Non-traditional school environments;

Over the last couple of weeks I had the opportunity to see, and learn about 2 very varying schools of thought about what a non-traditional school might look like, and also had the opportunity to read about the proponents and oppositions to the use of technology in schools. I would like to summarize some of my thoughts regarding those in this blog post.

Last week we were visited by Raymond Rozycki, Bill Taylor and David Zeiler from Edison Learning, who gave us an overview of the organization and the products they offer for K-12 schools. Edison Learning's online program, tries to create an interactive online learning environment using technology in traditional, hybrid and virtual schools. While Edison has been working with e-learning in the higher education field for a while, they have over the last few years launched their online K-12 school models in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and now South Carolina.

Provost Academy, Edison's most recent online high school in SC is their model for expansion and innovation in the field of e-learning for schools. Students have access to either synchronous (live meetings or classes online) or asynchronous (non-live) learning environments or a mix of the two. They continue to work towards their high school diploma but from their home environment. They have access to a personalized learning curriculum which advances at their pace and a strong support system of teachers, advisors and tutors who interact with the students on a regular basis. Edison is also creating interactive online social environments for their students now.

Edison has created learning objects based on student goals, and currently have around 350,000 learning objects. The learning objects are modular, act independently and can be used to build custom curricula and hit multiple markets at the same time. These curricula are state and school based and the students can easily move from one learning object to another. In order to build extra engagement with the students, Edison currently explores interaction through audio, video and kinesthetics. There are 3D social spaces that the students can venture into, online libraries they can check books out of and educational games they can engage in to improve cognitive and motor skills.

Edison also provides synchronous tutoring to help students who need additional help with the curriculum. There are real time indicators that track what areas a student is weak in and then focus on that to help the student out. This hybrid model consisting of Synchronous and Asynchronous classes, Asynchronous grading and Synchronous online tutoring works well to ensure that the students are on track and working towards their high school diplomas.

Now on the opposite end of the spectrum, I had the opportunity to visit the Waldorf School which promotes a somewhat more philosophical and creative approach to education. Waldorf teaches its students to "to think, reason, examine and question" and the focus highly on stimulating creativity and imagination within the student community. They attempt to transform education in a way which engages the child fully in the process and balance their faculties. Waldorf teachers exhibit concern about media hampering the development of the child's own imagination and believe that the child's inherent creativity is fostered more when media is eliminated from the environment. Regarding the use of technology, it is not encouraged before high school. They feel that is is more important to the students to interact with their fellow classmates and teachers while exploring the "exploring the world of ideas, participating in the creative process, and developing their knowledge, skills, abilities, and inner qualities". They believe that older students quickly master the technologies and can go on to have successful careers and work in fields which use extensive technology.

Waldorf does not impose formal reading on its students, and as per their findings the child learns comparatively quickly when he or she is ready. The teachers at Waldorf promote a love for literature, so once the children start reading they become voracious readers and develop a long term love for reading. Formal mathematics and science is introduced in the 5th grade and homework in the 4th grade. Waldorf believes that the impact of homework on achievement increases as the child moves through the grades. The dress code of the students also is a part of the learning environment. They wear natural fibres, without any brand name clothing.

Both of these schools can be categorized as non-traditional forms of learning, and there is an amazing amount of differences and perhaps if we look very closely a couple of similarities between them. They both target different needs that students have in our society.

An online interactive learning academy is great for reaching a large number of students who come from very different backgrounds and places (remote areas being one). It is more financially viable for families, it allows the child to move through the curriculum at their own pace and get help with the work anytime they need it. Working in a web based and 3D technological environment also helps them learn the technology faster. Online learning is also probably the best medium to reach a large demographic and scale without too much difficulty.

In an offline non-traditional school environment, the interaction between the student community and the teachers is the key. It fosters a different form of learning and creativity, and allows the students to explore the world by finding the need within themselves. Being a part of a group and being able to interact face to face is a huge plus for those who can access these forms of education.

