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!