World-Shaker: Five Tips for Faculty Working with an Educational Technology Designer
1) Trust me. I know how to use at least two different learning management systems, including the one at our school. I can train you to use at least a dozen different technologies to help you create interesting multimedia or content for your online course. I’m familiar with all the things that do…
All five … wow, do I relate!
Source: world-shaker
“Good going! You just earned your first 10 skill points.
“At Duolingo you learn by mastering skills. Complete the skill tree to become proficient in Spanish.”
Is there any way humans learn other than “mastering skills”?
Why teaching is hard
One of the hardest things for an expert in any field to remember is how it feels to be a novice in that field. Once you’ve gained enough experience that you start seeing the world in a different way, the world simply doesn’t look the same anymore.
This is a short clip from the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Host Jad Abumrad is interviewing pianist Jeffrey Swann about Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung. Listen as Swann tries to demonstrate Wagner’s use of leitmotif by playing two variations of the spear motif from Die Walküre.
Jad gives a small sigh of frustration before he bravely admits, “See, I can’t hear the difference there.” Swann offers to deconstruct it for him, and we go from bewilderment to an “aha!” moment in less than 30 seconds.
This whole Radiolab podcast (“The Ring and I”) is pretty cool, but Jad’s “aha!” moment really jumped out at me as a teacher because, even though I know a bit about the concept of leitmotif (and I’ve seen the Ring live and listened to it on the radio and CD), I did not quite grasp right away what Swann was trying to demonstrate either. I had the same “aha!” moment right along with Jad.
Swann had to turn off his “expert” ears, and present the spear motif in a way that “novice” ears could “hear” it. That’s why teaching is hard, but why those “aha!” moments with learners can be so awesome!
Source: radiolab.org
Ensuring student success – Students are not to blame
Many students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, that each one of them has a talent, each of one them has a capacity to develop – intellectually and emotionally – then it follows that each one should be given a fair chance to succeed.
— Arshad Ahmad, president, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Canada
Why student success is such a radical idea
MIT recently announced its plans to offer its free online course materials with the opportunity to earn certificates of completion through its new MITx platform.
Sebastian Thrun recently announced he is leaving Stanford to offer free online courses through a platform called Udacity.com, which also will offer certificates of completion.
Both MITx and Udacity are experiments in offering online learning to large numbers of students for free, along with some kind of “official” recognition of achievement. One way they differ is in their orientation toward student success and completion.
MIT emphasized the rigor of its courses by pointing out that not all students will be successful:
“Reif emphasizes that the [MITx] courses will be built with MIT-grade difficulty. Not everyone will be able to pass them. But, he says, ‘we believe strongly that anyone in the world who can dedicate themselves and learn this material should be given a credential.’”
Chronicle: MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
Thrun reflected on his own realization that weeding out students does not promote learning:
“In all my life of teaching, my 20 years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I had always been a tough teacher. I had always given students really hard questions, I had always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of ‘weeding.’ This was an open university. There was no reason to reduce class size. There was no certificate to be earned. And here I was teaching a ‘weeder’ class. Then I started to realize that we set up students not for success but for failure. We really empowered the professors by looking smart, and we don’t really help the students to become smart.”
MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn.
It’s no surprise that Thrun is leaving Stanford to pursue his vision on his own terms. Institutions and the academics within them are heavily invested in their own prestige and exclusivity. Even as they experiment with new learning formats, they measure the quality of their program by guaranteeing failure for some and success for others. Thrun takes the view that the success of his program is vested in the success of his students. This radical idea simply isn’t compatible with the mission of an institution like Stanford.
Of course it is the prestige of Thrun’s status as a now-former Stanford professor that enables him to be taken seriously, as is his role as a Google Fellow and the connections that brings (Google founder Sergey Brin is featured in a Udacity.com video). He’s not just some guy recording math lessons on YouTube, though Sal Khan and the Khan Academy have been part of his inspiration. The difference, though, is in how Thrun is using that prestige to create a platform that promotes successful learners.
