Military and Instructional Design

What instructional design practices and issues in corporate and military do you feel are similar and different from k-20 education?

1. Efficiency is (or should be) a priority in both the military and education.
2. Ultimately, the goal is for the learner to LEARN the material. The purpose and emphasis is different in different situations. In the military, not learning something can get you or someone else killed. In business, not learning something can get you fired. In schools, unfortunately for many kids not learning something seems to have little ramifications – especially when they see summer school as an easier alternative. This needs to change in education!!
3. The military does not seem to differentiate for different learning styles – one size fits all approach. But the same could be said about some teachers…
4. In the military the learning is much more hands on or in the field training. Classrooms traditionally tend to be learning within 4 walls of a room for 50 -90 minutes a day. Subjects are learned, but not connected or made relevant to one another. Thankfully ID can help change this.
5. The military leadership supports lifelong learning – as the book points out on page 191, opportunities present themselves most often to those who have sought to continue learning. This is not always a priority for students in a classroom. Often they “memorize” not learn, the material to pass a test and quickly forget the material. Emphasis is not always placed on applying that learning and seeking more information independently.

Should we develop general theories and models of ID that are applicable to all environments or should there be local theories and models for business, military and education?

I believe that as some basic rules of ID and Learning Theory are established and undergoing further testing and research eventually more institutions that need to instruct learners (businesses, schools, the military) will begin to use research based methods. I don’t think that there will ever be a “one size fits all” approach, because different agencies have different needs that need to be met or resources available to them and slight alterations may have to be made.

Distributed Learning

The web 2.0 tools that are available to teachers today are providing teachers with numerous tools to help them extend the learning of students outside of the traditional classroom. Distributed learning by definition is any educational or training experience that uses a variety of means, including technology, to enable learning. For these tools to effectively support distributed learning they should support learning outcomes, support or create a classroom community and climate, encourage interaction among learners, and encourages students to seek knowledge. Teachers wishing to enhance their curriculum and expand their classroom beyond the traditional four walls of the classroom are using these new Web 2.0 tools to support distributed learning.

Thankfully, there are several resources available to teachers to help implement these tools in their classrooms. Some of the best sites I found are listed below with a brief description:

How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement
http://mashable.com/2010/03/01/twitter-classroom/

This website gives some great insight about using Twitter in larger classrooms to enhance classroom discussion. It is worth noting that students do not have to use a cell phone to access Twitter – they can also use laptops. This is a great way to ask keep the discussion and lines of communication open even after class.

30+ Ways to Use FourSquare in Education
http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2010/30-ways-to-use-foursquare-in-education/

This website has some great ideas for using FourSquare in (and out of) the classroom. I don’t think I would link my facebook or personal check-in’s unless I were doing so from a “school account” set up for educational purposes – but, the other ideas, especially those for field trips, are definitely worth looking at!

Web 2.0 in the Classroom
http://web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com/

This blogger provides good overviews & introductions to specific Web 2.0 tools and has MANY useful links. If you are unfamiliar with Web 2.0 in Education this is a good place to start. :)

Challenges & Technology Issues in K-12 Schools

What is your perspective of the systemic change model described in chapter 21? Will such model work in the school district you work or you know?

Both the Guidance System for Transforming Education (page 211) or the Step-Up-To-Excellence model (page 213) do seem like a plans that could work effectively to redesign a school or school system. Both plans offer opportunities for stakeholder involvement, support for innovative ideas, identification of needs, and defined roles for involved parties, all within a defined, but workable framework.

This system could in fact be beneficial in some of the school districts and schools that have been identified as needing improvement. Either plan could be applied to a school or a district. I have served on several SACS Quality Assurance Review Teams and find the SACS (or similar self-study) programs help to serve the school in a similar fashion. The schools have to identify strengths and weaknesses and then create actionable items to combat the weaknesses. These 2 plans provide a similar (yet more complex) framework for this type of evaluation and redesign process.

In your opinion what should be the role of educational technology in k-12 systemic reform?

Often educational technology seems to come as an afterthought when planning curriculum and schools in general. This seems to be the case more often than not in schools. In my other classes we have looked at school technology plans and find that many of them are poorly written and do not really support educational technology in classrooms/whole schools. Why even have a separate plan? Educational technology should be part of the school-wide improvement plan! Students are demanding more and more technology and schools need to have a usable, efficient plan in place to meet those needs!

KMS & Informal Learning

Knowledge Management Systems

After our conversation in class last week my husband and I started discussing Knowledge Management Systems – Why in the world would he want to talk to me about my class work?? Well, he is part of a “business intelligence” team that essentially creates systems that are very similar to KMS. They build databases and the dashboard (user interface) to operate them. I have tried to summarize the general conclusions we came to!

