Project-Based Learning

http://www.edutopia.org/teaching-module-pbl

• "Start with the Essential Question
• Design a Plan for the Project
• Create a Schedule
• Monitor the Students and the Progress of the Project
• Assess the Outcome
• Evaluate the Experience"

"Take a real-world topic and begin an in-depth investigation. Base your question on an authentic situation or topic. What is happening in your classroom? In your community? Select a question about an issue students will believe that, by answering, they are having an impact on. Make it relevant for them. The question should be a "now" question -- a question that has meaning in your students' lives."

"Assessment meets many needs. It

• provides diagnostic feedback.
• helps educators set standards.
• allows one to evaluate progress and relate that progress to others.
• gives students feedback on how well they understand the information and on what they need to improve.
• helps the teacher design instruction to teach more effectively.

Whenever possible, give the students the opportunity to conduct self-assessment. When a student's assessment and the teacher's assessment don't agree, schedule a student-teacher conference to let the student explain in more detail his or her understanding of the content and justify the outcome."

"Allow for individual reflection, such as journaling, as well as group reflection and discussion. (For example, validate what students have learned and make suggestions for improvements.)

To enable effective self-evaluation, follow these steps:

• Take time to reflect, individually and as a group.
• Share feelings and experiences.
• Discuss what worked well.
• Discuss what needs change.
• Share ideas that will lead to new questions and new projects."

Factors for Learning:

• Relevant/Authentic
• Missionaries learning to "be" missionaries, yet they don't understand really the reason why because they aren't "doing" missionary work. Somehow missionaries have to see why they are learning the things that they are learning--why it is relevant.
• Perhaps one way to do this I believe is to have the missionaries be trained while they participating in real missionary work.
  
• The chat feature in Mormon.org allows anyone to chat with missionaries instantly at the MTC. Perhaps this is a way that the learning can become more real and missionaries can learn to "be" missionaries.
• The Referral Center could also allow missionaries to "be" missionaries by talking with real people that have real questions.
  
• Doing, actually practicing
• Missionaries can't just listen all day
• "Life's lessons are caught not taught" quote from Elder Bednar in CES broadcast.
• Learners cannot be lectured to, but given opportunities to try or use what they have learned, if that does not happen I believe a significant amount of the knowledge will be lost. Perhaps the motivation would improve if they knew they were going to use it.
  

Reciprocal teaching? Perhaps a method to engage the learners more.
Read "Myth of Leadership" about facilitating group/discussions.

• How do you create intrinsic motivation
  
• contest
• Shock and awe
• Now the audience to see how they learn
  

Annotated bibliography allows you to go back and see what the articles were about.

Bring draft of paper for next class of factors in learning.

Reigeluth - What is Instructional-Design Theory
Desired Outcomes:

• Effeciency
• Effective
• Appeal

Instructional Conditions:

• Learning
• Learner
• Learning Enviornment
• Develop Construction
  

Sept. 24

How do you know when to apply which theory? It is important tot note that learning theories describe how people learn--not application. We all have a theory on how people learn and that drives us to do what we do.

In the paper decide what are those fundamental principles that you believe about learning, or how people learn.

Perhaps use these in the paper:
Which factors influence learning?
What is the role of memory?
How does transfer occur?
What types of learning are best explained by this position?
What basic assumptions/principles of this theory are relevant to instructional design?
How should instruction be structured?

My daughter one day vacuumed the family room and cleaned the kitchen. After she was done she asked, "So, do I get a treat?" Behaviorism describes why Ashlyn did what she did.

Learning theories are descriptive and instructional theories are prescriptive.

Before class on Monday: What factors influence learning? (there's a paper due in a week and a half on this)

Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning

Community of practice
Group of people sharing knowledge and in the solving of the problems learning takes place.

Cognitive apprenticeship
The learner learns under the guidance of an expert. This is similar to a trainer with his new missionary companion. The expert can not just model the activity or principle, the activity must be situated in a cognitive apprenticeship.

Collins_CogApp-1.pdf has info on Cognitive Apprenticeship.

