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.

Worst Fears and Best Hopes

My worst fear is that I will not be able to connect my students to a global audience. I hope that I will be able to create the network needed to produce the interaction with other students that would increase their desire to perform at a higher capacity.

1. I will use my students to help me overcome these fears. I will ask them to help me create a network that would include students from another country. I would ask them what suggestions would they make on how to begin creating this network and make it part of their assignment to create this network.

2. I tried to identify to the barriers outlined by Romano and did not find any that I have come in contact with personally.

3. Learning more about blogging and building effective learning communities have lead to my fear of not being able to go global with these communities and being effective in the use of them.

4. As mentioned earlier I plan on shifting the control of creating a global audience that is diverse culturally to the students and get them to mentor me in the effective way to achieve this.

November and Romano Chapter 2 Readings

1. One of the things I want to use that we have learned about in class is having other people look at and evaluate each other’s work. Many students would do just about anything to perform in the sports arenas around the nation. They perform to the applause of the many fans who come to watch their sports activities whether it be at the college or professional levels. November (2001) stated this principle:

The importance of a real audience to motivate students can be a very powerful and positive force. Ask any music teacher or football coach what would happen to student focus, motivation, and intensity if the audience was removed―no more performances and no more games in the stadium. Some of these educators will tell you that the effect of the audience or crowd is one of the strongest catalysts of student motivation. (p. 34)

This is the same reason that many professors continue to publish their research studies. It is the approval of the many individual’s who evaluate their work on a regular basis. If we can incorporate this into the learning environment, it could produce motivation that can not be reached in any other fashion. Using the Word Wide Web to produce collaborative learning would be a great way to incorporate this element into the learning environment. Even if we are teaching a face-to-face class we can have our students publish their work so that other students from different parts of the state, country, or world can evaluate their work which could produce greater motivation for completion and quality of work.

2. I will no longer worry about quantity of technology without first planning for quality of use of technology. If we have all the classrooms in the United States furnished with computers but have not planned on what ways they will be used to increase motivation to learn, then we have accomplished nothing. In addition, when I am creating a online class I will review the 13 factors that Notar, Wilson, and Ross (2002) have suggested during the process.

3. It is very important to use the Internet for connecting students to other cultures. The world we live in requires individuals to develop relationships with others in different cultures. If we as educators can help students develop this skill we will be preparing them for something they are most likely to encounter in the business world.

Romano (2003) made it very clear that a revolution in education is not likely to occur so it is imperative that we bring about an evolution in education with technology. One of the things we need to do is start adding both in the classroom and in the online learning environments ways to increase right brain learning. I have done this by incorporating images into the face-to-face lecture environment. There are many images that I use when teaching psychology that help the student use their right brain learning capabilities. These images help the students visualize some concepts that could be very hard to grasp.

Microsoft Word and Publisher

Word is a very powerful tool for creating documents, merging envelops and labels with addresses, and desktop publishing. I have used Word to do all three of these things and there are many other capabilities that it has besides these. I have used Publisher to create brochures for conferences when I worked in the Education Department at SFA. Since then I have not had a need to use it so it was good to get a refresher on it. I would hope that in the future I will get the opportunity to use Publisher again because I enjoy desktop publishing but just never have a reason to use it in the areas that I am working.

Since my vision/goal is to teach psychology/sociology at the collegiate level I do not see myself using Publisher but Word is something I intend to use quit often. I have already used the track changes part in Word when I graded my students writing assignments for the online course I taught in sociology. I have also used it when I write papers for school. I have a friend who edits my papers for me and I turn on track changes so when she edits it I can tell what she has changed so that I can make sure I agree with the changes. Word is something that I probably take for grant because I use it so much. I forget how powerful it is in other areas like desktop publishing and it was great to be reminded of all those features.

Bloglines and del.icio.us

Class on the 6th was the best class I have been in for a long time. I am completely amazed at the information that we were allowed to become privy too. The site www.bloglines.com will and has allowed me to streamline many things I am trying to accomplish on the Internet. I have enjoyed being able to get on the site and now what knew things have been added to other people's blogs and the new things that are going on in the news and sports. I don't have to wade through a whole lot of duplicated material anymore and in turn make use of my time more wisely. The site www.del.icio.us is another website that was introduced in class on the 6th that has improved my world (i.e., made my life much easier). I am very grateful for learning about this website and being able to centralize all my favorites so I could access them over the Internet. These two things that we learned about shows the vastness of computers and the Internet and how they open the door for never being able to learn all there is to know about them. These are things we can study for the rest of our lifetimes and never stop being able to learn something new. Technology is so exciting and rewarding. Thanks again to everyone who was involved in introducing these new tools into our lives.

Charlie