In education, just as industry, exists the need to ‘share’ knowledge across the organization. This knowledge could be as simple as ‘what time does the bell ring’ or as advanced as ‘how to handle a student’s discipline issues’ and is often best relayed through a peer in the same organization. To meet this need, Knowledge Management Systems, or KMS, have become a popular type of technology intended to allow members of a community to share and contribute their knowledge to other members of the same community. On the surface, we can probably think of several uses for knowledge based systems, which include teacher-to-teacher methods discussion, or administrator-to-teacher procedure guides. Personally, I would love to have a resource with all of our user manuals in one place for the tech tools we have on campus. In the ideal environment, these types of systems would be readily accessible to answer questions and serve as a resource for peers, by peers. This would be especially helpful if “tech support” is limited or not around.

However, since we operate in conditions that are often less than ideal, KMS, becomes a much more difficult concept to implement successfully. Creating and maintaining KMS can be a time consuming process. The “human-ware” associated with this can be very expensive. This additional cost can be a burden for many school systems. Teachers often complain of time being taxed already and adding KMS maintenance to the list of responsibilities could be met with resistance from teachers.

An additional concern to KMS, which has been expressed in private industry, is the perception that sharing and documenting knowledge or a resource that you possess may result in a loss of a competency which has become a competitive advantage for some teachers, when compared to their peers. For example, a science teacher with a highly developed, personal and successful method of teaching DNA would argue that they should not ‘have’ to share this knowledge with other teachers unless it is by choice of the teacher where variations of the lesson are allowed. As we’ve seen with emerging technologies before, the technical part of KMS is less challenging than managing the change needed in user behavior becomes the true roadblock to successful implementation.

Informal Learning

I love the Winston Churchill quote about the difference in learning and being taught! I think for many people this is so true.

Technology in education opens up so many opportunities for informal learning. In my own experience I have used Twitter to help stimulate some informal learning experiences by posting links to current articles online that I have found. This will often spark the interest of students who either discuss the topic online or in class the next day. I have even had students who found something on their own share via twitter with the class.

Even without technology, my classroom itself provides opportunities for informal learning. I have posters and artifacts everywhere that will often spark discussions. I also have numerous books for students to peruse if they need to keep themselves busy!

HPT & EPSS

Description of HPT:

- What is meant by human performance? The book defines the term HPT with 3 parts: Vision, concept, and Desired End.
Vision – What goals are not being met? Why aren’t these goals being met? What are some possible barriers? Concept – How are goals going to be met? What interventions will be suggested? Desired End- Were the goals met after the intervention was implemented?

- Where is it most applied? HPT has most often been applied in a military or business setting. Lately, there have been attempts to improve education with this form of evaluation and intervention.

- What are the key strengths and limitations? Some of the key strengths are that HPT can provide a very individualized analysis of a problem. When a problem is identified, HPT can provide support through the intervention. Overall, HPT has been shown to improve the effectiveness of workers and therefore improve the effectiveness of an organization as a whole. Some of the limitations are that they can be very labor intensive to create because the analysis is so individualized.

Applications of HPT & EPSS in Education:
- Describe and discuss examples in education setting: The article Systemic Efforts in Georgia to Improve Education Leadership, written by Deb Page, provides a good example of HPT and its potential for use in education. This school system used a systematic approach to identify the needs of school systems, define what was needed from the leadership, find solutions to meet the needs, and finally to evaluate the impact of these solutions after implementation. This article shows that HPT can have value when evaluating schools and school systems.

- Can HPT & EPSS be applied widely nationally to improve school effectiveness? Possibly – I think HPT and EPSS may be more beneficial to school systems, but may not be the best intervention for specific students or teachers. HPT can help a school or school district identify possible problems and underlying factors. EPSS systems are very labor intensive to create and therefore can incur a large cost to the institution.

- What are some possible opportunities & challenges? EPSS could be beneficial to teachers to help provide technical support in schools that may not have on site support. EPSS systems that can help walk teachers through creating an online gradebook or logging into a school network email account would save the time of an on-site tech support person as well as enable the teacher to work through a problem without waiting for a tech support person to show up to help.

Challenges could be the sheer amount of time and money to keep up with EPSS systems that will need to change as needs evolve. If programs/software are not renewed each year the EPSS system will need to be updated to reflect those changes. Again, this costs time and money!

- If you are a technology leader at a school or school district, how would you apply it to improve your organization’s effectiveness? Again, I think EPSS systems could definitely help teachers and students “help themselves” so to speak. HPT may be best if left to help evaluate the overall effectiveness of the district or school. This systematic process can help a school self-diagnose issues, provide possible strategies/solutions, support the implementation of those solutions, and then finally assess the amount of change as a result of the implementation of those suggested strategies.

note: I am an idiot who apparently doesn't know the difference between "publish Post and "save now"....I apologize for just finding my error now, but here is my post! (this week is coming soon!)

