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Outline of These
Materials
1. Future of ICT in
Education
2. Learning Goals in a PBL
Lesson
3. What is ICT-Assisted
PBL?
4. Planning a PBL
Lesson
5. Authoring a Hypermedia
Document
6. Timeline and
Milestones
7. Assessment
8. FAQ and
Conclusions
References
Syllabus for a 1-credit (quarter hours system) course
Google Search of Local
Domain
Send Email to
Website Author Dave Moursund
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Click here for a detailed Syllabus for a one (quarter hour system) credit course/workshop based on the materials in this Website.
Click here for a Microsoft Word version of a 1 1/2 hour PBL guest lecture presented 11/9/04.
This Website has been used to facilitate a
number of workshops, short courses, and units of
study on Information and Communication
Technology-Assisted Project-Based Learning. More
details on the ideas contained on this Website are
available in the book:
Moursund, D.G. (2003). Project-Based
Learning Using Information Technology. International
Society for Technology in Education: Eugene,
OR.
Eight Component Parts of the Workshop: See
Sidebar Menu.
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Workshop and
Course Goals
This workshop, like all of Moursund's workshops,
has a two-part mission:
- To improve the education of students and
their teachers.
- To improve the professional preparation,
satisfaction, and careers of educators.
All people are both learners and teachers. They
help themselves to learn, and they help others to
learn
- The primary workshop goal is to help each
individual participant make progress in learning
to make effective use of ICT-Assisted Project-Based Learning in their
teaching. Many of the same ideas also apply to
ICT-Assisted Problem-Based
Learning, but this topic will receive only
brief treatment in the workshop.
- Secondary goals include participants and the
facilitator having an enjoyable time, and
everybody learning some things that may be only
vaguely related to the primary goal.
- The workshop content is guided by a number
of key "ICT in Education
philosophical ideas" that Dave Moursund
feels are particularly important and that are
woven into the workshop content.
- The workshop content is also guided by two
important learning theories: Constructivism
and Situated Learning.
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Prerequisites for the
Workshop
The workshop that is presented here is
specifically designed for any mixture of preservice
and inservice K-12 teachers and faculty in higher
education. The assumption is that participants have
given some thought to a project that they would
like to develop for use in a class they teach.
Participants will have widely varying levels of ICT
knowledge and skills. All will know how to make use
of a word processor, email, and the Web.
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Some ICT in Education
Ideas that Dave Moursund Feels are Especially
Important
Over the past 30 years, a substantial "Science of Teaching and Learning" (SoTL) body of knowledge has been developed by researchers and practitioners in the field of Cognitive Science.
- Many of these ideas are applicable to the teaching and learning of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and all other disciplines by students and teachers at all levels.
- In addition, many are applicable to making increased effective use of ICT as an aid to teaching and learning.
Areas in which substantial SoTL progress has occurred include:
- Learning theory, such as adding a variety of Cognitive Learning theories to Skinner's Behavioral Learning Theory. Constructivism and Situated Learning are both particularly relevant to Project-Based Learning.
- Transfer of learning, such as moving from a "Near Transfer, Far Transfer" theory to the more "Low Road/High Road theory of transfer, and other.
- Brain science. We now have a variety of instruments that allow us to study what is going on inside the brain during certain types of teaching, learning, and problem solving activities. Our increased understanding of such brain activities, as well as the plasticity of the brain, is contributing to significant improvements in addressing some teaching/learning problems.
Within every discipline, one can think of people moving up a scale from being an absolute novice to being a world class expert. Our formal education systems are designed to help students move up the expertise scale in the various disciplines covered in the curriculum. Here is an example of such a scale for teacher knowledge and skills in ICT in education.
- Within each discipline there are a variety of mental and physical tools that are integral components of the discipline. Increasing expertise within the discipline involves gaining increased knowledge about the tools and skills in using the tools.
- We have steadily increasing knowledge about transfer of learning between disciplines. Such transfer of learning can help a person more rapidly move up the expertise scale when studying a discipline the person has not previously studied.
- There are a number of "basic skills" that cut across many different disciplines. If basic skills such as the three Rs are appropriately taught and learned, they add expertise to the learner in many different disciplines. The same holds true for ICT.
The concepts of higher-order skills and lower-order skills is closely related to the Expertise Scale. SoTL stresses the desirability of teaching for understanding, and it points out the failures of education based on rote memory (inert knowledge and skills that do not transfer to new settings and tend to disappear quite rapidly over time).
- Metacognition, reflective practice, and self assessment are tools that all students can learn and that contribute significantly to increasing higher-order skills.
- Problem solving is an important aspect of every discipline. Many aspects of problem solving transfer from one discipline to another. For example, the strategy of breaking a big problem into smaller, more manageable components is such a strategy. ICT enters into this because computers can quickly and accurately solve many of the types of "smaller problems" that are building blocks for solving more complex problems,
- In this document, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving includes:
- Do critical, wise, higher-order thinking.
- Pose and solve challenging problems.
- Propose and accomplish tasks.
- Pose and answer questions.
- Make wise decisions.
- Analyze complex issues and make informed decisions.
- Synthesize information in order to arrive at reasoned conclusions.
- Evaluate the logic, validity, and relevance of data.
- Use knowledge and understanding in order to generate and explore new topics, intellectual areas, problems, and challenges that you encounter.
- Learn to learn and to develop and understand your potentials as a learner.
As you can see, this "definition" is quite broad. We are dealing with a continuum, as pictures in the diagram below, and the points on continuum are not particularly well defined. All of the ideas in the bulleted list fall on the right side of the "scale.":
Most "real world" problems are interdisciplinary. This suggests the value of teaching problem solving in an interdisciplinary manner and providing students with interdisciplinary aids to problem solving. This is also linked with the need to teach for transfer when teaching discipline-specific topics, such as math. While learning math and ICT can be important goals in their own right, one of the reasons for an emphasis on math and ICT in the curriculum is so that students can learn to use these intellectual tools throughout all disciplines and problem areas that they encounter.
The roles of ICT in problem solving is now an important discipline in its own right. If an ICT system can solve or significantly help in solving a type of problem that is currently addressed in our schools, what should students learn about "traditional" methods for dealing with this type of problem, and what should they learn about use of ICT in dealing with this type of problem? The following diagram helps to picture this situation:
- This basic question suggests that our educational systems should place significant emphasis on people and ICT systems learning to work together in a manner that leads to performance above what either people alone, or ICT systems alone, can accomplish.
- If schools decide to seriously address the question, then they are faced by the rapid pace of change of ICT capabilities. Our educational systems were not designed to deal with such a rapid pace of change in areas that are specifically relevant to curriculum content, instruction processes, assessment, and a wide variety of other aspects of students' and teachers' lives and careers.
- And, thinking along the lines of this fundamental question leads to asking whether there are topics that should be dropped from the curriculum and/or topics that should be added to the curriculum as a consequence of ICT and other areas of human intellectual progress.
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