Last night after the Bear game concluded (odd that the both road teams won in this round of the playoffs) I watched Ralph (rhymes with waif) Fiennes on Inside the Actors Studio. He was interesting to watch because he has played such horrible characters (the Nazi in Schindler’s List, the serial killer in Red Dragon, and of course Valdemort in the latest Harry Potter movie) and yet seemed so genuinely humble and vulnerable. Indeed, his representation of good acting experiences featured these aspects: openness, a willingness to take risks, unanticipated outcomes from trying new approaches, and, particularly from his female co-stars, a sense of humor to acknowledge situations where each was particularly vulnerable. In Fiennes view, good directors are those who promote this sort of environment.
It is tempting to envision teaching a course from this point of view, with the teacher as director and the students as actors, in which case one of the prime teaching questions must be this. How do I, as the teacher, get the students to open up? What activities can I design to get the students to explore and take risks?
Let’s leave that for a moment and come back to it. Actors and Directors have their preferences in alignment to the extent that both want to see a good movie made. Focusing on the student work, there is a similar alignment. But teachers often focus on their own presentations in class and because teachers assign grades to students the power relationship between teacher and students is different from the relationship between director and actors. So an important related question is how to move that teacher-student relationship more toward the collaborative director-actor relationship and away from the exertion of arbitrary authority that might very well act as an inhibitor rather than a spur to student risk taking.
To the extent that class size matters in teaching, I think this is one big reason. In large classes it is harder for the instructor to move outside this authoritative role. In smaller classes it is easier for the instructor to act as collaborator with the students. And, not surprisingly, it is easier for there to be meaningful dialog in small classes. I note this because I want to focus on method and using learning technology to make the instructor more like the director, and abstract from the class size issue.
It seems to me that innovative teachers in the humanities might ask this question but those in engineering, the sciences, or the social sciences would be less prone to pose a good teaching question in this form. But perhaps now the learning technology can make the question seem sensible, even in these other disciplines.
Suppose that students do project work and that the deliverable is a podcast, a vidcast, a multimedia presentation with PowerPoint, or some other format in which the students of necessity provide a performance as part of the project deliverable. Suppose that deliverable is “viewed” by other students, in a manner similar to the way we view films (but perhaps we encourage students to play the role of the critic in their viewing of other student productions). Does it then make sense to cast the role of instructor as director?
If the instructor is to do this seriously, then the instructor must put attention into it and thus must take attention away from something else, notably the presentations the instructor makes. It would then seem that this approach makes sense only if the instructor comes to the conclusion that the students learn what they need to master by being performers about their projects rather than being exposed to instructor presentation.
Actors don’t just act. They do a lot of preparation for their roles. They do research. Fiennes talked about doing this for the role of Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy, who had trauma during childhood because of sexual abuse. That was the root cause for his horrendus behavior. The research as preparation for performance seems akin if not identical to the research students should do as they work through their project. So the wrinkle here, something that now doesn’t seem so out of the usual, is to add performance into the delivery of the project. The performance should encourage student engagement and should help the students understand there is an audience for their work.
I believe this can be done irrespective of discipline, but does require imagination on behalf of the instructor. It also requires devoting considerable time to getting the students to prepare for the roles and for the instructor to deliver directions to the students qua actors.
I wonder how many instructors might try something like this.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
The Virtual University Conundrum
My campus is the Land Grant University for the state. We have a still new president, B. Joseph White, and one of the things he’d like to see is for the University (which currently is a 3-campus system) to be doing online learning big time via a fourth campus that is totally online. I’ve heard him speak about such efforts as being 21st century approaches to address the original ideal of the land grant university, providing educational services to all citizens of the state and indeed projecting our university and our state on a global stage. This is a noble vision.
But there is a difference between providing an education program for all citizens, such as with basic information about gardening, that traditionally has been the mission of the campus Extension service, and providing degree programs or certificate programs to students where tuition covers at least part of the cost and where these students are at least partly motivated by the degree or certificate improving their prospects in the labor market. My campus is highly selective. We don’t admit anyone out there for such a degree. Indeed, we turn away a lot of people. (And to the extent that admission has gotten even more competitive over time, this has rankled many who feel they or their offspring should be entitled to enter the university.) So issue number one with a virtual university is which one is it, a 21st century version of Extension or an online alternative of a prestigious degree granting institution? In other words, does it let everyone in or does it have selective admission?
Issue number two, which I believe applies to professional education in general but may be exacerbated in the virtual university case, as I elaborate below, is on the relative importance of having research faculty versus clinical faculty doing the instruction and indeed how much the curriculum is tied to research versus how much the curriculum is tied toward current practice in the field. This matters in several ways. It affects the cost of the instruction particularly with respect to whether tenure track faculty or adjuncts are doing the teaching, the market value of the degree or certificate, the extent to which the program can scale, how student centric the instruction will be, and how much competition there will be from other virtual universities.
A crass view, which I myself can slip into fairly easily, is that my university’s reputation is built on its research success (we take every possible opportunity to mention the Nobel Prize winners on the faculty when we promote the place) and for marketing purposes the research tie to instruction may be emphasized, but for practical reality and having programs that make business sense, courses that are part of a program will be designed by a team and then will be taught by adjuncts who get trained in the approach of the course. The adjuncts may very well have been researchers once and now have moved on to teaching or they can be folks who’ve already had a career in industry and have now moved on to online teaching. But they are not engaged in current research and they are not actively in communication with the faculty who are doing current research. In other words, there is a severance between the research and the instruction in deed but not in the marketing of the program.
There are two ways to be less crass. First, be up front that clinical faculty will be used and market the program accordingly. Don’t try to rely on a historic reputation that is based on assumptions not relevant to the virtual university situation. Second, really do engage active researchers in virtual university instruction. I’m agnostic about the second approach so I’ll discuss the first.
I believe one can get quite good instruction with clinical faculty doing the teaching and I know within the MBA world that some have argued for that type of instruction being more useful to the students than what they are taught by the research faculty. But I’m far less sure that such instruction should be done by not-for-profit universities and particularly public universities. The biggest argument for, that I can see and so far I’ve not heard many people make this argument, is that clinical faculty are a good thing not just for professional education but also for residential, undergraduate instruction. To date, the arguments I’m seeing are that having research faculty teach undergrads is the ideal, but for cost reasons we need to go the other way on occasion and then, maybe, in some make or break large intro courses people who teach those courses perhaps should know more about student issues in transitioning from high school to college rather than know about current research issues in the field. Otherwise, the clinical faculty idea hasn't really come up in the undergraduate context.
If clinical faculty are and remain mostly outside the culture of the R1 type of university, however, what mechanisms are there for these institutions to assure quality in instruction, both curriculum-wise and delivery-wise? Doesn’t one need a setting where the clinical faculty member is a main part of institutional culture to get the requisite quality? And if so, what type of institution can provide that culture? It looks like University of Phoenix can, but I'd bet we cannot.
Issue number three, particularly in my state which is seeing declines in state funding of higher education, is that any new virtual university will require substantial start up funds and if one looked from where those funds might arise, an obvious answer is that the money would come from funds already earmarked for higher education and in that sense would be a tax on existing programs. I believe many on my campus view the possibility of the fourth campus this way and hence feel angry about the initiative because it seems so insensitive to current residential campus needs.
The obvious solution to this, and I’ve heard President White talk directly on this point, is for the virtual university to be a for profit venture that can raise capital in other ways. I do believe that the fourth campus would be perceived in a much more welcome light on my campus if it went this route for the start up funds. But, as with the clinical faculty issue, I don’t then understand why then the affiliation with the University of Illinois is needed and why not, instead, be an entirely separate private venture.
Issue number four, which is the one I’ll close on, is defining the real goal of the university and asking whether it is something that we can expect to achieve, or if instead there is some wishful thinking acting as the driver and that is creating an unreality about what might be delivered. Consider these two distinct alternatives. First there is a high tuition, restrictive admission approach. Second there is a low tuition, open to all approach. My economics knowledge tells me the first is one that can produce high value in the labor market for the graduates while the second can produce a scalable solution that enrolls thousands and thousands of students. But, there is no free lunch. You can’t get both. Certainly, you can’t get both easily. However, the rhetoric behind the fourth campus seems to be saying that we want to produce both outcomes. I find that troubling.
I’ve not said one whit about learning technology in this post. I really don’t think that is the issue. From my perspective the technology used in online instruction and in on ground instruction is converging if not altogether identical at present. But on these non-technology issues, there seems to be a big gap. I hope those involved in the planning for the fourth campus can be more explicit about what is likely to emerge before the fourth campus becomes a done deal. I’m not wanting to block the effort. I’d just like to see these issues thought through and brought out into the open.
But there is a difference between providing an education program for all citizens, such as with basic information about gardening, that traditionally has been the mission of the campus Extension service, and providing degree programs or certificate programs to students where tuition covers at least part of the cost and where these students are at least partly motivated by the degree or certificate improving their prospects in the labor market. My campus is highly selective. We don’t admit anyone out there for such a degree. Indeed, we turn away a lot of people. (And to the extent that admission has gotten even more competitive over time, this has rankled many who feel they or their offspring should be entitled to enter the university.) So issue number one with a virtual university is which one is it, a 21st century version of Extension or an online alternative of a prestigious degree granting institution? In other words, does it let everyone in or does it have selective admission?
Issue number two, which I believe applies to professional education in general but may be exacerbated in the virtual university case, as I elaborate below, is on the relative importance of having research faculty versus clinical faculty doing the instruction and indeed how much the curriculum is tied to research versus how much the curriculum is tied toward current practice in the field. This matters in several ways. It affects the cost of the instruction particularly with respect to whether tenure track faculty or adjuncts are doing the teaching, the market value of the degree or certificate, the extent to which the program can scale, how student centric the instruction will be, and how much competition there will be from other virtual universities.
A crass view, which I myself can slip into fairly easily, is that my university’s reputation is built on its research success (we take every possible opportunity to mention the Nobel Prize winners on the faculty when we promote the place) and for marketing purposes the research tie to instruction may be emphasized, but for practical reality and having programs that make business sense, courses that are part of a program will be designed by a team and then will be taught by adjuncts who get trained in the approach of the course. The adjuncts may very well have been researchers once and now have moved on to teaching or they can be folks who’ve already had a career in industry and have now moved on to online teaching. But they are not engaged in current research and they are not actively in communication with the faculty who are doing current research. In other words, there is a severance between the research and the instruction in deed but not in the marketing of the program.
There are two ways to be less crass. First, be up front that clinical faculty will be used and market the program accordingly. Don’t try to rely on a historic reputation that is based on assumptions not relevant to the virtual university situation. Second, really do engage active researchers in virtual university instruction. I’m agnostic about the second approach so I’ll discuss the first.
I believe one can get quite good instruction with clinical faculty doing the teaching and I know within the MBA world that some have argued for that type of instruction being more useful to the students than what they are taught by the research faculty. But I’m far less sure that such instruction should be done by not-for-profit universities and particularly public universities. The biggest argument for, that I can see and so far I’ve not heard many people make this argument, is that clinical faculty are a good thing not just for professional education but also for residential, undergraduate instruction. To date, the arguments I’m seeing are that having research faculty teach undergrads is the ideal, but for cost reasons we need to go the other way on occasion and then, maybe, in some make or break large intro courses people who teach those courses perhaps should know more about student issues in transitioning from high school to college rather than know about current research issues in the field. Otherwise, the clinical faculty idea hasn't really come up in the undergraduate context.
If clinical faculty are and remain mostly outside the culture of the R1 type of university, however, what mechanisms are there for these institutions to assure quality in instruction, both curriculum-wise and delivery-wise? Doesn’t one need a setting where the clinical faculty member is a main part of institutional culture to get the requisite quality? And if so, what type of institution can provide that culture? It looks like University of Phoenix can, but I'd bet we cannot.
Issue number three, particularly in my state which is seeing declines in state funding of higher education, is that any new virtual university will require substantial start up funds and if one looked from where those funds might arise, an obvious answer is that the money would come from funds already earmarked for higher education and in that sense would be a tax on existing programs. I believe many on my campus view the possibility of the fourth campus this way and hence feel angry about the initiative because it seems so insensitive to current residential campus needs.
The obvious solution to this, and I’ve heard President White talk directly on this point, is for the virtual university to be a for profit venture that can raise capital in other ways. I do believe that the fourth campus would be perceived in a much more welcome light on my campus if it went this route for the start up funds. But, as with the clinical faculty issue, I don’t then understand why then the affiliation with the University of Illinois is needed and why not, instead, be an entirely separate private venture.
Issue number four, which is the one I’ll close on, is defining the real goal of the university and asking whether it is something that we can expect to achieve, or if instead there is some wishful thinking acting as the driver and that is creating an unreality about what might be delivered. Consider these two distinct alternatives. First there is a high tuition, restrictive admission approach. Second there is a low tuition, open to all approach. My economics knowledge tells me the first is one that can produce high value in the labor market for the graduates while the second can produce a scalable solution that enrolls thousands and thousands of students. But, there is no free lunch. You can’t get both. Certainly, you can’t get both easily. However, the rhetoric behind the fourth campus seems to be saying that we want to produce both outcomes. I find that troubling.
I’ve not said one whit about learning technology in this post. I really don’t think that is the issue. From my perspective the technology used in online instruction and in on ground instruction is converging if not altogether identical at present. But on these non-technology issues, there seems to be a big gap. I hope those involved in the planning for the fourth campus can be more explicit about what is likely to emerge before the fourth campus becomes a done deal. I’m not wanting to block the effort. I’d just like to see these issues thought through and brought out into the open.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Teaching Practical Stuff
I’ve been working on my Econ 101 course and this morning finished up the content survey on Stock Markets. My sense is that this particular module goes over quite well because it has a lot of info that students want. For example, they want an academic who doesn’t have a stake with them as a financial adviser to tell them that they can’t outperform the market on a consistent basis. And they want to understand why stock market prices change, whether there really are “bubbles” or if that is some psychological rationalization of a statistical artifact, and then want some nuts and bolts on things like how to read a stock quote. There is no question in my mind that the kids want to learn these things.
There is, however, a big question in my mind about whether my colleagues would think teaching this stuff is appropriate for such a class or if, instead, the students should be expected either to know this already or to learn it on their own. I really haven’t had such a conversation with Econ colleagues, but I’ve been through quite a few discussions on the analogous issue with respect to student computer skills, for example, in terms of making Web pages. There is a bit of a disconnect between the Computer Science faculty, who think we should be teaching the students stuff they really should have learned in K-12 and faculty elsewhere on campus, who themselves might not be so computer literate and who are exposed to some fraction of their student audience who are lacking in technical literacy. There is a lot of rhetoric under the umbrella – offering a course that is worthy of a U of I degree – and a strong feeling among the faculty that if the course is not worthy the students should take it at Parkland (the local Community College).
I’ve crossed that divide in my course but want to note it because teaching practical stuff is something out of the ordinary here. So there isn’t a lot of expertise to appeal to nor is there obvious best practice, at least as far as I’m aware. I should also say I’m far from an expert on personal finance and hence I don’t want to claim that my content survey is anything special in that regard. But I do want to make explicit some things I tried to do, in an effort to move toward what might be best practice with this type of material. What follows is an annotated list of my approach.
Philosophy – My approach is to assume that the students could sit down and learn this stuff on their own if they chose to do that. So what I’m trying to do is give them a focus and a reason for completing this module. (They get course credit for doing so.) Quite frequently, students will do required course work without ever asking why they are being expected to do that work.
Use Content Provided by the Feds – It turns out that The Securities and Exchange Commission has some really nice Web pages explaining how various stock market institutions work. Part of their role as watchdog and regulator is to educate the public, because the smarter the public is, the harder it is for the insiders to commit fraud. The SEC docs are written in a common sense style that is quite readable. This really is a good way to self-teach, but I doubt the students would stumble on these pages on their own, even if they were otherwise interested in the stock market and so did read a book on investment (as I recommended that they should).
Use Freely Available Online Tools for Nuts and Bolt Experience - I’ve got a link to the Nasdaq so the students can do their own stock lookup and learn to read the information that is provided. Of course, anybody who has done trading of financial assets will know this already. And this may seem a trivial point. But if a student hasn’t done this before, there likely is learning value for its own sake and it is relevant to the next point.
Tie the practical knowledge to the underlying theoretical issues – In this case one of the theoretical issues is to reconcile equilibrium trading with price variation over time. To do that, one first needs to provide evidence that prices do vary over time. Such evidence comes from the stock lookup. So that directly fits in with the rest of the economics I’m trying to teach.
Bring in expertise from famous academics – Eugene Fama’s name is mentioned explicitly as the father of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and there is some discussion as to what that means. Other finance experts from academia are mentioned in linked article about why the efficient market hypothesis has to be modified to accommodate facts that are known about the stock market.
Provide some institutional detail that is meant as a stand alone – In this case there is a discussion of stock indices that almost certainly the students will have heard of already, so the module helps to expand their understanding, but there is nothing else in the entire course that depends on knowing about stock indices.
Don’t drill down too far – because this is a self-help topic that some of the students should be inherently interested in, expect those students to learn more on their own outside of the class setting. That’s ok. This module is only an introduction into the subject.
There is, however, a big question in my mind about whether my colleagues would think teaching this stuff is appropriate for such a class or if, instead, the students should be expected either to know this already or to learn it on their own. I really haven’t had such a conversation with Econ colleagues, but I’ve been through quite a few discussions on the analogous issue with respect to student computer skills, for example, in terms of making Web pages. There is a bit of a disconnect between the Computer Science faculty, who think we should be teaching the students stuff they really should have learned in K-12 and faculty elsewhere on campus, who themselves might not be so computer literate and who are exposed to some fraction of their student audience who are lacking in technical literacy. There is a lot of rhetoric under the umbrella – offering a course that is worthy of a U of I degree – and a strong feeling among the faculty that if the course is not worthy the students should take it at Parkland (the local Community College).
I’ve crossed that divide in my course but want to note it because teaching practical stuff is something out of the ordinary here. So there isn’t a lot of expertise to appeal to nor is there obvious best practice, at least as far as I’m aware. I should also say I’m far from an expert on personal finance and hence I don’t want to claim that my content survey is anything special in that regard. But I do want to make explicit some things I tried to do, in an effort to move toward what might be best practice with this type of material. What follows is an annotated list of my approach.
Philosophy – My approach is to assume that the students could sit down and learn this stuff on their own if they chose to do that. So what I’m trying to do is give them a focus and a reason for completing this module. (They get course credit for doing so.) Quite frequently, students will do required course work without ever asking why they are being expected to do that work.
Use Content Provided by the Feds – It turns out that The Securities and Exchange Commission has some really nice Web pages explaining how various stock market institutions work. Part of their role as watchdog and regulator is to educate the public, because the smarter the public is, the harder it is for the insiders to commit fraud. The SEC docs are written in a common sense style that is quite readable. This really is a good way to self-teach, but I doubt the students would stumble on these pages on their own, even if they were otherwise interested in the stock market and so did read a book on investment (as I recommended that they should).
Use Freely Available Online Tools for Nuts and Bolt Experience - I’ve got a link to the Nasdaq so the students can do their own stock lookup and learn to read the information that is provided. Of course, anybody who has done trading of financial assets will know this already. And this may seem a trivial point. But if a student hasn’t done this before, there likely is learning value for its own sake and it is relevant to the next point.
Tie the practical knowledge to the underlying theoretical issues – In this case one of the theoretical issues is to reconcile equilibrium trading with price variation over time. To do that, one first needs to provide evidence that prices do vary over time. Such evidence comes from the stock lookup. So that directly fits in with the rest of the economics I’m trying to teach.
Bring in expertise from famous academics – Eugene Fama’s name is mentioned explicitly as the father of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and there is some discussion as to what that means. Other finance experts from academia are mentioned in linked article about why the efficient market hypothesis has to be modified to accommodate facts that are known about the stock market.
Provide some institutional detail that is meant as a stand alone – In this case there is a discussion of stock indices that almost certainly the students will have heard of already, so the module helps to expand their understanding, but there is nothing else in the entire course that depends on knowing about stock indices.
Don’t drill down too far – because this is a self-help topic that some of the students should be inherently interested in, expect those students to learn more on their own outside of the class setting. That’s ok. This module is only an introduction into the subject.
Friday, January 06, 2006
On Elegance in Content Design and Learning Objects
Over the years, I’ve made a fair amount of content for my Econ courses and at one point I considered making an alternative to a textbook that would be composed entirely with different type of modules in Excel. (I might still do that in the not too distant future, depending in part on how much progress I make with the course I’m teaching this spring.) Based on that activity and previous content creation activities I’ve been involved with, I feel comfortable asserting:
(a) My graphical design skills are rudimentary at best. I might benefit from some formal instruction in graphical design. But, in truth, my interest does not lie in trying to make my content “look slick” so that as long as I feel the look is functional, I’m ok with that. I have learned something about having borders and white space on the page and not jamming in too much stuff into a small spatial area. I’m probably more textual and less image intensive than suits the medium. Given that, I can make something that is passable.
(b) I have a pretty well honed instinct on how to represent the economic ideas into elegant representations that really should help the students visualize what is going on. This is both difficult, because it really does require out of the box thinking, and fun and rewarding when something has been produced, because there is then visual evidence of how these representations improve on the understanding of the economics. This started back when I did Excelets and it has carried over into what I’ve done more recently. I’ve gotten better at it and more sophisticated in my design.
When I speak of elegance in design, I’m speaking about (b). That is representation of ideas that are good for the novice to understand what is going on. I believe that elegance in design facilitates deep learning of the ideas and I believe further that we should be talking more about this when we advise instructors on making their materials. Elegance and simplicity need to be considered as cousins if not as identical twins. But elegance is far from making things simple minded. Indeed, I believe it is only through an elegant design that depth and complexity can be brought in. Otherwise, complex ideas that are presented seem too hard and impenetrable and will be off putting to the students. Then there is no learning, just pretensions, and it is likely that the designer will develop contempt for the students, blaming the learners for the non-learning.
I want to ask here whether the notion of elegance in content design aligns with the concept of modularity that we associate with learning objects. Let me see if I can sketch the issue. Certain concepts are derivative. They depend on more primitive concepts. To understand the notion of a molecule, there must first be the notion of an atom. In the economics of supply and demand before understanding how a change in the price in one market affects the price in another market, there must first be the notion of equilibrium in a single market. Every subject has examples of this sort.
Now consider the case where those more primitive notions “may” be developed in earlier modules, and note that the use of the word “may” is deliberate. If the content is interconnected in this way at a conceptual level, is it still correct to think of it as modular? An appropriate metaphor to consider is chapters in a textbook which, for example, can each be stored as a its own PDF file. Does the ability to make those chapters into PDFs mean the content is modular? Or must they be read in a prescribed order where later chapters depend on earlier ones?
A correct response is, “maybe” or, “it depends.” When there is no conceptual dependence then yes, I would agree the content is modular, but otherwise not. Actually, the issue is a bit more subtle than that. The question is not just dependency but rather whether there is dependency on ideas/jargon/framework that may be non-standard in such a course. So the real issue is whether a non-standard approach (meaning different from the way it has been done traditionally) can be developed that is also modular. Why does this matter?
Suppose others wanted to try out my content to see if it is useful, but they didn’t want to use it all, just some of it. In particular, what they want to do is to replace some part of the textbook they are using that they find less than satisfactory. Isn’t it more natural to experiment that way than to fully embrace an alternative right out of the box?
But now suppose my elegant module is dependent on some primitive ideas from earlier modules that these other instructors are unlikely to teach. For example, in this module on Supply and Demand that I developed some time ago, the penultimate worksheet entitled, Scale, does a nice graphical technique to visualize how an economy gets bigger by making replicas of existing buyers or sellers but who are some different in their valuations from the agents they were based upon. This is done in a precise way under the hood that in the exercise is explained to the students by the expression “filling in the gaps.” This is a nonstandard development of the idea but it is quite intuitive and gives the correct core notion of what is meant by a competitive market. I am proud of that particular worksheet because of this development.
Now, suppose I make a different module on Elasticity of Supply and Demand and, consistent with trying to maintain elegance in design, I want to base the development on the ideas that were introduced in that Scale worksheet. This seems good and correct to me for teaching my own students. But it means somebody else who might try to use my stuff and wants the elasticity module, but not the supply and demand module may be out of luck.
To complete the cycle in this thinking, suppose my own sense of development is driven by the possibility of external use. This could be driven by a desire to make money selling the modules I’ve created or it could be driven simply by a sense that the effort is of value if there is this type of social utility, but not otherwise. (In other words, the motives should be pretty much the same as why faculty author textbooks.) That means I the author might be concerned about the external use at the time of the writing, and therefore might want to accommodate it out of the box.
So what should I do? My inclination now is to please myself in the design and then encourage anyone else who wants to use it to try it all. But that is the typical ego-centric approach and I’m not sure it is self-sustaining.
(a) My graphical design skills are rudimentary at best. I might benefit from some formal instruction in graphical design. But, in truth, my interest does not lie in trying to make my content “look slick” so that as long as I feel the look is functional, I’m ok with that. I have learned something about having borders and white space on the page and not jamming in too much stuff into a small spatial area. I’m probably more textual and less image intensive than suits the medium. Given that, I can make something that is passable.
(b) I have a pretty well honed instinct on how to represent the economic ideas into elegant representations that really should help the students visualize what is going on. This is both difficult, because it really does require out of the box thinking, and fun and rewarding when something has been produced, because there is then visual evidence of how these representations improve on the understanding of the economics. This started back when I did Excelets and it has carried over into what I’ve done more recently. I’ve gotten better at it and more sophisticated in my design.
When I speak of elegance in design, I’m speaking about (b). That is representation of ideas that are good for the novice to understand what is going on. I believe that elegance in design facilitates deep learning of the ideas and I believe further that we should be talking more about this when we advise instructors on making their materials. Elegance and simplicity need to be considered as cousins if not as identical twins. But elegance is far from making things simple minded. Indeed, I believe it is only through an elegant design that depth and complexity can be brought in. Otherwise, complex ideas that are presented seem too hard and impenetrable and will be off putting to the students. Then there is no learning, just pretensions, and it is likely that the designer will develop contempt for the students, blaming the learners for the non-learning.
I want to ask here whether the notion of elegance in content design aligns with the concept of modularity that we associate with learning objects. Let me see if I can sketch the issue. Certain concepts are derivative. They depend on more primitive concepts. To understand the notion of a molecule, there must first be the notion of an atom. In the economics of supply and demand before understanding how a change in the price in one market affects the price in another market, there must first be the notion of equilibrium in a single market. Every subject has examples of this sort.
Now consider the case where those more primitive notions “may” be developed in earlier modules, and note that the use of the word “may” is deliberate. If the content is interconnected in this way at a conceptual level, is it still correct to think of it as modular? An appropriate metaphor to consider is chapters in a textbook which, for example, can each be stored as a its own PDF file. Does the ability to make those chapters into PDFs mean the content is modular? Or must they be read in a prescribed order where later chapters depend on earlier ones?
A correct response is, “maybe” or, “it depends.” When there is no conceptual dependence then yes, I would agree the content is modular, but otherwise not. Actually, the issue is a bit more subtle than that. The question is not just dependency but rather whether there is dependency on ideas/jargon/framework that may be non-standard in such a course. So the real issue is whether a non-standard approach (meaning different from the way it has been done traditionally) can be developed that is also modular. Why does this matter?
Suppose others wanted to try out my content to see if it is useful, but they didn’t want to use it all, just some of it. In particular, what they want to do is to replace some part of the textbook they are using that they find less than satisfactory. Isn’t it more natural to experiment that way than to fully embrace an alternative right out of the box?
But now suppose my elegant module is dependent on some primitive ideas from earlier modules that these other instructors are unlikely to teach. For example, in this module on Supply and Demand that I developed some time ago, the penultimate worksheet entitled, Scale, does a nice graphical technique to visualize how an economy gets bigger by making replicas of existing buyers or sellers but who are some different in their valuations from the agents they were based upon. This is done in a precise way under the hood that in the exercise is explained to the students by the expression “filling in the gaps.” This is a nonstandard development of the idea but it is quite intuitive and gives the correct core notion of what is meant by a competitive market. I am proud of that particular worksheet because of this development.
Now, suppose I make a different module on Elasticity of Supply and Demand and, consistent with trying to maintain elegance in design, I want to base the development on the ideas that were introduced in that Scale worksheet. This seems good and correct to me for teaching my own students. But it means somebody else who might try to use my stuff and wants the elasticity module, but not the supply and demand module may be out of luck.
To complete the cycle in this thinking, suppose my own sense of development is driven by the possibility of external use. This could be driven by a desire to make money selling the modules I’ve created or it could be driven simply by a sense that the effort is of value if there is this type of social utility, but not otherwise. (In other words, the motives should be pretty much the same as why faculty author textbooks.) That means I the author might be concerned about the external use at the time of the writing, and therefore might want to accommodate it out of the box.
So what should I do? My inclination now is to please myself in the design and then encourage anyone else who wants to use it to try it all. But that is the typical ego-centric approach and I’m not sure it is self-sustaining.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Homo Genius
There’s an interesting piece in this week's Chronicle (under Popped Culture in the Online version) entitled A Very Long Disengagement and written by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University. It depicts the University as two parallel worlds, the scholarly realm inhabited by the faculty and a social but intellectually dysfunctional world occupied by the students. Going through one metric after another, Baurlein observes the lack of interest students have in their courses, their poor performance in terms of knowledge in basic domains, and their “odd” form of interaction with peers via phone, instant messaging, or blog but not by face to face conversation, and when the last does happen it is disconnected with the classroom or other intellectual life on campus. This is a grim picture, but it is not fundamentally new. For example, it is essentially the picture depicted in Declining by Degrees.
Bauelein singles out the popular culture as a primary culprit for this decline. And in so doing, he indirectly is giving a warning to us who support IT in higher education. Be careful. Don’t embrace trends in student IT use merely because it’s popular to do so. Worry about the students becoming part of the campus community that is larger than themselves, that involves the faculty as well, and that at its base is intellectually driven because curiosity, dialog, and rigor are fundamental values that need to be supported. Don't feel on the the sidelines when making judgments about student cell phone and iPod usea and whether that is tied to the campus mission or orthogonal to it.
However, I don’t want to use this post as a soap box for that argument. I want to consider something else. The Declining by Degrees documentary made the point that things are different across Universities. (Amherst College in Massachusetts was depicted as an ideal place where there is strong faculty and student engagement.) In a similar fashion, I’d like to ask whether there is significant variation in student seriousness and engagement within an institution, such as where I work, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and if so what drives that variation.
Let me begin by pointing out some provocative observations made by Linda Hirshman in the American Prospect. (David Brooks wrote about this Hirshman piece in his column and said it was worthy of one of his Sidney Awards, but the actual winners were only males and espousers of a conservative view. Hmmm.) Hirshman did an informal poll of women she knows who had gone to the very best universities. The vast majority of them had for a while played important jobs soon after graduation, but they were now either part time workers or stay home moms, “opting out” of the more high stress and high paying jobs that they were presumably qualified for.
This gender/work issue may seem like I’m off on a tangent, so let me bring it back to home quickly. Hirshman says the women at these ritzy universities were studying humanities while the men were doing engineering or the natural sciences. Whether she is correct in her other conclusions, one wonders if seriousness in the student breaks down easily along these lines – the serious ones study engineering. Certainly Tom Friedman, in the World is Flat, makes the study of engineering and the achievement of engineering degrees as the measure of a country’s intellectual capital.
Are engineering students the way Baurlein depicts? And if not, why not?
One of my pleasures now is teaching a class in Economic Principles to Campus Honors Students. The class starts in a couple of weeks. The CHP program is a restricted club for our best and brightest students. When I taught the class the last time, the kids didn’t seem so much unlike me as an undergrad. They read what I assigned, were intellectually curious, and clearly did enjoy the in class discussion. I’m very interested to see how the 2006 cohort does. By the way, most of them the last time were engineering students.
Let’s say the correlation is true, that in the main engineering students are serious and liberal arts students are not and that this correlates with gender. What are we to do about the correlation?
At my campus the Engineering College has the highest average ACT scores for admission, followed by Business. Arts and Sciences is an easier college to get into and there students may very well be less challenged earlier in their academic career, taking large classes where they can get by and where they “learn” survival habits rather than intellectual engagement. While perhaps a bit stereotypical in description, this view says the differences were there before arrival on campus and the college experience reinforces them.
When I was at Cornell (I transferred there for the spring 1974 term and then stayed two years) I was a math major in arts and sciences and I believe it was the hardest college to get into, measured by the SAT scores that are used for such a metric. Humanities and social science were respectable areas to study and I don’t believe anyone felt those students were lesser in any way (other than that their lifetime incomes might be lower). And I’ve written before about how wonderful Cornell was for me because of the intellectual engagement outside the classroom and how that flowed seamlessly with my social existence.
Is that a diferrence between then and now or perhaps a difference between here and there? I really don't know. I suspect some of both.
Perhaps it is egotistical to envision that my undergraduate experience at an Ivy League school 30 years ago can be replayed at a public university now. But if not that, what else is there to do? Don’t allow students to major in the humanities or social sciences? Force more stringent performance requirements on the students so they can’t tune out? Require students to "apply for admission" prior to entry into their Junior year just as transfer students apply for admission?
I do think Baurlein is onto something talking about the student leisure time. If there is to be a move away from the disengagement he describes, we have to make inroads there. Does anyone have a plan?
Bauelein singles out the popular culture as a primary culprit for this decline. And in so doing, he indirectly is giving a warning to us who support IT in higher education. Be careful. Don’t embrace trends in student IT use merely because it’s popular to do so. Worry about the students becoming part of the campus community that is larger than themselves, that involves the faculty as well, and that at its base is intellectually driven because curiosity, dialog, and rigor are fundamental values that need to be supported. Don't feel on the the sidelines when making judgments about student cell phone and iPod usea and whether that is tied to the campus mission or orthogonal to it.
However, I don’t want to use this post as a soap box for that argument. I want to consider something else. The Declining by Degrees documentary made the point that things are different across Universities. (Amherst College in Massachusetts was depicted as an ideal place where there is strong faculty and student engagement.) In a similar fashion, I’d like to ask whether there is significant variation in student seriousness and engagement within an institution, such as where I work, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and if so what drives that variation.
Let me begin by pointing out some provocative observations made by Linda Hirshman in the American Prospect. (David Brooks wrote about this Hirshman piece in his column and said it was worthy of one of his Sidney Awards, but the actual winners were only males and espousers of a conservative view. Hmmm.) Hirshman did an informal poll of women she knows who had gone to the very best universities. The vast majority of them had for a while played important jobs soon after graduation, but they were now either part time workers or stay home moms, “opting out” of the more high stress and high paying jobs that they were presumably qualified for.
This gender/work issue may seem like I’m off on a tangent, so let me bring it back to home quickly. Hirshman says the women at these ritzy universities were studying humanities while the men were doing engineering or the natural sciences. Whether she is correct in her other conclusions, one wonders if seriousness in the student breaks down easily along these lines – the serious ones study engineering. Certainly Tom Friedman, in the World is Flat, makes the study of engineering and the achievement of engineering degrees as the measure of a country’s intellectual capital.
Are engineering students the way Baurlein depicts? And if not, why not?
One of my pleasures now is teaching a class in Economic Principles to Campus Honors Students. The class starts in a couple of weeks. The CHP program is a restricted club for our best and brightest students. When I taught the class the last time, the kids didn’t seem so much unlike me as an undergrad. They read what I assigned, were intellectually curious, and clearly did enjoy the in class discussion. I’m very interested to see how the 2006 cohort does. By the way, most of them the last time were engineering students.
Let’s say the correlation is true, that in the main engineering students are serious and liberal arts students are not and that this correlates with gender. What are we to do about the correlation?
At my campus the Engineering College has the highest average ACT scores for admission, followed by Business. Arts and Sciences is an easier college to get into and there students may very well be less challenged earlier in their academic career, taking large classes where they can get by and where they “learn” survival habits rather than intellectual engagement. While perhaps a bit stereotypical in description, this view says the differences were there before arrival on campus and the college experience reinforces them.
When I was at Cornell (I transferred there for the spring 1974 term and then stayed two years) I was a math major in arts and sciences and I believe it was the hardest college to get into, measured by the SAT scores that are used for such a metric. Humanities and social science were respectable areas to study and I don’t believe anyone felt those students were lesser in any way (other than that their lifetime incomes might be lower). And I’ve written before about how wonderful Cornell was for me because of the intellectual engagement outside the classroom and how that flowed seamlessly with my social existence.
Is that a diferrence between then and now or perhaps a difference between here and there? I really don't know. I suspect some of both.
Perhaps it is egotistical to envision that my undergraduate experience at an Ivy League school 30 years ago can be replayed at a public university now. But if not that, what else is there to do? Don’t allow students to major in the humanities or social sciences? Force more stringent performance requirements on the students so they can’t tune out? Require students to "apply for admission" prior to entry into their Junior year just as transfer students apply for admission?
I do think Baurlein is onto something talking about the student leisure time. If there is to be a move away from the disengagement he describes, we have to make inroads there. Does anyone have a plan?
Monday, January 02, 2006
Raking Muck
Perhaps in a fit of oddness, I spent a couple of days over the holiday reading a biography of Upton Sinclair by Jon A. Yoder. I must have purchased the book some years ago, because I found it on one of our bookshelves as I was browsing for something to read. I have an odd affinity with Sinclair, since my parents chose my first name at least in part in reference to Sinclair’s famous character, Lanny Budd. Having read Yoder’s book, I know a little more about that connection. Since Sinclair used his fiction in an overtly political way and his protagonists were meant as idealized forms of himself and since some of those political views coincide with my own, I feel a certain connection to Sinclair himself and in this post I’ll draw that out a bit.
Sinclair was an incredibly prolific writer, with 51 books to his credit and a substantial number of assorted other works – plays, screenplays, and the like. Apparently he is the most translated American writer and in his time was extremely popular abroad, though for a variety of reasons he was less admired at home. As an object of study from an academic viewpoint, I would think “historical fiction” would be a reasonable umbrella, his work fell between the cracks regarding which department(s) on college campuses would claim it for their own – English? History? Political Science? Sociology? This partly explains his comparatively poor reputation in the U.S.
I’m nowhere near as prolific as a writer, but I’ve surprised myself in just how much writing I’ve actually done since starting this blog. For better or worse, the Blogger.com “dashboard” keeps track of the number of posts. I’ve had 223, in about ten and a half months. Many of these are more than two pages when viewed in Word. So a fair amount of text has been generated. And in terms of recognition, the Sitemeter tracking data indicate a substantial number of hits from abroad. Hmmm, the planets are aligning.
Sinclair was a Socialist for much of his life because the evils of capitalism, particularly the exploitation of the many (notably new immigrants) for the benefit of the few contradicted his sense of American democracy. He wanted a system that produced greater equality of outcome, at least for the vast majority of workers who put in honest effort. Much of his work can be seen as variations on a theme, with the theme as I’ve just described. In that, according to Yoder, he was misunderstood in his time and he felt that he didn’t achieve what he was after in much of his writing.
For example, when I was a grade school student we were taught that The Jungle was Sinclair’s major contribution, a muckraking attack on the Meat Packing Industry. Indeed, the book caused quite a stir and did lead Teddy Roosevelt to institute reforms in that industry. But from Sinclair’s vantage, Meat Packing was just an example of an industry where immigrant workers were exploited and where the fantasy of the American dream, as symbolized by the words on the Statue of Liberty, was replaced by the reality of the immigrant’s nightmare, where their Darwinist attempts at survival start off from a noble base but end up with a morally bankrupt view of humanity. (Indeed, in this respect the story of Sinclair reminded me of the Paul Muni character in “I Was A Fugitive From a Chain Gang.”)
I too feel as if I’m somewhat misunderstood. Though the title of this blog employs the expression “Learning Technology” in it, I think a focus on the technology in itself is misplaced. The focus needs to be on a way of thinking about the teaching and learning. I hope the technology stimulates that way of thinking and that is why I’ve got the title as I do, but I think for too many, both inside my IT organization and even among some staff who work for me, the focus ends up being on the technology itself. Of course, part of my administrative job is to be the custodian for the technology itself, particularly the campus supported course management system and the technology we have in our smart classrooms. But that is not what makes me tick.
The essence with learning technology is seeing how the teaching and learning changes as a consequence. For example, very early on it became apparent that the technology was good at making the student work more overt – to the instructor and to the peer students. So we might ask questions like, are there ways with or without computer technology to make student work more overt? The elementary school where my kids went, and I think it was typical of a reasonably good elementary school, certainly made it commonplace to showcase the work of all the students. The technology they used was construction paper, thumbtacks, and a real (not electronic) bulletin board. The point is, once the question is raised, there are lots of ways of thinking about making the student work overt.
Then one might ask, now that we have the student work visible, what do we do with this knowledge? In the context that I think is most familiar in considering teaching reform, the instructor without seeing the student work has made some assumption about how much the student is learning. Invariably, that assumption is overly optimistic. So the question can be reframed as, now that the evidence from the student work indicates the students has less of an understanding than the instructor believed, how should the instructor change the teaching? What about the pacing of the presentation? What about activities for the students that might promote deeper understand? What about things that might be done to get the students to spend more time with the materials so they get a deeper understanding?
These are the right type of questions. Are they fundamentally about the technology? No, they aren’t. Does the technology immediately get the instructor into a position to ask these questions? No, it doesn’t. But if the instructor is asking these questions, it might very well help in answering them, particularly with what is possible to do.
Sinclair went through a sobering process in his adult life, from idealist to realist, from Socialist to Liberal, from feeling with his heart to thinking with his head. Much of this process happened because he was not fully successful in what he tried, but also because he recognized a tension between the idealism, driven by his sense of social justice, and the pragmatism of what could actually be accomplished, which he saw motivated so many others. Later in life he toned down some of the socialism and moved more to the pragmatic side. According to Yoder, much of Sinclair’s later fiction had the main characters play out this tension and recognize both of these views simultaneously. This is the distinct aspect of Sinclair that makes him the quintessential American Liberal of the middle 20th century. He was not a true believer. He was conflicted between these two distinct voices.
I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve discussed the issue with some of colleagues around the country. We too feel conflicted, much in the sense of Sinclair. The idealism, easy enough to articulate, is that the technology would transform the teaching and learning, in ways that would be clear to all and hence that would generate a big and across the board embrace of the technology on campus, with a big improvement on the learning. To a large extent this hope has not been realized. Certainly there have been some changes in instruction due to the technology. But for many those are simply a matter of convenience, not a matter of transforming the teaching approach.
Further, to the extent that we are witnessing reform in teaching on campus this is in the main motivated, as Bill Massy warned us, by changes in the subject matter being taught, not by changes in method. But it is changes in method that are needed. We are still teaching “stuff” instead of teaching “learning to learn” skills. And we are dealing with reform that comes from spot innovation, designed to address a situated learning issue, not a systematic transformation. All of this is frustrating.
Let me note one other tie with Sinclair. He wanted to reform the system from within. He ran for Governor of California in the 30’s and came in second. For us lesser mortals, it is extraordinarily tempting to argue for reform from without. Certainly the argument was made consistently in the late ‘90s that Higher Ed moves too slowly and that we need new approaches to bring about the changes needed to realize the promise of online learning, so we need to go to the outside, perhaps to the for profit sector. My blog can be easily read as an extended argument for reform. (A while ago I found this post from Yule Heibel, which includes a section on my blog that makes it seems as if I’m…… muckraking!!!)
Perhaps this is the consequence of being a dreamer. For me it certainly was interesting to read about Sinclair. I believe there are other parallels that I haven’t articulated here. (Fir example, he cared about being readable by a broad audience.) But there is obviously sufficient distance that I can see it’s not the technology that is primarily at issue. Reform is a tough business. And many times it does not play out in the way initially intended.
Sinclair was an incredibly prolific writer, with 51 books to his credit and a substantial number of assorted other works – plays, screenplays, and the like. Apparently he is the most translated American writer and in his time was extremely popular abroad, though for a variety of reasons he was less admired at home. As an object of study from an academic viewpoint, I would think “historical fiction” would be a reasonable umbrella, his work fell between the cracks regarding which department(s) on college campuses would claim it for their own – English? History? Political Science? Sociology? This partly explains his comparatively poor reputation in the U.S.
I’m nowhere near as prolific as a writer, but I’ve surprised myself in just how much writing I’ve actually done since starting this blog. For better or worse, the Blogger.com “dashboard” keeps track of the number of posts. I’ve had 223, in about ten and a half months. Many of these are more than two pages when viewed in Word. So a fair amount of text has been generated. And in terms of recognition, the Sitemeter tracking data indicate a substantial number of hits from abroad. Hmmm, the planets are aligning.
Sinclair was a Socialist for much of his life because the evils of capitalism, particularly the exploitation of the many (notably new immigrants) for the benefit of the few contradicted his sense of American democracy. He wanted a system that produced greater equality of outcome, at least for the vast majority of workers who put in honest effort. Much of his work can be seen as variations on a theme, with the theme as I’ve just described. In that, according to Yoder, he was misunderstood in his time and he felt that he didn’t achieve what he was after in much of his writing.
For example, when I was a grade school student we were taught that The Jungle was Sinclair’s major contribution, a muckraking attack on the Meat Packing Industry. Indeed, the book caused quite a stir and did lead Teddy Roosevelt to institute reforms in that industry. But from Sinclair’s vantage, Meat Packing was just an example of an industry where immigrant workers were exploited and where the fantasy of the American dream, as symbolized by the words on the Statue of Liberty, was replaced by the reality of the immigrant’s nightmare, where their Darwinist attempts at survival start off from a noble base but end up with a morally bankrupt view of humanity. (Indeed, in this respect the story of Sinclair reminded me of the Paul Muni character in “I Was A Fugitive From a Chain Gang.”)
I too feel as if I’m somewhat misunderstood. Though the title of this blog employs the expression “Learning Technology” in it, I think a focus on the technology in itself is misplaced. The focus needs to be on a way of thinking about the teaching and learning. I hope the technology stimulates that way of thinking and that is why I’ve got the title as I do, but I think for too many, both inside my IT organization and even among some staff who work for me, the focus ends up being on the technology itself. Of course, part of my administrative job is to be the custodian for the technology itself, particularly the campus supported course management system and the technology we have in our smart classrooms. But that is not what makes me tick.
The essence with learning technology is seeing how the teaching and learning changes as a consequence. For example, very early on it became apparent that the technology was good at making the student work more overt – to the instructor and to the peer students. So we might ask questions like, are there ways with or without computer technology to make student work more overt? The elementary school where my kids went, and I think it was typical of a reasonably good elementary school, certainly made it commonplace to showcase the work of all the students. The technology they used was construction paper, thumbtacks, and a real (not electronic) bulletin board. The point is, once the question is raised, there are lots of ways of thinking about making the student work overt.
Then one might ask, now that we have the student work visible, what do we do with this knowledge? In the context that I think is most familiar in considering teaching reform, the instructor without seeing the student work has made some assumption about how much the student is learning. Invariably, that assumption is overly optimistic. So the question can be reframed as, now that the evidence from the student work indicates the students has less of an understanding than the instructor believed, how should the instructor change the teaching? What about the pacing of the presentation? What about activities for the students that might promote deeper understand? What about things that might be done to get the students to spend more time with the materials so they get a deeper understanding?
These are the right type of questions. Are they fundamentally about the technology? No, they aren’t. Does the technology immediately get the instructor into a position to ask these questions? No, it doesn’t. But if the instructor is asking these questions, it might very well help in answering them, particularly with what is possible to do.
Sinclair went through a sobering process in his adult life, from idealist to realist, from Socialist to Liberal, from feeling with his heart to thinking with his head. Much of this process happened because he was not fully successful in what he tried, but also because he recognized a tension between the idealism, driven by his sense of social justice, and the pragmatism of what could actually be accomplished, which he saw motivated so many others. Later in life he toned down some of the socialism and moved more to the pragmatic side. According to Yoder, much of Sinclair’s later fiction had the main characters play out this tension and recognize both of these views simultaneously. This is the distinct aspect of Sinclair that makes him the quintessential American Liberal of the middle 20th century. He was not a true believer. He was conflicted between these two distinct voices.
I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve discussed the issue with some of colleagues around the country. We too feel conflicted, much in the sense of Sinclair. The idealism, easy enough to articulate, is that the technology would transform the teaching and learning, in ways that would be clear to all and hence that would generate a big and across the board embrace of the technology on campus, with a big improvement on the learning. To a large extent this hope has not been realized. Certainly there have been some changes in instruction due to the technology. But for many those are simply a matter of convenience, not a matter of transforming the teaching approach.
Further, to the extent that we are witnessing reform in teaching on campus this is in the main motivated, as Bill Massy warned us, by changes in the subject matter being taught, not by changes in method. But it is changes in method that are needed. We are still teaching “stuff” instead of teaching “learning to learn” skills. And we are dealing with reform that comes from spot innovation, designed to address a situated learning issue, not a systematic transformation. All of this is frustrating.
Let me note one other tie with Sinclair. He wanted to reform the system from within. He ran for Governor of California in the 30’s and came in second. For us lesser mortals, it is extraordinarily tempting to argue for reform from without. Certainly the argument was made consistently in the late ‘90s that Higher Ed moves too slowly and that we need new approaches to bring about the changes needed to realize the promise of online learning, so we need to go to the outside, perhaps to the for profit sector. My blog can be easily read as an extended argument for reform. (A while ago I found this post from Yule Heibel, which includes a section on my blog that makes it seems as if I’m…… muckraking!!!)
Perhaps this is the consequence of being a dreamer. For me it certainly was interesting to read about Sinclair. I believe there are other parallels that I haven’t articulated here. (Fir example, he cared about being readable by a broad audience.) But there is obviously sufficient distance that I can see it’s not the technology that is primarily at issue. Reform is a tough business. And many times it does not play out in the way initially intended.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Evolving from our children
This is my last post till after the New Year. Most people I know are either winding down or have already gone on vacation. I’m going to do likewise and so I hope will most of the readers of this blog. Happy Holidays!
***
I meant this title to be taken in a serious vein although I understand fully that Darwin and Evolution are hot button topics and that the causality there runs from the genetic makeup of the parents to the character and behavior of the offspring and not vice versa. I am not trying to defeat that idea here. I have something else in mind.
To a certain extent we all pine to be school children who have elders that watch us, nurture us, and evaluate us. We might especially want this as we reach middle age and beyond, although we expect to have much more self-awareness and internal radar to guide our own judgments. The issue with spending a lot of time in introspection and self-analysis is perspective and if one misses essential aspects by being too close to the situation and not being able see things as others, especially highly informed others, might see things.
So the thought is that we might learn things about ourselves by how others see our children and then to rely on Darwin and Evolution in the more traditional sense, that those observations about our children speak loudly about ourselves. What evolves in this case is our self-understanding. We may become better parents as a result. And we may also become better attuned to our own environment.
Let me give a personal example. I have two boys, ages 11 and 13 and their difference in ages (20 months) pretty much mirrors the difference in ages between me and my younger brother, Peter. (I also have an older sister so I’m the middle child, and that may have had substantial impact, so the analogy is not perfect. But my sister is 5 years my senior and hence our experiences during the grade school years didn’t overlap much.) So I’ve likened myself to my older boy, Nathan, and likened Peter to my younger boy, Ben.
In certain ways, that has played out. Nathan was the tallest and youngest in his classes, just as I was. He seems to have the “math gene” and he’s a little reticent to open up around adults. Ben is much the younger brother. This has been my preconception for some time and it seemingly fit, so I didn't bother to challenge it.
But now I want to talk about my own self-learning by considering Ben and seeing some of him in me. Ben’s grades are not as good as Nathan’s and yet his teachers talk about Ben as exceedingly bright. The issue, so it appears from conversations between my wife and Ben’s teachers (and I got a little of this from the parent-teacher conference this fall), is that Ben races through his written work with the sole goal seemingly to get to the end point. So he is careless and sloppy (his hand writing is atrocious) and as consequence he makes mistakes along the way and he doesn’t go back to correct those.
This is not a perfect description of me, but it is sufficiently close to the mark to feel that I am seeing a reflection of myself. My wife and I talked about why Ben races through his work and she wanted to discipline that out of him. I was much less sure that is the right thing to do. I’ve written in a post a few weeks ago that I have some ability to do a quick and to the point analysis. The racing through things is essential for that because at root is to get to the heart of the matter and discarding a whole bunch of other stuff that is window dressing only is critical. But this is clearly something that I cultivated on my own rather than having it taught to me. Indeed, part of the issue is whether pleasing the teachers is more important than pleasing oneself.
I will say that somehow I figured out how to do both and Ben doesn’t quite have the right balance yet, but this idea of wanting the right answer (or at least a good way to frame the issue) by zipping through things seems to be an important part of me and I’m grateful that the evaluation of Ben has brought this point home.
I now want to turn this idea to teaching, particularly at the college level. The connections to our students are at the species and cultural level rather than at more direct heredity level. But might there be this same type of learning about ourselves from observations of the behavior of our students? The literature I’m aware of emphasizes the “otherness” between us and our students. We faculty are unlike our students in that they for the most part will not go on in academe and they have inclinations that are much more practical. They eschew theory for theory’s sake. They want to learn things where the usefulness is obvious to them and not otherwise.
There is another source of otherness that has been emphasized recently. They are digital natives. They can’t remember a world without computers. Their core behaviors have been shaped by the ubiquitous presence of information technology. Books may matter less to them as a source of knowledge. We are digital immigrants. We grew up in a world that was different. Television was the defining technology and in the main it was viewed as a source of recreation, not as a source of information. So we read newspapers and books. We tended to trust authoritative sources.
I don’t want to deny either view of otherness, at least not entirely, but I do think there is some benefit from also seriously considering sameness and looking for hints of ourselves in our students. This really can’t be done in a lecture style class. It can be done in seminars where the students speak up frequently, so their world view and approach to life are pushed front and center.
But beyond this, and I think this is extremely difficult to do at the undergraduate level at a big Public university but it is something we should think about as we try various things to reform instructions, the faculty might engage from time to time in discussions about the students. If we are seeing reflections of ourselves in the students, what are other instructors seeing? Knowing that would seem to be enormously important. To the extent that we perform Schon-like experiments in our teaching modifying our approach from one semester to the next, this would seem to be the driver. It is much harder to find the right way to teach when conceiving of the students as the other. It is much easier to conceptualize about ourselves.
The current approach, in essence, is that the instructor has a blank slate on each student when teaching the class and an opinion is formed only from the experience with the student during the course – based on the written work and occasionally on what the student says in class discussion. Why does it make sense to start a course with instructor ignorance of the students? And how might we make more overt the process from instructors seeing themselves in what the students do to them reconsidering their teaching in light of that reflection?
***
I meant this title to be taken in a serious vein although I understand fully that Darwin and Evolution are hot button topics and that the causality there runs from the genetic makeup of the parents to the character and behavior of the offspring and not vice versa. I am not trying to defeat that idea here. I have something else in mind.
To a certain extent we all pine to be school children who have elders that watch us, nurture us, and evaluate us. We might especially want this as we reach middle age and beyond, although we expect to have much more self-awareness and internal radar to guide our own judgments. The issue with spending a lot of time in introspection and self-analysis is perspective and if one misses essential aspects by being too close to the situation and not being able see things as others, especially highly informed others, might see things.
So the thought is that we might learn things about ourselves by how others see our children and then to rely on Darwin and Evolution in the more traditional sense, that those observations about our children speak loudly about ourselves. What evolves in this case is our self-understanding. We may become better parents as a result. And we may also become better attuned to our own environment.
Let me give a personal example. I have two boys, ages 11 and 13 and their difference in ages (20 months) pretty much mirrors the difference in ages between me and my younger brother, Peter. (I also have an older sister so I’m the middle child, and that may have had substantial impact, so the analogy is not perfect. But my sister is 5 years my senior and hence our experiences during the grade school years didn’t overlap much.) So I’ve likened myself to my older boy, Nathan, and likened Peter to my younger boy, Ben.
In certain ways, that has played out. Nathan was the tallest and youngest in his classes, just as I was. He seems to have the “math gene” and he’s a little reticent to open up around adults. Ben is much the younger brother. This has been my preconception for some time and it seemingly fit, so I didn't bother to challenge it.
But now I want to talk about my own self-learning by considering Ben and seeing some of him in me. Ben’s grades are not as good as Nathan’s and yet his teachers talk about Ben as exceedingly bright. The issue, so it appears from conversations between my wife and Ben’s teachers (and I got a little of this from the parent-teacher conference this fall), is that Ben races through his written work with the sole goal seemingly to get to the end point. So he is careless and sloppy (his hand writing is atrocious) and as consequence he makes mistakes along the way and he doesn’t go back to correct those.
This is not a perfect description of me, but it is sufficiently close to the mark to feel that I am seeing a reflection of myself. My wife and I talked about why Ben races through his work and she wanted to discipline that out of him. I was much less sure that is the right thing to do. I’ve written in a post a few weeks ago that I have some ability to do a quick and to the point analysis. The racing through things is essential for that because at root is to get to the heart of the matter and discarding a whole bunch of other stuff that is window dressing only is critical. But this is clearly something that I cultivated on my own rather than having it taught to me. Indeed, part of the issue is whether pleasing the teachers is more important than pleasing oneself.
I will say that somehow I figured out how to do both and Ben doesn’t quite have the right balance yet, but this idea of wanting the right answer (or at least a good way to frame the issue) by zipping through things seems to be an important part of me and I’m grateful that the evaluation of Ben has brought this point home.
I now want to turn this idea to teaching, particularly at the college level. The connections to our students are at the species and cultural level rather than at more direct heredity level. But might there be this same type of learning about ourselves from observations of the behavior of our students? The literature I’m aware of emphasizes the “otherness” between us and our students. We faculty are unlike our students in that they for the most part will not go on in academe and they have inclinations that are much more practical. They eschew theory for theory’s sake. They want to learn things where the usefulness is obvious to them and not otherwise.
There is another source of otherness that has been emphasized recently. They are digital natives. They can’t remember a world without computers. Their core behaviors have been shaped by the ubiquitous presence of information technology. Books may matter less to them as a source of knowledge. We are digital immigrants. We grew up in a world that was different. Television was the defining technology and in the main it was viewed as a source of recreation, not as a source of information. So we read newspapers and books. We tended to trust authoritative sources.
I don’t want to deny either view of otherness, at least not entirely, but I do think there is some benefit from also seriously considering sameness and looking for hints of ourselves in our students. This really can’t be done in a lecture style class. It can be done in seminars where the students speak up frequently, so their world view and approach to life are pushed front and center.
But beyond this, and I think this is extremely difficult to do at the undergraduate level at a big Public university but it is something we should think about as we try various things to reform instructions, the faculty might engage from time to time in discussions about the students. If we are seeing reflections of ourselves in the students, what are other instructors seeing? Knowing that would seem to be enormously important. To the extent that we perform Schon-like experiments in our teaching modifying our approach from one semester to the next, this would seem to be the driver. It is much harder to find the right way to teach when conceiving of the students as the other. It is much easier to conceptualize about ourselves.
The current approach, in essence, is that the instructor has a blank slate on each student when teaching the class and an opinion is formed only from the experience with the student during the course – based on the written work and occasionally on what the student says in class discussion. Why does it make sense to start a course with instructor ignorance of the students? And how might we make more overt the process from instructors seeing themselves in what the students do to them reconsidering their teaching in light of that reflection?
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Intuition, Rigor, and Visualization
Way back when, during my first quarter of graduate school in fall 1976, I took what was then the traditional calculus based microeconomics course where we had two textbooks. One was a theory book by somebody named Kogiku (a text I’ve never seen anyone else teach with elsewhere. Indeed, many of the students in the class got a copy of Henderson and Quandt, which was the standard at the time.) The other was an “intuition book” by Gary Becker – his lectures for teaching this course. At least since I got started learning economics, there has always been this tension between rigor, represented by highly mathematical formulations of the economic models, and intuition, which is done in a more discursive style and typically makes anecdotal reference to real world situations.
It may seem strange that an economist would become a teaching with technology guy, there are many more faculty from the humanities, particularly English and there particularly Writing Studies, who have taken this path. But it seems to me not so surprising really, at least in my case, because of seeing so many ordinary students react negatively to the way economics is taught and in trying to work through this tension on intuition versus rigor.
I started out as a complete rigor guy and over the years have softened into an intuition guy. My simple justification for this is that to go the rigor route students have to be able to see through the math into the underlying ideas. If the students can do this, it is a remarkably good way to understand things, because then the students will get grounded in the theoretical justifications for why economists hold such and such to be true. Since I essentially missed undergraduate economics, this is how I learned in graduate school. So I certainly think there is value to the approach.
But, truthfully, many students can’t see through the mathematics (and many more don’t even want to try). So teaching this way at the undergraduate level leads to a schizophrenic type of outcome. The engineering students and the trickle of math majors who take the course are fine with the approach. The business students and those from political science, urban planning, or elsewhere usually are frustrated with it. Teaching the intermediate micro course that so many of us teach either leads to an approach that alienates the students or to the alternative that alienates ourselves in that it is unlike how we learned the subject. Let me get back to that point.
It is fairly standard that topics which were core in graduate school twenty or thirty years ago become part of the undergraduate curriculum today. Nowadays, there are many instructors who will teach the intermediate course at approximately the level of my first quarter graduate course. There is extensive use of LaGrange Multipliers and Bordered Hessians (those are matrices of partial derivatives, not German soldiers). A somewhat more modern version of this theory that emphasizes the duality between allocation and valuation derives many of the fundamental results without calculus (and the Implicit Function Theorem that is the basis for the standard Slutsky decomposition). The duality approach is a little less notation heavy and, I believe, more powerful in developing intuition. It is useful for those who want to do empirics based on the theory, because it emphasizes the testable hypotheses. But it still doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion, to make it really teachable at the undergraduate level.
Understanding economics means seeing the implications of the theory and my argument is that sometimes the theoretical apparatus itself blocks that seeing. Perhaps in my first or second year of graduate school I read a paper by Roy Radner, a very well known theorist, which appeared in Econometrica, the top theory and econometrics journal. The paper was from 1965 or 1966 and was about general equilibrium (that means looking at all markets simultaneously) when different agents in the economy had different pieces of information. It talked about partitions and probability distributions over them and how in being consistent with this differential information, market prices are constrained to be functions only of the coarsest partition that is consistent with each individual’s information. This was the primary result of the paper as I recall. But if asked by a non-economist what was the implication for reality, I couldn’t have told them a thing.
A little while later I read George Akerlof’s famous paper, the Market for Lemons, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970. Most people, including many in the profession, probably don’t know that Radner and Akerlof were modeling essentially the same phenomenon. And Radner was clearly first with the result. But it was Akerlof who won the Nobel prize (to be fair both published extensively on other topics). And it was Akerlof who is associated with the idea called “adverse selection,” that bad risks in the market often drive out good risks. The Market for Lemons is mostly a very simple example that plainly illustrates the result in a partial equilibrium (supply and demand) framework. It is teachable at the undergraduate level. And it is an incredibly important insight for a lot of real world economics (like why the unemployed have to pay such high premiums for health care).
I’ve written before about my colleague in the Math department, Jerry Uhl, and on his paper about getting away from lecturing and using Mathematica to teach calculus via giving students examples to play with. Almost all of us would rather learn from example than from theory. That goes for Economics, Calculus, and I believe Pedagogy as well. The example is easier to penetrate. The learner can draw conclusions from it. So the could teacher comes up with examples, to help the students visualize. The difficulty in doing so is that those examples may very well not come from how the instructor learned the subject. The instructor must be creative and generate those examples in a fresh way under the constraints that the students must find them accessible and that they indeed are exemplary of the core idea. This is hard to do, mostly because it requires an appropriate mindset. Some instructors make this leap to hyperspace. Many others don’t.
I wish I could say it ends there and it does for me in teaching a general education course that is outside the major, where the intuitions learned in the course either last a lifetime or are lost. But what of the course that is in the major, where the student is expected to get a deeper understanding of the subject, where rigor is a requirement for obtaining the degree. Does this intuitive approach spoil the student for the harder, more rigorous alternative? How does one reconcile promoting the student curiosity and demanding that arguments be presented in a rigorous fashion?
I don’t know the answer to that, but here is what I’d like to see. From a good example, one should draw an intuition. (If not, what was the point of the example?) The student needs to develop the habit of mind to ask, “Is that really right? Do I really believe that?” And then the student needs to spend some time, perhaps quite a bit of time, answering that question. How does the student do that? By constructing an analysis and reasoning through it. The student needs to be skeptical. The argument could be flawed in some way. And the intuition itself might be erroneous. So the student needs to be patient and skeptical, yet at the same time excited by coming to the possible realization that the example illuminated.
Is this what we teach in the major? If we peel off the disciplinary trappings, does it look at all like I’ve described? If not, is there something else there that allows the students to grow and thrive as the discipline changes? Or do they become used goods as the knowledge they acquire in school depreciates.
It may seem strange that an economist would become a teaching with technology guy, there are many more faculty from the humanities, particularly English and there particularly Writing Studies, who have taken this path. But it seems to me not so surprising really, at least in my case, because of seeing so many ordinary students react negatively to the way economics is taught and in trying to work through this tension on intuition versus rigor.
I started out as a complete rigor guy and over the years have softened into an intuition guy. My simple justification for this is that to go the rigor route students have to be able to see through the math into the underlying ideas. If the students can do this, it is a remarkably good way to understand things, because then the students will get grounded in the theoretical justifications for why economists hold such and such to be true. Since I essentially missed undergraduate economics, this is how I learned in graduate school. So I certainly think there is value to the approach.
But, truthfully, many students can’t see through the mathematics (and many more don’t even want to try). So teaching this way at the undergraduate level leads to a schizophrenic type of outcome. The engineering students and the trickle of math majors who take the course are fine with the approach. The business students and those from political science, urban planning, or elsewhere usually are frustrated with it. Teaching the intermediate micro course that so many of us teach either leads to an approach that alienates the students or to the alternative that alienates ourselves in that it is unlike how we learned the subject. Let me get back to that point.
It is fairly standard that topics which were core in graduate school twenty or thirty years ago become part of the undergraduate curriculum today. Nowadays, there are many instructors who will teach the intermediate course at approximately the level of my first quarter graduate course. There is extensive use of LaGrange Multipliers and Bordered Hessians (those are matrices of partial derivatives, not German soldiers). A somewhat more modern version of this theory that emphasizes the duality between allocation and valuation derives many of the fundamental results without calculus (and the Implicit Function Theorem that is the basis for the standard Slutsky decomposition). The duality approach is a little less notation heavy and, I believe, more powerful in developing intuition. It is useful for those who want to do empirics based on the theory, because it emphasizes the testable hypotheses. But it still doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion, to make it really teachable at the undergraduate level.
Understanding economics means seeing the implications of the theory and my argument is that sometimes the theoretical apparatus itself blocks that seeing. Perhaps in my first or second year of graduate school I read a paper by Roy Radner, a very well known theorist, which appeared in Econometrica, the top theory and econometrics journal. The paper was from 1965 or 1966 and was about general equilibrium (that means looking at all markets simultaneously) when different agents in the economy had different pieces of information. It talked about partitions and probability distributions over them and how in being consistent with this differential information, market prices are constrained to be functions only of the coarsest partition that is consistent with each individual’s information. This was the primary result of the paper as I recall. But if asked by a non-economist what was the implication for reality, I couldn’t have told them a thing.
A little while later I read George Akerlof’s famous paper, the Market for Lemons, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970. Most people, including many in the profession, probably don’t know that Radner and Akerlof were modeling essentially the same phenomenon. And Radner was clearly first with the result. But it was Akerlof who won the Nobel prize (to be fair both published extensively on other topics). And it was Akerlof who is associated with the idea called “adverse selection,” that bad risks in the market often drive out good risks. The Market for Lemons is mostly a very simple example that plainly illustrates the result in a partial equilibrium (supply and demand) framework. It is teachable at the undergraduate level. And it is an incredibly important insight for a lot of real world economics (like why the unemployed have to pay such high premiums for health care).
I’ve written before about my colleague in the Math department, Jerry Uhl, and on his paper about getting away from lecturing and using Mathematica to teach calculus via giving students examples to play with. Almost all of us would rather learn from example than from theory. That goes for Economics, Calculus, and I believe Pedagogy as well. The example is easier to penetrate. The learner can draw conclusions from it. So the could teacher comes up with examples, to help the students visualize. The difficulty in doing so is that those examples may very well not come from how the instructor learned the subject. The instructor must be creative and generate those examples in a fresh way under the constraints that the students must find them accessible and that they indeed are exemplary of the core idea. This is hard to do, mostly because it requires an appropriate mindset. Some instructors make this leap to hyperspace. Many others don’t.
I wish I could say it ends there and it does for me in teaching a general education course that is outside the major, where the intuitions learned in the course either last a lifetime or are lost. But what of the course that is in the major, where the student is expected to get a deeper understanding of the subject, where rigor is a requirement for obtaining the degree. Does this intuitive approach spoil the student for the harder, more rigorous alternative? How does one reconcile promoting the student curiosity and demanding that arguments be presented in a rigorous fashion?
I don’t know the answer to that, but here is what I’d like to see. From a good example, one should draw an intuition. (If not, what was the point of the example?) The student needs to develop the habit of mind to ask, “Is that really right? Do I really believe that?” And then the student needs to spend some time, perhaps quite a bit of time, answering that question. How does the student do that? By constructing an analysis and reasoning through it. The student needs to be skeptical. The argument could be flawed in some way. And the intuition itself might be erroneous. So the student needs to be patient and skeptical, yet at the same time excited by coming to the possible realization that the example illuminated.
Is this what we teach in the major? If we peel off the disciplinary trappings, does it look at all like I’ve described? If not, is there something else there that allows the students to grow and thrive as the discipline changes? Or do they become used goods as the knowledge they acquire in school depreciates.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Going Crazy with Excel
Things are fairly low key on campus today. Finals ended last Saturday and today the lot where I park my car was much emptier than it has been in some time. I had two meetings on my calendar for this afternoon. Both were cancelled. So I started with something I was working on over the weekend, looking toward my spring course and seeing how much of that I can do with intelligently designed Excel worksheets.
Here is an example I built about a year ago. It is a calendar tool that is good for the next 10 years or so and allows all the data entry within one screen (rather than a separate screen per date as with most Web calendars I’m aware of). It takes advantage of Excel’s built in capabilities and is pretty easy to use. It is downloadable so you can have it on your own desktop, with my dates pre-installed. (The linked version has only a couple of dates in it to prove the concept.) This is how I wish the Calendar tool in a CMS or a Portal worked. The data entry in those seems so clunky to me. Oh well.
And I’m beginning to think of assignments done in Excel that would be linked back to the grade book. I spent some time on this idea a couple of years ago, the last time I taught, and got stuck. Now the solution seems so obvious to me. There needs to be a student identifier in the file title so the generic title would look something like: assignment_name_student_id.xls, and then the trick is to have short names and ids so the entire file title is not that long. It is a little laborious creating different versions of the assignment with the student id in the title. But really, that is not so bad. And once those are created, it is fairly simple to link those back to the grade book.
Slightly harder, I believe, is to take those individual files and put them in a space intended for only that specific student. WebDav makes this not too bad, both for the upload and the download. (And on my new Mac, I discovered that if I view a Folder as a list then I can open subfolders and drag the contents to a common folder in one straightforward step.) That makes it pretty easy to link with the grade book. Excel requires linked workbooks to all be within the same folder.
Indeed, I’ve figured out how to do individual grade reports for each student based on the master grade book for the class. All I need to do for the individual ones is to open them and save, then upload via WebDav to the student’s own folder. This is pretty straightforward. (But it seems to me that upload via WebDav is a slow process, even when files are pretty small. I’m not sure why the slowness. It is the only downer in what I’ve tested so far.)
You can take a look at the linked grade book stuff at my course blog. So now I’ve been able to do grade book, quiz and survey, and calendar all with Excel and distributed through Xythos. For a large class there is still probably too much overhead in this type of an approach, but for a smaller class (I would say up to 50 students) this sort of thing gives me more functionality than with the CMS since I can do a lot of creative things with Excel (for example in the quiz I can restrict display of the next question till the previous question is done correctly and I can make the solution of a question be a complex set of inequalities) and I believe it is still quite manageable.
Will this generate any coattails? If it does, my thought would be that the coattails might come from trying to do CMS type stuff on a pittance or trying to do something more sophisticated than a CMS can manage. Excel really is powerful software and it is ubiquitous. Those two factors should matter. On the other hand, my approach is somewhat unorthodox and I believe for that reason it is hard to communicate about the idea. In the meantime, I’m going to keep putting up my little examples and see whether anyone else gets on the bandwagon.
If I were betting, this is not the next revolution. But it will be in my class!
Here is an example I built about a year ago. It is a calendar tool that is good for the next 10 years or so and allows all the data entry within one screen (rather than a separate screen per date as with most Web calendars I’m aware of). It takes advantage of Excel’s built in capabilities and is pretty easy to use. It is downloadable so you can have it on your own desktop, with my dates pre-installed. (The linked version has only a couple of dates in it to prove the concept.) This is how I wish the Calendar tool in a CMS or a Portal worked. The data entry in those seems so clunky to me. Oh well.
And I’m beginning to think of assignments done in Excel that would be linked back to the grade book. I spent some time on this idea a couple of years ago, the last time I taught, and got stuck. Now the solution seems so obvious to me. There needs to be a student identifier in the file title so the generic title would look something like: assignment_name_student_id.xls, and then the trick is to have short names and ids so the entire file title is not that long. It is a little laborious creating different versions of the assignment with the student id in the title. But really, that is not so bad. And once those are created, it is fairly simple to link those back to the grade book.
Slightly harder, I believe, is to take those individual files and put them in a space intended for only that specific student. WebDav makes this not too bad, both for the upload and the download. (And on my new Mac, I discovered that if I view a Folder as a list then I can open subfolders and drag the contents to a common folder in one straightforward step.) That makes it pretty easy to link with the grade book. Excel requires linked workbooks to all be within the same folder.
Indeed, I’ve figured out how to do individual grade reports for each student based on the master grade book for the class. All I need to do for the individual ones is to open them and save, then upload via WebDav to the student’s own folder. This is pretty straightforward. (But it seems to me that upload via WebDav is a slow process, even when files are pretty small. I’m not sure why the slowness. It is the only downer in what I’ve tested so far.)
You can take a look at the linked grade book stuff at my course blog. So now I’ve been able to do grade book, quiz and survey, and calendar all with Excel and distributed through Xythos. For a large class there is still probably too much overhead in this type of an approach, but for a smaller class (I would say up to 50 students) this sort of thing gives me more functionality than with the CMS since I can do a lot of creative things with Excel (for example in the quiz I can restrict display of the next question till the previous question is done correctly and I can make the solution of a question be a complex set of inequalities) and I believe it is still quite manageable.
Will this generate any coattails? If it does, my thought would be that the coattails might come from trying to do CMS type stuff on a pittance or trying to do something more sophisticated than a CMS can manage. Excel really is powerful software and it is ubiquitous. Those two factors should matter. On the other hand, my approach is somewhat unorthodox and I believe for that reason it is hard to communicate about the idea. In the meantime, I’m going to keep putting up my little examples and see whether anyone else gets on the bandwagon.
If I were betting, this is not the next revolution. But it will be in my class!
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Gresham’s Law and Using Learning Technology in Large Undergrad Classes
It is an unfortunate but real part of teaching that many students will try to subvert the assessment mechanism they are exposed to rather than be measured as an under performer. I’m not sure entirely why this happens. I’d guess it is a combination of human nature, a lack of understanding of the ethical issues involved, and a disconnect with the subject matter so that the assessment is perceived as for the grade only and not for the benefit of the student’s own learning. As a consequence, we who support online learning technology and those instructor/designers who author materials for these online environments go to some length to deter this type of behavior and encourage more appropriate student engagement.
Examples include banks of quiz questions from which CMS software makes a random draw so that when a student tries again (or when another student tries the quiz) a different question will appear, timed quizzes in the CMS so that students can’t get real time help during the period when the quiz is administered, anti-plagiarism software to see if the student has produced original content and to alert both the student and the instructor to the need for appropriate citation when the content was taken from elsewhere, and software to disable the ability to connect to external networks on computers in computer labs when such labs are being used to administer tests. Some instructors deliberately eschew the technology, particularly because of the perceived pernicious effects on class attendance. So they don’t put up lecture notes for fear that some students will view that as an excuse to miss class. Indeed, one instructor I know has students record multiple choice homework on scantron sheets that the students must turn in by hand during the live class session, just to make the students come to class.
These are examples of Gresham’s Law in Learning Technology clothing. (The bad drives out the good.) In the examples above the good students lose the convenience or learning benefit from the technology because the bad students will take advantage of the situation. In my own teaching, I know that in the old days I would hire extra proctors to administer paper tests and some students would report the feeling that they were in prison, being watched by the guard. The security measures created an aura of distrust. On the other hand, when some students witness other students cheating, that also hurts class morale.
This means that for any possible technology innovation there needs to be incentives to encourage the desired behavior. Good design takes a leveraged approach where those incentives double dip or triple dip and do other things that are benefits to learning, aside from providing the requisite “stick” to ensure appropriate student behavior.
So let’s consider the suggestion I made in my last post this way. Imagine there are two types of students within a single group. First there are Emily Eager-Beavers. Then there are George Goof-Offs. George and his cronies will try to free ride on Emily and her cadre. George will either not attend the live sessions at all or will be there but won't pay attention. Perhaps George will give Emily a hard time during the live session. Emily, on her part, wishes George would just go away and wasn't part of the team at all. She feels George is dragging down team performance.
If in this setting the professor designs a mechanism where team members police each other, there is a good chance it will fail. The Emilys of the world will feel they are getting nothing out of the policing activity. They will perceive this role as a burden without a commensurate benefit. And the Georges will take advantage of the situation as much as possible, trying to get the benefit of the doubt where they can and otherwise antagonizing the Emilys to get more out of the arrangement than is deserved based on performance.
What is the instructor to do? The obvious answer is to have someone else, an agent of the instructor who is not a student in the class sit in on the group discussion. Perhaps the most straight forward way to do this would be to have all the groups in the same physical location, i.e., the classroom to where class meetings are held. Of course if this is done then there is no economy achieved with respect to scarce classroom space. More importantly, to the extent that the group gather in the regular classroom, wouldn't it make sense that the instructor do direct communication, i.e., lecture, rather than engage the class in a placeware session? To the extent the instructor as regular practice has the students do active learning exercises to promote thinking and problem solving, perhaps using placeware to amplify and interconnect the active learning within each group would make sense. Certainly this is a possibility as an instructional enhancement but viewed this was it is an add on to cost. Further, many of our classrooms in the requisite size range are not well suited to accommodate students with laptops. So this might work in some instances but not as an across the board approach.
The other is to use students who have taken the class before as peer mentor/teachers, to attend the group meetings both for the live class session and for out of class sessions, each of which now can be held at a location designed for that purpose. I have suggested this before and would really like to see this possibility unfold. But it is clear that such peer mentor/teachers won't put such effort simply for the good of the order and thus that should be considered as a cost of instruction, one that we might not be able to afford. (My own view on the affordability front is that greater reform is needed and that it is possible if that happens, but not otherwise.)
