Last week I attended the ED-MEDIA conference in Honolulu, the highly productive conference sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). I had attended in 2007 in Vancouver and knew it would be great. I took notes on all the sessions and the many things I’ve learned, so much that it would make this post WAY too long! So you can read my full report if you wish — I will be later developing some of the ideas into individual posts.
It was most exciting to meet some of the people I only know from online, including George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Kristina Hoeppner, and Alan Levine. Plus I gained great respect for the work and delightful conversation of Nancy White and Tony Hirst. The beautiful setting was an enhancement rather than a distraction, and our mile-plus walk to dinner one night while talking teaching, technology, and more was a highlight of my time there.
My first technology-related experience, however, was on the plane getting here from San Diego. The flight was 5 1/2 hours, and during that time total strangers sat next to each other without ever introducing themselves, sharing adjacent space. Gradually I noticed some children giggling nearby. I looked over and they were, I thought, playing Nintendo. But when I peeked, I saw that they were writing on the screen, and I soon realized that many children on the plane had Nintendos and were using its wi-fi pictochat feature to write to each other. After an hour or so, children were exchanging information about their seat locations, and were getting up and saying hi. At one point there were kids standing in the aisle and the flight attendant had to ask them to sit down so she could serve food. By the time they had to shut off their devices for landing, they knew where everyone was staying in Hawaii and had arranged playdates if their hotels were near each other, forcing the parents to actually meet each other. The kids used technology to create society on the plane, where adults only endured the enforced company of others.
Last year, for my onsite class, I used Moodle’s glossary function to have students create an annotated art collection. Although I used it occasionally in lecture, the outcomes for its use were not very clear — we were mostly just experimenting with the technology. I liked what students found to post, though, and what they said about their items.
For some time in my Moodle discussion forums, I’ve been using a two-step system. Each week has its own forum in the simple format. I post a visual or video prompt, asking a very open question such as “how does this connect to our reading this week?” They are required to make their first post by Wednesday midnight. I come in on Thursday, summarize the discussion, and take it to the next level through quoting them and asking questions designed to deepen the discussion. They have till Sunday night to respond.
A couple of weeks ago, I explained what I do in an Elluminate session for our Program for Online Teaching. The visuals aren’t the point here, but an excerpt from the session should provide an idea of what I’m doing:
As I mention, students are assessed on their discussion performance twice during the semester, at the half-way point and at the end, each for 10% of the grade. They do a self-assessment based on the rubric (for example), and I assign points to that. This semester, on both the self-assessments and the end-of-semester class evaluation, a few students were saying what’s become a typical discussion complaint. They felt that the students who got there before them had already “said everything” so they didn’t have much to say.
Now remember, I’ve designed the prompts to be so open that having someone else say what you were going to say shouldn’t even be possible. And, of course, a number of students didn’t return each week for the analytical part of the discussion. And yet, they felt this way.
My own dissatisfaction with discussion has been different; it isn’t about management or what they’ve said. I not only enjoyed their posts, but my bi-weekly summarizing and guidance system was highly efficient. Their self-assessments were usually dead-on, and they appreciated the opportunity to do them.
My problem was that discussion seemed text-heavy and overly directed. We call it discussion, but of course everyone is typing. A number of students were writing when writing didn’t seem to be their thing. Some students did post images, which I encouraged, and some linked to other kinds of resources. Sometimes discussions got very lively, with (civil) disagreements and connections to modern events. But these things seemed to happen by chance rather than as part of my instructional design. Discussion just wasn’t broad enough, visual enough, connective enough, exciting enough, for me. There wasn’t enough sense of students discovering things on their own, constructing something. I wanted something constructivist, like my art gallery glossary had been, but directed in a way that enabled me to guide effectively in alignment with the course goals.
Plus, I’ve been sensitive for awhile that, although my assignments are very open and let students work on things in different ways, I do not have alternatives built in. In other words, you can’t either take the quiz or do a project. I have felt unable to individualize assignments and grading this way because I have so many students.
