Film-work Part 2: Complex Details Unfold

 

                                                            

Research and Development years: 1979-1999

 Initial 1979 research was conducted at the University of Kansas Watson Library, applying my class textbooks noted prominent researchers. It began with B.F. Skinner’s stimulus-response research followed with D. O. Hebb, Canadian Neuroscientist, who wrote on the organization of behavior.

 Those meant hours searching “the dark stacks” using Dewey decimal; cards, and printing textbook findings.

 Popular college instructional topics in the 1980s, expanded into Cognitive Behavioral Modification (CBM) with Donald Meichenbaum, who combined Skinner’s and Albert Bandura’s behavioral analysis work.

 It was an exciting, informative, time for me. I couldn’t read enough about it. The early 1980s created a fresh flavor for neuroscience, at a time when few lay people understood the meaning of the word “cognitive”, or cared about it.

 Scientific writing tutorials were recommended by a Journalism faculty member, who directed me to the well-known Topeka Menninger psychiatric clinic’s prominent editor.

 I soon found myself writing scientific papers, and publishing them in an accelerated learning journal, eager for fresh perspectives. Their editor soon became my mentor, and the research effort sprang from that point.

 Seeking Scientific Advancement

 

I kept going, setting up 12 research sites in the process, training and conducting trial classes with puppetry voices.

Today we have large, well-attended neuroscience conferences; many students major in cognition.

The topic now also floods the internet’s Social Media feeds, nearly half a century later.

The first memory and cognition lessons 1-30, were created on audio tape formats, recorded in detail several times.

Hefty personal-directive, workbook additions, complete with researched and cited, lessons, were added to interface with the listening tapes; 45 minutes of additional written/spoken homework was required.

Unfortunately, the cassette tapes consisted of the warm-up drills only; with few game lessons (which are the centerpiece of the instruction). The complete game lessons were administered by an instructor applying transparencies on an overhead projector in group settings, according to age ranges and abilities.

School implementations were activated on this crude model.

Data streams were compiled as such by 5 different university professors and grad students. Then, the data was submitted to the University of Iowa’s statistical analysis department with the Woodcock Johnson’s (Cognitive Skills Battery) Vice President, who evaluated the entire ongoing process.

The final data process then progressed to the New Jersey automated testing service for the schools’ achievement tests correlations.

This rehearsal model was rapidly becoming non-feasible, outdated, with technological advancement.

Subsequently, initial filming of the Warm-up lessons and a few simple “Games” followed. But the bulk of the program was in limbo, requiring high-definition video and sound.

The recent, arduous, film update was strapped with earlier detailed compilations to formulate, yet in the mirrored procedure as the earlier audio tape formats.

A long incubation followed, until recently, when the seemingly unattainable process was realized this spring in solid teamwork with talented sound engineer, Scott Adam Walker.

 

Blended e-Learning to the Rescue - 6 Available Models

By Jan Kuyper Erland


Today's students eagerly welcome new virtual educational approaches, as new information is readily at their fingertips. To complement the vast amount of available curricula, even the high average and overly bright students can upgrade their cognitive skills beyond imaginable depths. Now, we can move forward without hesitation.

For slower students, the typical solution was in-classroom or pull out tutorial assistance of daily assignments. Teachers, not knowing how to implement advanced instructional strategies, remained instructing within this inefficient model. In many cases, teachers feared additional, cumbersome work in learning and implementing new methodologies.

In-class time remain at a premium. Tight budgets prevent ordering instructional materials. Even though grant and State monies pave the way, test scores stagnated.

Years of often poor and limited instructional content and video production on CDs-DVD's, hindered streamlined, high impact education. High tech-quality instruction will now make a difference for both the teacher and now “Screenager” student to achieve quality education meeting State policy Common Core Standards.

Now, the internet booms with educational innovation, paving its way into the emerging high-tech classroom. Teachers will no longer have to learn new methodologies, because Blended e-Learning will do it for them. Interactivity between the student and online lab will be key. Various forms of student engagement practice exist to interface with virtual learning.

A recent article (January 2011) by Horn and Staker of Innosight Institute, reviewed the current six available classroom Blended e-Learning models to relieve the teacher by offering new insights, and recharge all students to higher academic performance levels: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publications/the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/

Model 1: Face-to-Face Driver; Supplemental Assistance
The physical teacher deploys online learning on a case-by-case basis to supplement or remediate, often in the back of the classroom in a study carrel, or in a technology lab.

Model 2: Student Rotation on a Fixed Schedule; Remote and Onsite – Teacher in Charge
Students rotate on a fixed schedule between online self-paced learning and sitting in a classroom with a traditional face-to-face teacher. The classroom teacher usually oversees the online work.

Model 3: Flex, as Needed, for Dropout - and Credit Recovery Programs
Flex model programs feature an online platform that delivers most of the curricula. Teachers provide on-site support on a flexible and adaptive as-needed basis through in-person tutoring sessions and small group sessions.

Model 4: Online Learning Lab Delivers the Entire Course in the Classroom
The online-lab model characterizes programs that rely on an online platform
to deliver the entire course but in a brick-and-mortar lab environment. Usually these programs provide online teachers. Paraprofessionals supervise, but offer little content expertise. Often students that participate in an online-lab program also take traditional courses and have typical block schedules.

Model 5: Self-Blend; High School Students Enroll in Online Courses
Blended learning among American high schools is the self-blend model, which encompasses any time students choose to take one or more courses online to supplement their traditional school’s catalog. The online learning is always remote, which distinguishes it from the online-lab model, but the traditional learning is in a brick-and-mortar school. All supplemental online schools that offer a la carte courses to individual students facilitate self-blending.

Model 6: Online Driver Platform and Remote Teacher; Home Schooling Option
The online-driver model involves an online platform and teacher that deliver all curricula. Students work remotely for the most part. Face-to-face check-ins is sometimes optional and other times required. Some of these programs offer brick and-mortar components as well, such as extracurricular activities.

These models have the potential to revolutionize education as we know it, offer excitement and learning nuances to the classroom, while additionally solving the budget crunches and raising student achievement performance scores.

Innosight’s 2011 white papers on Blended e-learning: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/innosight/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/The-Rise-of-K-12-Blended-Learning.pdf

Horn, M. B, & Staker, H. (January 2011) The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning. Innosight Institute, Philadelphia, PA.

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).