Professor Matt Bower

Blogs are great for reflective thinking!

Tom Reeves presentation:

Kirschner, Sweller, Clarke (2006) Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work….. (provocative paper – lookup)
Tom points to Conative domain (will, desire, drive, intention….) as a major deficate of the Cognitive Load Theory.
Cognitive (to know) – Affective (to feel) – Conative (to act)

Slavin:
Conditions for quality random experiment:
1. is there a control group
2. Are the groups assigned randomly
3. if a matched study, are the groups extremely similar
4. Is the samele size large enough
5. are the results statistically significant

Book: “Declining by degrees” says the most shocking aspect of tertiary education is the “non-agression pact” between academics and students.

NSSE survey: average 7 hours of f-2-f teaching for research universities (11 for community colleges).

Tom recommends a book “Educational Design Research”. He will be writing a book with Jan about how to do it!

Tom, Jan, and Ron believe that it’s the task that matters most.

Tom recommends that we need to overcome the cult of self-esteem, make grades meaningful again, focus on quality rather than quantity.

Tom recommends Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – an inquiry into values.

Get Tom’s slides – great!

David Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction:

1. Activation – learning is promoted when learners activate relevant cognitive structures.
2. Demonstration – learning is promoted when learners observe a demonstration of the skills to be learned
3. Application – learning is promoted when learners apply their newly acquired knowledge and skill
4. Integration – learning is promoted when learners integrate their new skills into their everyday life
5. Real-world task – learning is promoted when people are doing real world tasks

ADDIE Analysis Design Development Implementation Evaluation (?)
ISD – Instructional Systems Development
Question is not whether or not these are dead, they are just labels, you do need to think about the stages of development

Developing task-centred instruction:

• Identify whole task
• Identify task progression
• Analyse component skill
• Designing instructional strategy
• Design instructional interface
• Develop instruction
• Monitor instruction
• Evaluate

Relative contribution to learning (approx):

• 50% Content (selection, sequence, structure)
• 20% Strategy (presentation, demonstration, practice, application)
• 5% Delivery (online, CD Rom)
• 25% Other

Why get students to write essays to demonstrate their knowledge when they never have to do it when they work?

Recomends a task centred instructional strategy (lookup):
1. Show a new whole task and the component skills for situation A
2. Have students apply skills in new context (situation B)
3. Teach component skills for the new task (ellaborate)
4. Apply to further contexts…. (lookup)

Questions to ask subject matter experts (lay-person terms).
Content Knowledge:
Info-about
Part-of
Kind-of
How-to
What-happens
Information / Portrayal (process)
Tell
Ask
Show
Do

Great presentation (must lookup!!!):

• spoke about his paper Digital Storytelling using Web 2.0
• showed a great presentation software ????
• Alan Levine’s blog is http://cogdogblog.com/
• Recommends Nancy White’s workshop.