Tuesday, November 28 - Vygotsky & more!

BLOG for
ITEC 800
November 28, 2006
Dr. Kim Foreman

This is the first blog I have ever written to. Since I have never done this before, and having read past blogs from our course, I would like to keep this as a note format and not a personal reflection of my experience in the course this evening. Although we are nearly all present here this evening, I did not include student names next to their quotes. Instead, student comments are italicized. The bulk of the type below in standard font (like what you’re reading) is direct quote of Dr. Foreman or a close paraphrase. I hope you enjoy these specific notes.

Teaching For Understanding – Vygotsky & Bruner and what is understanding
“Look, Reflect, Explore, all these are forms of learning.”
Let’s do this about our Thanksgiving holiday.
Learned about his mother in-laws food patterns and rituals; how important it was to her. He also learned how to be flexible.

This has everything to do with our reading. Vygotsky talked about social learning. Cognitive then came about and is much more thinking based.
With Constructivism (Piaget) we talked about before it was more biological where the thinking skills developed with age.
Bruner & Vygotsky said there was much more to it, people learn in social situation, through our varied experiences of “informal learning”.
Lev Vygotsky was alive 100 years ago and there’s much more to it because at the time it was very novel and at the time it was a very different idea. When Constructivism came along in the 1980’s and so-on Vygotsky’s work took off. Today Project Zero at Harvard University began Teaching for Understanding (TFU). This is where the knowledge can be truly applied.
Vygotsky’s work was taken up by Bruner and that was the beginning of problem based learning. With problem based learning, came the Zone of Proximity.
Spiral curriculum was then began by Bruner, and in this curriculum you go forward in the material but always reviewing what came before.

A lot of the problem solving learning are social learning, and this comes out a lot with games. There are a lot of collaborative learning, problem based learning. The learning is interaction between people,.

Rented a house with four very different aged children, and the one, three, nine, and fifteen year old kids had to get along. Then in the process of playing the kids divided amongst themselves – the one with the three year old and the nine with the fifteen year old – and they were able to teach each other different things, frequently with the younger rising to the elder.
Vygotsky in Russian is a very different text. The social history impacted the way the writing is interpreted it.

The same thing happened with Dewey, the context of culture impacted the way he was remembered. He wrote about 30 – 50 articles and had over 500 response articles written about it, so the interpretation of it can vary because of the readers perspective (their lens).

Mac-N-Cheese Night. The interaction of the intuitive experienced chef and the educated chef and how they interact. They’re both experts in different ways. The mother in law is the matriarch and the sister in law is just the daughter and probably naturally takes the role of a tutee than a tutor.


The need to create instructional material on the spot while cooking dinner and people wanted to help out.

Assuming we’ve read the book, but we’re just going to go over the main points. The link was posted but Dr. Foreman’s not sure how many people looked at it.

On to the iLearn site and a brief overview of the remaining classes.
Ebook is a site that is a great source and “pretty safe”. We’re going to look at Vygotsky’s theories on eBook. “We learn a lot from people who know more than you do.”
The class then goes through the website with Dr. Foreman. “If you have time, read this, because I think it’s better than the book, and it gives great examples.” We then go through some of the websites as a class. (We focus on the graphic.)

The Zone of Proximal Development is teaching just above where the individual is and they are supported to raise up to the level of the instruction.

Vygotsky went against the theory of the time because Vygotsky said humans were different than animals because they only can imitate a limited amount of actions that the individual can do. Humans have the ability to imitate things that they may not yet be able to do. As soon as the child acquires a skill/idea then that is where the leading takes off. He was criticizing Piaget because he said that you should teach ahead of development that would bring development towards the next level. It would be worthless to start teaching something at the point of something that they can already do. Learning should preceed development. The reason Vygotsky began researching this is because his interest as a Psychologist was with kids who were developmentally disabled, and then also with kids with incredibly high IQ’s. He found that kids with higher IQ’s actually lowered their levels by going to school and the developmentally disabled kids were more concrete at school. The idea was that gradually by expanding the zone of proximal development, for both of these groups, were they able to do something abstract that they could not do before.
At the time, culturally, things were done in groups, so Vygotsky was very familiar with that, and group work almost came naturally.
Vygotsky was teaching teachers for a while as well.
In Russia, there is no concept of “gifted”, instead the students are constantly tested by subject and then the excel in different areas based on the success in different areas.

