Many of the theories we covered in this module felt like they were formalizing things that seemed intuitive – all of these things I already knew, but hadn’t put into words. What stood out was how wasteful text can be to the educational process when learning something from a video presentation. When I read about the redundancy principle it felt as if I had a ‘duh’ moment where I was able to tie back that formalized knowledge to so many first-hand experiences I had in lecture – I related to all the times I felt lost and confused while there was a wall of text being displayed by a projector while the professor was seemingly speaking in Gaelic.
Being overwhelmed in the context of education is something I have felt many times – usually when I approach any topic for the first time I panic and a million and one thoughts go through my mind. Sure, I can contribute much of that to other issues, more personal issues – but I do feel a large part of them are formalized by the concepts covered by the Cognitive Load Theory. The idea of us only having so much bandwidth to process new information, and how the familiarity with the material being taught dictates how much of this bandwidth is used is something I relate to. Further, this bandwidth can be taken up by many wasteful things before you even factor in the load of the material you are trying to understand and play with.
The more that I think about my time in education the more I realize how much extraneous cognitive load has been a detriment to me personally – specifically because of having ADHD. Extraneous cognitive load seems to be a huge detriment to me as I mostly related to the importance of the coherence principle (staying on topic), signaling principle (highlight key bits of info when presented with a lot of it), and pretty much all the other principles relating to extraneous cognitive load.
Enough of my random ramblings about this weeks reading though… onto my screen cast!
I found the screen cast pretty challenging – more challenging than I expected. I have experience streaming and taking part in podcasts, but it was a very different experience trying to record something with the sole purpose of teaching a concept.
My main goals were to keep things on track as much as possible, not to overwhelm anyone unfamiliar with the topic, and to keep visuals clean and concise as possible. I tailored the screen cast to keep the extraneous cognitive load as low as possible.
I considered the audience of the screen cast to be my peer learning group. With most of them being in computer science I imagined them to be familiar with what I was covering, but I also knew there was a student who wasn’t, so I tried to keep the topic as non-technical as I could, and more theoretical. (Hopefully interesting as well!)
Anyways, thanks for taking your time sifting through this. I’m curious about everyone’s experiences with extraneous cognitive load in specific – let me know about a time in your educational pursuits where you can remember it causing you as many troubles as it has caused me!
Hi Markus,
I like that you accommodated your screencast content to be more non-technical for those who might not be familiar with what you are talking about. Because I think the intrinsic load of what you are trying to teach is fairly high already you were able to minimize that. Saying that though I still had no idea what you were talking about (I am not in computer science) haha nice try though. Your screencast was very relaxing.
I like that you went into your personal experiences to describe examples of load theory. To answer your question: I had experiences with extraneous load when it came to teachers who began to teach things that weren’t a part of our learning curriculum. They would slip up and start to teach ahead when the unit or whatever we were working on didn’t include that.
Now, I have a question for you.
How would you label your video perhaps? What would you title it so students could decide if this was at their level or not?
Nice blog post!
Andrea,
I appreciate you letting me know you were lost during my screencast! Ill work on considering people with no knowledge on the subject even more in that case – Im glad you at least found it relaxing… silver linings! Maybe I should go into the ASMR game or something lol.
I know exactly what you mean about teachers/educators jumping ahead in the course material leaving you feeling overwhelmed and lost. I’d like to think this was just brought on by their enthusiasm more than anything.
I suppose I would label the screencast I made “Abstract Rambling on the Idea of Vectors” … I think it intrinsically filters out the non-target audience.
Hi Markus, I really enjoyed your screencast on vectors. The way you broke down the concept of direction was super clear, and it made it much easier to follow along without getting overwhelmed by too much text or complex equations. That’s a great use of the Coherence Principle we learned about. I know from my own experience, that explaining abstract concepts like vectors can be tricky, but you nailed it. The way you segmented the information into small, digestible steps was super effective and kept everything clear. I also loved how you asked that reflective question at the end about moving the vector, it really got me thinking and connected to Active Processing.
I love how relaxing your video is since the topic you’re talking about might be very foreign for some people. By keeping your video minimal, you’re able to show rudunancy principle. I like how you applied Voice principle in your screencast. It feels like you’re my personal tutor and I’m watching your podcast. Granted, I don’t like physics but, I feel like I learnt something. Also talking about magnitude and direction reminded me of Vector from Desciplable Me (hahaha).
To answer your question, I think the vectors 1 and 2 are the same vector. You define a vector by magnitude and direction. Well, they have the same magnitude and direction. So, they would be the same 😀 (I hope I got that right lol)
Very insightful blog post 1 Markus! I completely agree that cognitive load can be a detriment. I appreciate that you kept your visuals clean and concise so that somebody does not get overwhelmed in understanding how to use the learning tool you covered in your screencast. By not making things as technical I was able to understand better because I find that I can relate to the theoretical examples provided.