Both schools allow students to operate in an innovative environment and learn things their own way, and perhaps someday we will see something midway between the two, where you have the interactive technology, but also can find a means to foster strong social relationships between students.

Artifact Day..

I really enjoyed the class this week because we all got to see each other’s presentations. It was a myriad of different experiences, where I was really impressed to see the breadth that we all cover collectively.

I believe that all of our works don’t necessarily fall into a specific category, its more about how we interpret them ourselves based on our interests and viewpoints. I wanted to go deeper into a few of those themes.

Ashley’s take on learning English as a second language in India is something I identify with. Using the mobile platform to teach English to the Indian population is a great option, and the applications she chose and her take on them were really pertinent to what is needed to learn English. “English Seekho” (seekho is the Hindi word for “learn”), is a great platform for Indians to learn English on the go, currently offered by Tata Indicom. My hope is that as the cell phones technology becomes cheaper and more interactive, it will allow organizations to scale their applications and increase audience accessibility at a cheaper price.

Jacob’s presentation on the Israeli - Palestinian conflict is a long standing issue which seems to have no resolution in sight. I remember spending most of my time watching live updates on the Gaza war in 2008 while trying to finish my application to Stanford. The relentless bombing campaign by Israel in the first 48 hours left nearly 400 people dead, and far more injured. People in Gaza lost their children, were severely injured and left disabled for life. My belief is that war breeds terrorism, its really difficult to stand by and remain unaffected when you know you have lost your child because of someone else, and at that point when you have not much to live for, the hatred just grows. The conflict is something where I honestly do not see a resolution in sight, but it is heart warming to see how technology is taking on the challenge to bridge the gap between the citizens of these two nations. In particular I was quite impressed by PeaceMaker, which allows players to play the role of political leader and try to make decisions on conflict resolution. It would be wonderful to publish these stories online to see how people from both sides of the border perceived the possible solutions.

We also saw a movie Yaa made about Street children in east Africa. “The United Nations has defined the term ‘street children’ to include “any boy or girl… for whom the street in the widest sense of the word … has become his or her habitual abode and/or source of livelihood, and who is inadequately protected, supervised, or directed by responsible adults.” “. Organizations like Mkombozi are trying to use education outreach programs amongst other things to try and reach these children and enabling communities to value and protect them. Street kids' international is a ground breaking organization which works to develop locally relevant, innovative trainings that engage youth about entrepreneurship, sexual health, and drug use through interactive activities and animated videos. The “Karate Kid: Mario Gets Sick” is a wonderful video that shows us how HIV/AIDS impacts the lives of street children in Africa, and helps both us and the street children understand the seriousness of the situation and the need to find help.

Interactive 3d learning objects presented by Mike is an innovative research paradigm that delves into the use of virtual reality with learning objects to create solutions. A three year project, which ended in 2009, saw the Naledi3d Factory partnering with World Links Zimbabwe (WLZ) to address issues around water and soil conservation, sorghum, pests and bee-keeping. The i3dlo’s developed are being used at five World Links Community centers, and the local VR committees, established as part of the project, continue to hold their own workshops and field days, some attracting upwards of 200 people. It is one of the most unique methodologies I have seen to help users address their basic need by creating the tools and objects that will help them the most.

Finally I want to address both Janelle and Catherine’s presentations on fighting ADD and Childhood depression. Growing up in a country where the focus is primarily on studying and meeting your basic needs, the psychological issues that affect children is not something which is yet widely studied or vocally addressed in what is a more socially conservative society. As a result, my own knowledge about both these issues is very minor to say the least. For a child dealing with either one is an uphill battle, both in terms of trying to explain to them what the issue really is, and garnering a support system which will stand by them as they learn to deal with these. Both are medical conditions which can be possibly treated with drugs, but I am not really a proponent of giving psychotropic drugs to young children, when their minds are still developing not knowing how it will affect them. It was really great to hear both Janelle and Catherine advocate alternative methods of treatment and go into detail about the causes and means to identify and combat these issues.

