Peaceful Moment On Mars

Our Mars simulation was a big success this week. With the technical glitches and hurdles smoothed out, the students and I could focus on the uniqueness of the experience and enjoy it. At one moment I noticed a team of students had walked their astronaut away from the meteorite field where the other astronauts were gathered and ventured up the crater's side a ways. As they turned around to look over the scene below the screen held a beautifully captured moment with the expanse framed by the crevice in which the astronaut stood. I popped in and got a snapshot on their computer. It's worth looking at the larger version to see the tiny astronauts below.

1024 x 568

1920 x 1065

Notes on Mayer, Moreno, "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning"

• "The goal of [their] research is to figure out how to use words and pictures to foster meaningful learning," and the biggest hurdle to doing that successfully is minimizing cognitive overload.
  
• This paper is a summary of the entire Cognitive Science I syllabus. Every paragraph represents at least a paper or chapter. Wow, it's chock-full.
  
• I think my website design avoids the split attention effect and reduces incidental processing by allowing only one section to be open at a time. So while you are looking at the information in one section you aren't distracted by what's going on in another section, like a video or school assignments. This is done with this nice little bit of JavaScript:
  

  collapseprev: true,

• Signaling: tell them how to use the information.

Final Project Web Site

My final project web site is coming along. Here is the link to it. And here is a picture of my flow chart for the site.

Fair Use Explained Clearly

This document, "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education," is an excellent resource for understanding Fair Use. It puts the power and responsibility of choosing appropriate media for instructional use in the hands of the educator as the law intends instead of making us feel like we are getting away with something by using any media. It also makes clear to me that in cases where I have felt like students' use of media wasn't covered by fair use I was right. "...students may use copyrighted music for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity." The original work needs to be repurposed or transformed in such a way that its use contributes to an educational goal.

Prensky, Digital Natives/Immigrants

I noticed a point in Prensky's "Digital Natives Digital Immigrants" that was similar to the way I'm thinking of the Learning Wiki. To create software to teach engineers how to use a new type of CAD software Prensky had the developers and professors (content specialists) "create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded." The skills were not to be organized by concept or vocabulary or in a certain sequence, but by practical application. This is how I envision information being organized in the Learning Wiki.

Learning Wiki

In a constructivist learning environment providing sufficient support for students to be successful is tricky. Since students are working on solving unique problems at varying levels of difficulty the teacher can't predict very easily exactly what information they will need to find their solutions. In addition, the teacher can't, and shouldn't, be there to help every student with every problem. I propose developing a learning wiki as a means of providing some of this scaffolding. This wiki doesn't have a predetermined structure, nor specific predetermined content. The students will decide and maintain both. My hope is that when they encounter a problem they will be able to find possible solutions in the learning wiki. The key to making this successful is for students to update the wiki with their solutions as much as possible and create the structure of the wiki around the problems they faced. More on this later.