An Interview with Muriel Wells
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “MW” refers to Muriel Wells
Int:	I am here today interviewing Muriel Wells who is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education in the areas of Literacy and ICT. Welcome Muriel.
MW:	Thank you.
Int:	How would you describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how do you think your views on this have been shaped?
MW:	My views are quite similar to the theoretical prospectus we use in teaching our students about effective teaching and learning in schools. We talk to our students about teaching their students, in beginning where the learners are. Identifying where they currently are in their learning and what are their needs and how can we help them to move on from that point in time. I try to define what my students know about literacy or ICT's, and then help them to move from that spot and learn more. The other part of my philosophy relates to students being active learners, where they are actively processing in their learning and highly engaged and involved in meaningful and relevant tasks. When they are actively learning and really engaged, then they are actively interacting with the materials or the resources and thinking quite deeply and reflectively about what they are learning.
Int:	In the unit we are talking about, you have both face to face classes and online components. What were the design considerations involved in creating the online components of the unit?
MW:	We wanted to make it visually stimulating so it was engaging for our students. We also wanted to reflect the content of the course and this happened to be middle years literacy and middle years mathematics, and middle years being students in years 5 to 9. In particular, this one was focusing on years 5 and 6, so the students were about 10 to 13 in that age group. We wanted to visually represent what would engage and interest students at that age. The images and the design that the course content is sitting within reflects that. So we have images of young people in colours that are bright and engaging for students that age. We have tried to present our content in such a way as to reflect all of those representations of what we are teaching about.
Int:	Can you talk about the way you integrate the online work that students do with the face to face classes?
MW:	In this particular unit we combine lectures and tutorials and lots of the tutorial work was… the point of reference where they started was the online materials. This was also taught in an unusual way, in that it was an intensive unit where students were learning in a three-week intensive way and they were going daily to classes. It was a lot of material and content packed into quite a short time, but it also allowed us the opportunity to work with our students quite closely, get to know them very well. What we did in our tutorials, we had a mobile lab there every day and the students were using the computers from the mobile lab of computers and working in small groups and interacting with the tasks that we had prepared online. Because we were teaching every day, there was not much time in between to prepare anything, so we had to prepare as much of our material as we could beforehand and, by having it online, it was there for the students to interact with in their tutorials quite readily.
Int:	So it was very closely integrated obviously. You developed some re-usable learning objects. What was your rationale for doing that?
MW:	Our re-usable learning objects included some multimedia and flash objects and also some digital video and the digital video was examples of effective teaching in literacy in the middle years and in mathematics working in video that had been taken of really effective teaching there too. We put snippets of that online and then had tutorial tasks and used the discussion areas where students responded to that video and talked about it in a reflective way. One of the things we want in teaching is, we want our students to become reflective practitioners who can look at their teaching, step back a little bit and think about what they would want to change and improve on to be better teachers. To start with, you are letting them do it in a less threatening way because you are looking at another teacher's work and then reflecting on that and responding. And analysing it in ways in “what was good about this teaching, what would I do differently if it was my class?” Also modelling to them some good practices, in particular teaching approaches that are used in effective teaching at this stage of schooling.
Int:	In reference to the different digital media, what do you believe was the learning value of each aspect, text, audio, video etc?
