Friday, September 06, 2002
Pulled out the PC-Rat today--seemed to go okay. One student said she had some positive connotations with pack-rats
Also whipped up something I called "the research cycle": start with what you know about the topic/problem, ask what you need to learn in order to write about the topic/solve the problem, figure out how you are going to find/research what you need to know; synthesize/assess what you have learned, at which point you can either get off the cycle or start it over again.
I let them discuss points one and two (what do you know about weblogging in education? what do you need to know?). Number 2 was/is hard, but when we identified "find out who is using weblogs in education" they didn't have ideas for how to research that.
All of this is just to say that I am trying to enact problem-based learning, I could see before I tried it that I have never done a good job of asking "what do you need to learn and how will you learn it", and that it does make lots of sense to spend some time on these issues/problems.
Seems like a handful of students are still jazzed, but many are realizing that this class might be like so many other classes. Sigh.
Also whipped up something I called "the research cycle": start with what you know about the topic/problem, ask what you need to learn in order to write about the topic/solve the problem, figure out how you are going to find/research what you need to know; synthesize/assess what you have learned, at which point you can either get off the cycle or start it over again.
I let them discuss points one and two (what do you know about weblogging in education? what do you need to know?). Number 2 was/is hard, but when we identified "find out who is using weblogs in education" they didn't have ideas for how to research that.
All of this is just to say that I am trying to enact problem-based learning, I could see before I tried it that I have never done a good job of asking "what do you need to learn and how will you learn it", and that it does make lots of sense to spend some time on these issues/problems.
Seems like a handful of students are still jazzed, but many are realizing that this class might be like so many other classes. Sigh.
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