Week 8: Reading Discussion

This week’s discussion centered around what we thought was the most valuable part of the assigned reading for the week (Horton’s chapters 6 and 7). The thing that we all talked the most about was the make-up of the lessons for our eLearning design. I started off the discussion sharing the example Horton used about having lessons be self-contained, such as recipe cards. He said to picture throwing them all up in the air and picking one up. You still have a whole lesson, and it is not dependant on a sequence and can be used to prepare the dish all on its own.

Joni came back and said that it might help to think of the learning section as a meal, where different lessons are like different dishes. My response was, "That is a wonderful idea! Not only to put the project together, but to be able to use a meal made up of different dishes and ingredients as an example as I have the kids work on different topics and then put them all together. Thanks for that! I had started thinking about the recipe idea in terms of groups of recipes like breads and having pumpkin bread, zucchini bread, etc. But I like the idea of the meal because the components can be a lot more varied but all important parts.”

This was my best contribution in the discussion because it took what I had found in the reading and put it into a more real example that I can put into use in my work. The EdWeb I am doing will consist of many different parts, so the recipe idea really seemed to fit, but thinking of them as parts of a whole meal has really encouraged me and given me some good ideas for working on the EdWeb project. I think it will also be a good visual example to give my students, as I would like to have them work on the different parts and eventually put together everything they have learned as a class. It seemed like this week the reading really helped the people who posted get excited about this project. I am looking forward to seeing what develops from it all…