That was the work that lead to Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences which asks to capitalize on the strengths and then build the overall intelligences.

When Vygotsky was going to school Latin and Greek were taught for formal learning and he expanded on that to make the concept the main element of learning. From there, it lead to how the subject is being brought to you.

For another classmate:
The ZPD was an element of interest b/c he saw it in action in both high school teaching and in teaching adults, his work now. It seems like the Zone is the place that learning happens best no matter what is being taught and to whom.

Today, the George Lucas Foundation has an education element that embraces Vygotsky’s teaching of being within the Zone.

Knowing what the student already knows is so important and then relating the new concepts to it.

Project based learning is good for meeting people of varied skills and bringing everyone in to the learning.

Continued discussion about the way that the classmates have seen schools work with large numbers of students and keep them all within the students best Zone.


Back to the eBook website. The site is full of great ideas. www.coe.uga.edu/epitt/reciprocalteaching.htm

Back to the book:
Bruner is big into Discovery Theory. Bruner’s three cognitive representations on page 229.

Now off to a video. Vygotsky’s Developmental Theory, an Introduction
This introductory program introduces Vygotsky, his life, and a scaffolding of his theory.
These are his four elements (they call them propositions) of his theories that will help our later reading of Vygotsky.
Children construct knowledge. They do not passively reproduce what is presented to them. Learning always involves personalization of the material learned and applying it in their own way. Learning always involves more than one human.
Learning can lead development. Vygotsky believed there were mastery prerequisites to learning. For example you can not study logic without learning language. Vygotsky gave great value to using strategies to expand on their own learning capacities.
It is here that the ZPD is most seen. The level of independent performance is built from, leading to the level of assisted performance. The level between the level of independent performance and the level of assisted performance is the ZPD. The zone is not static. The ZPD has at least three impacts on education:
Makes educators reassess how they intervene in their learning.
The ZPD has implications for how we assess children. The unassisted / independent zone is where we’ve been testing children, and how might that change if the assessment was done with assistance in the areas they have difficulty. The level of unassisted performance alone does not give a true picture of where the child is.
The ZPD makes us rethink what is developmentally appropriate. Children’s play often remains narrow with limited roles. Teachers provide activities that are just beyond what one could do on their own, but not what could be done without assistance. The teacher can prompt the use of objects in new and creative ways.
Development cannot be separated from its social context. It has a profound impact on how we think, not just what we think. Vygotsky developed studies to discover that western logic is not universal.
Language plays a central role in mental development. Discussing the experience being learned – even talking with oneself about it – enables one to move to independent learners.
THE END

Time to write whatever you remember about the video that we thought was interesting or a new interest that we might remember.

Vygotsky’s teaching have been something I’ve worked with in my own teaching, so I am not surprised by any of the theory. What I find interesting about it all though is the way that his theory is applicable to all learning. I wonder how the virtual classroom might change the way this takes place…

Fifteen minute break.

Baby movie for a bit of laughter, straight from YouTube and Dr. Foreman’s weblog.

“Back to our learning, a bit boring. All of our learning should be like that.”

All next week we’ll be talking about multiple learning styles &intelligences. This class is a survey and it would be great if we could go deeper, but we will do a survey of it next week. We’ll also look at motivation theory.

Let’s look a little bit about Bruner. When you hear Bruner you ought to hear Discovery Learning and some people think Discovery Learning is where you send students out on their own, and it’s not. The students must have a set-up environment where students can construct their own learning. Montessori is a school system based on that type of instruction.
American education is so much more grounded in behaviorism. When Piaget came here to lecture he was only received by small groups, but in Japan he was embraced. You can see this in their education systems today; however, it has been somewhat impacted today by American education system, but still Piaget will always hold strong with the early education in Japan.

In education it seems that education is more going back and forth rather than just building one way or the other.

Now we’re going to go the the ALPS Teaching for Understanding link from the iLearn site:
http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ALPS/tfu/index.cfm

We’re going to go over this website and discuss it as a group afterwards. We’ll spend about the next twenty minutes reading it and then come back and discuss. The objective is to define TfU, how would you teach TfU?

