AnswerTips

Ever wonder what the AnswerTips icon means? Just double click on any word in my posts to find out. Will discuss about its potential to teaching and learning in my next post.

Learning Objects and Adaptive e-learning

Have those with experience in Computer Adaptive Testing (e.g. SAT) where each examinee receives a different sequence of items depending on which items are answered correctly ever wonder if e-learning environment may also adapt to the learner with regards to his learning styles and course attempt characteristics? This means the e-learning course will adapt and react dynamically to learner's domain-specific and background knowledge, cognitive and affective abilities, interests and learning targets in the process of interacting with the course. Hence if a learner has got prior experience and interests in game based learning, the course will dish out the relevant game based learning context to him/her. Or if through initial interaction of the course materials, learner's lack of prequisite knowledge is detected, the course will adjust the pace of delivery to strenghthen the learner's foundational knowledge base. Although fully adaptive e-learning is still under development, its success will depend to a large extent on the designed structure of learning objects.

Learnign Objects (LO) are digital resources/content that meet e-learning curricula design requirements and have particular structures pertaining to the learning objectives, subject domains in which the content is relevant in etc. These structures in the form of meta-tags enable e-learning course developer to search and aggregate various LO according to the intended course design into an IMS (some content packaging specification) course package in the learning management system (LMS). In this sense, LO may be analogous to a can of coke. The coke being the content; the can is a standard way of packaging the content. The can’s label is the Metadata, which tells us what the contents are, who produced it, how much it costs, how much sugar and fat it contains, and it has a unique identifier – a barcode.

Whilst LO may be useful for recycling and repackaging various configurations of e-learning courses for reusable and collaborative purposes, the LO the teachers have built up over the years may be limited to a specific LMS if that LMS is not SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) compliant. SCORM is a detailed technical framework with the aim of ensuring that content is interoperable, accessible and reusable across different platforms of LMS.

For e-learning system to adapt automatically to user preferences and needs, it would be logical to map a learning object to learner's characteristics, subject domain and context/task. This would also mean that the LMS must be equipped with learner profiling functions. Future SCORM specification may have the potential of fulfiling such requirements as providing different sequencing types (linear, divergent/convergent) to combine the learning objects and mapping these sequences to the learner's characteristics, subject domain or context/task.

Personally, I've been following on this area of adaptive e-learning and have some experience of developing SCORM e-learning courses that is partially adaptive. By that I mean learner's progession to the next topic of the course is prerequisited by his performance in the prior topic. May the day of fully adaptive SCORM courses be available for our students as they will surely be more motivated and efficient to learn according to their own styles and interests.

A Web 2.0 tool to enhance formative assessment

How do we integrate formative assessment for learning (i.e. providing timely and constructive feedback to help students bridge their learning gap) in Web 2.0 designed experiences (eg, a wiki, blog or podcast performance task. Check out this possibility HERE.

You are most welcome to click on the annotate button to comment on any particular part of my blog posting, then add this annotated page as a link in your comment. This can be done by clicking on account after you are done with the annotation, then click on the annotated link to get the public link of the annotated page.

One possible application for this is annotating comments as feedback for learning in students' design or art e-portfolio (may be based on blog platform), because it is so difficult to use words to describe the comments to specific location of the piece of design or art work. Although Fleck.com is in its beta version, there's so much potential for educational purposes in this piece of social software. Hope this Web 2.0 tool can be useful to you educators out there.

Virginia Tech Shooting: Amazing news coverage in Wiki

Within a short span of 4 days, the collective effort by a group of keen followers of the unfortunate and heart wrenching incident have amassed an impressive amount of news and report coverage in this wiki page. The coverage of the event in the wiki page is very comprehensive and includes perspectives from geopolitical to socio-historic considerations. The reports are also referenced to various news agencies and sources.

This to me is another testament to the working of Web 2.0 where people of similar interest are networked together in constructing group knowledge that is more effective if the incident is to be reported by individual news agencies.

Kiwi video for lifeskills lesson

This video from youtube can be an excellent resource for character and leadership education. The lesson can be based on the theme of knowing your goals in life and pursuing them with dogged determination, resilience and innovation (COZ KIWIS CAN'T FLY). As we can see, with careful searching and evaluation, some of the video resources in youtube can be excellent for educational purposes. An idea would be to organize a community of practice for a group of educators to contribute video resources (cleared of IP regulations) for teaching and learning, especially in areas of social studies, history, character and leadership education. In that way, we'll be leveraging on the spirit and working principles of web 2.0 for the advancement of education globally.

