LRND 6820

I enjoyed watching your presentations, and thought your final products were terrific.  Both teams went far beyond the sources cited by Carr, and used a nice combination of research and logic to make their arguments.  Your actual VoiceThread presentations were nicely polished.  (The rebuttals were particularly impressive since, unlike your initial postings, you had a very limited time in which to complete them.)

It was also interesting to see how you used online tools to collaborate.  The affirmative team made good use of a wiki to both organize itself and to develop material in private for public presentation via VoiceThread.  I also got to watch Aaron and Breanna compose the the negative team’s first presentation in real time in Google Docs.  I have used Google Apps many times and for many projects before, but I had not yet had the opportunity to see multiple people edit a document simultaneously (outside of the soon-to-be-defunct Google Wave.)  While watching and chatting with them via the built-in instant messaging feature, it made me wish tools like this were available when I was teaching language arts and communication classes to high school students.  Being able to read and give feedback on a final written product is one thing, but being able to work with students while they’re writing and also to “rewind” the edits of a document step by step to see the process students went through to get to a final product opens the door to a lot of new possibilities from a teaching perspective.

Another interesting takeaway observation for me was the value of using a mix of both synchronous and asynchronous tools for collaborative projects.  While both teams ultimately put asynchronous tools to productive use, several students commented in their blog posts at the end of the week that having a “live” meeting face-to-face or via Skype or Elluminate at the beginning of the project would have been helpful in getting organized and making sure each member of the team had a shared vision for the end product and a clear sense of which team member would be responsible for each project element.  (Doing this was “suggested,” and I know that there were some attempts by students to organize these live meetings, but it sounds like it might be a good idea to actually build a live meeting into the project requirements for future semesters.)

It was also nice to see people using various online tools in combination (search tools, wikis, shared documents, e-mail, bookmarking tools, Skype, etc., not to mention VoiceThread itself.)  In my view, one of the characteristics of a truly web-literate student is the ability to thoughtfully select (and combine) tools appropriate for accomplishing a particular task.  This is an area where I’ve seen a lot of progress among LRND students over the course of the semester.  While we often (and rightly, for the most part) say that online learning is “not about the tools,” I hope this project has helped underline the value of incorporating an appropriate variety of tools into the learning experiences you design in the future, especially when your goal is to help learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to grapple with “open ended” problems and answer questions that don’t have a single “right answer.”   

Finally, I was pleased that both teams uncovered arguments and articles I had not encountered previously related to the topic of the debate, so I got to learn a lot of new things last week as well.  Since the activity was “competitive,” it made sense that each team would keep it’s resources “secret” from the other prior to and during the debate.  However, now that the debate is over, please either open the worksite you used to prepare for the debate to members of the other team (so, the wiki for the affirmative team and the Google Doc for the negative team) or add links to the resources you found to our shared Diigo group library.  I think both teams found resources that students will find future uses for related to other projects.

Most of you also shared in your shared in your summary blog posts that your own views on the topic of the debate are not “black and white.”  To try to synthesize across blog posts a bit, to the extent that the arguments resulted in a consensus, that consensus would be as follows:

• The hyperlinked nature of the web as a medium DOES influence how we interact with information and ideas, and probably does have some influence on how we think.
• However, while there are some risks and unintended consequences associated with online media, the potential benefits of the web for learning are far greater.
• Whether or not Google and the web as a whole make a person smarter or stupider depends largely on whether or not a person (a) has the skills to needed to find information efficiently (b) knows how to evaluate information (from online AND offline sources) critically, and (c) has the skills needed to monitor and regulate their focus and attention.  (All of which can be cultivated and improved with the help of good learning design, teaching and mentoring, and guided reflective practice.  Thus, the ultimate impact of the web on human thinking will depend largely on people like you.)

Of course, your individual blog posts go much deeper than the three bullet points above, so I encourage you to browse each other’s reflections.  I’ve highlighted some particularly good points and added a few comments and questions using the Diigo highlighter and sticky note tools.  To view these, visit the LRND6820 Diigo group.  Please feel free to add your own comments or argue with mine.

I also thought some of you might enjoy the video below.  Much of it (I think) is intended as satire, and I certainly don’t agree with all of it, but I did find some of it funny after the week’s debate.  

Our focus this week in class is “universal design for learning” or “UDL,” with our assigned reading coming from Edyburn.  Frank will be facilitating things this week, and is kicking things off by sharing his overview presentation in a variety of formats with different media enhancements(true to the theme!), including a basic PowerPoint presentation, screencast, and podcast.  All of these are available through our course wiki page, and individually at the links below:

Traditional PowerPoint

I am intrigued by the concept of UDL, because its ambitions go much further than simply take learning materials and environments designed for “typical” students “accessible” to students with disabilities and students from diverse backgrounds.  Instead, the goal of UDL is to embed a variety of ways for learners to interact with curricula and so that the experience of every learner is enhanced, and to integrate technologies that are both “adaptive” and “augmentive.”  (I think there’s actually a strong connection between Edyburn’s view of learning design and Barab and Plucker’s ideas about talent and intelligence, but I’ll let you get into the readings and online discussion before I elaborate on this further.)  

As usual, participate in the running discussion throughout the week, and then synthesize key points of the reading and discussion in your summary blog post by Sunday night.

Next week, we continue on the theme of designing for diversity with a challenging but fascinating reading from Dai and Renzulli (library login required), this one focusing on “gifted” learners, but from a novel “systems” orientation that I think has interesting potential implications and applications for learning design.  Misty will be serving as our facilitator for that article.

The following week, you will each be “presenting” your “personal learning environments” to the rest of the class.  I’ll be posting instructions for signing up for a time slot tomorrow.

Finally, I want to put in a plug for the upcoming NWO STEM Learning Symposium coming up at the Penta Career Center in Perrysburg on Saturday, November 6, where Terry Herman, Sharon Shaffer, myself, and many others from the BGSU technology and education communities will be presenting.  (Terry will be presenting sessions on screencasting.  She and I will also be offering a session on simple tools teachers can use to increase parent and family engagement.  I’ll also be co-presenting with Rachel Winters on “lessons schools could learn from Facebook” to increase student motivation and engagement.  Your LRND 6820 peer Sharon Shaffer will also be presenting a session on PLEs.)  For those of you in and around Bowling Green, this is a super convenient and affordable opportunity to learn and network with educators, administrators, and businesses involved in STEM education from around the state.

If you’re planning to attend, please let me know.  Sharon and I have talked about trying to arrange a morning coffee or lunchtime meet-up as a rare opportunity to meet and talk in person.  It would be great to see you there.

That’s all for now.  Enjoy Frank’s materials, plug in to the conversation, and keep plugging away on your PLEs and research projects.  As always, if you have questions, please feel free to post them as comments to the blog or contact me privately by Skype or e-mail.  Have a great week!