Research Term

Research term

Phuong Pham

B-Learning

Blended learning can be defined as the combination of multiple approaches to pedagogy or teaching. For example:- self-paced, collaborative or inquiry-based study. Further to this blended learning can be facilitated through the use of 'blended' virtual and physical resources. Examples include combinations of technology-based materialsand traditional print materials.

With today's prevalence of high technology in many countries, blended learning often refers specifically to the provision or use of resources which combine e-learning (electronic) or m-learning (mobile) with other educational resources.

Some would claim that key blended-learning arrangements can also involve e-mentoring or e-tutoring.

These arrangements tend to combine an electronic learning component with some form of human intervention, although the involvement of an e-mentor or an e-tutor does not necessarily need to be in the context of e-learning. E-mentoring or e-tutoring can also be provided as part of a "stand alone" ("un-blended") e-tutoring or e-mentoring provision.

Ubiquitous Learning

Ubiquitous computing is a brand-new and human-centered computing paradigm, which is seamlessly embedded into every fabric of our lives. Ubiquitous Learning, also called u-Learning, is based on ubiquitous computing technology. The most important and complete role of ubiquitous computing technology in u-Learning is to construct a ubiquitous learning environment, which means Anyone is able to learn at Anyplace, Anytime.

Features of Ubiquitous Learning

The main characteristics of ubiquitous learning are shown as follows (Chen et al., 2002; Curtis et al., 2002):

- Permanency: Learners can never lose their work unless it is purposefully deleted. In addition, all the learning processes are recorded continuously in everyday.

- Accessibility: Learners have access to their documents, data, or videos from anywhere. That information is provided based on their requests. Therefore, the learning involved is self-directed.

- Immediacy: Wherever learners are, they can get any information immediately. Therefore learners can solve problems quickly. Otherwise, the learner may record the questions and look for the answer later.

- Interactivity: Learners can interact with experts, teachers, or peers in the form of synchronies or asynchronous communication. Hence, the experts are more reachable and the knowledge is more available.

- Situating of instructional activities: The learning could be embedded in our daily life. The problems encountered as well as the knowledge required are all presented in the nature and authentic forms. It helps learners notice the features of problem situations that make particular actions relevant.

- Adaptability: Learners can get the right information at the right place with the right way.

Moreover, ubiquitous learning can be Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments that focus on the socio-cognitive process of social knowledge building and sharing.

M-learning

M-learning is mobile learning: using mobile technologies (such as mobile phones and hand-held computers) to enhance the learning process. With a background of more than 4 years of trialling, research and development, m-learning has helped thousands of learners from all walks of life to develop their skills, confidence and motivation to learn.

The objective of m-learning is to give this target group an interest in life-long learning.
M-learning aims to improve levels of literacy, numeracy and participation in education amongst young adults. M-learning makes use of young people's interest in their mobile phones and and other handheld communications/entertainment devices to deliver exciting and unusual learning experiences and related messages.

WebEx

WebEx is an interactive communications program that allows you, the client, to sit back and watch as our trainer goes through the seminar session (both using slides and live on-line search demonstrations) as well as have you participate in the searching live. You can interact with other attendees via the teleconference abilities as you watch your computer screen. It is just likesitting in the classroom.

WebEx is the largest provider of Web seminar and meeting technology and so can enjoy its monopoly. With most of its products aimed at small meetings, (WebEx estimates that 70% to 80% of the revenue in the Web conferencing space comes from meetings with seven people or less) it has enjoyed success particularly with small businesses.
Today, WebEx offers five services:

 MeetingCenter, for small meetings where everyone can interact

 TrainingCenter, for online training sessions

 Support Center, an online help-desk alternative

 Sales Center, an online sales tool

 EventCenter, for events with thousands of participants

Metacognition

KNOWING HOW TO LEARN, and knowing which strategies work best, are valuable skills that differentiate expert learners from novice learners. Metacognition, or awareness of the process of learning, is a critical ingredient to successful learning.

What Is Metacognition?

Metacognition is an important concept in cognitive theory. It consists of two basic processes occurring simultaneously: monitoring your progress as you learn, and making changes and adaptingyour strategies if you perceive you are not doing so well. (Winn, W. & Snyder, D., 1998) It's about self-reflection, self-responsibility and initiative, as well as goal setting and time management.

"Metacognitive skills include taking conscious control of learning, planning and selecting strategies, monitoring the progress of learning, correcting errors, analyzing the effectiveness of learning strategies, and changing learning behaviors and strategies when necessary

Cognitive load

Cognitive loadtheory describes how the architecture of cognition has specific implications for the design of instruction. The theory has broad applications in the design of instructional materials, providing a general framework and conceptual toolkit for instructional designers to minimize and control the conditions that create unwanted cognitive load in learning materials.

