Dynamic Learning Communities: An Alternative to Designed Instructional Systems

I have heard of expertise being described as spending 10,000 hours or about 10 years doing the same type of work. So when designing a DLC, dynamic learning community, as long as there is a healthy respect among members, there should be more of a feeling that no question is stupid, or that other members may be able to answer questions and not just the experts if they are feeling overwhelmed. If experts feel that they are a valuable part of the team, they find that they are more open to figuring out that they are learning new things, en if they aren't necessarily what they thought they'd learn.

I take my school as this dynamic - the professional development I give the teachers, who are at all levels. I feel like the expert, everyone tends to treat me that way, and yet I recognize that the people I'm dealing with, some of them have 2 master's degrees under their belts, so they are by no means uneducated. They just lack knowledge of technology.

I also think that if ground rules are laid, like the mutual respect, DLCs can work. And the learning doesn't have to take place when all of the members are present at one time. Learning can take place in a variety of areas, with questions being asked and answered as problems arise. Answers can be shared with all those having the problem, or the solution documented if it arises again. I tend to show a piece of technology, and let them try it out within a month, and come to me with problems. If a general problem arises, or I need to address everyone with a solution, I can do it via email, or faculty meeting.

I have found that there was a distinct range along a spectrum among my faculty members when I started giving professional development over 10 years ago. Now everyone has more of a base understanding, so the conversations happen at a higher level of expertise. Where I had to teach where the on switch is, now we discuss the differences and uses of fonts by their names, sizes and types, which are conversations I used to have with other lab assistants in college. It amazes me and makes me proud.

I see the generalizations of setup, use and control of DLCs as delineated in the article can be for anything from a group of face-to-face people to setting up a good online website to teach users something.

I think that again, there is a place for both DLCs and designed instruction. Designed instruction for younger students, especially. Montessori schools try the DLC with young students, and they end up not learning necessary skills. Like writing. And we find that writing is not something that "just comes" to the students. They really have to work harder to develop those skills they are lacking to catch up to the rest of their classmates who have moved on. Also, Montessori students tend to come overly headstrong, unwilling to learn skills or do activities that the whole class participates in. I think DLCs are better for high school and college, although collaborative learning is fabulous around fifth grade and up. I find it doesn't work as well with younger students unless they are doing something concrete, like pointing out where to click to another student.

Media and Attention, Cognition, and School Achievement

Just reading the summary of the article brings to mind something I heard on a news story from the AP wires within the last 2 weeks: a person's IQ actually decreases the more they utilize technology to keep up with current events. In one way I believe this - stories taken to their smallest component and shot out over the internet or AP never give you a full picture, or follow up, so what you think you know, probably hasn't been corrected yet. I know I hear a lot of stories that don't have a point, or how the story turned out. In another way I believe this because there is absolute overload. I can get RSS feeds, news from all over the world, with Yahoo and AP being the 2 biggest sources for me, as well as most people, at least the ones I have talked to. I in some ways do not believe this, because knowledge is power, and the more you know, the more you can use and integrate. Yet there are times that I feel very overwhelmed trying to keep up with what is going on. This goes along with the studies that suggest a threshold of TV hours watched - up to a point it's beneficial, and then it becomes detrimental over that point.

I just love the way the article takes all the studies done about TV, but then can't draw any real conclusions because they all seem to contradict each other. So what the threshold is has to be different for each child, and based on several factors, just like every study. My great-grandmother used to say, "everything in moderation; too much of everything isn't good." She was talking food, of course, but those studies have been done, too.

So like with any stimuli for a child, it depends on the point they are in their social, developmental and cognitive development as to whether they get anything out of any type of media or not. In cognitive development we learned that students remember about 1/3 of what you teach; and that they do most of their transfer of knowledge at night during deep sleep, when the hippocampus processes the data into long term memory. So we, as teachers, "feed the hippo" on a daily basis.

This article just confirmed for me that I have to use every resource at my disposal to teach the students, because you don't know what may click with a child.

Tracing Teachers' Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher beliefs, Social Dynamics and Instutional Culture

Premise of article: Teachers change instructional practice over time - specifically toward a constructivist pedagogy. There are interrelated beliefs/causes, that are usually looked at separately by other studies. People are complex; meaning that there are complex reasons how and why teachers teach. Some of the interrelated beliefs include the perspective of the learners, the definition of good teaching, the role of technology in the learner's lives. One participant in the study went all the way, making the classroom completely out of collaborative student work and project-based learning.

