Lesson 5

The Cone of Experience

"The Cone is a visual analogy, and like all analogies, it does not bear an exact and detailed relationship to the complex elements it represents." - Edgar Dale

Introduction

     After a discussion on the systems' approach to instruction. Let us tackle Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience to get acquainted with various instructional media which form part of the system's approach to instruction. If you remember the 8 M's of induction, one element is media. Another is material. These 2 M's (media, material) are actually the elements of this Cone of Experience to be discussed in this Lesson.

Edgar Dale (1900-1985)

     Served on The Ohio State University faculty from 1929 until 1970. He was an internationally renowned pioneer in the utilization of audio-visual materials in instruction.

     Professor Dale's most famous concept was called "Cone of Experience", a graphic depiction of the relationship between how information is presented in instruction and the outcomes for learners.

Abstraction

     The Cone of Experience is a visual models, a pictorial device that presents bands of experience arranged according to degree of abstraction and not degree of difficulty. The farther you go from the bottom of the cone, the more abstract the experience becomes.

Dale (1969) asserts that:

    The pattern of arrangement of the bands of experience is not difficulty but degree of abstraction - the amount of immediate sensory participation that is involved.

     Does the Cone of Experience mean that all teaching and learning must move systematically from base to pinnacle, from direct purposeful experiences to verbal symbols?

Dale (1969) categorically says:

     No, We continually shuttle back and forth among various kinds of experiences. Everyday each of us acquires new concrete experiences through walking on the street, gardening, dramatics, and endless other means. Such learning by doing, such pleasurable return to the concrete is natural throughout our lives, and at every age level. On the other hand, both the older child and the young pupil make abstractions every day and may need help in doing this well.

     What are these bands of experience in Dale's Cone of Experience? It is best to look back at the Cone itself. But let us expound on each of them starting with the most direct.

Direct Purposeful Experiences - These are first hand experiences which serve as the foundation of our learning. We build up our reservoir of meaningful information and ideas through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.

Contrived Experiences - In here, we make use of a representative models or moch ups of reality for practical reasons and so that we can make the real-life accessible to the students perception and understanding.

Dramatized Experiences - By dramatization, we can participate in a reconstructed experience, even though the original event is far removed from us in time.

Demonstrations - It is a visualized explanation of an important fact, idea or process by the use of photographs, drawings, films, displays, or guided motions.

Study Trips - These are excursions, educational trips, and visits conducted to observe an event that is unavailable within the classroom.

Exhibits - These are displays to be seen by spectators. They may consist of working models arranged meaningfully or photographs with models, charts, and posters.

Television and Motion Pictures - Television and motion pictures can constructed the reality of the past so effectively that we are made to feel we are there.

Still pictures, Recordings, Radio - These are visual and auditory devices which may be used by an individual or a group. Still pictures lack the sound and motion of a sound film. The radio broadcast of an actual event may often be likened to a televised broadcast minus its visual dimension.

Visual Symbols - These are no longer realistic reproduction of physical things for these are highly abstract representations. Ex: are charts, graphs, maps,, and diagrams.

Verbal Symbols - They are not like the objects or ideas for which they stand. They usually do not contain visual clues to their meaning. Written words fall under this category. It may be a word for a concrete object (book), an idea (freedom of speech), a scientific principle (the principle of balance, a formula (e=mc2)

Jerome S. Bruner - Harvard psychologist, he presents a three-tiered model of learning where he points out that every area of knowledge can be presented and learned in three distinct steps.

• First through a series of actions ENACTIVE
• Second through a series of illustrations ICONIC
• Third through a series of symbols SYMBOLIC

Lesson 4

Systematic Approach to Teaching

"A plan that emphasizes the parts may pay the cost of failing to consider the whole and a plan that emphasizes the whole must pay the cost of failing to get down to the real depth with respect to the parts." -C. West Churchman

What is Systematic?

Methodical in procedure or plan (systematic approach)

Organize - relating to or consisting of a system

Logical - presented or formulated as a coherant body ideas or principle (systematic thought)

Efficient - Effective in class that marked by throughness and regularity (systematic efforts)

Systematic Approach to Teaching

     The systematic approach views the entire educational program as a system of closely interrelated parts. It is an orchestrated learning pattern with all parts harmoniously integrated into the whole: 

The school, the teacher, the students, the objectives, the media, the materials, and assessments tools and procedures. Such an approach integrates the older, more familliar methods and tools of instructions with the new ones such as the computer.

