Open and Online Learning Environments

It was interesting to go through the readings this week, thinking of the relationship between various technologies and Constructivism. I found several references to the idea that many of the designers of OLEs create their tools with the Constructivist approach in mind. They realize that learners will use them to pursue their own goals and be responsible for their own learning.

There were many fun OLEs mentioned in the readings, but my classmates found many, many interesting, fun, useful, entertaining, and informational sites. It was a lot of fun to go through each of them and do the various activities.

I posted some example activities from the Discovery Channel website (http://dsc.discovery.com). One of the week’s readings discussed OLEs as Constructivist because they are often used to simulate real-world problems, anchor instruction in realistic contexts, explore multiple perspectives on issues, learning from errors, and emphasizing cognitive processes. The two activities I shared from the Discovery Channel website were the Make-a-Quake Earthquake Simulator and Build Your Own Roller Coaster. To me, these two activities seemed to fit the definitions posed to us in the readings.

It is always great to share our findings with each other. It’s interesting to see the wide variety of examples that each classmate brings to the discussion.

Until next time…