John Sweller's theory employs an information processingmodel of cognition, emphasizes the inherent limitations of working memory, and uses schemas as the relevant unit of analysis — the building blocks — for instructional materials. His theory differentiates between intrinsic, germane, and extraneous cognitive load.

Intrinsic load relates to the integral complexity of an idea or set of concepts, and reflects the inherent, absolute difficulty of the material to be learned. For example, the mental calculation of 2 + 2 has lower intrinsic load than solving a differential equation. Extraneous load is attributable to the design of the instructional materials, and shows itself as the unnecessary load found in inefficient instructional designs. For example, an audio-visual presentation format usually has lower extraneous load than a visual-only format, because in the former case, working memory has less information to process in the visual modality since the audio modality is also being used to convey information. Germane load relates to the degree of effort involved in the processing, construction and automation of schemas. Germane load is sometimes associated with motivation and interest. Intrinsic load is unchangeable, whereas the instructional designer can manipulate extraneous and germane load.

Cognitivism

From the passive view of learning adopted by the behaviorist school sprung a quite different view. Many felt that the strict focus on observable behavior demanded by the behaviorist school restricted the usefulness of its theories. While the behaviorist view concentrated on investigating the observable behavior of organisms (humans, animals) resulting from exposure to different stimuli (reinforcement, punishment, conditioning etc), the cognitivist school explored an area that were explicitly taboo for behavioristic experiments.

The cognitivistic school "went inside the head of the learner" so to speak in that they made mental processes the primary object of study and tried to discover and model the mental processes on the part of the learner during the learning-process. In Cognitive theories knowledge is viewed as symbolic, mental constructions in the minds of individuals, and learning becomes the process of comitting these symbolic representations to memory where they may be processed. The development of computers with a strict "input - processing - output architechture" from the 1960s and up till today certainly have inspired these "information-processing" views of learning.

In sum the cognitive approach & cognitive theories emerged as a new perspective employing "information-processing ideas" rather than the behavioristic assumptions that the learner is determined by his environments and so passively adapts to the circumstances.This cognitivistic view emphasized the active mental processing on the part of the learner. However knowledge was still viewed as given and absolute just like in the behavioristic school.

Constructivism

The constructivistic approach to teaching and learning is based on a combination of a subset of research within cognitive psychology and a subset of research within social psychology, just as behavior modification techniques are based on operant conditioning theory within behavioral psychology. The basic premise is that an individual learner must actively "build" knowledge and skills (e.g., Bruner, 1990) and that information exists within these built constructs rather than in the external environment. [See Ullman (1980) versus Gibson (1979) for an overview of this controversy within the cognitive perspective.] However, all advocates of constructivism agree that it is the individual's processing of stimuli from the environment and the resulting cognitive structures, that produce adaptive behavior, rather than the stimuli themselves (Harnard, 1982). John Dewey (1933/1998) is often cited as the philosophical founder of this approach; Ausubel (1968), Bruner (1990), and Piaget (1972) are considered the chief theorists among the cognitive constructionists, while Vygotsky (1978) is the major theorist among the social constructionists. Activity theory and situated learning are two examples of modern work based on the work of Vygotsky and some of his followers

. Behaviorism

Loosely speaking, behaviorism is an attitude. Strictly speaking, behaviorism is a doctrine.

Wilfred Sellars (1912-89), the distinguished philosopher, noted that a person may qualify as a behaviorist, loosely or attitudinally speaking, if they insist on confirming “hypotheses about psychological events in terms of behavioral criteria” (1963, p. 22). A behaviorist, so understood, is a psychological theorist who demands behavioral evidence. For such a person, there is no knowable difference between two states of mind unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behavior associated with each state.

Arguably, there is nothing truly exciting about behaviorism loosely understood. It enthrones behavioral evidence, an arguably inescapable practice in psychological science. Not so behaviorism the doctrine. This entry is about the doctrine, not the attitude. Behaviorism, the doctrine, has caused considerable excitation among both advocates and critics.

Behaviorism, the doctrine, is committed in its fullest and most complete sense to the truth of the following three sets of claims.

1. Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not the science of mind.
2. Behavior can be described and explained without making reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind).
3. In the course of theory development in psychology, if, somehow, mental terms or concepts are deployed in describing or explaining behavior, then either (a) these terms or concepts should be eliminated and replaced by behavioral terms or (b) they can and should be translated or paraphrased into behavioral concepts.

Learning Technology Standards Committee
The Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) is chartered by the IEEE Computer Society Standards Activity Board to develop accredited technical standards, recommended practices and guides for learning technology. The LTSC coordinates formally and informally with other organizations that produce specifications and standards for similar purposes. Standards development is done in working groups via a combination of face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, and exchanges on discussion groups. The LTSC is governed by an executive committee consisting of working group chairs and elected officers.

