Bruce Wolcott – EDUC252 Learning Portfolio

In this week’s module, I’ll be pulling together an activity that will be used for a course that I’m teaching in Fall 2011 called Visual Storytelling (CMST115). In this case, the activity is designed to be a final team project in which students demonstrate a variety of visual communications skills/concepts that are covered throughout the quarter. It is a capstone project that demonstrates to me whether they understand and can put into practice the big ideas that I’ve taught during the class. I’ll call this assignment the Team Visual Storytelling Project. As I breakdown this assignment, I’ll make use of Robin’s guidelines for Module 3.

A Big Idea in Media Theory

Cartoonist and author Scott McCloud summarizes media communications as follows: “Media converts thoughts into forms that can traverse the physical world and be RE-converted by one or more senses BACK into thoughts.” McCloud’s statement distills my own commercial and academic interests. My specialty is media theory, which explores methods for shaping and conveying ideas using communications technologies. Voice, graphics, gesture, music, narrative, perspective, motion, lighting, color, text, style, and interactivity all play a role in orchestrating multisensory ideas.

The Web revolution is coming into full maturity. In this new arena, everyone is both a producer and receiver of information. My goal is not only to teach media production tools, but how to design ideas that are informative and entertaining. My intention for this final team project is to get students to discover production tools, create images, storyboard visual ideas, integrate text with pictures, synchronize sound, deliver relevant content – in summary, convert an existing concept into a form that can be published and transmitted using digital media. This project represents a delivery of the big idea as described by Scott McCloud – converting thoughts that can traverse the physical world and be RE-converted by one or more senses BACK into thoughts.

The learning outcome for this project can be stated as follows: Students will be able
to create a 2 to 8 minute online screencast that incorporates a selection of visual storytelling and information design principles that were discussed during the quarter.

   The Ill-Structured Problem

   The ill-structured problem as it relates to educational theory is defined by Namsoo Shin Hong as a problem which does not have a known solution. It means that rather than providing a detailed step-by-step method for answering a question (such as solving a quadratic equation), the instructor provides a set of overall principles and skills that must be used by students in their own way to solve a problem. It’s just the opposite of a spoon-feeding approach. Following this metaphor further, students in solving an ill-structured problem, must use their own initiative to make a spoon, find their own food, and demonstrate that they can feed themselves. Students, not the instructor, must do the heavy lifting. Here’s how I set up an ill-defined problem for the Team Visual Storytelling Project.

Your goal is to create a 2 to 8 minute online screencast that incorporates a selection of visual storytelling and information design principles that we’ve discussed during the quarter. The topic and content of this screencast is up to you. However, each project must a) convey one easily identified core concept or idea b) demonstrate a consistent style (look and feel), c) tell a visual story using text and images (audio is optional) d) create a message design with a pre-determined target audience in mind. You can use photographs, video, digital graphics, or hand rendered artwork. I will be looking closely at how well your screencast communicates your core concept or idea.

The problem is ill-structured because it doesn’t specify which topic to cover, which techniques/skills to choose, what style to use,  what core concept to employ, who the target audience is, or what their role will be within their project team.  These are choices students must make on their own within the broad boundary conditions of the assignment.

Skills and Concepts needed to Solve the Problem

Since this project takes place at the end of the quarter, the process of completing it is intended to weave together various strands of visual narrative skills and concepts that were covered in earlier weeks. Rather than demonstrate all of the principles/skills covered during the quarter, I’m asking students to choose seven of these from a larger list of possibilities. In a summary document, they must explain how and where they used each of these concepts that were chosen from this list.

Each project must make deliberate use of at least seven of the storytelling and information design approaches listed here (choose any 7 from these lists that you will explain in your summary):

Narrative Devices:
Central dramatic question, continuity device, status, character, exposition, conflict, raising stakes, foreshadowing, universal theme.

Visual Storytelling:
Closure, first person narrative, third person narrative, use of word balloons to convey contextual meaning, multiple camera perspectives, symbolic conventions, transitions (moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene).

Composition:
Leading lines, rule of thirds, symmetric balance, asymmetric balance, PARC (proximity, alignment, Repetition, Contrast).

Time:
Alternate worlds, eternal now, multiple perspectives, recursive time, time acceleration/deceleration, paused/frozen time.

Information Design:
More with lessing, present something new relative to something previously understood, efficient implementation of data ink, Location, Alphabet, Timeline, Category, Hierarchy (relative feature comparison).

