Subject: Re: Which objects are of interest?
From: Albert Ip (albert@dls.au.com)
Date: Fri 03 Mar 2000 - 03:43:46 MET
From: "Albert Ip" <albert@dls.au.com> Subject: Re: Which objects are of interest? Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 13:43:46 +1100
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On Wed, 1 Mar 2000 15:33:10 -0800 Clark Quinn wrote:
>>My feeling is that from a learning design point of view what needs
>>gluing together is not, in the main, bits of appropriately tagged
>>"explanatory content" = "those things that you use in your lessons", but
>>the things which learners have to _do_ to (get themselves) to learn.
>>
>>If you apply, say, Kolb's learning cycle to your learning design, you
>>would be looking for a series of "objects" to glue together for example:
>>an active experimentation "object", or a reflective observation
>>"object", or an abstract conceptualisation "object".
>>
>>The specific shape of each such object would be driven by things like
>>the learning outcomes and assessment criteria for the course, the type
>>and level of the learners, the way in which the learners were expected
>>to do the course.
>>
>>To each such object you would want to attach:
>>
>>* resources (= say, explanatory content which could be simple - a
web
>>page, or complex - a simulation, or a piece of multimedia);
>>
>>* support (= say, feedback, facilitation, formative assessment, peer
>>dialogue);
>
>This is an interesting perspective, and I can see some reasons to
>want to do it this way; you package content with educational activity
>wrapping. However does that make it hard to unpack it? Could you be
>better off packaging them separately and letting a learning object
>system concatenate or 'bookend' them?
I would like to distinguish between two levels of conceptualisation:
educational and technical.
From an educational view, resource and support are quite different thing.
From a technical view, they are both content.
From an educaitonal view, it seems the type of activities (or interaction)
matters, but only to the degree of how such interactions may affect
learning. From a technical view, activities are software which provides
responses according to pre-set conditions. Such conditions may be embedded
within the software or may be driven by content.
If we apply these veiws to course assembling, I can see that educators and
technologists are taking quite different views. The unit of packaging for
educators are learning units - which may comprise of several software
objects to achieve a specific learning outcome. For the technologist, s/he
would be concern about the "unit of delivery".
My experience is that educators and technologists very easily misunderstand
each other. Educators think technologists don't understand instruction.
Technologists thinks that educators can't even program, what else do
educators "know"!
A possible way out of this is the recognition of such different views and
try to understand each other from a different angle.
I guess the packing and unpacking issue needs to be addressed at both
educational and technical viewpoints.
Albert
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