• The focus of systematic instructional planning is the student.
• It tells about the systematic approach to teaching in which the focus in the teaching is the student.

Define Objectives - Instruction begins with the definition of instructional objectives that consider the students needs, interests and readiness.

Choose Appropriate Method - On the basis of these objectives the teacher selects the appropriate teaching method to be used.

Choose Appropriate Experience - In turn, based on the teaching method selected, the appropriate learning experiences an appropriate materials, equipment and facilities will also be selected.

Select Materials, Equipment and Facilities - The use of learning materials, equipment and facilities necessitates assigning the personnel to assists the teacher.

Assign Personnel Role - Defining the role of any personnel involved in the preparation, setting and returning of this learning resources would also help in the learning process.

Implement the Instruction - With the instructional objectives in the mind, the teacher implements planned instructions with the use of the selective teaching method, learning activities and learning materials with the help of other personnel whose role has been defined by the teacher.

Evaluate Outcome - After instruction, teacher evaluates the outcome of instruction. From the evaluation results, teacher comes to know if the instructional objective was attained.

Refine the process - If the instructional objective was attained, teacher proceeds to the next lesson going through the same cycle once more. If instructional objective was not attained, then teacher diagnoses was not learned and finds out why it was not learned in order to introduced remedial measure for improved student performance attainment of instructional objectives.

Examples of Learning Resources for Instructional Use:

1. Textbook
2.  Workbook
3. Programmed Material
4. Computer
5. Television Programs
6. Flat Pictures
7. Maps
8. Charts
9. Cartoon
10. Slides
11. Posters
12. Models 
13. Mock-up
14. Flannel Board Mate
15. Chalk Box

Examples of Learning Activities:

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Interviewing
4. Reporting or doing a presentation
5. Discussing
6. Thinking
7. Reflecting
8.  Dramatizing
9. Visualizing
10. Creating
11. Judging
12. Evaluating

Lesson 3

The Roles of Educational Technology in Learning

"Technology makes the world a new place"

Traditional role of Technology:

• Delivery vehicles for instructional lessons.

Traditional way:

• Technology serve as a teacher.

Constructivist role:

• Partners in the learning process.
• Technology is a learning tool to learn with, not from.

From a constructivist perspective, the following are the roles of technology in learning: (Jonassen, et al 1990)

• Learning to solve problems with technology.

Technology as tool to support knowledge construction:

• For representing learners' ideas, understandings and beliefs.
• For producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by learners.

Technology as information vehicles for exploring knowledge to support learning-by-constructing:

• For accessing needed information.
• For comparing perspectives, beliefs and world views.

Technology as context to support learning-by-doing:

• For representing and stimulating meaningful real-world problems, situations and context.
•  For representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments and stories of others.
• For defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking.

Technology as a social medium to support learning by conversing:

•  For collaborating with others.
•  For discussing, arguing, and building consensus among members of community.
• For supporting discourse among knowledge-building community.

Technology as intellectual partner (Jonassen 1996) to support learning-by-reflecting:

• For helping others to articulate and represent what they know.
• For reflecting on what they have learned and how they came to know it.
• For supporting learners internal negotiations and meaning making.
• For constructing personal representations of meaning for supporting mindful thinking.

Lesson 2

Technology: Boon or Bane?
"Technology is in our hands. We can use it to build or destroy".

Introduction

     After understanding what educational technology is all about it may be good reflect on whether this thing called technology is a boon or a bane to education, a blessing or a curse to education.

Activity

     Read the paragraphs given below and analyze the message of the comic strips/photograph given below. Is technology a boon or a bane? Stated more simply is it a blessing or a curse? A blessing or a detriment to a person's development?

A. Technology can be fascinating and mind-blogging in what it can do. It can bring distant places and people together, establishing invisible but powerful connections. It can transform societies, economies and cultures by opening them up to other ideas and other options, raising new expectations and creating new needs. It can release and rechannel previously unknown or wasted energies into more productive endeavors, allowing its users to pursue more creative goals.

