Week 3: Learning Theories

BLOG POST: Watch the videos and complete the required readings (we don't mind if you skim). Think about how each theory interacts with your instructional activity for your final project and address the following two points in your blog:

1. In your blog, discuss which theory/ies might be most applicable to your instruction and outline a specific activity/assignment/exercise that would facilitate learning according to that theory. Outline, design, or wireframe that activity in a way that  makes sense to you so you will be able to design it more in depth when you have time. Post all of this in your blog.
   PowerPoint works great for developing wireframes; use anything that is quick and easy and don't try to make it pretty!
2. Write a brief post addressing how you are going to motivate your learners/students, and align your response with the information drawn from Small's article on motivation.
   For this class, we expect that the majority of you are intrinsically motivated to complete this course. Your enrollment was of course optional, and you are likely doing this for reasons that are important to you. We've added in a few extrinsic motivators as well (e.g. blog posts viewable by your coursemates, a certificate of completion).

1. A large portion of this course will rely on constructivist and socio constructivist theory. By having learners identify an instructional scenario that can be used in their own professional environment, we are hoping to stimulate learner-generated knowledge, higher order thinking skills, and active engagement with the content. We want this to be a meaningful experience as much as possible.

Socio constructivist theory will also be at work. First, information literacy and its subsequent teaching strategies are almost entirely derived from the profession, in both very formal (IL Standards, best practices, publications) and informal (knowledge distributed via listservs, email, and in-person conversations amongst librarians) processes. Our profession has its own culture and norms, and these heavily influence the ways in which we adopt and integrate what is expected and accepted. The second way that this theory will be apparent is creating a community of peers within the course, which includes both the instructors and the other learners. Encouraging and facilitating conversations and asking for and giving feedback will be a crucial role in establishing norms and skill and knowledge acquisition.

As for outlining or wireframing, we're not going to go into that here, as the entire IDEALA course site will stand in for that. However, outlining instruction is a quick way to mock up the structure and flow of your course or activity (and it's how we started designing this course), and wireframing is an essential aspect of instructional design, especially if you are building standalone online learning objects (think websites, interactive tutorials, screencasts, etc). If you're not sure what wireframing is, take a look at A Beginner's Guide to Wireframing.

2. With regard to motivation, we give an idea of the activities we incorporated for this course in the activity writeup: For this class, we expect that the majority of you are intrinsically motivated to complete this course. Your enrollment was of course optional, and you are likely doing this for reasons that are important to you. We've added in a few extrinsic motivators as well (e.g. blog posts viewable by your coursemates, a certificate of completion). Hopefully the article on motivation will give you some great ideas for your own instruction.