Authentic Learning with Jan Herrington

I opened one of my Christmas presents early this year form the folks at Change 11.  This week Change 11 was facilitated by an innovative thinker, researcher, and scholar Jan Herrington, who is a Professor in Education at Murdoch University in Perth Western Australia.  The topic of the week was Authentic Learning.

Currently I am facilitating an online grant to help 13 faculty members form  the University of Hawaii Community Colleges develop authentic online learning activities. Our online community is located here.  We have been using the 10 Characteristics of Authentic Learning  as criteria for the activities faculty are creating. This is a new experience for all participants and we find ourselves learning by doing by the “seat of our pants” authentic learning experience in its own right. The thrill of the unexpected and uncovering of new ways to learn helps to maintain an exciting and mostly positive learning environment..

After reading and watching Jan’s post and video’s on the the 9 Elements of Authentic learning we remixed our criteria form both lists and now have 10 Elements of Authentic learning.  We based our revisions on the feedback we have been receiving as participants create their activities.

We have found that faculty struggle creating authentic activities are ill-defined, requiring students to define the tasks and sub-tasks needed to complete the activity. This approach is completely opposite of the traditional way faculty have developed their activities. They are required to have specific objectives for learners to meet. As a result they create highly structure processes that lead to the outcomes. When asked to create ill-defined activities the most common responses are; “that approach may be good for graduate level courses but my students are not ready for this”, and “if the activity is ill-defined how do I know they will do what I want them to do?”

As the project progresses it would be great to have feedback on the activities form other educators who are interested authentic online learning. If you would like to join our community here is the link:

Authentic Online Learning

 

“Connections: Virtual Learning Communities” ebook

Richard Schwier was a keynote speaker this week at the Elearn conference. Richard is a professor of Educational Technology and Design at the University of Saskatchewan, where he is the principal investigator in the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory (http://www.vlcresearch.ca).

Here is a link to his new ebook . You can download it from http://edmac.usask.ca/rick/ebookflyer it as a free download.

ZooBurst a digital storytelling tool

Craig Kapp, from New York  University was the keynote speaker on Firday at the E-Learn conference in Waikiki. The title of his presentatin was Visualizing the Future: How Augmented Reality can empower faculty…, inspire students and bring ideas to life in the classroom

Craig also created ZooBurst, a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books. Here is his demo.

http://www.zooburst.com/index.php

Prezi Templates

Often when I create a prezi  presentation I save a copy of  an interesting prezi, and use them as templates. Here are a few reasons  for using and offering prezi’s for re-mixing;

•  It’s easier to get inspired as you play around with an existing prezi, replacing texts and images as you build your version.
• Build a prezi just 10 minutes before a meeting: search for a prezi in the Reuse Library, save a copy to your own account, and replace the content.
• Don’t end the loop: offer your version for further reuse! The result will be a growing database of diverse open knowledge.

Prezi Templates

Seeking Meaning to Collective knowledge

I am currently working with faculty from 7 different  community colleges to create authentic online learning experiences.  We meet weekly in  a synchronous environment using Blackboard Collaborate . Each member has a Google document they use to  share, brainstorm and provide feedback to and from other participants. There’s a common goal to create and authentic learning experience. However the subjects are all different creating unique, multiple learning pathways.

This type of professional development and the tools used are new to all of the participants. Allison Littlejohn  describes charting,  as a set of web-based tools, to support each learner to dynamically map and manage their own view of the collective knowledge.  I would like to explore the use of charting to support participants as the explore authentic online learning.  What machine analytic tools have you used to aggregate individual behaviours into the collective?