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Design, Learning, and Collaboration - Spring 2002 Assignment 2 Jonathan Marbach 1. what did you find interesting about the article? It made me think about/remember what I found wrong with the teaching of undergraduate CS courses (which is what motivated me to teach...). Many of the concepts discussed were ones that, without knowing it or without being able to put them into succinct words, I had incorporated into my teaching. What am I talking about? Well, now that I have some vocabulary to discuss it, the major problem I saw was that the information was so decontextualized that students had no motivation to learn it. The easiest example is with a Data Structures course. Few students took it seriously because they had the attitude: "When am I going to need a tree?" Just having a teacher say "Learn this, you'll need it later" doesn't impress upon the student the potential usefulness or purpose of a piece of knowledge. Rather, if you present the material in context - "OK, one way we can organize all the objects in our 3-d scene is by using a tree" - their stake in learning how to build a tree increases. While teaching at my previous school, I developed a course in 3-d game programming. Part of the purpose for that was to provide a context for the integration of all the skills the students had learned up to that point, but another main goal was to give the students motivation toward learning. My hunch is that not too many students "care" about a priority queue that has arbitrary integer items, but tell them that they need to implement it so that objects in the scene that are closer are drawn first and you give them a tangible goal. Yet another aspect was to show the students that with their current knowledge, they could acquire any missing knowledge they needed to complete necessary tasks. Provided with appropriate references, the students were able to look up much of the information needed to implement their component, since there was no way I could provide all the necessary information in lecture form. The course consisted of short lectures used to point the students in the right direction and then hands-on lab time where I would merely assist them in their tasks, thus fulfilling the teacher as "coach" or "facilitator" role. not interesting about the article? Nothing that I remember. Not that this wasn't interesting but I can always go for more examples, although I understand that the article proposes a challenge for the future so the examples have yet to be designed! 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? [I'll put this in my own words later] "...the future of how we live, think, create, work, learn, and collaborate is not out there to be "discovered" it has to be invented and designed. Computational and communication media (firmly grounded in a deep understanding of theories and prescriptive goals) will be a critical force in shaping this future. Learning and intelligent systems research will play an important role in creating this future." 3. click on one of the words in blue and see what happens? a. is this feature useful? It was extremely useful in that since I'm just getting used to the terms it gave me access to the information "on demand". It allows you to tie in necessary and relevant information without straying too far from your current position. (I wish math books were more like that.) b. in which other situations have you encountered this feature? All of Microsoft's HTML-Help files are constructed this way, and again, it is extremely helpful in allowing you to navigate through the information. 4. global learning theories and approaches a. do you know any of the people mentioned in the diagrams: Skinner - yes, a little Piaget - yes, vaguely - he studied child development and developed the pyramid of needs (?) Papert - no Illich - no Vygotsky - no Dewey - no b. select one of the six in case you do not know something, find out something about her/him - and write a paragraph what she/he has contributed to a deeper understanding of learning? To be completed this afternoon...
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