2/19 Class

MY TWO LEARNING WIKI EXAMPLES:
- Language Learning Wikis - Knowledge section
http://www.italki.com/knowledge/

- Permaculture
http://permaculture.wikia.com/wiki/Permaculture_Wiki

CLASS NOTES/REFLECTION:

- Blog lurkers (Hai)
- Information doesn't really belong to you, once it gets on the blogosphere (Hai)
- Blogs are very limited forms of communication (Various)
- The communication purpose of blogs depends on how you use them (Kim)
- Be careful what you share (David)
- Proliferation of tools, it's gradually simplifying (Kim)
- "Reduce the chain of pain" (Marc, Steve Jobs)

This class was good. I liked the presentation by the blog/wiki/twitter group. Had some good information that I didn't know. Also, what I realize is that the knowledge gained in this class comes through the unique/shared ideas of individuals who are questioning how ideas come about, processes work, etc. The thing I wonder though is how much of it is retained. Our human minds are so precarious I think. That's why something like wikipedia is great. Sometime in the future, people may still be editing wiks. Nice RSS presentation by Ethan. Love that Data + Lor page!

Blogs/Wiki/Twitter Review
- Uses: Journaling, expression
- How to use Twitter academically: academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
- Blog/Wiki/Twitter mashups

COMMENTS ON "Emerging Technologies in E-learning":

I thought this was a great overview of Web2.0 and it's application in education and learning. An example of using cell-phones for learning was a game that was showcased at the 2008 NextFest. You would speak into your phone to make an avatar move on a screen, and you would fight/combat with ours. It was exhilirating yelling "walk, walk, walk" and "fire, fire, fire". Okay, that's actually not learning, but it has lots of potential for it. I could imagine people creating a list of brainstorming words, or sharing pictures of an assignment, etc. This is an example of just-in-time learning.

I think a big tool that will be used in the near future (next 2-10 years +) will be voice recogition. Voice to text will get a lot better, and also, computers will be able to recognize more complex voice commands. (Right now, help lines and car gps systems are the most popular utilizations). Ultimately, we'll be able to say something like: "Launch Google" "Search Web 2.0 + learning" and then "Find Instructional Design, and be able to find information quickly. We might even be able to say "Find users who play guitar, etc." I think the future of technnology is in video and audio.

Lastly, I loved the part where they draw from fiction: Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. I'd love to write more on that topic.

2/5 Class

Discussion: Connectivism

Summary/Observations on Siemens article:

Connectivism, as a learning theory, takes into account the radical changes occurring in the modern world: the availability of vast amounts of information, knowledge living outside of humans, a focus on how to access information versus what the information is, increasing multinodal and globalized collaboration, and much more. People are learning in ways that seem difficult to describe in the language of behaviorism and other older learning theories. My take on these changes are that they are part of an evolutionary trend of survival. Humans are constantly finding ways to survive in the world. Now, however, human beings have not only learned how to survive in the external world of nature, but also the human-made world of information. Connectivism belie a human need to adapt to change, to be human. As humans once developed social groupings in the past, so now today have our technologies created new social networks.

One of the most fascinating ideas is that one day, human knowledge and thought will live entirely in a non-human form.

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Interesting things from class:
- George Siemens
- Knowledge residing in an object.
- Danger of sharing personal information with the world. What if GoogleDocs were to go down one day? Honey bee virus?
- Globalizing trend - human race becoming closer? oneness? loss of individual identity? (identity theft)
- Ty: Technology compared to magic. People are learning spells on a mass-scale. It has a normalizing effect on what once was thought of as spectacular. Connectivism is a "force", the "pattern", the "chaos theory", "entropy".
- Interesting Blog: Information Aesthetics
- Ty: Connectivism sounds like Borg collectivism, hive-mentality culture/operation/connections
- Ty: Why do we learn? Progression from Survival to Enjoyment to ???? (Control? Mastery? Godliness?)
- Ty: What happens when: all of learning resides in non-human appliances? The matrix and virtual worlds powered by Dyson Spheres! =D
- Ty/'s Group: Biological analogy: virus is replicated (bee virus), incorrect or malicious information can be replicated. People can create this too: genetically modified. $-making: Biotech, Monsanto "terminator" seed that die after they are planted once so must be bought again.
- Jeff's group: Knowledge validity: Wiki's self-filtering/verifying ability
- Jeff's group: Competency, how do you involve everyone? You don't. It's all about "capacity to know more than what is known".
- Angie's group: Death of experts? Everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.
- Angie's group: Who sets boundaries?
- Blogs as natural extension of human desire to communicate/talk/chat/gossip. Some bloggers have more accurate information than others. Just as certain villagers are more credible than others.
- Ty: Is advanced technology allowing us to become more human across geography/distance?
- Ty: The more collective we become the more individual we feel.
- Ty: Truth VS human imperfection. Are the borg the villified versions of humans... becoming too "truth-obsessed", science is the embodiment of truth, and the Borg are certainly scientific.

