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Facilitating Technology Change

As we approach the end of our Current Trends and Issues in Instructional Technology course, the final project has me thinking. So many of these trends require supporting an organization or, in the very least, a group of people in adopting a change that involves technology. Whether it involves digital storytelling vs a traditional paper report, video learning games, virtual worlds or social networking to name a few, it requires educators (and learners) to change their teaching (and learning) process.

I began to search for a resource which simplifies the change process and guidelines to help a leader facilitate this technology change. I found this article and thought it had some good ideas (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6333_11-1057896.html). This article touches on many topics we discussed in our Leadership Reports. Hopefully repetition is as beneficial for you as it is for me. There may be some new information. I’ll summarize the main points below:

1. Agree on a desired state
   • The organization needs to decide on what the desired state will look like. This article focuses on corporate consultants instituting change but I can see this in many situations. Both the change agent and the recipients of the change must understand what the recommended changes will look like and require in terms of resources. For example, if a teacher is going to change a project from the traditional pen, paper and oral presentation format to a digital storytelling format, what will this require and what resources will be needed? Do all parties have a clear picture of these needs?
2. Present supporting research
   • “To justify such changes, the consultant should be able to demonstrate the favorable outcome of the changes and how they relate to the organization’s desired state by presenting white papers, case studies, anecdotal evidence, or other types of research.”
   • If we are going to ask someone to change a longstanding process (or try an unproven one for that matter), they must understand the reasons and the benefits for doing so.
3. Focus on business benefit of change
   • In a corporate setting, this usually means aligning the suggested change with budgetary or business goals.
   • In an educational setting, especially a k-12 setting, I am not sure what goals would be most beneficial in aligning technology changes with? My guess would be that you must first align the change with student learning. You would need to show learning is certainly not hurt and hopefully enhanced by the change.
   • I welcome any comments from those with more experience in this area.
4. Present a detailed change plan
   • “What you want to show the client, according to Snedaker, is that a map exists of how to reach the desired state. “A bridge from point A to point B,” she said. In many cases, because point B can be so far off in the distance, Snedaker recommends a change plan that has several phases so as not to overwhelm a client and its business.”
5. Anticipate pockes of resistance
   • “Once the desired state, the research, the business benefit, and the change plan are in place, the final step is to anticipate and discuss resistance.LaMarsh has her clients sketch what she calls a key roles map, which looks similar to an organizational chart but identifies what the new roles for each group would be, and outlines potential reasons for the resistance in each group.”

More from Mayer – The Coherence Principle

~Some simplified notes from Richard E. Mayer’s Multimedia Learning (2001)~

Coherence Principle 1: Student learning is hurt when interesting but irrelevant words and pictures are added to a multimedia presentation.

• Coherence: structural relations among elements in a message, such as the cause-and-effect chain in our explanations.
• Coherence effect: occurs when students better understand an explanation from a multimedia lesson containing less material that from a multimedia lesson containing more material.
• Multimedia: is any presentation in both words and media. (p 115)
• Topical Relevance: information that is related to the topic.(p 117)
• Conceptual Relevance: information that is related to an explanation of the topic.
• Seductive Details: interesting bu irrelevant material that is added to a passage to spice it up. Includes seductive text and seductive illustrations. Although seductive details is justified by the arousal theory (students learn better when they are emotionally aroused), Mayer feels that arousal theory is outmoded and may actually interfere with -knowledge construction by doing the following:
  • may direct the learner’s attention away from the relevant material
  • may disrupt the learner’s ability to build a cause-and-effect chain among the main steps
  • may assume the theme of the passage comes from the seductive details and try to integrate ALL incoming information into a general framework
  • All this leads to the conclusion: The cognitive theory of multimedia learning states that seductive details will result in poorer performance on tests of retention and transfer (p 117-119)
• Coherence effect for retention states that adding interesting but conceptually irrelevant material hurts student learning and should be eliminated to improve learning. It occurs in both paper based and computer-based environments. (p 120)
• Coherence effect for transfer states that adding interesting but conceptually irrelevant material results in poorer problem-solving transfer performance. (p 122)

Coherence Principle 2: Student learning is hurt when interesting but irrelevant sounds and music are added to a multimedia presentation

• Again, the arousal theory provides the motivation to implement interesting but irrelevant sounds into a multimedia presentation. (p 124)
• However, the cognitive theory for multimedia learning states that irrelevant sounds can compete with relevant sounds (such as narration) in the auditory channel leaving less capacity for paying attention to the narration. (p 125)
• Therefore, the cognitive theory of multimedia learning predicts a coherence effect in which adding interesting but irrelevant material, in the form of music and sounds, hurts student learning. (p 125)
• Coherence effect for retention states that adding interesting but irrelevant background sounds and music hurts student learning and should be eliminated to improve learning. (p 126)
• Coherence effect for transfer states that adding interesting but irrelevant irrelevant background sounds and music results in poorer problem-solving transfer performance. (p 127)

Coherence Principle 3: Student learning is improved when unneeded words are removed from a multimedia presentation

