I wrote two flight paths and so had the opportunity to visit my objectives and desired learning goals for this course twice over the past few months. The overall goal was to understand how technology can be used to achieve a set of learning outcomes and how to assess the success of the application of that technology within a course, a section or specific assignment. I used the analogy of fumbling around in the dark in the development of course material in the past and expressed my wish to develop the skill necessary for a conscious and structured approach to course development.
I expected my goals for learning to change with my understanding of the content of the course developed. I did not expect that the technological side of the course to be a challenge as I have worked in the web development and multimedia field for over a decade and have programmed and coded in a variety of languages and platforms. The design of educational tools and the understanding of how people learn, what they learn and how to assess their understanding is the challenge I expected to face and struggle with as we developed tools and discussed different scenarios throughout this course.
With regards to the toolkit, there was a lot of options here and at times I felt like a child in a candy shop faced with a short timeline and limited budget that allowed for one or two choices from hundreds of fantastic options. I hoped to embody the philosophy of education that I am trying to understand and apply to my online applications, this course and my own LMS. This is not as easy as Epictetus makes it sound all those centuries ago. Like most great teachers, he offers a simple task where the student only begins understands the difficulty and depth of skill and effort required once they have begun their way down the path of learning. I would like to have had more time to read all the optional readings, explore the ideas in the discussions and participate on a more frequent basis but that is the part of the art of online technology. It is overwhelming with opportunities to participate, create, expand, explore and assess and there has to be a conscious and strategic, often ruthless, accounting for time and resources. This has been an exercise of time management as much as it has been an exercise of learning. One has to be very concise and focused to accomplish specific tasks and be able to discern the necessary from the optional.
The educational toolkit was fun to look at, to use and I was introduced to a few new tools that are far easier to use than Flash, HTML, PHP or Javascript. I can see that the ability to use these languages, while valuable for specialized work, may become unnecessary as more and more applications are developed to allow the general user to make complicated media presentations and interactive tools develop and provide endless opportunities for creating online content and educational materials. The skill that will be of value is the educational acumen to design online media and tools that engage the user, provide access to the majority, fit time and resources at hand and achieve the educational objectives of the activity or course.
I was challenged in the the how to design it, what is it doing, who is it for, why use one element over another and how to measure the results. This was an exciting problem as it was many faceted and required a great deal of thought and planning. In many ways, it is similar to a large project with many stakeholders and many outcomes. I have led and been part of development projects and inventory/mapping projects that required similar planning and found the coordination and execution of the work to be challenging and rewarding. Here it is much the same though the outcomes are in some ways harder to measure because any assessment, of students or the course/application can be biased by the questions or measurements themselves. This is an area where I still have questions and I am grateful for this and the other new windows or inquiries that I have developed during this course.
I found the discussions and input of the experienced educators in this course and the readings that addressed educational frameworks and principles to be of great value. I read the discussions, visited blogs and LMS to confirm my understanding of the readings and as the educational design and understanding of what I was creating, what it meant and how it fit into the frameworks and principles introduced in this course.
The ideas presented by Wesch were perhaps the most powerful for me….how to engage students in the classroom and change the layout or structure of course delivery in our institutions to better fit the world we live in today. Universities were developed at a time when access to knowledge was very limited and very exclusive. Experts in their field of knowledge shared their understanding and ideas in lectures to a select few and these students could not afford to miss a word or lecture as they were unlikely to find the information elsewhere. That is no longer true. Information is everywhere. The wiki exercise confirmed for me that the authorities we have long relied on are actually no closer to a definitive representation of facts than an entry on wikipedia and the example shared in my discussion on the comparison of the definition of Burgundy between the established authorities and the wiki entry illustrated this point. The wiki entry, by virtue of numerous inputs, checks and constant updates, was far closer to the historic definition than any of the authorities, at least where the kingdom of Burgundy was concerned.
My focus from this point forward will be on the technologies that allow students to develop their own knowledge base and to prepare for activities that engage and challenge them in the lab or lecture. Perhaps lecture should be changed to discussion or forum, whether online or in a classroom, thus changing the perception that the authority stands at the front and the students sit and recieve the information. The example provided in the Cool Links section where the UBC prof is using clickers to engage an already educated class is one that I am inspired and intrigued to learn more about. The professor provides students with the knowledge they need, requires them to complete a quiz and then uses the class to challenge and test students in areas where he found they struggled in the quiz. He can also introduce advanced issues or topics that can generate a discussion or debate.
This engagement and use of technology to facilitate learning, to build critical assessment skills, capacity to troubleshoot, adapt and address problems with a creative confidence based on a deep understanding of the subject is truly a pursuit worth a lifetime of study. Technology can be used not only to facilitate this in a class, but in myself as well. “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it” – All right Epictetus, here I come and may I always find a challenge in this task you have set out for students for millenia.
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Substantive, comprehensive reflection about your overall ETEC565A experience
Substantive, comprehensive reflection about next steps for you, in terms of your practice in educational technology, which could include what technologies you hope to explore moving forward, or how you plan on engaging as a lifelong learner in terms of educational technology?
Overall quality of work is also important, as per the overall standards listed above
Posted on the Synthesis page of your e-portfolio.
Your final syntesis should be as detailed as possible, thus there is not word limit.