Today a possible redesign occurred to me. I’d keep all my prompts (I do like them, after all), but the assignment would be different. Instead of commenting textually, students will have options. They can post an image, audio or video clip, and just briefly explain how it’s connected to the original prompt, or add their own connection to someone else’s item. In other words, we’d be collecting evidence related to that week’s topic (this is possible because my online West and US classes focus on the modern era, so there’s lots of stuff available). Students who like text could post excerpts from historical documents instead of something aural or visual.
Then, for the second part of the week, they’d need to select several of the pieces of evidence that have been posted, and construct some kind of theme or thesis tying them together, in their own way, to say something about the era. This is the historical skill I spend all semester cultivating anyway, gradually getting them to construct and prove historical theses, in a way that allows for lots of mistakes and re-doing. And as I’m doing now, I can guide more specifically early on in the class, and more loosely later on.
This new design would create several benefits:
More work for them, less for me — this is one of my mantras, because their learning should result from their own practice of skills and reflection on material (as Stephen Downes has noted, that’s their job).
Themes would be introduced earlier — the gradual approach I’ve been using of starting with facts, then moving slowly into interpretation and themes, did not allow enough thesis practice — this will.
Options and choices — students who are visual can post images and videos, aural folks can post audio files, text learners can post text, so more learning styles are reached and a wider variety of evidence is collected.
Tech-savviness would be encouraged — students often either have very few web skills or don’t use them much for learning, so this might help them practice.
So that leaves me a few things to do:
Change the instructions for each forum.
Create tutorials on how to add images, audio and video to the forums.
Update the FAQ to point to these tutorials.
Overall, this should be a good change. I want to focus more anyway on designing for openness inside a Course Management System, and I think this will be a good start. The wonderful resources on the web can be searched, posted and repurposed, even though the class is offered in a CMS. And that’s worth doing for all sorts of reasons….
I noticed that if you took out the text in the middle, the process is very much the same as what I’d call Good Traditional Learning. Certainly as a historian, this is what I do. In fact, there is even more interplay between aspects of the prospect, if you’ll forgive my doodling:
As a historian, I naturally assume that ideas are not really new, but just a revision due to circumstances. And certainly, in my various discussions of connectivist theory, I hashed this out last fall.
During the class and again today, I’ve observed the polarization of educational ideas. On the one hand, you have the “Old School” hardliners, the “back to basics” folks, the ones pushing accountability, Student Learning Outcomes, data-driven models, etc. Industrialized education. Enlightenment social science gone mad.
On the other are the highly innovative ed-techies who say schools are failing because we are failing students, unempowering them to learn. Kohn’s book, constructivist and connectivist learning theory, promoters of blogs and wikis and Personal Learning Environments. Edupunks (I’m proud to be one!), learner-centered, wired. Those who claim today’s students are different (you can put the technology horse before or after this cart), so they need different methods to learn. Some even claim to be going back to a pre-industrial model, as in this article claiming that the grading system was created as a lazy and inappropriate way to assess learning. Many in this crowd don’t like Marc Prensky, with his idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, but others start with his ideas. For those not familiar with this view, Michael Wesch’s classic video should help:
The Middle Ground seems to be somewhat different, and I intend to explore these ideas further. I see a number of elements working against the polarization of educational viewpoints:
Student skills
Students today are technologically savvy only for social interaction, not academic work (see analysis of the ETS ICT report from 2007, among others)
Student use
Students are not particularly avid users of Web 2.0 technologies (Kennedy et al, 2007)
Workplace conditions
The conditions of the educational workplace require most of us to teach industrial-sized classes, making individualized approaches impossible unless they are almost completely student-led. (I have often been astonished by the failure of the “new” crowd to acknowledge this simple problem and deal with it on anything other than an “overthrow the system!” kind of way.)
Retraining
Creating constructivist or connectivist learning environments involves re-training instructors in areas far beyond their disciplines, and such re-training is not supported by compensation in any form.
