The Journey Tour
Please note, this section will be converted into a video tour as I get closer to completion and am able to complete the proper screen captures. However, as the synthesis for my portfolio will be contained within the tour and no annotations will be made within the rest of the portfolio I thought it best to give the work-in-progress for the first peer review.
One Big World started out as a documentary heavily influenced by the epistemology of Dr. James Burke and his knowledge web. While the footage was shot between 2003 and 2004, the editing, graphics, and final product were not completed until my final MET course. I had initially conceived of One Big World as a documentary taking students on a narrative journey through a bit of BC history. However, I soon started asking myself the questions I had hoped students would ask and the documentary project turned into a four part series exploring connections between culture, history, geography, and the things that unite us.
It was through my experiences with the MET program that I realized simply watching a documentary was too passive an experience for students to truly learn; that the model was transmission based and that I needed something more.
In this tour I will show how I have synthesized my experiences from the MET program to create a constructivist based course integrating theory, ideas, and skills from all of my MET classes. I have consciously chosen to not incorporate previously created artifacts as I wanted to develop a final portfolio that would ultimately be used by myself and other educators.
Introduction to the Program
The program consists of three main sections: the documentary, lessons designed to explore the documentary content more in depth, and a culminating project where students build on the course content and redevelop the curriculum.
The first documentary starts at an historical cemetery in Victoria and discusses a number of notable figures buried there. As the video progresses, we see how the figures interrelate and travel around the city discussing their accomplishments and how they contributed to the development of local, provincial, and national history. There is a significant amount of information delivered in a short time.
Students then enter a Moodle course where they explore various lessons that replay clips from the documentary and offer activities that allow students to reengage with the text in a slightly different way. Many of the activities involve working with artifacts featured in the video and promote a deeper investigation of the issues. The lessons are designed for both distance and classroom use affording students the opportunity to share in discussion forums within Moodle or share with other groups in the classroom.
Ultimately, students are brought to a final version of the documentary that has been chopped up into segments and incorporated into numerous wiki pages. The pages are linked together in a linear fashion mirroring the video. Students are then shown how to manipulate the hypertext narrative, and how they can start to build their own journeys (with a trailer to the Journey part 2 which takes place in China as an example). For a final project, students must develop a video or research project that “branches” off of the main journey and add their own wiki page.
Theoretical Tenets of the Journey Program
The nature of the Journey program is rooted in Activity Theory where students are interacting with their environment, with authentic artifacts, and then producing their own tools and artifacts. Social Studies is all to often externalized for students who look at far off people in far off places at far off times and see no relevance to their own lives.
However, in order to truly engage with the history, students must form some connection to it. Therefore, we must start with local history and work outwards showing students the connections formed. As Dr. Burke notes in his K-Web “without an ability to see these connections, history and science won't be learnable in a truly meaningful way and innovation will be stifled.” (n.d.)
Pedagogical Foundations
The entire program is geared toward Victoria grade 5 through grade 10 students with part 1 targeting curriculum issues in both grades 5 & 10. When comparing the complexity of issues and language presented in the program against the standard grade 5 textbook one may presume the material a little advanced for the average student however, early experience in the MET program with ETEC 512 showed me something which has dramatically changed my teaching practice. In my personal learning theory I note that “From Bruner, the idea arises that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.’ (as cited in Driscoll, 2005, p. 231) provided we work towards helping someone learn in a way that is meaningful to them, then they will learn.” (Laird, 2008). Unlike major curriculum publishers, the content of this course is targeted toward a very specific population. I am not trying to reach students in Canada, nor even BC; the crux of the program is that it starts locally and expands history through things that are meaningful to students. Victoria students will see the places they they have visited in their own town, I walk down the streets where they go shopping, teachers can drive the students to Ross Bay Cemetery and they can stand where I stood talking about the history that took place there. Social Studies is all of a sudden accessible, tangible, and meaningful. Students who can memorize hundreds of Pokemon characters and the complex interrelationships between their attacks and defences should have no issue connecting together a few historical figures - provided it is meaningful to them.
In ETEC 531, we examined Connectivism which stated that “learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources” (Siemens, 2004). This notion dovetailed nicely into the Constructivist Strategies introduced in ETEC 530 to take the Journey documentary well beyond its infancy as just a video.
The line “but that’s another journey for another day” is a recurrent theme throughout the documentary and was intended with Connectivism in mind. I wanted students to start asking “why” and make connections to other events in history that THEY were interested in. It was the synchronicity between ETEC 531, 512, 530, and 565 that lead to the documentary being turned into an interactive learning experience. Leveraging the technology of a wiki, I decided to create an almost “Choose Your Own Adventure” type journey where students not only participated in and controlled the narrative of the curriculum but also added to it - taking the curriculum where they want it to go (some reference to work of Seymour Papert here)
Choice of Moodle
As investigated in 565, Moodle is the chosen platform for the program as non-proprietary open source solutions have been shown to have a lower total cost of ownership than proprietary solutions (Becta, 2005). This is especially important for the elementary and highschool target populations who do do not have the ability to absorb costly learning systems. Initially, the course will be hosted off site on my server - the cost savings from the host are passed on to the schools and as more courses, materials, and subjects are added to the One Big World program. However, schools may wish to enter into a self-hosted partnership if they want to develop beyond the scope offered by the program or are concerned with privacy and security of student information.
