Key Note

Model of Authentic Learning
Key Note: Monday, October 16, 2006



Authentic assessment
Task-matters the most—how can we design really good task that enables them to carry so much learning. Research investigated examples of courses or units that use authentic tasks as a framework for the completion of an entire semester course.

Have real world relevance
Are ill-defined
(get notes from her paper_
Contextualized problem

Complex problems simplified

Review a book in a way that is appropriate for a real world journal. All the students act as real editorial board members and select the articles that go in a book.

Example: Business Writing

Authentic Task Web Site—

(Note—got to implement lots more multimedia into all courses)

(Note—get these problems sites into 5309)

History_not just a name on the wall—to help students research what the lives behind the names on the Memorial. ( Australian War Memorial Site)

Issues

Institutional restrictions
Technology problems
Does the setting need to be real?
Problems must raise the concepts
Alexxi (1988)
Physical fidelity (smith, 1986) cognitive realism more important.

Engagement of students is critical.

Some students resist the suspension of disbelief—Samuel Taylor Coleridge first coined the phrase—the reader’s response to poetry—today—the response of the human experience to art.

Some students:
Get angry
Don’t get engage
If task is authentic, they get won over and they use the resource available.
Students often want instructor engagement didactically or they feel they are not getting their monies worth.

Bain (2003) ask if constructivism has gone too far and do we need more instructivism.

Situated learning
Communities of practice
Distributed intelligence

(add researchers in and finish this lit)

Where to go now?

Develop research or design-based research studies needed.

Analysis of practical problems
Development of solutions with a theoretical framework
Evaluation and testing of solutions in practice
Documentation and reflection to produce design principles


http://edserver2.uow.edu.au/~janh/Elearn/index.html

Site to support presentation—links and web pages!