The future will bring many more experiments and many more radical ideas designed to bring online learning and higher education to vast numbers of students. If you’re going to teach the world, maybe you should start out by expecting success. It will be quite a different world when education is no longer a zero-sum game.
- Students are drawn to hot technologies, but they rely on more traditional devices
- Students report technology delivers major academic benefits
- Students report uneven perceptions of institutions’ and instructors’ use of technology
- Facebook generation students juggle personal and academic interactions
- Students prefer, and say they learn more in, classes with online components
— ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 Report
What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part.
It takes two: Brains come wired for cooperation, neuroscientists discover (via wildcat2030)
If vertebrate “brains come wired for cooperation,” as reported in this research, why is it that students so often resist working in groups? The answer is simple: schooling and other mechanisms of our culture have taught us to prefer to behave independently rather than cooperatively. Most teachers reward individual effort and discourage cooperative behavior, and our students come to expect this as normal. So your cooperative activity is going against the conditioning your students have received for the past dozen years or so. It’s going to take a lot more than one activity in one course in one semester for students to unlearn what they have been taught, even if they originally may have been predisposed for cooperation.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Source: sciencedaily.com
Your request has been received
Dear Student:
Thank you for contacting me by email. This is an acknowledgement to let you know I have received your request. I make every effort to respond personally to every student email within 36 hours (excluding weekends and official holidays). There is no need to send multiple requests for assistance.
I am very sorry to hear about the challenge you are currently facing. If you have an urgent technical problem, please contact the helpdesk at helpdesk@xyz.edu. You may also use the course Q&A forum where your classmates may be able to help you out. Many problems can also be resolved easily by doing a simple Google search. If you are encountering a problem, you may be surprised to discover that someone somewhere on the Internet has had the same problem and posted a solution. In the meantime, you may also want to consider that there are millions of other computers in the world, and you may know someone who will let you borrow one in order to complete your assignment. Computer labs and libraries seem especially generous with their computers.
When I send my prompt reply to your request, I will want to know a very detailed description of the problem, and a detailed list of the multiple steps you took to resolve the issue on your own other than your frantic email to me in the middle of the night. So please expect my response soon, and use your time until then productively. I hope you will consider the next 36 hours as an opportunity for individual learning and personal growth. By the end of your academic career, you may even look back on this moment and see it as a pivotal step on your path toward self-reliance and genuine independence that set you on a journey to success a learner and as an adult with aspirations of gainful employment after graduation. It is exactly that kind of personal enrichment I have dedicated myself to in my teaching career, and try to provide such opportunities to all of my students. Not all of them are as appreciative as I had hoped, but I know you are a truly exceptional student who looks for every opportunity to develop your skills and become a multi-faceted individual.
We will both be very happy if you have already resolved your issue by the time you receive my response, so that we can spend our time instead discussing all the things you have learned from this course. I look forward to our exchange at some time in the near future.
Sincerely
Your dedicated instructor
:-)
Natural brain state is primed to learn | New Scientist
STUDYING for an exam? Begin by thinking your way into a learning state.
Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. “But no one has looked at the preparedness state,” says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner.”
Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.
Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. “Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response,” suggests Gabrieli.
To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants’ memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. “There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task,” Gabrieli says.
Original paper here.
This will be a fascinating line of research to follow. What conditions create that state of readiness in the first place? What conditions inhibit it? How could we identify this kind of readiness behaviorially? While it would be premature to draw conclusions about how this applies to classroom practice, it certainly does raise some interesting possibilities about what activities do (or do not) promote this state of readiness.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
We need to remember that Play is not just for children!
we love to play.
In fact, play is HOW we learn much about our world in early childhood
Then compulsory education teaches us that play is what disrupts learning.
Sigh.
Source: teachingliteracy
Pew: College students and technology
Community college students and device ownership:
- 67% have desktop computer;
- 70% laptop;
- 72% ipod/mp3 player;
- 94% cell phone.