Activities Used to Build Narrative Skills

    Throughout the quarter, students are placed in 2-3 person teams for in-class exercises, and one other assignment. Team collaboration skills are emphasized, since it is vital to be able to work well and problem-solve within teams. There are also a number of related projects and exercises (in and out of class) that familiarize students with fundamental concepts that are essential to completing the Visual Storytelling project. These include:

1. Storyboard project
2. 2-Page comic
3. Graphic Styles assignment
4. Website review and analysis
5. Visual Language analysis
6. Storytelling devices identification
7. Principles of Information Design review
8. Creating a short slide show with Impressr

After reviewing this week’s material, I decided to re-visit a final team project assignment for my CMST115 Visual Storytelling class. This is a course that I’ll be teaching again in Fall 2011, and it gave me the chance to upgrade its structure and content based on some of the teaching principles covered in Module 3. In reviewing the assignment I was able to both see its promise in delivering some of this week’s key concepts, and also gave me some ideas for fixing current gaps/weaknesses that I’ll have in place well before the class begins.

Some of the Module 3 principles that apply to this project include the following:

• Backward Design: I’m using the final project as a way to structure my course content – so that necessary steps are covered before a demonstration of skills/concepts is required.
• Big ideas: related to backward design is the use of big scale over-riding principles to guide weekly assignments and lectures.
• Ill-Structured Problems & Active Learning: An assignment that leaves room for interpretation and creative solutions invokes discomfort and some anxiety in students but in the long run, motivates them to become active participants rather than passive observers. It’s a passport to autonomy, self-reliance, and independent creative thinking.
• Contextualized basic skills learning: Ideally, students will take the narrative and design principles learned during their hands-on project and apply them to other similar situations in the future where they must prepare materials for various situations requiring visual communication of ideas.

Over the years, I’ve gotten educational theory exposure by way of Knowles, Piaget and Vygotsky (proximal learning) and I’ve been able to put some of their ideas to work in my own classes. But I would say that their influence has been indirect. Up until recently, Bellevue College hasn’t pursued a systematic program to teach teachers how to teach to the unique student population that we have, although that’s now changing with the introduction of the new Teaching and Learning Center. I came from a commercial and media production background, and I think the assumption was made (this isn’t unique to my experience) when I began teaching at BC in 1998, that since I knew my media craft, I would know how to teach it effectively. This introduction to the classroom felt something like my first jump off the high dive platform at the Michigan State University Intramural Pool when I was growing up. I got some good advice and mentoring from colleagues, and learned a lot from my students along the way. I guess you could say I learned how to teach informally, and from multiple sources, much like a hands-on, total immersion apprenticeship. Also, throughout this process I’ve been fortunate to have always taught Web augmented courses that allowed me to consistently integrate the Internet with my classroom teaching. I’ve always had the feeling that I was running as fast as I can to remain current – I’ve been teaching and learning with equal intensity, and it hasn’t ever let up.

For this Week 2 module posting I’m going to be describing (in condensed form) four current learning concepts and relating them to my own experiences. These include:
1) The Perry Scheme of Intellectual Development
2) Situated cognition
3) Routine versus adaptive expertise
4) Novice versus expert behavior

The Perry Scheme of Intellectual Development

• What do the levels in the Perry Scheme of Intellectual Development describe?  Connect them to your own experience as a learner.
  

  William Perry was a Harvard-based education psychologist who focused on the learning stages of students during their college years. Perry described these stages as follows:
  

Dualism – Schools and teachers are perceived by the student as gospel truth. Education reveals knowledge that pre-exists and is established. Question: “What is it that the instructor really wants?”

Multiplicity – All understanding is merely a matter of opinion. Opinions are like noses… everyone has one. Teachers are merely expressing their own views. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” Students at this level don’t assume responsibility for their ideas.

Relativism – Students are able to weigh arguments based on strong and weak support. There’s also an understanding that knowledge or conclusions about something is strongly influenced by underlying assumptions, world views, methods of research, or perspectives.

Commitment in Relativism – This is the highest level of learning, where students take responsibility for their own world view and knowledge. They demonstrate higher cognitive skills – assuming their own biases, making value judgments, synthesizing information from various sources, relating the parts to the whole, etc.

In a broad sense, I can see Perry’s phases at work in my own educational development over time. When I was growing up, I tended to accept everything my parents and teachers said was the truth, and accepted that they were looking after my best interests and giving me the “straight scoop”. After I left home, traveled the world, and had a variety of work experiences, I realized that there were many opposing ways of being – greedy versus altruistic, heart versus head, lazy versus industrious, ascetic versus sensuous, etc. It seemed as if all of these perspectives had their benefits as well as liabilities. Finally, I began to commit to my own values based on the relativism that I experienced out in the world, and made my own decisions regarding how I would conduct my life. Some of my values match those given to me by my parents and early teachers, while others do not.

