E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs » Jonassen

Pale Blue Dot

Michael Hanley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

This image of Earth taken from Mars’ orbit represents my theme today.

While doing some house-keeping on my YouTube Favourites recently I re-discovered again an except from Carl Sagan’s work Pale Blue Dot.

Rediscovered again? Are we going all Sam Beckett here? (No. Not Quantum Leap Sam B. – the playwright Sam B.)

…begin again all over more or less in the same place…

Now read on…

The original Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth was taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of nearly seven billion kilometres (4 billion miles) as part of the Solar System family portrait.

It showed the Earth suspended in [the illusion of] a ray of sunlight [caused by the spacecraft's lens optics], against the vastness of space. This image had a much more profound effect on me than the Apollo 8 Earth Rise image – partly because, I suspect, I never knew a time when Man hadn’t visited the Moon, and Earth Rise was always there as part of my socio-cultural heritage (much a kids today can’t envisage a mobile-phone free world I guess), and it wasn’t really that far away anyway.

The personal value of this image of “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” is not only what it represents to us as a species, but its purpose as a semantic denotation, or what what David Jonassen would call “an object to think with.” And inevitably, that leads to Carl Sagan and his exposition on what the Pale Blue Dot represents. People my age who grew up under a sky increasingly filled with communications satellites were the first generation to be exposed to the mass media and all that came in its wake; so we saw the (soccer) World Cup live from Argentina, and we also saw hijacked planes and embassies stormed before our eyes.

And we also saw what a diverse world we were a part of (and believe me this was important if you lived on a mostly green island on the western edge of Europe, just a few degrees south of the Arctic circle), through documentary series like Cosmos and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth. There was an immediacy and an almost visceral quality to the narratives presented; a Shock of the New, imparted by these amazing colour images beamed into our living rooms (yes kids, before that TV used to be in both colours – black AND white). Better than fiction.

Now listen on…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

___________________
References:

Beckett, S. (2000) How it is. Avalon Travel Publishing.

Sagan, C. (1994). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, New York.

___________________

Image source:

Earth and Moon. Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL/Main Space Science Systems. Mars Global Surveyor. May 8, 2003. [Internet] Available from: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/
earth_from_mars_030522.html [Accessed 2 July 2008]

Pale Blue Dot. Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL. Voyager 1. February 14, 2001. [Internet] Available from: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=601 [Accessed 2 July 2008]

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Pale Blue Dot

Michael Hanley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

This image of Earth taken from Mars’ orbit represents my theme today.

While doing some house-keeping on my YouTube Favourites recently I re-discovered again an except from Carl Sagan’s work Pale Blue Dot.

Rediscovered again? Are we going all Sam Beckett here? (No. Not Quantum Leap Sam B. – the playwright Sam B.)

…begin again all over more or less in the same place…

Now read on…

The original Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth was taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of nearly seven billion kilometres (4 billion miles) as part of the Solar System family portrait.

Now listen on…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

___________________
References:

Beckett, S. (2000) How it is. Avalon Travel Publishing.

Sagan, C. (1994). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, New York.

___________________

Image source:

Pale Blue Dot. Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL. Voyager 1. February 14, 2001. [Internet] Available from: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=601 [Accessed 2 July 2008]

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ADDIE, and the Systems Approach: a Critical Analysis

Michael Hanley — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:47:00 +0000

In yesterday’s post I looked at a systems approach to instructional design and development, and suggested that this approach was an emergent property of the process whereby instructor-led courseware developers in the 1990’s attempted to apply previously-effective training development techniques to the new domain of e-learning.

As an example, I looked at the ADDIE design appraoch and suggested that it could be characterized as a set of heuristics (or conceptual framework) to enable learning professionals to output content commensurate with the systems approach.

Now read on…

In this context, we can say that ADDIE will only deliver results consistent with the expertise of the content designer, as it relies on their (the designers’) skills and experience in transferring information and knowledge to “deliver” learning to the recipient. In E-Learning Strategies: how to get implementation and delivery right first time, Don Morrison remarks that

…like many ISD models it fails to give clear guidance about what makes good learning content. You can follow ADDIE to the letter and still deliver mediocre content.

(2004, p.255)

It can be said that ADDIE (and similar systems’ approaches to learning content development) are closer in philosophy and practice to a project management methodology than a pedagogy. In this respect they can be a useful approach when developing “one-shot” training content in environments where repetitive worker activities are the norm.

Take this scenario as an example:

Production workers have just started using the new WidgetMaker 300-0 tool: it can create 3o widgets per hour.

As it’s operating principles are very similar to the the older WM 299-8 (20 widgets per hour) model, the organization decides that workers only need a 2-day familiarization course before beginning production with the new tool.

A new production target (30 WPH) is set for workers to reflect the increased efficiency of the tool.

