Article 2. What is Meaningful Learning?
Meaningful learning refers to the notion that process and acquisition of learnt knowledge is substantially constructed and understood by an individual. Furthermore, the concept relates to how ones new meaningfully obtained understanding coincides to ones prior knowledge and ideas. The respective assigned reading for this week, “What is meaningful learning?”, by Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R.M., Crismond, D. (2008), explores the relationship of students engaging in tasks that require intentional, active, constructive, cooperative and authentic learning processes, which will result in more rich and meaningful learning. In addition, the text also studies the role of technology in creating meaningful learning. The process of meaningful learning occurs when students have the ability to undertake and maintain activities that entail students to be to be active, constructive, intentional, authentic and cooperative. As students undertake activities, incorporating elements and the use of the five aspects, students will gain and obtain a more significant appreciation and proficiency in understanding the results. During active learning, students learn through engaging and manipulating objects in the respective environment, observing the apparent effects of their interventions and involvements in constructing their own interpretations. An exemplar to demonstrate this notion is the idea of students learning to play soccer. Whilst in the learning process, students are not required to formulate relative theories on how to kick a ball, however they simply kick the ball employing a significantly appropriate amount of force to see how far the ball will go. Therefore, through this action, students can learn through the concept of ‘cause and effect’. Moreover, constructive learning refers to a student’s capability to indicate and reflect on their own activity and performance. Newly introduced concepts will prompt the students in engaging in thoughtful and perplexing experiences resulting in constructing meaning. As students reflect on these puzzling encounters, they integrate their newly acquired experiences to their existing prior knowledge. Again referring to the soccer concept, when students are attempting to kick the ball, with little force directed, the ball will not progress very far. In this instance, the student then realizes that in order for the ball to move further in distance, they must apply stronger force than the previous attempt. Lastly, intentional learning permits learners to strive in a dynamic approach to decipher a given task in order to accomplish an objective. In addition, to be competent and able in engaging learners in expressing, communicating and representing their understanding, technology needs to be altered to allow for this to occur. Through this, students will be able to use their prior constructed knowledge in inexperienced and new situations. A constructive way to achieve this can be linked to the internet and its useful tools it provides in aiding students to connect prior knowledge to newly acquired situations. For example, Games that relate to real life situations such as the Fish Market Activity (from the learning federation website) can allow students to associate with and apply to their prior knowledge to gain new concepts such as trading, selling and purchasing items of interest.
In relation to this, authentic learning is not based on acquiring a principle and appropriating it to the puzzle to simply derive at the accurate answer. The idea is that it is in fact learning activities and processes that are positioned in meaningful real-life related contexts- such as that of the Fish Market Activity. Through this notion, students gain enhanced and improved understanding and identification of concepts that can be transferred from prior knowledge to newly acquired conceptions and situations, thus should be implemented in the learning environment and classroom setting. Likewise, cooperative activities allocate students to develop and bestow information and knowledge structuring identities in and out of the classroom environment, as they learn to gain methodologies and understandings of the vast multitude of way of viewing the world and presented solutions to problems. Through this notion, it can be inferred that technology connects the conventional informal processes by connecting learners together for discussion, collaboration or even assistance, as students compare ideologies, values and individual perspective views to inhabit meaningful learning.
Week Three Reflection Questions:
What learning style/s does this ICT support? This ICT supports the visual learning style through the moving images and colours. Also, kinesthetic learning through the movement of the images and the mouse to achieve the purpose of the game.
How could this ICT be implemented as a good cognitive tool within the learning environment? When studying a unit on trading and this notion of matheatics teachers could use this ICT as a method of actively engaging the children in the trading of objects with money process and the respective outcomes. The students would then be able to discuss what they have “purchased” and “sold” in a collaborative enviornment.
How is this ICT enabling the development of creativity? This ICT develops creativity in the students as they may decide to create their own games on the topic. They may also like to engage in the creation of other activities such as worksheets, skits and displays to demonstrate the importance of money, value and trading.
References:
Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Moura, R. M., Crismond, D. (2008). From ‘Meaningful Learning with Technology’ 3rd Edition Pearson: New Jersey
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