Saras's question - part 2 "Keepin' it Real"

When creating websites for learning LLN embedded within a specific subject, this gives exceptional opportunities to develop particular skills within a situation the student finds relevant to their personal environment, goals and literacy practices.

“A social perspective on LLN recognises that these practices are always embedded in social contexts and purposes. This applies to LLN in everyday contexts of home, work, community, and also to LLN in educational contexts, although some practices more obviously have a purpose than others.”
Ivanic, Appleby, Hodge, Tusting and Barton (2006, p. 7)

When the “school” is not a classroom but a laptop in a kitchen or on a desk at work, creating authentic materials with an obvious purpose becomes even more important. Adult learners, being autonomous and goal-oriented, need a clear purpose for assigned tasks, or they can lose motivation (Beder, Tomkins, Medina, Riccioni, & Deng, 2006; Garrison, 1997), a major problem for distance learning.  If, for example, they are learning numeracy through horticulture, a website that allows them to learn how to calculate volumes of potting mix for their home garden or work site can give immediate, personal and practical application of the learning, and demonstrates the authenticity of the material.  For me, the Home and Learn website was a welcome quick-fix for my computer woes.

In a 2003 literature review by Herrington, Oliver and Reeves, the authors defined ten characteristics of authentic activities. Authentic activities:
1. Have real-world relevance
2. Require the student to define the tasks required for the activity
3. Involve complex activities the learner may work on over days, weeks or even months, implying a need for constant goal-checking and reassessment
4. Allow the learner access to various resources in order to investigate from multiple perspectives
5. Promote collaboration
6. Provide metacognitive development through reflection
7. Are applicable across multiple domains of life
8. Provide assessment representative of real world evaluation
9. Create end-products relevant to the learner’s goals
10. Promote diversity of outcome from multiple, original solutions (Herrington, Oliver and Reeves, 2003)

As we can see here, the need to have learning activities contextually embedded in realistic scenarios sits at the top of the list, and although the need for activities to directly reflect the learner’s goals is at number eight, as adult learners, those goals are crucial for engagement.  A website for LLN based around informal learning of a particular interest provides the learner to choose whether or not to engage with the material.  After the learner has decided that yes, this website is interesting enough to warrant further investigation, the other principles come into play. 

The importance of each successive criterion may differ according to personal ability of the learner, for instance criterion 10, where a Foundation learner may find it easier to focus on one solution rather than be presented with an array of options.  At higher levels, however, and as confidence increases, a learner might feel stifled by a single “correct” answer, and a tutor would promote critical strategies for the learner to aid selection of a particular solution – and perhaps point out that in some cases there is no one “best fit”. 

Time constraints for informal learning can differ wildly.  One learner might be studying up on numeracy skills to allow him to wow an interviewer and land him the desired job, while another learner might want to work out how to calculate dilution factors for liquid fertilisers and pesticides, with different applications needed at various times of the year.  A website with a clear progression and automated assessment might be better suited for the first learner, who wants more intense learning, while the second learner might prefer a site with basic principles that she can dip into at periodic intervals to refresh her memory, and may or may not need to learn another numeracy skill.

On a personal level, I have witnessed a learner with low self-confidence cheer up immensely after she created and printed a “simple” one page Word document of a poem she had written and – by learning a new set of skills – illustrated with a picture from the internet.  This dramatically illustrated the importance of an authentic exercise with a concrete end-product a learner could take away from the lesson.