Instructional Design for Mediated Education feed

The Thing about "Peer Review"

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0600

The folks I know in academia have mixed feelings about peer review. “Peer review” simply means that colleagues have a lot of power over one’s teaching, one’s social standing, one’s publications, and one’s contributions to a field.

Peers are the “gatekeepers” in academia. They have a say on tenure. They have a say about whether one presents at conferences. They critique articles and chapters and suggest whether works should appear in public venues or not. They use their connections to help their colleagues around the world. And these are only the official roles.

Unofficially, they also control the gossip channels and the informal reputations of others on campus.

Mutual respect, of course, is critical. And as in any human endeavor, there is a fair amount of reciprocation: tit-for-tat, quid pro quo.

An Issue of Legitimacy

In a context of academic freedom, peer review is about legitimacy. As fields change and integrate new ideas, technologies, processes, and information, there has to be some sort of vetting structure to handle those findings.

Academia also has a long history and complex conventions. Integrating new knowledge requires respect for those traditions.

The Expression of Pet Peeves

There are boundless stories of various professional relationships gone sour over academic disagreements. There are many different personalities in academia, different educational backgrounds, different skill sets, different expectations, and well, even degrees of arrogance. People have their territories, and they have their preferences—all of which anonymous peer review seems to stoke and encourage their expressions of. I still remember one other-campus colleague's comments that reading a couple of my in-text citations (yup--in APA citation guidelines) shut down her desire to read my paper further--because it bothered her so much.

In dealing with edited publications, I’ve recently had to run interference in a case of some authors of a book chapter who felt that the peer critique shut down their work and made it unpublishable.

Even hardened faculty—who have had years of grant writing (and rejections—along with occasional acceptances), years of publishing, years of successes and failures—are hesitant and cautious about situations where their peers may rate or rank them. They care about the commentary that they get from others—even those whom they’ll never meet and who may only have a fleeting effect on their work lives or on one project.

I think most faculty have a balanced sense: Everyone has an opinion. Some are accurate, and some aren’t. Sometimes it’s personal; sometimes, it isn’t.

Some Editorial Work

Now that I have some editor work, I am wondering at the wisdom of my decision to let all peer critiques go through unedited and unvarnished. I will let global peers critique each other’s work anonymously and with no punches pulled—but also with the encouragement of empathy and civility. I don’t know how a team will respond. I don’t know how sensitively they’ll take comments from an anonymous peer.

When I weigh in, I will do so with candor and hopefully some degree of finesse. I have accidentally caused hurt feelings before, in my responses to students, no less. Indeed, all this is to say that it’s hard to give valuable feedback sometimes without potentially causing some hurt feelings. I am working with an editor on a separate project—and his ability to not spark defensive reactions is amazing. He gets to the point, but his sincerity and politeness and professional finesse really help me try to develop my own skills further.

Gray or Fugitive Literature

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0600

The building of online learning does not only draw on the writing of textbooks and contents on websites and in digital libraries. Every so often, faculty members include what is known as “gray” or “fugitive” literature. These are informational and unstructured contents that are not part of the official vetted literature in a domain field.

Not in the Official Record

The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research journals, and reports. What to use of these contents really depends on the faculty member(s) and the subject matter expert(s). They are the ones to formally uphold professional standards in the inclusion of relevant information in the learning.

Authentication for the Learners

Learners, though, do need proper representations of the origins of the information. They will need to know the provenance of the data. If different research methods were applied, how valid were the methodologies? How strong and significant were the results? If there are uncertainties to the information, it may help to qualify the data. It would help to include the proper metadata to that digital object—for proper indexing and searchability. (This assumes that the organizing formal ontologies used are broad enough to accommodate the relevant informal information.)

Learners may also want to know how that information relates to other established information in the field. How does the data stand up to cross-referencing and triangulation? If research was conducted, what standards were applied, and were those standards sufficient to support the standards drawn?

Highly Influential

If the gray literature is unduly influencing—by being inflammatory or unsupported or affective—then it’s important to contextualize this information even further, to cushion its effects. (This is assuming that the faculty is sure he or she wants to include this type of information.)

The varied nature of this “gray” literature suggests the importance of strong sifting work…to ensure that what is used is as solid as possible and as accurately described as possible, for all learners. The descriptions here would include expert annotations to show the relevance of this unstructured contents. And ideally, what is unofficial may become official with a little more work by the SMEs to get the unstructured data into the literature.

