Summary+of+Feb+9+class

The February 9 class was a little "magic" in that Agnes visited us to talk about the importance of Learner Analysis -- and it just so happened that the class chapter covered learner analysis as well. We were all a little dissatisfied with the learner analysis chapter because we all walked away from it wondering ... what are we supposed to do about learner analysis?

Agnes provided so much insight into the role that culture plays in the learner experience. I've been fighting the need to add a fifth interaction category (which is learner to environment) to the four types of learner interaction, but now I think that we do need the fifth category. A person's culture is definitely important, and culture is more than interface.

I suppose another little piece of magic to the Feb. 9 class was what preceded it ... Special Topics: Emerging Technologies. That class made me aware of how much the role of the teacher is changing to be a manager of instructional artifacts. Shari (also in this et702) class showed us how to create a YouTube channel and I felt a breakthrough in the way I think about instructional environments. I have this little folder on my computer desktop called "Learning objects." I store things in that folder that end up being used over and over, in lots of different contexts. I can see now how YouTube, and even Facebook will eventually be absorbed into the Learning Objects folder. And, even more futuristic, my Learning objects folder will now be somewhere like YouTube. Is this what they mean by "cloud" technology?  (**Yes! This is cloud technology!**Shari)​ When we create learning environments we may use some basic objects over and over.

This led me to thinking about technology as a tool for individualizing instruction. In the future will we be setting up learning environments that have several portals to the same information, allowing us to customize instruction at a basic level. Giving students a variety of options helps us attend to the unique needs of the learner.

Maybe we'll create options like:

> Will format of instruction help us figure out the learner analysis piece? We can't really test everyone for different learning styles since none of the reserch supports that. Can we instead create really rich learning environments. RRLE -- REALLY RICH LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS. Will RRLEs be accompanied by HCL? (huge cognitive load).
 * Do one of the following to learn about X**
 * 1) Read about X in this article.
 * 2) Hear about X in this interview.
 * 3) Watch X in this YouTube
 * 4) Identify X in this simluation
 * 5) Create X yourself

We could design around the senses ... visual (reading and images), audio, visual and audio - like YouTube, action/kinesthetic (simulations) ... haptic (of or relating to or proceeding from the sense of touch"