Analysis
Introduction to the analysis component – March 4, 2013
A final entry for your e-folio will be analysis of your thinking throughout the course. To do this you will need to critically examine what you’ve written.
- What do you notice about what you were paying attention to?
- Look for patterns or themes in your thinking; locate the learning that has taken place; look for similarities or differences in the kinds of questions you were asking.
You might find that using a metaphor to bring your ideas together will be helpful or you might find that you can organize your entries around particular issues, questions, or categories, that seem to surface for you and have been addressed.You might notice that you are asking different questions now as you were at the start of the course – you then might explore why this is the case (or whether the question is really still the same … or if your response has changed).
This analysis of your e-folio should be approximately 2000 words, as a summative examination of what you have learned, using your inquiry e-folio as your data source. This is not a summary of your e-folio but an analysis of it. The analysis should be placed within your e-folio, clearly labeled as such. We will access it from there.
Organize your analysis by a theme (or set of themes), and locate your development in terms of what you have learned, along this theme. Cite: 1) important course readings 2) course activities (e.g. assignments, hands-on activities with specific technologies, guest speaker discussions) in the development of your learning trajectory, and 3) integrate direct quotations from peer discussions in the forums, where appropriate. To enrich the analysis, make connections wherever possible to your practice and the teaching of math and science.
We imagine that a sample response for this assignment could include a theme (with embedded description) of the various categories of learning you have noticed about your writings or collections in your e-folio; you will need to provide evidence of the nature of this “category” by selecting passages or quotes from your previous journal entries or class discussions, with appropriate and specific references to lessons and scholarly writing. Your evidence might not just be text based but could include other media and artifacts within your inquiry e-folio.
Your wrap-up or conclusion should address:
- The importance of this “theme” or “category” (ie why you have chosen these)
- What you have learned from engagement with pedagogy, design, and learning of math and science, and
- What further questions have been raised for you that you aim to explore via research, design, development, or through other forms of practice within classrooms.
What I have learned from this course: Technology in the math and science classroom – April 2, 2013
Introduction:
This analysis piece is an analysis of my thinking and learning throughout the course. Writing it has given be the opportunity to critically examine what I have written throughout the course. I was able to reflect on what I was paying attention to and discovered patterns and themes in my thinking. In summary it is an analysis of what I have learned.
As this is the last course that I need to take in the MET program before graduating in May 2013, I have included at the end of this analysis, a program epilogue called “To Here, and From Here”. The epilogue provides my final thoughts and learning over the last four years while in the program and how I intend to use them going into the future. The epilogue is located after the references in this posting.
This has been an intensive writing course, much more than I expected. Except for quotes from some papers and my peer’s comments to my postings from the course discussion board, the content in this e-folio is my own, all created originally for this course. I estimate my contribution of close to 25, 000 words.
The course also stretched me by placing me firmly outside of my comfort zone many times. The course is focused on technology in the science and mathematics classroom, whereas I am an administrator at a post-secondary polytechnic who has not been in the classroom for many years. I have a keen interest in course and program design and development, so drilling down to the details of how technology is important and useful in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classroom was a challenge for me. To provide some context to progress through this course I needed to reach back some 20 plus years to a time when science and technology was more prominent in my life than is today. I seemed to have survived, probably because I had just enough background knowledge and experience that keep me in the upper levels of my “zone of proximal development” (Bruner, 1984) for much of the course. I was never bored and a few times frustrated when I entered the zone of confusion. Regardless of how exhausting and intense this has been, it is all good and much of what I am taking away from this course can be applied to my current and future work environment.
The pace of the course was fast; the instructor put the “pedal to the metal” on January 2, 2013 and did not let up throughout the course. Now it is early April and time to reflect on what I have learned and how I can apply it to my current role as the Curriculum Coordinator for the School of Business at SAIT Polytechnic.
Here are some of the themes that I take away from the course
- Deal with misconceptions
- Encourage engagement with technology
- Refer to theoretical frameworks for guidance when using technology
- Embrace emerging genres of teaching, learning and technologies
- Use technology where appropriate
Misconceptions
Conceptual challenges are something that I had never thought of previously as being important. But as I went through the course resources, read the postings from my colleagues and started to reflect on my own situation, I realized that yes there are a lot of challenges out there that people have related to math and science that are important to identify and to talk about. Posner, Strike, Hewson and Gertzog (1982) in their research on a theory for conceptual change, discuss how accommodations or foundational conceptual changes can be stated and that conceptual changes can be “ …. strenuous and potentially threatening, particularly when the individual is firmly committed to prior assumptions” p223.
