I chose to use Mural for this exercise because I had often seen it used as a dynamic visual aid when I’ve taken virtual face-to-face classes lead by other instructors. I’ve also seen it used as an effective collaboration tool that allows students to participate in real-time virtual group work.
My approach to learning this tool reflected some elements of Constructivism in that I had to shape my own learning journey through exploration, questioning and problem-solving. The Mural website provides may tutorials on how to create beautiful and interactive boards, which could be seen as a stand-in for an instructor. After attempting to use the basic features, I relied less on the videos and switched to a trial-and-error approach to achieve the results that I wanted. This approach could apply more to Cognitivism because I constantly adjusted the mural based on the pursuit of a mental model that I had for the finished product. The ah-ha moment I discovered was that my learning speed increase using the trail and error method vs. watching guided videos, as long as the task wasn’t too large.
Andragogy also came in to play because I had a very clear motivation for pursuing this learning goal: I wanted to create something to facilitate my lessons and make them more interactive. Therefore, I knew “why” I felt I needed to not only learn, but be able to apply the material. And while there was no collaborative work in this case, I was able to benefit from my prior experiences because I had seen examples of what I wanted to create.