Technology is any process or product that improves an aspect of life. Media are the delivery systems for communication. Technology can improve the creation, distribution, and delivery of media between individuals or groups, and information about a technology distributed through media can help or hinder a technology's distribution. Both concepts are intertwined, with one needing the other in order to continue to grow.
Instructional technology uses both technology and media in development, design, implementation, and creation to best enhance student learning. The goal of IT research is to understand the impact technology and media have on student learning, the teaching process, and the education process as a whole (Hargrave WebCT lecture 6/19). Based on assigned readings and lectures, the concept of instructional technology has been a work in progress over the last one hundred years. All of this must be taken into account in order to determine the best definition of instructional technology; that being said, this definition needs to be an evolving work in progress, changing as research into the field continues to help it evolve and grow.
As technologies have improved, educational psychologists and teachers have attempted to integrate those improvements into the classroom. The original belief was that if a large group were to receive a message through a specific medium en masse, all members of the group would receive the same message equally. As research and technologies evolved, the educational theory of behaviorism began to have an impact on I.T., and media comparison studies began to develop. The studies determined that there were no significant differences in student learning when comparing media. Starting in the 1980's, the impact of cognitive theory was felt in I.T., researching the effectiveness of matching student learning types to specific media in order to enhance student learning. Much of this was grounded in the development of computer based learning. The newest research takes the cognitive theory one step further by adding neuroscience to the mix. This blending of the psychology and biology of the brain is further enhanced by intra-media studies using research to show technology used naturally within the flow of classroom instruction and assessment to gain an understanding of how a single medium within itself can best help student learning. According to Reiser, the AECT 1994 definition of Instructional Technology states: "Instructional Technology is the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management, and evaluation of processes and resources for learning."
Add to this plethora of information the four theories of instructional technology (systems theory, communication theory, behaviorism, and constructivism), and the basis of information available to create a definition of instructional technology is almost overwhelming. Many questions arise and need to be addressed: Should IT be specific to only technology classrooms, or should it be applicable to classes across the board? How should teacher training look, for both incoming teachers and those who have been in the field for many years? Who / what will supply the funding for such an endeavor? What about age-appropriateness?
My personal belief is that I.T. should be treated as a combination of several factors. The concept of using technology to better enhance communication is key. Teachers should use technology naturally within instruction and assessment to create authentic experiences for students to apply to their schema, use metacognition for self-correction, and take and use that information to make continuing cross-curricular connections. Students need to be able to show measurable quantifiable behaviors to meet previously determined standards and benchmarks. Students needs to take ownership of their own learning by functioning as partners in that learning with their teachers, determining appropriate behaviors regarding technology use and abuse, positive and negative consequences for those behaviors, and functioning as a self-governing democracy regarding those consequences. Students need to be able to work in groups to help foster ideas, function as emotional and intellectual supports, and create new concepts or items. All these skills are now necessary in order for today's students to become active, competent, and engaged citizens in the ever shrinking (or flattening) world of the 21st century. Students need to have their desire to be problem-solving, ever-evolving, never-ending learners fostered by teacher mentors in this newly emerging world of technology and media infusion.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Visual and Media Literacy
What are the similarities and differences between visual literacy and media literacy?
The term literacy has traditionally meant to decode, interpret, and comprehend text. As technologies have evolved, this term needs to be broken down by discipline and continually updated. Visual literacy is the ability to work with visual cues by interpreting, creating, encoding, and decoding: seeing relationships, picturing circumstances, and visualizing solutions. Media literacy is more difficult to define simply because of the broad scope and spectrum for the term media. Media literacy has been defined many ways, but for these purposes will be defined as: one's ability to critically think about how to access, evaluate, & create messages and to participate with these messages in a variety of forms.
The processes of understanding and creating visual literacy are both extremely linear and follow established parameters. Comprehending visual literacy is often shown using Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience to measure the level of concrete or abstract thinking required: the base, or completely concrete, level displays the student doing the action; the middle, or beginning abstraction, level displays the student observing the action; and the top, or most abstract, level displays the student understanding knowledge through visual and verbal symbolisms. In creating media design to show visual literacy the student will follow the design principles based in the creation of visual arts: balance, sequence, emphasis, and unity (which uses the artistic elements of color, shape, line, space, and texture). Visual literacy has its roots in the functions of communication, intending to inform, instruct, persuade, entertain, or enrich. Finally, the student's use of specific colors and color combinations, layout, and design proportion will relay to the consumer an emotional response as well as transmission of the initial message. This response may be noise within the communication process, or bias used to persuade.
