Working in pair, I was responsible for the collection of the materials for the contents (which is equally contributed by me and my partner Martin), drawing most of the graphical elements, setting the sliders in the “How is evaporation affected?” part, and making the animation in the “Groundwater” part.
Discussion
The water cycle is a topic taught in primary level General Studies and junior secondary level Geography. Students are required to understand that the water on Earth moves in a continuous cycle and to know various stages of the cycle. Traditionally, students learn the water cycle by reading the flowchart and text in the textbook. Our learning object, on the other hand, shows the whole cycle in an interactive way. According to Information Pickup Theory (Gibson, 1979; Neisser, 1976), using motion pictures in a visual representation stimulates students and facilitates their understanding. Moreover, Clark & Paivio (1991) stated that presenting information in both graphical and textual forms enhances students’ recognition.
For textual information, minimal but essential information is shown in the presentation at first. Details are hidden by default but they are available when needed (by pointing over or clicking a label). Not showing all the details at once lets viewers have a grasp of the basics of the water cycle first, without congesting their minds with too much information.
In traditional lectures, students are passively spoon-fed with the concepts of evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, runoff and ground water in the water cycle. In our learning object, materials are given to let students construct hypotheses and draw conclusions, as pointed out by Bruner’s Constructivist Theory (1996). For example, in the “How evaporation is affected” part, students can explore how the evaporation rate relates to the air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed on their own by dragging the sliders.
How can the Learning Object be Used?
Self-initiated learning takes place when the subject matter arouses students’ interest (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). We can ask the students to think if the water they drink is the same water dinosaurs drank. Then they study the learning object for the answer. During the problem solving process, they master the unending flow of the water. Further, through the various experiments in the website mentioned below, they can grasp the concept of each stage in water cycle:
By accomplishing this task, as well as various tasks throughout the course, I have gone through the detailed steps including drafting design plans and developing prototypes, which bring me fruitful experiences of implementing effective, interactive visual representations. With the skills learnt in this module, I think I can try to develop some interactive visual representations for my teaching in the future.
References:
Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Clark, J. M. & Paivio, A. (1991). “Dual coding theory and education”. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149-170.
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and Reality. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
Here are some of the comments from our fellow classmates up to 15th May, showing the strengths and weaknesses of our prototype. Our responses to the comments as well as the revisions to be done to the prototype are also listed.
Thanks again for all of your comments and suggestions.
Strength
Weakness with suggestion
Our response
The graphic design is very colourful and fantastic.
The animations are really nice.
Simplify the explanation or use the bullet point form.
We agree that short and clear explanations facilitate viewers’ comprehension of information. We will touch up the text in the prototype to make it more concise.
Clear illustrations. The explanation of the whole water cycle is in detailed manner.
Provide a summary box to show a complete but simple version of different stages of water cycle.
We think it is a good idea to include a summary of the whole cycle. We are considering adding it if time allows.
The objective is clear and all the interactive switches are well organized.
After clicking into “Evaporation” message box, the “Evaporation” pop-up window is shown, but the “Condensation” cloud was still working at the backward window.
When moving the mouse pointer to the word “high” of relative humidity, not drag the button to it, the pointer changes to a finger.
We have modified the prototype so that the problematic behaviours are now gone. You can check the result by clicking the link in our previous post.
The “Sun button” determines the sequential display of the information so that the audience discovers the natural process of water cycle.
Use the number of arrows or the speed of their movement to reflect the effect of evaporation, rather than changing of size of the arrow.
What a good idea! We have revised the “How is evaporation affected” box so that the evaporation rate is now shown with the speed of a moving arrow.
Add references.
This is an essential part of our presentation. We will add them in the final stage.
The showing of information box(es) when a label (in pale yellow) is clicked. (Currently, only the “Evaporation” label has such feature);
Further animation effects and interactivities to facilitate the explanation of the water cycle.
Your comments are welcome.
1 May: The prototype is updated. A preloader is added so that viewers can see the progress while the file is loading and the “How is evaporation affected” box is now working.
Learning while travelling.Here is the photo story I made with Microsoft Photo Story. It is about the Japan’s topographical features, wearing style, eating etiquette and food.Please click the link below.Your comment is welcome.
The storyboard had been developed jointly with Martin.In the process, I was responsible for the drawing of the water cycle diagram as Martin was responsible for the consolidation.Data collection was jointly done by both of us.Hope the workflow description and images can provide enough information for others to get an idea what our final project will look like.
Please click the link below and feel free to give comment.
The learners prefer to interact with graphical representations than sedentary observed. So existing kinds of passive animations and immersed virtual reality haven’t demonstrated learning benefits, but only allow for shallow processing of information. The potential significance of representations will be depended on the following variables such as the level of experience with the graphical representation and knowledge domain, type of task and abstractness of information being represented, the account of the cognitive benefits and mechanisms involved. I should cautiously examine the value of graphical technology for facilitating cognitive tasks when designing representations.
Scaife, M and Rogers, Y (1996). External cognition : how do graphical representations work? International Journal of Human – Computer Studies, v.45, p.185 – 213, January 1996. Retrieved from: http://www.isr.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234bs03/15-ScaifeRogers-ExternalCog.pdf
I will team with Martin Lau for completing the Group Assignment. After discussions, we propose to develop a learning object for presenting the water cycle. The target audience of the proposed learning object will be students of senior primary to junior secondary levels.
We will first gather the materials about the water cycle and will see how the concepts can be implemented with Adobe Flash.
Accomplishing this task, I was responsible for drawing the objects and adding some interactivity which the descriptions appears only when the viewer moves the mouse pointer over the different shapes of the raindrops.Through the process, the main difficulty we encountered was to make web surfing more productive, to evaluate the quality of information on various websites, and to select the appropriate information presented in the visual representation.Based our experience, we need to ask ourselves some questions before making the decision: (1)Who is responsible for the content? (2)Does the website have an editorial board? Is the information reviewed before it is posted? (3)Does the website identify the author? Does it rely on testimonials? (4)Is the information current? (5)Does the website have a privacy policy and tell us what information they collect?
Here is a visual display presented by Martin and me.You can click the link below and take a look.
Working in pairs, I was responsible for drawing of the objects in the troposphere and studying the mechanism of motion button in the PowerPoint.Through the process, we talked the exact wordings of the illustrations and the appropriate information presented in the diagrams over.And the main problem we encountered was that ionosphere and exosphere occupy most of the diagram but they do not have many features than the lower stratosphere and troposphere.Thus we have to decide whether the diagram is drawn in proportion or not. At last, we settled on that the diagram was not drawn to scale so that the features of the lower layers can be shown more clearly.
Visuals make something less complicated or easier to understand. It helps the students master the content easily in some extents.But contradictorily, we have no universal method to decode the visuals.Like the picture Daniel showed the class this session, a girl dance behind her classmates when she want to presented the concept of flower,but the result was different from the expectation.This posed me a question about the education.What is the destination of the education?Teacher imparted the knowledge into the students’ brains and they perform in the same way.
