The Map is the Territory: Course “Engagement Streams” as Catalysts for Deep Learning
W. Gardner Campbell, Baylor Univ.
Robert German, Millersville Univ. of Pennsylvania
Portals have become like telephone books, providing information but no engagement which is boring. They provide information aggregation, pushing information to the end user (student) rather then sparking learning. How can these online tools amplify information literacy?
The question asked: What if we could create visualizations of students engagement with their learning while it
was happening so that it would inspire and augment their in-class experience?
The use of blogs gives the students an arena where they discuss and formulate the progress of the learner. Blog posts essentially write the course into being. The cognitive process of learning is viewable – a sort of catalyst feedback loop. It is here that students’ engagement becomes visible.
The Mythical Man Month says that software creation is pure “thought stuff”, perfectly malleable because it is so intensely cognitive and imaginative. It can not be done without the human brain.
So too is computer aided education – technology tools give us a way to communicate and represent experiences in ways that are hard to represent elsewhere.
How do we harness the catalytic process? How can we produce an organic system of catalytic agents – not randomly but particularly designed. Instructional technology should no longer in the business of automating tasks. Technology can now be used to address the larger goals of helping a student to understand how they learn and how to make meaningful connections. Our success should be measured by the creation of catalytic agents to better enable learning. There should be a transparency to the learning experience.
Such basic technology issues such as authentication are necessary but should not be the focus – the focus should be on the acquisition of tool skills beyond these points. We need to intentionally design the tools used to create the knowledge project.
Take Away Quote: “Users own the technology space. Privacy, confidentiality and security needs to focused on relative risk. There is honor in defeating them rather than surrendering to them.”
Exercise:
Imagine what kinds of student engagement you would like to display to the class to show it’s work believing that it would catalyze learning. How would you arrange that in a portal space?
*put in link to the images on flickr….when I find them…
Questions/Ideas:
Have i3 students create an i3 portal, pulling in all the items that they think would be a “catalyst” to doing their jobs better. Something more dynamic then the sakai site, perhaps pulling in the sakai stuff as well?
Target a class that has students using popular culture references and create a sandbox where they can post video/audio/images that spark discussion.
Have students “take turns” creating a catalytic portal site for their peers in the class each week.
The message once again – the whole is greater then the individual.