This notion of challenging a student’s conceptions and putting them into a state of starting to realize they have misconceptions provides a great opportunity for them to seek alternatives and thus engage in learning opportunities to find answers to their newly discovered doubts about their current assumptions. I found this approach to be appropriate as it is the basis for scientific inquiry. It also leads to some of the theoretical frameworks explored in this course as solutions for teachers and instructors using technology to help students challenge their assumptions and to grow. I believe this approach is related to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as it pushes students outside their comfort zones much like I have been throughout this course (Vygotsky; 1978).
I had some fun with the mapping misconception that I used as an example in this course; AKA Greenland. I believe increasing inaccuracies of land masses as one moves from the equator to the poles is an unrecognized misconception due to the use of the Mercator projection as a standard for map creation. As we have moved to the Internet, I noticed that the use of the Mercator projection as the basis for world maps did not go away however there are many maps now available on the Internet that use a projection that is more accurate for land mass size. The best tool that I found for exploring the earth through maps is Google Earth and not through Google Maps which uses the Mercator projection as a base.
Engagement
Engagement is a theme that appeared early in the course and was maintained throughout. Engagement needs to be there for the student and the teacher and when both are engaged, then teaching and learning really happen. My initial postings in the course focused more on teacher engagement starting with the case studies on calculators and clickers. In these videos, I was as much interested in the teacher’s engagement as the student’s engagement with these simple technologies. These two videos were the basis that eventually leads me to the topic of my framing issues paper about using clickers as a way to engage students and instructors in post-secondary first and second year STEM courses. I found that student engagement in first and second year post-secondary STEM courses is critical to retaining them in STEM disciplines while in school, unfortunately these courses are often considered to be killer courses to weed out the non-scientists early. The paper entitled “STEM in post-secondary education can be engaging or boring; it is the instructor’s choice“, is summarized in the framing page of this blog.
The engagement theme occurred throughout the course, especially in the design and emerging modules where many of the key questions were asking what are the roles of the students and the teachers. As we discovered, science inquiry, the foundation of the theoretical networks that we explored, needs the teacher to be engaged as a leader or guide to help the students work through these different learning environments. Whether it be the staged Jasper Woodbury series using anchored instruction (CTGV, 1992) or the open My World package using the learning for use framework (Edelson, 2001). These are all refreshing constructivist pedagogies for students to learn and the teacher to observe and guide compared to the old transmission of information methods of the past that were not very engaging for either.
Looking forward into emerging methods and technologies for STEM education, topics such as knowledge diffusion and information visualization will continue to keep the students and teachers engaged at a much deeper level.
Theoretical Frameworks
The four theoretical frameworks and the teaching and learning applications discussed in this course were all new to me.
Anchored Instruction:
The anchored instruction applied through the Jasper series would have been very innovative when released in the late 1980’s as it was a complete package that encouraged students to problem solve and critically think. The approach removed the centre of learning away from the teacher and distributed it through knowledge, the learner, assessment and the community (CTGV, 1992). Jasper produced the foundation to further encourage a scientific inquiry approach to STEM education with the development and acceptance of the Internet throughout the 1990’s.
Scaffolded Knowledge Integration:
Next came the development of the web based inquiry system or WISE in the late 1990’s. This system embraces many inquiry based practices including engagement of students with diagnosing problems, critiquing experiments, planning investigations, searching for information and debating with peers. WISE is based on the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration framework SKI) (Linn, Clark and Slotta, 2003). I liked this framework and the WISE examples as they provide basic demonstrations and simulations that are easy to update and customize much like updating or customizing a course in a learning management system.
Learning for Use:
My World and the learning for use pedagogy (Edelson; 2001) took me back 15 years to a former career as a GIS Coordinator. This was a time when you needed to be a specialist to do “GIS”, now students can do “GIS” as part of their curriculum in K-12 education. Although the software is complex, so there is a very important role of the teacher to be informed of how it works and how to guide students through interpreting the outputs. The learning for use pedagogy coupled with the My World GIS is a very constructivist approach for both learning and knowledge creation. So much so, that without proper guidance, students could enhance misconceptions or develop new misconceptions in their excitement of working with this package.
A Diversion:
While I was experimenting in My World in Mid-February, my attention got diverted to Google Maps and Google Earth. Here I decided to add another dimension to my Diversion page in this blog. Initially the diversion page was intended to track on a weekly basis, my parallel life-work-learning activities. This idea popped into my mind in early January when I was thinking about the course will skiing. The added dimension was to convert the kilometers that I logged over the winter to the road route from my house in Calgary to the Chan Centre at UBC where graduation will be held in May. This is a great example of setting an activity goal and attaching different locations to it to find out more “along the way”. You can follow my journey by reading my ski log on the Diversions page.
