Program Reflection Statement

From the Beginning

When I applied for the master's program in 2005, I started asking myself what role technology can, should and will play in education. I am still asking myself and I hope to continue my questions after I finish my degree. The program showed me that asking is a worthwhile activity. It encouraged me to question rather than memorize and to value research results over anecdotal opinions. An unexpected idea I gained was that we can learn through failure and I became convinced that we should learn from stories.

I started this program with the desire to better support my faculty and staff. At the time I applied to graduate school, I was working as an event coordinator in a grant project at the University. In my application essay, I wrote that I wanted to "increase my knowledge and skills and bring more value to my employer."

Skill Development and Career Advancement

Before I started the program, I knew basic Web design, XHTML and CSS. Through both the master's program and my job experience, I learned basic programming using PHP and Flash ActionScript, advanced Web design, usability testing, information architecture and database development. I gained a working knowledge of JavaScript, XML, XSLT and ASP.NET. These are valuable skills that serve me well in my career.

I advanced to a better position within the University about midway during my program. I credit the real skills I learned from SISLT development classes as part of the reason I was able to move up to a full-time Web development position.

I have already successfully accomplished my goal of increasing my knowledge and skills and bringing more value to my employer. My new goal is to continue improving my ability to produce, to grow and to think.

My future has a lot of opportunities. I see my ideal job as a place in higher education where I can develop interactive, rich learning environments that incorporate multimedia, problem-based learning and peer collaboration.

Theoretical Perspective

What is Learning?

In essence, learning is a transformative process based on change. It's about creating movement within the mind and influencing how people think and approach problems. To alter thinking, we first need to understand how thinking works. Thinking is fluid, chaotic and active. In order for a learning environment to affect thoughts, the designer must account for the nature of human cognition. According to Norman (1988), "human thought—and its close relatives, problem solving and planning—seem more rooted in past experience than in logical deduction. Mental life is not neat and orderly . . . it hops, skips, and jumps its way from idea to idea, tying together things that have no business being put together; forming new creative leaps, new insights and concepts" (p. 115).

Problem-based Learning

My first design course was Designing Problem-based Learning Environments with David Jonassen which I took during my first semester of the program. This course heavily influenced my perspective, especially the idea of ill-structured problems which was a new concept to me. It was the only face-to-face course I took and it was a unique, memorable experience for me.

Learning by doing was important to me because of the richness and depth I got from doing hands-on activities, rather than a passive style of learning based on only reading and rote memorization. The SISLT EdTech master's program is based on learning by doing, so from the beginning I was immersed in this philosophy as a learner. This idea offers a practicality that appeals to my nature. I actively built applications and sites, solved problems and conducted evalutions.

This program introduced me to rubrics which were a new concept to me. Rubrics work well with problem-based learning as a useful method of assessment for gauging performance. They show learners what the expectations are and support better communication between the learner and teacher.

Storytelling

The value of storytelling is an important component of learning and teaching. Before the program, I viewed storytelling as culturally and historically worthwhile but I did not understand how it could play a key role in learning by incorporating imagination into the learning process and offering a meaningful context to activities.

Stories provide a natural, powerful medium for understanding the world and its problems. Jonassen (2004) states that "humans appear to have an innate ability and predisposition to organize and represent their experiences in the forms of stories" (p. 93).

Storytelling builds a community of practice and adds to identity formation. Stories are particularily advantageous for advancing novice learners up to the expert level. Experts in industries use stories to share their knowledge with one another. Novice learners need to hear these stories and then practice being storytellers themselves. Within my own circle of friends in grad school, the stories we told one another strengthened our identities as learners. Our shared stories motivated us to overcome the difficulties inherent in the grad school experience and excel.

Failure

Failure is useful in the learning process because failure is part of trying new things. According to Jonassen (2004), "we tend to learn more from our failures" (p. 96). To change our minds and widen our perspectives, we need to find out what doesn't work. As learners, we need to dare to ask questions and dare to fail. Then we can ask better questions.

I am a cleaner and more careful coder now because my learning experience included both successes and failures. Failure represents part of how I learned my skills. First it was with XHTML and CSS which were forgiving. I had strange-looking Web pages but I still had something. Then I moved onto PHP and got the dreaded parse errors. A single typo and the whole page broke into nothingness. Similar issues happened with ActionScript in Flash.

I became a good debugger through my errors, not through my successful scripting. I learned to find problems and solve them and only failure made this possible. In design, there needs to be opportunities for multiple solutions and multiple failures, sometimes simultaneously, so learners can become comfortable with contradictions and unexpected results.

A New View on Learning

Before this program, I imagined learning as a logical, linear progression and education as a pure intellectual pursuit easily measured at the end and called complete with a thick piece of paper. I felt that learning could be contained, whether it was inside books or a computer program which says correct or not correct after each test question.

My new view is that learning is about becoming open to novel experiences, being willing to experiment and listening to stories. Books and computers can be part of the experience but learning is centered on the learner who is part of a learning community. Education is bigger than tests with their right and wrong answers while technology is more than interfaces and pixels.

Now that I am at the end of my program, I see the best kind of learning as messy, complicated, emotional, contradictory, social and constantly changing.

In this way, learning reflects life.

Conclusion

So what role can technology play in education? It can include opportunities to experiment and fail. It can create a space for new cognitive experiences instead of being a strict dualistic correct or not correct answer screen.

Regardless of the specific technology used, it should focus on the learner. Designers should use storytelling effectively to support learners in becoming expert problem solvers. Technology in education, when developed sensitively, will support a learning environment rich with emotions, memories and connections.

I know it did for me.