Desktop computers have been available for classroom use longer, which is why there are more studies on them. In New York, I wonder why they picked 4th graders to get laptops? Or 7th graders in Maine? And so would each new year of fourth or seventh graders get laptops as well, or would this be a one-year deal to see how it went and then the funding runs out? Or the next legislative session votes in new people who stop the program? Now I see why people can get so passionate about starting a laptop program in the first place.

I think St. Joseph School in Downers Grove has the most comprehensive program I have seen, even down to students performing maintenance. I know more about the program than I do about the teacher's using them, however.

I agree that studies have focused more on how professional development facilitates the use of technology, whereas with these studies they're looking at it from the teacher's perspective, and factoring in the entire spectrum of what influences how that teacher teaches.

My personal perspective on teaching is skewed by a variety of factors:
- teaching K through 8
- teaching to students of higher socioeconomic background, and fairly consistent ethnic backgrounds
- teaching to Catholic school students
- teaching something I know well vs. teaching something new to me
- limitations of available funds and available software and students various medical or learning limits
- time of day/year I teach them
- how stressed I am or they are
- Principals or Administrators pushing and using me as a resource
- how much training or prep time I have had
- what seminar I have attended recently to gather new ideas and try them

In the article, it quoted the ACOT study and 5 stages of technology integration of teachers, but it didn't say what the stages were; very annoying.

There is a need for all students to have a computer or laptop in the classroom, or for the teacher to have consistent access to the lab or laptops to create constructivist pedagogy. It is rare but possible to create that in a one-computer classroom provided the supports are in place.

The word "facilitator" keeps popping up; in my head if not on paper. To have the teacher as facilitator, and not the center of attention seems to be the goal. I find that as ages get younger, the discussion of technology exponentially increases - which technology is better than which and what works best. I saw a Discovery channel program once that stated that 13-year-old Japanese girls were driving the innovations in the cell phone market, with very convincing arguments. I believe that, as that age group purchases or gets purchased for them the most amount of technology. Overall, the discussion about technology has increased everywhere you go; it is such an integral part of society. Yet as with all things, the more people involved in a decision, the less decisions are made, or the less gets done. I also disagree with the premise in the article that parents have to buy the laptops; most programs I know of are loaners with fees.

I identify more with Carol than Stephan or Julia, although I have used all three elements in my classroom; integrating technology projects in the older grades, and drill and practice for the younger grades. My language arts teachers in fifth grade do the word processing - highly guided practice/assignments to help students understand the writing process. I have more of Carol's beliefs of teaching with technology and her classroom sounds a lot like mine. There are some days I feel like Julia where the students have too much freedom, and are too loud, and we as a faculty are working on aligning our curriculum to Archdiocesan and state standards. My math teacher, unlike Stephan, uses a combination of Carol's and Stephan's approaches. She also has set times in the computer lab each week to bring her kids in and do projects as well as drill and practice. My Language Arts teachers for Jr. High also do more project-based assignments with the computer lab than just word processing.

If my administrators were not behind the use of technology, pushing the teachers to show them some way to use the technology of the year during their evals, my school wouldn't be where it is today. I can tell you who is open to new tech, who is an over-achiever when using tech in their classroom, and who is still tech-phobic. I give varying degrees of professional development and tech support to the teachers, speak to them on their individual levels, and I have found that the tech discussions are much more in-depth, much more technical, than I had ever hoped. My teachers know the basics of Word and Powerpoint, use SMARTBoards and MimioXis, have hookups to their TVs, and all use the technology available in some way in their classrooms. This year, with me being maxed-out on jobs, they have turned to each other for more help as well, and are making it just fine. They also listen closely when I tell them how to fix or how I fixed a problem, and they are able to duplicate that if it happens again. They offer suggestions for things for professional development to me. I think it's great. I enjoy my job and it is still challenging - especially this year! But if it wasn't, I wouldn't sign the contract each year.

Two things that initially came out when Apple and IBM hit the market: kids would isolate themselves in their homes, and computers would do away with paper. Both have been blown out of the water, and Stephan commented on the first part of that - students are incredibly more social. They also find ways around blocks by firewalls to stay social throughout the day.

I find that teachers who are very into directed instruction will not move toward a constructivist pedagogy. Like Julia in the study.

I think that if the administration of Woodvale had forced the teachers to use the laptops, that the administration will come in and look at one project being done by the students and teacher, that more integration would take place. These three levels of integration would still exist, but it would force the opportunity to find/figure out something that would work in their classrooms. And once they have a handle on the one project, they tend to do it yearly, maybe modify it a little, but it does change them in some small way. It puts the thought in the back of their minds that this is here to stay, and the administration thinks it's important enough that they need to see what you are doing with it. I do think this study was a "slice of life" that you can find in most schools.