After three months, production is still 5WPH short of target. It turns out that workers are using the old production process on the new machine, and with the expectation of attaining 30WPH are actually working harder than ever, but are still 50% short of the difference between the new and old hourly production rate. Much disgruntlement all round.

It seems that there’s an extra gadget on the handle of the WM300-0 that nobody noticed because of the cursory nature of the 2-day familiarization course.

Time for some training…

Table 1. Formative evaluation is present in each stage of the ADDIE process.

2. Summative evaluation consists of tests designed for criterion-related referenced items and providing opportunities for feedback from the users.

Once they have undergone formative and summative evaluation, learners are encouraged to review and revise the courseware as necessary, until they have successfully passed the proscribed tests

The transactional nature of the systems approach assumes that the very act of communicating information to the supplicant (sorry, learner) results in the output of “learning.”

Adhering to this content development methodology, instructors consider that the channels used to “deliver” knowledge are cognitively neutral and merely replicate and modalities of the classroom – voice-over narration equating to instructor explanation, the screen being equivalent to the overhead projector or blackboard, computer-mediated interaction being the essentially the same as teacher-student interaction, and so on.

By balancing the cognitive load across the learning modalities, it is supposed that knowledge can be effectively delivered, and the student will “learn.” A corollory of this is that the learning delivery channels (visual, audial, text-based, and so forth) themselves have no affect upon the learner’s interpretation of the content, so to all intents and purposes, the “sage on the stage” transforms into the “guide by the side.”

_____________________

References:

Brown, J. S. Collins, C. & Duguid, P. (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning [Internet] Educational Researcher 18(1), pp. 32-42, Jan-Feb 1989. Available from: http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/%7Ejonassen/courses/CLE/index.html [Accessed January 12th 2007]

Dick, W. & Carey, L. (1996). The Systematic Design of Instruction (4th Ed.). New York: Harper Collins College Publishers.

Dillon, P. & Hallett, C. (2001, October). Powering the leap to maturity: The eLearning ecosystem. Cisco Systems white paper.

Exclusive Interview with Professor David Jonassen (2001) IN: elearningpost [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningpost.com/articles/archives/
exclusive_interview_with_professor_david_jonassen [Accessed 12th January 2007]

Molenda, M. (2003). In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model. [Internet] Available from: http://www.indiana.edu/~molpage/
In%20Search%20of%20Elusive%20ADDIE.pdf Accessed 12 May 2008

Rosenberg, M.J. (2001) What Lies Beyond E-Learning? learningcircuits.org e-zine [Internet] Available from: http://www.learningcircuits.org/2006/March/rosenberg.htm Accessed 14th April 2007

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E-learning ecosystems and the failure of ADDIE

Michael Hanley — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:35:00 +0000

Onwards with our investigation of the e-learning ecosystem and learning & development in organizations. Today’s post looks at the similarly-sounding but fundamentally different Systems Approach to instructional design and learning, and why the doubtful provenance of ADDIE combined with a misunderstanding of the role of content delivery channels have failed a generation of e-learners.

Now read on.

I have suggested that a growing number of researchers and learning professionals (Dillon & Hallett, Jonassen, Rosenberg etc) are recognizing the negative affect of what Brown, Collins, & Duguid (1989) call the “breach between learning and use” (p.1) of training interventions in organizations. We have seen that both instructor-led and ‘traditional’ self-paced learning courseware is relatively limited in its application, and is most effective in a restricted range of circumstances. Brown, Collins, & Duguid elaborate:

Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. [The authors] argue that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used.

(p.1)

To meet these conditions, we can say that it is appropriate to adapt both pedagogical approaches and the technology resources now available to enhance learners performance.

Marc J. Rosenberg concurs:

Although e-learning began as a new way to deliver training, it cannot remain that way because it is no longer able to adequately support all the learning needs of individuals and organizations by itself – if it every was. E-learning has moved in a new, somewhat unanticipated direction that is not always reminiscent of an instructional framework. To be more influential, e-learning must be reinvented. While continuing to provide a viable instructional option in a formal learning setting, it must also move toward informational and collaborative solutions that focus more prominently on the specific jobs people do. It must move beyond courseware and classrooms and into work. To reinvent e-learning is, in many ways, to reinvent learning itself.

In essence, this means transforming workplace learning, so that learning activities and resources are situated around the learner, their work environment, and their tasks, enabling learners to construct their own knowledge in the context of what resources they need to carry out their work effectively. As David Jonassen says:

In constructivist learning environments, technologies are used to situate learning tasks in a variety of contexts. With video, very rich and engaging contexts can be created.

He asserts that in the traditional organizational approach that

[u]nfortunately, most e-learning replicates the worst features of face-to-face instruction. So, it may be cheaper to “deliver” knowledge over the Internet, but it will not be more effective.