Design-Based Research

What is design-based research? How does it differ from traditional research?

I like 2 definitions of design research:

1. The book definition on page 48, Design research uses continuous cycles of design, implementation, analysis, and redesign. Design research not only uses but also produces sharable theories that have implications for practitioners and designers with a focus on design in authentic setting.
2. Ann Brown’s 1992 definition that design research “was introduced with the expectation that researchers would systematically adjust various aspects of the designed context so that each adjustment served as a type of experimentation that allowed the researchers to test and generate theory in naturalistic contexts” (Barab & Squire, p. 3).

Both of these definitions give a good explanation of design research. I think there are a few keys to understanding design-based research and how it differs from traditional research.

1. Cyclical Process = Design, Revision & Evaluation - This form of research is a process that is continually evaluated and revised as needed throughout the study. This revision is one of the key aspects of design research. Traditional research does not change throughout the process, rather the experiment takes place in a controlled laboratory setting in which the researcher observes the differences between the control group and experimental group with as little interference as possible from the researcher. The outcomes are then reported as the study’s findings. In design research if the intervention is not working, or needs to be modified evaluation and revision is an acceptable part of the process - in fact it is a key element of design research!
2. Naturalistic setting/Authentic setting - For me, the ability to conduct research about learning and teaching has to take place in a realistic setting - the classroom. This ability to conduct research in the actual classrooms (the most natural or authentic setting for learners) is critical to accurately testing theories or practices. While there are limitations to research in a classroom because of the many variables that can affect learning, those limitations can be carefully accounted for and moderated to the best of the researcher’s ability.

Which type makes more sense to you and would be more valuable in advancing theory, research and practice of educational technology?

I believe that design research would be most beneficial to advancing theory, research, and practice of educational technology because the research is conducted in that naturalistic, authentic classroom setting. In my experience, once you take the students out of their natural learning environment (the classroom) they tend to act differently than they would in the “normal” classroom. More importantly, the aspects of design research that allow for changes to be made as the research process continues is one of the most important aspects of design research. What works for one student or group of students won’t always work for every student. The ability to make changes and try again or try another approach can provide valuable insight into the learning process. Researcher conclusions about why one intervention worked with one group and not the other can help future researchers either repeat the same study or better anticipate ways in which to modify the study to achieve results.

This evolutionary process is important to educational technology because technology changes so quickly! If research was based on one specific type of technology, i.e. a certain brand of software or hardware, that study would be very limited in terms of generizability and applicability to other situations. If research is more focused on educational technology theories and practices, those studies will remain useful as the technologies change because the theories will be backed by research studies that can attest to their applicability.

How would you use design-based research in an educational or training setting you're familiar with?

This is ideal for conducting research in an actual classroom like my own. In fact, when I was looking at other types of research in preparing for my wiki study last semester, design research seemed like a feasible solution. True experimental groups are hard to come by in a school. As I have experienced, the group that does not get the experimental treatment feels “left out.” In my case it was my World History Senior classes that weren’t even part of the study. When they heard I was using a wiki in my American History classes they immediately asked why I wasn’t using it with them! So imagine having 2 American History classes that get a treatment that is supposed to benefit the students and enhance the class and 1 American History class that did not receive this treatment. The students in the class may care (or in my case, may not care :( ) that they did not receive this treatment and feel left out - if the kids don’t care their parents certainly will!

Another classroom issue concerning research is that you are teaching students who ultimately do need to learn the material. If an intervention fails to teach the lesson or if students fail to learn for any reason it has to be retaught. Teachers (well good ones at least!) cannot just simply say "oh that didn't work" and move on to the next lesson. Design research allows for those changes to be made in the intervention so that the material can still be taught in a way for the students to understand. Design research also sees value in theory building based on these types of observations.

Ultimately, I classified my wiki study as Action Research which is very similar to design research. To make my wiki study follow a more design-based research structure, the research questions would have to change to be more theoretical and less prescriptive/explanatory. My research questions focused on how and why the wiki would change behavior, attitudes, etc. but to be more design research they would need to be more theoretical in nature & focus more on the learning process.

Reflection Week 3&4

What a class conversation! The first part of the discussion about the different learning theories (Behaviorist, Cognitivist, & Constructivist) both cleared up some questions and supported the conclusions I had drawn myself. I had said previously that I thought I had incorporated more behaviorist theory in my own classes. As we discussed these theories I realized that while I do incorporate a good bit of drill and practice I actually should give myself more credit! I often incorporate many more learning strategies to accommodate for multiple learning styles. I often incorporate projects, videos, audio, pictures, and cooperative learning activities. All of these would be much more constructivist than behaviorist.

I realized that I don’t incorporate much constructivist theory. Perhaps this is because of my content material or because my students always seem to be much more reluctant to take more control of their own learning. Either way, I see this as a challenge to myself – incorporate more “real world” learning activities!