While visual literacy is extremely lineal, media literacy is anything but. The main focus of media literacy is to teach students to become critical thinkers and to ask questions, not look for answers in their daily work. Media literacy can either enlighten and democratize or become an unequal elitist force within a society. There are five core concepts of media: that is it constructed by an author, uses creative language containing its own rules, that the point of view different for different people, that they have embedded values, and that messages are sent to gain profit or power. The two parts of media, construction and deconstruction, are BOTH essential to developing a strong media literacy. Based on Thoman & Jolls article "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World," there are five key questions to apply in both construction and deconstruction of media. These five questions are companions to the five key concepts, and are as follows:
Sonia Livingston continues the definition of media literacy in her article "The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy" by stressing that the heart of media literacy is found in both construction and deconstruction of the media; literacy can not be achieved without both elements. She also reiterates that media literacy is media-dependent: a person must engage with the text on a personal level in order to attain "literacy."
Both visual literacy and media literacy stress the importance of creation in gaining literacy. Both also stress the development and use of critical thinking skills in the creation and deconstruction processes. Both stress that authorship is not natural and is based in the experience and point of view of the creator. Finally, both forms of literacy show that without a doubt education must go beyond the traditional definition of literacy and begin to instruct students in supplementary forms of literacy that will be essential to their future as active, engaged, and functional citizens of the future.
That being said, media literacy does take some of its cues from visual literacy, but takes the ideas much further. Media does involve text in print, but it carries the concepts of emotional schema and bias through composition much further. Also, media literacy deals with all forms of media, from advertisements, to textbooks, blogs to spam. The vast cornucopia of formats within media make it innately more complex and less likely to lend itself to linear definitions.
** Compiled using WebCT video lectures, lecture notes for CI 501 and the following articles:
"The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy" by Sonia Livingstone published in London, 2003, obtained from the on-line media collection at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Thoman, E & Jolls, T. (2004, September.) "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World" American Behaviorial Scientist. 48:1. from the Center for Media Literacy website.
The term literacy has traditionally meant to decode, interpret, and comprehend text. As technologies have evolved, this term needs to be broken down by discipline and continually updated. Visual literacy is the ability to work with visual cues by interpreting, creating, encoding, and decoding: seeing relationships, picturing circumstances, and visualizing solutions. Media literacy is more difficult to define simply because of the broad scope and spectrum for the term media. Media literacy has been defined many ways, but for these purposes will be defined as: one's ability to critically think about how to access, evaluate, & create messages and to participate with these messages in a variety of forms.
The processes of understanding and creating visual literacy are both extremely linear and follow established parameters. Comprehending visual literacy is often shown using Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience to measure the level of concrete or abstract thinking required: the base, or completely concrete, level displays the student doing the action; the middle, or beginning abstraction, level displays the student observing the action; and the top, or most abstract, level displays the student understanding knowledge through visual and verbal symbolisms. In creating media design to show visual literacy the student will follow the design principles based in the creation of visual arts: balance, sequence, emphasis, and unity (which uses the artistic elements of color, shape, line, space, and texture). Visual literacy has its roots in the functions of communication, intending to inform, instruct, persuade, entertain, or enrich. Finally, the student's use of specific colors and color combinations, layout, and design proportion will relay to the consumer an emotional response as well as transmission of the initial message. This response may be noise within the communication process, or bias used to persuade.
While visual literacy is extremely lineal, media literacy is anything but. The main focus of media literacy is to teach students to become critical thinkers and to ask questions, not look for answers in their daily work. Media literacy can either enlighten and democratize or become an unequal elitist force within a society. There are five core concepts of media: that is it constructed by an author, uses creative language containing its own rules, that the point of view different for different people, that they have embedded values, and that messages are sent to gain profit or power. The two parts of media, construction and deconstruction, are BOTH essential to developing a strong media literacy. Based on Thoman & Jolls article "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World," there are five key questions to apply in both construction and deconstruction of media. These five questions are companions to the five key concepts, and are as follows:
| concept | deconstruction questions | construction questions |
| authorship | Who created this message? | What am I creating? |
| format | What creative techniques are used to attract my attention? | Does the message reflect an understanding in format, creativity & technology? |
| consumers | How might different people view this differently? | Is my message engaging & compelling for my target audience? |
| content | What values, lifestyles & points of view are shown or omitted in this message? | Does content have clearly & consistently framed values & points of view? |
| purpose | Why is this message being sent? | Is the purpose communicated clearly & effectively? |
Both visual literacy and media literacy stress the importance of creation in gaining literacy. Both also stress the development and use of critical thinking skills in the creation and deconstruction processes. Both stress that authorship is not natural and is based in the experience and point of view of the creator. Finally, both forms of literacy show that without a doubt education must go beyond the traditional definition of literacy and begin to instruct students in supplementary forms of literacy that will be essential to their future as active, engaged, and functional citizens of the future.
