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Author: cyan677

TaiChi

Overview:

Tai Chi, as a Chinese intangible cultural heritage, carries the inheritance and development of martial arts culture and is fundamental to the development of modern martial arts.

This week we will learn about:

  • The origin and history of Tai Chi
  • Tai Chi movements
  • The benefits of Tai Chi

Our top priority is to teach the learners the basic Tai Chi moves and we will help learners to learn Tai Chi better through videos, games, PowerPoint and final assignment.

Lesson Objectives:

By the end of this class, you will be able to:

  • Can perform some basic movements of Tai chi independently.
  • The theoretical knowledge of Tai Chi and the history of Tai Chi.
  • Understand the benefits of Tai Chi for people.
  • When see one of the movements, will be able to think of which one it is, or rather know it is Tai Chi.
Big IdeaTai Chi is one of the traditional Chinese activities, an exercise that is good for physical and mental health, and learning Tai Chi will bring many benefits.
Learning OutcomesAt the end of the course, learners will be able to understand the historical story of Tai Chi, know the benefits of Tai Chi and learn the basic Tai Chi movements.
Evidence of LearningStudents will successfully complete the activities and quizzes in the course and will be able to do basic Tai Chi independently in their daily lives.
AssessmentsStudents will complete a self-assessment by completing activities, quizzes set in the course. And a video of doing Tai Chi will be shown at the final assessment.
Learning ActivitiesWatch/read videos, articles, and web pages.
Participate in interactive games and quizzes in the course.
Complete at least one of the Reflection Questions.

Mayer and Instructional Design Model:

Mayer’s principles used in our courses ( Debell, 2019):

We follow Meyer’s Coherence Principle: people learn best when irrelevant material is not included. In our courses, we make sure that all learning materials are helpful to students, and in the process of creating videos, we make sure to cut out the extras and use only the information that learners need. to ensure text and visuals that are directly related to the learning topic.

Next is the Signaling principle, meaning that they learn best when exactly what to look for is shown on the screen. We created the PowerPoint portion of the course to ensure that the important knowledge could be visualized for the students.

For the Redundancy Principle, this principle suggests that one should ideally not put narration, graphics and text together. If you already have narration and graphics, then the text above is just redundant information. However, during the video production of our course, we minimized the text in order to make the teaching of Tai Chi more detailed as well as to give the learners a clearer understanding of the Tai Chi movements when we had video and narration.

The Spatial Contiguity Principle refers to the fact that people learn best when there is close proximity between text and visuals on the screen. This principle we use for the PowerPoint in Content.

For the Temporal Contiguity Principle, during the production of the video, we made sure that our visuals and the voiceover audio were present at the same time.

In Multimedia Principle, people learn most effectively from words and pictures, not just words. That’s why we have added relevant pictures to the course content in addition to text.

In the video production, all narration voices were recorded by us personally, in line with the Voice Principle.

In addition, in the content, we used H5p to make interactive games and quiz as a course design to increase the fun and learning experience of the learners.

Instructional Design Model:

In designing the course, we used the constructive alignment model to guide students in integrating classroom activities and allowing them to learn through various activities and games. Before the course begins, we inform students of the objectives of the course, the format of the assessment, and the activities that students will need to participate in.


We also used the backwards design model to first identify expected learning goals to ensure students knew what they needed to do during the semester, then create assessments to measure student learning, and finally plan activities and lessons around the goals and assessments that would contribute to student success.

The above is the part I am responsible for in our group’s project, and this is the link to the full Group K project.

Active and Passive Learning

Through this week’s course, I believe that practice and application are very important. Students want to really learn something, they have to actively participate and not just passively listen to the lecture. Students must actively think and participate. For example, in Historia, the students are connected to the class, the teacher, and the knowledge in a relaxed way. It makes the class more engaging, and it makes the students seriously and actively participate in it, which makes them more motivated and able to learn more.

In our academic life, students need to strike a good balance between active and passive learning. Active learning is learning that can be accomplished on one’s own without the need for supervision by others. Passive learning, on the other hand, is while the learning process is initiated by someone other than the learner. First of all, in the classroom, you should listen carefully and keep up with the professor’s thoughts so that you do not miss the real key points. At the end of class, it is important to complete the learning tasks and assignments assigned by the professor. Secondly, students should take responsibility for themselves and actively explore their knowledge without aiming to complete tasks. Be active and look for answers.

The most familiar and common way we teach is that the professor is talking and the students are listening, and this is the least effective way to learn. In Gonzalez’s blog, she recounts her children’s experience with passive learning in the classroom, and it resonated with me. I had a professor in an economics class who taught in this way, with very little interaction with the students throughout the class, and by the end of the class I had learned very little that I had actually learned. I had to spend my time outside of class and find some study materials online for active learning.