Student expectations
In keeping with the cultural movement toward self-esteem boosting, open access education and reality-show social interactions, students now expect to be entertained and “engaged” in their classes. They do not particularly value self-motivation, organization, or the abundance of content available to them.
Anti-intellectualism
Many also don’t value the development of knowledge, which requires reflection. The tendency toward multi-tasking and mashups of content encourages superficiality of intellectual process in a world already too accepting of snap judgements and “fly over” assessments of data.
Yes, there are certainly problems. Some students are disengaged, and today’s iPod is yesterday’s comic book or television. Some students who would succeed better in vocational education are now put through General Education, and consider a passing grade (not just equal access) to be a civil right. Many wish to be entertained, are restricted by instructors in their approach to material, and want to break away.
Some Middle Ground approaches might include:
Subversive innovation
Tech-savvy, constructivist and/or connectivist instructional methods can be implemented (at least at the college level) inside the restrictive data-driven environment. This has been my solution for many years.
Acknowledging skills deficiencies
It is foolish to assume that students know all the web tools, or how to use any technology (textbook, video, internet) for learning. Like the skills for a discipline, these must too be taught if we’re going to use the tools. (I don’t mean the technical skill of how to make PowerPoint slides, but rather the methods for creating new content through deep understanding of the old content.)
Professional development focused on pedagogy
This would ensure that the instructor’s strengths are the focus of any method, rather than the latest trendy technology.
Supplemented assessment
There are many types of success, and some, as I mentioned in my last post, have nothing to do with completing the class or earning a passing grade. To these mandatory manifestations of student success should be added “assessment” of potential and contribution.
Independent/alternative study
Any independent options available to instructors could be used, including independent study, alternative assignments, and credit for outside work.
Thinking creatively.
No need to throw out the baby
or the bathwater Flickr cc image from Pfau
None of these is new. All are techniques used for many years to provide instructors with approaches to respond to changing populations of students. There is no need to push the Hegelian dialectic to envision a synthesis of traditionalism with Edupunk, since a similar balance has been struck by good instructors for years. I’m sure you can think of at least one elementary or high school teacher you had who did these things. I personally recall my junior high English teacher, who let a gang of us write, rehearse and produce a play based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” instead of sit in class. We did all the standardized testing, fulfilled the curriculum, she just thought a little sideways. As a result, I always saw school as I environment I could change to fit my goals. Empowerment did not require a complete rejection of tradition, just a middle ground between extremes.
I do some shocking things to help my students succeed:
Questions in advance: all multiple-choice quiz questions are available in advance, with two tries to check your score. But, I have students who don’t use them.
Late work accepted: All quizzes and assignments are accepted up to a week late for partial credit. For on-site classes, homework may be turned in as a replacement for the quiz for partial credit. But, I have students who don’t avail themselves of this and get 0 points.
Samples posted: each quiz is followed by real-life examples from the exams of current students. But, I have students who don’t read them.
Help available: each class features both an extensive FAQ and a Help forum open to all. But, I have students who write things like “I couldn’t find this cartoon at the website, so I can’t answer the question”.
Access to me: via IM, email, Messages, etc. But, I have students who don’t contact me all semester.
Shout-outs and encouragement: in every discussion forum, I summarize and note the contributions of particular individuals. But, I have students who don’t read my posts.
Self-assessments and rubrics: instead of just assigning participation points, students write self-assessments comparing their own performance to that of the rubric, on which I base my grade. But, I have students who don’t do it, or do it as if there were no rubric, or tell me what they think they should get in the class because of all the effort they feel they put into it.
So, some of them fail. I figure that among the various rights I ascribe to them is the right to fail. I’m trying to get past the point where I think every failure of theirs is because I did something wrong.
