Day: April 2, 2009

I recorded these thoughts awhile ago, but just got to posting them here…

I just completed my ILN lab. This was an experience where we were able to remotely operate a GC/MS analyzing a prepared sample. I chose to analysis sample 5, the anesthesiologist as I figured, since he’s the person handling the drugs, he’d have the best chance to swipe some.

My GC/MS analysis resulted in 2 peaks. I library searched both of them. The first I identified as caffeine (no surprise there) and the second I identified as Fentanyl!!

I’m interested in hearing what everyone else discovered! I love mysteries and as a chemist, it was nice to go back to a type of analysis I haven’t had a chance to do since I was in University!! 🙂

Who knows, maybe they were all swiping some drugs!

On a different note, I found I couldn’t get the camera to pan or zoom. I used the sliders, but the image didn’t seem to change. That being said, there isn’t much to watch while a GC/MS is processing, so I’m not sure why the camera was considered necessary in the first place.

I was very excited to arrive at my lab date and time. I felt like this was an appointment I could not miss which differentiated this experience from that of a simulation that is available all the time. I felt like I had the privilege of this one hour on the machine and I needed to be as prepared as possible to make the best of my one hour!

It would be interesting to see what effect (if any) working on experiments such as this while online with a lab partner may have. Would the collaboration between you and your lab partner help you to get more out of an experience such as this?

Science is a discipline that is never conducted in a vacuum, scientists are constantly collaborating in one way or another so it would be interesting to see if collaboration could be added into an experience such as this.

I sat in my PJ’s doing the lab, and it was more relaxed than I remember my university or high school labs being. While it’s interesting that we were running actual samples on an actual machine, it felt like a simulation as we were analyzing pre-prepared samples that we had no control over.

When in university, the major portion of the experiment was in preparation of the sample, the final analysis step of injecting the sample into the GC/MS almost felt like submitting your experimental work for assessment. The hands-on portion of the lab was lost in this ILN experience (for me anyway).

Even if my camera had been working, I’m not sure watching the machine inject my sample would have made it feel less like a simulation.

I wonder about this question every time I notice the reliance of students on technology. It is clearly evident to me that students no longer use technology to enhance their everyday lives, they are reliant on it. Take away their cell phones, they’d be crushed! Scarier…take away their calculators and the vast majority would be quite helpless in math class!

I think in our haste to utilize technology in teaching to help keep our students attention we may have begun to unconsciously teach them about a perceived value of technology.

While I am pro-technology integration in teaching I believe we need to be careful that in our attempts to expand our students experiences we don’t neglect the basics upon which we build our understanding of the world!

According to Resnick and Wilensky (1998)¹ , while role-playing activities have been commonly used in social studies classrooms, they have been infrequently used in science and mathematics classrooms. Speculate on why role playing activities may not be promoted in math and science and elaborate on your opinion on whether activities such as role playing should be promoted. Draw upon embodied learning in your response.

Role playing is an activity that seems especially well-suited to the humanities classroom. Students learn about a character by reading a novel and then exemplify their understanding of the character by acting out they way they think the character would behave in a given situation. In social studies a student could take on the role of Napoleon or Adolph Hitler and help the pages of the textbook “come alive”.

The practicality of role playing in the science or math classroom is not nearly as obvious as in the humanities classroom. If you asked a student to role-play an exponential curve they would likely look at you as though you’d grown a second head. However, from reading Colella (2000) and Roschelle (2003) I have realized that there is definitely a place for roll playing in the science and math classroom. Colella describes an example of embodied learning, where students utilize a small technological device to explore the way in which infectious diseases spread. The students were completely immersed in the experience, remarking about whether they were healthy or sick, expressing emotion against those who they deemed to have infected them, and arguing about the best ways to structure experiments to determine the causes of infection. I was very impressed with the personal ownership the students took of their own learning in this example. Role playing activities such as this one, where the students are actively involved in their learning and have the freedom to structure their own experiments, should definitely be promoted in the science classroom.

Winn (2002) described an interesting theory of learning where the students’ perception of the environment is considered along with the environments effect on the students. This is exemplified in the aforementioned disease example, as the students structure the experiments, then the feedback they get from the role playing game structures their understanding of the concept and points them in new directions of experimentation.

I would be interested in hearing about any such role playing experiments in the math classroom. Has anyone heard, or had experience with role playing in the math classroom?

References:

Colella, V. (2000). Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 471-500. UBC library: full-text available online

Roschelle, J. (2003). Unlocking the learning value of wireless mobile devices. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 19(3), 260-272.

Winn, W. (2002). Learning in Artificial Environments: Embodiment, Embeddedness and Dynamic Adaptation, Tech. Inst. Cognition and Learning, Vol.1