USING COMPLEXITY THEORY TO CONSTRUCT A DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FACILITATING EXPERIENTIAL LIFE EDUCATION PROGRAMS ON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Year 2015, Volume: 2 , 132 - 138, 01.09.2015

İ-tsun Chıang Hsiu-chi Fu Shang-ti Chen Hsin-chih Wu Sheng-hung Tsaı Mao Lıu

Abstract

E-learning has become a global trend, however, the entire globe is
facing the problems of social disruption and disorder, overwhelmed with sensual
desire, and filled with distorted sense of ethics and morality, it has a strong
need to guide the younger generation to understand the meaning and purpose of
life through life education.  Therefore,
there is an urgent need to understand how to develop, implement, and promote
experiential life education programs with technology support environment.  Complexity theory has been pervasively
applied in education and management to adapt multiple environmental changes and
multidisciplinary collaboration in recently research.  Evolving from chaos theory, complexity theory
not only keeps the unpredictability and nonlinearity in education models but
also develops mutual-adaptation, co-evolution, dynamic interaction and
self-organization.  Therefore, it is
appropriate to use this theory to construct educational models in complicate
educational areas. The study used complexity theory as the theoretical basis
and utilized a series of high-definition digital TV programs as teaching
materials to develop life experiential education courses model and understand
its effectiveness for elementary school teachers and students. The study was
conducted by observing volunteer classes to understand the design of digital
learning.  One unit of a national popular
TV program, “Let’s Play Stories”, was be utilized as the teaching
materials.  Attitudes and behaviors of
teachers and students during participating, suggestions from teachers, feelings
and learning of students, and interactions were investigated.  Purposive sampling was used to collect five
schools in northern and central Taiwan. 
Qualitative research methodology was the major research approach to
construct the teaching model. The results of the study showed that four themes,
mutual-adaptation, co-evolution, dynamic interaction and self-organization,
could be found in qualitative information from teachers, students and
volunteers.  The study help us to
understand how to establish digital learning model and effectiveness of using
complexity theory to construct a digital learning environment facilitating
experiential life education programs on elementary school teachers and students
in real teaching sites.

Keywords

Complexity, experiential education, life education

References

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