Online Learning/My Blog-My Vision 4/17

Second Life will be a powerful medium for enhancing online learning experiences for students. The developers of Second Life still have a lot of kinks to iron out of the program but as they continue to develop it the program will become more user friendly. The idea of being able to use the movie screen inside Second Life to teach math classes will certainly empower teachers to demonstrate some very difficult concepts by working the problems on the screen for the class to see and have access to when they need it.

In the future, Virtual High Schools (VHS) will make it possible for students who cannot make in the traditional classroom setting to graduate high school rather than dropping out and not being able to further their education. It will also empower students, who do not have a problem with traditional classroom settings, by allowing them to be a part of something they have become very familiar with. I believe students should always be given a choice in the type of median they want to experience when it comes to learning. Some students do not like online learning environments and others would have it no other way. November (2001) stated that the students who do not do well in online classes are those who sit in the front of the class and who answers the questions and have the chance to shine in front of all their classmates because they are quick-witted. He believed that if students do not want to be their (i.e., an online class), they will not do well.

The VHS and Second Life will continue to grow and as the “old guard” leaves and the new one takes over we will see more and more uses of these powerful median for learning. The future hold some very exciting things for those who are willing to venture out into the virtual world and grasp the power it has for teaching students.

Windows Movie Maker

Here is a video I made with Windows Movie Maker of my graduation in the Summer of 2005.

Primary Sources and NARA

This is great stuff. I never knew anything about Primary Sources and NARA. I consider this a great find that will enhance the students learning experience when I teach face-to-face classes or completely online classes. I plan on substituting one of the writing assignments for an assignment where students have to use http://www.archives.gov/index.html to access primary sources of information on one of the individuals who have influenced psychology/sociology. I intend on suppling them with several names of individuals (e.g., Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner or John B. Watson) associated with psychology and tell them to search these archives for a primary source document print it out and write a two page paper describing the primary source, how it is related to the individual they were researching, and how the feel searching for a primary source helped enhance their learning experience. I will do the same thing for a sociology class but substitute individuals who influenced sociology (e.g. Emily Durkheim, Herbert Spencer or George Herbert Mead).

My Blog-My Vision Posting: 4/3

I see that many instructors are apprehensive about teaching via teleconference because of the extra load it causes them and not adequate compensation for the extra work. I have been in a teleconference setting where the home class was teleconferenced to other areas and we interacting with each other. We had to push buttons to talk so that our classmates could hear use talk as we made comments. I can see the added pressure that the instructor would have in dealing with twice as many students and from a distance. I believe this could be resolved by reduce the instructors work load if they had to teach teleconference class as well as compensate them with an increase in the amount of money allotted for teaching these types of classes.

“Experience over the past 50 years indicates that any application of television—or any technology—that compromises the teacher’s traditional role in the classroom inevitably will engender resistance” (p. 77). I experience this when I am worried about how much I should reveal about the amount of technology I use in the traditional classroom setting. There are some traditional instructors who would frown on the use of WebCT for taking quizzes, exams and having discussion postings.

“Television’s primary role in education is not to supplant teachers. Rather, it can be adapted to supplement their capacity to impart audible and visible information, thus enhancing the fuel that powers the teaching-learning process and consequently the outcome” (p. 78). I believe this and use movies to portray certain things I am trying to teach in psychology. There are some things a movie can show more realistically than I could ever show any other way.

The above is reiterated in the perception “Television’s fundamental role in the classroom is to allow teachers to eliminate the compromise of using verbal descriptions of anything that can be seen, thus enhancing the quality of the information they make available to the learners, enhancing the outcome of the teaching-learning process” (p. 80).

I have experienced the perception “The mind coupled with a computer infinitely amplifies its capacity to perform the basic cognitive functions. Yet, there is no configuration of microchips that replicates the intricate, vital interface between mind and emotions―a basic limitations of computers” (p. 87). I have seen this in communication with email where you cannot express emotions and cannot tell what people are trying to express because you are not face-to-face with them knowing really how they feel because you can see it in there face.

Romano, M. T. (2003). Empowering Teachers with Technology. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Perceptions

One of Romano’s perceptions was that the final out-come of the teaching-learning process relies heavily on how teachers handle the vast amount of information generated with the digital age. He included a profound statement “Thompson said that the successful teacher primarily manages information, not students” (p. 52). This may be true at the collegiate level but any education lower than that seems to make demands on teachers to spend more time managing students to be successful in their classrooms.

Romano (2003) stated that the master instructors in the Information Age will be those individuals who can sort through all the vast amounts of data provided by the Worldwide Web and pick out only the information that will enhance the students learning experience. This is something I am trying to improve myself by taking this class so that I can develop more effective learning communities. The words “replicas” and “referents” helped me to better understand how the quality of the experience you are trying replicate to learners is derived from the disparity between the referent and the replica. This disparity determines the fidelity of information you are trying to bring into the learners environment.

Another one of Romano’s perceptions identified the fundamental level of all learning being done through the senses which consist of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling. In past teaching experiences, I have tried to bring in each on of the senses during the learning process. It is very difficult to always use all of the senses all the time but over the course of the whole semester different ones can be used to help students’ process information.

I think the perception presented by Romano that overwhelmed my cognitive ability to comprehend was “Human progress from the Stone Age to the Information Age resulted primarily from amplifying individuals’ capacity to function, first by empowering them with crude implements, then tools, then machines, and now technology. He later inferred that the amplifier brought about by the computer and its being able to link across the world with distribution technologies is “too awesome to contemplate” (p. 47). This would bring about a million-fold multiplication of a million-fold amplifier which is more than I can comprehend. I know that the technological knowledge we have now grow exponentially every so many years and we have not even come close to what the future could hold in technology which will effect the teacher.

Romano (2003) stated “A verbal description alone of anything that can be seen must be considered a compromise; a compromise made every day in classrooms in an age when technology makes it unnecessary” (p. 56). This is why I try to use all the visual aids I can when I teach face-to-face. I put pictures of neurotransmitters and etc. on my website and pull them up and project them on the screen in the front of the class. In addition, I use movies to show an accurate portrayal of a particular disorder we are talking about.

Creating this type of learning experience encroaches on Romano’s perception that there is enough scientific evidence “That learning is heightened when teachers create visually rich experiences, thus engaging the learner’s entire brain―rather than only half. This evidence has encouraged me to include even more visual aids and continue to use WebCT to enrich the learners experience so that both sides of their brains will be used during the learning process.

Romano, M. T. (2003). Empowering Teachers with Technology. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.