremely well structured and
delivered to the students in an easily understandable way. Of the
three classes I have, this class is far and away the easiest
comprehend what my objectives for each module are. That being said,
chapter 29 points out on page 282 “...e-learning today may combine
any and all (e-learning instructional methods), do so at a moment's
notice, and add or drop them as dictated by the needs of the moment.”
As far as I can tell, Dr. Horvitz has not exercised this ability to
adapt the course. It seems that we have done exactly what was
planned. That being said, I haven't seen any reason for him to
exercise that particular benefit of e-learning as the class has
progressed quite smoothly with little lack of understanding on the
part of the students.
Second, this class has been a very
social class. These reflections that I've posted on my blog have
also been posted to a discussion forum for our class. The class has
been divided up into small groups weekly, and we are responsible for
reading other students' reflections and responding to them in an
intelligent, thoughtful, manner that contributes to both our and
their understanding. This resonates with what was said on page 283:
“The biggest swing in the last few years is the strength of
community and the use of social learning technologies for purposeful
learning activities. The sceneario of the solitary student working
alone at her computer...still exists, but many current and future
learning systems will emphasize shared experience features.”
Finally, I was struck by how little a
quote on page 284 held water with regards to this class. The quote
says “Almost thirty years ago, Clark (1983) famously argued that
media “do not influence student achievement any more than the truck
that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition” (p.
446).” In the context of this class, Clark is wrong. What we have
done would have been ill-suited for classroom instruction. We have
created blogs, RSS Readers, wikis, web pages, and other valuable
educational tools. We have done so in a constructivist manner –
our instructor pointed us in the direction, and we went to explore
and complete the task. In this case, the media is a huge part of the
achievement. (The other part of the achievement, of course, is the
realization of how these various tools can be utilized to improve our
own methods.)
The second chapter for this week's
reflection, chapter 31, is entitled “Networks, Web 2.0, and the
Connected Learner” by Terry Anderson. With this chapter, we've
been asked to reflect on the Web 2.0 tools we've been using and
explain how it exemplifies some of the concepts explained in the
chapter. Without question, my favorite tool of this class is this
one: the blog. What can I say? I love to write. I love to have
people read what I write. (Is that egotistical?) I love to hear
what people have to say about what I write to open up a discourse.
(No one's commented on any of my posts yet, but I only recently
started sharing it with anyone but my classmates. I remain hopeful.)
All of this is easy to achieve with a
blog. It has legal issues when using it with a public high school
class (like the fact that all students' names are classified
information in case they have someone stalking them or something), so
those would have to be overcome when implementing a classroom blog or
student blogs. Furthermore, the issue of lack of control from the
teacher could arise since classmates could easily “cyber-bully”
each other in the comments, so that would have to be considered as
well, probably as a discipline-related consideration. However, the
use of a blog by the teacher to convey and elaborate on information
(with various forms of embedded media, for instance), and then to
have the students able to ask clarifying questions, comment on
connections they've made, etc. is extremely valuable. Having
students create their own blogs, reflect on their learning process,
and contribute to their classmates' learning processes would allow
for even more educational value.
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