It's All About the Learning

So, maybe we should feed em?

2009-04-05T10:43:00.002-04:00

Have been enamored lately with reading research related to learning and the brain (I think this latest interest began with The Brain Rules, to which I refer constantly). [Link]

Anyway, prior research indicates that flavenols, found in cocoa beans, appear to increase blood flow to the brain. Taking that a step further is this exploratory study from England that fed flavenols to students in an experimental group and then asked both they and a control group to do some math calculations (counting backwards by 3's for example). Turns out that the flavenol enhanced group were less tired and more adept than the control. [Link]

So, maybe if we come to class armed with Snickers bars? Nah .. we would run into peanut allergies for sure.

Online learning paradigm

2009-03-08T14:14:00.004-04:00

I know .. I haven't actually posted here in a while, letting my Facebook status upgrades keep me current.

However, I am compelled this morning to ruminate about an apparent paradox described by the following two recent headlines from various RSS sources to which I subscribe:

Online students learned more than peers in traditional lecture format [Link]
This is the most recent iteration of this story to come to my attention. I have seen it in several other venues, and have received links to it from folks who know I would be interested in it. Basically, it describes a longitudinal study which resulted in a conclusion that students learned better from audio such as lectures posted at i-Tunes U than from just attending class.
AND
Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning [Link, subscription required]
This, from February 10, 2009 "Today's News" at the Chronicle for Higher Education. The article reports the results of a survey of 10,000 faculty members at 67 public universities.
Instructors' extra time and effort aren't being rewarded financially or professionally, and what's more, online education doesn't translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in the faculty survey.

While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior. Among faculty members who have taught online courses, that figure drops to 48 percent, but that still represents a "substantial minority" holding a negative view

Ummm .. ok. Does this leave anyone else scratching their head and saying "huh"?

(Image: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/people/people.htm)

SCC Learning Tech's Podcast

2009-02-22T18:11:00.001-05:00

Check out our new podcast from our SCC Learning Tech team. We're shooting for weekly, so be sure and subscribe there.

http://scclearntech.blogspot.com

Enjoy!
Jana

Playing with Factbook

2009-01-03T16:05:00.001-05:00

Passages 2008 presentation

2008-11-07T07:45:00.000-05:00

Web 2.0 for Passages 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 stanly)

I have to teach myself - Complaint or Praise?

2008-10-19T07:33:00.012-04:00

Perception is everything, isn't it? (In this picture, you can see both a beautiful young girl and an old hag, depending on your point of view).

To prepare for a presentation we gave in Raleigh last week, I had occasion to interview some of our students just finishing our "Student Success" class. The goal of the class, obviously, is to help our new students prepare for college work. We have revamped this class (which was the topic of our presentation) so that, hopefully, students work not only at learning the content, but at learning to learn and at preparing to do so in an online environment. The course is completed from our online LMS, although students can opt for a facilitated environment to help them with the technology. The content is designed to provide choices of pathways towards mastering the various skills identified as necessary for college success and includes the requirement for some reflection and student self-direction.

One of the students I interviewed indicated she didn't like online classes because, in her words:

I have to teach myself!

I find that such an amazing statement, particularly within the context of NOT liking an environment designed to help students become independent life-long learners.

Teach yourself? Of course you have to teach yourself! How else can you learn? You can be told, warned, coerced, lectured, spoon-fed, praised, criticized, .....

BUT

Until you self-illuminate the "light bulb", you have not learned.

What the student was saying, I think, was not "I have to teach myself", but more probably:

I don't know how to self-direct my learning. I only know how to memorize what someone else tells me is important about a subject. I am unfamiliar with non-passively creating knowledge and do not like the uncomfortable feeling it imposes. I much prefer the safety of having someone else tell me what I need to know.

We educators propagate this resistance. As David Cohen pointed out in his June '08 essay in the Oxford Review of Education, teachers are experts and, as such, generally present concepts from their expert perspective. They are far past remembering the fumbling and frustration of the learning years, and so tend to bundle their expertise in complete packages that a learner cannot possibly emmulate. Worse, Cohen does not offer an easy way out of this paradox (emphasis and spacing added):

The lack of many efforts to thoughtfully unpack knowledge is no simple oversight, easily remedied with a bit of supplementary instruction. For such teaching cuts against the ways that we learn and hold knowledge, and the value that we attach to masterful performance.