T-GEM:
My favourite framework was Technology – Generate – Evaluate -Modify (T-GEM) (Khan; 2007, 2010), not because it is fully embraced by the instructor of this course but because it is truly a framework that can be applied to just about any situation. This method encourages students to generate their own rules or relationships given initial information. Then they are then challenged with new, often conflicting information and asked to evaluate the rules and then modify them based on the new information. The example used in this course was Chemistry through Chemland, however this framework could be applied many different subject areas and can use a multitude of resources to support it.
Any of these theoretical frameworks: anchored Instruction, WISE/SKI, learning for use and T-GEM should be considered when designing anything from a lesson to a course whether it be in STEM or in other disciplines such as business where an inquiry based approach is beneficial.
Emerging Teaching, Learning and Technologies
The last module of this course examined emerging teaching, learning and technologies and often we were asked to consider one or more of these emerging aspects in the context of one of the theoretical frameworks.
Embodied Learning:
I was a bit puzzled when we started with the embodied learning lesson, however I soon put it into the context of talking with your hands. The examples given by Winn (2003) the guest speaker in her paper and the examples she gave in the discussion all made sense.
For me, physical movement gets my brain going. I find that I can explain something better when I am moving around and I find I am most creative and do the best problem solving when I am off on a long hike, cycle or cross country ski. When I think back of my time in this MET program over the last 43 months and the 10 courses (including this one), I was better able to process and digest the heavy duty academic readings if I was active after completing the readings. I was also the most creative in designing and carrying out the projects, papers and posts that I wrote while in this program after thinking about them while I was active. There is nothing better than a 5 hour road ride or cross country ski covering anywhere from 30 to 100 kilometres to develop an idea from concept to a draft in my mind. I guess I embraced embodied learning all along; this lesson helped me to acknowledge it.
Knowledge Diffusion:
Knowledge diffusion is where concepts and practices are shared, appropriated and changed by others (Roth 1996). The Internet has thus created a structure and opportunity for educators, students and scientists to collaborate to generate and share information, data, concepts and practices. This can be done through networked environments and applications such as virtual field trips, web-based expeditions, virtual worlds, Exploratorium and GLOBE. Globe for example provides the unique opportunity for students to gather valid scientific data alongside scientists and interact with the scientists along the way. Virtual field trips give teachers the opportunity to augment actual field trips or even replace field trips when actual field trips are not possible.
These two knowledge diffusion methods create opportunities for student engagement with actual real time scientific data and scientists. We can only hope that the excitement that students in K-12 will gain from working with scientists will not be spoiled if they end up in a killer post-secondary introductory science course of their liking by an instructor who purposely disengages themselves and students to weed out the class.
Information Visualization:
Information Visualization is a great way to bring information and data to life through simulation. Quite often we gather data to prove a point or to find out what something means. Information visualization is a great was to show the point to be made or what something means. For example, the complexities of a simple business case such as running a small business can be easily visualized by running the lemonade stand simulation.
Overall my learning’s from this emerging module are related to my Auto e-ography where I came to the realization that emerging technologies gradually and sometimes quickly diffuse into everyday tools. The calculator of the 1970’s is now just an application or a widget in many devices. The merging of data sets and 3-D perspective displays of spatial data sets that I spent weeks working on for my graduate thesis in the early 1990’s is done instantly with Google Earth. Being aware of emerging teaching, learning and technologies now is important so as educators, we can be on the leading edge in using them. Suddenly or even more gradually they will become common place widgets and applications and then we can move onto working with the next emerging things to stay on top.
Technology Where Appropriate
One common theme that I noticed throughout my time in the MET program is, when should we use technology? The simple answer is when it is appropriate; the difficult answer is to determine when it is it appropriate? I have carried this theme over to this course and mentioned it in the unpacking assumptions posting for this course:
“We need to be careful that we don’t just use technology because we can, and not get caught up in the wow factor. Also to be careful that just because we are teaching math, science or a technology that everything does not need to be taught with technology. There are plenty of ways to teach concepts and many of the old ways still work; always mix it up. Working for a Polytechnic, we need programs that are a fine balance of training and education. The employers love our graduates as they are more “job ready” than university graduates. Thus the technologies that we use are applicable and relevant to the jobs the graduates will be moving into.”
I still believe in what I wrote above after taking this course, even more so. Based on the interviews that I did for the framing issues module, I found that students exposed to technology in high school or who have had some post-secondary experience, are better prepared than students returning from the workforce when they choose to go to post-secondary education full-time. So by using a variety of appropriate technologies in K-12 students will be better prepared to pick-up new technologies (beyond social networking) when they enter post-secondary programs.
Conclusions
This course has expanded my view of science education using technology, especially as I needed to reach back some 20 years to a previous science based career. Many aspects of this course including: misconceptions, engagement, science-based inquiry frameworks, emerging technologies and methods, and when to use technology will be useful for me as I continue to provide guidance and support as a coordinator in the post-secondary environment.
