A preview of what’s to come?

Will everyone abandon coming to class in our first life in favor of Second Life?

Organizing images on your PC with Picasa

If you don’t already use it, Picasa is a great way to organize photos on your PC. Once you download it, it does a search for all graphics files on your hard drive. It also allows for very basic editing. Oh yeah, and it’s free….

Another one of my lies

I said that Windows MovieMaker is the PC equivalent of i-Movie on Macs. Equivalent does not mean equal, it just means similar. If you are using MovieMaker, you are going to have a lot of difficulty replicating the robustness of the Ken Burns effect that you can produce in i-movie (or Final Cut, or Premiere, or any other more robust video editing software). 

Related to experiential learning

I ran across this blog posting from an 8th grade student after participating in an activity like the one Melissa mentioned in her presentation.  Any thoughts?

new_housemate

new_housemate

Originally uploaded by midquel.

test post

Recording Audio

Here is the link to the set of instructions I was referring to today on recording audio. Note that this is a pdf and you will need Adobe Reader to view the file.

Behaviorism follow up

I felt this was worth posting separately, rather than simply adding to the course links.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Also, in class we mentioned Milgram’s experiments on Obedience. I can’t find as robust a website as exists for the prison experiment, but here is one of Milgram’s essays explaining about the experiment.

I also found another website about Milgram that has this fantastic quote by Zimbardo about Milgram’s experiments:

Obedience is not to be understood solely by reference to the individual’s conforming deed; that is merely the end product of a long process of prior programming by which the rationality of power, dominance, and authority become impressed upon us….

The major lesson taught in school systems is the necessity to obey trivial, irrelevant rules and to observe protocol, while at all times respecting authority because it exists…. We must critically reexamine the ethics and tactics of our revered social institutions, which lay the foundation for our mindless obedience to rules, to expectations, and to people playing at being authorities….

The question to ask of Milgram’s research is not why did the majority of normal, average subjects behave in evil (felonious) ways, but what did the disobeying minority do after they refused to continue to shock the poor soul, who was obviously in pain? Did they intervene, go to his aid, denounce the researcher, protest to higher authorities, etc.? No, even their disobedience was within the framework of ‘acceptability’; they stayed in their seats, ‘in their assigned place,’ politely, psychologically demurred, and they waited to be dismissed by the authority. Using other measures of obedience in addition to ‘going all the way’ on the shock generator, obedience to authority in Milgram’s research was total!…. It ought to give each of us pause as no other single bit of research has.

Again, it is always helpful to have a reminder that though behaviorism as a methodology for instruction is flawed, at best- 1) it is employed frequently to control behavior in educational environments and 2) human beings often behave in certain ways when they are integrated into certain systems. This has ALL KINDS of implications for education!Now your bonus question for today.

There is a computer in a classroom.

Scenario 1: Students are permitted to use the computer only as a reward when they have finished all their normal coursework.

Scenario 2: Students who are not able to pass their math tests are often assigned to do math drill exercises on the computer for 45 minutes at a time (They hate the math exercises!)

What behaviorist principles are at work? What kind of message do you think is being sent about educational computing use?

Is learning linear?

Photo taken by: keithcarver.
On the first day of class, I said that people don’t learn linearly and thus I wouldn’t be teaching that way. Of course, I didn’t mean that I thought we should carry on our scholastic dialogue in the manner of an absurdist play. What does the term linearity suggest? If learning isn’t linear, what shape might it be? What have we read that offers insight into how people process information?Keep this idea of linearity in mind as you read Ch2 & 3 of Freedman for this week.

“Interactivity” -Synthesis of today’s class

The transformation of the PTA presentation was phenomenal. It was a completely different presentation! That group’s use of the first organizing slide was what I think some of you were talking about when you talk about using PowerPoint as notecards or to organize information.

Now was it heart-stopping innovative design? Maybe not so much. The medium of PowerPoint has a certain look and feel and for the most part people use it as a functional sort of thing, to provide visual back-up for their text.

The other group focused in on a more micro-level view and reorganized a slide of information. They were limited by the fact that they didn’t have a content expert on their team, which made their whole process different. They really cleaned up the slide, limited the number of images, grouped related information proximally, and improved the visibility of the most salient information. Their work made me question a lot of stuff that was on the slide and what the content of the slide was really trying to say. After they pared it down, it didn’t seem like the information being shared got down to the meat of anything important–which was not the group’s fault. But it did reveal how all that text and imagery can make a presentation look full, when it is really quite empty.
After the class discussion today—when do you think it would be appropriate to use PowerPoint? When is it inappropriate? How much information do you think a typical audience retains from a PowerPoint presentation?

As a final note, creating hands-on/minds-on activities is great. It requires learners to engage with the material. As Angela noted in regards to Dale’s Cone of Experience, it becomes more probable that the learners will retain the information and be able to apply it later on.  It also takes more time than you ever imagine it will.  Lots of time! However, it is time well invested.

More on PowerPoint

Elizabeth’s post on PowerPoint reminded me that I wanted to point those of you who never get tired of reading in the direction of a recent blog post by a colleague of mine entitled, “Why PowerPoint is Evil“

Keep in mind that I will be disappointed if you take either this blog post or the Tufte article as some kind of indication that you can just forget about using PowerPoint because clearly it’s useless. Who can think of some perfectly valid reasons why you would use it…?