So after reading the readings and listening to the webcast, I realised two things. First I was there at the lecture! haha but I duno why listening to webcast is sooo much more insightful than being there physically haha Another thing i realised is, this week's topic is not as tough as i would have imagined it to be! haha So here are my 20 cent worth on this week's topic of 'Learning Design'.
Basically the most important thing this week is we should design our Learning Design based on Activities than on the technology used.
Another important thing is, what the different shapes of a learning design represent. Using a method of mine to remember them, Rectangles are the learner's tasks, Triangles are the resources that support the learner's activities/task and Circles are the supports aka feedback channels such as online Chat rooms and this reflection blog.
This week's readings also differentiated the different tasks. Basically there are 6 different tasks with their own set of appropriate tools. They are Assimilative, Information Handling, Adaptive, Communicative, Productive and Experiential.
Assimilative are tasks that involved reading, listening, viewing. An example of this would be a student going for lectures/viewing/listening to the webcast. This is an assimilative task with the powerpoint slides as a form of resource and tutors/lecturer as the support. (? not too sure if this is correct since supports are feedback channels but I remember (Elmie) when u said it depends on how I define the lecturer/tutor as support ?)
Information Handling is the process that involves students actively gather information either thru the web or in other forms of media. This also involves students gathering and sorting the information as well as distinguishing the appropriate information from those that aren't.
I am not too sure about adaptive tasks but I guess Adaptive would be the process of simulations. Some what like a role playing scenario whereby we 'pretend' to be somebody and do something. An example would be case studies?
Communicative tasks would involve the students to present/discuss their findings to other students/lecturers.
Productive would involve the students to produce something at the end of the learning design. An example would be us producing a workable learning design on EXE at the end of this semester.
Experiential would be something like an on-the-job-training kinda thing. To gain real life experience.
After reading the readings, I thought learning is a combination of all. Like the courses in NUS and using Elearning as an example, it all requires us to participate in the Assimilative process. To further motivate us to learn more beyond the information given to us, we are required to produce essays/projects that require us to do some information handling first. At the end of the semester, we would usually be required to communicate to the class what we found and also constantly engage in online forums to communicate with everyone our thoughts on what was taught. I guess an Adaptive process would be something like a given scenario for us for our projects? haha Experiential process would be the internships i suppose haha
Oh one more thing we learnt this week too. It is the use of ADDIE.
Analysis
Design
Developement
Implementation
Evaluation
Like how we went about doing our EXE webquest project, we had to go thru all the steps of ADDIE and because it is online now, we can now not follow the linear path and jumble the steps up to further improve the webquest. Going through this week's lecture and readings also explained to me why our webquest 'Learning how to record using Starhub's Smart TV' is a productive activity.
There are a few things I would like to clarify regarding this week's lecture.
First on the slide on Affordances, does he mean that we must design a learning platform that is easily understood and simple to navigate? Does he mean this when he said affordances? That the website should afford students to move/proceed from one page to another like flipping a book?
Another thing is as you can see below the learning design we created all have the supports and resources pointed towards the tasks. But in the readings and lecture slides (cos they used the same examples), the arrow is pointing from the task to the Resource. For example on the 12th slide, the task is 'take part in lecture' and the arrow points to 'powerpoint slides'. I thought the resource is supposed to compliment/support the task? So it should be pointing towards the task instead right? Well it might not matter but just wondering =)
And also would it be a problem if for example you as the markers of our paper, do not understand why we chose certain things as supports/resource?
Ok the two pictures above were done on week 4, one being a lecture activity and the other being the revised version in tutorials. I think overall it is much better/neater after revising it.
Ok I hope I can get some clarifications regarding some of the questions i posed earlier on. =)
