Week 4 Response

On Jasper and anchored instruction . . . I found that I was mostly critical of the Jasper project as I read this week's readings, wondering what advantage this project has as a learning technology. It seems to me that the real value of the project doesn't come from the fact that it takes the shape of a relatively advanced technology (a videodisc program), but that it basically replaces the lesson planning that a teacher might do on his/her own with a really well thought-out and well-planned program for immersing students into rich problem spaces. It is almost as if Jasper provides excellent scaffolding for teachers - not students - by demonstrating the kinds of complex problem-solving activities that educators could actually be creating on their own for their students. In other words, the technology of this program isn't what seemed essential to its success; it is the instructional methods that it employs and the nature of the problem space that it presents that make it successful. The CTGV paper ("The Jasper Experiment: An Exploration of Issues in Learning and Instructional Design") emphasized that, for students, the project itself was motivating and the problems it presented were meaningful, but I didn't see anywhere what criteria were used to determine precisely what makes this project so meaningful and motivating. Rather, it seemed to me as though the authors just assumed that the project was instrinsically more meaningful and motivating simply because technology was used. Yes, watching and searching the stories on videodiscs may be fun for awhile, but eventually the novelty wears off. I also fail to see how the situation/problem that is presented -- that of an adolescent learning to fly an ultralight airplane, and then potentially using it to rescue an injured eagle from the wild in order to take it to her vet for it to be cared for -- qualifies as a truly meaningful problem for students today. Wouldn't a more meaningful problem be one that students have to actually engage in and experience first hand? Wouldn't it be better - truly more meaningful and motivating - to place students in an actual scenario in which they have to accomplish a goal by figuring out how to get from point A to point B to point C, and then having them actually do so? (An aside -- an additional hope of the project creators was that students would become concerned about elements of the problem and would go on to conduct extra research in order to learn more. However, because the problem sets up the false pretense that an adolescent can and should rescue an endangered species, this project is actually doing a disservice to its students by contributing to their miseducation: no untrained person should ever handle any animal from the wild, endangered or not, injured or not. A more responsible project would give students a realistic problem that can realistically be solved, without contributing to misconceptions that will then have to be unlearned -- that is *if* the students actually go on to do further research.) One final beef I have with this project - I also think that it is not an advantage, but is rather a disadvantage, that this project sidesteps the need for students to be able to read. Isn't the whole point of the project to embed skills and concepts into a rich and lifelike learning space, one that connects to other disciplines? If so, then reading and language arts have a place in this problem, and should not be viewed as barriers to success. Teachers concerned about literacy would want reading to be a part of the problem, because it would further connect reading to math, rather than disassociating the two subjects. That's all. Thanks for reading!

Week 3 Responses

Of the three articles for today, the Brown, Collins, & Duguid article resonated with me the most. Their metaphor for thinking of knowledge/concepts as tools helped me to really grasp the fact that if knowledge is pulled out and abstracted from its context, it cannot truly be understood. I especially like this notion because it illustrates how knowledge, as a tool, is not only best understood within context, but it also has the power to change the context. When we understand and use knowledge, we change our world, just as when we understand a tool and use it, we change the world around us. This just made sense to me - it's a way to think of knowledge and ideas as almost tangible things that we actually use to shape our world. The authors' theories on knowledge as concepts embedded into context impacts our discussion on learning technologies in a number of ways. For instance, one way is that their notions suggest that learning technologies would only be effective when they are used in instruction that situates the concept to be learned, or problem to be solved, in a real-world experience that applies to the lives of students. (I suppose this is what is meant by "authentic learning" -- a term I have come across in a number of readings for other classes.) Along with this, Brown, Collins, & Duguid touch upon what it might mean to teach students to be like "Just Plain Folks," regular people who creatively tackle ill-defined problems in real life. This too makes sense to me because this is what life is like: problems are not well-defined, and we often have to resort to inventive, resourceful heuristics to try to solve problems. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but real learning can take place. As for the other two articles, by Roschelle, et al. and Kleiman, these articles seemed to be compatible with each other in that Roschelle, et al. highlighted several successful math and science oriented computer technologies while Kleiman discussed the best ways to incorporate technologies like these and others into classrooms. However, I thought that the claim made early on in the Roschelle et al. article that because information is exploding, students will need to learn to "master calculus and other complicated subjects to participate fully in an increasingly technological society" (Roschelle et al. 77) was dubious. Is this really true? I consider myself to be a full participant in society, yet I have never taken calculus and I still think I'm a pretty good problem-solver. If this is the premise that Roschelle et al. are working off of -- that learning technologies are important for teaching students tasks such as calculus because there is information overload in our day -- I think that this is faulty reasoning that would situate the learning of calculus in a misinformed and inauthentic context for students. As a future media specialist, I think there are more important and better ways for dealing with information overload (as opposed to learning calculus) -- such as learning how to navigate information sources (like the World Wide Web), access information, evaluate it, and create and use it responsibly.