Cognitive apprenticeships

Cognitive apprenticeships are situated within the social constructivist paradigm. They suggest studentswork in teams on projects or problems with close scaffolding of the instructor. Cognitive apprenticeships are representative of Vygotskian "zones of proximal development" in which student tasks are slightly more difficult than students can manage independently, requiring the aid of their peers and instructor to succeed. Cognitive apprenticeships reflect situated cognition theory, as do anchored instruction modules described on a previous page.

Component Display Theory

CDT IS AN INSTRUCTIONAL MODEL which designers can apply to develop an instructional micro-strategy. The theory is designed for developing instruction for concepts while providing learner control. The theory suggests that there is a unique combination for the most effective learning experience by determining the content and desired performance then adding prescriptions to form a learning strategy. To achieve that experience, the designer identifies the content and desired learning and develops a prescriptive learning strategy

SCORM

SCORM is a suite of technical standards that enable web-based learning systems to find, import, share, reuse, and export learning content in a standardized way. (See ADL Background for how SCORM came to be.) Note that SCORM is written primarily for vendors and toolmakers who build Learning Management Systems and learning content authoring tools so they know what they need to do to their products to conform with SCORM technically. A "Designer's Guide" for implementing SCORM is in the works. Stay tuned.

GLORIAD

GLORIAD or Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development is a high-speed computer network used to connect scientific organizations in Russia, China, United States, the Netherlands, Korea and Canada.

GLORIAD is sponsored by the USNational Science Foundation, a consortium of science organizations and Ministries in Russia, the ChineseAcademy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology of Korea, the Canadian CANARIE network, the Netherlands SURFnet team and has some telecommunications services donated by Tyco Telecommunications.

GLORIAD provides bandwidth of up to 622 Mbit/s via OC-12 links between Russia and the United States, and 155 Mbit/s via OC-3 between Russia and China, among others.

The previous version of the network, "Little GLORIAD", was completed in mid-2004, and it connected Chicago, Hong Kong, Beijing, Novosibirsk, Moscow, Amsterdam and Chicago again. For this network, a direct computer link was drawn between Russia and China for the first time in history.

Internet2

The second generation of the Internet, developed by a consortium of more than 200 universities, private companies and the U.S. government. It was not developed for commercial use or to replace the Internet, but is the reincarnation of it, intended primarily for research. Whereas the Internet was first designed to exchange text, Internet2 is designed for full-motion video and 3D animations.

Originally named UCAID (University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development), Internet2 spawned the high-speed Abilene backbone.

XML

(EXtensible Markup Language) An open standard for describing data from the W3C. It is used for defining data elements on a Web page and business-to-business documents. XML uses a similar tag structure as HTML; however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. While HTML uses predefined tags, XML allows tags to be defined by the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items, such as "product," "sales rep" and "amount due," can be identified, allowing Web pages to function like database records. By providing a common method for identifying data, XML supports business-to-business transactions and has become "the" format for electronic data interchange and Web services (see XML vocabulary, Web services, SOA and EDI).

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction

Gagne's book, The Conditions of Learning, first published in 1965, identified the mental conditions for learning. These were based on the information processing model of the mental events that occur when adults are presented with various stimuli. Gagne created a nine-step process called the events of instruction, which correlate to and address the conditions of learning. The figure below shows these instructional events in the left column and the associated mental processes in the right column.

Instructional Event / Internal Mental Process
1. Gain attention / Stimuli activates receptors
2. Inform learners of objectives / Creates level of expectation for learning
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning / Retrieval and activation of short-term memory
4. Present the content / Selective perception of content
5. Provide "learning guidance" / Semantic encoding for storage long-term memory
6. Elicit performance (practice) / Responds to questions to enhance encoding and verification
7. Provide feedback / Reinforcement and assessment of correct performance
8. Assess performance / Retrieval and reinforcement of content as final evaluation
9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job / Retrieval and generalization of learned skill to new situation

1. Gain attention

In order for any learning to take place, you must first capture the attention of the student. A multimedia program that begins with an animated title screen sequence accompanied by sound effects or music startles the senses with auditory or visual stimuli. An even better way to capture students' attention is to start each lesson with a thought-provoking question or interesting fact. Curiosity motivates students to learn.

1. Inform learners of objectives

Early in each lesson students should encounter a list of learning objectives. This initiates the internal process of expectancy and helps motivate the learner to complete the lesson. These objectives should form the basis for assessment and possible certification as well. Typically, learning objectives are presented in the form of "Upon completing this lesson you will be able to. . . ." The phrasing of the objectives themselves will be covered under Robert Mager's contributions later in this chapter.

1. Stimulate recall of prior learning

Associating new information with prior knowledge can facilitate the learning process. It is easier for learners to encode and store information in long-term memory when there are links to personal experience and knowledge. A simple way to stimulate recall is to ask questions about previous experiences, an understanding of previous concepts, or a body of content.