Advanced Distributed Learning

"Learning Anytime, Anywhere: Advanced Distributed Leraning and the Changing Face of Education"

So is this the article, then? Lifelong Learning Anytime, Anywhere - the mantra of the TIE program at National-Louis. The article was unique in that it is talking about networking computers and the WWW and distribution of created materials for the computer without actually trying to use specific product names. Sort of talking about it at arm's length, or defining it from afar. Although they broke down and used World Wide Web.

I agree with the article that in the last few years, education has seen the value of individualized instruction through computers, especially for those with special needs. They used general terms, like "learning objects" to describe the variety of products created by computers, from images to complete courses. Having these objects available to all who can use them, or like the internet, available all the time, is beneficial in all forms of learning.

I think that we are already there, though, and getting in deeper: "ADL is building toward a future in which human knowledge, held in instructional objects, is identified and collected from the global information grid (currently the Web) and is then assembled on demand for real-time interactions tailored to each learner's knowledge, goals, interests, and needs. We anticipate that learning in the future may take place through goal-driven, tutorial, and problem-solving conversations involving handheld (or perhaps worn) devices wirelessly linked to one another and to the global information grid." We have that now; especially with iPhones and Blackberries.

I agree that education can be affordable and globally accessible with computers. I like how they described programs like Star-Online, that keep track of student progress through a course so they can see how far they've finished, and how much they have left to do. There are many, many sites that fit the bill for online educational discussions, from chatting to Second Life. It is affordable in that it is cheaper than a real tutor, FAQs can be created for recurring problems or when there is no viable real-life support. All the options open can be used by teachers or by students, whether the classroom is traditional or not.

Education over the past decades seems in some cases to be the slowest to modify itself and keep pace with the business world. Rather than be a leader, schools have been followers, waiting for clear-cut, well-defined outcomes with the use of technology before using it. It is clear that with ADL, a redefinition of administrative roles, as well as students and teachers, has to take place. I don't think this will happen anytime soon.

Business has always been the first to embrace technology because it cuts costs and improves productivity. Business always wants to be bigger, better, faster. The government and schools have been slow to follow.

Politics of Curriculum

Should be called Politics IN Curriculum.

I once read/heard somewhere that the reason schools were created was to indoctrinate children; so that the students would all think/reason alike, and understand/accept the current views of the government. This was the “hidden curriculum/hidden agenda” of schools.

With the industrial revolution, and the need for more skilled labor, I see the bottom-up structure of moving from the base to the superstructure.

I think that yes, the school system has evolved to ideology, However, I have a real problem with McLaren’s quote. “Dominant culture was described as those "social practices and representations that affirm the central values, interests, and concerns of the social class in control of the material and symbolic wealth of society" (McLaren, 1989, p. 172).” I think the government, of the individual state or the central government, has always had and wanted complete control of the content. Even now I heard Pres. Obama put out a statement that teachers are only allowed to teach curriculum from a specifically sanctioned list, and although we can “supplement” our curriculum with unsanctioned material, we still have to teach what’s on the list. True or not, there is enough truth in that statement to make us have to deal with it as teachers. However, I don’t see the government as a social class. At least, it’s not supposed to be.

An yet, I suppose that if you look at the government in terms of their salaries and power, they certainly are the “social class in control of the material and symbolic wealth of society.” I don’t know how symbolic that wealth is – it’s more concrete!

I highly agree that the students are resistant to anything you want to teach them, and that teachers are control freaks in some respects or we wouldn’t be teachers, so there is a bit of resistance there as well. However, there is less resistance by teachers because they either believe in what they are teaching or they need the job. So they will reluctantly teach the curriculum in the way proposed.

Elaboration of intervention strategies – certainly this article seems to follow fairly accurately the evolution of schools. RTI is the latest buzzword that everyone has bought into.

There are still days that I feel I am indoctrinating the children; teaching good citizenship, evangelizing for the Church so the students feel a sense of stewardship, having to teach internet safety to 3rd through 8th graders, having to teach keyboarding to Kindergarten and 1st graders so they don’t create their own version that they have to “unlearn” later – who says their own ways of keyboarding aren’t better?

I think politics has and always will be intertwined with education because we are teaching those easily swayed and influenced. Indoctrinating those with open minds and willing hearts. I know race, class, gender, social structure, family, society and government all play deeply influencing roles in education today. It is incredibly complex and interwoven and plays out daily in each classroom across the country.

