In my last post I wrote a very cheery description of how we can now import animations from PowerPoint allowing you to reveal content at a controlled pace in DyKnow. Now, a skeptic might frown upon all this activity, and it's true that adding animations isn't guaranteed to create a better learning experience. In fact one study in the International Journal of Innovation and Learning I read about on Ars Technica concluded that there is a possibility that using PowerPoint animations to disclose information in a slow controlled manner may have negative impact on comprehension. But this is where DyKnow is different from simple PowerPoints.
Firstly, all the content is delivered to the students allowing them to write directly on the PowerPoint slides during the class discussion. Our antagonist now astutely points out that this is the equivalent of printing out your PowerPoints and passing them out to students before class, an interface that is significantly less complex than ours. I am a firm believer, however, in the advantage of our lecture capture and replay features, having used them on many occasions during college.
Secondly, DyKnow offers interactive possibilities that PowerPoint does not. I think it's meaningful in Dr. Berque's whitepaper that he defined progressive disclosure as a pattern of “pause, practice, and disclose.” I said before I believe the power in progressive disclosure, is not in the controlled reveal of information but in the active practice and engagement that occurs during the practice portion of the pattern. And this is where DyKnow is different. In between your "disclose" steps, you can have students work on sample problems individually or in groups. You can have students submit their solutions and have then entire class discuss them together. You can have a student work out their solution and all the other students would be getting that solution automatically via shared control.
Slowly revealing information to students runs the risk of trivializing that information. If it's so simple to follow that it barely takes engagement, why would you engage? Adding active-learning activities to lectures is so important to counter-act this tendency. Hopefully by adding functionality such as importing editable PowerPoint content and animations for images and text, you will find it much more natural to integrate these active learning activities into the flow of your PowerPoint lecture content.
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Firstly, all the content is delivered to the students allowing them to write directly on the PowerPoint slides during the class discussion. Our antagonist now astutely points out that this is the equivalent of printing out your PowerPoints and passing them out to students before class, an interface that is significantly less complex than ours. I am a firm believer, however, in the advantage of our lecture capture and replay features, having used them on many occasions during college.
Secondly, DyKnow offers interactive possibilities that PowerPoint does not. I think it's meaningful in Dr. Berque's whitepaper that he defined progressive disclosure as a pattern of “pause, practice, and disclose.” I said before I believe the power in progressive disclosure, is not in the controlled reveal of information but in the active practice and engagement that occurs during the practice portion of the pattern. And this is where DyKnow is different. In between your "disclose" steps, you can have students work on sample problems individually or in groups. You can have students submit their solutions and have then entire class discuss them together. You can have a student work out their solution and all the other students would be getting that solution automatically via shared control.
Slowly revealing information to students runs the risk of trivializing that information. If it's so simple to follow that it barely takes engagement, why would you engage? Adding active-learning activities to lectures is so important to counter-act this tendency. Hopefully by adding functionality such as importing editable PowerPoint content and animations for images and text, you will find it much more natural to integrate these active learning activities into the flow of your PowerPoint lecture content.
___________________________
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