Just like in Game based learning, there are activities such as group discussion, practice, flexible application, and teaching activities. In these forms, students are the masters of their own learning, they take the initiative to think and work with their hands, and in the process, their comprehension, memory, judgment, problem-solving skills and creativity are exercised. I personally prefer the discussion, mini-projects, and Anticipation Guides approach to learning. This allows us to be fully engaged in our learning and gives me a sense of control over my learning, making complex knowledge clear little by little, which is a really good feeling!

Here is the interactive video I made, I used the one used by assignment 3, I hope it looks more helpful.

Reference:

Gonzalez J, (2018), To Learn, Students Need to DO Something, retrieved from: To Learn, Students Need to DO Something | Cult of Pedagogy

Core Multimedia Skills

This is the first video that I have done and edited independently. The main content of the video teaches makeup, and the audience is those who want to learn makeup and learn makeup techniques.

Makeup is very common in our lives nowadays, but many people want to learn makeup but don’t know where to start, so I created this video and I tried to make sure I was as detailed as possible in my teaching. According to Mayer (2014)’s Segmenting Principle, I’m going to keep the video short, so I broke the video down into different segments to make sure that each segment is important. And when I made the video at the beginning, I just connected each segment together and the transitions were very stiff. In the changes I made later, I added some turning point effects between each segment to make the connections more natural and interesting.

In creating the video, I followed Mayer(2014)’s coherence principle. Avoiding useless words and images, every image and text used is helpful for the audience.
For Mayer(2014)’s redundancy principle, I would like to set up a hidden caption, but due to limited technology, I don’t know how to make it optional.

Second, I recorded voice-over narration throughout the video, and where I didn’t need it, I inserted relaxing background music to make it easier for the reader to watch. And the inserted images and my off-camera audio appear at the same time. I followed Mayer’s contiguity principles to avoid the off-camera audio not being consistent with my visuals or images. (2014)

In addition, I added interesting opening and closing credits to enhance people’s visual effect. When shooting the video, I did not use a single fixed shot, but showed more details through close up, and far away.

All in all, it was a great experience and I hope I will finish better in the future.

Reference

Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2014). Principles for Reducing Extraneous Processing in Multimedia Learning, from The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp 279 – 315

Storytelling and Generative AI Tools to generate story templates.

Stories help people connect reality and theory very well. In my major class, I had a hard time understanding some specialized theories, but if the professor told a story as a more direct example, it was easy for me to understand and made learning more interesting. Storytelling does drive our imagination, drives our thoughts, and allows us to focus better on the story.

For example, in Rich Mccue’s storytelling example, the 46-second recording showed me what the 3-2-1 Backup Rule was, but I wasn’t impressed or interested. But after watching his video, through the story he told and the corresponding pictures, I deeply understood the importance of the 3-2-1 Backup Rule and was impressed with the story he told. In his video, which satisfies my auditory and visual senses, In his description of his student standing in front of him with tears sliding down her face very slowly made me see a sad girl, as well as the description of the story of the girl waking up from a friend’s house after the fire and learning that her laptop and the hard drive she backed up her data on had been completely destroyed, I also felt that sadness and despair. He follows Mayer’s segmenting principle as well as Mayer’s coherence principle, which summarizes the topic well and highlights the video’s focus through its brief content. It also follows Mayer’s Signalling principle, adding many pictures related to the story in the video, so that the audience can better immerse themselves in the story.

In the seven TED talks, each of these seven storytelling techniques I identified with and was interested in and was really engaged in while listening to them. But if I were to choose the one that appeals to me the most, it would have to be the third one: create suspense. At the beginning of the story, the speaker tells of an assassination, and a bombing attack, creating suspense that was very intriguing to me, and I was shocked when he revealed that the assassination and bombing attack was carried out by his father.

form Zak Ebrahim ted talk

As Chibana (2015) says, a good story will always have conflict and plot. The speaker says he grew up with violence, but he did not grow up to be like his father.

Although it is stated in Mayer’s personalization principle that the narration process should be energetic and enthusiastic, it is also appropriate to change the tone according to the content of the story. For example, in Zak ebrahim’s speech, after all the difficult and painful things he went through, he was able to tell his story in such a calm tone that I was very impressed.

Next is my story template, my theme is how to complete a makeup look. When creating the story version, I tried to use DALL-E, an AI tool, to generate images. The more specific I described, the more it could generate images that fit my conditions, as well as being very detailed.