Assistive Technology and Universal Design for Learning: Two Sides of the Same Coin

I agree with this article in all but one respect; the curriculum will still first have to be retrofitted before it can then be universally designed. You have to know what the technology is currently and see where it is going before you can use it to look ahead to creating the possibilities. Just like they used the example of building, you have to retrofit some while seeing how the new ways of building can be standardized in new construction. We had to see how XML worked and try retrofitting some of the curriculum before we could see what works and universally design curriculum that utilizes it and expands on it to include the possibilities of what it can become and be used for in the not-so-distant future.

I attended a seminar within the last year, and I have read ACM News that discusses how computers may at some point in the future be an implanted interface in our brains to be quick enough to respond to our commands. However, this has to be realized before we can use it to create/enhance curriculum. And at that point, we may be able to more accurately help learning disabled as well as disabled people with a more complete map of the brain.

Designing Educative Curriculum Materials to Promote Teacher Learning

Thoughts…

Materials that promote teacher learning while teaching the students are Educative Curriculum Materials. Technology comes to mind. However, I still see technology as having to be learned first and the teachers have to become comfortable with it before they use it in front of the students. Then there’s still always the possibility that it won’t work anyway, for one reason or another, and the teacher always has to have a backup plan.

The article went into how a teacher brings their perspectives to the material before they ever teach it. It is a complex interaction, especially when bringing the student into the equation, and given the fact that the teacher makes decisions in a constantly changing real-time dynamic effecting upwards of more than 20 students at a time.

The article touched upon nine design hueristics to help create and determine educative curriculum materials. If the features of the curriculum materials are based on these, the article suggests that teacher learning will take place. “Curriculum materials that incorporate all three components (i.e., instructional approaches, rationales for using the approaches and recommendations for their effective use) may promote teacher learning and help teachers overcome challenges that they face…” (7). I highly agree with this statement. I have found that the majority of teachers like to do things a certain way, yet if you give them a reason why doing something differently might work, they are much more receptive to trying it and seeing the outcome for themselves. Teachers also like concrete, practical materials/ideas they can try immediately, and like it better when others have tried it and discussed the pros and cons of using it in a classroom. This is the difficulty when government, state and local district authorities make decisions that sound good but are impossible or ineffective at best to carry out in a classroom environment. Take teaching the Holocaust to Kindergarten through eighth graders. How do you get a Kindergartener to understand this? Or how about whole language? Sounded good, but now we have a section of a generation that had to relearn how to read when it was discovered that they couldn’t decode new words without phonics. Effective, efficient and thoughtfully designed – words that should be taken into consideration, and appear to be the underlying idea behind the hueristics. Although created with science in mind, they do appear to be adaptable to a certain extent to other curricula.

Curriculum and Society: Rethinking the Link

I agree initially with the article. Just reading the abstract and knowing the history of schooling in the US, I see schooling now as playing catch-up, rather than one-up. It used to be that an education got you ahead in society; it allowed you to see wider viewpoints, and there was more of a disparity between the uneducated and educated. You were able to get a better paying job, had an advantage over other job applicants, and did better than your parents.

Now, you need an education just to maintain a level of adequacy in society. There's no guarantee that you will do better than your parents; and as a teacher, I feel like I am racing to teach them all the things they should know before I even think of preparing them to handle the possibilities of the future. I no longer start keyboarding in third grade; now I'm told to start it in Kindergarten because by second grade they are set in their ways. In eighth grade, I am now preparing them to pass technology competency tests offered by several of the high schools.

My curriculum is slowly being mandated by the government, NETS, the ISBE, and the Archdiocese of Chicago. I don't seem to have the time anymore to let them see an I Spy game all the way through to the end, even though it helps develop more visual-spatial-language relationships. I don't have the time to teach them the complete history of computers; it's been relegated to an after-school enrichment offering. I am now playing the juggling act of my fellow teachers - finding enough time to teach what they need to know, what is mandated, what they should know, and what they are interested in.

I agree that school is "a political- educational project constituted by a synthesis or an articulation of cultural elements derived from fights, impositions and negotiations amongst different social subjects." (481) Someone once put it simply that it was created to indoctrinate children to the general beliefs of society at the time. And I see that in the past. It was said that Abraham Lincoln wanted to educate all the newly freed slaves to make them more productive members of society. However, education was also seen as freedom, and it was easier to keep the less educated oppressed if they didn't know or understand what they were missing.