Much deliberate re-learning would be required before most good performers in any field would be able to understand novice work and appreciate the paths to competent performance.

Much study of learning would be required in order to recover the elements of early and inexpert performance, and to learn what instructional approaches might help novices to improve.

Much analysis of knowledge and of teaching would be required to understand how knowledge might be unpacked and extended so as to offer learners greater access to it.

Many opportunities to cultivate intellectual courage and adventurousness would be required if teachers were to learn to extend knowledge in ways that increased uncertainty and multiplied the difficulty of instruction. (p. 374)
(Cohen, David K.(2008)'Knowledge and teaching',Oxford Review of Education,34:3, 357-378)

It sounds like we all better get busy! We've got a lot of work to do and much to teach ourselves.

Joining Work Literacy 6 week event

2008-09-28T20:00:00.001-04:00

View my page on Work Literacy

Just joined College 2.0 at Ning

2008-09-27T09:28:00.001-04:00

View my page on College 2.0

EdD comps and the state capitals?

2008-08-03T11:08:00.005-04:00

I have just finished the course work for an EdD in Community College Leadership. It has required 4 years, about $16,000, uncounted hours away from family and hobby pursuits, and has been an absolutely fascinating journey. I am looking forward with great anticipation to applying what I have learned and learned to reflect on while I complete the dissertation process. I will be delighted to have earned the prestige marks that will follow my name.

Having said all that, I am less than enthusiastic over the latest hoop we had to jump in order to pursue this dream. We just completed a comprehensive, closed-book, six-hour essay exam, the outcome of which is unknown to us, and can remain so for another month. We can't figure out the rationale for this exam as it obfuscates the very curriculum from which we learned; a curriculum based on cohort discussion, learn-to-learn contextual activities, and constant research, all framed by adult-learning theory. Being forced to reverse course, spend a month memorizing authors and quotes and dates turned my brain into oatmeal and my stress level up to overload. It was one of the worst experiences in my professional life and one I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Dr. Tony Karrar had an interesting post following up on his concept of being knowledgeable vs being knowledge-able (sure wish I had said that!). [Link to full post] Entitled Brain 2.0, Dr. Karrar posits that he would rather his children know when it would be important to know the capital of a state and what they would need to know about it than to have them memorize the 50 state capitals.

I had not thought about my recent experience with the EdD comps in context of the 50 state capitals memory exercise, but suspect they have a lot in common. I had to memorize the capitals, I bet you did, if you went to elementary school in the US, and apparently today's young folks still have to do that. What are the odds that the form and content of the exam I was just tortured with was required because it always has been required, just as, apparently is the 50 state capital memorization activity? Has anyone, with either example, looked to see what is being assessed and correcting where it is the wrong thing? I doubt it.

Karrar's blog posting moved from his children to a reflection on one of his college professors who tested on details rather than critical analysis. Specifically, he recalled the questions:

(1) "What was the population in England in 1800?" (2) "What percentage worked in agriculture?". I actually knew the first part, because I believe that fully 10% of the population had moved to London which had grown to 1M people. (Now these facts could be completely wrong some 25 years later, but that's besides the point.) I got part 1 correct. The second part I had to guess between 25% and 35% or some such thing and still don't remember.

I could have told the professor about the move towards more urban and away from agriculture, but he didn't ask that. He didn't know if I knew the important concepts that he stressed in the class. No he had to ask a ridiculous memorization question.

I guess that says it. What if we all took a look at every assessment we force on our students and try to determine if each gets to the meat of what the student knows of if we, too, are guilty of asking "a ridiculous memorization question"?

Is it really the method?

2008-07-03T14:57:00.002-04:00

Clive on Learning is a blog I read [Link to blog] and there recently found what I might describe as a paradox in his postings of June 26. First off, Clive humorously retells some "Now I've heard it all" stories gleaned from IT trainers he recently encountered. [Link to posting]. This posting brought lots of comment of ridiculous IT adventures with hapless newbies; the kinds we have all seen. (CD drives used for coffee cup holders comes to mind).

So, where's the paradox? Well, that same day brought a posting entitled "It's the method, not the medium" where the gist was that e-learning efficacy depends on the instructional approach rather than on the delivery platform. [Link to posting]

These two posts, though not intentionally connected, made me think about the technologically challenged folks described in the first who, for various reasons, enroll in our online classes. How can we possibly expect them to succeed in a technologically driven platform, no matter what the instructional pedagogy, as discussed in the second? Someone who thinks a mouse is a floor pedal with too short a cord has been set up to fail in e-learning, don't you think?