In regards to some of the other learning theories – Behavioral Learning theory, Cognitive Learning theory, & Piaget’s Development theory – as teachers, we may know these theories but reviewing them from time to time is always a good idea! We also discussed how these theories relate to research. These theories provide a framework or base for research & inspire new research. The framework set in place by previous research can both strengthen theories as well as challenge old notions as students and learning evolve.

These theories and how they relate to research are important to the understanding of research as a whole. Teachers often (and if they don’t they should!) look to research to find new and innovative strategies to implement in their own classroom. Without this knowledge it is hard for teachers to read current research and implement research-based strategies in their own classrooms. To fully understand this research teachers need to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive theories. Descriptive theories describe how and why a particular strategy works. Prescriptive theories prescribe or predict outcomes based on a set of variables. Teachers can use these descriptive and prescriptive theories to help teachers implement new strategies in their own classrooms because these theories can provide teachers with a fundamental basis for their innovations (descriptive) as well as probable expected outcomes based on the innovation (prescriptive). By understanding these research-based theories, teachers can better allocate their own time and resources to implementing these strategies in their own classrooms.

As far as future research is concerned, I agree with the conclusion Elen & Clarebout describe in regards to descriptive and prescriptive theories that although descriptive and prescriptive theories can be distinguished they are highly interrelated (p 708). These theories are separate, but they complement each other to explain past research and support new research. This cycle of descriptive and prescriptive will only continue to inspire new research and support or disprove old research as this field continues to evolve!

Reflection (Week 1 &2)

Chapters 1-3, AECT Handbook - Historical Foundations, & Classroom discussion.

Well, as a history teacher I enjoyed reading the chapters and foundations article as well as our classroom discussion! Even though I teach about Socrates, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Turn of the Century, and the 1900s, I often don't get the chance to really think about HOW those teachers were teaching and what they were using to teach. Sometimes we get so caught up on the newest technology, we forget that Socrates had little more than a porch and his voice! I also find it fascinating that the 1840s saw the first "blackboard"! I guess I just always took it for granted & never thought about where that technology came from. The 17th century saw slides illuminated by oil lamps, the 1900s saw silent movies and eventually recorded sound with those movies - all things that I teach about, but never really stopped to think about them as educational tools. Photographic images, movies, and recorded sound are all things that we barely even consider technology anymore. I know in my own experience I get funny looks from students when I introduce something like barbed wire or the phonograph as new forms of technology. I have to remind my students that technology does not have to require electricity or batteries, but it just means that it is an improvement over what you had before the new technology.

I also found the information presented about media use during and after WWII very interesting. The fact that Hollywood directors and actors produced over 400 sound films and over 400 silent filmstrips is amazing! Using these films to train troops not only taught them to care for their weapons, but teaching them about jungle diseases like malaria kept them safe as well. These films were also used to inform citizens. Even Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had wartime films that encouraged citizens to buy war bonds or recycle materials.

A few things that come up often when talking about the lack of technology used in the classroom today was also an issue in the 1940s &50s - lack of teacher training, limited budgets, and lack of resources! It is very easy for us to think that these are new issues, but in reality they are the very issues that always seem to come when implementing any new technology.

Then came the computers! Computers in the classroom were going to change education forever! Well, they did, didn't they? Just maybe not the way it was originally envisioned. I remember as a kid playing "Oregon Trail" for hours during "Computer Lab" classes in the library. Thinking back there was not much to it & I probably learned more about playing computer games than what life was actually like along the Trail - well, I did learn I did not want to lose little Susie to dysentery or get my wagon wheels stuck in the mud! :)

With the creation of (and continued emphasis on) Instructional Design models, these new technologies are being implemented more efficiently and with more emphasis on student learning. HOW students learn (cognitivism, constructivism) has also emerged as important to the instructional design process and the implementation of technology into the classroom. These models, like ADDIE, ensure that the learning process is learner centered, has specific goals, is meaningful, is measurable, is revisable, & the creation usually involves many viewpoints. I would be willing to bet if the "Oregon Trail" game has been remade for classroom use Instructional Design strategies were used!

Students of the "Digital Age" have the world at their fingertips with the Internet, mobile devices, and even virtual schooling the world is so much more open to students than ever before. Socrates had his voice and a porch - today I have my voice AND voices from all over the world! Teachers today can use recorded videos from the History Channel, websites from around the world, and live streaming video of experts that the kids can question. What would Socrates think about that!?

Getting Started!

Hello everyone!

I am looking forward to this semester with all of you - from these 2 classes alone I know we will continue to have great, lively discussions! It is refreshing to see so many different viewpoints & hear so many different ideas. Sometimes it is too easy to get stuck in our own little bubble with our own experiences. I look forward to reading your blogs & comments as we progress through this class.

Happy blogging! Reflection blog to follow shortly..