For this week's post, we have been asked to choose one of three scenarios, and reflect how best to manage the design aspect of the scenario through the use of technology. The scenario I chose deals with creating a distance learning experience via an interactive art museum. The scenario is given below.
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the artwork on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?
I chose this scenario from the three presented because it applies well to my background in K-12 education. I can also relate to the teacher who is still a novice with web 2.0 technologies, and to the designer who is being asked to supply a design plan that will be a dynamic engaging experience for the students as well as a valuable and manageable learning experience for the teacher.
When I started this assignment, I was not entirely sure how to approach the methodology. In my research, I found some really interesting resources available online that would work great in a module suitable for this topic. For instance, the Museum of Fine art in Boston http://www.mfa.org/explore has a great interactive museum web site that allows the user to tour the museum and interact in limited fashion with the artwork (Museum of Fine Art Boston, n.d.). I also found Google's art Gallery http://www.googleartproject.com. The Google Art Gallery is an extremely impressive site. It features links to twenty museums from around the world. It is a virtual museum that allows the user to tour the museum by using Google's Street View (Art Project, n.d.). When one chooses a particular piece of art, they can click on information provided with the picture. It truly is an amazing site. My first thought was to reply to this scenario using the Google Art Gallery technology as my starting point. However as I thought about it, I decided to take a different approach. Here is a piece of my reasoning. Though I really love the Google Art Gallery, the scenario mentions an interactive piece with the curators. Though Art Gallery does offer videos with the curators, I thought it might be interesting to get a more personal view from them. I feel like the students being able to interact with the curators would give the students a more real world feel to the assignment. Though it will take more work on my part as the designer, it could be an experience the students can apply to other learning situations (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012).
As the designer of this project, I would need to begin by sitting down with the teacher and getting to know her and her students. This is an instance where I as the designer can get a really good feel for the type of learners I will be working with. This is critical in forming a learner analysis for the module (Morrison, Ross, Kalman, & Kemp, 2011). The next step is going to be to assess the technology that is available to both teacher and students (Simonson, et al, 2012). Followed by a discussion of leaning outcomes and any information I can get from the teacher about both teacher and student experience with technology (Simonson, et al, 2012).
Ideally (and this may be a stretch, obviously there would be a lot of homework to do regarding the cooperation of the curators and the museum), the design would look something like this. After the teacher and students contact the two museums for the focus of the assignment, and a few of the curators agree to take part in the activity. The curators would take raw video footage of the new exhibits. In these videos, the curators would narrate about their favorite parts of the exhibit, provide information on the artwork, and any tidbits of information not readily available to the public. The videos would be short, ten to fifteen minutes maximum. The raw footage would then come back to the designer, and using technology such as Movie Maker I would edit the videos so they could be posted to the teacher web page. Students could then choose which exhibits they would like to view. The reason I like this process better than using a tool like Art Gallery is that it gives the students a view of the exhibit through the eyes of the curator. The next piece of the assignment is the collaborative piece the teacher wanted. The teacher wanted the students to be able to critique pieces from the exhibits. I this case I would set up a wiki with those pictures as well as information on the picture, artist, museum, etc. The students could choose which pictures to critique and post those to the wikis. Students could then respond to those critiques via the wiki. A final piece that might be fun would be to have a web cast with one or more of the curators so students could interview the curators and get their thoughts on the pieces chosen for the wiki. This last piece would take some logistical work, but it could add some wonderful enrichment to the activity.
Here is some of the rationale I used in deciding on these particular technologies. Like I said before, using video that is enhanced with the narration of the curators gives the students a bird's eye view from the lens of those closest to the exhibits. This type of authentic experience is very difficult to recreate (Simonson, et al, 2012) in an online virtual tour. The use of a wiki seemed like a great way to get students to collaborate (Simonson, et al, 2012), while addressing writing standards that are often required by school districts as well as state governments. I also like the wiki format because students who are often not comfortable speaking in class have a forum to express themselves in a way that feels safer for them. Another advantage to using the wiki is when having students use this technology, you are asking them to take some initiative in their learning experience. This initiative is a way to build autonomy in the learners, which will be necessary as the learners advance in their education (Simonson, & Saba, n.d.). I found a short video that shows how wiki's can be used to augment classroom instruction. Click the following link to view the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pR5yogCmkA (Richardson, n.d.). The final piece of technology, the web cast is a great way to get direct interaction between the students and the curators. This interaction allows the separation between the curator and the students to be greatly reduced by allowing two-way communication (Simonson, et al, 2012). For an example of how a classroom teacher used this technology to connect his class with a nanotechnology expert, click on the following blog link. http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2007/02/interview-with-nanotechnology-expert.html (Davis, 2007).
Ultimately, there could be many ways to create a module based on the given scenario. I feel like the methods suggested here could create a great distance learning experience for the students while introducing the teacher to some of the technologies available that can narrow the distance in a learning community.
References
Art project by Google. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.googleartproject.com/
Davis, V. (2007), February 12). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2007/02/interview-with-nanotechnology-expert.html
Museum of fine arts Boston: Explore online. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.mfa.org/explore
Morrison, G.R., Ros, S.M., Kalman, H.K., & Kemp, J.E. (20110. Designing effective instruction. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, & Sons, Inc.
Richardson, W. (Writer) (n.d.) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for the classroom [DVD]. Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pR5yogCmkA
Simonson, M. (Writer), & Saba, F. (Writer) (n.d.). Theory and distance learning [Web]. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6493362&Survey=1&47=888416 1&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
No comments:
Post a Comment