It’s interesting to note that, over twenty years, I have experimented with many different methods, from the bizarrely open to the strict instructivist. I’ve done this both for myself, because I take pride in my work, and to increase student success. BUT the result in terms of assessments and drop-out rate is almost invariable. My retention and “success” statistics rarely shift over the long term, but my more open methods have created less stress for me and certainly more opportunities for students, if they take advantage of them.
Last week, an instructor wrote me, distressed because students who weren’t enrolled till fall were getting into this semester’s course to look at the tests (Moodle has a self-enrollment system). I discovered in the documentation that you can change your “enrolment key” to prevent this, and currently enrolled students won’t be affected, so I sent out a message to all Moodlers. Then I started to go through this semester’s courses to put in a code on all my classes (I don’t use one).
Then it occurred to me. As with all the other things I’ve done, it won’t make much difference. If a student from next semester sees the tests, they will face two sections. One is multiple-choice, where I already give the questions in advance anyone, and the other is essay, which I won’t grade, obviously. If they look at the sample essays I’ve posted, then try to copy and paste them, I’ll probably recognize them because they are the ones I selected as examples. If they use the samples to create their own, they’ll learn something anyway. I took the enrollment keys back off.
I was told once about a professor who had a huge test bank of multiple-choice questions, which he vigorously protected. He figured, as many do, that prevention of cheating could best be accomplished by having a huge test bank so students rarely got the same questions. The very day he got up to 1,000 questions in the test bank, he found a printed copy of all of the questions left behind at a student’s desk. At first he was angry. Then it occurred to him that if a student actually studied all 1,000 questions, they were learning anyway, so what the heck? I remember that story all the time to remind me what I’m trying to do, whether the students choose to fail or succeed, sideways or otherwise.
Last year, our technicians at Academic Information Services were concerned that if we encouraged faculty to use web 2.0 applications in their teaching, they would expect AIS to provide support. Obviously, the college’s staff can’t be tech support for the whole internet! So I drafted a document that ultimately got approved by the Technology and Pedagogy Committee, then Senate Council, which kind of makes it policy.
The tricky part was to try to encourage instructors to use the wonderful variety of tools available on the web, but let them know that the traditional support systems do not apply. While it was a bit of a tightrope, I was glad to be able to do it in such a way that faculty felt encouraged to experiment, rather than discouraged.
[Thanks to Mike Bogle for getting me out of my posting funk (I have written several posts lately, but they're all too whiney) and reminding me there are some cool things happening out there as faculty get onto the web.]
Last week I attended the ED-MEDIA conference in Honolulu, the highly productive conference sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). I had attended in 2007 in Vancouver and knew it would be great. I took notes on all the sessions and the many things I’ve learned, so much that it would make this post WAY too long! So you can read my full report if you wish — I will be later developing some of the ideas into individual posts.
My first technology-related experience, however, was on the plane getting here from San Diego. The flight was 5 1/2 hours, and during that time total strangers sat next to each other without ever introducing themselves, sharing adjacent space. Gradually I noticed some children giggling nearby. I looked over and they were, I thought, playing Nintendo. But when I peeked, I saw that they were writing on the screen, and I soon realized that many children on the plane had Nintendos and were using its wi-fi pictochat feature to write to each other. After an hour or so, children were exchanging information about their seat locations, and were getting up and saying hi. At one point there were kids standing in the aisle and the flight attendant had to ask them to sit down so she could serve food. By the time they had to shut off their devices for landing, they knew where everyone was staying in Hawaii and had arranged playdates if their hotels were near each other, forcing the parents to actually meet each other. The kids used technology to create society on the plane, where adults only endured the enforced company of others.
I’d keep all my prompts (I do like them, after all), but the assignment would be different. Instead of commenting textually, students will have options. They can post an image, audio or video clip, and just briefly explain how it’s connected to the original prompt, or add their own connection to someone else’s item. In other words, we’d be collecting evidence related to that week’s topic (this is possible because my online West and US classes focus on the modern era, so there’s lots of stuff available). Students who like text could post excerpts from historical documents instead of something aural or visual.
