Kim+March+9+thoughts

We had another good doctoral dissertation presentation tonight from **__Ben Johnson __**__. __ Ben shared some .ppt slides he created to explain/defend his dissertation proposal about social agents. He spent time explaining to us the difference between mastery and performance goals which I only vaguely understood before. Mastery goals convey that the purpose of learning is to improve, and that it's ok to make mistakes. Performance goals foster competition and are used to motivate learners to do better than someone else or outperform others. Mastery goals focus on developing skills, while performance goals foster competition.

In addition to understanding these two concepts better, Ben offered advice about finding a good dissertation topic. He suggested we think about issues in educational psychology that are confounded and in need of further research and then overlay an educational technology lens or focus. He suggested we take a look at NMAP from the US dept. of Education for some ideas about areas in need or more research. This seems like a good idea, since I don't have a dissertation topic yet and will need one soon!


 * __Tekleab __** presented chapter 8. He gave us an outline of the chapter which is helpful when tying to remember the entire chapter covered. What intrigues me is that some say declarative knowledge is rote memorization and applicable to the knowledge and comprehension levels (the lower levels) of Bloom's taxonomy. But if you read Smith & Ragan (+ others) you begin to see how important declarative knowledge is. It provides foundational knowledge and is demonstrated by our ability to explain, describe, summarize or list. Obviously declarative knowledge involves close interaction between the learner and the content. And as designers we need to support the learning of declarative knowledge (when identified) by helping learners link (attend to) organize and elaborate the new information.

A good way to sum this up is //declarative knowledge // is knowing "that" (e.g., that Castle Rock is located south of Denver) as opposed to //procedural knowledge// is knowing "how" (e.g., how to make hot chocolate). Semantic knowledge (memory for knowledge of the world, facts, meaning of words, etc.) is also part of declarative knowledge as is episodic knowledge which is memory for episodes of the context of where, when who, with etc.)

I am excited to see what everyone posts in our wiki regarding the revised objectives scenarios for next week (Mar. 23). Thank you **__Shari__ ** for reorganizing the left nav menu so we can quickly find the case study scenarios as well as our reflections. Also thanks Shari for giving us a brief demo of Wiki Spaces and realizing that it can be a bit temperamental at times!
 * __Case Studies for March 23 __**