This is commonly known as the systems-based approach to instructional design & development (ISD). A system is a set of elements or components that must integrate to perform a specific function. Every job in an organization is used by the organizational ecosystem to produce a product or output. The product or output is the means by which a organization generates its assets and remains self-supporting.

There are four inputs necessary in every system to produce a product or output:

People: The workers making up a group and linked by a common activity.
Material: The raw products which go into the system.
Technology: The technique for achieving a practical purpose or goal.
Time: The measured period during which an action or process begins and ends.

In learning and development, this systems-based approach is epitomized by the ADDIE conceptual framework (see Figure 1), most notably refined by Dick & Carey in The Systematic Design of Instruction (1996).

Figure 1. The ADDIE ISD Heuristic

The ADDIE approach has been one of the core tenets of instructional design for the best part of two decades, but curiously, it may not exist! In his article In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model (2003), Michael Molenda of Indiana University, the author undertook a Livingstonian attempt to discover the source for the original reference to the ADDIE model. Molenda’s research uncovered no original reference for the ADDIE model. This lack of an original reference led Molenda to write,

I am satisfied at this point to conclude that the ADDIE Model is merely a colloquial term used to describe a systematic approach to instructional development, virtually synonymous with instructional systems development (ISD). The label seems not to have a single author, but rather to have evolved informally through oral tradition. There is no original, fully elaborated model, just an umbrella term that refers to a family of models that share a common underlying structure.

(p.1)

Hence my suggestion above that ADDIE is more proerly labeled a conceptual framework; I would go so far as to say that it could more properly be called a set of heuristics or “rules of thumb” to develop learning content by adhering to the precepts of the systems approach (see Table 1).

Table 1. Formative evaluation is present in each stage of the ADDIE process.

2. Summative evaluation consists of tests designed for criterion-related referenced items and providing opportunities for feedback from the users.

Once they have undergone formative and summative evaluation, learners are encouraged to review and revise the courseware as necessary, until they have successfully passed the proscribed tests

The transactional nature of the systems approach assumes that the very act of communicating information to the supplicant (sorry, learner) results in the output of “learning.”

_____________________

References:

Dick, W. & Carey, L. (1996). The Systematic Design of Instruction (4th Ed.). New York: Harper Collins College Publishers.

Dillon, P. & Hallett, C. (2001, October). Powering the leap to maturity: The eLearning ecosystem. Cisco Systems white paper.

Molenda, M. (2003). In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model. [Internet] Available from: http://www.indiana.edu/~molpage/
In%20Search%20of%20Elusive%20ADDIE.pdf Accessed 12 May 2008

Rosenberg, M.J. (2001) What Lies Beyond E-Learning? learningcircuits.org e-zine [Interent] Available from: http://www.learningcircuits.org/2006/March/rosenberg.htm Accessed 14th April 2007

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Thoughts on Evaluating Non-Formal Learning

Michael Hanley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:35:00 +0000

In previous posts, I’ve suggested that knowledge workers under time-pressure and with high demands on their skills are motivated to continually educate themselves on new topics. In small- to mid-sized enterprises, for example, workers are required to learn new skills, behaviours and attitudes in the context of their functional tasks. As they do not necessarily have the time to take formal training courses, they take advantage of the range of knowledge resources at their disposal, ranging from searching the Web, corporate knowledge bases, and other information repositories, as well as discovering information incidentally through social interaction with credible colleagues to assist their ability to “frame the problem” (Argyris & Schön, 1974).

As organisations are at root, cognitive enterprises, and the sum of the knowledge of the organisation is expressed collectively through the behaviour, skills and attitudes of its employees, the organisation is itself a cognitive entity. One of the ways that such an entity continually constructs itself is through the learning processes its members engage in.

Situated, experiential learning, delivered:

synchronously in a social setting where workers can engage in a dialogue with More Knowledgeable Others, subject matter experts and their peers,

or,
asynchronously accessed when the individual learner has a requirement to acquire information and knowledge relevant to a task at hand

in relevant, context-specific formats, whether in a classroom, live online, on-demand over the web, or via an easily accessible format such as a DVD-ROM to suit a range of learning styles and environments, creates the conditions for “meaningful learning” (Jonassen, 2001) to occur.

Providing workers with a knowledge-centric learning and performance architecture, and structured, goal-oriented content, gives them the motivation or intention to learn, enables them to process “raw” information into actionable knowledge on an ongoing basis, and regularly inhabit a scaffolded environment which encourages the learner’s development. Digitally-based technologies are the optimal mediator for this learning process, which is called ‘non-formal’ in recognition of its flexibility and accessibility for learners, and also because of its pedagogical structure and outcomes-focus.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to look at ways to quantify the learning effect of non-formal learning its target audience beginning with an overview of that stalwart of evaluation, Donald Kirkpatrick.