• The motivation for adding words and information is the information-delivery hypothesis: the idea that students learn more when they receive information via more routes (ex. in a text passage and illustration captions). (p 129)
• The cognitive theory of multimedia states that students given a multimedia summary will perform as well or better on tests of retention and transfer than will students given the summary along with the regular test passage. (p 129)
• Coherence effect for retention states that deleting extraneous words tended to help student learning. (p 130)
• Coherence effect for transfer states that removing extraneous text resulted in improved problem-solving transfer performance. (p 131)

Implications

• In the case of multimedia lessons, students tend to learn more when less is presented.
• The cognitive theory of multimedia learning helps explain this by stating that learners are actively trying to make sense of the presented material by building a coherent mental representation, so adding extraneous information gets in the way of this structure-building process. (p 132) Therefore
  1. do not add extraneous words and pictures to a multimedia presentation
  2. do not add unneeded sounds an music to a multimedia presentation
  3. keep the presentation short and to the point

Motivation for eLearners

I came across some great articles when doing research for my Leadership Report. I was particularly interested in the articles that specified methods for successful eLearning strategies.  Here are some very basic summaries and the articles I found them in:

Form A Successful Strategy

• How do the external forces relate to e-learning?
• An internal strategy
• Aligning the internal e-learning strategy with the external corporate strategy
• What does this mean for corporate leadership?
• Pitfalls
• Where to go from here

E-learning 1.0: Tips to Make E-Learning StickCreate a job-focused curriculum

•  Create a job-focused curriculum
• Make learning interactive
• Offer support materials
• Prepare learners
• Prepare managers
• Support learners
• Monitor and report the results
• Evaluate learning
• Enhance the course
• Identify future training needs

Preparing E-Learners for Online Success

•  E-learner readiness
• E-learning study skills
• Readiness surveys
  • Technology access
  • Online skills and relationships
  • Motivation
  • Online audio/video
  • Internet discussions
  • Importance to your success

  Designing for e-learner success

Phases to Online Participation

I came across this article today which discusses the phases a participant goes through in online participation. I was interested in this article because I am attempting to research how a learning community naturally thrives in a blog format.

Based on the article, I believe a great deal of the growth and development in a single blog is the responsibility of the owner or “commentator”. He gives suggestions for this role such as analyzing the thoughts of others and creating links among articles. I also like the description of the other roles which I think would enrich my experience as a commenter on my classmates blogs. These include tips such as: ask questions, seek clarification and test opinion.

I am guessing the primary goal to encourage participation for any blog and therefore nurture a community is to generate interest in your topic. It seems these are good tips to help accomplish this.

Can Blogs Support a Learning Community?

Collin’s blog got me thinking about blogs, social presence, community and learning. Can you build a learning community with blogs? I went to the article that Christine Thornam directed me to and which happens also to have been authored by our instructor, Brent Wilson. It is titled Bounded Community: Designing and Facilitating Learning Communities in Formal Courses. Here is “A draft of a quick-and-dirty instrument for assessing levels of community within courses” from the article:

• Shared Goals
  • Students in this class are focused on certain goals we have in common.
  • Projects and activities give us a sense of working together for something worthwhile.
• Safe and Supportive Conditions
  • People feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas.
  • I wouldn’t take too many risks in this class; not a safe environment.
• Collective Identity
  • We enjoy a sense of connection.
  • There is really a feeling of belonging in this class.
• Collaboration
  • We interact and work together a lot in this class.
  • There’s not much student-to-student contact in this class.
• Respectful Inclusion
  • Differences between people are respected.
  • Not much effort it made to help everyone fit in.
• Progressive Discourse toward Knowledge Building
  • Our questions and discussions help us build knowledge together.
  • I know why I’m working on projects-to learn better!
• Mutual Appropriation
  • We teach each other a lot in this class, not just relying on the teacher.
  • There’s room for everyone in this class.

If I were to evaluate this class and the use of blogs as a tool for building a learning community I would say that many of the above criteria are positively met. I feel we have shared goals, supportive, safe, progressive discourse towards knowledge building and mutual appropriation. In fact, a blog may be the ultimate forum in expressing our thoughts and therefore supporting learning. My only questions would be the criteria that may need a more physical connection to achieve “collective identity” and “collaboration”. In my mind, I am having a hard time making connections because of all of the physical things (open a browser window, click a link, or two links, or more?) I have to do to connect all of our ideas. We know that Mayer states (I’m paraphrasing) that descriptive text must be in close proximity to the image it is describing. Is that the same for connected ideas?

For example, I felt that this blog was very closely related to Collin’s blog titled “What does it take to build on-line communinty?”. Yet, for you to see Collin’s blog, you have to open another window or tab in your browser and then search for the particular entry (if it is no longer the 1st one listed). I think there are some things that bloggers can do to reduce this “physical disconnect”:

• Create lots of links when referring to other blogs, resources, info.
• Have them open in other windows (_blank) if possible
• Display comments next to related entries (I have no idea if this is possible in many blogs. I need to look on this blog! At this time on my blog, you have to click on “comments” to view related comments.)

As I describe these “tips”, I wonder if this tool already exists. Is this a wiki? I would LOVE to hear your thoughts. Am I the only one experiencing this “physical disconnect”?