What is the bottom line? Can we get there with using placeware in large undergraduate classes as a way to promote interaction between students and instructor as well as from one student to another? I don't really know, but it is clear that hoping it will happen is not sufficient.
Examples include banks of quiz questions from which CMS software makes a random draw so that when a student tries again (or when another student tries the quiz) a different question will appear, timed quizzes in the CMS so that students can’t get real time help during the period when the quiz is administered, anti-plagiarism software to see if the student has produced original content and to alert both the student and the instructor to the need for appropriate citation when the content was taken from elsewhere, and software to disable the ability to connect to external networks on computers in computer labs when such labs are being used to administer tests. Some instructors deliberately eschew the technology, particularly because of the perceived pernicious effects on class attendance. So they don’t put up lecture notes for fear that some students will view that as an excuse to miss class. Indeed, one instructor I know has students record multiple choice homework on scantron sheets that the students must turn in by hand during the live class session, just to make the students come to class.
These are examples of Gresham’s Law in Learning Technology clothing. (The bad drives out the good.) In the examples above the good students lose the convenience or learning benefit from the technology because the bad students will take advantage of the situation. In my own teaching, I know that in the old days I would hire extra proctors to administer paper tests and some students would report the feeling that they were in prison, being watched by the guard. The security measures created an aura of distrust. On the other hand, when some students witness other students cheating, that also hurts class morale.
This means that for any possible technology innovation there needs to be incentives to encourage the desired behavior. Good design takes a leveraged approach where those incentives double dip or triple dip and do other things that are benefits to learning, aside from providing the requisite “stick” to ensure appropriate student behavior.
So let’s consider the suggestion I made in my last post this way. Imagine there are two types of students within a single group. First there are Emily Eager-Beavers. Then there are George Goof-Offs. George and his cronies will try to free ride on Emily and her cadre. George will either not attend the live sessions at all or will be there but won't pay attention. Perhaps George will give Emily a hard time during the live session. Emily, on her part, wishes George would just go away and wasn't part of the team at all. She feels George is dragging down team performance.
If in this setting the professor designs a mechanism where team members police each other, there is a good chance it will fail. The Emilys of the world will feel they are getting nothing out of the policing activity. They will perceive this role as a burden without a commensurate benefit. And the Georges will take advantage of the situation as much as possible, trying to get the benefit of the doubt where they can and otherwise antagonizing the Emilys to get more out of the arrangement than is deserved based on performance.
What is the instructor to do? The obvious answer is to have someone else, an agent of the instructor who is not a student in the class sit in on the group discussion. Perhaps the most straight forward way to do this would be to have all the groups in the same physical location, i.e., the classroom to where class meetings are held. Of course if this is done then there is no economy achieved with respect to scarce classroom space. More importantly, to the extent that the group gather in the regular classroom, wouldn't it make sense that the instructor do direct communication, i.e., lecture, rather than engage the class in a placeware session? To the extent the instructor as regular practice has the students do active learning exercises to promote thinking and problem solving, perhaps using placeware to amplify and interconnect the active learning within each group would make sense. Certainly this is a possibility as an instructional enhancement but viewed this was it is an add on to cost. Further, many of our classrooms in the requisite size range are not well suited to accommodate students with laptops. So this might work in some instances but not as an across the board approach.
The other is to use students who have taken the class before as peer mentor/teachers, to attend the group meetings both for the live class session and for out of class sessions, each of which now can be held at a location designed for that purpose. I have suggested this before and would really like to see this possibility unfold. But it is clear that such peer mentor/teachers won't put such effort simply for the good of the order and thus that should be considered as a cost of instruction, one that we might not be able to afford. (My own view on the affordability front is that greater reform is needed and that it is possible if that happens, but not otherwise.)
What is the bottom line? Can we get there with using placeware in large undergraduate classes as a way to promote interaction between students and instructor as well as from one student to another? I don't really know, but it is clear that hoping it will happen is not sufficient.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Can Online and On Ground Converge?
The title is a little grander than what I will ultimately discuss in this post, but it gets to the main issue so I’m going to allow the hyperbole for now. Let me explain why I’m asking the question. There is an ad hoc group of folks who care a lot about online instruction and they want it to be included in the campus strategic planning process. To date, we’ve had some very high caliber online programs on campus, but they have been one-offs with essentially very little coattails. There have been spillovers from these programs within the units that have offered them. But the spillovers have not been broader.
I have been asked to serve on this group and want to contribute if I can. From where I sit there are only two possible positions to embrace with little potential middle ground. Either online is destined to be a fringe activity on this campus as it has been for the last 10 years or so or online and face-to-face essentially become one thing and then, where it makes sense (because there is demand and we have the expertise on the instructional side), we expand the audience to those who are not physically on campus.
In this post I want to restrict attention to the “synchronous component” in instruction and I don’t want to get into whether asynchronous can substitute for synchronous, a topic many others have written about. (I think it can and some of my experiments with quickie videos are intended in that vein.) Instead, I want to look at instruction via placeware and variants of that sort of technology – chat, online whiteboards, voice over IP; some commercial products in this space are Breeze, Centra, and Elluminate. In so doing I want to bring two distinct strands/issues together.
First, we’re seeing a classroom space crunch in the range of 60 – 110 seat classrooms. More and more courses are being offered in this size range, where say 5 years ago those courses has 30 or 40 students. These class sessions are most likely lecture. One wonders whether one might engage the students more actively while simultaneously economize on this type of classroom space by moving from lecture to an interactive placeware session.
Second, some of our online programs want to offer their courses in multi-mode simultaneously, with on ground and online students in the same class. They can’t afford to do make two separate offerings. The question is how to do this. If there is a live class session that the online students “join” via video conference, then they invariably become second class citizens. The instructor can make eye contact with the on ground students and will be more connected to them. The online students are outsiders and don’t participate in the same way.
I propose an alternative that seems sensible to me, though I don’t know too many folks who have tried this. The idea is for the instructor to interact with all students via the placeware. The online students do what they normally would do in such a synchronous class session. The on ground students, however, do something different. They are in groups of 3, 4, or 5 students who meet in a location where the students have good internet connectivity, can see a common computer screen, and can talk amongst themselves in that location. So they can have face to face interaction with each other and online interaction with the rest of the class. In the placeware, these students are represented by a single group presence rather than by a separate individual presence for each student.
So, for example, in an on ground class of 60 students, one might have 15 groups of 4 students per group, rather than a lecture of the 60 ensemble. In this example, there is now a tolerable reason to believe that the placeware sessions would be better than the lecture alternative (and this surely is something that we could test via the appropriate experiments) because it would be much more interactive throughout. Further, the students might like these type of sessions more (this too should be testable) because they would be akin to the IM sessions that students engage in throughout the rest of the day in their social lives.
Similarly, in the blended setting where there are both on ground and online students, the on ground students would be represented in groups while the online students would be represented as individuals. It wouldn’t be totally symmetric, to be sure, but it would be symmetric vis-Ã -vis how those students interact with the instructor. Indeed, one might think that in this circumstance the pedagogy would not vary so much from the totally on ground situation to the totally online circumstance, but instead would vary only by the subject matter, the maturity of the students, and the disposition of the instructor.
To date, placeware has been kind of a fringe application. If this sort of teaching approach were proven to be successful, however, it could become the core application. Similarly, regarding physical learning spaces, at present group work areas for students that meet the necessary requirements for placeware sessions have not been a priority on my campus in thinking about instructional spaces. But some experiments in testing this teaching approach could make such spaces seem more important and bring our campus view of learning spaces more into accord with the current view by professionals in the field. (For example see this piece by Chris Johnson and Cyprien Lomas in a recent Educause Review.) This would allow such spaces to be used for such synchronous sessions and for group work done out of class meeting time.
So that is the rough overview of the idea. This is how it came up. The last time I taught (spring 2004) I had to go on the road a couple of times and yet I wanted to keep my commitment to my campus honors class, so I had them do text chat sessions inside WebCT Vista. I only had 15 students but I was concerned both about tech support issues (and sure enough during the chat some of them bounced in and out until that stabilized) as well as my ability to manage the threads with 15 individual contributors. So I had them meet in their project teams. (We had 5 teams with 3 students per team.) They met in one of the team member’s dorm rooms.
Those sessions ended up working very well from my vantage as the teacher. Each group participated vigorously and so I got more feedback from them during those sessions than I got while we had face to face class discussion, where invariably some of them talked more than others. And because they were sending their messages more or less simultaneously, we avoided the first to raise her hand preempting other students from raising their hands. And when there was diversity in their views, it was immediately apparent so we had a natural next step to reconcile those opinions.
Of course, this was not the normal mode of instruction. It was the exception use only when I was out of town and perhaps it worked so well because of Hawthorne effects. So maybe the approach has to be blended with a more traditional face to face approach (when there is a significant number of on ground students) and certainly if others experiment with the approach there needs to be sufficient use as to rule out Hawthorne effects as the explanation of the good results.
We do have on ground courses with much higher enrollments than 110, for which this approach would not work, and we have many classes that are sufficiently small where they could be taught in seminar mode if the instructor chose to adopt that approach. So I’m not proposing that every on ground class we offer be done this way. But there are many classes that would be ripe for this approach and, in my opinion, it would be a way of invigorating our instruction without raising costs dramatically. (We’d need the placeware and the infrastructure to support that as well as the group meeting facilities for the students, but the former is not that expensive and the latter probably is necessary anyway, simply to accommodate the out of class group work.)
It would be a direct way to change the culture here in thinking about online and about quality of instruction. To me, it sure seems something to explore.
But it may be too good to be true. So as is my wont, tomorrow I’ll make a post taking a somewhat more skeptical view about trying to implement this type of an approach with a bunch of typical undergrads, where poor attendance, plagiarism, and other such issues are likely to crop up.
I have been asked to serve on this group and want to contribute if I can. From where I sit there are only two possible positions to embrace with little potential middle ground. Either online is destined to be a fringe activity on this campus as it has been for the last 10 years or so or online and face-to-face essentially become one thing and then, where it makes sense (because there is demand and we have the expertise on the instructional side), we expand the audience to those who are not physically on campus.
In this post I want to restrict attention to the “synchronous component” in instruction and I don’t want to get into whether asynchronous can substitute for synchronous, a topic many others have written about. (I think it can and some of my experiments with quickie videos are intended in that vein.) Instead, I want to look at instruction via placeware and variants of that sort of technology – chat, online whiteboards, voice over IP; some commercial products in this space are Breeze, Centra, and Elluminate. In so doing I want to bring two distinct strands/issues together.
First, we’re seeing a classroom space crunch in the range of 60 – 110 seat classrooms. More and more courses are being offered in this size range, where say 5 years ago those courses has 30 or 40 students. These class sessions are most likely lecture. One wonders whether one might engage the students more actively while simultaneously economize on this type of classroom space by moving from lecture to an interactive placeware session.
Second, some of our online programs want to offer their courses in multi-mode simultaneously, with on ground and online students in the same class. They can’t afford to do make two separate offerings. The question is how to do this. If there is a live class session that the online students “join” via video conference, then they invariably become second class citizens. The instructor can make eye contact with the on ground students and will be more connected to them. The online students are outsiders and don’t participate in the same way.
I propose an alternative that seems sensible to me, though I don’t know too many folks who have tried this. The idea is for the instructor to interact with all students via the placeware. The online students do what they normally would do in such a synchronous class session. The on ground students, however, do something different. They are in groups of 3, 4, or 5 students who meet in a location where the students have good internet connectivity, can see a common computer screen, and can talk amongst themselves in that location. So they can have face to face interaction with each other and online interaction with the rest of the class. In the placeware, these students are represented by a single group presence rather than by a separate individual presence for each student.
So, for example, in an on ground class of 60 students, one might have 15 groups of 4 students per group, rather than a lecture of the 60 ensemble. In this example, there is now a tolerable reason to believe that the placeware sessions would be better than the lecture alternative (and this surely is something that we could test via the appropriate experiments) because it would be much more interactive throughout. Further, the students might like these type of sessions more (this too should be testable) because they would be akin to the IM sessions that students engage in throughout the rest of the day in their social lives.
Similarly, in the blended setting where there are both on ground and online students, the on ground students would be represented in groups while the online students would be represented as individuals. It wouldn’t be totally symmetric, to be sure, but it would be symmetric vis-Ã -vis how those students interact with the instructor. Indeed, one might think that in this circumstance the pedagogy would not vary so much from the totally on ground situation to the totally online circumstance, but instead would vary only by the subject matter, the maturity of the students, and the disposition of the instructor.
To date, placeware has been kind of a fringe application. If this sort of teaching approach were proven to be successful, however, it could become the core application. Similarly, regarding physical learning spaces, at present group work areas for students that meet the necessary requirements for placeware sessions have not been a priority on my campus in thinking about instructional spaces. But some experiments in testing this teaching approach could make such spaces seem more important and bring our campus view of learning spaces more into accord with the current view by professionals in the field. (For example see this piece by Chris Johnson and Cyprien Lomas in a recent Educause Review.) This would allow such spaces to be used for such synchronous sessions and for group work done out of class meeting time.
So that is the rough overview of the idea. This is how it came up. The last time I taught (spring 2004) I had to go on the road a couple of times and yet I wanted to keep my commitment to my campus honors class, so I had them do text chat sessions inside WebCT Vista. I only had 15 students but I was concerned both about tech support issues (and sure enough during the chat some of them bounced in and out until that stabilized) as well as my ability to manage the threads with 15 individual contributors. So I had them meet in their project teams. (We had 5 teams with 3 students per team.) They met in one of the team member’s dorm rooms.
Those sessions ended up working very well from my vantage as the teacher. Each group participated vigorously and so I got more feedback from them during those sessions than I got while we had face to face class discussion, where invariably some of them talked more than others. And because they were sending their messages more or less simultaneously, we avoided the first to raise her hand preempting other students from raising their hands. And when there was diversity in their views, it was immediately apparent so we had a natural next step to reconcile those opinions.
Of course, this was not the normal mode of instruction. It was the exception use only when I was out of town and perhaps it worked so well because of Hawthorne effects. So maybe the approach has to be blended with a more traditional face to face approach (when there is a significant number of on ground students) and certainly if others experiment with the approach there needs to be sufficient use as to rule out Hawthorne effects as the explanation of the good results.
We do have on ground courses with much higher enrollments than 110, for which this approach would not work, and we have many classes that are sufficiently small where they could be taught in seminar mode if the instructor chose to adopt that approach. So I’m not proposing that every on ground class we offer be done this way. But there are many classes that would be ripe for this approach and, in my opinion, it would be a way of invigorating our instruction without raising costs dramatically. (We’d need the placeware and the infrastructure to support that as well as the group meeting facilities for the students, but the former is not that expensive and the latter probably is necessary anyway, simply to accommodate the out of class group work.)
It would be a direct way to change the culture here in thinking about online and about quality of instruction. To me, it sure seems something to explore.
But it may be too good to be true. So as is my wont, tomorrow I’ll make a post taking a somewhat more skeptical view about trying to implement this type of an approach with a bunch of typical undergrads, where poor attendance, plagiarism, and other such issues are likely to crop up.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Talking head video
here is a clip I made with my new iSight camera and a product that converts it into a video capture device. it seem easy and the video quality is better than what i did on my laptop. you need quicktime.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Old Dogs and New Tricks
My parents were very generous to me. After I earned my doctorate, they gave me $10K to buy a new car. (In graduate school I drove a car affectionately known as the Ruster Duster, which I also used my first year at Illinois.) So in early fall of 1981, I bought my first car - a new silver/gray Honda Accord. The thing is, it had a stick shift (which I got for the fuel economy). I didn’t know how to drive a stick at the time. Buying the car forced me to learn. For the next 15 years or so I probably road the clutch too much during turns, but I managed.
So with that thought in mind, let me talk about the first few days with my new iMac G5. I bought this for two reasons. First, and most importantly to me, I decided that in my office I didn’t want to look at the screen of my Tablet. I wanted a big screen, so I could make the font big and read it easily, particularly late in the day as it is now. I got the 20” version and that certainly is nicer to work with. And though I do dearly love my Tablet PC, one thing it doesn’t do well is produce audio. Now I’m sitting here listening to classical music radio while I write this post. That’s a nice touch.
