Unit Five: The Pathfinder Template

Go to ETAP 623 Spring 2012

Go to Building a Pathfinder as a Course Coordination and Teaching Tool

Target Objective

Develop a Pathfinder Template that will define the structure of the research to be constructed and shared by faculty teaching multi-section courses.

Unit Objectives

Generate an organization strategy for the pathfinder
Develop a Table of Contents
Understand Communities of Practice

Let's Get Started

Watch the following video:TED in Half-Ken Robinson-Creativity in Education

Ken Robinson was Professor of Education at Warwick University in the U.K. He is an expert in the field of creativity and innovation, and is the author of several best selling books including "The Arts in Schools: Principles, Practice and Provision" and he is a TED speaker. On this video he wants us to re-think our incredible human capacities and he says:

"I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology one in which we start to reconstruct our conception of the richness of human capacity ... we have to re-think the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

Do Some Research

Visit the following site to familiarize yourself with different pathfinder styles: The Pathfinder Project

Visit the University of Idaho's Information Literacy Site. Each Module provides a wealth of knowledge and information.

Read the following e-learning paper on Communities of Practice and virtual learning communities: benefits, barriers and success factors by Pat Gannon-Leary and Elsa Fontainha.

Reflect

Think about how you would go about collaborating and sharing your template. Consider the use of the Course Management System (CMS) at your institution via the Learning Object Repository (LOR), using "Google docs", or using "drop box" among many. For this mini course I will be using this wiki space.

Sample Pathfinder

The development of this pathfinder is grounded on the notion that the power of great education is intimately bound to effective course coordination through the sharing of resources, knowledge, and experiences among its faculty.

The use of a pathfinder for course coordination changes the rules of engagement. It presupposes that we each bring to the conversation a different set of skills, knowledge, experiences, and expertise. It requires that we draw from our past experiences to construct the present and prepare our students for the future.