Onward to our own discussion with a focus of the questions above... We use the ALPS site to make connections to our own elements of teaching and learning.

Understanding is using your knowledge in a new way. Being able to apply your knowledge to something beyond our situational learning. (This is similar to the transfer of learning that Gagne raised.)

We then went around the room and each of us identified something that we do well or deeply understand.

From here, the class went back to the learnweb site and went through the question and answer of the TfU components.

We then discussed the way that questions lead to our own understandings of the concepts within TfU, going back and forth between the website and our own comments about the ways we became aware of our understanding of the elements of life that we have mastered.

San Franciso State University ITEC 800 Blog

Links:

http://ecast.sfsu.edu/wiki/index.php/Tuesday
http://ecast.sfsu.edu/wiki/index.php/ITEC_800
http://coe.sdsu.edu/edtec544/Modules/8-CDT_ClassifyingOutcomes/c/connect.htm
http://www.susanbcline.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Susan Cline presented wiki's as an intro to her ITEC 849 project, a WIKI for the SFSU itec DEPT. The goal of this project is to create a space for communities of practice to post their contributions for the community, and read the posts of others.

We will familiarize ourselves with WIKI by adding the quiz questions we worked on for our assignment tonight to a page of a WIKI.

Here is the link to Susan's WIKI, a good source of information on WIKI's:

http://www.susanbcline.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Here is the link to the WIKI we are to edit:
http://ecast.sfsu.edu/wiki/index.php/Tuesday
http://ecast.sfsu.edu/wiki/index.php/ITEC_800

Susan got us set up and left.

Lecture
There was some discussion about the focus of the assignment for tonight. Kim wanted us to know that the main reason for the assignment was to read the chapter and this creation of questions would help extend our learning.

KF: (handout on Merrill's outcomes) Gange and Merrill, Bloom—all these practicioners have different languages. Gagne is predominantly used.

[handout is read]

Link (thanks to Jennifer):
http://coe.sdsu.edu/edtec544/Modules/8-CDT_ClassifyingOutcomes/c/connect.htm

Performance analysis
content analysis 'what types of knowledge are you trying to teach'
Ask yourself (as a designer) what level do you want to reach?

First question [from handout]:
On a topographic map what is the symbol for a church:
Remember/Fact

2.
concept/remember

3.
use/concept

4.
Find/procedure

5.
remember/procedure

6.
Use/procedure

7.
Find/procedure

8.
Remember/pricinciple

9.
Find/principle or use/principle

10.
Find/principle

Moving on. . . .

Guessing Dan's questions

What year was printing press invented?
Fact/recall

What was happening around the time of its invention?
Fact/recall

How might have other historical factors influence the impact printing press had on society?
Use/Fact

Describe the does a printing press work?

How does one become a printer at the time of it's invention?
Remember/Fact

What book was most printed?
Fact/REmember

How might have that text impacted society?

[break; quizzes came back]

Piaget = constructivist
remember how children learn and stages of development

His four stages are a guideline; everyone goes through the four stages, but perhaps not at the same speed. Remember the net generation.

But he was not without his critics

How is schema really structured; children are expanding their shcema through experience

;accommodation and assimilation'
Their structure is getting new info from 'accommodation' and 'assimilation'

[video on Piaget]

Talk about final project:

If you want to do a final on Piaget or other chapter, that would be OK.

Example: One report on Piaget included a practical application—how a school would give Piaget lessons

Possible project:
Marshall—web 2.0 and how it applies

There is no one way to do the final project

Some people can set up website to describe concept

Go one step beyond regurgitation; come up with a lesson plan for instance

Rubrick: Scope; Relevance to 800 content; Presentation (10 minutes) how well prepared?; Documentation (to turn in)

Two people can work together (talk to her first)

Sent a proposal? YES!

Next week read chapter 7, but skip assignment 9.

Wednesday, November 8

Blog – 11/08/06 - Provided by Ben Fendel

Present Students: Dr. Foreman, David, Lane, Ben, Chastiti, Doris, Philip, Liz, Deidre, Mary, Erica, Deb, Kate, Toni, Mauricio, Valerie, Nora, Devorah

4:10 Began class with a practice quiz – through iLearn – Quiz Link – this quiz was done as a final project of a student a few years ago. Dr. Foreman will talk more about final projects later in the class.

