Month: July 2011

Why did you choose this particular tools?
The main reason that I used this tool was that it could provide an intuitive interface in which to create a video story with maximum impact. Secondly, it introduced my course collaborators to Animoto, a tool they could use to produce stories about student learning for peer review and collaboration within the course.

How did the tool impact the manner in which you told your story (perhaps in a way that is different had you just used text or related the story using your voice)?
Describing my journey of discovery in Lesson Study in text or voice limits my ability to invoke emotional responses in my audience, something more easily achieve with the help of music and images. Using Animoto, I hope to capture the audience`s full attention for 30 seconds and make them experience a part of my journey through the process of Lesson Study.

How might you use such tools in your own teaching to produce materials for students?
As a physics teacher, I could see producing review videos for each learning outcome, including images, short videos and text. Each 30 second video would demonstrate, illustrate or summarize a concept.

How might students be given access to the same authoring tools?
Using classroom laptops and free accounts in Animoto, students could produce their own 30 second review videos to share with their peers through email or online forums and blogs.

What kind of impact would you expect to see in your students in terms of motivation, creativity, or any other characteristics?
Referring to the exercise above, I would expect to see variable perspectives of events or topics, differing meanings, and varying aspects that they find important.  I believe that the sharing of these review videos would help students in ways that I couldn’t. The 30 seconds would require them to really think about what they feel is most important. Regarding motivation, knowing that their videos would be reviewed and used by peers would likely motivate students to create an accurate and quality product. Creativity would also be enhanced as students tried to show off for each other, demonstrating all their cool tech skills and knowledge.

  I choose to make an Animoto video describing my journey in the professional development practice of Lesson Study, an online course designed to facilitate its study and develop a community of collaborators.  Animoto is a great story telling tool, but this story also introduces collaborators to a tool that will afford them the ability to share their own stories about student learning and collaboratively find patterns and meaning in these moments. 

One of the advantages of group wikis is the opportunity to jump right in and extend other’s ideas.  In an LMS forum, you may extend someone’s idea but there is no pressing incentive to find a mutually negotiated understanding.  Often these extensions are educational but may not become acclimated into our view of the world.  In a wiki there has to be some negotiation of meaning and corroboration before the final product can be produced often leading to discourse and deeper understanding. 

Another advantage that I enjoy is corroboration.  When someone agrees with and extends my ideas, I feel validated.  I believe this validation comes from the corroboration of one’s understanding of the world.  Von Glasersfeld (1988) believes that our knowledge of the world or others is not a true representation, but rather a basis for thinking, a viable model of elements of our experiential world which is strengthened by other’s corroboration. Von Glasersfeld (1988) merges the constructivist theories by stating that learning occurs through perturbation and subsequent viable reorganization of knowledge based on activities, prior knowledge, goals and social interactions of the learner.  Although I did not experience it in this wiki, I have experienced perturbation through discourse of differing perspectives and ideas leading to increased understanding in other wiki activities.   Interestingly, this assignment did not seem to inspire a lot of disagreement or challenging views, most of the decisions seemed to be based on consensus rather than discourse.  Although educational, I am not sure that I achieved a deeper understanding of social media. 

The challenge of working with others in a collaborative space is the lack of accountability and incentive to negotiate meaning (agree just to agree so you can minimize the workload).  One of the things that may have increased this discourse in this particular wiki would have been more marks assigned to the final product.  In the past, when my group was worried that our grade may suffer if the product wasn’t comprehensive or ‘top notch’, there was more interaction and impassioned discussions.   Another idea might have been to make the group wiki smaller, dividing the class up into 2 or three groups to increase member accountability and participation.  Although both of these ideas do not match the theory behind Wikipedia, I believe this would have resulted in a much more comprehensive and corroborated final product.

References:

Von Glasersfeld, E.  (1988) The reluctance to change a way of thinking. Irish Journal of Psychology, 9, 83–90. Retrieved July 10, 2011 from http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/EvG/cgi-bin/index.cgi?browse=journal