References:

Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Jonassen, D. H. (1996) Computers in the Classroom: Mindtools for Critical Thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Prentice Hall Inc.

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Thoughts on Evaluating Non-Formal Learning

Michael Hanley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:35:00 +0000

Situated, experiential learning, delivered:

synchronously in a social setting where workers can engage in a dialogue with More Knowledgeable Others, subject matter experts and their peers,

or,
asynchronously accessed when the individual learner has a requirement to acquire information and knowledge relevant to a task at hand

References:

Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Jonassen, D. H. (1996) Computers in the Classroom: Mindtools for Critical Thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Prentice Hall Inc.

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Constructivism Pt.10: More Mindtools

Michael Hanley — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:43:00 +0000

Significantly, Jonassen et al point out that learning is not restricted to formal learning environments, and that learners can “acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge in natural learning situations” (p. 28).

Table 1 Characteristics of a computer-based learning environment (after Jonassen, 1994)

Characteristic	Definition
Active:	Learners are engaged by the learning process in mindful processing of information where they are responsible for the result. In natural learning situations, learners, without the intervention of formal instruction, can acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge about what they are learning. Through formal and informal apprenticeships and communities, learners develop skills and knowledge which they then share with other members of those communities with whom they learned and practiced those skills. In all of these situations, learners are actively manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and learning by reflecting on what they have done.
Constructive:	Learners integrate new ideas with prior knowledge in order to make sense or make meaning or reconcile a discrepancy, curiosity, or puzzlement. They construct their own meaning for different phenomena. The models that they build to explain things are simple and unsophisticated at first, but with experience, support, and reflection, they become increasingly complex. They can only know what they know, so they should be supported in the process of coming to know.
Collaborative:	Learners naturally work in learning and knowledge building communities, exploiting each other’s skills while providing social support and observing the contributions of each member. Humans naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks.
Intentional:	All human behaviour is goal-directed (Cleary & Schank, 1995). That is, everything that we do is intended to fulfil some goal. When learners are actively trying to achieve a cognitive goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), they think and learn more. Learning environments need to support learners in articulating what their goals are in any learning situation.
Complex:	Teachers oversimplify most ideas in order to make them more easily transferable to learners. In addition to stripping ideas out of their normal contexts, concepts are distilled to their simplest form so that learners will more readily learn them. But the message this gives learners is that t the world is a reliable and simple place. However, the world is not a reliable and simple place. Problems have multiple components and multiple perspectives. They cannot be solved in predictable ways. Learners need to be engaged in solving complex and “ill-structured problems as well as simple problems” (p.31). Unless learners are required to engage in higher-order thinking, they will develop oversimplified views of the world.
Contextual:	A great deal of recent research has shown that learning tasks that are situated in some meaningful real world task or simulated in some case-based or problem based learning environment are not only better understood, but also are more consistently transferred to new situations. Rather than abstracting ideas in rules that are learned by rote and applied to other “canned problems” (p.31), knowledge and skills should be delivered in reality-based, useful contexts and provide new and different contexts for learners to practice using those concepts.
Conversational:	Learning is inherently a social, dialogical process (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). That is, given a problem or task, people naturally seek out opinions and ideas form others. Technologies can support this conversational process by connecting learners across an organisation or across the world. When learners become part of knowledge-building communities they learn that there are multiple ways of viewing the world and multiple solutions to most of its problems.
Reflective:	Learners should be required by technology-based learning to articulate their actions, the decisions they make, the strategies the use, and the solutions that are generated. When they articulate what they have learned and reflect on the processes and decisions that were entailed by the process, they understand more and are better able to use the knowledge that they have constructed in new situations.

The implications of placing learners in this technology-based environment fundamentally affect pedagogical approaches to learning. An interesting subtext to this approach may be the design of the internet itself: as Agre (1999, p.3) points out, the Internet was originally designed for the scientific community. As a result, its underlying design features reflect that community’s high capacity for self-regulation and openness. Applications can be used to represent knowledge that is generalisable to content in different subjects; learners are engaged in critical thinking about the subject; and, as skills are integrated into the learner’s schemata, they become transferable to other subjects (1996). From a practical viewpoint, Mindtools can be developed for applications the learner is already familiar with, and that are non-content specific – the classic example Jonassen gives is semantic organisation using databases (1998). Similarly, computers and the internet enable the learner to engage with microworlds that allow the learner to experience multiple representations or simulation of real-world phenomena and which provide immediate feedback when learners attempt to solve problems (1996).

References:

Agre, P. E. (1999). Life after cyberspace. EASST Review, 18(2), pp.3-5.

Carr, C. Jonassen, D. H. & Hsiu-Ping, Y. (1998) Computers as Mindtools for Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking [Internet] TechTrends 43(2). pp.24-32. March 1998