B. Below are reactions to the question "Do instant messaging e-mail, cell phones and other gadgetry bring family members closer or drive them apart?"

     "Using a lot of high-tech gear to communicate at home is a poor proxy for face-to-face communication and sees omnipresent technological ties as threatening to intimacy." B.I.

     "Typing each other instead of talking to each other can only lead to problems down the road, such as teens using e-mail to deceive parents about their activities." G.W.

C. Study these comic trips. Find out what it depicts about the consequence of the use of technology on relationships, learning and life.

Abstraction

     Technology is a blessing for man. With technology, there is a lot that we can do which we could not do then. With cellphones, webcam, you will be closer to someone miles away. So far yet so close! That is your feeling when you talk through a cell phone to a beloved who is far away from home. Just think of the many human lives saved because of speedy notifications via cellphones. 

In education technology is bane when:

• the learner is made to accept as Gospel truth information they get from the Internet
• the learner surfs the internet for pornography
• the learner has an uncritical mind on images floating on televisions and computers that represent modernity and progress
• the TV makes the learner a mere spectator for computer-assisted instruction unmindful of the world and so fails to develop the ability to relate to others
• we make use of the Internet to do character assassination of people whom we hardly like
• we use overuse and abuse TV or film viewing as a strategy to kill time

     Technology contributes much to the improvement of the teaching-learning process and to the humanization of life. It is indeed a blessing. But when not used properly, it becomes a detriment to instruction and human progress and development.

     Technology is made for man and not man for technology. Technology is made for the teacher and not the teacher for technology. This means technology is meant to serve a man in all aspects of life including instruction. It is man, and in the context of the classroom, the teacher, who determines how technology ought to be used in order to reap the maximum benefits that come along with technology.

     The integration of technology in the instructional process must be geared towards:

• interactive and meaningful learning
• the development of creative and critical thinking
• the development and nurturing of teamwork
• efficient and effective teaching

Postscript - Thank God for the gift of new technology!

    Now with the computer, I may commit as many typographical error as I can and I have not to re-do the whole thing again. How convenient! What a liberation!

Lesson 1

Meaning of Educational Technology

"Technology is more than hardware. Technology consists of the designs and the environments that engage learners." -D. Jonassen

Introduction

     The organization of this course on Educational Technology 1 is based on the broad meaning of educational technology. That's why we start this course with a comprehensive understanding of the term educational technology.

Meaning of the Educational Technology

     To understand the meaning of educational technology, it may be good to begin with the meaning of technology. The word "technology" comes from the Greek word techne which means craft or art. Based on the etymology of the word "technology" the term educational technology, therefore, refers to the art or craft of responding to our educational needs.

     Educational technology is "a complex, integrated process involving people, procedures, ideas, devices, and organization for analyzing problems and devising, implementing evaluating, and managing solutions to those problems, involved in all aspects of human learning".

     Educational Technology is a field involved in applying a complex, integrated process to analyze and solve problems in human learning. (David H. Jonassen, et al 1999)

     Educational technology is a field study which is concerned with the practice of using educational methods and resources for the ultimate goal of facilitating the ultimate process (Lucido and Borabo, 1997). As a field, it operates within the total field of education.

Benefits from using Educational Technology

1.  Increase the quality of learning and the degree of its mastery through the use of special effects of unique programming that are considered individualized valid and accessible.
2.  Decrease the time spent in instruction for learners to achieved desired learning objectives.
3.  Increase efficiency of teachers.
4.  Reduce educational cost without affecting quality of instruction.
5. 
   

Guidelines in using Educational Technology

1.  Determine the purpose for which the instructional materials are to be used.
2.  Define the objectives to determine the appropriateness of the material.
3.  Know the content of the material.
4.  Exercise flexibility so that the materials satisfy different purposes.
5.  Consider/diversity/variety of materials.
6.  Relate materials to age, ability, maturity, and interest of students.
7.  Arrange the conditions so that the materials do not interrupt the momentum of the lesson.
8.  Prepare the students for what they will see, hear, and do as lessons follow.
9.  Operate equipment needed for efficient use.
10.  Summarize experiences gained and follow up with further relevant discussion.
11.  Evaluate the results of the use materials together with the instructional process to determine effectiveness.