Month: May 2019

Team Presentation Thoughts

My team for this MALAT course presented last week on our experience with using Ted-Ed as a student. If you have not had the chance to view or read our recent blog, you can see it here. Due to presenting this past weekend, my personal inquiry project was momentarily placed on the back burner. However, by doing this is give me a chance to reflect on my inquiry experience so far.

It was interesting that even though we (Team Ted-Ed) all had the same learning event, our inquiries all ended up being very different. We all naturally chose to focus on different aspects of Ted-Ed, as they ended up being the driving force behind our individual inquiry. Our personal contexts, experiences, and personalities allowed us to have the same experience analyze it with different lenses. This had me thinking about my own students and how little choice they sometimes have as students.

As much as I would love to give my student free rein to learn the material the way they want too, letting go of the control is scary. Allowing students to pick and choose for themselves is scary. Inquiry like we are experiencing in this course is one option to allow students to have more choice. Having had experience with inquiry before as a teacher, I was interested to see how it would go as a student. My students are younger and have less educational experience and skills than I do. Considering how it is going for me, I am wondering how and what to scaffold if I did want to introduce more inquiry or options into my courses. Thinking how it is going for me now, my biggest hurdle is motivation. As Garrison (1997) discusses, motivation is key to self-directed learning, and is impacted by multiple factors, such as expectancy and valence. Even though it is a topic I am interested in, and one I chose for myself, I am still finding the motivation is my biggest hurdle.

As other learners going through an inquiry, what has been your biggest challenge so far?

Reference

Garrison, D. (1997). Self-directed learning: Toward a comprehensive model. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(1), 18-33. doi:10.1177/074171369704800103

Critical Inquiry Log part 1.

Now that we are in full swing of our critical inquiry in LRNT 526, I am going blog more to answer some of my smaller questions I have, and to summarize some of the ideas I found in my readings from the week. From my Individual learning plan that was due last week, I came up with my main question

“How can video-based learning create effective learning communities?”

For this inquiry, effective learning being described best by Anderson (2008) as being “community-centred, knowledge-centred, learner-centred, and assessment-centred” (p.47). Thinking about how I can improve the learning in my own environment, the community aspect is the piece that is missing the most. As discussed by Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw (2015), building community is easier to do through face to face collaboration, than it is with online collaboration. Their findings support my initial instincts that it takes more planning and facilitation to reach the same amount of community.  It is my hope that through my inquiry, I will be able to find how to utilize video-based learning to bridge the gap. One of the ways I had thought would be helpful would be to make the videos more interactive. However, as shown by Reiss (2008) more traditional and less interactive videos were the more effective for learning and retaining information. This showed that sometimes less is more, and the interactive additions may seem like a good idea, but may just fall under the category of adding tech just because it is available.  Reiss (2008) also discussed that when watching and learning from videos, you become more emotionally involved, as opposed to logically. This was an interesting concept for me, and sometime that I want to look further into. If videos are able to target the more emotional portion of our brain, would that be more effective, or less effective for learning?

As this is still very early into my inquiry, I still have lots of ideas to flush out. If you have any questions or ideas for me to consider I would love to hear from you.

Thanks,
Amanda

References

Anderson, T. (2008). Chapter 2: Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson (Ed.), The theory and practice of online learning (2nd ed., pp. 45-74). Edmonton, AB: AU Press.

Wendt, J. L., & Rockinson-Szapkiw, A. J. (2015). The Effect of Online Collaboration on Adolescent Since of Community in Eighth-Grade Physical Science. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 24(5), 671-683. doi: 10.1007/s10956-015-9556-6

Reiss, D. (2008). Video-based multimedia designs: A research study testing learning effectiveness. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, 33(3). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.21432/T2FG64