Barbara’s thoughts…

Activity 2

Activity 2.1

What is Learning?
“The best definition is to conceive of learning as a relatively permanent change in behaviour with behaviour including both observable activity and internal processes such as thinking, attitudes, and emotions.” Burns, R., 1995, The Adult Learner at Work 

What is your definition of Learning?
Learning is the act of acknowledgeing and taking into memory an acitivity, information or data that a learner has not come across before.

Activity 2.2

Behaviourists attempted to study behaviour and learning from a scientific approach – only observable and measurable behaviours are reliable.   They explain human behaviour in terms of cause and effect – therefore learning is a modification of behaviour by application of stimuli, shaping of responses and the provision of reinforcement.  Learning is demonstrated in the response or behaviour of the learner. 
TASK: Watch the following video from the Wharton University of Pennsylvania:http://www.learningwiki.com/theory  
Part 1 – Behaviourism  Examples you may be familiar with:
Classical Conditioning – Pavlov’s  DogsThe learner (dog) is conditioned (learns) to emit a response (dribble) which was originally a natural response to another stimulus (food) to a new stimulus (a bell). Classic conditioning can also be demonstrated by our ability to generalize our responses to stimuli.

Eg. A household drill may cause a reaction for a person that has had an experience with a dentist’s drill!

 What effect might generalizing have in e-Learning contexts?
Operant Conditioning – SkinnerSkinner argued that people learn to behave in ways that help them obtain things they want or avoid things they don’t want. Reinforcement is used  (money, promotions, success, praise etc) to increase the likelihood of the desired response being repeated. Skinner believed that by ignoring a response, without reinforcement the behaviour will die out. Negative reinforcement – knowing how to avoid unpleasant or dangerous circumstances.Punishment – creating unpleasant situations to decrease unwanted behaviour.Feedback – is used to reinforce behaviour and let learners know how they are doing. 
Principles emphasised by Behaviourist theory: 
§         The learner must be able to respond actively 
§         Frequency of repetition of responses is important in acquiring skill 
§         Reinforcement is vital to obtain repetition of required or correct behaviour  
§         Generalisation suggests the importance of practice in varied situations 
§         Immediate feedback of results is strongly motivating 
§         Shaping behaviour by the reinforcement of approximate responses is essential in learning new skills   Burns, R. 1995, The Adult Learner at Work, Business & Professional Publishing, Sydney

Activity 2.3

Cognitive psychologists emphasize the role of experience, the development of meaning, and the use of problem-solving and insight as the sources of learning. The individual learner will perceives organised wholes – rather than disconnected pieces.  Each person will behave and learn in terms of what is real for them. Learning is therefore based on the re-organisation of experiences into systematic and meaningful patterns that lead to problem-solving and insight. This will mean that interpretation is subjective – reality is what each of us perceives and understands at any given time. 
TASK: Watch the following video from the Wharton University of Pennsylvania:http://www.learningwiki.com/theory  
Part 2 – Cognitivism  Examples you may be familiar with: 
Meaningfulness:According to cognitive theory – our brains look for patterns and completion. Our brains have the capacity to associate anything with anything else and will find associations if we allow it to! This allows us to be creative and problem-solve. Each person will create their own meaning based on the current context and their past experiences. 
Insight:The sudden Blinding Flash of the Obvious!  The realization of how to solve a problem by a cognitive restructuring of the environment – looking at things differently! 

Until we start thinking around the problem (restructuring and reorganising) we will not be able to gain any insight into how to solve the problem.

What effect might meaningfulness and insight have in e-Learning contexts?

 Advance Organisers:An advance organiser provides a scaffold for the ideas – or cognitive structure – which will bridge the gap for the learner between the content – what’s known and what they will need to know before new material becomes meaningful. The scaffolding is intended to provide a higher level (more generalized) concept that will then allow the learner to incorporate more detailed and differentiated materials into the structure. Advance organisers use current and relevant concepts that the learner already has – to make it possible to put new learning into the framework. The sequencing of content must allow new concepts to be related to old ones.

