Investigating Technology Enhanced Learning Environments – The Jasper Series
Description
The Jasper Series is a series of fourteen movies that are used in technology enhanced learning environments. Each movie/video provides a number of problem solving scenarios that require students to come up with mathematical solutions to real life problems/questions.
The media offers audio and visual sets that are arranged and narrated as an adventure. The voices used in the narrations all give the lessons/problem solving scenario a movie like or a book-like (Sherlock Holmes type of adventure) quality.
Instructor perspective/Impact
The Series provided an interesting medium for presenting problems. The movie gave some connectivity with the persons involved and in some instances provided broader contexts and links such as historical facts. For example in Movie 6, Charles Linbergh as the first person to desire to fly solo across the Atlantic and his non-stop trip from New York to Paris in 1927.
The movies are constructivist in nature and provide context, relevance and added interest through the use of voice and animation versus text. Many more senses are involved and multiple intelligences catered for (Gardner, 1983).
Multiple Intelligences (Source – http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu)
Critical questions are asked in contexts that are more real than abstract and that students are more readily able to relate to and connect with. It also will engage them more to want to do the research/ work needed to solve the problem.
Questions
Instructor perspective
- How can lessons be made more contextual and not abstracted from students’ reality? For example, I think there are many areas in Mathematics (at some levels) that are not readily applicable to everyday use, for example factorisation of quadratic formulas.
- Can lessons be structured in such as way that they all start from a contextualised problem and all learning platform from there? How is this possible or how can it be different for abstract concepts?
- How can I add real-life aspects to perceived abstract or non-relational elements?
Design perspective
- What type of technology, pedagogy and assessment do we need to have to support such education as described in 2 above?
Resources
1. The Jasper Series – https://www.vista.ubc.ca/webct/RelativeResourceManager/Template/ModuleB/MB_L1ACTJasperMovies.htm
2. Charels Lindbergh – http://www.charleslindbergh.com/history/paris.asp
3. Theory of Multiple Intelligences – http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html
4. Photo of Multiple Intelligences – http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu