On PBS radio, Kevin Whitehead’s review of Jenny Scheinman’s ‘Mayhem’ included a quick comment that if one of the songs was “taken out of context” it would be heard differently.
There are wide-open moments on Scheinman’s “Devil’s Ink” that, taken out of context, could pass for modern composed music.
Which made me wonder how a piece of a song could be taken out of context? It would have to be informed by other songs or other knowledge.
Of course, an individual song can be taken out of context — bands like Pink Floyd and Radiohead didn’t want their songs to be sold separately in iTunes. Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare is meant to be heard in a certain order – so is Queen’s Night at the Opera. Album rock is based on the album, not the individual songs.
But context can be important for bits of knowledge as well. And this connects (really it does) to my students coming to class not having done their reading.
I complained about this on John Mak’s blog, in answering his query about flipping the classroom, where I described the problem in my hybrid class, where lectures and readings are online, and on-site time is for discussion:
Several students seem to “forget” to do the online work at all, having been “trained” to just show up in a class. The time in class, now joyfully turned over to “discussion”, doesn’t go as well when students don’t do the online readings.
The readings provide context for what we talk about in class. Reading about what happened (yes, including some facts) provides the context for both the primary sources and further discussion.
And yet, there is no reason for a person to realize they do not possess context for their ideas. They may think their thoughts spring from an internal source, without connection to their culture, upbringing, or surroundings. Only their presence is required to engage in criticism, on any subject.
Such disconnected idea-building could represent a moment of spirituality, but is more likely to express simple ignorance.
People who cannot think within a pattern of intellectual endeavor (mathematical, historical, literary, scientific) lack the context within which to put the bits and pieces of information they may encounter.
The Nowhere Man in Yellow Submarine knew a million details, but had no knowledge.
So the entire purpose of education is to provide context. Or, at least, it is its central purpose. Providing facts and forcing memorization, we say, doesn’t do that – you only learn the details. But could enough facts, stuck together however tenuously, create a net that becomes a context? Can we rearrange the songs to make an album?
Or is it necessary to have someone else (expert, professor, teacher, curator) create the album, so that we hear the individual tunes as a contextual package?
Perhaps the controversy between the constructivist or connectivist pedagogies and the instructivist pedagogy is mostlya bout context. The constructivists and connectivists want the students to build their own contextual package, inductively, and the instructivists want to provide the contextual package, within which students fit the specifics, deductively.
No, I am not a big fan of the James Cameron film, mostly because of the awful script and the inability of the two leads to rise above it.
I have also not been a big fan of tweeting “history”, in historical reinactments done via Twitter. I critiqued the approach heartily almost exactly two years ago.
However, I have now been to two museum exhibits of artifacts from the Titanic (including the current one in San Diego), and tonight I sit here watching Twitter as the Carpathian steams in to pick up survivors, and I have to say, it’s ridiculously riveting to watch the disaster unfold on Twitter.
I have followed both Real-Time Titanic and TitanicVoyage out of the UK publishing house The History Press for the last couple of days. Both have done a great job in creating a suspenseful account of what professional historians like to call (often disdainfully), “popular” history, Real-Time Titanic using a third-person, journalistic style and TitanicVoyage marking posts by the type of tweeter (#captain, #crew, #thirdclass) for an even more harrowing first-person tone.
As with most of the popular history I’ve enjoyed, I was drawn to a single aspect of the subject, in this case the problem with the Marconi wireless radio just a day before they hit the iceberg.
Even if only parts of the stories are true, it is possible that a couple of young men took apart a radio against some sort of policy to make sure it transmitted, and if they hadn’t then a day later when Titanic hit an iceberg they might not have been able to send the distress call.
Conclusions can thus be made about the value of mechanical tinkering, and not being afraid to break the rules, and professional pressure to do your job (hundreds of passenger-sent messages were sent from the ship by radio).
It’s harder to explain, though, the emotional impact of watching it unfold, in “real time” 100 years later, as if it were happening now and we could hear the screams of the people freezing to death yards from the lifeboats. There was a certain War of the Worlds aspect to it, even though Twitter is not really the radio and one couldn’t unknowingly follow the Twitter stream the same way people unknowingly tuned in to Welles’ show.
And again this odd use of Twitter makes me rethink the role of stories and history and the enthusiasts who put it all together, and I’m filled with nothing but respect for their work.
This is a story of failure. Not, at first, the good kind of failure, the kind that leads to growth. In this case, it’s the kind of failure that leads you to go back on the trail, to find that tree around which you tied the ribbon, and take the other fork in the road.
For many years, I did all my web stuff myself. This was before a whole lot of software or webware – it was all HTML, which I taught myself from a For Dummies book (Quick Reference, 1997). Oh, and we had Webboard 1 (they’re on 9 now) for threaded discussion. Geeks used IRC and other ways to talk in real time. The sound of the modem was music to my ears.
Then Web 2.0 happened, and it was so exciting and easy to use all the cool stuff. Flickr for photos! Blogger and WordPress.com for blogs! Twitter for microblogging! You could post all your stuff, even create stuff, and there it is, all for free. No need to know HTML!
I should have known better. I’m a historian.
Problems at Pedagogy First!
Most of our participants at Pedagogy First!, at our encouragement, have been using Edublogs or WordPress.com for their blogs. At first, these blogging services provided for free the means to upload the things our participants created as part of the class. But, as time has gone on, fewer features have been enabled for free accounts at these services.
The number of plugins that both services offer has also decreased. We have been exploring workarounds in response to the decline in services like embedding media. First it was Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, where you could just by typing the URL into WordPress.com but Edublogs wasn’t so easy. Then we couldn’t get Edublogs to embed Jing or Slideshare (and WordPress.com could only if we used Vodpod).
Now our intrepid participants are posting audio and sure enough, WordPress.com won’t let them embed audio on the free account using an upload. So the trick here is to upload ones audio “somewhere on the web” and put in a shortcode like [audio http://myserver.net/myaudio.mp3].
To upload “somewhere” means they really should have access to a web folder somewhere and know how to ftp to it, or try a service (I tried yourlisten.com, but it didn’t work). As they helped each other, they discovered Soundcloud could work. But this sort of thing is dicey and inconsistent, and it freaks out the newbies. Come on, everybody, let’s run all over the web looking for ways to do something simple!
Problems for Me
At the same time, I have been experiencing problems with my own free services. Posterous won’t convert my video to embed it, regardless of the codec used. I recorded the weekly message to my students in Eyejot, and it didn’t send it to me for four days. Flickr wants money to share my photos with others.
And then I look at ds106, harbinger of all things self-participatory. Jim Groom at UMW just raised money for a separate server, and they’re giving students domain names and web hosting so everyone can run their own blogs (not, you’ll note, using WordPress.com or Edublogs).
Going Backward
So is it time to go back to that tree? Back up (beep, beep, beep) the road of Web 2.0 “freemium” service providers, who (like insurance companies) are charging us more and delivering less, and get back to that DIY spirit? I always recommend some DIY anyway – keeping your files on your own computer to protect them from loss, never writing anything directly into a system. Now we may have to build learning units around it.
As we revise the syllabus for next year’s Pedagogy First! class, I’m asking my colleagues whether we should recommend some hosting, and teach everyone how purchase hosting space and create their own blog (as ds106 did last year). Our college’s super computer guy is happy to administer some WPMU blogs for MiraCosta participants, which is wonderful, but every plugin will have to be approved and updated, and/or faculty will need to be taught how to use their web folder and upload things, a whole different level of web comprehension. They won’t know why they should make the choice between uploading to their web folder and uploading into WP — too many choices is bad for newbies. And, if this year is anything to go by, 75% of participants won’t be from MiraCosta, or won’t want a MiraCosta-controlled blog. We’ll need to teach them how to not only set up a blog but get a hosting account (likely at Hippie Hosting for $12/year), install WordPress, and then set it up. It’s a year long class, but still…
This was the sort of thing we taught in 1998. Here’s some HTML. Here’s how to ftp. Now have fun. Blog platforms should make it easier, but in their current push toward monetization, they really are adding another layer, something else to be learned, instead of substituting for that back end knowledge. We didn’t whine in 1998 about learning the back end — you had to know some in order to teach online.
Walking away
As for me, I’m creating a new WordPress blog of my own and using Posterous Importer to transfer my ds106 blog. And I’m crawling through those php.ini files trying to fix problems, knowing I cannot expect novices to do that in the fall.
I also know, of course, that you can never really go back….
My stuff is stashed in a few main places on the web that aren’t hosted by me: Slideshare, YouTube, and Flickr are the main sites where I “publish”, plus I have stuff at Screencast, Screenr, MindMeister where I create things. I have this blog, and a Posterous blog for ds106 and separate blogs for other classes, etc.
So the big three are places where I am really trying to share. I upload many tutorials to YouTube (if they still look ok when they’re compressed that much). I post all my presentations, often with audio, at Slideshare as slidecasts. And Flickr has lots of my pics. Well, 173 pics. Which brings me to the issue.
Flickr has decided that when I reach 200 pics, they want to charge me $25/year. To get analytics and remove ads, I have to pay Slideshare the educational price of $144/year (certainly an educational price, since it is educating me rapidly). If I want more space on Screencast (they tell me I’m almost full up), I’d have to pay them.
No, I do not think everything on the web is or should be free. But these are not sites where I’m marketing my products, selling my photos, or making my career. Nothing I post there makes me any money, and by posting I am contributing to everyone else. Everything I have up is Creative Commons licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
So, for example, all my photos on Flickr can be used, for free, by anyone. I post them there for that reason.
But these services want me to pay to share. I don’t think that’s right.
The business model for these sites relies on ads, and thus lots of eyeballs coming to their site. Users who post add value to the website – in fact, they are the website. If those of us who shouldn’t pay remove our stuff, then the only stuff will be from people who can afford it or are trying to sell things.
