Creating Passionate Users: Stop your presentation before it kills again!

Creating Passionate Users: Stop your presentation before it kills again!

The Analytical essay, Don't Get it Right, Get it Wrote!

The analytical essay is a relatively brief, tightly organized, and highly focused piece of writing designed to (1) reveal your understanding of the perspectives or issues under discussion, (2) identify and analyze important concepts, assumptions or principles contained in the works, (3) identify strengths and weaknesses of various perspectives, competing ideas, or arguments, and (4) report any noteworthy insights gained or things learned from doing the analysis. Topics can be selected from a list that will be generated in class. The essays should be amenable to a brief treatment and should have a sufficient literature base available. If you are comparing and contrasting perspectives of different authors, include at least two, but preferably three, somewhat different perspectives. It is possible to write essays using only the resources found in the ACC Library, but it may be desirable to use other literature. Online resources may address the topic of an essay in a substantive way, so feel free to use any relevant literature you can find. When using online resources be sure to use a systematic approach to determining the reliability of the source.
Another essay marking rubric. Guidleines for Grading Essays

Developing Effective Presentation Techniques

Triple A Lecture This site is a wiki dedicated to the lecture technique. They have posted a faily extensive article which discusses all major aspects of lecturing and the authors have started a wiki or open online discussion forum to allow everyone to participate. As with most wikis yuou must register with a valid email address. Thge password for this wiki is "lecture".

The lecture is a time honoured technique for the transmission of knowledge, and used appropriately can be a very effective tool in the process of facilitating learning. It is a very efficient delivery format for learning institutions because it allows for the targeting of many individuals, as many as can be reached by the lecturers voice.
A well prepared and delivered lecture is a thing of beauty and joy. In fact, it can be a form of entertainment and great lecturers are in demand and comand large fees. Often the thing we remember most about a "really great lecture" is just that it was really great but we can't recall much of the content much less say that we have learned anything.
While it is a great technique for teaching, it is not necessarily the greatest technique for learning. We know that adults learn best when they are engaged in their learing and with the lecture format the engagement is minimal.

Developers have been working hard to replace instructors who simply lecture (as have many educational institutions. Pedagogical agents, virtual tutors digital helpers. are all terms used to describe the computer based training system being developed at Florida State University by Amy L.Baylor

These programs are also known as knowledge avatars or chat bots.

DESCA

http://www.officeport.com/enrich/files/Inspiring_DESCA.pdf

Liberal Education: Faculty development for teaching innovation - Greater Expectations

Liberal Education: Faculty development for teaching innovation - Greater Expectations: "he action research model describes cycles of change with four 'moments': planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Applied to teaching, this suggests that an instance of teaching change involves four stages:

* selecting a new practice,

* experimenting with it,

* collecting information on what kind of learning the practice produced, and

* reflecting on the desirability of the change as well as whether the practice should be continued, modified, or discarded under specific sets of conditions.

"

Chapter 8: Teacher Learning | How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

Chapter 8: Teacher Learning | How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society

Article regarding the qualities of reflective teaching practice in of university
Referencing Shoen and Weinger.

"www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0201.pdf"

Reflective learning.

Lesson Plannning

Lesson Planning is a stage in the formal educational process and that begins with

• Conducting a needs assessment
  
• Development of goals and objectives
• Conducting an occupational analysis DACUM
  
• Developing Units of instruction and course outlines
  
• Developing lessons
  
• providing instruction
• assessment and refining course.
  

The essential components of a lesson plan are time, resources and order of presentation

There are many guidelines and resources for lesson planning. Often the type of lesson plan that is used depends on the philosphy and approach to teaching. The approach to lesson planning is also also dependant on the subject matter and setting. Courses that are presenting strictly cognitive material and are organized around a 50 minute time slot require different planning than a lesson that involves a psychomotor skill with a lab or shop component. The latter require considerably more planning in terms of time and resources. As most guides to lesson planning point out, there is seldom strict adherence to a lesson plan as experienced teachers make adjustments and shift strategies on the fly.

Lesson planning depends upon earlier events in the planning cycle particularly developing course outlines and units of instruction.
Blooms taxonomy provides a useful frame work for planning by dividing learning tasks into cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.
A further taxonomy allows for a distinction between the level of accomplishment expected as a consequence of instuction general knowledge, working knowledge and qualified knowledge.
A course outline should specify the dominant domain and the expected level of knowlege.
Once these things have been determined a plan can be developed to deliver instruction that will meet this goal. As long as the outline is realistic in terms of expectations given time and resources the lesson plan can be fairly mechanical often completed in a template.

So a lesson is being planned to teach the boline knot.
What domain?
What level of learning?
How much time is required?
What resources are necessary?
How will we know when the lesson is learned?


Gagnes 9 Units of Instruction provides a guide for understaning the tasks that should be considered when devising a lesson plan .
1) gaining attention (reception)
(2) informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
(3) stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
(4) presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
(5) providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)
(6) eliciting performance (responding)
(7) providing feedback (reinforcement)
(8) assessing performance (retrieval)
(9) enhancing retention and transfer (generalization).

