In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee developed and launched The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury, which consisted of a series of videos and mathematical problem solving scenarios aimed at middle school students. The videos depict real people in authentic situations that require math reasoning to solve.

Springing onto the educational scene in 20-30 years ago, this series would have been cutting edge in terms of video quality and problem-based learning. Allowing students to move through problems and challenges at their own pace provided more opportunities for learning,but the video clips viewed in Lesson 1 did not showcase the interactivity potential that is promoted by Vanderbilt. How do expectations for interactivity in a TELE compare between the late 80’s and the present? This goes hand in hand with inquiring into what social collaboration entailed, and how it was used. Given the time frame for this series, asynchronous learning was probably most relevant, but with the advent of greater social media, how could this affect interactions, collaborative opportunities and how collective knowledge is built?

Pedagogical design left me with some questions as well. How did the Jasper Series address diversity of instruction to meet various learning styles? Would this meet expectations today? As interesting as some of the problems seemed, it left me feeling that students seem to be expected to fill and keep a lot of information in their heads as they are navigating the problem. How did this program fare, with specific attention to student abilities and learning styles?

Ultimately, I wonder about what this program would look like with further inquiry embedded into it. That means that less data is handed to students as they try to figure out which variables to change and how resulting in greater complexity of problems.

image: Eyespy by KayVee.INC released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license