Author Archives: lucaslongo

Tech 4 Learners – Week 7 – Prototype Presentation

Prototype presentation: 

Text for presentation: 

Learning goal: 

We want ‘A’ to learn the value of communicating with others.

Theory of learning:

Our tool intends to offer him practice in generating new words and then rewarding him with the playback experience. This will reinforce that his words have meaning, power and entertainment value. If he is interested in the material presented, he will engage in narrating it. Ideally we want him to transfer these skills into real life situations.

If the program:

  • Utilizes engaging content for ‘A’
  • Replays ‘A’s words so he and others see their value (and enjoy them!)
  • Initially offers prompts for ‘A’ to speak then gradually reduces them

Then ‘A’ will overtime…

  • Generate spontaneous and increasingly complex sentences.
  • Transfer those skills to real life situations.

Question:

  • How do we build on what we’ve learned to create a tool that encourages ‘A’ to express his thoughts with less prompting?
  • What additional mechanism or feature could support ‘A’ in transferring these skills to real-world situations?
  • Did some videos but there would be no time to present it – we had 60 seconds!

Videos

I prepared a stop-motion video for presenting the prototype as well:

Which is the final result of some thinking and prototyping:

LDT Seminar – Week 7 – Expert Interview

I interviewed Candice Thille, Ann Porteous, Sara Rutheford-Quach, and Karin Forssell regarding my learning problem. The greatest take-away for me was the vast amount of research and practice that has already happened. The depth and width of the problem space is enormous yet it helped me immensely in understanding the need to become more specific and focus on areas that interest me the most and with which I have the most familiarity with.

Learners’ goals: From the learner’s perspective, I understood from the interviews that there is a real challenge in knowing how to effectively create, publish, run and/or lead an online course. Very few tools aid the content-expert in acquiring PK and PCK  during the process of publishing a course for example. There are few lesson planning tools embedded in the existing educational technologies out there.

Context: I was ‘forced’ to learned about all the distinct online course types and methodologies that exist in the market to be able to ‘talk-the-talk’ during the interviews. This showed how rich the field is and how much there is to advance in it still. A major take-away was that human interaction has to be designed into a course, be it teacher-student or student-student along with a temporal dimension so that the course is effective in terms of course completion and depth of learning.

Special Needs: The learner’s needs are very specific to the subject matter I found out through the interviews. A statistics course has different needs than a linguistic course and different needs than a programing course. The scaffolding required for each subject matter would be different. The teaching strategies are different. The activities recommended to be done with the learners will be different.

In conclusion, the interviews were a tremendous source of information and served a great purpose of directing further inquiry, research and the desire to repeat the interviews in order to evolve the debate once I can get a better grasp of the material. Inspiring.

Learning Environments – Week 7 – Class Notes

The Reading Czars this week outdid themselves 🙂 The group was divided into two. My group met in the classroom.

Lego Run:

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We were divided into 2 competing groups. Each group was given a set of Lego pieces – the same required to build a model. This model can only be seen by the Observer, who describes to the Runner  what it looks like. The Runner then tells the Builder about the model, who tries to build it as precisely as possible. In the middle of the exercise, an extra Runner was added, which sped up the process immensely. Less waiting time for the Builder. More bite sized instructions.

Model -> Observer -> Runner -> Builder -> Replica

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Windhover

The second half was going to the Windhover Contemplative Center. No electronics allowed inside. We all got one of two texts to reflect upon.

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After reflection period inside we debriefed at the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden

o-2  o

Second half of class we discussed the readings.

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Learning Environments – Week 7 – Reading Assignment

“Within these multiple overlapping zones, students navigate by different routes and at different rates. But the push is toward upper, ratherthan lower, levels of competence.” (Brown, 1994)

For me this is a key take-away from this piece since it sums up the power of well lead group activities or discussions and seems to potentialize ZPD. Not only there is a common ZPD for the group, but individual ZPDs can be attended to by not one but several people at once.

The shared responsibility of the learning goal for the group also tends to be higher than that it would be for an individual. Not only can people feed of each other’s knowledge but their own shortfalls will be covered by others. The feeling of community and being part of a team also helps to upward spiral this synergic effect.

The meaning of the group can also be more encompassing by including the learners home environment, culture and funds of knowledge. If these factors are also seen as multiple overlapping ZPDs, the outcomes of learning are probably exacerbated and reach the student’s extended learning community.