Subject: Re: IFETS-DISCUSS Digest - 7 Dec 1999 to 8 Dec 1999
From: Dr. M. Goswamy (mygos@del3.vsnl.net.in)
Date: Thu 09 Dec 1999 - 17:50:33 MET
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 1999 21:50:33 +0500 From: "Dr. M. Goswamy" <mygos@del3.vsnl.net.in> Subject: Re: IFETS-DISCUSS Digest - 7 Dec 1999 to 8 Dec 1999
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Taking up the comments of Margaret Farren on
>Multimedia / Hypermedia / Authoring tools from the point of view of
teaching =
>teachers about the design, creation and evaluation of multimedia =
>programmes.
I would like to take up fascinating question posed by Margaret in
>"..... on observation, a lot of processes are happening when students =
>design, develop and implement a multimedia project. I would encourage =
>students to reflect and document these processes. Do other people think =
>that these processes are worth assessing? How would you recommend doing =
>this?"
It is really interesting to note that almost all 'teachers' (or is it
'trainers"?) involved in the use or designing of multimedia based
hypermedia projects by their students (particularly for comprehension and
language related topics), whom I have had the opportunity to interact,
willy-nilly got involved in 'exploring' the thought process that 'goes in
the learners' mind (or head). This aspect is probably a 'byproduct' of
using or teaching the use of hypermedia for comprehension projects
(otherwise, generally speaking why don't they end up thinking and trying to
assess what process is involved in 'writing an essay' or 'reviewing a
composition or a book' or I am yet to come across similar 'concern' in
equal magnitude for finding out about the process in those who are
involved in hypermedia based projects in history or geography or other
subjects which are by no means less creative than writing a
comprehension!). Nonetheless, it is apparent that 'understanding' the
issues and analyzing "the processes (that) are happening when students
design, develop and implement a multimedia project" not only would help in
improving instructional delivery but also strengthen the planning and
'goal-setting' process before undertaking a hyper-media project. All these
sounds so nice but the problem starts cropping up when one actually starts
thinking whether is it 'worth assessing'. Our efforts in this directions
ultimately lead to a common thinking that the process involved has more to
do with 'creativity' than mere 'subjective thinking' (that is why my
earlier submission stressed that that it involves 'thrashing of many
issues' ). Therefore, the question that needs to be answered even before
'whether it is worth assessing' is 'will the assessment sufficiently valid
and reliable that it would be of any specific use for the teacher', unless,
of course, you are talking of undertaking an independent research oriented
study, which obviously would involve much more complex process and
methodology than doing it by just encouraging the students ' reflect and
document' these processes. When I made a similar attempt (only difference
being the recorded feedback was supplemented with the response of the
learner when I informally 'cross-examined' the learner regarding the
process that they thought actually took place) just for personal
'gratification' rather than for any research purpose, the range of
response was so varied and 'indeterminate' in nature we found it too
difficult (specially because we did not wish to expand the scope and
complexity of our initiative for reasons I would enumerate a bit later)
the to actually extract a common identifiable thread in the process
involved which would 'unequivocally' indicate or identify the process
involved. However, our 'experience' may provide some useful direction for
focusing Margaret's effort.
To start with the responses seemed to lead to 'something'; but soon we
realized their limitations. Without going into details it can be stated by
hindsight that limitations of the responses (in terms of analyzing it for
clues) could be attributed to the fact that our education concerns itself
almost exclusively with vertical thinking. While recording their responses
the learner seemed to be pre-occupied with the thought of 'what seems to
be the right way' while 'exploring' his /her thought process and more often
than not the parameters to judge 'the right way' being limited to one's
personal analytic ability we found the explorations were not 'provocative'
enough to reflect any in-depth analysis of the process. We also realized
that any attempt to provide external 'provocation' to explore any deeper
mostly resulted in eliciting more 'right' responses which fit
well-recognized patterns.
Preliminary analysis of the responses and recorded feedback lead us to
'conclude' (we intentionally avoided referring to existing research and
reports to make our 'task' more enjoyable and 'open'-ended and also
because ours was not a 'research' project in true sense) that while using
hyper-media and /or authoring tools to interpret an 'information' and
use it correctly required the learners to make a number of inferences
which they make with unfaltering accuracy. The rules of inference are based
on individual's learning (or otherwise) experience and the output has more
to do with 'creativity' (in the sense that it leads to a new way of seeing
and expanding the idea, more in line with Sternberg's concept of insight of
being 'selective' than Koestler's 'bisociation') than one's ability to
'sequencing' the information like mathematical programming. The whole
process seems (I don't have enough evidence to say 'is' instead of 'seems')
to be quite well developed 'imaginative thinking' ( expansive in nature)
rather than being 'evaluative thinking' (convergent in nature). (It is
because of this 'finding', or rather observation. of 'divergent nature
of thinking' I disagreed with the doubts expressed by Benzamin in earlier
interaction). Then the learner seemed to take up some sort of
'brain-storming' pooling different ideas from different sets of information
the learner has gathered (or have been presented with, in case of an
authoring tool) and use some sort of 'mind-map', rather than a purely
logical 'flow-chart', to classify these ideas before 'selecting' the ideas
he /she wishes to develop further. These initial observations and
semi-analytical results lead us to believe that the process involved ( in
the authoring-tool or hyper-media based learning or designing ) had all the
ingredients of a 'creative process' (as on probing the literature on
creativity and 'creative thinking' right from Wallas' (1926) and
Sternberg's (1988) exposition on creativity to Newell, Shaw and Simon 's
concept of creative thinking, 'Snow-flake model of creativity' developed
by Perkin which talks of 'personal aesthetic' and 'mental mobility', and
Kahney's (1986) study on problem solving we could not but accept that
the response provided by the learners pointed towards a high degree of
creative thinking is involved in the process). We also found (by comparing
different 'levels of input' by various trainers and learners and the final
'outcome' ) that the time and efforts invested in planning, analyzing and
developing the idea had direct correlation with the scope of 'creativity'.
We were also perplexed ( as we could not fully explain the reason for the
apparent contradiction, and the possible explanations provided by others
did not, somehow, convince me) to observe that higher the 'creative
thinking' capability of a learner (as depicted by quality of their work)
less is his capability to exactly 'reflect and document ' these processes
(their responses getting more and more expansive and in a sense less
'well-defined'). This last observation together with our finding that the
process involves 'creative thinking' made me think again of the purpose (or
'worth' in Margaret's word) of my initiative and my discussions (which felt
more like 'cross-examinations' as I was trying to fathom the depth of
their reply and responses) I strongly felt that may be doing injustice to
the learner (particularly the more creative ones) as exposing them to this
additional 'work evaluation' may lead to undermining their intrinsic
motivation which in turn may inhibit creativity. This is the reason (which
I promised earlier to state) I decided not to carry out my 'investigations'
any further (for which I have no regrets).
Dr. M. Goswamy
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