learning our ABCD's

During class this past week, we had the opportunity to role-play in order to get a better understanding of a particular concept discussed during class. In particular, instructional objectives were the focus and A,B,C,D was the concept that was to be applied to a given situation.

To give some insight, A,B,C,D represents Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree. From class discussion and some further online investigation I would say that the following represents what each of these mean:

1. Audience: The who. The objectives should say who will be addressed and any special characteristics about them.
2. Behavior: The objective should says what a learner is expected to be able to do. The objective sometimes describes the product or result of the doing.
3. Condition:The objective should describe the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.
4. Degree: The objective should describe the criteria of acceptable performance by describing how well the learner must perform in order to be considered acceptable. These should be measurable.

Given this, we grouped up and designed a learning curriculum for a particular situation. The outcome was a bit scattered in that some groups were able to describe in great detail each of the A,B,C,D's, while other groups weren't

Overall, I think this role-play experience worked out well. Before this, I had some kind of understand of what this concept was and envisioned how you might you this in designing educational media, but didn't have as clear of an understanding of its true relevance. Being able to role play gave me a better understanding of this. For example, I understand how important identifying the "Degree" piece really is. It is the evaluative piece that lets you understand whether your curriculum or instructional objectives are being met.

During class we also spoke a little bit about our digital artifacts and just briefly introduced who each of our potential audiences would be. It was rather interesting to see the varying communities that will be targeted and it made me quite interested in seeing the final projects (which are not due for quite a while).

The community that I have chosen to focus on is Texas-Mexico border children. From the Texas side, this region has the greatest percentage of children living in poverty and the greatest number without access to health care in the state of Texas. Statistics can be found here. From the Mexico side, however, the health and educational conditions are even far more tragic. Taking a look at this particular community is of particular interest to me as it where I myself grew up. It will be interesting to see if educational media is something feasible for this community and how it would be possible.

I've included some pictures of this community as it is near and dear to my heart:

Water truck being delivered in a small town in South Texas.

Homes in a "richer" colony in Matamoros, Mexico

Children helping mother at a garbage dump in Matamoros, Mexico.