How can we use Advance Organisers in e-Learning contexts?

Principles emphasised by Cognitive theory: 
§         The perceptual features of the problem as interpreted by the individual affect what is learned 
§         A learning problem should be structured by the teacher so that the essential features are open to the learner’s inspection 
§         The organisation of knowledge should move from simple to complex to create a meaningful whole 
§         Feedback as hypothesis testing is a basis for correcting faulty learning 
Burns, R. 1995, The Adult Learner at Work, Business & Professional Publishing, Sydney

Activity 2.4

The Humanist approach developed from the Cognitive but focuses on experiential learning and the assumption that the individual is ever seeking greater personal adequacy, self-esteem and self-actualisation. Humanists emphasise the individual’s innate need to achieve personal worth, dignity and creativity and believe a better society will evolve by nurturing these qualities. Humanist teachers can create a positive classroom climate and encourage the psychological growth towards the creation of self-actualising people.  Humanists believe that learners respond to their environments as they experience it – part of that is the person themselves – the self. 

Feeling and emotions play an important part in learning.

What effect might e-Learning contexts have for the Humanist approach?

Principles emphasised by Humanist theory: 
§         People learn by relating the world to their previous experience – they learn by doing 
§         People learn in a free environment that permits and encourages development of potential, self-expression and self-determination 
§         People learn co-operatively, which includes constructive feedback in a non-competitive environment 
§         The learning that has most meaning for people is that which is contructed by individuals out of their experience 
Burns, R. 1995, The Adult Learner at Work, Business & Professional Publishing, Sydney.

Activity 2.5

Bruner’s Constructivist Theory: Bruner (1966) based his theory on learning by discovery – information should be  organised in a spiral manner that allows the learner to re-arrange and re-assemble content to create new insights.  According to Bruner, discovery and meaningful learning enhances recall and transfer of learning. The main objective is to build upon knowledge the learner already has.  “By creating learning environments that foster the self-development of learners as they explore a situation or problem, teachers can enable learners to arrange, rearrange, and transform evidence so they can gain new insights and experience a sense of achievement in making their own discoveries.  The problem–solving strategies they develop are more transferable, as they have personal meaning and value in terms of the learner’s own purposes and intentions.”
Burns, R. 1995, The Adult Learner at Work, Business & Professional Publishing, Sydney.Applying principles of Bruner’s theory: 
1.      Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and context that make the learner willing and able to learn (readiness) 
2.      Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the learner (spiral organisation) 
3.      Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and/or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given) 

The Current Debate:There is a great deal of current debate in education fields that can be summarized into distinct views:

1)      Directed Instruction Primarily the behaviourist and cognitive learning theories
2)      Constructivist Learning 

Characteristics of the 2 types of instruction:            

Directed Instruction                           Constructivist Learning

Activity 2.6

Albert Bandura (1977) combines behaviourist reinforcement with cognitive processes for understanding the behaviour of others. Bandura empasises the importance of observing and modeling – his 2 key elements for learning are: experience and expectations§         Experience enables us to learn the consequences of our actions§        

Expectations are formed by our experiences Four processes underlie this type of observational learning:

1.      Attention: focus on the features of behaviour to be modeled
2.      Retention: how well the behaviour is remembered
3.      Reproduction: observed behaviour must be turned into action, practice and feedback
4.      Reinforcement: to motivate learners to reproduce and perform the behaviours 

How could you apply Bandura’s Social Learning Theory in an e-Learning context?

Read: Social Constructivismhttp://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Social_Constructivism  Watch/listen to the brief lecture:http://www.coe.uga.edu/epltt/impaticas/Social-Constructivism-PPT.html   Now – consider the learning theories in the context of  the technologies you have researched in Module 1. Which theories are suited or more appropriate? to be continued

Activity 2.7

Creating storyboards 

Refer to this resource on creating storyboards: http://www.uncc.edu/webcourse/sb/storyboard.htm  We will be developing course storyboards based on the simple or graphical storyboards.