ull,
el.
b) EMAIL WRITING
Write an email to the manager of Jim Corbett Resort, informing him about
the above excursion and giving all the details about your stay such as the
number of students, the number of days you all will stay and any other
information you wish to share.
Answers
Answer:
Designing an Interactive Learning Environment to Support Children's Understanding in Complex Domains
Marcelo Milrad
The Institute for Media Technology (IMT) Box 450, 551 16 Jönköping Sweden E-mail: marcelo [email protected]
Background
Current and emerging technological advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) make it possible to develop interactive learning environments to support new ways of learning. Interactive learning environments (ILES) are having an increasing role in teaching and leaming and are likely to play an important role in the future (Wasson, 1997). In particular those tools that encourage and enhance discovery, creativity, thinking and expression are very much needed. The main point of our research focuses within the design of an ILE to support learning in complex domains for young learners. We argue that because children are learning for real life and preparing to solve real complex problems in the future, the complexity of the world should be taken into account much more and much earlier than usually happens.
Interactive Learning Environments and Learning Theories
Emerging trends in education are increasingly moving towards learner-centered approaches. In these, learning becomes an active process of discovery and participation based on self-motivation rather than on more passive acquaintance of facts and rules (Sfard, 1998). The role of the teacher is coming more to be seen as mentor or guide, facilitating and playing an essential role in this process. From this perspective, learning can be considered as a dynamic process in which the learner actively "constructs" new knowledge as he or she is engaged and immersed in a learning activity (Papert, 1993). The theory of constructivism is at the core of the movement to shift the center of instruction away from delivery in order to allow the leamer to actively direct and choose a personal learning path. Jonassen (1998) claims that designers committed to designing and implementing constructivist learning environments need an appropriate set of design tools and methods which are consistent with the fundamental assumptions of those environments for analyzing learning outcomes and designing constructivist learning environments.
Our approach to the design of ILEs is to strike a proper balance between the constructionist (Resnick, 1996) and the instructionism leaming approaches. Moreover, we are attempting to explore the design implications of learning theories such as constructivism and socioculturism (Nardi, 1996) that have heretofore received less attention than, say, behaviorism (upon which computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is built) and cognitive psychology (upon which intelligent tutoring systems are built). These two theoretical perspectives are consistent with each other, they just emphasize different themes: the former speaks to the individual's cognition, while the latter speaks to the contributions of the surroundings to that cognition. From socio constructivism, then, guidelines for the design of learning environments and the supporting scaffolding can be developed.
Designing an Interactive Learning Environment to Support Children's Understanding of Complexity
One of the purposes with this research is to develop an interactive learning environment to support children's understanding in the domains of environmental sciences and ecology. The basic assumption is that environmental issues will become increasingly significant and much more complex in the next century. In