So tell me again please why online courses and learning management systems are still designed around a desktop paradigm?
Neuroscientists at Princeton suggest in a new paper that environment is a factor in increase or decrease in the number of new neurons in the brain. High-threat environments lead to the suppression of neurogenesis in the hippocampus, while high-reward environments favor the growth of new neurons. The authors see this as part of the way that the brain prepares for continued stress or reward, leading to adaptive behaviors: inhibition in the stressful environment, and exploration in the rewarding environments.
High-threat environment = suppression of new neurons = reduced cognitive and learning capacity = reduced exploration = increased chance of survival.
High-reward environment = production of new neurons = increased cognitive and learning capacity = increased exploration = increased chance of finding food and mates.
The fact that stress and reward modulate adult neurogenesis (and results in adaptive behaviors) is interesting enough. I have heard often about the growth of new neurons in the brain, but I never thought about the number of new neurons being variable. Think about what that might indicate about how environments contribute to reduced or increased capacity for learning in adult humans.
Assume for a moment that the same factors play a similar role in humans that they do in other mammals (a leap, I know, but …). It would support the common-sense notion that high-stress, low-reward environments result in a reduced the capacity for learning, while low-stress, high-reward environments increase it — and explains it by pointing to an increase or decrease in the number of new neurons in the hippocampus that are available to support learning.
Glasper, E.R., Schoenfeld, T.J., and Gould, E. (In press). Adult neurogenesis: Optimizing hippocampal function to suit the environment. Behavioural Brain Research. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.05.013
Assessment for online teaching and learning
Discussion post from a professional development course for online community college teachers on assessment, grading, and feedback:
The administrators want “data” they can show to their “stakeholders” (not my favorite word) to demonstrate the “effectiveness” of teaching and learning. As you know, I take a rather … ahem … non-traditional approach to this topic, which is one of the reasons I was asked to develop this course. My own personal view is that “data” that show that students scored 80 percent on a test before, and then 90 percent on a test later, doesn’t really say much about the effectiveness of teaching and learning, unless what you’re teaching your students to learn how to take multiple-choice tests.
There are a whole series of issues here involving test validity, levels of knowledge that can be assessed, learning domains, learning styles, expectations of the discipline, accreditation requirements, learner preparation and prior knowledge, and so forth. Most administrators are not “real” educators <grin> and come from the epistemological view that quantitative data from test scores are an objective measurement of real learning. I take the view that assessing through multiple choice tests — especially in areas such as the humanities — is never truly objective, and is probably not even measuring the learning that actually happening.
We have to play the hand we’re dealt. If they want multiple choice tests, give it to them. It is very unlikely you will persuade a committee to take an alternative approach, since these tests are cheap and easy to administer, and everyone can agree that 90 is a higher score than 80 (probably the real reasons they are used). So I give them all the spreadsheets they want. Then I go about subverting the system by focusing my efforts on authentic assessment models, such as student portfolios or whatever. A funny thing happens. The administrators who really lack the imagination to see assessment as anything but a spreadsheet get an opportunity to see what authentic assessment looks like, and they love it! They want to host portfolio shows and invite their “stakeholders,” and put student videos on the campus YouTube site, along with PowerPoint presentations and photographs of smiling students with their projects, and otherwise show the world what their students can actually DO!
So that’s my strategy. Give them what they ask for, then SHOW them what my students can actually DO. I don’t know if they ever really understand it as being “real” assessment, but they usually dig it and can see the benefit to the institution (whether or not they see the benefit for the learners). I’d rather work the fringe, wiggle through the gaps, and play within whatever sandbox they give me, than try to get them to imagine something about learning they’ve probably never experienced themselves.
The line for co-conspirators forms to the left. :-)
We’re not clueless about how the brain processes information. For example, we know something about the brain’s performance envelope, which is as follows: The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion. As I was writing Brain Rules, it hit me [that] if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain is naturally good at doing, you would design something like a classroom.
Source: schoolbriefing.com
