Learning By Doing, Learning in Context?

The theme of the ELI 2008 Online Spring Focus Session is “Real-World and Technology-Rich: Learning By Doing, Learning in Context”.

I’ve spent the past hour or so watching a text-heavy slideshow scroll by, while the presenter spoke at length (at least she didn’t read from the slides), and we answered a couple of polls, one of which let me find out that most common stereotype for a scientist is an individual with crazy. The backchannel, as usual, was way more interesting than the actual discussion. And now, toward the end of the presentation, a whiteboard has come up where we can write in words that “reflect what we learned in the prior session”.

So where was the opportunity to “Learn by Doing” and “Learn in Context” for the participants?

Two Million Minutes

On the heels of Did You Know 2.0 comes Two Million Minutes, a documentary that tracks the lives of six students, two America, two Indian, and two Chinese as they go through four years of high school (hence the 2 million minutes) in their respective countries. It i examine the value Americans add to the global economy, and the impact these students are likely to have on the economic futures of their home countries.

Executive producer Bob Compton, a venture capitalist for 20 years, was inspired to make this documentary after visiting India and China a few times for his business ventures. Impressed by the calibre of the employees, he decided to visit the schools and discovered that high schoolers in Indian and China were ahead of their US counterparts by 2-3 years. According to compton, global education standards are ahead of the US and especially in India and China, two of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Neil Ahrendt, one of the students in the documentary, in conversation with GMA anchor Robin Robers, claims that it is not entirely untrue that he has been portrayed as unmotivated in the film; he says there is not enough challenge in the school system to motivate him to expend more effort than was necessary. Bob Compton claims the film is not an indictment of the school system in the US, rather, it’s a closer look at the way the students in each of these countries allocates the time available to them over four years of high school.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences With Moodle

Frameworks for Higher Ed

• Learning from a cognitive science perspective – what do we know know about the learning process that we didn’t before.
• Principles of good teaching.
• Principles of instructional design
• Goals of higher ed.

How People Learn

• Knowledge is constructed
• Importance of foundational knowledge
• Role of metacognition – understand the learning process, how to get the students thinking about their learning process.

Create Significant Learning Experiences
Establish foundational knowledge, that you then apply to higher skills learning as well as other aspects of life.

There is the human dimension where they care about learning and develip skills so that learning is a lifelong process.

Fink’s taxonomy is not hierarchical, all the elements are available and impact the learning process.

Examples

Journaling – Reading Reflections Exercise
Post questions on the reading for students to respond to:
Main point of the reading, what info you find surprising and why, and what is confusing and why?

Due at the beginning of class, not graded but give students credit for doing it. Allows you to adjust class time and address sticky points or focus on active learning activities.

Allows students to see how knowledge is constructed, assess their own knowledge.  Allows the faculty to see what’s going on in the students’ heads; increases student-faculty contact.

Journaling can also be used in the affective domain to establish community; also to help them set goals and create a map to achieve those goals.

Using RSS Feeds to Bring Current Events To the Classroom
Allows students to see the relevance of what they are learning to the external world and current events.

Problem-based Learning
Using Moodle facilitated problem-based learning. Creates a cyclical process where students work with each other on projects and problems to consider what they do and don’t know and construct knowledge on it.

Becoming Intentional Learners
The course is just a channel to help students learn how to become lifelong learners. Students, inherently, do not have a clear idea of what it is to be an “intentional learner”, they need a framework to get them there.

Create a “knowledge survey” to assess student’s prior learning/understanding of the material. Student’s don’t actually respond to the quiz question, they let you know if they know the answer, maybe some of it, or not at all. Can be used to assess their confidence in their prior knowledge of the material to be covered. Used to evaluate what students already know before coming into the course.

New opportunities for significant learning

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Can Blogging Facilitate Writing Integrity?

Ensuring that students turn in original written work is a concern on many a campus these days and tackled in many diverse ways. One approach is to have students “pledge” their work to indicate that it is indeed original.

My reservations on “forcing” integrity on somebody aside, I have noticed, that in both my classes, where I ask students to blog rather than write a paper, at least thus far, the work has been original and I’ve had no reason to believe otherwise. And I wonder if there’s something inherent to blogging that somehow facilitates this?

I’m not sure that a first year student (I team teach a first year seminar class) necessarily factors in the notion that blogging implies writing for a larger audience, while blogging, so that may not be why this is happening.

