Placed Based learing for Digital Ed? Post from 6-19-08

In my quest to gain a better understanding of how to connect digital learning to transformative learning I am auditing a course called Interdisciplinary Science for Teachers. This course is based on the premise that Place-based education (learning) is the key to connecting students to science which thereby makes science more relevant and meaningful to their lives. This is an interesting concept because it basically seeks to situate the student between his life and life experiences and the content being learned.

Furthermore, according to Wikipedia “place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local–the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place -that is, in students’ own “place” or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.”

Can place-based education be used as the foundation for digital games and digital learning to help connect what the students learns in digital games to real life situations? Can it help the student who learns via digital games transform his daily actions? If so, can it be used to teach the student sustainability concepts which he then applies?

In our first day of class, Dr. Chinn and her co-teacher Jennifer Hoff lead us through a “sense of place,” where we wrote about several childhood experiences that we believed connected prompted our environmental awareness we possess today. After a brief writing exercise we shared our thoughts within our groups. It made for interesting conversations and lead to connections we found between each other and our childhood experiences. Later, we took a field trip to a local stream where we engaged in some hands-on science experiments to test water quality and to track local versus invasive fish. At the end of our day we debriefed and spoke of the relevance of our experiments in relation to our daily lives. It was an interesting day and will provide me with plenty of new questions on how to make digital learning transformative.

Day 3. Today we went to Mokulea Island, the last remaining Hawaiian Fishing Village in all of the state of Hawaii. There are four families who live on the island. They are direct descendents of original families of this fishing village. Our work today involved helping to plant native vegetation to prevent soil erosion, to pick up and dispose of trash, and to gain a better understanding of how to use sea birds as barometers of the health of the sea and the land. It was a perfectly sunny and breezy day. There were many good interactions and conversations going on between the teachers and the researchers. These types of connections are what lead to effective environmental awareness campaigns and action. We were able to make a connection with the people of this island when we learned about the decades of suffering they have endured as a result of urbanization and modernization. It is safe to say we worked today to benefit their lives as much as the lives of the ecosystems that we hope will thrive here again.

I have missed out on many of the other field trips. However, I have been enthralled with what I have participated in and observed about place-based learning in science education. I hope by the end of the course to gain a better understanding of how place-based education can fit into technology-based learning

But can they transfer it to real life? Post from 6/13/09

Just read some of Gee’s book, “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” (2003) and I’m becoming fascinated with this topic. I think I will soon be playing video games. In the meantime, I still want to discover how does the student (i.e. player) take what he’s learned from the video game and apply it to real life? Gee. Prensky, and Arnseth have lots of wonderful, positive news to share about the benefits of well-designed video games but there seems to be a lack of research on video games as tranformative learning tools. Where Gee says, “…video games are powerful learning devices for shaping identities” (2003, p. 200), he also wonders how the “…prospective identity can possible transform the player’s hopes, values and fears” (2003, p. 201).

If we look to how the military uses video gaming to train soldiers we may find proof of video gaming as a transformative learning tool. I will have to look into research on the military’s findings if there are any. Does anyone have insight on this topic?

Playing to learn - Post 6/9/08

Just read two good articles on gaming and its effects on learning. Both articles (Prensky, 2003; Arnseth, 2006) suggested that teachers don’t have to be entertainers

to gain students’ attention. Instead, they need to step-up their teaching strategies and make them more challenging, more multi-modal, and more diverse. Both articles also suggested that while students learn on a “deeper” level while gaming, they have not been able to transfer what they have learned to everyday practice!

It is within the last sentence that I find my concerns: Can kids take what they learn from gaming and apply it to their lives? Can digital gaming reach transformative learning? Can we teach students content that requires hands-on engagement (i.e. environmental sciences) and reaches their affective domain through digital games? What will the future classroom

look like if digital gaming is part of the teaching strategy? This is the beginning of my quest. I hope to discover whether digital games on sustainability can help the elementary-age student transform his everyday practices. This is simple I know, but it’s a beginning.

What is sustainability? Post from 6/7/08

Sustainability basically means the ability to meet today’s needs without compromising the resources available to future generations.

A well-known quote originating from Native American Indian culture provides insight into the importance of practicing sustainability:

Do we inherit the earth from our ancestors or borrow it from our grandchildren? (Native American)

[from Wikipedia] It has generally been accepted that achieving sustainable development will require balancing environmental, societal, and economic considerations in the pursuit of development and an improved quality of life. A number of ideals and principles underlying sustainability have been identified. These include intergenerational equity, gender equity, just and peaceable societies, social tolerance, environmental preservation and restoration, poverty alleviation and natural resource conservation

.

Research Question from 6/7/08

Here I will begin to draft my research question.

Ultimately I am concerned that learning about sustainability in a virtual learning environment will remove the student’s connection to earth, to the human side of environmental engagement. That it may cause the student to “disconnect” from the reality of engaging with the environment. That it will in fact distance his understanding of what it means to practice sustainability.

How do we keep the student grounded when he is learning through technology?

How do we keep the student connected to “place” and “people” when he is learning through technology?

Can virtual learning tools cause transformative learning? I hope to better understand this question by taking a look at the field of sustainable education, which is hands-on, place-based, requires the student to engage in tangible activities and aims to affect the way the student practices everyday living for the benefit of the environment.