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Andrew Skalet hw141.1 For me the most ineresting part of the article is that it made me think about the difference between the quality of learning that students experience in a cooperative environment compared to an adult run environment. In particular, the idea that students from a cooperative environment gain a "greater conceptual understanding," and can apply what they know more readily to new situations, seems very valuable. 1.2 The article was interesting overall, but some of the theory regarding educational models was repeated. The article could have been more concise with additional work by the authors. 2. I think the main message of the article was that there is real value in a cooperative approach to learning, and it is being applied in a real world educational evironment. The article takes pains to point out that this approach is neither end of the pendulum of adult or child-driven. 3.1 adult-run 94% student-run 1% cooperative 5% 3.2 An example of an adult run environment is a chemistry lecture in CHEM 100 here at CU with 300 students in a 500 student lecture hall. An example of a student-run environment is a Montessori preschool, I think. I attended one of these but I don't remember very much about it. I have experienced some cooperative environments here at CU, through the Herbst humanities program and a similar environment in Michael Eisenberg's The Canon course. In both cases, the instructor guided the students slightly, but let the students create their own learning path. 4.1 technologies used to display information to students are most used and most useful in an adult-run environment. Better computer graphics and more importantly carefully created representations can expand this communication channel in the future. 4.2 child-run education can be helped most by giving children interesting objects to manipulate. For young children, play is a very educational dimension, and wooden blocks, legos, and other construction toys are used. similar toys like lego mindstorms and future construction kits with embedded computation may help slightly older students explore technology. 4.3 communities of learners can also be helped by experimental objects, but they may also be guided by the teacher through these technologies. the Swiki is a good example of a tool being used to support a community of learners. In the future, environments like the techology supported experimental environment in the squeak video could be very helpful to children learning science and technology. 5.1 our course has some element of adult-run education through Gerhard's presentation of the lecture slides, but this primarily acts as supporting information to discussions and analysis in the course. 5.2 the "child"-run education in this course is not the same as it would be for very young children, but I suppose the independent research and semester project are examples of student-directed learning. with responsibile students, I think the course has an appropriate amount of student-directed learning. 5.3 The community of learners education is the perhaps body of this course. it consists of interactions over the swiki and the significant discussions in class. I feel that the community of learners approach gives this course great strength. 6. I hope I do not misunderstand this question, but I feel that the cooperative learning environment is a general framework for effective integration of the two sides. Especially for older students, I do not think there is a problem with presenting some supporting information in a adult-run format, as with the lecture slides in this course. I think the important part is that the students still have the opportunity to explore the ideas together. One challenge I see with the cooperative approach for public primary and secondary schools is that the ratio of adults to students has to be much greater than there is normally funding for to provide enough subtle structure for the learning. The school in the paper uses parents to help this, but I think it would still be a challenge. |