MW:	We used the multimedia objects and the video. They were the main two that were part of our course as far as the online materials. The audio was live and face-to-face and that is where the audio aspect comes into it. So the online part: as I mentioned, the video was in snippets with particular aspects of the teaching for a session of teaching. The beginning section: where a teacher is working with a whole class focus, preparing the children in the next stage, preparing them to go and work in groups or preparing them to go and work individually. We break up our video into different sections and then have support materials about those different objects that student teachers would be working with. The multimedia objects was a very interesting part of it where we worked with a multimedia developer who developed, using Director and Flash materials, examples of things kids at primary school in years 5 and 6… that they might be engaged with in order to learn about particular things. In this particular case we focused on environmental issues and we had an eco system prepared in Flash and had different activities within it for the students to be engaged in. Our students then had to reflect on how those materials would be good and how they would be effective teaching or ineffective by analysing it from a variety of perspectives. Also thinking about what value they would be for kids and their literacy learning. Even though it has particular focus of the environment, it was also about their literacy and maths, and how do you develop kids' skills within a meaningful context, and the environmental learning objects in this environmental theme allow the students to think about the literacy demands of the kids working on a topic like this. In the multimedia objects there was a mathematics one where they worked on volume and they had a quite engaging task and set at a variety of levels, so our student teachers could think about how those different levels would suit kids at these ages and about what sort of tasks were they. Were they open-ended tasks, were they closed, how might they add to them and support these particular digital objects, other things they might do with them in a classroom. We had links in there to resource materials about the environment that were created by the local environmental group in Geelong, about the Jerringot Swamplands near K-Mart. It's a very sensitive but sustainable environment where there's lots of wild life, flora and fauna that's very much in need of protection. It was giving us context for our student teachers to think about how they would teach children in schools about the literacy and maths within this environmental context. It was engaging because it had… with Flash it had interactive things, it had feedback for the kids in a very positive way. It was very colourful and entertaining as well.
Int:	In general what would you say the teachers and learners experiences of the unit were?
MW:	The student teachers said to me that they thought it was a valuable experience. They liked the way the online environment was designed within the learning module so that they navigate through it to find the discussions, to find the learning objects, the videos and the other resources materials, and the links to outside resources were very manageable for them. They had other experiences with the online environment where they said it wasn't as easy to find the materials and the resources. They liked the idea of the learning module and that was really supportive to them. They appreciated the visual aspect for themselves and it helped them think about how that would be useful with kids this age. It helped them to put themselves into the space of kids this age, because it had that feel and that look and that context that it quickly brought them to think about what kids at this age are like and what their interests are. They found it very good and the feedback from them was very positive. They were also very good at reflecting on the video and quite critical at times which was good, because they were thinking therefore about what was good and what they didn't think was good and what they might not do themselves as teachers. That was a very positive thing in a negative kind of way, but that's what we wanted them to do. We wanted them to be reflective so that was very valuable.
Int:	What about your own experience as a teacher in the unit?
MW:	It was great. To try and teach in an intensive mode every day for such a short period of time, as well as carrying out the assessment, was very intensive and time consuming and demanding. To have it pretty well prepared beforehand was very valuable. I have not written course materials in a hard copy ever, as a fairly new academic, and I was more comfortable and more experienced in working with digital materials, so it worked very well for me to be developing it in this way. I liked the fact that I could change and modify it when I wanted to. For me, that is a very important part of learning. Being able to respond to the students' needs and change things if it was appropriate was very quick and easy to do.
Int:	Are you able to tell us what impact your teaching and use of digital media might have had on students learning, say from their assessment pieces…?
MW:	They talked quite a bit about the fact that they were using the computers all the time and how good a learning experience that was for them, because not all of them had had that much experience. I had them daily working on them and doing a variety of tasks and they were saying that they were learning and picking up skills quite quickly because they were continuously using them. So that was very positive. They had not seen the potential for some of the digital things and I was able to show to them some of the opportunities of things they might do in their teaching. I also showed them some models of great teaching using ICT's from a website in the George Lucas Foundation and models of teachers doing some really challenging and exciting work with kids. I was able to open up their minds to some of the opportunities of things they might do in the future that just talking about doesn't have the same impact and effect. They found that really useful. You are able to demonstrate visually, and in a more meaningful way, the sorts of concepts that you are talking about than if you are just standing up talking to them and they are tired, and they were exhausted by the end of this year. They had to do two extra units very quickly at the end of a full year's teaching and learning. They had to be very engaged or they weren't there at all and it was very useful in keeping them on task, keeping them interested and engaged with the task so that they could learn about the content they needed to learn.