The other thing I wanted to try was the various applications that the Writing with Video project, an innovative project on my campus, will be using with an eye toward learning whether the Mac is really better for Media production. (Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder I meant this to be my own personal beauty contest, not a scientific study.)
One of those applications is Pages - part of the iWorks suite along with Keynote. If Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint on Steroids, then Pages is the analog for Word. So far I’ve only used it in blank format. There are quite a few templates that would be useful for doing text plus image documents and likewise text plus video documents.
The way I’m using it now is simply to write the blog posts and then copy and paste over into the textbox for my blog at Blogger.com. I’ve used Word for the same function in the past, so a few observations just based on that simple use. Habits formed over a long period of time are hard to break and one habit I have is using the Control key for select all, copy, and paste. On the Mac, that’s the wrong key, one must use the Apple key instead. Now it is clear from a prior design point of view, using either key is equally arbitrary, so I certainly don’t blame Apple for this. But having done this for such a long time it is as if the memory is in my left pinky and otherwise I do this without thinking. So in just a couple days use of the Mac, I must have done at least two dozen times attempts at copying that didn’t work. Then when I go back to do it correctly I must do this with conscious effort and make myself aware of something I would normally take for granted. It is a good lesson for me about changing any technology even if the successor is better (and for me in this test the Jury won’t even start to meet for a month), there will be switching costs such as this that will irk the user.
I have a couple of other minor gripes. The pages software as I have it set up does single space within paragraph and then hitting the return key puts a line space between paragraphs. When I copy the document and paste into the Blogger text box, the line space between paragraphs is not there. So I have to put in two returns. That is not itself a big deal. But in Word, I was able to understand that return holding the Shift key down was a line break. That seems to be the case in Pages as well. But when I paste that into Blogger, it looks the same as if the Shift key were not used. Hmmm. Another issue is that hyperlinks I insert in Pages do not carry over to the Blogger text box. Maybe they would if I changed my settings. But at present I’m not sure how to do this. One last grumble. Word has the grammar checker in addition to the spell checker. I’ve come to like those squiggly green lines because I use passive voice way too much and sometimes make other awkward constructions. So I’m less happy that Pages has only the spell checker. It’s not the end of the world, just an observation.
I want to talk about another issue, which is doing my own trouble shooting and learning. On the PC I was pretty far along with self-support and would only rarely ask someone else for help, preferring to solve the issue myself (typical male thing). On the Mac, I’m at a loss to find the information so I got a little frustrated when I couldn’t solve my problem. For example, on Saturday I downloaded and installed NeoOffice, an Open Office alternative for the Mac and something I wanted to try to see if I could use it “seamlessly” in my business dealings. (We share a lot of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets.) But at the moment AppleWorks is the default for files with a .doc or .xls extension. So I’d like to change that. I’m sure it is a simple command. But which simple command? I didn’t find the answer in the Apple help nor in a couple of quick Google searches. This doesn’t mean the help isn’t there. It just means I didn’t find it. And I’m an impatient searcher, only occasionally a diligent one. (Also NeoOffice didn’t display bullets in a Word document in a nice way. That was disappointing.)
I have yet to use the built in microphone and iSight camera. Nor have I played with iMovie or iPhoto. So I’m a long way from saying - go back to the PC. But I am wary about how I will do with email and calendaring (I currently use Outlook on our Campus Exchange server.)
The funny thing is that I was a Mac guy for 10 years. But I switch in the late 90s, in large part because my friends in Econ were all PC folks. Now I’m at the point of buying my own Honda Accord. But I’m a lot older than I was 24 years ago.
So with that thought in mind, let me talk about the first few days with my new iMac G5. I bought this for two reasons. First, and most importantly to me, I decided that in my office I didn’t want to look at the screen of my Tablet. I wanted a big screen, so I could make the font big and read it easily, particularly late in the day as it is now. I got the 20” version and that certainly is nicer to work with. And though I do dearly love my Tablet PC, one thing it doesn’t do well is produce audio. Now I’m sitting here listening to classical music radio while I write this post. That’s a nice touch.
The other thing I wanted to try was the various applications that the Writing with Video project, an innovative project on my campus, will be using with an eye toward learning whether the Mac is really better for Media production. (Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder I meant this to be my own personal beauty contest, not a scientific study.)
One of those applications is Pages - part of the iWorks suite along with Keynote. If Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint on Steroids, then Pages is the analog for Word. So far I’ve only used it in blank format. There are quite a few templates that would be useful for doing text plus image documents and likewise text plus video documents.
The way I’m using it now is simply to write the blog posts and then copy and paste over into the textbox for my blog at Blogger.com. I’ve used Word for the same function in the past, so a few observations just based on that simple use. Habits formed over a long period of time are hard to break and one habit I have is using the Control key for select all, copy, and paste. On the Mac, that’s the wrong key, one must use the Apple key instead. Now it is clear from a prior design point of view, using either key is equally arbitrary, so I certainly don’t blame Apple for this. But having done this for such a long time it is as if the memory is in my left pinky and otherwise I do this without thinking. So in just a couple days use of the Mac, I must have done at least two dozen times attempts at copying that didn’t work. Then when I go back to do it correctly I must do this with conscious effort and make myself aware of something I would normally take for granted. It is a good lesson for me about changing any technology even if the successor is better (and for me in this test the Jury won’t even start to meet for a month), there will be switching costs such as this that will irk the user.
I have a couple of other minor gripes. The pages software as I have it set up does single space within paragraph and then hitting the return key puts a line space between paragraphs. When I copy the document and paste into the Blogger text box, the line space between paragraphs is not there. So I have to put in two returns. That is not itself a big deal. But in Word, I was able to understand that return holding the Shift key down was a line break. That seems to be the case in Pages as well. But when I paste that into Blogger, it looks the same as if the Shift key were not used. Hmmm. Another issue is that hyperlinks I insert in Pages do not carry over to the Blogger text box. Maybe they would if I changed my settings. But at present I’m not sure how to do this. One last grumble. Word has the grammar checker in addition to the spell checker. I’ve come to like those squiggly green lines because I use passive voice way too much and sometimes make other awkward constructions. So I’m less happy that Pages has only the spell checker. It’s not the end of the world, just an observation.
I want to talk about another issue, which is doing my own trouble shooting and learning. On the PC I was pretty far along with self-support and would only rarely ask someone else for help, preferring to solve the issue myself (typical male thing). On the Mac, I’m at a loss to find the information so I got a little frustrated when I couldn’t solve my problem. For example, on Saturday I downloaded and installed NeoOffice, an Open Office alternative for the Mac and something I wanted to try to see if I could use it “seamlessly” in my business dealings. (We share a lot of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets.) But at the moment AppleWorks is the default for files with a .doc or .xls extension. So I’d like to change that. I’m sure it is a simple command. But which simple command? I didn’t find the answer in the Apple help nor in a couple of quick Google searches. This doesn’t mean the help isn’t there. It just means I didn’t find it. And I’m an impatient searcher, only occasionally a diligent one. (Also NeoOffice didn’t display bullets in a Word document in a nice way. That was disappointing.)
I have yet to use the built in microphone and iSight camera. Nor have I played with iMovie or iPhoto. So I’m a long way from saying - go back to the PC. But I am wary about how I will do with email and calendaring (I currently use Outlook on our Campus Exchange server.)
The funny thing is that I was a Mac guy for 10 years. But I switch in the late 90s, in large part because my friends in Econ were all PC folks. Now I’m at the point of buying my own Honda Accord. But I’m a lot older than I was 24 years ago.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Would you take a course from an Instructional Designer/Technologist?
Sometime in the late 90’s I participated in a conference hosted by VPI that was not held on the campus in Blacksburg but rather at some convention center that was easier to get to (maybe in Roanoke, I can’t recall). The conference went several days and had a variety of interesting moments, perhaps the most surreal of which was to see a Howard Strauss presentation where he kept up a frenetic pace for the entire time to give us his sense of what the future held for IT and learning technology in particular.
I typically get “conferenced out” after a couple of days at an event so start spending more time in casual conversation than in going to sessions. On the third or fourth day of this VPI conference I recall having some beers with more junior types, a chain smoking junior faculty member in English from NC State and if memory serves the son of one of the conference organizers, Len Hatfield. We talked for quite a while about how students learn and whether there is a good model for that which we could all embrace. Somewhere during that conversation, the guy from NC State said there was a really great book, The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon, and it had the type of theory we were looking for.
Reading Schon’s book was good for me. It confirmed a lot of my own thinking about how we learn and how we know things and how we are seemingly smart within the situation and can come up with things in context, but can’t recall and don’t reason well in the more abstract setting. Though I haven’t looked at the book for quite a while, I believe Schon uses terms like “knowing in action” and “learning in action” to indicate this highly nuanced and localized knowledge that professionals possess and that apprentices aspire to. Schon also has a notion of an experiment - not an experiment in the sense of the scientific method and hypothesis testing, but rather in the sense of an exploration into something unknown where the choice of what to try and what might be expected as the outcome is driven by the knowing in action. This is the type of experimentation that I think should be a regular part of our teaching.
There was a piece in Educause Quarterly a while back that embraced the Schon approach and tried to use it as the basis for a framework of experimentation with educational technology, though it uses the term “Plan” where I would much prefer the term “experiment” for reasons that I’ll explain as I go on.
In the current Educause Quarterly there is an an interview with attendees of the recent Instructional Technology Leadership Institute, held last summer at Penn State. There is a discussion of what Instructional Design means and in my way of thinking, it was cast in a very “instrumental” light. Consider these remarks from Larry Ragan, one of the instructors at the Institute.
I have some trepidation about this type of instrumental approach in support of instruction and for similar reasons I have concerns when it is applied elsewhere, as in the continuous improvement model that underlies the accreditation process and in the project management process that is how our respective IT organizations go about doing their work. In the rest of this piece I want to explore whether my fears are rational or paranoid and how I think one might reconcile a Schon view with this instrumental instructional design view.
So let me bring in my own theoretical background, which is of course economics, not teaching and learning. During my first year in graduate school, I learned continuous time decision models under certainty - Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control Theory. Some time later I learned the discrete time alternative, Dynamic Programming. And then I was exposed to but didn’t become expert in the stochastic alternatives. I did spend some time on what is called Markov Decision Processes. (How is that for a lot of jargon in one paragraph?)
Let me summarize what one learns from this type of study. A solution to such a program is a “policy” that says what to do at each time and, in the Markov case, as a function of the “state” of the system at that time. So the policy is a function that takes state and time and maps into actions. At a theoretical level, what an instructional designer should be doing is coming up with a policy, according to the articulated goals of the instructor.
However, this notion of a policy is a complex beast and it would be extremely hard to communicate, let alone derive. So a designer might solve a simpler problem by
(1) ignoring the uncertainty altogether and
(2) making the time intervals each sufficiently long so that are not too many of them in total.
This type of abstraction is natural to do for the designer. Indeed, part of Schon's point, though it is tacit in his book, is that abstract problems of this sort are not natural to pose so we don't solve them in their full complexity that way. In other words, the problem the designer solves is a simpler problem. But it means that when it is applied that one will almost surely go “off the plan” as time passes and then it will be be necessary either to re-calibrate the plan in mid stream or to stubbornly proceed with the original plan although it may seem doing so is not working.
An alternative is to encourage the instructor to be more robust in the instructor role, more robust in the sense of Schon, and try to know in action what is the appropriate thing to do but not to try to encode that ahead of time and instead let the appropriate action be determined by the instructor on the spot. I think good teachers do this all the time and to the students it makes the instructors seem responsive, a desirable in my view.
But if the instructor does this type of knowing in action while teaching, then a detailed plan probably gets in the way. Some higher level scaffolding may be fine, but putting a lot of flesh on this is counter-productive. So a significant part of my concern is how the instructor handles surprise as the course is taught. In lecture classes, there will be little surprise in what the instructor presents. But there is potentially a lot of surprise in how the students will react (and then maybe some surprise in how the instructor reacts to the student’s reaction, etc.) In courses that are seminar based, presumably there will be surprise throughout the discussion and then the instructor has to decide whether to bring the class "back on track" or to go with the flow of the conversation.
My sense is that the instrumental approach, in practice if not in theory, short changes consideration of surprise. Thus it is best at training of known skills (like learning the rules of the road for a driver’s license) and it is less good where the learning is more open ended, as with doing investigative research. The latter is what seems critical for learning to learn and higher order thinking. That is where my bias lies.
The other issue I have, specifically with instructional design and not, for example, with project management is the agency notion and how that should be managed. The instrumental approach implies that the expertise stays with the designer; the instructor can remain ignorant of the design process and as long as a plan is produced, proceed apace. The instructor doesn’t learn to teach in this approach (and in particular doesn’t get exposure on how to know in action about what to do when confronting a particular teaching issue in class).
This is why a mentoring approach between an experienced instructor and another instructor earlier in his career or a shared experience approach where instructors openly discuss their own teaching issues and comment on what other instructors have said may be preferable to the instructional design approach, because the agency issue is not there with mentoring or shared experience. The information sharing becomes a form of collective problem solving rather than knowledge transfer from expert to novice.
Does instructional design have to be this way? I don’t think so. I think it can be more collegial and less instrumental. But in too many cases I believe the designers cling to the instrumental approach for pretty much the same reasons that very junior faculty end up teaching “the best graduate course a freshman ever had,” to establish their credentials and justify their role in the consultation. Unfortunately, the consequence is for the designers to seem pedantic, inflexible, and quite possibly irrelevant.
Who will let them know?
I typically get “conferenced out” after a couple of days at an event so start spending more time in casual conversation than in going to sessions. On the third or fourth day of this VPI conference I recall having some beers with more junior types, a chain smoking junior faculty member in English from NC State and if memory serves the son of one of the conference organizers, Len Hatfield. We talked for quite a while about how students learn and whether there is a good model for that which we could all embrace. Somewhere during that conversation, the guy from NC State said there was a really great book, The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon, and it had the type of theory we were looking for.
Reading Schon’s book was good for me. It confirmed a lot of my own thinking about how we learn and how we know things and how we are seemingly smart within the situation and can come up with things in context, but can’t recall and don’t reason well in the more abstract setting. Though I haven’t looked at the book for quite a while, I believe Schon uses terms like “knowing in action” and “learning in action” to indicate this highly nuanced and localized knowledge that professionals possess and that apprentices aspire to. Schon also has a notion of an experiment - not an experiment in the sense of the scientific method and hypothesis testing, but rather in the sense of an exploration into something unknown where the choice of what to try and what might be expected as the outcome is driven by the knowing in action. This is the type of experimentation that I think should be a regular part of our teaching.
There was a piece in Educause Quarterly a while back that embraced the Schon approach and tried to use it as the basis for a framework of experimentation with educational technology, though it uses the term “Plan” where I would much prefer the term “experiment” for reasons that I’ll explain as I go on.
In the current Educause Quarterly there is an an interview with attendees of the recent Instructional Technology Leadership Institute, held last summer at Penn State. There is a discussion of what Instructional Design means and in my way of thinking, it was cast in a very “instrumental” light. Consider these remarks from Larry Ragan, one of the instructors at the Institute.
The designer’s role is to craft a learning experience so that you achieve an
outcome, and the technologist’s job is to create the environment for that to
happen in. The technologist is more defined and delineated in approaching tasks,
addressing hardware, support systems, and the technologies needed to get
something done. The designer brings in the art. Think of an interior designer.
He isn’t the one doing the building; he tells you where he thinks the lighting
should go and how things should be arranged. He doesn’t build the furniture. The
technologist says, “You want a chair, I’ll build you a chair.” The designer is
the one who has to think about placing it.
I have some trepidation about this type of instrumental approach in support of instruction and for similar reasons I have concerns when it is applied elsewhere, as in the continuous improvement model that underlies the accreditation process and in the project management process that is how our respective IT organizations go about doing their work. In the rest of this piece I want to explore whether my fears are rational or paranoid and how I think one might reconcile a Schon view with this instrumental instructional design view.