Global Branding of E-Learning in Higher Education (Survey)

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0600

Hello, all: A number of universities have created strong academic degree programs and courses for online delivery. Their areas of specialty enable many to stand out as global leaders in particular domain-field niches, disciplinary fields, and cross-disciplinary areas of study. How these colleges and universities reach out to a global and local student population is of interest, particularly their global branding strategies.

I am conducting a survey on the global branding of e-learning programs and courses in higher education.

This online survey should take 20-30 minutes to complete. Your insights will be collected anonymously and shared in a forthcoming academic publication.

The survey information is as follows:

Survey Title: Global Branding of E-Learning Programs and Courses in Higher Education

Your survey will be offered Nov 05, 2009 through Nov 27, 2009.

https://surveys.ksu.edu/TS?offeringId=151186

I sincerely appreciate your help.

Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew shalin@k-state.edu

Negative Learning

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0600

A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.

A Subtext in Instructional Design

Subject matter experts are often very deservedly confident in their fields. When it comes to presenting learning, they may present ideas in very broad strokes or with insufficient examples for novice learners to understand. They may approach learning with assumptions of others’ understanding that “mirror” their own, which may well be a highly dubious assumption. One major job in education is to unravel the learning back to the proper developmental level for learners, so the focus of the work is not too high.

Much higher education learning is based on language and imagery and multimedia. All these elements are highly polysemic or many-meaninged. The intention behind a message may not be conveyed in terms of the actual message received.

The variable nature of the learners also means that the “receivers” of the message and the interactors in the e-learning spaces may not be assumed to have particular backgrounds. Even if the message built is clean and purposive, it’ll be critical to understand the messages that the learners are receiving. Further feedback and elaboration may be necessary.

Identifying Rookie Assumptions and the Expert-Rookie Gap

Much of learning requires the identification of the gap between experts in a field and the novice / rookie learners. Identifying the places where rookies stumble will be important in order to provide them with the support necessary.

In order to walk through this endeavor, I brainstormed some rookie assumptions about writing. Novice student writers tend to be cautious. They seem to view the application of communications strategy in writing as problematic and somehow unfair. They lack confidence in the expression of their opinions as if one way is the right way to express ideas. They tend towards straight emulation—from textbooks, from websites, or from their peers. They tend not to take any risks.

Many lack exposure to reading. Many hover in their areas of comfort only in terms of selecting topics of interest, and they are unwilling to make the effort to reach out outside their areas of expertise. In summarizing writing, they have a hard time differentiating between what is relevant and what is irrelevant. Many do not have strong sourcing skills to verify the power or accuracy of the information they’re looking at.

Many cannot carry a cogent line of argumentation. They confuse making an assertion with proving a point—without the necessary logics and evidence in between.

Heading Off Negative Learning

There are many strategies used in heading off negative learning. Simply put, designing the learning to be clear is one strategy. Another is encouraging broad feedback from learners to find out what is going on. Another is to support learners with plenty of learning and plenty of examples.

This is not about shutting down serendipity or open learning or chance factors. This is not about rigidity; rather, it’s the opposite. It’s about supporting students where they are and providing a coherent learning experience…to properly reflect the subject matter domain.

Electronic Sulking

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0600

Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.

They’ll ignore suggestions to change their behaviors, or they’ll even take offense at the suggestions made by their peers. Whether they do this intentionally or not (and it’s hard not to assume purposeful and intentional behaviors), this seems somewhat passive-aggressive.

It’s hard to know if this is just frustration with the technologies or the online learning format or something else altogether. Indeed, learning itself and learning alone may be sufficient grounds for frustrations.

Profiling by Online Behaviors

Well beyond the digital profiles students create of themselves in online classrooms, their behaviors really leave a strong impact. What they write, when they write, and how they treat their colleagues and the instructor are important factors.

Saved by Original Quality Work

Usually, I am not very understanding when people engage in “electronic sulking.” Teaching writing classes means a heavy work-load and plenty of learner support as-is, and trying to support a kind of civility becomes tedious quickly. However, I found my own attitude changing when a particular student who was doing all the above started posting very original and thoughtful work. In my rush to be efficient, I was not considering that there does have to be an outlet for e-learning frustrations…and these small challenges were just that.

