Interactive computer learning has the potential to revolutionise the role of educators by empowering students to take more responsibility for their own learning, according to EIT’s newly appointed eLearning Advisor Joyce Seitzinger.
“No longer the sage on stage, an educator is now the guide on the side,” Joyce quips. “Tertiary educators are no longer the founts of knowledge that they were, and they don’t need to be. Teaching is not about holding all the information. Because the field of knowledge is constantly changing and growing, it’s about guiding students, engaging them in activities and discussion and encouraging them to explore opportunities to construct their own learning.”
Completing a Masters in Educational Technology through the University of Southern Queensland Online, Joyce knows first-hand what it is to be a distance student engaged in online learning. At the same time, she is using her instructional design expertise to help EIT lecturers design material for their students.
So where does she see eLearning headed?
With a large volume of new software coming out all the time, Joyce says it’s easy to feel barraged by technology.
“It’s important to be clear about which technologies we want to use, to not jump on all new technologies. We want to make sure they will enhance the way we teach and learn.”
Learning stepped up a gear with the arrival of the World Wide Web, Joyce says, developing e-Learning as a new sub-entity.
While software producers have endeavoured to force everything into closed systems, users also demand open systems such as blogs, Podcasts and wikis where they can construct their own content. One of Joyce’s master’s projects is looking at how these media might operate as constructive learning tools.
“A sense of urgency exists to see where this kind of learning can take us.”
Five years ago, few people had heard of a blog. They would probably have called it an online journal or Web diary.
Blog became a commonplace term during and following the American invasion of Iraq, when the world heard the story from the perspective of the Baghdad Blogger, whose reports were televised as news items.
“Now Weblogs are as prevalent and ubiquitous as mobile phones in our daily lives.”
An obvious ways to use blogs in constructive learning is as an online learning journal in which students reflect on their perceptions of the learning materials and on their own learning process.
By following a blog site over time, Joyce says you can see how the author learns from his own observations and reflections and builds on his knowledge, often fed and spurred on by the comments of other edubloggers.
Adding a real audience by posting assignments on the Web creates authentic discourse and forces students to think more carefully about how they articulate their opinions.
“A blog can evolve into a community of learners, with comments acting as powerful feedback tools. They offer immediate and detailed responses to the learner’s thoughts and ideas.”
Because Podcasts are one-way traffic, their use for interactivity, constructing knowledge and collaboration may appear limited. They are, however, proving their value as an educator, assisting auditory learners and non-native speakers, creating an alternate channel of material review, providing feedback for students and making it possible to review lectures or training and providing supplementary content.
Nothing more than an MP3 file, a Podcast doesn’t need a mobile MP3 player – it can be recorded with a microphone and software on a computer, or by calling it via phone to a service.
A Podcast produced as a class work can be published on the Web – attracting comments that further help the learning process.
The most obvious way for Podcasting to support constructive learning is in the learner-control and flexibility it provides.
The ultimate tool for constructive learning, according to Joyce, seems to be wikis. A collaborative technology for organising information on a Website, these allow visitors to add, remove and edit content and they be linked up with any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes wikis an effective tool for mass collaboration and authoring.
Joyce says they provide a problem manipulation space, cognitive tools, learner-centredness and social presence through communities of learners, interactivity and support – all in one place.
Aware of “wikiphobia” among trainers, teachers, designers and learning managers, she says their main objection, that anyone can change anything, is the point of learning together in an open environment. In any case, it is possible to host a wiki in a protected corporate intranet environment, safeguarding sensitive information.
Each participant in a wiki can change anything about an article, but it is considered bad form to change anything without consent of the community. In that way, it is both learner-centred and community-centred.
The individual active learner can concentrate on a piece of an article she wants to improve on, but she will have to negotiate and argue to have her idea or interpretation accepted by the group.
“But perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t really matter whether some overbearing know-it-all posts a lot of nonsense to the ‘final draft’. In wikis, there is no real final draft, but even finishing a draft is really not as important as the process of collaborating with fellow participants to attain that draft.”
A plus for wikis in educational environments is that they can be kept online, and classes in subsequent years can add to them.
Joyce uses the term ‘constructivist learning’ to describe the use of blogs, Podcasts and wikis in education.
The aim is for teacher or trainer to become a facilitator rather than a lecturer, while the learner becomes an active participant in the learning process.
The University of Southern Queensland has found that relationships can be readily developed online as in the classroom is students who are uneasy about the process are given the appropriate support.
An advantage of engaging students in online activities associated with problem-based learning is that the process requires participants to apply various cognitive skills.
“Looking at the evidence, one can conclude that not only are blogs, Podcasts and wikis effective, they are also affordable tools for constructive learning. They can facilitate key elements of constructive learning such as problem-based and collaborative learning, learner-centredness, cognitive tools, social presence, interactivity and support.”