Nora L Cloonan
Columbia River Gorge
Foundations
Learning Paradigms Paper
I wrote this paper for Edit 6100E my first semester. It challenged us to define and compare the major learning paradigms, Behaviorism, Constructivism, and Cognitivism. I already understood Behaviorism in the context of scientific training and it wasn’t hard to convert that understanding to a learning context. The other two disciplines were new to me. I found myself wanting to write a lot of words to describe these two concepts. I think they are difficult to pin down in a very concise way. I did the least justice to Constructivism. I don’t think I had a very good understanding of Constructivism until we started designing our own courses. Once I began to see how creative assignments and group projects could influence the thinking of students about the subject matter and push them to another level of understanding, the principles of Constuctivism really started to become clear to me. It really helped that I had great classmates who gave me very helpful feedback while I was working on these assignments.
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An Investigation of Learning Paragigms
A Definition of Instructional Technology
These videos were an iterative process as our personal definitions of Instructional Technology grew and changed throughout the semester. We began with a simple statement and then added a basic diagram. As we read about how various organizations defined the field over the years we were able to evaluate our own views in light of those evolving definitions. I feel this is a fairly well structured and pretty complete definition. As shown by the definitions provided over the years by the AECT (Association for Educational Communication & Technology) and other organizations, it isn't an easy thing to sum up in one sentence. I would probably need to write an essay to take a really good stab at a fully comprehensive definition of the field. In addition, this was my very first attempt at making any type of video. Watching this now is somewhat embarrassing. The audio especially, is the first thing I would do over.