Next week’s assignment – to create a 10-question quiz based on the reading.

Final project – can be in various forms, print, video, online, etc. Dr Foreman doesn’t want to you to be overly concerned with the technical stuff.

4:38 – Quiz – focused on different learning theories. Mostly multiple choice, true/false. Some fill in the blank. One short example. Covered topics such as the major learning theories, Gagne’s stages of instruction and learning outcomes, and Ausebel’s meaningful learning.

5:03 - Situated Cognition –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning

Learning is situated, meaning that knowledge is dependant on the situation or context. (Review of Gagne’s steps of instruction, learning outcomes.)
Important concept because often students don’t always transfer knowledge to a different context. Knowledge is not totally isolated. It must have various contexts. Context plays a role in learning, as learning communities play a role in the environment in which the learner exists.
In learning communities, everyone has a different level of involvement. May be very involved (insider) or just barely involved (peripheral.)

David Merrill – Component Display Theory (CDT) - provides a list of prescriptions for designing instruction for different kinds of instructional outcomes.

CDT is an instructional model which designers can apply to develop an instructional micro-strategy. The theory is designed for developing instruction for concepts while providing learner control. The theory suggests that there is a unique combination for the most effective learning experience by determining the content and desired performance then adding prescriptions to form a learning strategy. To achieve that experience, the designer identifies the content and desired learning and develops a prescriptive learning strategy.

Merrill (Merrill, 1983) uses a two-dimensional matrix or table to illustrate the dynamics of his Component Display Theory. On one side the types of content are listed (fact, concept, procedure, process and principle). Perpendicularly listed are the desired levels of performance, finding, using and remembering. This content/performance table comprises the desired level of student performance. In other words, the designer identifies what type of content and how the learner is expected to use the information.

Once the correct content/performance is identified, then a set of prescriptions can be applied to the instructional strategy.

Next week, after reading Chapter 6 about Jean Piaget, you will create questions. You can use Merrill’s matrix to help determine what types of questions to ask or to create instruction.

Merrill’s Theory seems to stem from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Saying similar things in a different way.

5:45 – Break

6:00 – Discussion of learning communities…

What defines a learning community was a primary question in our discussion: “What types of communities / organizations are not communities of practice?” Just because you are a member of a subgroup of society, are you part of a community of practice? Does “learning” have to be a central objective of the community? Is it enough to share a common interest or must there be a degree of interaction or shared knowledge? We discussed how people take on different roles within their learning communities, from peripheral to insider, from inbound to outbound, and sometimes a boundary. How can one discern as an outsider who is a member of a learning community?


6:45 – Final Project Discussion – Due December 13th.

From the course syllabus:

Final Project (20%): A PERSONALIZED SYNTHESIS of the material which we cover this semester. The project can be a product of instructional materials based on one or more of the instructional theories we covered or a summary/critique paper of major instructional theories.


End goal of ITEC 800 is to synthesize and to apply a learning theory or learning process into some form of instruction or creation. Each student will design / develop a project which reflects the understanding and critical evaluation of one or more learning theories studied in this class.

For next week – come with an example of what you have in mind for your final project.

Tuesday Class 11/07/06

Hello members of our Community-of-Learning,
This is Lynda Banks signing on to recap this week’s 800-2 class. As usual, it was a very interesting class—even though it started off with a test.


The test/quiz
Before the actual test, we reviewed a student-designed online series of quizzes using multiple-choice questions that covered the topics we have learned so far. It was designed with instant feedback: a green “Well done” box, or a red “This is the wrong answer, try again” box. I did not find this quiz to be aligned with the actual test we took, but it gave us another take on the interpretation of the material.

On the “real” test, there were 20 questions divided into three categories:
1) Several multiple choice
2) About 6-7 fill-in-the-blank
3) One “give an example”

The test gave us empathy for the learners for whom we are designing instruction. This week we will have the opportunity to design our own exam questions, so it was a useful experience to have taken an actual test before creating our own exam.