References
Bruner, J. (1984), Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development: The hidden agenda. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1984: 93–97. doi: 10.1002/cd.23219842309
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1992). The Jasper experiment: An exploration of issues in learning and instructional design. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 40(1), 65-80.
Gerofsky,S. (2010). Mathematical learning and gesture. Gesture, 2-3, Gerofsky Gesture article 2011 CVPT OVPT point of view-1.pdf
Edelson, D.C. (2001). Learning-for-use: A framework for the design of technology-supported inquiry activities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching,38(3), 355-385.
Khan, S. (2007). Model-based inquiries in chemistry. Science Education, 91(6), 877-905.
Khan, S. (2010). New pedagogies for teaching with computer simulations. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 20(3), 215-232.
Linn, M., Clark, D., & Slotta, J. (2003). Wise design for knowledge integration. Science Education, 87(4), 517-538.
Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W. and Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accomodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2): 211-227.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winn, W. (2003). Learning in artificial environments: Embodiment, embeddedness, and dynamic adaptation. Technology, Instruction, Cognition and Learning, 1(1), 87-114.
To Here, and From Here: My MET Program Epilogue
This course concludes my formal learning and engagement as an online graduate student in the MET program. I have now completed 10 courses in the degree and have fulfilled the requirements to graduate in May, 2013. This adventure started many years ago when it was mentioned to me that if I wanted to work in the post-secondary curriculum development field, than I should have a Master’s degree in education. This sounded like a reasonable assumption, but the hard part was, how I could achieve a second Master’s degree at a stage past the mid-point in my career. I knew of a few people who had through part time studies, achieved their graduate degrees, perhaps it was now my turn. So over four years ago I applied for the MET program and was accepted over the winter of 2008-09. Fortunately SAIT saw promise in me and hired me in a curriculum role and supported me while taking this program.
In my application to my employer (SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary, AB) for credential enhancement funding, I described my interest in this program as follows: “There is now a need for me to crystallize my experience in curriculum development and my role as a Curriculum Coordinator with a formal education in learning technologies to enhance my role and to provide learning and technology leadership to faculty and staff in my school and across SAIT”. In addition, I described this program as providing the following value to myself “The proposed Master’s degree will provide me with knowledge and skills, based on current best practices, and emerging trends in learning and technology that will give me the confidence to provide guidance to faculty and Academic Chairs and leadership to the School of Business in the development of proposed new programs and the redevelopment of existing programs”. SAIT accepted my request and provided me with on-going funding throughout the four years to cover the majority of the tuition and fee costs. I started my first course in September 2009 and preceded slowly, one course at a time for 43 months to now.
During this time I maintained my position as the Curriculum Coordinator for the School of Business at SAIT. Throughout this time I was involved in five major program redesigns that involved the coordination of the design and development or redevelopment of approximately 75 three-credit courses into blended and online formats. The programs include: Business Administration diploma with four majors, the Bachelor of Business Administration (Accounting) Degree, Community Economic Development Certificate, Legal Assistant Diploma and the Administration Information Management Diploma. During this time I guided, lead, supported and learned from many a faculty member, Instructional Designer, Academic Chair, Project Manager and Dean.
This work experience gave me much material and examples to bring to my MET courses which I am grateful for. At the same time I was able to apply much of the learning from these courses to my workplace environment. Much along the lines of a professional apprentiship, if there is such an approach to reciprocal learning and work. Also there is the experience of living the distance education dream of taking courses from an institute hundreds of kilometres away without leaving my own city to fully participate. This experience in turn was helpful to me in guiding the design and development of the many blended and fully online business courses that I have been responsible for. Because of the combination of my work experience over the last four years and my learning through the MET program, I feel that I have fulfilled the interest and value statements that I quoted above from my funding application.
From here moving forward, I will value the learning from this course and the nine others in my work as an post-secondary education administrator. There is still much to be done finishing off the last two School of Business program redesigns over the next 15 months. Hopefully we will also be permitted to expand some of our current programs with new exciting majors over the next few years.
One final comment, I recall a couple of motivators for taking a graduate degree in education that I acknowledged four years ago before starting this program: first, I am a lifelong learner and had not done much formal learning over the previous 15 years so this program helped to fill a gap. Second, I remember saying that doing a Master’s degree at this stage in my life will surely help prevent the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This program and especially this course have certainly kept my brain more than active and will surely delay the possible onset!
Thank you Samia Khan and all of the MET instructors for the opportunity to learn from you and engage with you over the last four years that I have been in the program. I look forward to meeting in person for the first time you, MET faculty and many of my classmates at the UBC graduation ceremonies in May.