So let me bring in my own theoretical background, which is of course economics, not teaching and learning. During my first year in graduate school, I learned continuous time decision models under certainty - Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control Theory. Some time later I learned the discrete time alternative, Dynamic Programming. And then I was exposed to but didn’t become expert in the stochastic alternatives. I did spend some time on what is called Markov Decision Processes. (How is that for a lot of jargon in one paragraph?)
Let me summarize what one learns from this type of study. A solution to such a program is a “policy” that says what to do at each time and, in the Markov case, as a function of the “state” of the system at that time. So the policy is a function that takes state and time and maps into actions. At a theoretical level, what an instructional designer should be doing is coming up with a policy, according to the articulated goals of the instructor.
However, this notion of a policy is a complex beast and it would be extremely hard to communicate, let alone derive. So a designer might solve a simpler problem by
(1) ignoring the uncertainty altogether and
(2) making the time intervals each sufficiently long so that are not too many of them in total.
This type of abstraction is natural to do for the designer. Indeed, part of Schon's point, though it is tacit in his book, is that abstract problems of this sort are not natural to pose so we don't solve them in their full complexity that way. In other words, the problem the designer solves is a simpler problem. But it means that when it is applied that one will almost surely go “off the plan” as time passes and then it will be be necessary either to re-calibrate the plan in mid stream or to stubbornly proceed with the original plan although it may seem doing so is not working.
An alternative is to encourage the instructor to be more robust in the instructor role, more robust in the sense of Schon, and try to know in action what is the appropriate thing to do but not to try to encode that ahead of time and instead let the appropriate action be determined by the instructor on the spot. I think good teachers do this all the time and to the students it makes the instructors seem responsive, a desirable in my view.
But if the instructor does this type of knowing in action while teaching, then a detailed plan probably gets in the way. Some higher level scaffolding may be fine, but putting a lot of flesh on this is counter-productive. So a significant part of my concern is how the instructor handles surprise as the course is taught. In lecture classes, there will be little surprise in what the instructor presents. But there is potentially a lot of surprise in how the students will react (and then maybe some surprise in how the instructor reacts to the student’s reaction, etc.) In courses that are seminar based, presumably there will be surprise throughout the discussion and then the instructor has to decide whether to bring the class "back on track" or to go with the flow of the conversation.
My sense is that the instrumental approach, in practice if not in theory, short changes consideration of surprise. Thus it is best at training of known skills (like learning the rules of the road for a driver’s license) and it is less good where the learning is more open ended, as with doing investigative research. The latter is what seems critical for learning to learn and higher order thinking. That is where my bias lies.
The other issue I have, specifically with instructional design and not, for example, with project management is the agency notion and how that should be managed. The instrumental approach implies that the expertise stays with the designer; the instructor can remain ignorant of the design process and as long as a plan is produced, proceed apace. The instructor doesn’t learn to teach in this approach (and in particular doesn’t get exposure on how to know in action about what to do when confronting a particular teaching issue in class).
This is why a mentoring approach between an experienced instructor and another instructor earlier in his career or a shared experience approach where instructors openly discuss their own teaching issues and comment on what other instructors have said may be preferable to the instructional design approach, because the agency issue is not there with mentoring or shared experience. The information sharing becomes a form of collective problem solving rather than knowledge transfer from expert to novice.
Does instructional design have to be this way? I don’t think so. I think it can be more collegial and less instrumental. But in too many cases I believe the designers cling to the instrumental approach for pretty much the same reasons that very junior faculty end up teaching “the best graduate course a freshman ever had,” to establish their credentials and justify their role in the consultation. Unfortunately, the consequence is for the designers to seem pedantic, inflexible, and quite possibly irrelevant.
Who will let them know?
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Unconventional Wisdom
This is a quickie today. Yesterday I was in Indy for a CIC Learning Technology Group meeting. It's always good to see colleagues and learn about new developments. There was discussion on many topics including: (1) using publisher eContent for assemble your own coursepacks (including textbook chapters debundled) , (2) a discussion of blended learning and (classroom) space utilization issues, and (3) an update on the Sakai implementations at UMich and Indiana U - a lot of fun stuff. At the end of our morning session we had a few minutes to discuss disruptive technologies - blogs, wikis, podcasts, the current grab bag. Among the schools that fessed up, there was clearly interest in the topic, but nobody was yet doing anything significant in this space at the campus IT level. The happenings were all bottom up spur of the moment things. The impression I had was that most people were content with this approach.
I want to juxtapose that with this really excellent piece by Michael Lewis in the NY Times Magazine about the Texas Tech Football coach. This guy has talent, in the main, that have been recruited by U Texas, or A&M, or any of the other powerhouse schools in the southwest. But by going against the grain with a well considered approach that has proven some significant tests of time, he has revolutionized the offensive game.
One wonders if something analogous might happen with disruptive technologies. Why are we all taking it slow?
I want to juxtapose that with this really excellent piece by Michael Lewis in the NY Times Magazine about the Texas Tech Football coach. This guy has talent, in the main, that have been recruited by U Texas, or A&M, or any of the other powerhouse schools in the southwest. But by going against the grain with a well considered approach that has proven some significant tests of time, he has revolutionized the offensive game.
One wonders if something analogous might happen with disruptive technologies. Why are we all taking it slow?
Friday, December 02, 2005
Virtual Learning Spaces
I came across an interesting piece by Clay Shirky on Situated Software in which he describes a software design approach via small group customization where the question – will it scale? – is not a consideration at all. Presumably user satisfaction is quite high with the situated software because it was designed to work in the context where the users are located. Whether situated software offers a robust solution, i.e. the costs are reasonable and the application is sufficiently durable, is an open question. (The argument for is that with clever design the software takes advantage of the local group characteristics to keep cost down and user expectations about the service are more readily brought into line because they can see the “back end” part of the service.) This is an interesting piece to read, certainly provocative if not a portent of the future.
I want to drill down and consider how Shirky used situated software in his teaching, in a course called Social Software. He divided the students into groups and each group had to design and build some software that the other members of the class would use. The use by the others could very well be taken into account in the design and implementation, indeed that is what motivated some of the clever designs that were produced in Shirky’s class, but more interesting regarding instruction, from my point of view, is that the use serves as an informed evaluation of the work of the original creators by their peers. One wonders whether it is possible to have such informed evaluation in other courses.
Unfortunately, from that perspective, it is not typical in other courses for student projects to create things of practical use by other students. It is more typical for course project deliverables to be written documents in some format. So the question arises whether other students can read those documents and provide feedback for the creators in a way that is meaningful to both. I believe the answer to that question is yes, it is possible.
In a piece I wrote for Campus Technology Magazine a couple of years ago, I talked about dialogic learning objects as a possible mechanism for achieving this end. After that article appeared I taught an Econ 101 course to honors students where I followed that approach. During the early parts of the course the students completed “content surveys” that I authored, written in a style to imitate an article in the New York Review of Books, but of course with Econ content and with questions interspersed that required the students to write some response. After the students responded I would collate their answers, distribute those, and then discuss in class. This particular group was an easy class to please, so it may be premature to make generalizations on the approach, but it remains that they liked these content surveys very much.
About one third of the way into the course, the students were required to produce content surveys of their own, just as Shirky’s students produced software. Some of the students were a bit doubtful that they could produce anything that others would find worth reading. (This is an example of the standard problem that novice students compare themselves to expert instructors in terms of their own performance and invariably they come up short in that comparison.) We got through that problem through my encouragement and coaching. The students did indeed produce content surveys though they were “flatter” than mine, but they were useful and interesting to read nonetheless. The novel aspect of their surveys was the metaphors the students came up with; in several cases those were more appropriate entry points into the topic than what I would have delivered.
A crucial aspect of making the approach work was the ensuing class discussion. I found that because we had already done the survey and I had read their comments that we could start a little further into the topic and bring out some deeper points. In one particular case, which was a discussion on the economics of population growth, I had coached the team that wrote the content survey on the possibility that Malthus is wrong, that there had been an economist right here at Illinois, Julian Simon, who had made this very famous bet with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, about how the price of scarce metals would vary over a 10 year period. Simon won, and the students were able to find some articles by other economists who made Simon’s points more formally. So the content survey ended up being critical of the Malthus view. In the class discussion, I got the students to reflect on human nutrition and stunted growth, by getting them to consider the size of the armor for knights we see at various museums such as the Chicago Art Institute. That both sides of the argument might have some validity and that which side a particular individual took in the debate might very well depend on the individual’s circumstance, was really good for the students to see and made that particular class very gratifying to teach.
Armed with this experience, I did start to generalize and still maintain that a very good way to teach is to have students make reusable learning objects as part of their course obligation, the content surveys being an exemplar from the class of possible learning objects, and therefore the Course Management System is the essential virtual environment for this type of instruction. I still subscribe to this argument.
However, I’m not sure whether the argument has legs with other instructors. In the meantime, there has been a lot of excitement about wikis for supporting collaboration, both in the classroom and with the research group. The argument for wikis is that every student is potentially both a reader and a user and thus the wiki is a great way to make the students fell part of a larger community. While the community building is a good thing, I have to say I’m not entirely comfortable with this view and find it easier to take the Shirky approach and separate out the creator from the user. Indeed, all of us may be both, when broadly considered, but when drilling down to a particular project it seems to me we are usually one or the other.
But I’m quite willing to believe that others think differently and that what is important to them is creating a completely horizontal environment where each person’s role is determined only by their own participation and not some pre-assigned role. Indeed, blogs may do likewise in terms of building a communitarian sense. So I think that some folks out there are asking whether blogs and wikis might end up replacing the CMS.
One such article on the subject is by Scott Leslie in his blog, on the false dichotomy between ELGG (an open source blog/file management/social networking application) and Moodle (an open source Course Management System, which incidentally features a wiki). Scott talks about peaceful coexistence of these two applications at Athabasca University and he links to an article by Terry Anderson describing how this will be done. It is encouraging to see others think that faculty will by their own volition operate in both environments, and choose one or the other depending on the need. But I’m not sure it will play out that way.
The wiki and blog software, while in some cases accommodating private communication among a limited set of users, is first and foremost meant to be used out in the open where postings are generally available on the Internet. For many people I know, this sense of openness is what the Web is about and hence these folks feel an affinity toward these environments. I do think that if the CMS don’t afford an open component in their environment, they will lose these folks who will move on to the newer coloration technologies. So I think it a safe prediction to say that at least some of our communication in the future will be happening out in the open and indeed that a greater share of what we do will be publicly available.
Beyond that, however, things seem quite uncertain. Will the same environments be used for formal instruction and research collaboration? Will we finally “solve” how to distribute content efficiently so that we can move past that and focus more on the student and the student’s interactions? Will we continue to see on large campuses such as mine that many individual units try to support their own thing, whether developed locally or not, so the service can be more situated? Or will they tire from that and hence we end up with fewer flavors of these type of environments overall? Should very large classes and more modestly sized course be using the same software? Will tool interoperability happen for real in the future so that we can mix and match apps according to our own inclinations?
It should be fun finding out.
I want to drill down and consider how Shirky used situated software in his teaching, in a course called Social Software. He divided the students into groups and each group had to design and build some software that the other members of the class would use. The use by the others could very well be taken into account in the design and implementation, indeed that is what motivated some of the clever designs that were produced in Shirky’s class, but more interesting regarding instruction, from my point of view, is that the use serves as an informed evaluation of the work of the original creators by their peers. One wonders whether it is possible to have such informed evaluation in other courses.
Unfortunately, from that perspective, it is not typical in other courses for student projects to create things of practical use by other students. It is more typical for course project deliverables to be written documents in some format. So the question arises whether other students can read those documents and provide feedback for the creators in a way that is meaningful to both. I believe the answer to that question is yes, it is possible.
In a piece I wrote for Campus Technology Magazine a couple of years ago, I talked about dialogic learning objects as a possible mechanism for achieving this end. After that article appeared I taught an Econ 101 course to honors students where I followed that approach. During the early parts of the course the students completed “content surveys” that I authored, written in a style to imitate an article in the New York Review of Books, but of course with Econ content and with questions interspersed that required the students to write some response. After the students responded I would collate their answers, distribute those, and then discuss in class. This particular group was an easy class to please, so it may be premature to make generalizations on the approach, but it remains that they liked these content surveys very much.
About one third of the way into the course, the students were required to produce content surveys of their own, just as Shirky’s students produced software. Some of the students were a bit doubtful that they could produce anything that others would find worth reading. (This is an example of the standard problem that novice students compare themselves to expert instructors in terms of their own performance and invariably they come up short in that comparison.) We got through that problem through my encouragement and coaching. The students did indeed produce content surveys though they were “flatter” than mine, but they were useful and interesting to read nonetheless. The novel aspect of their surveys was the metaphors the students came up with; in several cases those were more appropriate entry points into the topic than what I would have delivered.
A crucial aspect of making the approach work was the ensuing class discussion. I found that because we had already done the survey and I had read their comments that we could start a little further into the topic and bring out some deeper points. In one particular case, which was a discussion on the economics of population growth, I had coached the team that wrote the content survey on the possibility that Malthus is wrong, that there had been an economist right here at Illinois, Julian Simon, who had made this very famous bet with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, about how the price of scarce metals would vary over a 10 year period. Simon won, and the students were able to find some articles by other economists who made Simon’s points more formally. So the content survey ended up being critical of the Malthus view. In the class discussion, I got the students to reflect on human nutrition and stunted growth, by getting them to consider the size of the armor for knights we see at various museums such as the Chicago Art Institute. That both sides of the argument might have some validity and that which side a particular individual took in the debate might very well depend on the individual’s circumstance, was really good for the students to see and made that particular class very gratifying to teach.
Armed with this experience, I did start to generalize and still maintain that a very good way to teach is to have students make reusable learning objects as part of their course obligation, the content surveys being an exemplar from the class of possible learning objects, and therefore the Course Management System is the essential virtual environment for this type of instruction. I still subscribe to this argument.
However, I’m not sure whether the argument has legs with other instructors. In the meantime, there has been a lot of excitement about wikis for supporting collaboration, both in the classroom and with the research group. The argument for wikis is that every student is potentially both a reader and a user and thus the wiki is a great way to make the students fell part of a larger community. While the community building is a good thing, I have to say I’m not entirely comfortable with this view and find it easier to take the Shirky approach and separate out the creator from the user. Indeed, all of us may be both, when broadly considered, but when drilling down to a particular project it seems to me we are usually one or the other.
But I’m quite willing to believe that others think differently and that what is important to them is creating a completely horizontal environment where each person’s role is determined only by their own participation and not some pre-assigned role. Indeed, blogs may do likewise in terms of building a communitarian sense. So I think that some folks out there are asking whether blogs and wikis might end up replacing the CMS.
One such article on the subject is by Scott Leslie in his blog, on the false dichotomy between ELGG (an open source blog/file management/social networking application) and Moodle (an open source Course Management System, which incidentally features a wiki). Scott talks about peaceful coexistence of these two applications at Athabasca University and he links to an article by Terry Anderson describing how this will be done. It is encouraging to see others think that faculty will by their own volition operate in both environments, and choose one or the other depending on the need. But I’m not sure it will play out that way.
The wiki and blog software, while in some cases accommodating private communication among a limited set of users, is first and foremost meant to be used out in the open where postings are generally available on the Internet. For many people I know, this sense of openness is what the Web is about and hence these folks feel an affinity toward these environments. I do think that if the CMS don’t afford an open component in their environment, they will lose these folks who will move on to the newer coloration technologies. So I think it a safe prediction to say that at least some of our communication in the future will be happening out in the open and indeed that a greater share of what we do will be publicly available.
Beyond that, however, things seem quite uncertain. Will the same environments be used for formal instruction and research collaboration? Will we finally “solve” how to distribute content efficiently so that we can move past that and focus more on the student and the student’s interactions? Will we continue to see on large campuses such as mine that many individual units try to support their own thing, whether developed locally or not, so the service can be more situated? Or will they tire from that and hence we end up with fewer flavors of these type of environments overall? Should very large classes and more modestly sized course be using the same software? Will tool interoperability happen for real in the future so that we can mix and match apps according to our own inclinations?
It should be fun finding out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)