- What are your early impressions of using a blog and what was your experience using Socrative (or Poll Everywhere) this week? Any surprises, pleasant or otherwise?
- Which part(s) of Dale’s Cone do you think each tool (Blog, Socrative/Poll Everywhere) lends itself best to and why?
- Considering Siegel’s concept of “computer imagination”, what do you think would be at least one “imaginative” educational use of each tool (blog, BYOD) that takes advantage of each tool’s inherent strengths? That is, what do you think you and/or your students could use these tools for that they might not be able to do with other more simple or low-tech tools? Or, as Postman might ask, what is a problem to which each of these tools is an answer?
Response
My first experiences using a blog was back when blogs were just starting to gain increasing popularity. I remember then the motivation being similar to what Facebook has taken over, however blogs encouraged a more personalized and intimate experience with sharing, writing, and a culture of interaction that felt less contrived than Facebook (the largest and most used social media platform at the time - 2008/2009). In this way - on Dale's Cone of Experience - the blog was almost like a dramatized experience as I formatted life experiences into (what I like to hope) were entertaining essays about life and my place in it, as well as the lives and experiences and thoughts of others. Depending on the blog they also seemed to feel like study trips or demonstrations. Before their were recipe websites, and Youtube sites dedicated as small educational or tutorial businesses, there were bloggers creating the standards and norms that would eventually be adopted as 'industry' standards.
My experience with a blog now feels much more like a direct experience or even a contrived experience. The use of blogs has shrunk back down to a stand in for a highly customizable and interconnected notebook. There is value in this, and I think it can create a dynamic tool for helping students take notes, create records of their educational experience, share their experiences in novel or aesthetically pleasing, or highly supplemented ways with an ease and access that a paper and pen or even a word processor on the computer does not allow.
Socrative is an interesting tool to consider using the cone. I would probably categorize it as a contrived experience if I am looking at it from the perspective of a tool I am using to create an educational experience, or as a tool I am using to create this meta-analysis of it. However, it can be used to create experiences for participants that I think can mimic still picture and recording participation, demonstrative learning, and potentially could be used to prompt a 'digital study trip' depending on how a quiz or race was structured and what it was asking the student to do to complete it.
The interesting crossover between Dale's Cone and the idea of Imaginative Computers, to me, is that Dale's Cone was developed before the internet was more than science fiction for most educators. It has developed into what we might consider Dale's Cone turned on its side and brought into a 3D world. We work through it as a tunnel, with each successive narrowing level producing an experience that is consequently more limited in how it can be interacted with in a physical level, but also more all-encompassing in the sense of how much of our brain we must use to make sense of and participate meaningfully with. Perhaps I am drawing to heavily on the colloquial that people apply to the internet often as it being a process of going to a rabbit hole, or even how we talk about how our 'corners' of the internet can become 'tunnels' or 'silos' or even 'echo chambers.'
At the entrance of the Cone we recognize that the way we travel through it (assuming gravity is a non-issue) is massive. The world's options and experiential possibilities and their corresponding digital replications and corollaries are mind-blowingly vast. We must all enter somewhere though, by choice or by necessity. We are then all traversing the different possibilities of how to make that journey through, around, or back and forth in the cone. As an educator considering it this way I am interested in what kinds of leaps I can encourage my students to make, how does the internet make those leaps more or less possible? More or less overwhelming? How does my mentality about education change if I am looking at it as a tunnel without gravity rather than a mountain to be scaled or navigated up or down or in other linear fashions?
I think the deep and tragic heart of Postman's assertions were that he is stuck in a linear mentality. There is only forward back or stay still. There is only scale and measurement. And anything beyond that cannot be applicable to tools, and is rather ephemeral and too broad and special to be tied to any physical thing. I find this inclination in myself all the time and it is something I have put a lot of time and effort into breaking out of, because the reality is that nothing in life is that way, and to try and push it into that is to (I believe) force ourselves into a perpetual spiral around the learning level of contrived experiences. It is like like turning the cone sideways but keeping it 2D, we are only walking across a target of theoretical learning, intent of learning, but never really able to meaningfully participate.
A good educational experience must include our sense and an understanding of the interconnectedness of everything to be personal to everyone. I think it is the personal experience - the purposeful part - that should be always looked at as our entrance point, and the turn around and remember where we started stabilizer. On the internet I can start anywhere and end anywhere and it can still be a learning experience that is impactful. Blogs and Socratic are tools that allow for that to be a guided experience. A creative computer approach allows for the flexibility of mind and breaking down of what education can look like, feel like, entail, and bring about in a person.
Relevant Notes
Edgar Dale (1969)
Cone of Experience
firsthand participation -> pictorial representation -> abstract symbolic expression
Three Major Modes of Learning (Jerome S. Bruner)
-enactive (direct experience)
The goal being to help a learner create "Because a verbal symbol does not resemble anything the child can do or see, he may have difficulty in relating it to his own experience. If a symbol is to stand for something, it must stand on something - a firm foundation of of relevant experience ... Our sense experiences, in fact, are not something that we simply "drop" when we have developed an appropriate symbolic language for a summarizing idea. A certain amount of sensory imagery may accompany even our most abstract thinking, although we may not be aware of it."
"Bronowski notes that the electronic computer has often been used as a visual analogy to the human brain. Now, this machine does resemble the human brain in many ways. For one thing, the methods of receiving and reporting information are somewhat similar in both systems ... [however] the internal processing of information - is carried out by the brain in a manner quite different from that which is used by the computer."
-iconic (pictorial experience)
"we should remember that students do not learn merely by looking: they learn by becoming creatively involved."
-symbolic (highly abstract experience)
"When we think about the actual conveying of a message we must link it with the medium."
Martin Siegel (2003)
"...for an e-learning application to be more effective than its print counterpart it has to be computer imaginative – it has to offer features that are a clear advantage over print. Computer imagination is particularly important when the goal is to develop understanding that leads to effective action."
- Learner interaction and collaboration
- Facilitation
- Just-in-time resources
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