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Note: THU 4/2 1-5pm Web 2.0 EXPO Meet up with Class. You are registered.

1/29 Class

First night of ITEC830 class! Lots of familiar faces.

SHARED IN CLASS:


- Commoncraft: Video shares in plain English

WHAT IS WEB 2.0?
- Collaborative, social, communal, cloud-think
- Multidirectional
- Global, far-reaching, distance-conquering
- Customizable
- Open source, creative commons, democratized
- Ease-of-use, economical, efficient
- A/synchronous
- No software, all web-based
- Creating natural learning environments, virtually
* Hidden agendas - capitalist veins, true costs
* Severity of viral infection

SIX C's of Web 2.0, Connectivism
- Content
- Context
- Create
- Communicate
- Collaborate
- Contribute

TOOLS
-A Whole New Mind - Daniel Fink 2005 (Required)
-The Design of Everyday Things - Donald Norman (Required)
-Flock - Web 2.0 enhanced web browser

ASSIGNMENTS
- Make Blog (DONE!)
- Sign-up for ITEC 830 Ning Group (DONE!)
- iGoogle (DONE - just rearranged it a bit)

Here's something fun. I think it's an example of how diy media is being created by your "average jo", and being shared around the world (viral?). Web 2.0 has enabled people notoriety, and the ability to influence others.

Notes from Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development (Ch 7)

Notes from Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development (Ch 7)

Social and cultural context within which learning takes place. Learning as more than curriculum and instructional strategies.

Pet Monkey Example: Teacher as authority figure
Spanish Activity Example: Participants establishing mutual goals and control over task.

Theorist:
JEROME BRUNER
- the developed mind creates from experience, generic coding systems that them to go beyond data to new and potentially fruitful predictions.
- learner: autonomous and self-propelled.
- Theme 1: Sequence of representational systems children acquire in understanding their worlds.
- Theme 2: Role of culture in cognitive growth and schooling as a instrument of culture in "amplifying human intellectual powers".

MODES OF REPRESENTATION

Enactive representation
- "motor memory"
- past events represented through action memory
- remembering how to walk through an office, but not being able to draw a schematic of the office.

Iconic representation
- perception through images
- remembering a fire by see images of red hot flames

Symbolic representation
- system of symbols used to recall/understand something
- language, morphemes

SEQUENCE OF STAGES
- sequence above is normal for children (Enactive, Iconic, Symbolic)
- but anyone can be taught any of the three (in contrast to Piaget)

COURSE OF COGNITIVE GROWTH

Learning by Discovery
Collins and Steven's Model of Inquiry Teaching: Instructional Strategies Used by Inquiry Teachers

1 Selecting positive and negative exemplars
2 Varying cases systematically
3 Selecting counterexamples
4 Generating hypothetical cases
5 Forming hypotheses
6 Testing hypotheses
7 Considering alternative predictions
8 Entrapping students
9 Tracing consequences
10 Questing authority

"To instruct someone in the disciplines is not a matter of getting them to commit results to mind. Rather it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce living libraries on the subject, but rather to get a student to think mathmatically for themselves, to consider matters as a historian does, to take part in the process if knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process, not a product." (Bruner).

VYGOTSKY

DEVELOPMENTAL METHOD
Natural Process of Development
Phylogenetic Comparisons
Sociocultural History

SOCIAL ORIGINS OF HIGHER MENTAL PROCESSES
- Classification systems (see Australian Aborigines example)
- Internalization
- Zone of Proximal Development
- Interaction in Zone of Proximal Development

Week 7 - Meaningful Learning and Schema Theory

This blog entry will double as my blog entry for the class. I will copy/paste it to the class blog after I'm done.

WEEK 7 - Meaningful Learning and Schema Theory

We started out class with some technical difficulties with getting links of our personal blogs listed on the class blog. We finally figured it out and Kim said she would collect our blog urls and list them on the class blog. For those who didn't create their blogs yet, Kim mentioned that our personal blogs should be reflections of what we learned in class. Kim also talked briefly about Illuminate, an application - there are (3) free accounts available through our class site license. It allows you to see PPTs, documents, etc. Next we quickly ran through the main ideas of this chapter.

