What is the best way to learn and in particular what is the best way to learn using ICT’s. I’m pretty sure that is the question we are being asked but more importantly, we are being asked …what the best way to achieve this is.
The course identifies three frameworks to work with in order to achieve the goal of best learning practice. Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), Engagement Theory (1999) and Tpack (2006).
I read somewhere in the forums that Wendy ( Fasso 2011)described the process as a recipe and I have to say that being a hands on learner the idea appealed to me. By taking a little bit of this and that from each of the frameworks you can create something that is considered best practice for e-learning design and hopefully you’ll end up with a perfectly baked cake or a well rounded student. One who has absorbed the right information, built on it appropriately and can take the knowledge one step further by being capable of higher order thinking.
Blooms Taxonomy (1956) is my starting point in my e learning design recipe. Bloom identified three types of learning. Cognitive which is your mental skills or knowledge and your ability to process that information. The next domain was the Affective domain representing your feelings or attitudes and lastly the Psychomotor domain which are your manual or physical skills. Then, like all good recipies, his student Lorin Anderson (2001) revised Bloom’s original Taxonomy, and made it better by giving it life and action. Anderson chose words like Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing, Applying, Understanding and Remembering. These begin with the lower order thinking skills such as remembering and work their way up to creating which represents a high order thinking skill, all of which must create a better tasting, looking and smelling cake.
If Bloom’s was the raw ingredients then Engagement Theory is where we start to mix all up to form the batter. Engagement theory was specifically developed to deal with technology based learning and teaching. “The fundamental idea underlying engagement theory is that students must be meaningfully engaged in learning activities through interaction with others and worthwhile tasks”. (Kearsley and Schneiderman, 1999)
Kearsley and Shneiderman came up with the catchy phrase of Relate… meaning learning must occur in a group context with collaboration. Students must Create… the tasks should be project based to give students control over their own learning. Lastly Donate refers to the fact that it must have an authentic focus that will only increase student’s motivation and therefore success. In this way I saw learning engagement theory as relating very closely to Constructivism as proposed by Vygotsky (1962) and that is that students will build their own knowledge and understanding of the world only by experience and being able to then reflect on what they experienced.
Much of what is referred to in Engagement Theory mirrors what we have all been working towards in this course. In particular it all started to make sense for me when Kearsley and Shneiderman wrote that in order to collaborate students need a way of getting to know one another quickly…. They talked about a bios or background statement… that sounds exactly like our profile wiki.
Then they write “a good starter activity is to assign pairs of students to research a question or problem and report their results to the entire group” ……. Sound familiar? Yes it’s the learning theories wiki and the mobile phone wiki.
Engaged is a word that keeps coming back again and again…. So my own personal theory is that while Wendy keeps us “engaged” with the course material… without our even noticing it we are learning about frameworks that we will actually be using in our teaching profession.
BUT…. It’s not enough to know your subject. It’s not enough to know how best to teach. It’s not enough to know the best teaching approaches for that content and it’s not enough to know about the standard and advanced technologies.
It’s not even enough to know how the application of technology can improve on the content, or how teaching might change once technologies are applied…. YOU need TPack to succeed. This framework represents the ideal teaching place where content, pedagogy, and technology merge. As it says in our course notes…. “You must have technical skills, you must know your content, and you must know how to deliver your content so that students learn effectively.” So at the risk of a cliché… Tpack is the icing that sits all over the cake and right through the middle in a rich creamy layer.
My framework would therefore begin with Blooms and the later revision by Anderson. This helps to address the lower and higher order thinking skills and starts the process of getting students to THINK and then ENGAGE. The actions required here are straightforward. Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating.
At the same time Engagement Theory is operating too. Relate, Create, And Donate. This helps to structure our activities… in the case of our own course things like the wikis, group activities, and our blog.
And then using Tpack… we combine all of this and decide which technology is most suited to get the best learning outcome.
It’s important to consider that the frameworks are not rigid and set, they don’t stand independent of one another and nor should they be used in a linear way, step by step starting at the bottom and working our way up. They should be fluid and moveable…Can I risk going back to my cake analogy again….. Think of it this way. Icing tastes nice on its own but it tastes even better with a soft spongey cake underneath… and more importantly the combination of ingredients must be right. You need the right amount of everything for the cake to rise and taste good, and with a delicious layer of icing you’ll achieve the best possible outcome… ALL the students will want to eat the cake and they’ll all be better off for it.
Ohh and as a background to all of this is the need to consider the moral ethical and legal implications of operating in the ICT domain. Firstly we need to model good behavior to our students which means following copyright and referencing guidelines ALWAYS… and the other side of this is that we need to consider what harm could be done by allowing students access to these ICT resources. Things like child safety, material of a pornographic nature and privacy issues.
Bravo!
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