storyboarding

I spent a few hours yesterday evening working on storyboards for both the narrowing game and what I’m calling the “truncation feud.” I’ll add photos when I upload them.

It was good practice, inspired by much of my reading earlier in the day, particularly in Susan’s book.  Hopefully I can whip up something for next week!

reading

In the car on the way to Hertford, NC, in the post-Thanksgiving lunch stupor, and before bed, I was able to get in four hours of reading.   My biggest accomplishment was scanning and reading sections from Susan Smith’s Web-Based Instruction: A Guide for Libraries 2^nd addition.  I also read through several articles I printed out before leaving town.

I feel like this has been enough to become familiar with some of what is being said about online pedagogy.  I’ll talk with Susan next week to see if she’s accomplished this course goal. 

Susan’s book was useful.  It provided a really good context for the project, and I wished I had read it when I got it.  Some chapters are a bit techyier than my role in the project (chapter 4), but others are extremely useful such as chapter 5, on design and interface, chapter 6, on multimedia, and on chapter 7, on interactivity.  There’s a discussion of teamwork on page 51 that helped me think about my role in this project, and the role I’d like to have eventually in a professional position.  My coursework has prepared me to participate as an instructional designer and as a content specialist.  These are areas of interest for me, and combined with technology, are real professional interests.

The general take-away points for Boolean Slots that it’s good that we’re focusing on interactivity and a focus on concepts.  I think we should probably make the objectives clearer in the beginning and review the outcomes at the end. I should also look through the tutorial and remove as much text as possible and work to improve the scannability.  I’d also like to add the ability to email or IM the reference librarians during or after the tutorial. 

Several of the articles that I printed were not applicable after all.  It turns out that much of what is written about online pedagogy focuses on online classes, and not on learning objects. 

Articles I read:

The Pedagogy of On-Line Learning: A Report from the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute by Bernard Scott

To Boldly GLO-Towards the Next Generation of Learning Objects Panel—submission to eLearn 2004 (mostly a bibliography, but good information, too)

Constructivism and Emerging Online Learning Pedagogy: A Discussion for Formal to Acknowledge and Promote the Informal  by Shalni Gulati

Online Pedagogy–Online/On-ground: What’s the Same 

There were several themes that arose from these articles.  One was that online learning is non-linear and self-directed.  Our game is a little this way, but not really.  The user can choose the way they play the game, but there is a definite start, finish, and a limited number of paths between.  I also feel like our game doesn’t meet the nature of “non-linear,” but I think that might be okay.  Boolean Slots is a short module, designed to help students learn one specific concept, and in such a limited role, I don’t know that it needs to be presented in a fancier way.

Most of the articles focused on the importance of discussion, too.  Discussion was described as a way to meet the need for online collaboration and informal learning.  Since our learning objects are being designed to be asynchronous objects to be used as a very small part of a class, there isn’t really a good way to add conversation or discussion to the modules.  I think the best approach we perhaps could take is to add an opportunity for reflection.  Perhaps instead of a specific statement, it could be phrased as a leading question.  This is something to think about in the context of the Boolean Slots game we’ve worked on as well as the games we haven’t worked on yet. 

Reuse was mentioned again and again.  Boolean Slots was designed to be used in a number of contexts at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, but not outside of our university.  It has our branding all over it.  Should we remove this identifying information from the slides in order to make the games universally useful?  If we are interested in sharing the games with other universities, we probably need to look into quality assurance standards (and I need to know this anyway) so that we can meet the level of expectation.

Next Actions:

• Add slide: Why is Boolean searching useful?
• Add email or IM to Boolean Slots game.
• Change some specific statement slides to be phrased as a leading question.
• Look into quality assurance standards.