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