Rich was later able to have a colleague fill in for Scientist Sam and shoot some video giving pre, post, and during the module instructions.

If you’d like you see our presentation, you can view it here:

FinalPresentation

For the last few hours we have been emailing and google chatting back and forth, adding our final touches to this blog, and discussing tomorrows presentation.

Thankfully, we are all committed to doing our best work!  This has made our project one to enjoy.  Often you hear about groups and teams going through various stages of fighting and working and such; but, I don’t think we’ve experienced any of that.  Certainly, we have all had various opinions but we’ve respected each others ideas and all put in our “two cents” to create a greater whole. The strengths of our team have carried us to this point and I think we are all considering going forward with this project. . . yes, I did say considering !

So. . . until tomorrow. . . this is Brenda signing off!

Brick and mortar architecture in the United States which has traditionally followed a Design-Bid-Build process is giving way to a Design-Build process where construction begins while the building is being designed. This is approach we used to maximize input and development and exploit multiple opportunities to evaluate, revise and improve the project

In a sense we turned Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction on it’s head starting with the goal of Enhancing Retention Transfer (his #9), and only then brainstorming on way and prototyping to gain attention, guide the learner, elicit involvement and performance, provide feedback and make assessments.

We implemented a form of Reiguluth’s Elaboration Theory moving from simple to more complex (in terms of multiple online observations) but also starting out with the big picture (”Welcome to my laboratory, here’s what we do here”) and zooming in on important instances (”Can you help me with observations? Can you help me give another student some feeback?”) We also literally used the concept of a magnifying glass to help the student observer isolate and more closely examine aspects of photographic objects.

We also incorporated a portion of Merrill’s Component Display Theory taking students from facts (the starfish is rigid) to concept (rigidity is one quality that can be observed) to procedures (observation, recording and comparison of observations in a systematic way) to principle (recorded observations and comparisons are among the tools of a scientist).

There were some students in this small group who needed more guidance and encouragement to read the directions and move forward.

Everything flowed so much better.  Students took time to more fully read the content on the slides and to read the feedback from Scientist Sam.  They continued to take notes and to improve in their observational skills.

As the first group was working, Brenda also went through the site and noticed any revisions.  As she found them she copied the URL and wrote down the changes associated with each page.  She emailed them to Aaron and the next group of students had the revisions in place for their field test.

Then, during class we went over some of the feedback and suggestions from my students.  We also created a student names Addie to help us assess our learners.  It is so rewarding and exciting when ideas come together and meet our goals.

For example, during class we were trying to come up with how to get feedback and assess our subjects without creating a formal “test”.  We came up with the idea of writing Addie’s observation notes and patterning it after the other screens throughout the module.  Then after asking the subjects for help, we present them with Addie’s observation notes, actual observations she chose, and finally a way to “text” Scientist Sam the observation that the user thinks the Scientist would pick.

After texting Scientist Sam, the Scientist texts back with some feedback.  We love it!