Surely, the medium, just by virtue of its inherent learning curve can be intimidating enough to have an impact on the success of an e-learner. While not insurmountable, I think this combination of Clive's blog posts serves as a reminder to us that, while it very well may be the "method and not the medium" we must be vigilant to fulfill our educational duty to make sure our learners know how to use the medium BEFORE we ask them to learn the content.

All lecture, all the time?

2008-05-31T14:06:00.007-04:00

OMG, it has been more than a MONTH since posting. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, busy, busy, busy, mutter, mutter.

Reading some terrific blogging over at "The Clutter Museum", a new find for me. [Link to blog]. The post that has driven me back here to my own blog is the piece of trillwing's May 24 entry entitled "The tyranny of content" [Link to full entry].

Specifically resonating for me are her comments related to perceptions held by many higher-ed instructors that classroom knowledge transfer via all lecture, all the time is the preferred instructional approach. Small group discussion and other such activities are raise eyebrows and are thought of as new and innovative and relegated to alternative, or "if I have time", activities. Specifically, the PhD Mom, who works with faculty to student center their focus, said:

Tens of thousands of people come through this building every day. And yet I rarely hear student voices, except during passing periods between classes. The talking emanates mostly from foreign-language classes, where students are hunched over textbooks or workbooks, mumbling through exercises or conversing haltingly with their classmates.

I was naive. I was shocked to learn that people from across the disciplines still lecture all the time. And I pointed this out to the science faculty at the talk--that they had it backward. That lecturing should be considered the "alternative" method, and interactivity and active learning should constitute our modus operandi.

She coined the phrase, "tyranny of content" in exhorting some science faculty to focus on learning to learn rather than trying to cover all the content. This strikes so close to home. How many of our faculty, no matter the discipline, feel they must mention all points of content, be it from text book, web site, etc.? Instead of helping students learn how to extrapolate important concepts from readings, postings, videos, or other resources, our faculty think they must TELL them the important points or they will miss them.

I know there is something to this mindset as our students have become passive and used to someone telling them what is important. That is regrettable. But must we perpetuate the error? What if we decide to talk no longer than 15 minutes per hour of learning? We would, at first, befuddle our students. But once they were empowered to take responsibility for their own learning, I'm betting we would drastically improve that learning, well beyond the assessment and the semester.

I'm afraid I have echoed the thoughts voiced by George Siemens (who's blog, elearnspace, I never miss), who said in a recent posting:

Educators are concerned about student use of technology in the classroom. Laptops are an easy exit point from a lecture. A few years ago, I upset a series of colleagues when I stated something to the effect of "if students are distracted in your class, the issue is not with them, but with you as a teacher". [Link to full posting].

I wonder if we would see more benefit to technology in the classroom if we stopped lecturing and started facilitating its use for learning.

My CD Cover Meme

2008-04-27T14:24:00.004-04:00

Here is my meme for a CD cover, following the instructions on David Davies' blog (Happy birthday, by the way :-) [Link go David Davies blog], which I found upon my reading of the can't miss Stephen Downes' Half an Hour blog [Link to Half an Hour]:

A graphical designer I am NOT, but check out the Flickr group of CD cover memes. [Link to Flickr CD cover memes]. Now THAT's pretty awesome. AND, look at how some instructors are using this group. Obviously they have assigned the meme as a learning activity. I'm betting it is a pretty popular assignment, at that!

Collaboration - why don't we teach it?

2008-04-24T20:40:00.002-04:00

Crunch time here so very little blogging time. Besides, I must say that trying to whip your dissertation proposal into shape leaves little incentive for more writing.

This terrific white paper on collaboration, though, caught my eye. [Link to full article at Anecdote]. Actually, what caught my eye was this sentence in the introduction:

Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught.

Now, as a "teacher" of long standing and a concerned community college professional, that concerns me. Why are we "rarely taught" to collaborate? As discussed in this white paper, tomorrow's workers will need to collaborate as never before. And, sheesh .. aren't these new millennial gensters supposed to be master collaborators to the exclusion of any interest in one-on-one discussion?

