The Weekly – Part 2
Hello all,
Following up on yesterday’s post, I wanted to add just a few of my own random thoughts on UDL based on the discussion and activities last week, and share a few reminders about the PLE presentations next week.
The Week That Was
Frank provided an excellent introduction to the principles of Universal Design for Learning, along with opportunities to see some of the principles applied in actual curriculum modules.
In student blog posts, everyone expressed seeing value in the application of UDL principles, both for making online content accessible to people with disabilities and for enhancing learning for all. I hope that, as you read the Edyburn article and explored the CAST resources Frank suggested, you saw some connections with the findings from the Cisco report we read earlier regarding effective strategies for enhancing learning with media.
One of the elements of UDL that I find particularly appealing (and that Matt also commented on in his blog post) is its consideration of “affective networks.” Learner motivation is such a critical element for success, yet consideration of learner motives is often given short shrift. (Think back to the Hardre article on motivation we read. Can you see connections between the issues in that article and the coverage of affective networks in UDL?) When learners have choices about how to pursue a learning objective — not only because they can choose to use media that play to their strengths, but because of a relationship between choice and persistence. When learners have a sense of ownership and control, they are more likely to persist when they encounter challenges. Their tolerance for frustration increases, making them less likely to quit before mastering new material than they would be if they perceive the learning process as being highly prescriptive. This is true for students with disabilities (who often face frustrating circumstances others do not) and everyone else when attempting to grapple with particularly challenging content. (Look for this theme in the Dai and Renzulli article this week on giftedness as well.)
Another interesting thread I noticed running through some of the discussion comments last week was a criticism that the UDL resources we explored did not adequately address students who may learn best “kinesthetically” through physical experiences and hands-on activities. (Good observation.) I wonder if we’ll see that gap addressed soon as technology for making devices more physically aware becomes more common place and as tools for producing media that users interact with through “natural interfaces” become popularly available. For example, a few years ago, using physical movement and feedback in educational media was science fiction. Now, however, devices like iPods and iPads perceive touch and can track their own physical positions, movement, and orientation to the ground and the user. The new Xbox Kinect add-on allows game players to compete in virtual environments using only natural body movement to maneuver and interact with objects within games. Can you envision ways these technologies could be used to create online learning opportunities for students who learn through movement and physical experience that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, either by “augmenting reality” or providing more immersive experiences in virtual worlds?
Finally, I wanted to share a couple of interesting popular media articles that I happend to stumble across on the same day and which I thought provided interesting contrasts on how people incorporate technology into their lives and cognitive processes. Specifically, these two pieces deal with memory.
One is from Wired, and chronicles the life of Piotr Wozniak, a Polish software developer, who created an application called Super Memo. Super Memo is based on the work of German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who discovered a “spacing effect” that applied to memorization. In a nutshell, Ebbinghaus found that rote memorization can be improved dramatically in most people by optimally timed repetitions of information. Wozniak used Ebbinhaus’ work to create an algorithm upon which Super Memo is based. Super Memo’s magic, then, lies in its ability to repeat exposure to the same material for its users at just the right time. According to Wired, Wozniak now uses the software himself and is essentially living an experiment to explore the limits of the brain for memorization. While he has successfully mastered extraordinary amounts of information, the software has come to dominate his life, as he shuns activities and attachments that might interfere with his availability for interacting with content stored in Super Memo at the optimal time according to the algorithm. (By the way, a similar tool is now built into the web interface for Amazon Kindle.)
The contrasting article is a post from the Evernote blog. Evernote is a software application for computers and smart phones for capturing and organizing notes, web pages, photos, and voice memos. The post describes how Patrick Jones uses the software to help compensate for severe memory problems stemming from a series of eight concussions. Due to his injuries, Jones lacks the internal ability to do the kind of memorization Wozniak has organized his life around. Instead, Jones has figured out strategies for using software to “offload” the task of remembering to software. Jones relies on computer hardware to store information he needs to remember, and then uses tools like Evernote, a mind-mapping application called Curio (which can be used to visualize connections among bits of information stored in Evernote) and desktop search engines to recall and reconstruct information. While Jones suffers physical symptoms from his injuries such as fatigue and headaches, he maintains a full-time job as a chaplain, hikes, travels, and runs his own foundation.
I thought the stories were interesting. One man, with a normal capacity for memory, has almost become subservient to technology, while the other man (with a significant disability) who uses technology very differently from the first man (but with a somewhat similar goal) is liberated by it.
I hope you’ll check them out at the links below:
Wired: Want to Remember Everything? Surrender to This Algorithm
Evernote Blog: Patrick Jones – User Profile
This Week
As noted in my previous post, Misty is facilitating our reading this week on “Snowflakes, Living Systems, and the Mysteries of Giftedness.” After reading the article, please view Misty’s overview presentation and respond to her discussion questions via her blog. Don’t forget to write and share your summary blog posts by Sunday night synthesizing the reading and the discussion throughout the week.
Coming Up
Next week is our week of PLE presentations.
As a reminder, the requirements for the PLE project and presentations are included in the slides below.
Rather than try to coordinate “live” presentation sessions, we’ll go with asynchronous presentations via screencast in which you provide a narrated “guided tour” through your PLE based on the project requirements.
Please remember that a component of the assignment is providing feedback on the PLEs and presentations of at least five of your peers via comments on their blog or posted screencast. To allow everyone ample time and opportunity to view and review screencasts, remember to post your screencast by 9:00 PM this Sunday night, and to keep your screencast to a length of 15 minutes or less.
If you are new to screencasting, a few easy-to-use tools you may want to explore are Screencast, Jing, or Snapz Pro X (for Mac users only.) All three offer free basic or trial versions which should suffice for this project. (BTW, for a quick overview of screencasting, check out Terry Herman’s session at the NWO Symposium on Saturday.)
Aaron has already posted his PLE screencast, which is embedded below. It’s a good example, so please check it out. (Thanks, Aaron, for posting early!)
If you have any questions, as always, please post a comment or send a message via Twitter.
That’s all for now. I hope to see some of you on Saturday at the Symposium and wish you a good (and healthy) week.
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