One Word:
Class this week was really fun and engaging. The entire first two hours of class time were devoted to learning theory group presentations. A principal requirement for these presentations was that they needed to be interactive and engaging. Every group met that requirement in their presentations - albeit in different ways and to different levels of effectiveness.
Quote of the day for me comes from Mark Twain, who paraphrased Blaise Pascal when he said:
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead"
Pascal actually said something like, "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter"
Why these quotes? Because many of the groups (my own included) struggled with time during their presentations. As a teacher, I know how easy it is to go over time, which is why the Mark Twain quote is so apt. It is a skill to be concise - skill and practice and experience. The mention of time also adds relevance to this quote, as each group only had a week to prepare their presentations. In my own teaching, I will work to find that line between giving students enough lead time to be concise, but not so much lead time that they feel they can procrastinate. I suspect Dr. Robertson intentionally gave short presentation time to teach us about the importance of time management and being concise. If that was her goal then it certainly worked for me!
Our group did connectivism learning theory. We had a great time despite only having a week to prepare. I took on the task of creating the case study. I chose to use an animated video to describe the case study. It's short (it had to be) and open-ended. Tell me what you think! Here it is:
There was a requirement to provide targeted, explicit and specific peer feedback to each group presenting. Much like being concise, the ability to provide useful feedback is a skill, and I like how Dr. Robertson is giving us the opportunity to practice this skill. Further, the feedback is always diverse as it comes from different people, as opposed to a traditional classroom where just one professor provides all of the feedback. Peer assessors were required to use a rubric to frame the feedback. this not only ensures the feedback is relevant to an objective, it also allows students to see (and use) a rubric for evaluating work. As a professor myself, the rubric is a very helpful tool that takes the subjectivity out of the grade, as the grade assigned is defensible.
Groups presented on:
- Behaviourism
- Constructivism
- Early Learning
- Experiential Learning
- Connectivism
- Transformative Learning
- Brain based theories
- 21st Century learning
- UDL (Universal Design for Learning)
- Grit
Also this week I was asked to conduct an "error analysis" based on the feedback I received for my assignment 2 submission. My evaluator made some good points - mostly around being concise. Also, I didn't elaborate on a few things that, upon reflection, I probably should have. While tempted to make excuses and blame the work count limitation, I have to own my mistakes. I could have been more concise in some areas to allow me to elaborate on others. Lastly, I am consistently amazed by my own refusal to consider the rubric before I work on an assignment. This has hurt me in the past but I will learn from this for future assignments.
Learning Outcomes met this week:
The presentations met several learning outcomes, including creating well-informed and rigorously researched educational artifacts (LO#4), engaging in scholarly communication (LO#5), solving complex educational problems by using research (LO#3), and demonstrating a critical awareness of learning theories (LO#2).
There are two readings I have to complete for class next week, and apparently there will be a review test taken up in class that covers the first half of the course. Should be fun! ;)
James
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