I was focusing on my own frustrations and needed to be more patient. All said, it worked out fine. We’re all on track for a strong study term.

"A New Generation of Learning..."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0600

Dr. Mark David Milliron presented on "A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainability Challenge" at the recent Axio Learning Conference in Sept. 2009.

The video capture of this event will be available at the following URLs:

http://www.axioconference.org/followup

http://www.k-state.edu/provost/academic/lecture/2009-2010/milliron.htm

http://www.axioconference.org/schedule/keynote-presentation/

Continual Digital Content Creation

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0600

Years ago, I wrote about the intimidation factor about “data hungry” models for simulations and decision-making cases. Here, we had projects that involved the uses of massive amounts of information and digital imagery. I ripped through a proprietary repository of some 30,000 images and still had troubles finding imagery for particular concepts…and the simulation piece was a small part of the larger automated learning experience.

Well, I’m having a sense of déjà vu again, albeit with Web 2.0 and social technologies.

A Website

First is one website that uses user-generated imagery, audio files, and video as well as articles and literature—to create a sense of camaraderie and community, to strengthen the protective factors against suicide in university students. This site is not even a year old, and it has sopped up enormous amounts of energy and effort for the creation of digital contents. And this is with a wide public creating and uploading contents…and endeavors to have contests to solicit and bring in more contents. This is with various talented faculty, staff, and students creating contents for deployment on the site.

The challenge is that “fresh” is quickly dissipated. A person who is a savvy information consumer can probably rip through the site’s contents in maybe a couple days maximum. And with the huge range of users and potential needs, people can hit the far limits of the site’s contents in a short time.

Recently, I went trekking around campus with a digital camera to capture images both inside and outside of buildings. I went around for two days and ended up with maybe about 200 images…most of which could be used. Some were for a forthcoming contest. The rest went online and live and we bought time, maybe for another month. And that’s on a much slower cycle than most people who run websites.

And a Wiki

Another project, a wiki, captures e-learning research, practices, and tools, to support those working in the field. This one has fairly high standards for information. The data has to be cited. Images, audio, video, and slideshows may be uploaded as well.

This project has captured a fair amount of global attention, and with that, the contents also seem to date out fairly quickly. The changes to the technologies mean that there is a need for constant updating. The public is voracious. Not having sufficient contents is a little like having insufficient food at a party.

The professor spear-heading this project has been working to change the academic culture around publishing on a wiki to make it respectable...but he is absolutely fighting an uphill battle in terms of asking faculty to potentially spill protected ideas before they formally publish. Virtually no one will do that.

A Faster Digital Contents Cycle

The challenges here have to do with the constant cycle of information development and deployment. This digital information has to be tailored. It has to be logical. It has to be researched. It has to be engaging. It has to be multi-medial. It has to be original. It has to be engaging. Much information now has to be packaged—with the video connected to a transcript and to a learning assignment and to a self-assessment and maybe slideshows. And those who develop multimedia know how much work goes into every piece.

One healthy limit on this cycle is the budget aspect—which requires that the instructional design and content creation work be paid. The unhealthy non-limit is when a project never was budgeted and is funded out of goodwill, which actually also does have its limits. Deadline-based, funded projects always get first priority. And then the goodwill work that is “fun” and that aligns with my other projects and presentations then get attention. I’m not sure if there’s any practical or better way of approaching this. (And yes, I have done everything I can to encourage community members to not only partake of the contents but to actually create contents, too! And that’s so far been a fairly tough proposition, with a few loyal friends and a few professional colleagues contributing.)

Transitory Digital Documents

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0600

For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.

However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By being transitory, these are dumpable…which means I can rid myself of secondary and tertiary copies once my faculty and administration clients have gotten their versions—their finalized and raw forms.

Enabling Documents

The nature of such enabling digital documents became absolutely clear when I was cleaning out files, and for one article, I probably had some 150 articles that had been read to inform the background information for that article. And in the final cut, only maybe some 30 articles had been relevant enough to be summarized, paraphrased, or quoted.

Ubiquitous Digital Documents

Digital documents are ubiquitous in many work environments. They are used for communications, planning, record-keeping (and institutional memory), and information dissemination. They are eminently transitory and editable. And yet, they’re also very persistent. They may be structured flexibly. They are repurposable in various forms. Some are used for nearly a decade before they’re reformatted or inaccessible due to computer errors or code problems.