Situated cognition is a phrase taken from John Seely Brown – who argued that all knowledge is strongly influenced by the context where it is learned. This context can be represented by language, culture, historical setting, personality, and many other factors. For example, language is acquired by many informal conversational interactions in a wide number of settings. The average 17 year old in the U.S. learns a vocabulary of about 5,000 words per year (or 13 a day for 16 years). The language itself contains the values, sentiments, and world view of its collective membership who share its structure and vocabulary. (Source: John Bransford).

Another term for this collective membership (in this case, people using the same language), is a community of practice.
A community of practice is made up of a group of people who share an area of common interest, and work together to enhance their continued learning of this shared interest. Examples of these are craft guilds, professional societies, fan clubs, musical groups, sports teams, and hobbyists.

A community of practice that I belong to in the Seattle area is social dancing, which I’ll be making more references to later. There are many different dances – tango, east coast swing, west coast swing, balboa, waltz, night-club 2-step, salsa, zydeco, foxtrot, polka, schottische, among many others. Each of these dances have steps associated with them, along with thousands of songs. There are instructors that teach these dances, but much of the instruction takes place informally on the dance floor, as techniques are spread by word of mouth. The techniques and styling for each dance form can never be exhausted, they’re infinite. The dances are also forms of exploration, where new patterns are discovered with names like Swango (swing and tango), Latin Waltz, and Traveling Blues. Thousands of people participate in social dancing in the Puget Sound area, and much of the information about classes, dances, and special events is communicated on the Web. You could consider this learning community as being situated cognition in the sense that everyone participates in contexts which are musical, interpersonal, and involve continuous teaching and learning of a variety of dance forms.

Routine / Adaptive behavior as they relate to Novices / Experts

The learning and education researcher John Bransford makes a distinction between routine and adaptive experts.

Routine experts learn specific methods for solving problems, and makes increasing use of them to become more efficient for a task at hand, perhaps learning a few additional tricks along the way. The example Bransford uses is typing, for which he says as a routine expert: “I just want a good keyboard and the ability to increase my efficiency over time.”

Adaptive experts “look forward to the opportunity to expand their thinking, and increase their existing solutions strategies”.
They are able to experience ambiguity longer than routine experts, and are aware of their own limitations and biases in their decision making processes. A recent television program on Alaska bush pilots provides a good example of adaptive experts, having to continually shift their flying strategies based on a wide variety of weather conditions, landing strips, cargo, and passenger requests. They have to continually draw from a wide variety of increasing skills to adapt to continually changing conditions. They are also aware of their own limitations and liabilities.

Novices relate to routine experts in the sense that they tend to pay attention to specific details and techniques before gaining an understanding of higher-order principles. They also tend to stay within established and learned paths rather than exploring new territory. Learning to drive a car is an example of this; a novice driver must pay attention to the mechanics of steering, shifting, braking, and accelerating before attending to navigating through traffic patterns. As another example, here’s a link to novices who are just learning to dance in a welcoming and safe environment. All are following specific steps and moves, since they’re just beginning their path to expertise.

Experts relate to adaptive experts in that they make use of fundamental learned skills to build more elaborate and sophisticated structures. They draw from higher-order principles which inform them what technique will be used for a specific task at hand. In the following video, two expert dance instructors, Jodi Fleischman and Ari Levitt demonstrate a Night-Club 2-Step. This is not choreographed, but is improvised in real-time to the music. It appears that this is pre-rehearsed, but they are both drawing from a wide variety of dance patterns to create this spontaneous performance.

Ideal Learning Environment

• Given intellectual development, communities of practice, situated cognition, routine/adaptive expertise, novice and expert behavior, posit an ideal learning environment.
  

I believe my experience with the Seattle area dance community provides a good example of an ideal learning environment, for the following reasons. 1) You can enter into the dance community with the intent of either learning existing techniques or dance patterns on a superficial but fun way, or decide to put your own stamp and styling over time. 2) You participate with a large group of people who have a wide variety of expertise, and are willing to share it, either formally (in dance classes) or informally ( on the dance floor). 3) You can learn a wide variety of dances from different cultures and musical traditions such as Lindy Hop, Scandanavian Dances, and Latin. 4) There are long established pathways to moving from novice to expert. 5) The dance community is a hybrid Web and live social entity. Websites, email lists, and blogs provide a method for the community to remain aware of events and stay in contact.

eLearning Environment

What kinds of learning does eLearning facilitate, what kinds does it limit?

Probably the greatest contribution of the Web to education are the huge number of resources it provides to teachers and students – both in the form of information sites, but also tools for building a personal knowledgebase. Regarding teaching theory, it allows students to take control of their own learning process and become their own librarian and producer. In the Perry Scheme it gives students a wide variety of material to weigh, measure, evaluate… and come to their own conclusions. I think it also provides a way for novices to potentially connect directly with the highest levels of expertise – in the form of individual tutors as well as supportive communities of practice. What the Web lacks so far is the limbic resonance and personal connections between students and instructors that occur in traditional classrooms.