That being said, media literacy does take some of its cues from visual literacy, but takes the ideas much further. Media does involve text in print, but it carries the concepts of emotional schema and bias through composition much further. Also, media literacy deals with all forms of media, from advertisements, to textbooks, blogs to spam. The vast cornucopia of formats within media make it innately more complex and less likely to lend itself to linear definitions.
** Compiled using WebCT video lectures, lecture notes for CI 501 and the following articles:
"The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy" by Sonia Livingstone published in London, 2003, obtained from the on-line media collection at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Thoman, E & Jolls, T. (2004, September.) "Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World" American Behaviorial Scientist. 48:1. from the Center for Media Literacy website.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Theories of Education and Theories of Instructional Technology
Explain where and how the theories that support IT fit with the theories of Education.
In 1963 Hutchins developed that theory that education develops the intellect and the mind. The perennialist theory of education believes that truth is found in the great works of education and that education is for the development of pure intellect. Behaviorism follows two schools: Pavlov's classical behaviorism states that repeated stimuli will bring about a conditioned response. Skinner's operant behaviorism states that the consequence of an action (negative or position) is will dictate the response. Behaviorial objectives determine the conditions under which the learning process will occur, the expected performance of students following instruction, and the quantifiable consequence of the student's performance. By concentrating a school on learning simply to increase knowledge (perennialism), the best compliment to this type of learning would be a measurable means of instruction and assessment for mastery (behaviorism).
Essentialism was the retaliation to Dewey's progressive education and stressed emphasis on academic subject curriculum to develop well-rounded students that would become functioning members of society. It stressed discipline and hard work and was driven forward by the Industrial Revolution to create a literate society willing to conform to the norms given. Systems theory takes its cue from the nature and physical sciences, using an adaptation of chaos theory in an attempt to clearly develop a procedure for how real-world events interact by showing the role of each component individually and then explaining their impacts on the system as a whole. Schools that are designed to crank out students that would be well-educated and malleable enough to follow society's dictums would lend themselves to the idea that each student's actions would impact their own lives as well as society as a whole. In this case systems theory could be used to both summarize and predict social group behaviors of students educated using the essentialist method.
Progressivism is often considered the most pragmatic of all educational theories and developed out of the social reforms of the early 1900's. It stressed common-sense, applied, practical problem-solving through rote memorization of facts, and was developed in response to more traditional methods of education. Progressivist schools functioned as a source of data collection, believing that children should be allowed to develop naturally with the teacher functioning more as a facilitator of student-driven experiential learning. Socially, the schools function as the heart of society while student begin to learn from context. Constructivism is most often used by K-12 schools today and stresses students actively transforming & interpreting experiences by relating current or new experiences to previous experiences based on individual schema (based on Fosnot's work in 1992). In 1992 Bednar expanded this idea to show that meaning is developed through the active process of schema interpretation and building, and is most effective when student metacognition occurs during this process. In this area teachers function as facilitators and use authentic instruction and assessment of student progress. While the concept of rote memorization found in progressivism does not jive well with constructivism, the idea of an "anti-theory" to previous education theories shows how progressivist schools would apply the common-sense problem solving to the real-world problems and experiences found in the constructivist theory. Both share the idea of teacher as mentor or facilitator, focusing on the student as a learner and not the content to be covered.
Reconstructionism is related to progressivism but stresses education as the catalyst for social change. It emphasizes the use of technology to facilitate change, diminish learning gaps, and helping students determine their own destiny. The Wilbur Schram model of communication theory shows that communication occurs when the sender sends a message through a channel to be interpreted by the receiver. This model of communication can be affected by physical or psychological noise, but allows for extensive feedback to occur to help modify, maintain, and control the process. Integral to this process is the idea that both the sender and receiver need to have a field of experience that overlaps somewhere: language, cultural background, education, or previous schema or experience. Also necessary is the idea of compatible technologies for the message channel: the receiver must be able to decode the message into the same idea as the sender. Reconstructionist schools emphasize the idea of equalizing the playing field by encouraging students to expand their fields of experience. These schools also stress the importance of technologies as leveling the playing field for all students. The communication theory fits into both these areas by stressing the need for shared fields of experience and the use of technology to both expand those fields of experiences as well as communicate information effectively, efficiently, and with as little noise as possible.