Is it possible that formal educational didactic environments remove natural instincts for collaboration in favor of "group work" that most people I know claim to hate. Maybe our formal learning "group work" needs to start with teaching our students HOW to function in those groups; teach them HOW to collaborate. Consensus building, constructive evaluation, evolving leadership all are components that would serve our students well.

Four items per lesson

2008-03-29T14:46:00.002-04:00

Four items per lesson .. or so says Dr Itiel Dror, a scientist at the School of Psychology, university of Southampton, in a presentation at a recent conference summarized by the British Computer Association [Link to Full Article]

Four items! That's a give or take number depending on the lesson content, but, according to Dror:

We are a machine with limited resources. We have limited information processing capacity. So when you design training, you need to think about which parts of the brain you are targeting. You need to make sure learning goes into modules to do with the memory. You can spread learning load over different modules to increase the amount of information that can be processed.

Some of his examples are old friends from adult learning theory. For example, lessons should be planned around learner prior knowledge, "a context with which the learner is familiar". Other examples, such as illuminating contrasts among items as a memory tool, are common sense to many of us.

His best advice, IMHO:

Focus on the learner, not on the material

Ah .. now therein lies the rub, don't you think? How many syllabii have you seen with learning objectives based on pacing or other content oriented features? (I have to cover this much of the book today). I'm afraid there are too many classes conducted from this perspective and, worse, I'm afraid the objectives do not drive the class anyway. What if we each took time to help our students identify the real take-aways based on the knowledge they already bring to the table?

Honest .. I couldn't help myself .. the computer made me cheat!

2008-03-02T13:27:00.005-05:00

mmmm hmmm [she says, noncommitally]. I first read about this posting to a blog called "Research Digest" from the "The British Psychology Society" [link to that full text] from George Siemens' wonderful elearnspace blog which is one of my "can't miss" subscribed blogs. [link to full post on elearnspace].

Basically, according to the BPS blog, students were asked to take computerized tests where they were told that there was a glitch in the testing program that displayed the answers to the test questions and were given instructions on how to avoid having that happen. Before testing began, the treatment group read about deterministic argument that postulates human free will is a myth, an "illusion" as they say on the blog, and that the students (presumably human) thus had no control over their actions or decisions.

You guessed it. The treatment group were found to be more likely to cheat than those who had not read the material about determinism. A second, similar experiment where students were exposed to information arguing for the concept, against, and neutrally and were then asked to self-evaluate a test is also described, and again, those who read arguments that we really have no self-will were more likely to cheat.

The researchers say the significance here is:

If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.

Yikes! I hear so much about cheating students, particularly in online classes, and I have always thought one of the main reasons was because we put so much pressure on the grading process and so little on actual learning assessment. But heck, maybe all we have to do is insert anti-deterministic literature before every quiz and test to solve the cheating process

Nah .. I still think it's the stress!

Teaching Millennials

2008-02-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

The instructional areas of our community college are just starting to be exposed to the "Millennial Generation" and are very perplexed by what they see. Our faculty senate just sent a letter to our compatriots in other community colleges in our state to see if they have developed any answers to "problems" like:

"apathy with classroom participation and discussion lack of responsibility for outside assignments lack of etiquette toward instructors/students disregard of proper cell phone use".

Our vice-president of instruction pointed to this You-Tube video:

Her take was that those of us who are members of the "Baby Boomer" generation have forgotten that we were probably the most disrespectful, rabble rousing, standards changing bunch in a long time and that our teachers MUST have had to change things to accommodate our learning needs.

We have conversed extensively about the traits of this new generation, but it doesn't seem to have an impact with us as we continually try to "teach" using the techniques we learn best with, rather than those preferred by these new learners.
I ran across this comparison recently in an Eric document that illuminated these differences for me.

(Kiesa, A., Orlowski, A. P., Levine, P., Both, D., Kirby, E. H., Lopez, M. H., et al. (2007). Millennials talk politics: A study of college student political engagement: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)).

Flat classroom project

2008-01-26T11:06:00.000-05:00

I just read about the "Flat Classroom Project" in the August 2007, Learning and Leading with Technology [Link to full text - pdf file] and am more than wowed! I think I am green with envy, glowing with admiration, and anxious to get to know these two women as we obviously share common pedagogical beliefs.

