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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Model Proses Kreatif Graham Wallas 1922

Rajah 1. Model Pemikiran Kreatiif Graham Wallas
Graham Wallas dilahirkan pada 31 Mei 1858 dan meninggal pada 9 Ogos 1932. Beliau merupakan seorang sosialis Inggeris, pakar psikologi dan tokoh akademik. Beliau juga telah banyak mengemukakan idea berkaitan dengan proses pemikiran kreatif.  Model proses kreatif seperti rajah 1 di atas telah diperkenalkan pada tahun 1922.
  1. Penyediaan (Preparation)- minda difokuskan kepada isu atau masalah dan dianalisis atau diteroka. Kreteria dibina untuk menganal pasti penyelesaian masalah yang boleh diteruskan. melibatkan langkah-langkah seperti membina rangka kasar, mendraf soalan dan idea-idea awal.
  2. Pengeraman (Incubation)- Individu menangguhkan proses kreativiti buat sementara dan melakukan perkara-perkara lain terdahulu. Idea dibiarkan mengeram dalam minda.
  3. Iluminasi (Illumination)- Idea-idea kreatif tercetus secara tiba-tiba dalam keadaan sedar mereka tiba-tiba mendapati idea bagaimana menyelesaikan sesuatu masalah. Pada peringkat ini individu memalui proses mengenal karekter.
  4. Verifikasi (Verification)- peringkat akhir. Idea elah disahkan, dihuraikan dan diaplikasikan. Aktiviti atau demostrasi akan dijalankan untuk melibatkan apa yang terdapat pada peringkat illuminasi atau tidak dengan keperluan kreteria yang terdapat pada peringkat persediaan.

TEAM BUILDING

Team Building refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance. Team building is pursued via a variety of practices, and can range from simple bonding exercises to complex simulations and multi-day team building retreats designed to develop a team (including group assessment and group-dynamic games), usually falling somewhere in between. It generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development, but can also be applied to sports teams, school groups, and other contexts. Team building is not to be confused with "team recreation" that consists of activities for teams that are strictly recreational. Teambuilding is an important factor in any environment, its focus is to specialize in bringing out the best in a team to ensure self development, positive communication, leadership skills and the ability to work closely together as a team to problem solve.
Work environments tend to focus on individuals and personal goals, with reward & recognition singling out the achievements of individual employees. "How to create effective teams is a challenge in every organization. Team building can also refer to the process of selecting or creating a team from scratch.

 

Reasons for Team Building

Reasons for Team Building include
§  Improving communication
§  Making the workplace more enjoyable
§  Motivating a team
§  Getting to know each other
§  Getting everyone "onto the same page", including goal setting
§  Teaching the team self-regulation strategies
§  Helping participants to learn more about themselves (strengths and weaknesses)
§  Identifying and utilizing the strengths of team members
§  Improving team productivity
§  Practicing effective collaboration with team members
What are Team Building Exercises and what is their purpose?
Team building exercises consist of a variety of tasks designed to develop group members and their ability to work together effectively. There are many types of team building activities that range from kids games to games that involve novel complex tasks and are designed for specific needs. There are also more complex team building exercises that are composed of multiple exercises such as ropes courses, corporate drumming and exercises that last over several days. The purpose of team building exercises is to assist teams in becoming cohesive units of individuals that can effectively work together to complete tasks.

 

Types of Team Building Exercises

Communication Exercise

This type of team building exercise is exactly what it sounds like. Communications exercises are problem solving activities that are geared towards improving communication skills. The issues teams encounter in these exercises are solved by communicating effectively with each other.
• Goal: Create an activity which highlights the importance of good communication in team performance and/or potential problems with communication.
Problem Solving/Decision Making Exercise
Problem Solving/Decision making exercises focus specifically on groups working together to solve difficult problems or make complex decisions. These exercises are some of the most common as they appear to have the most direct link to what employers want their teams to be able to do.
• Goal: Give team a problem in which the solution is not easily apparent or requires the team to come up with a creative solution
Planning/Adaptability Exercise
These exercises focus on aspects of planning and being adaptable to change. These are important things for teams to be able to do when they are assigned complex tasks or decisions. • Goal: Show the importance of planning before implementing a solution
Trust Exercise
A trust exercise involves engaging team members in a way that will induce trust between them. They are sometimes difficult exercises to implement as there are varying degrees of trust between individuals and varying degrees of individual comfort trusting others in general.
• Goal: Create trust between team members

Subgroups of Team Building Exercises

§  simple social activities - to encourage team members to spend time together
§  group bonding sessions - company sponsored fun activities to get to know team members (sometimes intending also to inspire creativity)
§  personal development activities - individual programs given to groups (sometimes physically challenging)
§  team development activities - group-dynamic games designed to help individuals discover how they approach a problem, how the team works together, and discover better methods
§  psychological analysis of team roles, and training in how to work better together
(and combinations of the above)
Team interaction involves "soft" interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation, leadership, and motivation - in contrast to technical skills directly involved with the job at hand. Depending on the type of team building, the novel tasks can encourage or specifically teach interpersonal team skills to increase team performance.

