Now what I want to do now is I want to talk about the ways in which we can build
environments which are adaptive and which are allowed a degree of flexibility.
But which are not at the expense of the social.
And I'm going to give you some examples of that from Scholar.
And particularly,
the way in which we build curriculum units called learning modules in Scholar.
I'm going to talk about this point that computer-mediated learning and,
specifically, learning which is adaptive and
personalized need not be at the expense of community, of social connections.
And what I'm going to do is show you a hybrid kind of
curriculum artifact that we've been building.
And above on this space called Bookstore, and we call this thing a learning module.
So we've got a number of learning modules for K-12.
We've got some Higher Education learning modules, and
if you go on to the next screen, there's even more.
So, I'm going to take you into two examples of these.
The first one is an example for the school level and what it is.
It's a learning module that aligns with the American Common Core standards,
the US Common Core standards for information texts in which the students
are going to write an information text which is, in this case, a biography.
So when I go into this Scholar Web Work here,
and I've got it already open here in a new tab.
We've got it laid out in this kind of a format.
A two column format,
where on the left we have text which will be delivered to the student.
And on the right,
we've got kind of talking professional teacher talk to the teacher.
So this if you like is teacher to student talk, classroom talk.
This is teacher to teacher talk, professional education talk,
in which we might, for example,
highlight the connections with the curriculum standards we might talk about.
The underlying objectives we might talk about.
Some of the techniques that are used to deliver this content.
So here we've got a chunk of content here which can include media.
We're starting with the students to talk about this question of
writing biographies of people who may well have started off being ordinary people but
became extraordinary.
And over here, we have this button, Post Left-Side Content to a Community.
And what I then do is I then select a community amongst my communities.
And when I press Continue,
this content on the left gets pushed into the student's activity stream.
And in fact, when it's pushed into the student's activity stream,
it can still be edited by the person pushing it, the teacher.
But nevertheless, what I've done is I have kind of pre-scripted something that we're
going to talk about with the students.
And see here it ends with a comment, so it's kind of dialogical if you like.
It's something which doesn't just tell.
What historically textbooks did is they told, but this is something which asks and
which prompts discussion in the activity streaming community.
So, we're gonnna go on and talk about making a difference.
We're going to perhaps look at some videos.
We're going to see some examples, links there, to CNN Heroes, in various years.
And we're going to get the students to talk about that.
We might start talking about what are the qualities of an extraordinary person.
And what we might even do is have a Word document that we deliver,
which is an Inferring Chart where the students can think about
the qualities of extraordinary people.
There are some more examples of things that are linked to on the web.
And, here again, we can post this chunk of content over whenever we're ready to.
And this is the teacher again talking about which bits of the Common Core
standards this particular resource relates to.
We also have in here, in Scholar,
another artifact called a Survey, right?
So what we have here is we have a text about Harriet Tubman.
We don't need to put the text in because we can link to it on the web.
And what we can do is when we go preview a survey, here we might have some questions
about this text, which the instructional designer or the teacher has created.
And this, if you like, it's like a conventional item-based test, if you like.
So we can do that as well, but again,
it's a listening to active response on the part of the teacher.
So so far we have two types of objects that were interactive objects.
We have a chunk of content that we can post into the activity stream,
in the community.
And in fact, into every learner's activity stream at the same time.
And we have a survey, and when we distribute the survey,
it posts a link into the activity stream, and
the students take that survey there and that produces assessment data.
But now we're going to start a project.
This is the third kind of artifact in our learning module.
So this is the project description and
this then is the rubric over here on the right.
So this is for the teacher, and this is the rubric that all the students
are going to get, which has been pre-designed.
Of course, when it's delivered, it could be edited, so
it's not that we have to stick with exactly this rubric.
But this rubric aligns the Common Core standards for
information text with the particular issues of writing a biography.
And what happens here is when we start a project, what we do is a wizard
that comes up in the publisher area where we set a series of parameters.
For example, for the deadlines, when are things due,
how many reviewers are there are going to be?
Are they going to be anonymous or named?
And ten minutes later, we can set the project going.
Now, while the project's going, we might have the students doing researching and
inferring their famous person.
Here's some information about how to do that.
We might get them to investigate Internet sources and
study references, let's post this chunk of content in the community.
But maybe we might skip that, maybe we don't necessarily need to do that.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