There is so much more I want to go into, but in conclusion, the whole presentation was an enlightening event! I learned so much from everyone, and it was wonderful to see the different ways in which we all presented our ideas.

Bloom's Taxonomy and Mind Maps;

We covered quite a few things in class again last Wednesday, and performed a really interesting group exercise with Mind Maps.

I would like to go into a bit more of detail about Bloom's Taxonomy as an exercise to help myself understand it better. Probably not a fun blog read !

Bloom's Taxonomy, identifies three domains of educational activities. The domains can be thought of as goals of the learning process. That is at the end of your learning, you should have acquired new knowledge, new skills and possibly a new attitude.

Cognitive Domain: mental skills (Knowledge) comprise of

• Knowledge; which is understanding of facts, ways and means of dealing with facts and understanding the universal principles and abstractions in a field.
• Comprehension; which is understanding the meaning of the facts by translation, interpretation and extrapolation.
• Application; solving problems in a new manner using previously acquired knowledge.
• Analysis; examining and breaking down the information into parts to identify motives and causes.
• Synthesis; combining elements of previously acquired knowledge in different ways to create alternative solutions.
• Evaluation; Based on certain criteria judge the validity of ideas or information.

Affective Domain: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude) comprise of

• Receiving; The lowest level; comprises of the learner paying attention and absorbing the knowledge; without this no further progress can occur.
• Responding; the learner actively participates in the learning process at this level.
• Valuing; the learner attaches value or worth to a particular object, phenomenon or behavior. This can range from simple acceptance to a complex state of commitment.
• Organizing; at this level, the learner can organize the differences between values, by contrasting and resolving conflicts between them.
• Characterizing; or internalizing values; the learner has a value system which controls their behavior at this level, such that it becomes a characteristic.

Psychomotor Domain: manual or physical skills (Skills)

Bloom's committee did not produce a description for the psychomotor domain, but Simpson (1972) described it in more detail. Psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination and use of the motor skills.

• Perception; using your sensory responses to guide motor activities.
• Set; the readiness to act, which includes physical, mental and emotional sets.
• Guided Response; the early stages of learning a complex skill which requires imitation and trial and error.
• Mechanism; intermediate stage in learning a complex skill, e.g. driving a car.
• Complex Overt Response; a skillful performance of motor arts that involves complex movement patterns, for e.g. parallel parking the car you learned to drive.
• Adaptation; the learners skills are developed enough that they can modify movement patterns for special cases.
• Origination; create new movement patterns to fit a particular problem.

We also touched briefly on constructivism, a theory of knowledge that believes we as individuals construct new knowledge through the process of accommodation and assimilation. This can be separated into

• Cognitive constructivism; which explores how the individual learner understands things.
• Social constructivism; which puts an emphasis on how social encounters lead to growth of learning.

A part of the constructivist theory, is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), proposed by Lev Vygotsky. Think of ZPD as a form of scaffolding. The child can reach the lower level by themselves. But in order to scaffold to the higher level, they need assistance from an adult or more skilled children. Thus, the ZPD can capture the cognitive skills of the child which are in the process of maturing.

We also talked about traditional vs non-traditional learning spaces, that is a traditional university vs an online university, or charter school or high school. I would like to spend a little more time researching the statistics and the software used for online programs, and hopefully address it in detail in another blog post.

For now I would like to move onto our exercise in trying to devise ABCD for a learning objective, and then expand on the evaluation techniques to test the learning objectives and create a mind map for it.

Catherine, Tanya, Deonne and I got to work on trying to build an online learning environment for Dr.Lucerno, who had always taught in a traditional learning environment. It was a great exercise, and we went quite in depth into trying to understand the needs of the students from different backgrounds and schools, and also those of Dr.Lucerno, who was completely unfamiliar with instructing using technology.

