MOST Environments and Storytelling

MOST Environments (Multimedia environments that Organize and Support Text) was developed by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) in order to help develop literacy in young children (Bransford et al., 1996). The approach used is to organize “instruction around visually rich, meaningful 'macrocontexts' that students and teachers can mutually share and explore” (Bransford et al, 1996, p. 223).

This model was interesting from a few different perspectives:

• It reminded me again of a staple assignment in grade school where we worked in groups to 'publish' a book, using coil binding with cardboard for covers and regular computer paper for the text pages. Today there are so many more sophisticated technologies that students could use to actually publish a pretty good quality bound volume – it seems to me that this assignment would be even more appealing to students. It made me wonder how students would react to the old-school version of the assignment – which I nevertheless enjoyed. 
• The use of the puppet was interesting for me from the perspective of teaching my own (future, hypothetical) children. But it made me somewhat doubtful whether any aspect of this approach could be applied to college learners.
• At a stretch, the idea of using multimedia delivery of information to support mental model building, may be one aspect that applies to college students. I've used concept mapping as a way to get at mental model building – I used it with a 300 level honors seminar class of students. The class was discussing the topic of peer review, and students were asked to map out their current understanding of how the peer review process worked (they'd had readings assigned on this topic for that day, though none of them necessarily explicitly explained this process in great detail). Then we watched the peer review in 5 minutes video, and then students were given a different colored pen to make any adjustments to their map. Many of the students made small revisions, but the kinds of revisions were different across students. The remainder of the class was used to discuss the readings in more detail. I've also had feedback from some of the writing instructors who have used some of our videos – they suggest that the stories seem to 'really stick' with their students, many of them referring back to the videos later in discussions further along in the semester.

In terms of possible tools – I recently re-discovered Aviary's fairly full suite of tools. Considering how expensive Adobe products can be, I think this is a great free resource, though I haven't used it very much yet. There also seem to be fairly good 'freemium' concept mapping tools available either online or for download.

Reference

Bransford, J.D., Sharp, D.M., Vye, N.J. Goldman, S.R., Hasselbring, T.S., Going, L., O’Banion, K., Livernois, J., Saul, E., with the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1996). MOST environments for accelerating literacy development. In S. Vosniadour, E. De Cort, R. Glaser, & H. Mandl (eds.), International Perspectives on the Design of Technolgoy-Supported Learning Environments (pp. 223-255)