Communities of practice
The focus of the class discussion was situated cognition and its implications for instruction. Dr. Foreman reviewed the results of this week’s assignment that asked us to describe our own Communities of Learning/Practice, our place within them, and our learning trajectories. The results were fascinating, further revealing (in addition to the digital storytelling) what a well-rounded class we have:


Insiders and inbound:

• Jen Bamesberger is an “insider” in her contra dance community. She explained contra dancing with its spinning and jumping, and about the interaction of the participants.

• Dan Dworkin has been an insider for some time in the extreme sport of mountainboarding (a fast-growing sport worldwide). He has been a competitor, teacher, and events organizer on the national and international level. Since many of us did not know about the sport, Dan explained it to us and issued an invitation for us to join him in Snowmass, Colorado next summer for lessons.

• Ben Burling was previously an insider in the car-modification community and is now an insider at his company, having moved into a senior position where he is now mentoring others.

• Marshall Taxer is an insider in his company in the area of standards and compliance. In this company there are many “lone rangers” and forming a community of practice is not always easy.

• Michelle Gilkey is an insider in her company that is a network of computer consultants. There the community has formed easily and people readily share info and ideas.

• Cecile Lelievre is an insider in the metalsmith community. She is a goldsmith who creates her own jewelry in addition to being active in the association and publishing and updating various websites.

• Jana Rathman has been, and remains, an insider in the now-defunct startup company Epiphany, that created marketing analytics products. Even though Epiphany no longer exists, Jana receives calls to do consulting on the products and, now that she is taking instructional design courses, has been asked to develop training. So, she has been outbound in this community but is still a participant. Currently she participates in an online community of high school parents.

• Lynda Banks is an insider in a couple of non-profit organizations and is inbound in the sport of modern pentathlon (fencing, horse jumping, running, swimming, shooting) because her teenage daughter has been training at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and aspires to compete in the Olympics.

• John Gulixson is the parent of small children and so is trying to remain on the periphery of his communities. However, his wife is a recruiter and John finds himself becoming an insider the recruiting community where he is teaching and designing courses for different types of job centers

• Carol John is inbound to becoming an insider in the ITEC community because she has already taken eight ITEC courses. Dr. Foreman clarified for us that to be a real insider in the ITEC community, a student must donate time to the department and contribute to the instructional design field.

Outbound

• Karen Giehler is a busy teacher who is trying to be outbound in her school community where she has been involved on several levels including curriculum committees.

• Dr. Foreman is attempting to be outbound in the Korean community where she has been very active as a volunteer.

• Cecile Lelievre is outbound in the martial arts community of taekwando, however she still updates their website.

• Marshall Taxer and his wife are outbound in the organization Canine Companions for Independence. Last week we saw in his digital story just how involved they were when he described caring for litters of rambunctious puppies!

• Dan Dworkin is outbound as an English and History teacher. He is now a Tech teacher but he still mentors the English and History teachers a few times each week.

How does one successfully become outbound?
Dan compared being outbound to a 12-step program where you have to remove yourself from the context where you were an insider. Dr. Foreman described how the university handles outbound professors who are about to retire. They are put on a 5-year outbound path where they are not required to attend meetings and thus become less and less of an insider.


How does one assess whether a person is outbound, or an insider?

• Look at the relationships with others in the community. Is the person viewed as an expert?
• Survey people in the field to see who is considered an insider/expert
  
• Observe who is giving presentations, writing articles for newsletters, speaking
• Look at the person’s portfolio of work
• Evaluate the person’s contribution to the organization
• 
  

Situated cognition: implications for instruction
We discussed the roll of the instructor, learning outcomes, and the role of the learner. The primary job of the learner is to have a goal and to actively participate—it is a community of “practice.” With today’s explosion of knowledge, we must rely more and more on our communities because it is increasingly difficult to possess all the knowledge ourselves that we need for projects.


Component Displacement Theory (CDT)
Dr. Forman presented the matrix developed by David Merrill, a student of Gagné, that explains how learners use knowledge. The x-axis progressed from Fact, Concept, Procedure, to Principle. The y-axis began at Remember and went to Use, then Discover. She instructed us to consider Merrill’s Component Theory when creating our quiz questions for next week.


Final Class Project
Dr. Foreman will post the criteria along with examples of former projects. In the meantime, be thinking about possible topics. We will write lesson plans considering all the theories we have covered, and synthesize them to develop our own learning theory.