Resource: Chibana, N. (2015), 7 Storytelling Techniques Used by the Most Inspiring TED Presenters, VISME, retrieved from: 7 Storytelling Techniques Used by the Most Inspiring TED Presenters (visme.co)

About Constructive Alignment

Through this week’s study, I feel that there is a common step in a range of approaches to establishing goals.

For example, I think the constructive alignment model is a way in which the professor guides students to integrate classroom activities, and students construct meaning through various activities. The purpose of learning is not to memorize rigid knowledge, but to apply what we have learned to practice. Before the class begins, the professor informs the students of the objectives of the lesson, the form of assessment, and the activities that the students will be required to participate in, and then focuses on the themes of each unit. I have seen this pattern in this section of EDCI 337 and my EDCI 339, where the professor would give us a detailed outline at the beginning of the semester, which would have details of their weekly assignments and topics. However, in some of my economics courses, some professors would only tell us the grading criteria in advance, and the specific topics and assignments would be learned as the class progressed.

And for the backwards design model, it’s also about first identifying expected learning goals to make sure students know what all they need to do for the semester, second creating assessments to measure student learning, and then finally planning activities and lessons around the goals and assessments that will contribute to student success. In backwards design, the level of student understanding is pursued. Under a model where assessment is preferred over curriculum design, a close connection between instructional activities and learning outcomes can better facilitate students to achieve understanding and apply their knowledge to accomplish their initial goals.

No matter when and what you do, having a clear and unambiguous goal is the key to success.

In Merrill’s First Principle of Teaching, I identify with Problem/task-focused, Activation, and Integration.

Problem/task-focused is that learning can be facilitated when learners show that they are competent at the task or can solve the problem when the course or learning is completed. Learning can be facilitated when learners are engaged at the problem or task level, rather than simply at the operational action level. Learning can be facilitated when learners solve a series of problems that are clearly further along than others. This was particularly evident to me in my major economics course, where most of the economics professors would give us basic, or extended, problems. Whenever I applied what I had learned or prepped to answer these questions, I became more and more interested in learning and eager for new knowledge.

In Activation, when relevant learning experiences are recalled under guidance and activated, it can facilitate learning. When I was working on a problem, whenever I saw some topics that were familiar but I couldn’t recall, I felt tired, but once the memory was activated, it became very motivating.

For the integration principle, when learners are encouraged to integrate new knowledge into their lives or work, it promotes learning. This is something I also know well. In another of my EDCI courses, the professor asked us to create a Mini course, and I chose a piece of knowledge from economics to make the Mini course. It was an opportunity for me to open up my learning skills and delve into that knowledge, and I felt very good about it.

Blog 2: About Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia

Among the three cognitive theories in Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia, the most intuitive one for me is Limited capacity, which I understand is that there are two separate systems in the brain, one for auditory processing and one for visual processing, but people need to consume cognitive resources for cognitive processing. However, cognitive processing requires cognitive resources, and cognitive resources are limited, so the amount of information that can be processed simultaneously in each information channel is also limited.

Mayer focuses on the reduction of external cognitive load and I agree with all four principles, the most agreeable of which is the redundancy principle, according to YouTube, “less really does equal more.” ( Redundancy principle, 0:49) means that using graphics, text and narration at the same time can overwhelm the brain and make it difficult for the audience to get the point you are trying to make. When I first started learning to create PowerPoint multimedia assignments, I liked to add pictures and large paragraphs of text to the screen at the same time, along with narration, but later found that this not only made the screen look messy, but also made it difficult to fully understand the content on the screen, so later on I personally preferred to add important pictures to the screen, or just short, important text.

Here is my screencast video.

The principles of signaling, redundancy, cohesion, and contiguity, firstly, I made the screencast video concise enough and easy for the audience to understand, without irrelevant content on the screen. Secondly, I kept the text and images far apart and avoided having a lot of text and images on the same screen, and I used arrows to point out important information.

Hi, this is Cyan

My name is Cyan, and I named myself because cyan is my favorite color. I’m a senior year student. I’m currently studying in the Department of Economics of UVic. Here are my cats.

photo taken by Cyan Liu on Aug 16, 2022

There are many things I like to do. Dancing is my favorite. like k-pop and urban dance. I also like reading books, sometimes read some modern classic. sometimes just read some frivolous novel. but let me feel happy. I also like to be in a daze, don’t think about anything. I just feel comfortable to empty myself.

I chose this course because multimedia has been integrated into people’s daily life, multimedia field contains imagination and creativity, this field is constantly developing and improving.

This is a TV program projected from my home projector, which is an output device and is included in multimedia. The projector gives us a better viewing experience and a greater sense of immersion.

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