To summarize, international educator, Julie Lindsay, currently in Qatar, and Georgia, USA high school teacher and EduBlog award winner, Vicki Davis, have teamed up and implemented the Flat Classroom Project in reaction to Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat". The project paired geographically separated international students and had them investigate one of the precepts of the the Friedman book as a function of their own perspectives. The instructors served as facilitators, and the learning was documented via video and wiki. Now, how cool is that?

This project has reinforced our belief that learning takes place in many different ways, times, and places. It also shows us that the single-classroom research that emphasizes the effectiveness of collaborative learning, genuine assessment, and project-based learning can occur when students have partners that are never in class at the same time. Additionally, social learning research has shown us that the sociability of online learning combined with interaction can help promote understanding. (p. 28)

In addition to wikis, the project utilized synchronous and asynchronous tools, including many Web2.0 applications. As noted in the article, they have plans for future projects where they think an implementation of Elluminate as a student final project summit would add to the benefits.

An instructional environment such as this would be a phenomenal opportunity for our community college students, many of whom have never traveled outside their area. We strive to help them incorporate a respect for diversity, but there is little context for them. An international project could certainly help with this.

It's all about the learning - What I learned in 2007

2007-12-30T09:40:00.000-05:00

Happy 2008! Gosh, I love the new year time as it truly does offer each of us a fresh new start.

The Big Question on the Learning Circuits blog of which I am a shameless lurker asks what we learned in 2007 [Link to full text]. For someone who may be addicted to learning, you would think that would be an easy question to answer. But .... maybe if I categorize?

I completed 24 hours towards my EdD at Western Carolina in 2007. What did I learn? A ton about higher ed programming and leadership and research. I integrate concepts from school into my job every day, and probably, for me, the most important tidbit is that a dedication to our mission puts students and learning first, but is all too rare, even for idealistic educators at community colleges. I've learned I am definitely an outlier, usually finding the status quo to be an unacceptable alternative for any solution, and becoming more impatient with the lack of andragogy-based instruction in higher ed. Most surprisingly, I learned that instructors of adults trained in the shadow of Knowles and his counter-parts, tend to be extremely resistant to adoption of said andragogy-based instruction!

I assisted 46 different community college faculty to adopt or improve their use of technology as an instructional tool. My involvement ranged from training folks to use their e-mail program to co-authoring media-rich online classes. What did I learn? Without doubt, I learned that people embrace change reluctantly and only when they foresee a benefit to themselves. On the other hand, I learned to break down the process of change to extremely small steps, and found that resistance eased and, in many cases, innovation ensued. I also learned that effective seated-class instructors fear the loss of interaction and "light-bulb" moments in moving their classes to an online environment. I learned, however, that as long as I didn't try to boilerplate a solution, these same instructors found much joy in collaborating with me to develop individualized, media-rich online classes to which they point with pride.

On a personal note, I learned how much smaller the world seems without my dad and my brother-in-law, Cliff, both of whom we lost in July. I learned the value of international travel, visiting Europe twice and Mexico once. I learned so much on these trips that I join one of my professors in the belief that all students at our community colleges should get a passport and be offered myriad ways to use it.

OK .. enough is enough. I really enjoyed reading what others learned as linked from the Big Question and hope this adds something to the conversation.

Happy New Year and all the best in 2008!

Generating online discussion

2007-12-19T14:41:00.000-05:00

Wow! It has been a while! Time just gets away from you when your plate is too full, doesn't it? What with the best job on my campus and a full load of doctoral classes, I guess I let this little blog slip through the cracks. Oh well, I'm back at it now!

I had bookmarked this article on how to generate online discussion [Link to full text] a while back as the topic is one of interest to most of the online faculty I know. Research invariably tells us that online students engage when they are connected, not only to their instructor, but to each other as well. Asynchronous discussion postings are one way we have of trying to make sure that connection occurs and grows. Some of the suggestions offered the above ref'd list include:

Consider integrating Internet research, in which students include and discuss relevant Web sites as active links in their messages to each other, for example, a misconduct case from Ethics in Science or a Pre-Raphaelite painting from the Victorian Web. When appropriate, encourage students to incorporate visual images and multimedia.
AND
Encourage or require students to quote from the textbook, from your lectures and materials, and from their classmates’ posts when they respond to each other and when they write their tests or papers on topics they discussed online. Provide a model for informal documentation for these source references

There is no question, that effective online discussion in a class full of community college students is not an easy goal to attain. Some instructors force the point, requiring a certain number and level of postings as part of the graded activities for the class (the list cited here suggests giving credit but not grading). I'm not sure that gets us where we want to go, but leaving students to their own devices often means no postings at all! So, what are some ways we can encourage lively debate amongst the inquiring minds enrolled in our online classes?

