Orchestrating Closure

April 24, 2003.
Excerpt from online chat re paper Of Drugs, Messages and Time

Pia: Our Staff Development program offered a workshop for the faculty on How to Say Hello and Goodbye in the semester.

CaroleM: A debrief can enable students to see the ROI in their sharing and alternative methods of reusing them [i.e. work on file or work in progress]

CaroleM: sounds interesting Pia

Beverley: Pia, can you elaborate a bit?

Pia: The faculty agreed that we are good at getting started and acquainted in the class

lachance: When do you begin to say goodbye?

Pia: But at the end of the semester we faculty are mostly concerned with grading the finals

Pia: Rather than creating an environment to reflect on what was learned throughout the semester.

lachance: Portable & shareable creations worthy of commentary spring from recognizing we must say goodbye

lachance: a good learning situation creates memories.

This interaction led to another online contribution in the form of "Infrastructure and Transactions: students as custodian-enablers" for the Online In Higher Education, School of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Purdue/University Fort Wayne, November 2003. That paper has a feisty conclusion:

I do know that characterizing the online learning experience as a perpetual field trip, a magical show and tell, means that we can do a lot more with less. And someone someday will tell some dean that online learning is all about an encounter: pedagogy of the oppressed meets the theatre of poverty.

And so for day 1120
06.01.2010

Hearing, Emotion and Multimedia

First a little text to consider:

Anthony Storr, in Music and the Mind, talks about the close link between hearing and emotions. He points out that hearing is much more closely related to emotions than vision is. If we see a wounded animal or person, he says, we are never as moved as we are if we hear the animal or person's anguished screams with our ears. He theorizes that the strong link between hearing and feeling may be related to the fact that we can hear before we can see, as the sense of hearing is developed in the womb early, before the sense of vision is formed.

from Beverly Biderman, Wired for Sound (Toronto: Trifolium Books, 1998), pp. 25-26.

Next, a couple of questions for multimedia students:

• Consider your use of sound and images in an opening sequence. How much of your design is currently affected by your training and technical know-how?
• What is the role of ambient sound in your project?
• Is the relation between moving and still images similar to the relation between sound and images?

And so for day 995
03.09.2009

Roles and Models

John Sener has produced a synthesis of listserv conversation under the question Are Instructors Essential? In this synthesis he identifies three roles for instructors.

Meaning Makers

Explaining how and why information is important, helping learners integrate disparate content and make sense of it so that information can become 'knowledge and maybe even wisdom'

Growth Agents

Pushing [learners] ... 'beyond their level of comfort and into areas of improvement'

People Builders

Instructors serve as a bridge — in some situations, the only bridge — between learners and the society in which they seek a place

from http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/view/v4n5/coverv4n5.htm

I would like to add an important role. I do so with an evident eye on the literature about early learning and the often expressed outcome for building future learning: "self-regulation". I think it is interesting that the listserv conversation revolves around the term "instructor". I think that there is a way of extending the discussion with the introduction of the term "teacher". The teacher is a model. In a sense the teacher models coaching and how to be a catalyst for knowledge acquisition. So in a sense the essence is with the teacher as model, the instructor is secondary.

And so for day 846
07.04.2009

Motives for Motivation

For a while now I have been intrigued by the objective of cultivating "intrinsic motivation". The phrase is from a 2000 conference paper by Deborah Hanson, Ph.D. presented online at the Teaching Online in Higher Education conference.

The underpinnings of interactions, which result in successful learning, involve the transfer of knowledge coupled with changes in intrinsic motivation

Thanks to the preservation efforts of William E. Fogarty the abstract and paper are archived at http://www.ofogartaigh.com/pro/portfolio/conference/Papers/hanson.htm. And we can gain more context:

For this reason, Crowder College developed extensive procedures, orientation, and guidelines for students. In support of the thesis, "The underpinnings of interactions, which result in successful learning, involve the transfer of knowledge coupled with changes in intrinsic motivation," the author has identified and examined seven distance learning interactions which help to promote interactivity:

Increase participation and feedback
Build communication and understanding
Enhance elaboration and retention
Support learner motivation and self-regulation
Develop team building
Promote exploration and discovery
Generate learner self-diagnosis and closure

I draw your attention to "Support learner motivation and self-regulation". This translates into the skills and knowledge to learn on one's own. I find it interesting that this characterization of metacognitive abilities appears to be couched in moral terms.

It begins to lift and unlock a somewhat for me cryptic statement (divined and devised by yours truly in one of those moments). I can bring the phrase "intrinsic motivation" into a reverberating proximity with this statement:

Rhetoric is a question of bringing valence to bear on the tautological.

A phrase such as "intrinsic motivation" is a perfect example of the more abstract principle. That is not a fault. It becomes easy to remember. And what is remembered can be more easily applied.

And the whole question of appropriately motivating students has a long tradition. For example, consider this wise observation from Montaigne's "Du pédantisme":

Or ce n'est pas assez que nostre institution ne nous gaste pas, il faut qu'elle nous change en mieux.

And a loose translation: it's not enough to be wasted ;)

And so for day 839
31.03.2009