 

Models of Team Behavior

Team building generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development. The related field of team management refers to techniques, processes and tools for organizing and coordinating a team towards a common goal - as well as the inhibitors to teamwork and ways to remove, mitigate or overcome them.
Several well-known approaches to team management have come out of academic work.
§  The forming-storming-norming-performing model posits four stages of new team development to reach high performance. Some team activities are designed to speed up (or improve) this process in the safe team development environment.
§  Belbin Team Types can be assessed to gain insight into an individual's natural behavioral tendencies in a team context, and can be used to create and develop better functioning teams.
§  Team Sociomapping  social networks approach and improves the team performance by improvement of specific cooperation ties between the people.

 

Organizational Development

In the organizational development context, a team may embark on a process of self-assessment to gauge its effectiveness and improve its performance. To assess itself, a team seeks feedback from group members to find out both its current strengths and weakness.
To improve its current performance, feedback from the team assessment can be used to identify gaps between the desired state and the current state, and to design a gap-closure strategy. Team development can be the greater term containing this assessment and improvement actions, or as a component of organizational development.
Another way is to allow for personality assessment amongst the team members, so that they will have a better understanding of their working style, as well as their fellow team mates.
A structured teambuilding plan is a good tool to implement team bonding and thus, team awareness. These may be introduced by companies that specialize in executing teambuilding sessions, or done internally by the human resource department.
A team-building consultant is responsible for each component of a team building intervention. He will likely interact with the team once, or for a limited number of times. During these first contacts, actively assessing the team, making recommendations, and providing activities (exercises that compose a team building intervention) for the team are the main responsibilities of the consultant. Moreover, usually a written proposal is required after the evaluation process, in which the trainer indicates how he or she would go about improving the team’s performance. Once the organization and consultant determine which recommendations to utilize (if not all), the consultant is then responsible for providing a useful intervention that will transfer back into the organizational setting. This responsibility usually requires the consultant to create a detailed plan of events, while allowing for flexibility. After the intervention has been employed, the consultant will typically evaluate the team-building program and communicate the results to the organization.

Maksud IKONOGRAFI


The Ambassadors karya Holbein adalah karya yang ikonografinya masih diperdebatkan.
Ikonografi adalah cabang sejarah seni yang mempelajari identifikasi, deskripsi dan interpretasi isi gambar. Kata ikonografi berarti "penulisan gambar", dan berasam dari Yunani Kuno.
Ikonografi juga dikenali sebagai lambang-lambang seni yang digambarjkan melalui lukisan, ukiran arca dan sebagainya.
Sementara itu perkataan ikon dikenali sebagai gambar, lukisan, imej dan gambaran 
Ayat: puisi Sutardji wujud dalam konteks ritual dan kepercayaan berserta ikon yang seiring bagi dunia magis Melayu-Indonesia yang primitif;
Lukisan atau gambar yang di anggap keramat (orang yang mulia)

