Authentic Learning

For the remainder of today (Saturday 27th April) I thought it would be of interest to do some research into understanding more about 'authentic learning.' The lecturers refer to this regularly and it's something I know very little about. I was aware that there was some useful links on the Technology Toolbox that I had briefly glanced over before now, but not in depth.

Week 8 Lecture on Authentic learning (Jenni, April 2013): gave some good examples of non meaningful tasks and word problems. "Why would your students want to care about these problems?" (Jenni, April 2013) It did make me think about how we should approach this task and looking at it from the students perspective on whether they would be interested in it or not.

We needed to ensure we were not "giving our students questions with no meaning"( Jenni, April 2013). What is the end product? These were all important questions we need to be asking oursleves throughout this task.

The lecture refers to Jan Herrington's 9 elements and that we could use these as a check list for task 3 The more of these elements our task addresses, the more authentic the task will be.

I knew that it had been mentioned that there were links and information to Jan Harringtons elements of Authentic learning on the Technology Toolbox for Educators. This would be my first point of call. I followed the link and watched a couple of the You Tube videos on authentic tasks. The first describing the characteristics of an authentic context and the second on authentic tasks.

 

 Above,YouTube video: Jan Harrington (2013) Authentic learning 2: Authentic Task, retrieved from Technology Toolbox for Educators,Murdoch University.

The video gave 3 clear examples of authentic tasks and gave you a clear idea of what was not. Jan also states that an authentic task 'should be broad enough for students to still be able to make their own decisions'. I thought this was a very important point made. We needed to be careful that our task does not end up a series of instructions on what to do and how to do it. Students need to be able to problem solve and think on their own. The task matters the most and should be completed over a longer period of time, not in only one lesson.