Building on the ideology that “technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible” (Lehman, 2010) the initial plans for the course component were to use Moodle 2.0. The 2.0 version of the software will include some critical features that will allow students to easily upload and embed media files facilitating intuitive work with the wiki. Unfortunately the new Moodle is in pre-release alpha at the time of project completion. While I was able to get a working Moodle 2.0 course installation and the ability to upload and embed student media files, the media filter within Moodle would not render the videos properly and I submitted a bug report for the Moodle team to address.
In the interim, the most current stable version of Moodle was used in conjunction with Youtube and a 3rd party wiki module developed by the UK Open University (OUwiki) in order to create the most natural and intuitive system for working with the course. This specific combination was chosen because OUwiki solves an issue with rendering embedded media that exists with the current default Moodle wiki, OUwiki is compatible with the latest stable Moodle (not with 2.0), and Youtube videos can be parsed through Moodle’s multimedia filter meaning that end users can simply highlight a piece of text and click the “link” icon in order to add a video to the wiki. I do not believe that end users should be worrying about HTML and embed codes - these are not invisible technology requirements. The process should ideally be no more technologically complicated than sending an email.
When a stable 2.0 is released, the Journey course will be ported over to allow for maximum accessibility. While the Victoria school district (the intended audience) does not currently block Youtube, some districts do and may also find the course of interest. In the end, the course technology should be self-sufficient.
The Venture
Buying cameras, computers, travelling around the globe, and spending countless hours editing can be a costly process if funded completely by an individual. I enrolled in ETEC 522: Ventures in eLearning to examine the business side of eLearning and explore the possibilities of monetizing the work. The Journey program will eventually be based around four related documentaries which will show the amazing connections in global history which all start locally for students.
In part 1 we see how Chinese immigrants came to BC in search of gold and learn a great deal about the founding of the province and the pull factors that brought people here. Part 2 finds us in China looking at the social conditions that pushed people out of the country by going back to ancient China and exploring the thousands of years old dynastic cycle which fell apart when the British invaded showing the Middle Kingdom they were no longer the centre of the world and plunging China into chaos. Part 3 will explore Europe - specifically the technological innovations which led to the rise of colonialism and the search for spices which drove countries to find new routes to the east and particularly the British who found their position in India useful but also looked westward. Finally, in part 4 we see the race between the British and French to exploit the resources of North America after proving to not be the fastest way to the East. We look at the founding of the thirteen colonies, the creation of the United States, and the formation of Canada. Canada was ultimately brought together through the construction of a continental railroad that was in large built by Chinese labourers who were looking for work after the gold rush we experienced in part 1.
The cycle complete, we have brought students through a significant portion of their social studies curriculum from grades 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 (with parts 1,2,3,4 respectively, and back to part 1 in grade 10).
So, with one documentary completed and a “pitch” for three more what does one do to make the venture sustainable?
With all of the options out there, I was inspired by David Heinemeier Hansson’s lecture in ETEC 522 looking at software as a service rather than playing the venture capital buyout lottery game. Hansson (2008) proposal a simple three stage process for developing a successful ebusiness:
- Great application
- Price
- Profit!!!
Rather than selling the Journey documentary series, I plan to opt for a software for service model of hosting classrooms who wish to use the documentary/lessons/wiki services and charge a nominal yearly subscription fee equal to the price of one textbook meaning three subscribers will cover the expenses of providing the initial service. With 28 elementary school and 7 secondary schools all offering multiple classrooms as an initial pool of buyers (with 10 middle schools to follow with part 2) I believe the Journey has a future as a successful eLearning venture.
Becta (2005). Open source software in schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs. Retrieved from http://publications.becta.org.uk/download.cfm?resID=25907
Driscoll. M.P. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (pp. 227-244; Ch. 7 –Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development). Toronto, ON: Pearson.
Hansson, H. (2008). A Secret to Making Money Online. Retrieved from http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08
Burke, J. (n.d.) http://www.k-web.org/public_html/vision.htm
Laird, J. (2008). Personal Learning Theory. Unpublished manuscript.
Lehman, C. Address to TEDxNYED http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ
Nardi, B. A. (1995) Studying Context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distrubuted cognition. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.) Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 35-52). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Assessment Rubric
Technical mastery
not MET ----------------- MET
Portfolio demonstrates a technical mastery of educational design tools. Web design, coding, media creation are all at a level expected of a professional.
Pedagogical mastery
not MET ----------------- MET
Clear mastery of current pedagogical concepts is demonstrated in the construction of lessons. Activities are varied and engaging to the target audience. Curriculum is relevant and rigorous.
Theoretical mastery
not MET ----------------- MET
Evidence that theory from across many courses in the MET program drove the construction of the portfolio. Concepts and ideas from different courses are discussed in the walk-through of the portfolio design.
Teleological mastery
not MET ----------------- MET
The holistic design of the portfolio shows purpose in every feature. Reasons are stated or obvious as to why elements were included or excluded and how the "big picture" was constructed. Clear evidence that there is planning of the parts to make a greater whole.
Visual Design
not MET ----------------- MET
Portfolio is aesthetically appealing. Colour schemes and format are unified to promote cohesion. Portfolio appears polished and professional.
Practicality
not MET ----------------- MET
Portfolio is ultimately useful and contributes to the greater body of knowledge and research in the field of Educational Technology. Portfolio is useful to other teachers and students.