I have always felt that one "no duh" point is that the discussion topic, including the way it is worded can make or break the dynamics of the discussion. A topic or question that doesn't interest anybody isn't going to generate much innovative thought.

I try to tie my discussion topics and questions into some media or third-party product, particularly ones self-discovered by the student. Lately, I have turned to YouTube for the basis of my discussion points and have had pretty good luck engendering conversation on the discussion boards.

Train the brain

2007-10-24T09:13:00.000-04:00

Training the brain for learning is what we are all about in the community college instructional world. We all have our unique approaches, of course, but training the brain is definitely what we are after. It seems to me that our jobs would be easier if those brains were happy brains to begin with, as attitude has a lot to do with accomplishment.

Consider this recent article from the wonderful Pick the Brain blog entitled "The Psychology of Happiness" [Link to full post]. The thrust of the post is simple. We choose what we pay attention to and what we choose determines whether we have happy brains. As the comments to the post pointed out, we probably can't teach our students to "think themselves happy", but there are skill sets we can help them acquire that might impact their outlook towards learning.

The "Train Your Brain" article that is linked in the Pick the Brain article includes a bit of information about the power of the word "can", which is probably what I would focus on in trying to help students take responsibility for their attitudes about their learning. There is a quote there, "The question should not be whether you are happy but what you can do to become happier" (Dr. Ben-Shahar) reminds me of my own favorite quotes on what CAN be done (warning, these come from my mom days, so the sources don't exactly have rigor, but the concept is relevant):

Do or do not, there is no try (Yoda)
and
I don't say, no .. I don't say can't, I don't say I won't try. All I say is 'yes I can' and I get there bye and bye (Eeore)

I'm just going to call you all Suzy

2007-10-07T07:18:00.000-04:00

What? How much ferpa / hippa / zippa / lippa (ok, I made those last two up) can we deal with? Check out this information from the Iowa City Press-Citizen regarding the possible privacy issues with ... are you ready? .... CALLING STUDENTS BY NAME IN YOUR CLASSROOMS! Unbelievable. [Link to full text]

Distance Ed - Teachable Moments?

2007-09-23T07:54:00.000-04:00

There has been lots of research and commentary concerning the comparative learning from and readiness for distance learning. This article from NewsWise and initially sourced to Indiana University [Link] is a recent example. The focus of this article is the concern that the uninitiated younger college student will not do well in online classes.

"Freshmen really stood out," said Mark Urtel, assistant professor in the Department of Physical Education in IUPUI's School of Physical Education and Tourism Management. "It's counterintuitive -- people say younger students are the ones who grasp technology, use it most, and know it the best, but it's my opinion that they grasp the technology and use it on their terms, not necessarily ours."

This statement seems to suggest an assumption that the "net native" generation, because of their exposure to the technology, will naturally take to the LMS structured, due-date delivered pedagogy of a "typical" higher ed online class. I don't think the most techie geek could accomplish that; everyone needs orientation to the navigation and requirements of a class as well as student to student and student / instructor connection. At our institution, we have piloted online student success classes which, at the student's discretion can be taken in a "seated" facilitated environment. In this way a new student is introduced to the how and what of online learning in a setting more comfortable to their expectations. We're still compiling data, but our "seat of the pants" reactions are that the experience is positive and preparatory, particularly for students who had not expected to ever have to face an online class environment.

I have another problem with the statement from Indiana. If we are NOT using the tech our students know how to use, are comfortable using, and enjoy using, I have to ask, WHY NOT? Would this not be the perfect launching point for the integration of prior student knowledge into the learning process? Wouldn't Malcome Knowles be proud of us if we found ways to do that with texting and vidcasting and music?

Just my 2¢ worth in my quest for finding ways to focus more on learning and less on process.

Textbooks; Why do you assign them?

2007-08-26T12:57:00.000-04:00

An August 20, 2007 article from the Inside Higher Ed folks about whats spurs students to read their text books [Link to full article] raises the question in my mind as to why we assign textbooks for classes. According to the research cited in the article:

Four factors (not all of which professors can control) best predicted whether students would spend more time with the textbook: gender of the students, the quality of visuals and the quality of photographs in the books, and the extent to which professors link assigned textbook sections to lectures and other in-class work.

