Author: uvicmkim

For this blog post the video I chose was Joshua Weissman’s ‘The Only Knife Skills Guide You Need’ (Linked and cited below)

Prompt 1:

The video that I chose does not have inherent interactivity. The 9.6 article makes the point that for something to have “Inherent Interactivity” (Bates 9.6.2.1) there must be something that actively forces the learners to interact with that piece of media. This can be done in many ways, for instance by halting progress until a certain level of understanding is gained by the learners. Unfortunately,  Both the short length of the video, and the nature of videos in general, make it hard for interaction to be forced. 

Prompt 2:

While we will be guiding learners as they go through the course, the video itself does encourage “user-generated interaction.” (Bates 9.6.2.3) Joshua will often address the audience as “you.” For example when he said “you’re literally picking the knife up and…” (Weissman 3:53) by inserting the audience into the equation he is encouraging them to try things. So for that reason I believe that the learner’s response to video, if we were not providing any guidance, would be to mimic Joshua by doing things like finding their knife grip or choosing their knife.

Prompt 3:

I feel that out of the listed interaction types most videos, including this one, would fall into the “Designed interactivity” (Bates 9.6.2.2) section. The videos we will be using in our learning resource will also be accompanied by activities and assessment designed by us. For example: when Joshua is talking about chopping techniques we will have the video there as a visual for the learners, but the interactivity will come from us asking learners to watch the video, test out the different methods, and choose which one they like best. In the case of our learning resource, there will be learners who may be picking up knives for the first time, or some who have gotten used to a certain cutting technique that could be improved upon. In these cases the visuals a professional video provides are invaluable, so if we were asking learners to learn about and perform a task it would be best for us to design that learning experience around a video like Joshua Weissman’s.

Prompt 6:

While the camera angles are great for viewers to see how to do every technique there is no inherent way for viewers to assess themselves. One of the advantages of YouTube is that one of its built-in features allows for what the article refers to as “Student – student interaction” (Bates 9.6.1.3). The article states that “Merely putting students together in a group… is not likely to lead to high quality learning,” and admittedly YouTube’s comment section is essentially just putting random students together. If Joshua wanted to increase the quality of the interaction that viewers have with the video by providing the commenters with a topic for discussions. Different people have different knives, knife sharpness, cutting boards etc. So if there was a call for people to comment how successful their knife use attempts were, and also their own kitchen situation, it would lead to a higher level of learning for all viewers.

Citations:

Joshua Weissman. (Jan 20, 2020). The Only Knife Skills Guide You Need [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoqVGdmVlKk

Bates, A. W. (T. (2019, October 10). 9.6 interaction. Teaching in a Digital Age Second Edition. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/chapter/pedagogical-roles-for-text-audio-and-video/

When it comes to learning every person approaches it differently. Whether that be because of their own preferences or because of some other factor that requires them to learn in a certain way. For our interactive learning resource we want to take into account as many of these possible situations as possible to create an inclusive resource. Luckily for us there are already a lot of things in place to make this relatively easy for us. When it comes to teaching students in an online space many accessibility features are there for our use. Read aloud is a browser extension that reads out articles for the visually impaired, and YouTube has auto generated subtitles. However, there is one major potential barrier for some learners.

Our resource will take the form of a google classroom wherein learners will be led around the many different pages where they will learn to cook, and by the end we want our learners to be able to cook a meal on their own. We plan to give a recipe to learners but this opens up the possibility for some students to run into a barrier: dietary restrictions. Throughout our course, learners will be taught many lessons and a byproduct of our course being about cooking is that a lot of those lessons will require tasting their food. Things like how to season food is impossible to teach without the students using their own sense of taste and not accounting for dietary restrictions would be completely excluding those with food allergies or certain conditions from the course. Making sure our recipes are inclusive for all dietary restrictions is a must and the best way for us to do so is to provide substitution options. Giving students a way to remove parts of the recipe that would be a barrier to their learning, while also creating a completed dish is how we will make our course more inclusive.

prompt: Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use?  Use the language you learned in this unit.

A learning challenge I overcame was learning the Assembly coding language in CSC 230. For context Assembly is a programming language, similar to Java or Python, that is extremely bare bones. Unlike the other languages I had learned up to that point there were very few tools at my disposal. As an example a loop in Python can be done by typing in one key word “for”, which tells the system that the following code segment is to be repeated a certain amount of times as specified by given parameters. In assembly however there is no simple keyword to create such a loop and on top of specifying parameters, and the code you want repeated, you must also create the logic that the system will use to check those parameters and repeat the code if necessary.

My main problem when learning Assembly (ASM) was that I wasn’t trying to understand it by using the knowledge I had gained thus far, I was simply trying to learn it as an isolated topic. Similar to the backwards bicycle example, my thinking had become too rigid and I was having trouble relating the new ideas to those that I already had embedded in my memory. It was a TA in a lab who really helped me connect the dots and understand where I was going wrong, and his style of teaching is what I can now recognize as a cognitive approach. As stated in the article Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, cognitivism places an emphasis on connecting new and prior knowledge to “…identify and illustrate prerequisite relationships.” The TA explained ASM to me in a way that allowed me to see the more rudimentary ASM code in the same way that I had already learned to see code in Python. By showing me how to relate ASM to the mental structures I had already created in past classes my understanding of the topic increased greatly. Moving forward, as I was taught new techniques in ASM they were much easier to interpret and understand when I used the cognitive approach he showed me to connect them back to my prior knowledge.

Hi all my name is Matthew Kim. This will be my first introduction post in EDCI 335. I’m a 3rd year computer science major originally from Calgary, AB. I hope to have a good semester and learn a lot in this course.