Radical Behaviorism

Radical Behaviorism
The black box (an organism--something that learns) the organism reacts to things, the enviornment. The behavior (response) has consequences (stimulus) which feeds back into their enviornment. That then increases or decreases their behavior.

Behaviorism is ingrained into our American culture.

It was interesting because Sunday

Methods are not tied to any one learning theory. It's what you believe about how people learn.

Behaviorism says you can manage behavior. That's a behaviorist approach. If you take the approach that my child is a agent and I can't force them to behave a certain way. Then you are trying to persuade. In behaviorism you don't care what's happening in the box or why they are doing what they are doing. You just care about the behavior or outcomes.

You need to clearly define what your subject is, what the response is, and what the Satisfying/Aversive consequence is in behaviorism is.

With the following, S is presented contingent upon R:

• Positive Reinforcement (R strengthened)
• Punishment (R weakened)

With the following, S is removed contingent upon R:

• Reinforcement Removal (R weakened)
• Negative Reinforcement (R strengthened)

Example: Students in the class started whispering to one another, the teacher gave them a warning look, which resulted in them being quiet and allowed her to go back to the lesson.

Subject: Students
Response: decrease the whispering (you're trying to weaken the response in this case)
S: Dirty look

Here's a problem I see with behaviorism that if people are always rewarded for showing a particular behavior, they'll repeat the behavior because of the reward only. Here's a quote from President Kimball with a gospel perspective:

“If pain and sorrow and total punishment immediately followed the doing of evil, no soul would repeat a misdeed. If joy and peace and rewards were instantaneously given the doer of good, there could be no evil—all would do good and not because of the rightness of doing good. There would be no test of strength, no development of character, no growth of powers, no free agency. … There would also be an absence of joy, success, resurrection, eternal life, and godhood” (The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, ed. Edward L. Kimball (1982), 77).

Cognitive information processing
How things get stored in memory. Terms used are short-term and long-term memory.
Picture taken from Psychology of Learning for Instruction, Marcy P. Driscoll (2000) , 73.


The theories are how do you get things into short-term memory and long term memory.














Constructivism
Ontology - What is real
Epistemology - How we come to know or learn

We're trying to focus on Epistemology for learning theories. Your taking ideas in your mind and constructing your own reality. Tell a child that a world is round, but they walk on it and it looks flat. Therefore, it must be like a pancake.

We use our own experiences and knowledge to try to make sense of what we are learning. The constructivist would say, unlike the cognitive processing, that what is input and then comes out of the box depends on what was in the box to begin with.

In constructivism, each student is going to process and construct their knowledge in a way that is unique to them. So, you would build on the learners current experiences and knowledge.

Project-based learning comes out of constructivism.

Web 2.0 Stuff

In Feb. 2004, a Harvard student launched a social networking site to help students get to know each other. Within 2 weeks half the student body signed up. Within 4 months the network expaned to include 30 colleges. After 6 months, Friendster offered to purchase the company for $10 million. The offer was turned down. In Sept. 2006, the site was opened up to anyone with an email account. That same year Yahoo! offered 1$ billion to acquire the social network and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, turned it down!

The company is Facebook. Their growth is unbelievable. In 2007, over 1 million users signed up every week! They averaged over 40 billion page views a month! The average Facebook user spends 19 minutes using Facebook. They are the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S.

Last year in October, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook. You know what Microsoft got with that investment 1.6% of the company--only 1.6%. That means that $240 million had a valuation of $15 billion making Facebook the 5th most valuable Internet company (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook).

These social networking sites are fascinating. They are part of the emerging Web 2.0. These sites that provide social networking, blogs, wikis, etc. Examples of these are MySpace, YouTube, Blogspot, and others. In fact, in 2006, YouTube serves 100 million videos daily, with 60,000 videos uploaded monthly.

Something drives people to these sites. How do we create that in education? How can we get learners to be just as motivate in their own learning?

Learning 2.0 capitalizes on these Web 2.0 technologies. I am trying to find more on Learning 2.0, but there isn't a lot out there. The personal learning environment seems to be relate to Learning 2.0.

Let me know if you know of any resources on Learning 2.0 so I can do some more research on it.

This is my Blog!! Yeah!