So What?

Viewing digital files as transitory and temporal is helping in several ways. First, one is not so protective of digital files—with the idea that once something is captured that it’s in fixed and final form. It’s a lot easier to start new files for scaffolding, planning, and development. There’s not the block of a mental commitment to a file once it is started. It is totally fine to create documents for trial runs and as drafts.

Psychological Ownership "Markers"

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0600

A recent article discussed the phenomena of “psychological ownership” of digital contents. The context of this was about how individual work is marked in a collaborative work environment. The authors discuss various motives for ownership—perceptual (social-cognitive) or part of the human need to categorize the world, instrumental (efficacy and in control) to satisfy (workplace or personal) needs, and symbolic (self-identity) in terms of how people perceive themselves (Wang, Battocchi, Graziola, Pianesi, Tomasini, Zancanaro, & Nass, 2006, p. 226). The researchers identified psychological ownership as an important one in terms of how people interact with each other. That all aligns with our intuitive sense of how things work.

This issue is critical when the spirit of Web 2.0 is rife, and people are all about sharing a lot of digital objects (photos, audio, video, and other forms of multimedia) and information on the Web through various content sharing sites. There are many consuming and a few producing in terms of actual numbers, even in those sites.

Who’s First?

The issue of psychological ownership and how an idea is marked as one person’s or another’s is important in an online classroom. Students will email instructors off-list to let them know when a peer has swiped his or her ideas in a discussion board posting, or worse, in a formal paper. A savvy instructor will have noticed already…but the email does show that students can be proactive about identifying an idea as their own and protecting that.

Implications on Co-Creation

In a professional setting, where original ideas have heft and reputation value (and sometimes monetary value), identifying ownership of a work is critical. This is even more important in cases of virtual teaming where dispersed teams of people will collaborate and where there is not yet strong trust (even if there is initial “swift trust”).

Legal Implications

There are legal implications, too, based on the provability of who came up with an original idea first. But if collaborators on a project are approaching a work very defensively and protectively of their own ideas, that will not necessarily support open creativity. Of course, most projects start with a contract or memorandum of agreement or binding grant understandings—about the ownership of the work, the payments, the roles, and the ground rules of sharing. There are understood ethics of keeping work private and protected and not infringing on others’ rights.

In some fields where discoveries may have huge monetary and reputation implications, this issue of who originated an idea or came up with something first is even more critical.

Ownership Markers in Collaborative Work Spaces

The concept of “markers” or indicators to show ownership of contents is the linking of a team member with his or her contributions. The organization and the larger legal system then deals with issues of actual ownership and benefits from original work, within the particular work contexts. Still, the socio-technical system has to be rigorous enough for forensics to establish provenance…but the truth is that ideas are messy, and establishing the timeline of when an idea originated or a discovery was made—in shared work—may be very difficult. In such cases, the research team—spearheaded by a lead researcher or PI—will gain the glory. Most findings and innovations are not done in isolation but are achieved collaboratively, in a context of trust, competition, intellect, and resourcing.

Yours to Keep

One intriguing angle I’ve found is that I’ve run across people who think that their ideas are wholly original when they’re borrowing broadly from others. They think that if they think an idea (even if they weren’t the first to think it) that it’s the same as actualizing it. In other words, people often seem to consider psychological ownership even when there are no factual grounds for that.

Many amateurs also assume huge commercial value to their ideas which are untested and pretty much works that have not been tested in the world. They psychologically monetize their works, without any factual basis to do so. In other words, this psychological ownership can be taken to an extreme and to the detriment of the holder of those ideas. Many ideas never make it into the light of day and are never a benefit to anyone else but are just in the minds of the thinkers.

Embargoing Original Works

The issue of protecting work is a real one. There have been a half-dozen times where I’ve declined to send on an accepted chapter draft or article to a colleague pre-publication simply because the ownership of the contents has already been signed over to a publisher, and leaking any piece of the as-yet-unpublished work would be problematic with the publisher. Unintended leaks and other mishandling of information has happened enough in my observations of the world for me to err on the side of caution.

There’s enough of a sense of caution in the workplace that most people know not to share information unnecessarily. And many even hold work back from presentations and publications because there may be ways to enhance the value of the work through patenting…or other processes…for competitive advantage.