That last item is the real kicker for me. If the textbook is NOT used as a class learning tool, why is it required? Could there not be "suggested readings" instead of required texts? Better still, why not get students involved with finding and evaluating those suggested readings? As with all instructional methods, it would take a lot of time to implement and the instructor would have to be on her / his toes to make sure that students had the necessary skills to locate, evaluate and report on quality and relevant learning material for each course. But imagine what the possibilities for actual learning!

Learning, Pepsi, Pickles, and Spaghetti Sauce?

2007-08-11T19:35:00.001-04:00

One of the best books I've read recently was Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about first impressions and missed opportunities. So, I was intrigued when one of my favorite blogs, e-learning Weekly posted an article which tied a 2004 TED Gladwell talk to the concept of learning preferences [Link to post].

The 13 minute YouTube video is well worth the look-see [Link to video]

In a nutshell, Gladwell discusses an obsessed physicist who had been unsuccessful in determining the ultimate, perfect percent of artificial sweetener for Diet Pepsi. His conclusion was that there is no "perfectly sweetened Diet Pepsi"; rather the answer was there were many perfect Diet Pepsis. Of course, this is not what Pepsi wanted to hear. Vlasic Pickles, however, heard his message and, instead of trying to create a single perfect pickle, created a second kind of zesty pickle which appealed to the taste buds of an entirely different group than did the original Vlasic Pickle.

The reputation-building victory for the physicist, however, was with Prego spaghetti sauce which, in spite of being a superior product was losing to Ragu in the spaghetti sauce wars of the 70's. So you know what this guy did? He worked the the Prego folks and created a gazillion varieties of Prego and taste-tested them with folks around the country and, instead of looking for THE winner, grouped the preferences into data clusters which indicated three categories of taste preferences, one of which was not available at all on super market shelves. The short story is that Prego took over the market by meeting a "need" for chunky spaghetti sauce.

So, what does that have to do with learning? As with the spaghetti sauce, there is no perfect learning approach, there are perfect learning approachES. How many varieties of learning opportunities do you offer in your own instructional environments? If you do vary your instruction, is it within your comfort zone, or do you make an effort to determine the preferences of your students? How do you know the preferences of your students? As Gladwell points out, you can't ask them; they probably don't know!

The thing to remember IMHO, is that there is no perfect instructional approach, there is no hierarchy of instructional approaches where one is better than another. There ARE however, variable instructional approaches which will appeal to different people. Like chunky Prego and Gray Poupon, there are instructional approaches that have never been tried, but once experienced might blow the socks off our current ideas about learning.

Just something to comtemplate.

Why PowerPoint?

2007-06-23T15:28:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading a 2004 interview of Richard E. Mayer, a guru of educational psychology research and psychology professor at University of California - Santa Barbara. The title of the article reporting the interview is "The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint" and the crux of Dr. Mayer's remarks have to do with our instructional objectives when using PowerPoint in the classroom [Link to full text, registration required]. Specifically, he suggests we instructors (and presumably committee presenters, and conference presenters, etc., etc., and so forth) take a look at what we are trying to accomplish when we use PowerPoint. Are we trying to use the slides to transfer information or to guide learning? The former, he says, usually does not result in learning since sharing information via a PowerPoint slide does not typically allow for cognitive processing time. On the other hand, he says:

When your goal is cognitive guidance, you want to make sure that the audience members build appropriate knowledge in their memories. Your job is to communicate in a way that will have the desired impact on the audience, so you need to design your slides so they are consistent with how people learn.

Now that's a pretty interesting distinction, don't you think? And Dr Mayer goes on to point out:

Research on instructional design has shown that the presentation medium does not create learning, but the presentation method does affect learning.

In other words, PowerPoint doesn't teach anything, it is a tool. And if it is used to present information in a way that is not instructionally sound, it doesn't even HELP with learning and may have a negative impact on what we're trying to accomplish!
So, next time you're creating a PowerPoint enhanced classroom lesson, consider the principles put forward by Dr. Mayer for effective use of the tool:

people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone
people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included
people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen
people learn better from animation with spoken text than animation with printed text
people learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings
people learn better from conversational style than formal style