CONE DALE’S EXPERIENCE

What is Dale’s Cone of Experience?

The Cone was originally developed by Edgar Dale in 1946 and was intended as a way to describe various learning experiences. Essentially, the Cone shows the progression of experiences from the most concrete (at the bottom of the cone) to the most abstract (at the top of the cone). 

Look at the picture below.

This picture shows people or ,in this case, student learning stages and divides them into several cattegories. To be abe to understand more about this Cone Dale’s Experience, let’s classify the level of students into three categories:Basic, intermediate, and advanced.

SOCIALLY DISTRIBUTED COGNITION

Distributed cognition is a psychological theory developed in the mid-1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf. cultural-historical psychology) it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework (not a method) that involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment. It has several key components:

• Embodiment of information that is embedded in representations of interaction
• Coordination of enaction among embodied agents
• Ecological contributions to a cognitive ecosystem

In a sense, it expresses cognition as the process of information that occurs from interaction with symbols in the world. It considers and labels all phenomena responsible for this processing as ecological elements of a cognitive ecosystem. The ecosystem is the environment in which ecological elements assemble and interact in respect to a specific cognitive process. Cognition is then shaped by the transduction of information across extended and embodied modalities, the representations formed as result of their interactions and the attentive distribution of those representations toward a cognitive goal.

Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.

This abstraction can be categorized into three distinct types of processes.

• Cognitive processes may be distributed across the members of a social group.
• Cognitive processes may be distributed in the sense that the operation of the cognitive system involves coordination between internal and external (material or environmental) structure.
• Processes may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of related events. 

TOP TEN USES OF VIDEO IN EDUCATION BASED ON DALE'S EXPERIENCES

Introduction

The aim of this section is to highlight the range of innovative uses of digital video in education with reference to their relative pedagogical value. The ‘Top Ten’ is a populist format but the underpinning pedagogical approach was inspired by Uskov (2005) who in his National Science Foundation project “Technology for advanced e-learning” investigated the perceived value of among video among teachers and learners. As part of his advocacy for increased use of this media he referred to Edgar Dale’s ‘Cone of Experience’ (Dale, 1969), originally developed to highlight the role of media in learning. According to Dale’s intuitive model, learners learn better by “doing” rather than through more passive experiences such as reading and observing. “Learning by doing” is nowadays often termed “experiential learning” or “action learning”. At the narrow top of Dale’s cone are experiences such as reading which are furthest removed from real life. At the broad base of the cone are immersive, contextualized learning experiences (see Fig. 1).

Revisiting this list, it seemed that Dale’s model could usefully be reinterpreted. Although originally designed to show the role of educational media somewhere between reading and real activity, the changes in video production technologies described above enabled the ‘doing’ model to be applied to a wide range of educational media approaches. It provides a way of looking at educational video based on the principle that increasing degrees of learner participation may provide increasing quality of learning. 

Fig. 1 Dale's Cone of Experience (Dale, 1969, p. 107)

• The Top Ten Countdown

The Top Ten is based on Dale’s concept that increasingly levels of activity encourage better learning. The Top Ten covers what we believe are particularly innovative applications of digital video in terms of increasing levels of student participation and (inter)activity. It will be clear there is considerable technical overlap between the various categories, and the distinction is based on pedagogical aim. As is customary, the Top Ten list will be presented in reverse order.

BENEFITS AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES OF CONSTRUCTIVISM

What are some critical perspectives?

Constructivism has been criticized on various grounds. Some of the charges that critics level against it are:

1. It's elitist. Critics say that constructivism and other "progressive" educational theories have been most successful with children from privileged backgrounds who are fortunate in having outstanding teachers, committed parents, and rich home environments. They argue that disadvantaged children, lacking such resources, benefit more from more explicit instruction. " In truth, progressivism didn't work with all "privileged" kids, just those who had advantages at home or were smart enough to do discovery learning." -E.D.Hirsch
2. Social constructivism leads to "group think." Critics say the collaborative aspects of constructivist classrooms tend to produce a "tyranny of the majority," in which a few students' voices or interpretations dominate the group's conclusions, and dissenting students are forced to conform to the emerging consensus.
3. There is little hard evidence that constructivist methods work. Critics say that constructivists, by rejecting evaluation through testing and other external criteria, have made themselves unaccountable for their students' progress. Critics also say that studies of various kinds of instruction -- in particular Project Follow Through , a long-term government initiative -- have found that students in constructivist classrooms lag behind those in more traditional classrooms in basic skills.

REFERENCES FOR THE THEORY

1. http://educapsycho.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/the-role-of-art/
2. http://youtube.com/
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAxrwScyttc
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1RgaYopQb