The final class is December 12, so we have 3 class sessions plus the presentations on the 12th. There is no class on Nov 19, the week of Thanksgiving. Next week Susan Cline will be here to teach us about creating a wiki.

See you next week, Lynda Banks

San Franciso State University ITEC 800 Blog

San Franciso State University ITEC 800 Blog

The images for the 11/01/2006 Wednesday class are here .

p.s.
Sorry I don't know how to undo the last two posts.

Blog 11/1/06

Dr. Foreman will link digital stories to iLearn. You may access your story by going to: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~YOURNAME/itec800/
“YOURNAME” is whatever your username is for your SFSU Webmail.

We all got a chance to reflect on our digital storytelling experience. Some words used to describe the experience were: difficult, personal, satisfying, enjoyable, torture, sharing, “therapized”, technical, skill-oriented, interesting, easy, good time – all in all everyone got something worthwhile out of it.

Dr. Foreman made the point that her intention behind us doing the digital storytelling workshop was to demonstrate the value of project based learning versus expository learning. For this project we had to go through the process of creating a complete project in one day and so were able to experience almost immediate satisfaction and a sense of real accomplishment. The point was also made that learning has to be meaningful and the personal nature of this assignment naturally made it more meaningful.

After our discussion of storytelling, some of our classmates presented lessons to us. Erica taught us to make wormy dirt cups and Nora how to get the attention of a person who is deaf and say hello and how are you in American Sign Language. Devorah taught us how to make a book and Doris to make a California Roll. Philip taught us the method for producing an owl call (though few of us succeeded) and Diedre instructed us on how to introduce ourselves in Japanese.

We had a short discussion of advance organizers, Ausubel’s meaningful learning and schema theory. Advance organizers were discussed and the ones in our text were found to be inadequate in the “advance” sense. The intention of these is to give the learner a structure that will help him or her access the material to be learned more readily and allow the information to be integrated into already established schemata.

Ausubel's "meaningful learning" is concerned mostly with instructional practices or strategies rather than a theory of learning like schema theory (input-process-output). The emphasis in this chapter was on concept learning rather than procedural learning.

Schema theory says we recognize patterns and features and then apply these to novel experiences that follow a similar pattern or have similar features. Language acquisition is a good example of needing a grounding foundational schema in order to build on.

Ausubel wasn’t for pure discovery learning because he felt that learners can’t discover if they don’t have an “anchor” for their learning or an established concept of something. To Ausubel, in order to make learning meaningful it must have structure.

Next week there will be a short quiz: Review Chaters 1-4. Behaviorism, cognitivism, Gagne, Ausubel, and Schema Theory. Look over the advance organizers at the beginning of the chapters and the summaries at the end of the chapters as a means of review. Also read Chapter 5 and do the assignment associated with it on iLearn.

-Deb Farkas

San Franciso State University ITEC 800 Blog

Tuesday 31 October:

The first part of our class was for catching up. We started our class with several lesson plan presentations including the care and feeding of fish, tying knots, and working with color values. All of these presentations made good use of props and the last two involved significant interaction. From there we viewed several of the digital story telling assignments that we had created during the Saturday workshops. Like with the lesson plan presentations, there was a lot of variety in subject matter. The stories were set in far away places like Israel and Thailand and closer places like San Jose and Santa Rosa. All were interesting.

After viewing these stories, we briefly discussed the value of digital story telling. We identified a variety of things:

• getting to know our fellow students through their digital stories


• the value of this insight for learning communities


• the value of the process and collaboration of the workshop (you can't do this in isolation

After that, we began our main discussion of the reading assignment: Meaningful learning theory. Our discussion pointed out how this was, in some ways, another step in the evolution of our understanding of how students learn and how instructors instruct. Where Gagne discussed learning in isolation of any context, Ausubel focused a lot on context. His theories explained concept learning and not just skills learning; but he stopped short of getting into the issue of transfer of knowledge. Perhaps the biggest contribution of Ausubel to learning theory is his observations on implementation of learning such as advance organizeres.

It is quite interesting how chapter by chapter we build a more complete understanding of the learning process and how to best influence it.

This blog moment brought to you by Marshall Taxer