Int:	To some extent you have touched on the next question, but could you elaborate. From your experiences with DSO, what have you learned about designing and working effectively online?
MW:	I have worked online quite a lot before and I have worked with computers quite a lot. For me it was more a case of becoming familiar with the new learning environment or new management system and looking at its potential. It is not until you are engaged regularly, a bit like the students, I was also engaged very regularly building and I learnt a lot about building because I was doing a lot of it over a fairly short time. I created the learning module a number of times. I learnt some better, more efficient ways of doing it which was very helpful. And unless you are doing that quite intensively over a period, I don't know that you learn about it and realise its potential and what are the better and more efficient ways of doing things. Trying different ways of putting the materials together and then think “no, that doesn't work, I can try it another way” and that is important to be able to play around with that and get it so that it works right for a particular group of students. It won't be the same for every group, but to have the basic materials there and be able to work and closely tailor it to a group of students was important. To be able to look at options of what can be included and what can be useful. Learning more about different models of objects of the multimedia that might be useful and the different ways of using it. I then had conversations with other colleagues, one in particular who works in the visual arts area, and getting more ideas about the sorts of things that she had done and ways of using visual images, which I hadn't really done much of before. Part of literacy is visual literacy so I was also trying to engage my students with thinking about how they have to think, what they have to do, and to consider when they are teaching or developing visual literacy skills in their students in schools, so it was useful from both those perspectives.
Int:	If someone is setting out to develop and design a new unit online, what might be two key messages that you would give them?
MW:	People learn and think in different ways. They also develop in different ways so I don't think you can ever tell anyone “this is the way to go”. Some people are very organised, structured thinkers and they would plan it out carefully beforehand. I am not, clearly I am not. So for me, it is better to have a go at things, play around, change them and I would probably work in a much more unstructured way, but I still have a lot of materials I have gathered beforehand before I started to create the module of things I thought might be useful. I probably only used a quarter of what I had gathered because when it came right down to it, some things really worked better and some things fitted in better than others. But I do think you need the time to prepare yourself to sift through the essential materials that fit with your philosophy, that fit with what you want to teach and fit with that cohort of students. So there are those three ways of looking at it. For those who are more structured, then they would be better off looking at their materials again, and then designing it off line first and structuring it that way, and then creating it online. But for me, because of my computer background, I was better off doing that playing around online and recreating things, throwing them out occasionally and starting again. Also one interesting thing was learning that it was better to create my web materials in Dreamweaver on my computer beforehand, zipping it and uploading it and then making the links to the learning module afterwards. That way, all the links to the outside sites can all be correct beforehand and it is very hard to change those. I think it is quite hard to change those in DSO afterwards. They are much better changed and worked on outside DSO than uploaded.
Int:	Well that's very helpful Muriel. How do you think you would like to develop teaching and learning materials and environments into the future.
MW:	I would like to have more digital material available. I would like to be able to think of different ways of using it and trial different ways of using it. But I want to have more control. For me, I really feel I need the control over the objects and I need to be able to change and adapt them to suit what I want to do. Especially with video, I want to be able to create more of my own video and to have the software that allows me to manipulate it and recreate it as I need it and present it in different contexts or packaging. So that you have the same object but you might be getting the students to think about… the teacher talking about or doing some teaching and you might have a set of questions or materials that the students were working on, but the same thing could be recreated in different ways. But I always want the facility for me to be able to do it because I find it quite frustrating if I'm not able to have enough control over those materials and how I can present them.
Int:	Okay, are there any other comments you would like to make about your experiences?
MW:	I guess, part of what I have just said, is for me to have the software and hardware fairly close at hand and available to prepare the sort of materials I want to prepare and the sorts of resources, that would be really useful and meet my students' needs.
Int:	Thank you Muriel.
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