Metacognition, technology and learning

This last week or so have been pretty hard going with the learning in these courses. I have done a lot of reading in 5601 but it is really hard to put it all together and synthesize something meaningful out of them to post something meaningful for the starter wrapper exercise.

I have been taking a little bit of luxury I feel in taking a little extra time to ponder and consider what I have been learning. I have also been thinking about a lot of changes I could and even need to make to my teaching and to my design and materials choices.

Two days ago I didn't even know what metacognition meant, now here I am pondering it. I am going to ponder a bit more on how to put the new ideas I have encountered into practice, in particular with my assignment, then I will do the starter wrapper thing, then I'll come back to this again. Hopefully this can all be done in the next couple of days.

I have felt this week that I have really been bootstrapping, as in starting from scratch a lot. This is probably a lot to do with hitting a wall physically. I took a 4 day break from my exercise routine, (2 extra days after the weekend cos I don't exercise on weekends anyways). This was hard to deal with and I do think that the physical and cognitive interrelate quite a bit.

My highlights from this weeks metacognition, my understanding of my own learning and knowing of my knowing are as follows: Assessment should be much more than just a normative (bad) or even just a summative thing (necessary) but should also be formative and when it needs to be summative it should be mixed. I suppose the aha in this is that there really are great opportunities for learning from assessment feedback and it really is a shame to miss these. But then consider pure formative assessment (practice assessments, comparison to exemplars etc) these really have a powerful opportunity for learning.

Seimens learning domains I mentioned in my previous post, these seem to almost have a requirement for technology in order to reach domains of; accretion, emergence and aquisition. I can also see a strong link between new technologies and developing learning ecologies, especially considering asynchonous discussion forums.

Biggs discussion of quality was very reminiscent of TQM but bring this into the education realm. I liked the prospective / retrosspective dialectic, this was very TQM like. the levels of teaching and learning model I found to be quite enlightening and I can see the benefit of focussing more on level 3 what the student does.
Reushle et. al I think will be quite useful and practical when designing and building onn-line learning modules. Crowe et al made a good point for peer assessment which i think I can use with a mix of PBL and discussion forums in my project. I will definitely also be using Critirion referenced assessment.