5th Global Conference
Thursday 8th May - Saturday 10th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
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Session 9: Virtual Educations
Chair: Karen Gomoluch
Using a Cognitive Flexibility Hypertext to Develop Reading Comprehension. A Case Study with Students of a Media Studies Degree
Maria Isabel Orega
Escola Superior de Educação,
Universidade do Algarve,
Faro,
Portugal
This paper presents an ongoing case study on the use of the platform
DidaktosOnLine (Moreira et al, 2005). The participants in the study are
a class of first year students attending an English language course of
the Media Studies degree, at the School of Education of the University
of the Algarve.
DidaktosOnLine was developed at the University of Aveiro by Moreira and his research
team and is based on Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro et al, 1987).
This is a constructivist theory of learning and instruction which defends that
information should be presented from multiple perspectives through the use of
cases that function as examples of knowledge in context. According to Spiro et
al (1987), multiple representations of knowledge and the development of cognitive
flexibility are facilitated by the use of hypertexts which facilitate navigating
through complex knowledge domains. As this theory emphasizes repeated presentations
of the same material in reorganized sequences and from different perspectives,
cognitive flexibility hypertexts provide non-linear links that help implement
multiple dimensions of knowledge representation.
The students worked with a hyperdocument called Images of Britain and the
British, to develop reading comprehension competences and their sociocultural
knowledge on British society. The aim of the study is to understand the effect
of some individual characteristics of the readers as well as the effect of features
of the digital learning environment on the comprehension of the texts included
in it. The individual characteristics of the learners relevant for the study
are, among others, learning styles, epistemic preferences, prior knowledge of
the themes of the texts and other documents, language proficiency, and reading
experience. The features of the digital learning environment studied are essentially
aspects of the design of the platform, which allow multiple representations of
the texts and themes and their possible contribution to facilitate reading comprehension.
Online Teaching with Learning Objects
Bill Tait
COLMSCT, The Open University, United Kingdom
Online teaching involves the delivery of content, mainly through the use of learning objects, and discussion, by means of web 2.0 or other technologies. It is widely accepted that the process requires expertise in three areas, namely, subject content, Internet technology and what may be described as e-pedagogy. Subject expertise is largely assumed but there are often deficits in terms of the other two aspects. This paper describes an attempt to formulate an approach that minimises these problems for the tutors of a large distance learning university.
In recent work on the use of online tutorials it became apparent that the technological skills of the teaching staff were less well developed than expected and certainly less mature than those of their students. Consequently a number of strategies have been explored as ways of overcoming this problem and enabling tutors to develop and deploy their own learning objects. The aim was to compare the merits of online blogs and an xml-based editable Flash template.
The pedagogical problem is equally pressing. There are many well developed theories of online pedagogy and a corresponding plethora of learning theories but they are not easily assimilated by any except the cognoscenti and certainly not by a busy tutor concentrating on domain oriented research. It is argued that these mainstream theories of associative, cognitive and distributed learning easily converge to a manageable single set of principles. These are allied to an object-oriented view of contextual effects to develop a compact e-pedagogy.
The combination of simple technology and essential pedagogy is shown to be sufficient to inform the design of theoretically sound and practically useful learning objects that can be applied to many different subject areas. They can be used as embedded online lessons or supplementary tutorials.