However, I do think that the informal writing style that blogging lends itself to plays a role in that it allows them to think about and engage with the material and perhaps do more research because of that? Student in my class today mentioned that he did far more research and reading for his second blog post than he did for the first so he could improve. So there may be some validity to this theory of mine.

I’m not negating the benefits of making them write papers with appropriate bibliographic resources here, but trying to ascertain if the model in and of itself still works with this generation of students? Given that they are more likely to turn to Wikipedia or Google scholar, how do we leverage that intuitive behaviour to incorporate good information literacy skills? How do we make it less forced and more natural? And if we do so, and in the process also teach them to validate their information sources, would we induce better and more honest writing?

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Haiku – A Web 2.0 Learning Experience

Haiku is a Web 2.0-centric learning management system from education software developer Haiku Inc. Compared to established systems like Blackboard and WebCT, or even open source options like Sakai and Moodle, Haiku is still in its infancy. In fact, going by the tour, it appears to be mostly an easy way to set up a course web site.

I took the tour to check it out and Haiku does have a few things going for it. The drag-and-drop interface makes it a snap to set up the course website with content and activities.  Skins allow you to customize the look and feel and the latest version includes enhanced discussion forums, drop box functionality, and an Inbox for messaging.

In terms of content, there’s the usual suspects – text, links, and files – but you can also add images from Flickr, audio from Odeo and video from YouTube and Google Video. All in all, Haiku looks like it might be an option for anybody who wants to quickly and easily build a course web site with a few interactive options.

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Of Students and Laptops

Results of technology surveys at the University of Virginia and Stanford sparked off some lively discussion among some of the Trinity faculty, a librarian and the instructional tech (yours truly) today. One faculty expressed fear of a future where every student has a laptop, I suspect because of the inability to blank their screens if desired, as is possible with desktops and some software today, even as he acknowledged that laptops in the classroom are changing the way faculty interact with their students.

On the flip side, another faculty member recognized that multi-tasking at a computer is inevitable today. In fact, it’s not unusual for non-Net Gens to be playing Free Cell, or shopping, or checking their email while at meetings and presentations. So why expect any less from the students when the difference is just that they are more likely to be on Facebook, MySpace,YouTube, or listening to their iPods. Her contention is that the future belongs to institutions, faculty, and developers who adapt to this changing environment. As for the laptops, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em,” is her contention.

What was interesting about this is that the instructional tech (yours truly) and the librarian had near identical thoughts. Here’s what he said:

We really MUST insert ourselves here.  I think it’s not just education that can become diffused or distracted by technology, but most aspects of life. We have to be the ones who find means to blend technology and education in such a way that education is still the focus.  Computer and online technology is ubiquitous for students today, and if we remove technology in order to focus on education, we stop meeting students where they are.  Too, we have to be the ones to critique technologies (and their uses) and we must encourage students to critique them as well, and they’ll need to be present to do that.

My sentiments exactly. We definitely are dealing with a new generation of learners here, but I suspect some time-tested strategies hold just as true for them, as they did for us. For instance, when my daughter needs to buckle down and get some writing done, she turns off her IM, shuts the door to her room, the music is still on, but she’s focused on what she needs to do. I suspect a lot of them work in a similar mode, we just don’t see it as often as their multi-tasking mode.

So, can we force them to listen by blanking out their computers? Maybe. Can we force them to pay attention by blanking off their computers? Perhaps. Yes, you’ve got to know when to hold them, and to that, I would say, you’ve also got to know “how” to hold them. Engagement doesn’t need PowerPoint presentations, fancy technology, or cool toys.

On the flip side however, we are also, to some degree, teaching them to think critically about what technology or tool is appropriate to the learning context at hand, or even if one is needed at all. Consequently, I would say the issue is also how does one teach them to recognize when it is essential that they turn away from their laptop or desktop and their email, Free Cell, Facebook, etc. to focus on what’s going on, to learn, to reflect. Perhaps what we the non-Net Gens, could, should, teach them, is how to disconnect and focus when the situation calls for it.

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OCulture – Educational Podcasts

Stumbled upon OCulture today. “Enlightened ideas and media. served up fresh” runs their tag line. Don’t know about the enlightened ideas as I haven’t really explored it in depth yet, but the site speaks to an academic audience from my quick peek at it, and the focus is primarily educational content including free courses from UC Berkeley and content from Yale.

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