a.) Rationale:
After reading the first chapter of All the Devils Are Here, it immediately became apparent to me that only the rarest of high school students would possibly be able to construct any meaning from this text. To be completely honest, I myself was only able to comprehend maybe 30% of what I was reading. As I continued forward in the reading, I gradually became aware that one of the biggest obstacles to my own comprehension was the complete lack of chronological order in which the events are related to the reader. To me, that was the first indication that my learning object should take the form of a timeline; I tend to be more of a linear thinker myself, and I can only imagine that a large number of my future students will share the same affliction. The other major obstacle to my own comprehension of this text was the massive amount of backstory that the authors deemed necessary to relate each of the major events leading up to the financial meltdown of 2008. The timeline that I’ve created attempts to explain the aforementioned events in the simplest possible terms for the sake of accessibility to high school students. It may not be anything close to the whole picture, but it represents just about the extent of my own ability to understand the events described in this book.
b.) Assessment:
When it comes to assessing my students understanding relating to my learning object, I realized very quickly this is probably not something that I would ever test students on in anything other than an advanced high school economics class. This would probably comprise one portion of a self-contained mini-unit that I would probably quiz students on after they had been exposed to the learning object. The quiz would be mostly comprised of closed-ended questions requiring single-word responses (“What is the name of the bank that created the first credit default swap?”, for example). At the end of the quiz, I would also include some short-answer format question prompts (“Explain what a credit default swap is”, for example) to assess the extent to which students are actually comprehending the realities behind the financial jargon and buzzwords.
c.) Explain how the learning object will be used, re-used, repurposed, easily “discoverable,” accessible, and durable.
With something as simple as a timeline of events, it should be fairly straightforward to make this learning object discoverable; I would simply upload the contents of the first 6 pages of this Word document to a website. The keywords that I’ve included at the end of the timeline should render the website fairly searchable via Google or whatever kids are using in the future. My own students would be directed to the website, where they would have a period of several days to familiarize themselves with the embedded content using a light study guide that I will give them to help direct their learning. This will all be done in preparation for the quiz that I will use to formally assess their learning.
d.) How you plan to connect your learning object to students, other ideas, or complementary learning objects.
My learning object is already specifically designed to connect these very abstract and esoteric financial concepts to high school students as much as possible. I felt it necessary to omit everything but the most important details and express them in the simplest possible terms simply for the fact that my students will probably have no background in economics to speak of. I also plan on including links on the website to complementary learning objects such as Jonathan Jarvis’ “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” and the interviews with the authors that are linked on our Curriki site. I may also design a crossword puzzle as an original complementary learning object.