Personal Learning Environment

Relate having a “personal learning environment” to one or more of the learning theories.

I think my own personal learning environment allows me to resonate most closely with what William Perry calls the Commitment in Relativism. With my own PLE, I now have the ability to organize information, publish (in multiple media forms) my own ideas directly to a Web audience, and get feedback from a wide range of teaching expertise through a variety of communities of practice (TED-ED, REZ-ED, Skype Educators). While I now feel I have a solid foundation in my own teaching skills, my PLE gives me the opportunity to continually upgrade my professional chops, in the context of a community of supportive colleagues. I can fully take responsibility for my own knowledge base, and remain committed to my own path of lifetime learning.

The new generation of Web2.0 technologies have now made possible the organization of sharable online knowledge, the development of updateable libraries of information that are customized to each individual Web user. Each participant on the World Wide Web can build their own individualized library of easily accessible information. This is information available in many different forms beyond printed text – streaming video, web-based games, photos, podcasts, screencasts, telephone communications, and live conferencing.

This historically new situation has resulted in what information architect Saul Wurman has described as an information management crisis, that requires finding methods for organizing it in a way that is accessible and meaningful.

Wurman says:

There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. It’s filled with flotsam and jetsam. It’s filled with the sticks and bones and shells of inanimate and animate life. None of it is easily related, none of it comes with any organizational methodology.

– Source: Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety 2

Wurman wrote this back in 2001, at a time when over 2 billion documents had already been published on the World Wide Web and 7.3 million pages were being added every day. This amount of published information has dramatically increased since then, and much of it in a state of perpetual change – much like sports scores, weather reports, stock tickers, and public opinion polls. It’s a Category 5 information storm, and presents a special challenge to educational institutions and instructors. As instructors, how do we navigate this storm?

Enter the Personal Learning Environment or PLE. The PLE requires that instructors (as lifetime learners) step up to the plate, get organized, and become a manager of their own learning. For both students and instructors, this means that learning takes place both inside and outside a classroom setting. Everyone needs to become a librarian for their own personalized knowledge base, using cloud-based Web 2.0 applications to assist them in this process. This should not be a solitary activity however, but a shared experience by way of online learning communities of practice.

My own Web2.0-based PLE uses the following applications:

1. Information organization and access tools:
   Symbaloo.com website access organizer, Delicious, Google Apps (Reader, Docs, Sites, Survey, Presentation), Microsoft SkyDrive (online Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel), secure password list, Evernote, Diigo, Flickr, Picasa, Photoshop Express, Facebook, Twitter, BC Library (online), Seattle Public Library (online)
   
2. Publication/Presentation tools: Vista/Blackboard, WordPress, Blogger, WetPaint (Wiki), SlideRocket (presentation storage and access), Prezi (presentation storage and access), YouTube (presentation storage and access), Vimeo, Screencast.com (Jing and Camtasia screencasts), Google Presentations, SlideShare, LinkedIn, as well as my own website (www.brucewolcott.com)
   
3. Learning communities: TED-ED, REZ-ED, Educator’s PLN, Skype Educators
   

For the EDUC 251 course I intend to use WordPress, Delicious, Diigo, Vista/Blackboard, SlideRocket, Prezi, and SkyDrive Office to organize and present information for my PLE.

Here are the bulletin board questions and my answers for the first Module of the EDUC251 class:

What position do I occupy or hope to occupy in education?  How many classes in the e-learning certificate sequence have I taken?  When I think about assessment, what do I think about?

This is my 13th year of teaching at Bellevue College. I’m currently splitting my classes between the Communication Studies and Digital Media Arts programs. Beginning last summer, I began teaching an online course for the University of Tasmania (Human Interface Technology Lab) called the Fundamentals of Interactive Entertainment. I have a long term interest in the connection between human cognition and media technologies. Before coming to BC I worked for many years as a visual effects designer. (My information website is at http://www.brucewolcott.com )

I want to continue my exploration of the use of digital media technologies to augment and expand my teaching methods. This is my second class in the certification program, after completing Jennifer Dalby’s 251 course last quarter.

Assessment to me is the process of determining the level of learning that has been successfully completed by a student. This is important 1) to provide feedback regarding my effectiveness as an instructor and 2) provide an objective evaluation of a student’s understanding of a given topic. Unfortunately, many times assessment has meant the ability of a student to parrot back knowledge given by an instructor forms of written projects or exams. I’m hoping to learn how to make assessment models that can be used to evaluate a student’s ability to solve problems, create original and useful projects, collaborate, and intelligently debate ideas. Students should be evaluated on their ability to “step up to the plate” and take responsibility for their own learning. This kind of evaluation is trickier than grading exams. Also, how is this done in online courses?

– Bruce Wolcott