*all factual information summarized from WebCT video lectures and handouts for Ci 501 with Dr. Constance Hargrave
In 1963 Hutchins developed that theory that education develops the intellect and the mind. The perennialist theory of education believes that truth is found in the great works of education and that education is for the development of pure intellect. Behaviorism follows two schools: Pavlov's classical behaviorism states that repeated stimuli will bring about a conditioned response. Skinner's operant behaviorism states that the consequence of an action (negative or position) is will dictate the response. Behaviorial objectives determine the conditions under which the learning process will occur, the expected performance of students following instruction, and the quantifiable consequence of the student's performance. By concentrating a school on learning simply to increase knowledge (perennialism), the best compliment to this type of learning would be a measurable means of instruction and assessment for mastery (behaviorism).
Essentialism was the retaliation to Dewey's progressive education and stressed emphasis on academic subject curriculum to develop well-rounded students that would become functioning members of society. It stressed discipline and hard work and was driven forward by the Industrial Revolution to create a literate society willing to conform to the norms given. Systems theory takes its cue from the nature and physical sciences, using an adaptation of chaos theory in an attempt to clearly develop a procedure for how real-world events interact by showing the role of each component individually and then explaining their impacts on the system as a whole. Schools that are designed to crank out students that would be well-educated and malleable enough to follow society's dictums would lend themselves to the idea that each student's actions would impact their own lives as well as society as a whole. In this case systems theory could be used to both summarize and predict social group behaviors of students educated using the essentialist method.
Progressivism is often considered the most pragmatic of all educational theories and developed out of the social reforms of the early 1900's. It stressed common-sense, applied, practical problem-solving through rote memorization of facts, and was developed in response to more traditional methods of education. Progressivist schools functioned as a source of data collection, believing that children should be allowed to develop naturally with the teacher functioning more as a facilitator of student-driven experiential learning. Socially, the schools function as the heart of society while student begin to learn from context. Constructivism is most often used by K-12 schools today and stresses students actively transforming & interpreting experiences by relating current or new experiences to previous experiences based on individual schema (based on Fosnot's work in 1992). In 1992 Bednar expanded this idea to show that meaning is developed through the active process of schema interpretation and building, and is most effective when student metacognition occurs during this process. In this area teachers function as facilitators and use authentic instruction and assessment of student progress. While the concept of rote memorization found in progressivism does not jive well with constructivism, the idea of an "anti-theory" to previous education theories shows how progressivist schools would apply the common-sense problem solving to the real-world problems and experiences found in the constructivist theory. Both share the idea of teacher as mentor or facilitator, focusing on the student as a learner and not the content to be covered.
Reconstructionism is related to progressivism but stresses education as the catalyst for social change. It emphasizes the use of technology to facilitate change, diminish learning gaps, and helping students determine their own destiny. The Wilbur Schram model of communication theory shows that communication occurs when the sender sends a message through a channel to be interpreted by the receiver. This model of communication can be affected by physical or psychological noise, but allows for extensive feedback to occur to help modify, maintain, and control the process. Integral to this process is the idea that both the sender and receiver need to have a field of experience that overlaps somewhere: language, cultural background, education, or previous schema or experience. Also necessary is the idea of compatible technologies for the message channel: the receiver must be able to decode the message into the same idea as the sender. Reconstructionist schools emphasize the idea of equalizing the playing field by encouraging students to expand their fields of experience. These schools also stress the importance of technologies as leveling the playing field for all students. The communication theory fits into both these areas by stressing the need for shared fields of experience and the use of technology to both expand those fields of experiences as well as communicate information effectively, efficiently, and with as little noise as possible.*all factual information summarized from WebCT video lectures and handouts for Ci 501 with Dr. Constance Hargrave
Monday, June 16, 2008
CI501 Photo Intro
Name: Colleen Ites ("Irish for girl" from Saturday's Welcome activity)
Unique Characteristic: I keep written (and evolving) "Top 10" lists for my life:
- Top 10 People I'd Like to Have Coffee With
- Top 10 Things I Would Like to Accomplish in Life
- Top 10 Places I Would Like to Visit
- etc.
What I expect from CI501: a strong foundation in instructional technology that will increase my own knowledge of the field and upon which I can build all other coursework in the program.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)