Week 7 - Media Choices - Choose Wisely!

1. Why is media selection important in eLearning?

Media selection is important in eLearning because the students are likely to have a wide variety needs; some they will share, while others will vary from individual to individual. Thoughtful media selection by the designer can help students in the course have greater equality in access and as such greater equality in potential success.

The following may impact the quality of a mobile or virtual eLearning course:

·           A learner’s situation and work activities may require special design efforts. For example, learners that are busy and engaged in activities they consider more important than learning should have media that support learning fitting between “higher priority” activities. These are likely to be short, self-contained sequences and media that allow learners to quit at any time and resume in the same place.

·           A learner’s environmental conditions may require special design efforts. For example, learners may have to work in noisy environments. In that case, any audio should be clear, recorded in the case of live meetings and a text transcript for all voice segments should be provided and delivered in a format that would allow for mobility to a (possibly) quieter location.

·           A learner’s technology may require special design efforts. For example, those with intermittent and/or slow network connections should have the same basic materials as those who have access to a higher bandwidth. As a result, it would be helpful to have media available for download (so that it can be accessed off network), shorter self-contained segments, and established procedures for uploading work when network availability presents itself.

     Finally, in considering each of these potential limitations, media selection allows for: the learners to access material with the technology that they have, to use their time more efficiently, to engage more clearly with other students (be the course meetings synchronous or asynchronous), and to engage more clearly with the teacher and the content.

    We all want those things for our students and I know that I, at least, don't want anyone saying the following of me(especially with similar finishing results for myself!)...

2. Define "new media"?

In canvassing the Internet for more clarification, I stumbled across an article (http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html) from 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, the man who popularized Darcy DiNucci’s phrase Web 2.0 with his Media Web 2.0 conference in late 2004.

O’Reilly working to clarify the difference between the new and the old media started by making a list where he defined something as old or new media. See his list below:

Through the production of this list, he was able to determine the qualities of new media which he put into this lovely bubble map:

So, in short, new media are media that allow users the ability to interact through and about the media that are being shared. It is the ability to use, reuse, link to and comment upon these shared works is what separates the new media from the old. New media means building applications that get better the more people use them and that don’t just seek to acquire users, but also seek to learn from these users and build from their contributions. The new media is as O’Reilly states it,  “all about harnessing collective intelligence.”

Follow up 2009 article: http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194

I also found this interesting link on Discovery Education designed for teachers and students to readily and easily start implementing Web 2.0 components in their classes: https://web2012.discoveryeducation.com/web20tools.cfm

3. Choose a "new media" and explain its strengths and weaknesses for supporting eLearning.

The “new media” which I would like to explore for eLearning is Facebook/Edmodo.

Facebook could be a powerful tool for eLearning because it excels at connecting people. Social learning (like we are trying to access for our eLearning courses) requires interaction with fellow learners, the teacher, and, if possible, experts and other professionals. As a high school teacher working to apply that which we learn to the classes I teach, Facebook is a natural media to consider. Most of my students have a Facebook account before they enter my class and are very familiar with its computer, mobile app and messaging interfaces. Their familiarity with the interface would make it easy to create groups and integrate structures for discussions, collaboration and feedback to the teacher as it minimizes that which the students need to acquire to begin work.

The strength of Facebook, however, is also its weakness. The fact that anyone can create a Facebook and pretend to be whomever they like makes it difficult to direct 13-18 year old high school students there for their interactions as it opens them, through school instructions, to the dangers of the Internet. Moreover, as it is largely unmoderated, students may interact with each other in whatever manner they like and inappropriate comments (of MANY sorts) may linger over long on a group page for all to see.

 Edmodo is a site, somewhat similar to Facebook, created specifically to connect teachers, students, administrators, parents and publishers. (To learn more about Edmodo check out the video or listed information here: https://www.edmodo.com/about?language=en)

While the general familiarity of the interface allows educators to draw on the aforementioned strength of Facebook, very few students walk into my classroom with an Edmodo account. They do not gravitate to the site in their free time like they do to Facebook and so the power of the social connectivity already inherent in Facebook has to be built in my classroom, a far more challenging prospect.

4. Explain the term "Mobile Learning" and discuss the importance of "Mobile Learning in the current eLearning environment and in future eLearning environments.

According to Horton (2012), mobile learning is learning that, “frees people to learn at the place and time they choose and to learn from a world of teachers.” (p.501) It is learning in which the learning comes from interactions with objects (e.g. buildings, tools, cameras), locations (e.g. museums, factories, stores), environments (both natural and manmade), experts(e.g. professionals, docents, customers), fellow learners (in person and online) and the Internet and which capitalizes on the teachable moment as it engages the learner with a desire for knowledge.

Mobile learning currently reduces the need for: physical campus, classrooms, faculty offices, desktop computers (as I type from mine…), wired networks, physical laboratories, and libraries of physical books. (p.504) Moreover, it reduces the difficulty of finding qualified instructors as mobility allows more people to serve in that capacity without disrupting their other professional and familial duties.

Mobile Learning of the future will take advantage of the fact that students can now/will be able to:

·           Communicate directly with anyone else via voice, text or video.

·           Capture and edit text, voice, sound, music and video

·           Post and receive messages from anyone

·           Lookup any information needed

·           Determine his or her exact location and learn how to navigate to any other location.

Well, almost any location…

The future of mobile learning is in the fact that it truly opens up learning to a wider group of people than ever before in history. It is not universal as there are still limitations of access, but it is more accessible and grows even more so on a daily basis. Moreover, as it allows for people to engage when they have the time, not at certain regular pre-determined times, more people can fit mobile learning into their busy schedules.

5. Explain the term "Virtual Classroom". Describe how a "Virtual Classroom" can be used in eLearning.

To paraphrase Horton, virtual classrooms use collaboration tools to re-create the structure and learning experiences of a physical classroom in such a way as to preserve the structures and quality interactions built by a good teacher without the need for everyone to be in the same location at the same time as the teacher leads a class of learners through an explicit set of learning objectives on a schedule.

A virtual classroom can be used in eLearning when you have learners who can attend online meetings.  According to Horton, their benefits include: the teacher being able to adapt to the learners immediately, the virtual classroom providing the community and weekly meeting time discipline some students need to thrive, the familiarity of traditional classroom learning and flexible and active learning.