Microlearning Project
Tool: H5P is a free, user-friendly website that helps people author HTML5 content to insert into their websites or LMS. What intrigued me about this site initially was the ability to make some interactive activities for users to partake in to check their learning along the way. I chose the timeline content type and sketched out a timeline of our 100x class this fall.
Reflection:
My main strategy in learning this tool was trial and error. I played around with different inputs until I got the output I desired. In this case, it was getting text in the right parts of the timeline generated by the tool. When I hit sticking points I consulted the forums to see how other users troubleshot similar issues. I didn’t read any formal documentation or watch any instructional media.
Throughout the time I spent learning how to use this tool, there were a couple of learning theories at play. Though I haven’t thought too much explicitly about behaviorism since the beginning of the course, I do think that it was somewhat applicable here. Entering text into the appropriate boxes to achieve a specific, desired outcome correlated pretty well to the machinistic behaviorist philosophy. You’re rewarded when you put text into the right boxes because the preview of the content updates to refresh the output of your input - a lot of instant gratification and conditioning to change behavior if an output isn’t matching what you expect based on your input.
Though behaviorism had a hand here, as I think it does with a lot of computer learning, constructivism and andragogy were ultimately the big learning theories present.
My experience learning this tool was self-guided. In line with constructivist thought, my ease in learning this tool is due to making connections between disparate skills I already had and applying them in a new combined context. I’ve used content management systems like WordPress before, and I’ve done some light coding before. The combination of which, experimenting on the H5P platform, guided my learning.
Andragogy, of course, also takes prior knowledge into consideration. I have skills in related tools that make learning this tool easier than it might be for others. I’m also an intrinsically motivated learner in this context, since I got to pick the tool that I learned, and am even more motivated since the mastering of this tool will immediately impact my work for the better!