I agree that the dividing lines between subjects have been blurred. We are even supposed to teach students their inter-relatedness. However, I see students getting more easily confused by this. Take the holidays, for example. You used to say "the holidays" and it meant Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and possibly Halloween, although Halloween used to be a lot more minor than it has become. Now, thanks to cultural contact and the multiple interpellations it produced, Chanukah, Kwanza, Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Birth of the Bab (Baha'i holiday), and Dia de los Muertos are thrown in the mix, just to name a few. And that's only in November and December! You can find places on the net that show daily holidays, like World Aids Day (December 1) and Day Without Art (December 1). Many have several holidays applied to them, confusing things further.

We, as an American society, are trying very hard to be the ultimate melting pot, where no one group is seen as bigger, better or higher than another. We are trying to create a level playing field and allow all groups to fully keep their identity while becoming fully American. Yet this is clashing with education by defining any subject so broadly that it gets lost within itself and the sphere of curriculum as a whole. If it was more partial and less "imperialistic" (487), it can be redefined in a way acceptable to society as a whole.

On the whole, I found this article more confusing than the last! I am hoping I got the gist of it, and the above is my interpretation of what it meant. Please let me know how far I am off the mark. At the end of the article, it sounds as though reworking curriculum subjects can now ultimately change society, while society changes the subjects to fit a larger world view.

Curriculum Integration Reflection

Curriculum Integration
Author(s): J. A. Gibbons
Source: Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 321-332
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education/University of Toronto
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/

The integration the article is concerned with is "the transformation of knowledge." Transforming it into something more than its original form. The one thing this article talked about, aside from the difficulty of accurately defining curriculum integration and the difficulty of actually doing it, is that interpretation is needed. That word, right now, comes up a lot in education. A teacher's interpretation of the curriculum, how to integrate it, how to integrate real-world problems/scenarios into it, how to integrate technology into it, all without losing the original intent and goal of the lesson. And teaching the students to interpret - lessons, data, how to find what's missing and read between the lines to come up with viable conclusions/solutions.

Modifying the curriculum is big, too, in education, to allow for better integration. Right now, RTI, or Response to Intervention, is all about identifying the differences in learning styles of students and modifying the curriculum to meet the needs of those students. And I agree, that in order to integrate, modification is needed. Look at relationships and marriage, and to some level, simply meeting another person. Modifications in behavior, attitude, speech, etc., are made internally and externally to find common ground and interaction. It is how much modification to make that is debated.

It was hypothesized in the article that curriculum integration "hangs on the meaning of the phrase 'hanging on to complex connections between different domains.'" (Pring, 146) Someone, perhaps a district manager, or teacher, or committee, has to discover the complex connections between two subject areas, and identify what can be modified to integrate them successfully. And quite often, as in the "whole language" teaching approach, it seems very much that education is used more for experimentation than discovering real integration, and that there are no answers to the nature of the concepts and propositions questions posed in the article.

I found that the hypothesis that integration/modification can only take place between two things at once intriguing. Going back to relationships, If you have 3 or more people in a group, I suppose this is still true. Modification still only takes place one-on-one, even if that one-to-one switches between people of the group quickly. I guess that's why educators talk about integration of technology and curriculum, as a separate topic from integrating curriculum subjects with each other.

INTRODUCTION

My name is Dianne Rowe. I have been the Computer Instructor/Coordinator at St. Alexander School in Palos Heights for 14 years. Apple computers had just gained a foothold in the marketplace by appealing to schools when I was finally able to get my hands on one in high school. Since the typing teacher taught the computer class using IIe and IIgs models, I had to take typing. Resented it then, love it now. Moved to lab assistant at St. Xavier, and moved up to the Macintosh se and beyond. IBM and Windows machines mixed in here and there. I worked for two years at St. Germaine part-time and St. Alex the rest of the week, using Windows 3.11 and IIes again. The other day I was just going through a box of peripherals out of storage, taking a walk down memory lane. If it was out there, I've used it in some way. I moved from just teaching computers, to teaching the teachers, and now I also teach the PITSCO Synergistic Systems Applied Technology Lab - a new way to teach curriculum; self-guided, and geared to reach all types of learners. I have watched technology grow from a novelty to an integral part of daily life, and although I have reservations about a computer in my brain (isn't that already one?) I am excited to see how far it can go.
"Technology Integration is seamlessly incorporating multimedia and other innovative tools to enhance the teaching and learning of subject matter." The definition we created in our TIE 536 class. The definition that defines what I do on a daily basis, not just for my classes, but for all the classes at St. Alexander. I love playing with the latest technology, introducing it to the teachers, and seeing what they can come up with. I love the challenge and juggling act of my job, and as long as it keeps challenging me, I will keep accepting their offers to stay.