Employability skills are mostly tasks that involve the affective domain.


DESCA
Some the characteristics of successful teachers
flexibility
sensitivity
and as Dr. Andy Chun describes, agility



The Teaching Cycle (on the left of the diagram) is for teachers on the right is for the learner.


Another important characteristic is the ability to reflect and modify instruction based on feed back from a variety of sources.
An article on the reflective teacher.

Feed back is essential to lesson planning and one of the main issues is "Are they learning what Iam trying to teach."
I know learning is occuring when ......

Oct 22 Learning Theory for the Digital Age

Tenative agenda

How did it feel to be a learner?

Blogger review and a few more tricks.

Learning theories

Open Courseware Proprietary Educational Systems. MIT

Behaviorism

A fable.
A scientist put a laboratory mouse in a box with six rooms. The mouse soon learned the cheese was in room three. Therefore, it always ran directly to room three upon being put in the box. One day the scientist put the cheese in room five. Upon entering the box, the mouse ran directly to room three. "Hmmm...no cheese." The mouse looked around. Tried room four. No cheese. Tried room five. "Ah-ha! Cheese!"

What would a human being have done? He or she would have continued to return to room three again and again and again — expecting and then demanding cheese. "Where is my cheese!? This is where it has always been. It's supposed to be here! I want it NOW — GIVE ME MY CHEESE!!! I have rights you know. Blah, blah, blah." And so the complaining was heard through the night in the now-dark laboratory. Meanwhile, the cheese remained in room five.

So what is the difference between mice and people? Mice get their cheese.

— Author unknown

Learning Theories

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age


Evolution of learning
Presentation from Uof M

Terms, Concepts and Understandings

In order to learn (or teach) the fundamental skills of any job or occupation we must first learn the language of that occupation. We must also learn how to listen to the narratives that experienced individuals use to describe what they do. We need to be able to separate the tasks and duties of our job so that we can develop competence. To do that we need a framework of understanding and some agreed upon terminology. Some of these terms will have common meanings but some will represent specialize useages of common terms.

One currently popular framework for understanidn what adult educators do is the theory of communities of practice. All the practitioners of a certain occupation or social group form a community of practice. The community of practice is like a living thing and like any living thing one of the major preoccupations is replication of community. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied the process by which a community replicates itself and some patterns emerge. They describe a systematic process that seems to occur in any human society, primitive or modern.
One analysis of the systematic process is the theory put forward by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger.
Basically, Lave and Wenger say that all learning is situated, that is, true learning of a skill occurs in the environment where the skill will be displayed. Formal learning may occur before this but
true learning is only complete when the skill is used in context.
Lave and Wenger go on to describe the process where by newcommers become oldtimers in any occupation. Their theory is known as Legitimate Peripheral Participation in communities of practice.

• Newcommers gain their entree into the community of practice by various means but in most occupational settings this means they get hired and they are allowed to be in the workplace where the job is happening. They are legitimately there.

• Initially they are not expected to do much just watch and learn and perform minor duties as the oldtimmers see fit. They are on the periphery of the job.

• Finally, there is an expectation that they will participate in the performance of the duties of the community at some point.

Later as they become more accomplished they will be the sole responsible agents for minor parts of the performance and then later they will be aspiring experts and then oldtimers themselves.
Lave and Wengers process is very similar to the traditional understanding of apprenticeship.

The main means of transmission of knowledge in this scenario is observation and narrative. The narrative takes particular forms and occupational narratives share some characteristics across occupations. Hero sagas, cautionary tales, BS stories all contain the elements of the job. Newcomer must be in postion to hear these stories and must behave in a way that elicits the stories. If a newcomer can survive the first three weeks on the job, usually an oldtimer will take them in hand and begin the process of education. Most of the time our task as occupational educators is to prepare newcomers to survive the first three weeks.

Terms we need to unpack.
Learning
Teacher
Student

Connectivism Blog

Welcome to Course Implementation

Those of you who have worked on CAE classes with me will recognize this format.
For the first meeting I hope we will be able to deal with the course outline, course expectations and various parking lot issues.
We will then get everyone set up on the individual and group blog and figure out a way to use this tool for this course. Part of the task for instructors when using blogs or bulletin boards is to determine the evaluation process that will be used.
Once we have figured out the blogging process we can get to work on using the blog to work on the course objectives starting with the terms and concepts.
I will be trying to guide this course in a fashion consistent with current understandings of adult education. One of the main precepts is that adults have a vast knowledge base to draw on and as they learn anything they will shape their learning consistent with their understanding of the world.
This is certainly the case for this group and we have teachers with a wide variety of experience and training. Teaching is at least in part, a performance art and a certain ego strength is required. Of course, ego strength has its drawbacks and can limit a teachers usefulness as well. Its a fine line.
I will attempt to guide this course so that each of you gains the maximum benefit according to your needs and your dispositions. Accordingly, the focus of attention of this course will be the body of work we will be covering as collected and gathered in your own individual portfolios.