References

Wang, Q-Y., Battocchi, A., Graziola, I., Pianesi, F., Tomasini, D., Zancanaro, M., & Nass, C. (2006). The role of psychological ownership and ownership markers in collaborative working environment. ICMI ’06: Banff, Alberta, Canada. ACM. 225 – 232.

Games Teaching to the Unconscious

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0600

I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.

Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” (2005, Paraglyph Press). Give me a minute to set up this concept.

Bonafides First

So Koster (b. 1971) has worked for many years in the field of game design—as lead designer for Ultima Online, Ultima Online: The Second Age, Star Wars Galaxies, and many other works. He has won many awards for his work. His book is a fast read—which is well illustrated with images—but which also does contain some challenging concepts.

Koster's Conceptualization of Games

So what makes a game? Koster rattles through the various extant definitions from the various contributors who’ve offered their ideas (Callois, Huizinga, and then more recent ones—Crawford, Meier, Adams & Rollings, Salen & Zimmerman), and then he offers his own definition of a game.

A game essentially involves learning (and pattern recognition), optimally at a state that is not too difficult so as to be frustrating to the player but not too easy so as to lead to boredom. Patterns exist widely in the world, and human brains are unique designed to respond to those patterns—whether they be faces (facial recognition) or musical patterns or artistic patterns. Koster quips: “Even static has patterns to it.”

Games are iconic depictions of the world that work on an abstract level often beneath the level of conscious learning. They may tap into rote memorization, muscle memory, and mathematical patterning. “Fun” then involves engaging the brain and making the brain feel good so as to release “endorphins,” which give the body a feeling of pleasure. The brain is built to process data and understand patterns and solve puzzles—for the survival of the fittest.

Major game design challenges are to make a game simple enough to be playable but hard enough to engage learners…such as by having different challenges and learning. The games have to fit learners at the margin of learner ability which involves what they already know but also what they have yet to learn. People want mostly predictable lives albeit with some unpredictability to allay boredom, he suggests. While playing with other live players may add interest, there has to be a match between the players for the shared play to be “fun” because players hate to lose, he observes. He suggests that cross-pollination in design may be one way to begin to offer more variety in game design.

This is also forcing game designers to find new dimensions for gameplay. He suggests that stories and back-stories are almost negligible overlays to the gameplay itself and are not ever really central to the action. Games teach experientially while stories teach vicariously; games objectify while stories excel at empathy; games simplify and classify while stories deepen, and games are external while stories tend to be internal (Koster, 2005, p. 88).

Games may teach a range of types of learning: social skills, spatial reasoning, problem solving, odds-making (through games of chance), power relations, teamwork, social network building, construction, and others. Koster suggests that many games teach to the reptilian and primitive human brain and should maybe not reinforce some of the following types of negative learning: “blind obedience to leaders and cultism, rigid hierarchies, binary thinking, the use of force to resolve problems, (and) like seeking like, and its converse, xenophobia” (Koster, 2005, p. 68).

In response to the gap between male and female gamers, this author suggests that people should experience games that they may not intuitively enjoy so as to broaden their own horizons. There’s a value to discomfort in the learning.

Nothing Lasts Forever or “The Destiny of Games”

No games last forever. As a matter of fact, Koster suggests that the human being—once it masters a pattern, becomes bored. The game then loses its magical hold on the player, and it’s on to the next game. Once a game is played and a skill is acquired, that results in a kind of permanent learning, in Koster’s view, and the game then loses its utility (of sorts).

Teaching to the Unconscious Mind

Games offer highly abstracted models of the world with an underpinning of quantized models. He then writes: “They primarily teach us things that we can absorb into the unconscious as opposed to things designed to be tackled by the conscious, logical mind” (Koster, 2005, p. 76). Earlier in the text, he had observed that the brain observes and notices more than the conscious mind may assume—and gives up further observations often while in hypnotic states.

The types of teaching to the unconscious mind seems to be that of providing experiential engagements with complex systems and waiting for the brain’s “aha!” realization.

After many years teaching to the conscious mind with my designs, I am now wondering if I shouldn’t have also attended to the unconscious mind.

References

Koster, R. (2005). A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scottsdale: Paraglyph Press, Inc.