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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: The Hottest Posts Everybody's Reading

Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: The Hottest Posts Everybody's Reading: Here’s the roundup of what's been popular on The Innovative Educator blog. Below you’ll see the top posts along with the number of page...

Digital reflections

My last post was about integrating technologies into education. This post examines some of the categories of technology and the places they might occupy when they are integrated into the learning process. It's important for teachers to consider that integrated technology can provide a doorway to deeper learning, characterised for example in critical analysis and personal reflection. A journal article by Kirk and Pitches (2013) is a useful starting point, because they identify three specific categories of technology that have a place in contemporary learning.
The first category, capture technologies, can be useful when students need to record things or events that they will later be able to reflect upon. This could be a conversation, an image or video, or some other digital artefact. Capture technologies include cameras, recording devices, and other simple to use tools that can record and store content. Most students carry capture technologies around with them in their pockets and bags, embedded in their mobile phones. What's more, they generally know how to use them to complete the task.

At a little higher up in the manipulation spectrum are archive technologies, which can be used to store, organise and document the digital artefacts that have been previously captured. This can be hosted photo and video sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, or social networking sites such as Facebook, but are equally likely to be curation and aggregation tools such as Scoop.it and Pinterest. The act of making and archiving such artefacts supports learning through doing, encourages students to develop skills such as problem solving, and enables the presentation of this content to peers and experts to elicit constructive feedback.

At the highest level of manipulation are reflection technologies - or digital reflection mechanisms, to use Kirk and Pitches' terminology. These are technologies that enable students to 'look and listen again' to their digital artefacts, a process that encourages them to reflect not only on the learning itself, but also on the process by which they came to that learning. In a cognitive sense, this is 'making sense of learning', affording students with deeper insight or explanation of what they have already learnt. The ultimate reflective tool in this context is blogging, because it performs all of the above and supports reflective forms of learning within its affordances. Blogging can take many forms from purely textual to multi-media, incorporating images, hyperlinks, audio and video. In Kirk and Pitches' terms the reflection mechanism can 'prompt the use of explanation, so that the selection of visual material, the ordering and presentation of it, and any verbal/textual commentary all prompt the process of making sense of what is being looked at.'

So much of education could be enriched and extended when technology is embedded in these ways into the process of learning.

Reference
Kirk, C. and Pitches, J. (2013) Digital reflection: Using digital technologies to enhance and embed creative processes. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 22 (2), 213-230.

Thinking, language and memory

I've had several conversations with my students in the past few weeks about how Vygotskiian theory informs our understanding of learning. But social constructivist theory, particularly Vygotsky's socio-cultural focus, extends greatly beyond the concept of ZPD - the zone of proximal development - that most people are familar with. While ZPD is an important explanation of how we learn, we limit our understanding if we focus exclusively on this aspect of the theory. Vygotsky also believed that language development was important for higher order thinking.
Recently, while exploring learning and memory with my students, I gave one of my groups the task to think about their earliest memories. The students came up with recollections of their memories in early childhood, usually from when they were two or three years old. This would have been around the time when they were developing language, extending their lexicons. Many of the memories my students reported were not particularly happy - feelings of nausea, getting lost, being scared. Others told of their interaction with various objects and how it made them feel. In short, many of the first memories they reported had emotions attached.

My own earliest recollection was a conversation I had with my grandmother about naming my small army of teddy bears when I was about 3 years old. I had given them all the same name, and remember being quite upset when she told me they each had to have different names. I believe I recalled it because I was able to articulate it and I speculate that perhaps children do not recall events before a certain age because they have insufficient language to describe them. When children interact with tools and objects, how much can they remember of these events, if they have not developed their language sufficiently to describe and therefore consolidate these memories? It seems to me that to express our emotions or relate what has happened to us, we need language. It also seems clear that recalling memories involves thinking. But how much do our memories depend on the development of language?

Vygotsky held some strong opinions about this question and proposed strong connections between language and intelligence. He bemoaned the problems that have arisen when speech and thought have been studied as though they had no influence on each other. The two, he believed, have a 'dialectical unity' and are the 'very essence of complex human behaviour.' In his seminal book Mind and Society, he argues that the development of speech has great importance to thinking when there is interaction with objects and tools. When children discover the relationship between signs and their meaning, something significant happens - higher order processes occur. Whether memory begins to crystallise as language develops is open to debate.

It led me to wondering if this could be applied in education? Teachers need to consider reinforcing memory and recall by encouraging students to develop richer language around their learning. They might use a mix of symbolic multimedia content that incorporates text, images and speech to create and represent ideas and concepts, to promote reflection. This is one reason why I believe blogging is such an important tool to support thinking and learning. Blogging and other creative forms of writing have a rich language capability that can support better memory and recall, particularly if the technology is used as a mind tool to extend language. I welcome any comments on these ideas.

Reference
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp 23-24.