Reflective Log 22 March 2009

5621
Last week was v busy in terms of my ‘Educational Theory’ learning. Besides the penny dropping on the structure of the course, materials, media etc modeling modern learning theories, I also got a good taste of cooperative learning.


As I started to read some of the theory of learning design I began to recognize portions of that theory being reflected in the 5621 course materials. Not explicitly but implicitly in the choice of media structure of materials and learning activities. That was kind of a sweet nugget.


During the week I also went on 2 ‘Teaching and Learning’ professional development activities; one on cooperative learning and one on using journals for reflective learning. Both of these PDs had homework given. “We are supposed to try them out in the classroom’ So I am going to do that too. That should be good for reflection.

I also had two meetings to discuss these courses specifically. One with Cheri to discuss different tools I might use in the course. The other with Holly and Wilf to discuss this course. I found these meetings very useful. It is good to have short meetings to discuss these things. We give each other some good ideas and also good to bounce our ideas off someone. Sort of group constructivist learning?

I also started a PD with Dr. Zaid Said on spectroscopy. It was interesting to reflect in practice during this PD to see the things that worked for me in that learning situation also. Definitely it is good to have a variety of learning activities as different learners benefit from different approaches.

On a related topic, Grace is doing lots of learning at the moment, she completed a Basic Life Support class last week and is doing the Advanced Cardiac Life Support course next week and in the meantime all the while doing an IELTs course. So there are plenty of opportunities to reflect on learning.

I have been putting some thought into the project assignment. This was giving me a real headache. But I got a really good tip from Holly which was to read ahead and skim the later units of 5601. I have done that last night and I agree this was a great idea. I now have an idea of a project.

I want to build some learning activities in CH1011 that will be a more modern type of learning. Including groupwork, some on-line discussion and reflection. As the students are really not familiar with this, their experience is more objectivist and behaviorist, I am going to take a measured approach. I am thinking about the review of CH1010 module for CH1011 with special attention to the mathematics. This is an area we have identified in Mike Conn’s project as needing development. It is also something that we have some freedom to develop as apposed to the credit courses which are defined in Newfoundland. I think I can use survey-monkey to help with analysis among other things..

5621
Well I finally finished the assignment 1 on Thursday night. This was nice since the deadline was Friday (or was is Saturday) whatever. I had expected that I might have to spend most of Friday working on it, especially since I had some little bits of code that were holding me up, specifically applying styles with CSS but inside the XHTML code. The problem being that the example in the notes was not complete (had an unterminated style string). But hey I solved it simply by applying logic to the problem. The notes did say that all code strings need to terminate. So I just made up what I thought would be the appropriate termination symbols and it worked. I was so pleased that I got up on Thursday and rode for 3 hours hard in the desert.. Now that I call rewards for learning..

I would definitely say that I am getting to the point in both these courses where learning is starting to have its own rewards. In terms of aha moments and that sweet feeling of being able to see more clearly something that now transparent was recently opaque.