Video on Kiwi

Second Life for Education, a discussion part II

In part I of this discussion, we have seen the potential of SL for education in terms of its interactivity and openness in designing and building possible learning experiences, abeit with certain limitations in net safety, demographics and technical constraints. In this section, I'll offer my views for discussion on how SL can be leveraged upon for engaged learning experiences in a virtual environment.

Engagement in SL is a thoroughly multimodal activity involving manipulation of texts, audio, visual, gestural (see Video 1) and spatial modes for meaning making and achieving particular ends. These modes of meaning constitute the metalanguage for the design elements in multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). These design elements of multiliteracies can help users in SL to describe and explain social and cultural patterns of meaning in the increasingly pluralistic and globalized virtual community. In such a world, users will need the necessary skills for working within social networks, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling multimodal data to form a coherent picture of the world around them.

Video 1: Tutorial on creating and using gesture in SL

According to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 239-248), there are four factors that need to be considered for literacy pedagogy. These are Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice. Ina learning context, Situated Practice means using available Designs of meaning, including students own lifeworld experiences to immerse in meaningful practices in a given context. The goal of Overt Instruction is to facilitate conscious awareness and systematic understanding of what is being learned. Critical Framing involves students reviewing the designs critcially in its social and cultural context of meaning. Finally, Transformed Practice means applying the available designs of meaning in a different context, or making a new design of meaning. The four elements of the multiliteracies can be used to provide the necessary ideas and angles with which to design multiliteracies learning experiences in SL.

In designing multiliteracies learning experiences for students in TSL educational land, one may consider situating learners as apprentice journalists, scientists, doctors, engineers or creative artists in real world problem solving contexts inside the virtual environment. For example, students can take on the roles of Crime Scene Investigators to work as a mixed race team (via schools tweening programmes that cross states, national boundaries). The team will go about the virtual crime scene piecing together traces of evidences planted all over the island and suspect character avartars. In the process of trying to solve the crime case, students will be employing and innovating upon their curriculum based scientific thinking and communication skills and concepts, resulting in socially and culturally mediated construction of group knowledge. The learning goals of such activities are twofold, one for students to develop an epistemic frame (Shaffer, 2006) to think, act, communicate, collaborate and innovate like professionals (this requires deep learning in situated practice); two for students to interact efficiently using multiple languages and communication patterns that cross cultural, community and national boundaries. These goals are essential in preparing our learners to face the challenges of the 21st century.

For such situated learning experiences in SL, one would need expertise in linden scripting languages to develop the designed learning environment. Unfortunately, Linden Lab in my opinion, has not provided sufficient technical support in this area. There is also not enough interests generated in the education industries to venture into SL learning packages business model. These are not helped by the lack of a critical mass of communities of practice in SL learning pedagogy. I'm still searching for solution to this, if anyone out there has some answers, will appreciate your comments.

For Mathematics educators, I think you will agree with me that SL offers so much potential in the teaching and learning of geometrical and vector concepts with the construction module (see Video 2 on the construction of a prism).

Video 2: Tutorial on creating a prism

References:

Cope, B. & M. Kalantzis (eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.

Shaffer, D. W. (2006). Epistemic frames for epistemic games. Computers and Education, 46(3), 223-234.

Second Life for Education, a discussion part I

Second Life (SL), a program from San Francisco-based company Linden Lab, immerses participants in a virtual world of their own making and allows users to create everything within their virtual world. Users are able to buy and sell plots of land, objects they have created themselves, and so on. The world itself and its economy closely resemble that of everyday society. The quality of interaction and expression in SL are attracting people with various agenda to it. In my brief visits to it, various commercial entities are using it for marketing purposes to good effect. There are also people creating and selling objects in SL and exchanging them for US currency in real life.

SL has its potential in education due to its open environment and undetermined state. The ability to design and create object, building, character within the virtual world can be adapted and extended into teaching and learning. This will be discussed in part II.

Notwithstanding SL's immense popularity, there is a serious issue with the appropriateness of its content. There is a range of seedy activity available to users: Gambling, stripping, and virtual prostitution. To address this concern for SL to have a stake in the educational market sector, Teen Second Life (TSL) is developed.

TSL, is arranged in the same fashion as the adult version, although there is only PG-rated material available in it. The world is restricted to teens aged 13-17, and all adults other than Linden Lab employees are banned from entering the main island in TSL.

Recently, private islands in TSL have been set up as the only place where educators can set foot if they decide to participate in the program. The purchased island can be limited to students in their class or program, or open to any teen using Teen Second Life.

Ironically, even though it's free to get in Teen Second Life, you will still need a credit card to register. That's how Linden Lab manage and maintain a youth-only space, but this makes registering a challenge for teens internationally. Another possible access issue is the requirement for a relatively new computer with the necessary graphic card support and broadband network speed.