Thursday, April 7, 2011

A Definition of Collaborative vs Cooperative Learning


Ted Panitz (1996)
I have been searching for many years for the Holy Grail of interactive learning, a distinction between collaborative and cooperative learning definitions. I am getting closer to my elusive goal all the time but I am still not completely satisfied with my perception of the two concepts. I believe my confusion arises when I look at processes associated with each concept and see some overlap or inter-concept usage. I will make a humble attempt to clarify this question by presenting my definitions and reviewing those of other authors who have helped clarify my thinking.
Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle whereas cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of an end product or goal.
Collaborative learning (CL) is a personal philosophy, not just a classroom technique. In all situations where people come together in groups, it suggests a way of dealing with people which respects and highlights individual group members' abilities and contributions. There is a sharing of authority and acceptance of responsibility among group members for the groups actions. The underlying premise of collaborative learning is based upon consensus building through cooperation by group members, in contrast to competition in which individuals best other group members. CL practitioners apply this philosophy in the classroom, at committee meetings, with community groups, within their families and generally as a way of living with and dealing with other people.
Cooperative learning is defined by a set of processes which help people interact together in order to accomplish a specific goal or develop an end product which is usually content specific. It is more directive than a collaboratve system of governance and closely controlled by the teacher. While there are many mechanisms for group analysis and introspection the fundamental approach is teacher centered whereas collaborative learning is more student centered.
Spencer Kagan in an article in Educational Leadership (Dec/Jan 1989/1990) provides an excellent definition of cooperative learning by looking at general structures which can be applied to any situation. His definition provides an unbrella for the work cooperative learning specialists including the Johnsons, Slavin, Cooper, Graves and Graves, Millis, etc. It follows below:
"The structural approach to cooperative learning is based on the creation, analysis and systematic application of structures, or content-free ways of organizing social interaction in the classroom. Structures usually involve a series of steps, with proscribed behavior at each step. An important cornerstone of the approach is the distinction between "structures" and "activities".
"To illustrate, teachers can design many excellent cooperative activities, such as making a team mural or a quilt. Such activities almost always have a specific content-bound objective and thus cannot be used to deliver a range of academic content. Structures may be used repeatedly with almost any subject matter, at a wide range of grade levels and at various points in a lesson plan."
John Myers (Cooperative Learning vol 11 #4 July 1991) points out that the dictionary definitions of "collaboration", derived from its Latin root, focus on the process of working together; the root word for "cooperation" stresses the product of such work. Co-operative learning has largely American roots from the philosophical writings of John Dewey stressing the social nature of learning and the work on group dynamics by Kurt Lewin. Collaborative learning has British roots, based on the work of English teachers exploring ways to help students respond to literature by taking a more active role in their own learning. The cooperative learning tradition tends to use quantitative methods which look at achievement: i.e., the product of learning. The collaborative tradition takes a more qualitative approach, analyzing student talk in response to a piece of literature or a primary source in history. Myers points out some differences between the two concepts:
"Supporters of co-operative learning tend to be more teacher-centered, for example when forming heterogeneous groups, structuring positive inter- dependence, and teaching co-operative skills. Collaborative learning advocates distrust structure and allow students more say if forming friendhip and interest groups. Student talk is stressed as a means for working things out. Discovery and contextural approaches are used to teach interpersonal skills."
"Such differences can lead to disagreements.... I contend the dispute is not about research, but more about the morality of what should happen in the schools. Beliefs as to whast should happen in the schools can be viewed as a continuum of orientations toward curriculum from "transmission" to "transaction" to "transmission". At one end is the transmission position. As the name suggests, the aim of this orientation is to transmit knowledge to students in the form of facts, skills and values. The transformation position at the other end of the continuum stresses personal and social change in which the person is said to be interrelated with the environment rather than having control over it. The aim of this orientation is self-actualization, personal or organizational change."
Rocky Rockwood (National Teaching and Learning Forum vol 4 #6, 1995 part 1) describes the differences by acknowledging the parallels they both have in that they both use groups, both assign specific tasks, and both have the groups share and compare their procedures and conclusions in plenary class sessions. The major difference lies in the fact that cooperative deals exclusively with traditional (canonical) knowledge while collaborative ties into the social constructivist movement, asserting that both knowledge and authority of knowledge have changed dramatically in the last century. "The result has been a transition from "foundational (cognitive) understanding of knowledge", to a nonfoundational ground where "we understand knowledge to be a social construct and learning a social process" (Brufee, Collaborative learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, 1993). Rockwood states:
"In the ideal collaborative environment, the authority for testing and determining the appropriateness of the group product rests with, first, the small group, second, the plenary group (the whole class) and finally (but always understood to be subject to challenge and revision) the requisite knowledge community (i.e. the discipline: geography, history, biology etc.) The concept of non- foundational knowledge challenges not only the product acquired, but also the process employed in the acquisition of foundational knowledge."
"Most importantly, in cooperative, the authority remains with the instructor, who retains ownership of the task, which involves either a closed or a closable (that is to say foundational) problem ( the instructor knows or can predict the answer). In collaborative, the instructor--once the task is set-- transfers all authority to the group.In the ideal, the group's task is always open ended."
"Seen from this perspective, cooperative does not empower students. It employs them to serve the instructor's ends and produces a "right" or acceptable answer. Collaborative does truly empower and braves all the risks of empowerment (for example, having the group or class agree to an embarrassingly simplistic or unconvincing position or produce a solution in conflict with the instructor's)."
"Every person, Brufee holds, belongs to several "interpretative or knowledge communities" that share vocabularies, points of view, histories, values, conventions and interests. The job of the instructor id to help students learn to negotiate the boundaries between the communities they already belong to and the community represented by the teacher's academic discipline, which the students want to join. Every knowledge community has a core of foundational knowledge that its members consider as given (but not necessarily absolute). To function independently within a knowledge community, the fledgling scholar must master enough material to become conversant with the community."
Rockwood concludes:
"In my teaching experience, cooperative represents the best means to approach mastery of foundational knowledge. Once students become reasonably conversant, they are ready for collaborative, ready to discuss and assess,...."
Myers suggests use of the "transaction" orientation as a compromise between taking hard positions advocating either methodology.
"This orientation views education as a dialogue between the student and the curriculum. Students are viewed as problem solvers. Problem solving and inquiry approaches stressing cognitive skills and the ideas of Vygotsky, Piaget, Kohlberg and Bruner are linked to transaction. This perspective views teaching as a "conversation" in which teachers and students learn together through a process of negotiation with the curriculum to develop a shared view of the world."
It is clear to me that in undertaking the exercize of defining differences between the two ideas we run the risk of polarizing the educational community into a we versus them mentality. There are so many benefits which acrue from both ideas that it would be a shame to lose any advantage gained from the student-student-teacher interactions created by both methods. We must be careful to avoid a one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to education paradigms.
As a final thought, I think it behooves teachers to educate themselves about the myriad of techniques and philosophies which create interactive environments where students take more responsibility for their own learning and that of their peers. Then it will become possible to pick and chose those methods which best fit a particular educational goal or community of learners.