Why not charge the nominal fee to the people who treat their work as copyrighted, who demand that people pay to use it, or who post it to sell it? If the purpose of the content is commercial, charge a bit. If it’s just for free sharing, keep it free.
I have been introduced this week, via a Google+ post by Dianne Rees, to the research of Derek Muller, a physics educator who creates videos for physics students (many posted on his YouTube channel Veritasium).
His research work, which dates back to his dissertation in 2004 but includes articles (most behind paywalls, unfortunately), concerns student preconceptions and misconceptions blocking the cognitive work needed for them to understand material being presented in videos. In a blog post about designing multimedia units to teach physics, he notes that “pseudoteaching” occurs when the video looks like good teaching (it’s clear and concise), students feel like they’re learning (they gain confidence that their answers are correct), but the students aren’t learning (scores don’t improve).
In this video, he uses Khan Academy as an example of videos that don’t work for this reason. (Note: I have nothing against Khan Academy – I think what Sal Khan has done is amazing and wonderful and badly needed – that’s not the point of showing this video.)
His focus may be on physics, and video/multimedia, but the implications are huge for all forms of teaching (in class and online) and all subjects, including mine.
Science is most definitely not the only field where students bring in preconceptions and notions that stick, that prevent them from learning something new. In History, these notions range from conspiracy theories to stuff they were taught in elementary school or picked up in popular culture.
As it happened, the night before I discovered Muller’s work, I was grading a batch of US History essays, and I noticed a pattern among the essays written about women. Almost every student writing on that subject believed that prior to the Progressive era, women were sequestered at home, had no public or political influence, couldn’t vote, and possessed no rights. All of a sudden, due to women like Margaret Sanger and the suffragists who pushed for the vote, they were freed.
In total frustration, I created this slideshow in a couple of hours, and posted it with the announcement that the essays had been graded.
This was different from other slideshows I’ve made, where I tell a narrative story or take them through a list of points, because the context was clearly correcting a false belief: that women’s active role in society sprung up suddenly in the early 20th century. Although I was creating it out of frustration with student misconceptions, I was inadvertently using the technique Muller suggests: deal with the misconceptions directly as part of the lesson.
Muller’s work has broad implications, not just for multimedia and physics, but any instructional method (especially presentation) and any subject. Over two decades of teaching, I have seen repeatedly what Muller describes. I get all excited because class discussion was so wonderful that day, everyone seemed to get it, everyone was engaged, but then they fail to show any understanding on an exam or even in the next class discussion. Or my lecture seemed great, no one was bored, they asked cool questions and took lots of notes, and no understanding was apparent in the essay.
Muller’s research thus also supports my concern that engagement does not necessarily mean learning is happening (a viewpoint which seems to put me in the minority among faculty). A student can be fully engaged but be learning very little.
In the original post by physics teacher Frank Noschese that Dianne shared (the one which led me to Muller), Nochese says many people have their own preconceived notion: “that teaching is really just explaining”. We explain and explain, and believe that because we are clear in our explanation, students should learn.
But if we don’t deal with factors that may block them from learning, we can’t get through. So to our list of things that prevent student learning (lack of sleep, socio-economic conditions, weak intrinsic motivation, and strategic studying) we can at least add a factor we can do something about.
In the beginning, although I was not interested in what you had for breakfast, I was interested in what you thought about things. And you told me, in tweets and blogs and comments on my blog. Things were good.
But as time has passed, you have turned to posting links, often without comment. Sometimes these links are very interesting, but I can’t know until I click on them, and either way I’m not getting anything from you except the link. And when I create a link-less post in Twitter, I don’t often get much response.
Now I understand that I am supposed to consider you as nodes in my network and as filters for my information. But to me, you were so much more. And now you blog less, if at all, and instead give me lots of links to works by other people. If you read my blog anymore (and the numbers indicate you don’t) you rarely comment. If I comment on yours, little conversation ensues unless you are a very big name with many people commenting to each other.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but I don’t want just links. I want you, your thoughts and dreams, your frustrations and successes. And I want that just as much from those of you who are big social media stars in educational technology as I do from my more intimate connections. And you all scroll by so fast these days, with all those links; it’s hard to find the comments you do make.
So I’ve been hanging less and less around our old haunts. Twitter is occasional rather than daily. I moved all my RSS feeds to Netvibes to get away from Reader, so I see your posts better now. Some of them are just RSS feeds of links. I was going to spend more time with you in Google +, where there seemed to be some Buzz-like conversation at first. But even there now it’s mostly links. And Facebook? We made a little corner for ourselves, where people feel comfortable to … post a lot of links.
Of course, an individual song can be taken out of context — bands like Pink Floyd and Radiohead didn’t want their songs to be sold separately in iTunes. Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare is meant to be heard in a certain order – so is Queen’s Night at the Opera. Album rock is based on the album, not the individual songs.
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