OVERVIEW OF IDEAS

[Derivative Subsumption]
KIM: Parts of a tree: trunk, leaves, roots, branches.

[Correlative Subsumption]
KIM: What will happen when you show someone a tiny tree or a tree that isn't green? They would have to change their schema, their concept of what a tree is. Overtime, their schema is stretched.

[Superordinate Learning]
KIM: Different types of plants are all categorized as trees.

[Combinatorial Learning]
WALTER: Computer Networks. You already know how to connect computers through IP addresses. A switch does something similar, but with physical or MAT addresses. So the two things do similar things.

[Advance Organizer]
KIM: Providing concrete examples in advance of instruction.

[Comparative Organizer]
KIM: Comparing two ideas simeautaneously.

[Progressive Differentiation]
Teaching from simple to complex

[Schema]
KIM: "How many people in your party?" Where is this question asked? A restaurant. We have past experiences that determine a schema. In a foreign country, if you walk into a restaurant with your shoes on, you might not know to take them off. After that one experience, your exprience and schema will be modified.

[Accretion]
KIM: Going to one restaurant, then going to another similar restaurant. Your schema isn't modified.

[Tuning]
KIM: Going to a new kind of restaurant, your schema undergoes change.

[Restructuring]
KIM: A total re-organization of schema.

[Mental Model VS Schema]
Mental Models are the process of solving or thinking through a concept or problem.

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After briefly going over these terms, we the split up into small groups to think of examples of derivative subsumption, correlative subsumption, superordinate learning, and combinatorial learning. My group's example was about sports balls. Another group used guitars, and another about buying technological devices (recording tv shows).

- Derivative Subsumption: What is a ball? Ping pong ball, a tennis ball, basketball
- Correlative Subsumption: Adding a football to the group, a person would expand their definition (schema) of a ball because
of its different shape.
- Superordinate Learning: All these balls are sports equipment.
- Combinatorial Learning: A mouse ball is introduced, which is still a ball, but not sports equipment. Their schema would change.

For a instructional designer, the toughest thing is what content to present. How do you take apart and sequence things so that people can learn. This is known as Content Analysis. Most of the presentations covered theory. It's important how to apply this to actual instructional design. All of this informs us about how we do good instructional design. Each of the concepts above are a starting place for us to build upon them.

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Next, Kim asked us to take from the examples that we got from our small groups and design instruction with Gagnes Instructional taxonomy and 9 events of instruction. For our group, we had to create instruction on how to distinguish between different movie formats (VHS, laserdiscs, DVDs) and how to use them with their respective machines. Our goals were based on Verbal Information (the names of the different formats, acronyms) + Motor Skills (how to put the formats in their readers). Our attention getter was to let them see the devices turned on then turn them off. For prior knowledge, we would present a the childhood shape toy. Then we'd explain how one shape fits another. Watch as they do it, then let them do it on their own, then show them other media to have them apply that same principle.

Kim stressed that you don't have to use all the 9 events for every instructional situation.

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For the midterm exam, fundamentals will be covered (like Gagnes Learning Taxonomy, and 9 Events of Instruction). Also, we talked about how it would be helpful if we had a list of important ideas. Kim agreed to come up with a list of important ideas for us. By the end of the semester, ideally, the whole class might use a wiki to have a list of all the important ideas.

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Next Week: Situated Cognition! Hooray!

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction

In my ITEC 800 Theory of Instructional Technology class, for week six, we had to teach something to the class, keeping Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction in mind. It was a fun class.

Taxonomies of Learning Outcomes

- Verbal Information
- Intellectual Skills
- Cognitive Strategies
- Attitudes
- Motor Skills

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction (-> w/Internal Process)

1 Get Attention -> Reception
2 Explain Objective -> Expectancy
3 Recall Prior Learning -> Retrieval from Memory
4 Present Content -> Selective Perception
5 Provide Learning Guidance -> Semantic Encoding
6 Elicit Performance -> Responding
7 Provide Feedback -> Reinforcement
8 Assess Performance -> Retrieval and Reinforcement
9 Enhance Retention and Transfer -> Retrieval and Generalization

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Some of the ones I remember the most were several language ones, including Japanese, Chichewa, and Swahili.

Ex:
Swahili - Walter

Jambo - Hello
Asante - Thank You
Karibu - You're Welcome

Also, I liked Natalia's where we really delved into our collective knowledge of South America.

South America - Natalia

Drawing on our existing knowledge; everyone knew a lot about Brazil, Venezeula, and Peru.

Lattice Multiplication Method - Felix

Pretty cool.