Week 2: Situated Cognition
These articles brought a lot of cool ideas and views into my eyes.
The first article i looked at was What can the iPad do for Museums by scott Billings. This article brought to my attention the use of mobile devices in museums. hand-held devices are commonplace in our lives today. I read this article on my iPad in my home for example. With this growing use, these devices are being utilized everywhere. Museums have taken these devices and developed apps to be used. In some cases, you can take a complete tour of a museum in the comfort of your own home. You can have virtual tours and activities at your disposal. This is so cool to me because not only does it save you a trip to the museum, but you can look at the pieces as many times as you like, and even take screenshots. In some apps, you can interact with the works you are looking at and even play games. This raises a big question however, do mobile guides generate revenue? This was the question dwelling in my mind while reading this article, how do these museums bring in money if these apps are free? My question was answered. Some of these apps must be bought from the app store, which could bring in revenue for the museum. By selling some apps, not only will people be buying them on their phones, they might also take the trip to the museum to see the works in person.
The next article I read was Communities of Practice. Before reading this article, I never thought in depth about what this is and the huge benefit it can have on a community of people. In short, communities of practice are formed by people, not only with similar interests, but a shared domain and a bond. Communities of Practice are collaborative groups of people who want to learn and share ideas between each other about a common passion. This requires a high level of commitment. These groups share information and build relationships with each other. In education for example, schools may have common bonds and knowledge, but without communication they cannot learn and help each other. Especially with the new common core, schools all across the nation are learning the same topics at the same time. With a community of practice between teachers, they could share lesson plans and work with each other to better not only their classrooms, but the classrooms of others. Being in education I like to look at these articles from an educators point of view. When i go into a school, i hope to become a part of this so that i know I have a network of people who have similar passions to help me better my lessons and better myself.
The article Using Mobile Technologies for Multimedia Tours in a Traditional Museum Setting directly links to the first article I talked about. This article was about a study performed at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in the United Kingdom. Mobile technology was introduced into this museum to see if this would engage visitors and have them learning. The article talks about what attracts visitors to certain pieces and how they take in what they see. As a personal experience, I am in a class now where we explore education in museums. On my museum visits I left very unsatisfied. I wanted to know more about the works I had viewed. I wanted to learn what the artist was trying to say. On some of the works, there was a short paragraph or two describing the artist, but nothing describing the piece I was viewing. I even said to my teacher "Is there an app i could download to learn more about what this artist is trying to say?". It was fascinating to read that this is the direction we are heading. Reading the requirements was also very interesting. I do not agree that we should omit the use of specialist language. Although some words are hard to understand, with a proper explanation we have the potential to learn something new while learning about this piece. I also agree that the videos and audio need to be coherent. While looking at a piece and understanding its nature, I do not want to stop my thought to rewind the audio in order to hear what was said. The use of these mobile technologies can greatly benefit how people view the works in museums and what they can take away from it.
Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning was a great article to read. This article starts off by saying we must separate what is learned from how it is learned. They also talk about how knowing is different than doing. The authors provide a number of examples in this article to express their points. One example is how we learn vocabulary words. They state that people generally learn words in the context of ordinary communication. This is so true. For me, i always learned better by applying what i know, rather than reading it out of a book. With vocabulary, we can all look at a dictionary and get a well written definition of a word, but that does not help us use this word in every day life. They say that the average 17 year old learns vocabulary at a rate of 5,000 words per day, which is 13 words per day. This is not from looking at a dictionary, but by learning these words through communication and in context. In my elementary school, we would have a "word of the day" where we would be given a word, and we were challenged to use it in every day conversations for that day. This was so fun to me and every time I had the chance to use this word, I would. Another great part of this article was comparing knowledge to a tool. This stood out to me because it is so true. If you have a tool but you do not know what it is used for, you will not understand it and use it properly. One example was the old-fashioned pocket knife (which I did not know). There was a tool on this knife that was used to pick stones out of horses hooves. I am certain that today's generation did not know this, so we may have been using that tool wrong for decades. While learning, we must be able to understand and apply the knowledge we gain to every day life. This article also talked about Authentic Activities. One thing I liked was how they stated that authentic activities are not only pursued by experts of the craft. Some activities are common knowledge. I also gained knowledge that I will take with me as an educator. The article talked about how a professor taught his college students how to think like a mathematician and apply mathematics to the world for a greater understanding. If i can manage to get the majority of my class to think like mathematicians then they will be able to apply their knowledge to real world applications and hopefully achieve a better understanding of what they learned.
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