After defining ABCD for the problem, we decided to go ahead and work on defining the evaluation methods. During this we realized that all of our ideas did not necessarily fit into evaluation, but were still necessary for the success of the online program, and so we created two new categories "Course Structure" and "Course Materials" based on our understanding of what we wanted the online program and Dr.Lucerno to have. Here is our final mind map created on mindmeister.

While we did have pretty good material, I think our presentation skills could still use a bit of work :). Ricardo, Paul, Jaehi and Mike did a great job with that. So here's to better presentation skills for the next round !

Mobile technologies, storytelling and learning objectives;

Mobile technology is being rapidly adopted and is consistently on the growth in developing countries around the world. According to Moco News there are currently 4.1 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a global penetration rate of 61.1%; It is an important factor assisting in the growth in economies and communication in emerging nations like India (India Mobility Trends) and Kenya (Mobile in Africa). Furthermore, as computation moves to the cloud, cell phones will be able to transfer more of the heavy computing away from the device allowing it to offer more functionality to the end user.

Mobile technology is hence, a great way to create new learning spaces that can be given to children in developing nations. One way this has been accomplished is by loading short stories for children in a small town in Baja, Mexico, who can listen to and learn from these stories. The mobile devices are small and can be hand cranked, so the children can carry them as their families move in search of work. There have been proposals on how best to crank up the mobile devices, perhaps using a bike or a toy, or alternatives like solar or wind, but this still has some ways to go.

Moving away slightly, we learned that storytelling is a great way to get children to participate and motivate them to learn. It doesn't require the child to have access to books, or a formal school or technology, but allows them to draw on their creativity. According to Dr.Kim's working paper "Stories to tell and 1001 more days to live: Exploring the Micro Creative Economy as a Means to Fund and Promote Literacy Development in Underserved Areas", one of the most important things to learn about education in developing nations is that it should be sustainable, and we need to provide incentives to children who are still struggling with the basic necessities in life, making literacy secondary to their other needs. The "1001 Stories Project" allows the child to explore their creativity, contributes to their literacy and lets their voice be heard at a global level. The goal is to spread this to other nations and also organize drawing and singing competitions to empower children through their creativity.

Children also rapidly learn how to use mobile technology and the web to teach themselves new things. It was observed in a school in Ahmedabad, India, that given a set of mobile devices with mathematical problems, it took barely an hour for some groups of children to learn how to use them effectively. Collaborative learning between children helps build collective intelligence and hopefully motivates them to catch up with their peers and learn more new things. Technology is probably most effective on the under and over performing brackets, but it will likely make some kind of an impact across the graph.

Now a little about learning objectives; Kapp's notes, is a blog post that goes briefly over ABCD, the basics of creating an effective learning objective, which we discussed in class.

In programming if ABCD were arguments to a function, A and C are your inputs, and B and D are the return values expected after the function finishes processing.

A is your Audience, an input field, which is the group of individuals who are being targeted for the instruction. It also addresses their prior knowledge, if any is needed as a foundation before participating in the learning.

B is behavior, an output field, which is the desired outcome of your learning method. It's what you want the Audience to be able to do as a result of your training. Behavior should be defined in a concrete manner and it's really important to define it because your tutorial may go off track if you haven't clearly stated what is expected at its completion.

C is condition, another input field, which describes the circumstances or the conditions under which the learning takes place.

D is degree, an output field, which is a measurable component that tries to assess the level of learning attained by the person. For instance after completing flight lessons, a pilot should have a success rate of 99% or higher.

I think it's important that we define ABCD, not to create boundaries, but to set broader learning objectives and allow the learners to experiment to some extent.

We also touched briefly on the topics of cognition "knowing" and meta-cognition "knowing about knowing". For me, coming from a non-educational background, the words initially seemed like ancient greek, but now I've had a chance to study them a bit more closely, they make more sense. I hope to be able to go more in depth into these in a future blog post to improve my own understanding of them and the theories that surround them.