I am certain that the only reason I got onto the flight from Wellington to Auckland on Friday night was because of The Magnet's propensity for misadventure.
A fault in the original aircraft saw a delay in departure that allowed me to escape the consequences of arriving at the check in counter after the flight should have closed. Mind you it was because of the Magnet's propensity for misadventure that I was late arriving. Getting lost in a Lower Hutt car park beside the Hutt River when I missed the turnoff to Melling Bridge and SH2 just has to be attributable to lack of clarity in magnetic directions given. Another win win situation for the Magnet.
My recklessly rushed departure meant that I travelled without my latest book and had to rely on the laminated safety instructions and Air NZ Inflight magazine for mind food during the flight.
The lack of engagement and authenticity in the safety information provided (ironical I know) allowed me the mindspace to think about the deceit in both engagement and authenticity in the context of Web2.0 and school.
I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of engagement and authenticity in school.
For example, students may well be engaged, and the context may well be authentic BUT if nothing is remembered, has anything been learned?
A contemporary definition of "learning" is a long term change in a person's memory (thinking and behaviour). So "I forgot to make a back up copy of my brain so everything I learned last term was lost" fails the criteria descriptors for a "learning experience".
I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of Web2.0 in school.
We boldly claim that student learning will be enhanced if they are able to use various engaging and authentic Web2.0 applications, and rail against the institutional blocking of access to social networking sites or YouTube, but we seldom explain exactly how learning outcomes might be enhanced through the conditions Web2.0 applications offer the learner.
So the onflight question/s I was interested in exploring with respect to Web2.0 applications in school was
How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance/ betray the conditions for student learning?
When I elaborated this I got
How can use of Web2.0 applications enhance the conditions for finding, organising, analysing, creating and sharing digital information?
To understand this question better I needed to unpack identifiable stages of "learning outcomes", types of "digital information" and discriminating "categories of Web2.0 applications".
At this point, much like the use of a napkin to sketch thoughts in a cafe, the inflight sick bag offered a surface for recording the ideas I couldn't hold in my head,
Digital information was easiest to unpack - I decided it should include language, symbols, text, movement, voice, and music. And once Wii type game controller haptic devices become more commonly available in schools I will add in digital touch/ vibration/ motion information.
Check out the haptic cow "a virtual reality simulator developed to train veterinary students to palpate the bovine reproductive tract, to perform fertility examinations and to diagnose pregnancy".
In terms of learning outcomes, the framework of learning outcomes within "The Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes" SOLO (Biggs and Collis) is easily understood by both teachers and students. The SOLO research suggests that students learn "quite diverse material in stages of ascending structural complexity that display a similar sequence across tasks".
I am still thinking about a meaningful classification of Web2.0 applications
All this inflight thinking and sickbag sketching meant that my question became
How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance conditions for student learning outcomes, at unistructural, multistructural, relational and extended abstract levels (SOLO Taxonomy)?
When you try to include categories of Web2.0 applications and types of digital information in the question the options become so complex that it is best thought of as a multidimensional database rather than in linear text.
The sickbag surface was no longer big enough ...
The Web2.0 and Student Learning table (Full table web2.0 and Student Learning.pdf
) is my first attempt to understand the complexity of the question - it makes a limited attempt to look at the types of digital information available, excludes the asynchronous/ synchronous dimension of the Web2.0 applications AND hasn't even begun to imagine a Web2.0 equivalent of the haptic cow BUT it is a start ....
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