Good story from This American Life on a collaboration between a scientist and a music professor who experiment with sound waves as a means of killing cancer cells. (It’s an engrossing story that I highly recommend). As the story progresses, the narrator describes several experiments that show promising results, but because of the high stakes, they need to keep running tests under different conditions, etc. Eventually, they run out of money and so that, among other factors, brings their collaboration to an end.
As the story was wrapping up, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone suggested Kickstarter as a way to re-start it?
The New York Times has a piece that renews the debate over whether or not ed tech software really makes a positive difference on learning outcomes. One of the people they talk to is a representative from the Software and Information Industry Association who argues that the problem is not the software but the lack of adequate training.
… the problem was not that companies overpromise, but that schools often do not properly deploy the products or train teachers to use them.
Finger-pointing aside, I think there would be many teachers who would actually agree that one of the factors is the lack of training (and lack of money to make that training possible). Of course, training also has its detractors who argue over ROI. But where I think training gets a bad reputation is its short-sightedness. Instead of a quick one or two-day workshop to learn the basic functionalities of the software, why not also complement it with a more sustained learning initiative designed to facilitate creative strategies for engaging students? Why not have the teachers work with the tool on a regular basis and collaborate with their colleagues on different approaches to using it in their classrooms? Instead of setting it up as a workshop, perhaps a studio concept might be more appropriate?
Ed-Tech: the established thinking is that pedagogy should precede technology. But in a review of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It, we see an instance of the reverse:
She and her Duke colleagues worked with Apple to give every entering freshmen an iPod, and then they sat back and watched as students and teachers developed innovate [sic] and collaborative ways to incorporate iPods into their work … No one could have predicted all the ways the iPods enhanced learning once they were in the hands of students and teachers — and that’s a central point of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It.
So what was the key ingredient to this deviation from the established line of thought? Was it the demographic (e.g., college-aged students as opposed to a younger, K-12 crowd)? Were students asked to take more active roles in the instructional designs? Or was it just an outlier? I’m curious to know if Davidson elaborates on this in her book.
This semester I’m using Atlassian-Confluence as my wiki for EdTec 498 and before that I used PBWorks. Both are great tools that offer a wide array of impressive features, but one that I’ve always wanted to see was inline commenting. Yes, of course, wikis make it a breeze to make corrections to a page, but especially as a teacher, I’m frequently more interested in asking a question than making a correction; I’m interested in comparing my interpretation to their intent and seeing what learning emerges from the juxtaposition between the two. Given the wide popularity of wikis in the education community, I’ve been surprised that such a capability hasn’t been available (at least based on my research); in fact, I hadn’t seen it all until Wikispaces announced they were adding it.
Wikispaces is definitely distinguishing itself here. While lots of wiki platforms have comment features, the comments aren’t contextualized; instead, they’re typically aggregated at the bottom of the page which requires the user to first scroll down the page to the comments section and then to scroll back up and then carefully search for that section of text that the comment corresponds to (and hoping not to forget the gist of that comment while hunting down that specific piece of text). This requires too much work. Wikis are well known for their ease of use and the process of commenting should be just as easy.
In the process of catching up on some of Will Richardson’s recent posts, I read one where he refers to Kevin Washburn’s Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles. (Aside: Washburn has recently published a book called The Architecture of Learning that I’ve heard many good things about). Anyway, in principle 5, Washburn urges
Do not appoint a group leader. In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group’s thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction.
In theory, this makes a lot of sense, but within the frame of my own teaching experience, I’ve usually found that most students prefer a group leader. They typically prefer somebody to function as the leader (unless of course that person is engaging in tyrannical behaviors). Anecdotally, I’ve heard how they like the leader as an arbiter of more complex decisions and one who reminds members of overall group goals. So where does this predilection for leaders spring from? Is it conditioning? Lack of evidence or compelling stories of successful implementation? Is change more likely by teachers assuming a greater role? Have teachers expected too much from students when it comes to building their own capacity for designing leader-less groups?
When educators assemble and debate the pros and cons of integrating social networking tools or models into the curriculum, it’s often centered around questions of value and fidelity to instructional objectives and the like. That of course is completely understandable and appropriate. But sometimes it’s important to step back a bit and look at them through other lenses. Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir does that for me. It shows an inspiring aesthetic value to social networks.
futurelearn has a post on plugin devices from Steelcase called pucks that allow students to connect with whatever devices they brought with them to the classroom. Although it’s not entirely clear from the description in the post, I’m assuming that students could connect their device to a classroom projector via the puck and an hdmi or vga cable. Even better will be the day when students can avoid the extra burden of cables and connect to the projector wirelessly.
A friend sent me a presentation by Mike Sharples of the Learning Sciences Research Institute that looks into what teaching will be like in the next 25 years. On one of the slides, Sharples identifies the Widening gap between learning inside and outside school. What’s interesting in this gap is how it suggests how students have used the web to enable more self-directed learning outside the walls of the traditional classroom. But what’s even more interesting is how students are designing their own learning experiences as a result of stitching together those web-based resources they’ve determined to be most relevant to advancing their objectives. To what extent are teachers and/or schools paying attention to this self-directed learning that may not necessarily be visible in the formal assignments the students submit for review? Are there opportunities here for collaboratively designed instruction (between teacher and student)?
Lots of teachers like the idea of blogs as a tool for learning and reflection, but sometimes find that students tend to be more hesitant when their posts live in such an open environment. Setting up a private blog is an option with many web-publishing platforms but it can also impose limits in terms of usability or functionality.
Posterous recently announced a private groups option. Like a lot of people, I really like the ease and simplicity of Posterous (writing a post is as easy as sending an email). One of the best advantages of this new feature is that it doesn’t require individual group members to sign up because all the posts can be sent via a simple email. In an educational setting this is a big help because one of the more time-consuming logistical tasks instructors encounter is getting all the students either registered with the main class blog or helping them set up their own. All too often valuable class time is lost with keeping track of who’s signed up and who hasn’t.
Connectivist learning happens through the building of networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems … Rather than formal and structured classes, connectivist learning is bursty (occurs in short, uneven spurts), driven by need and interest and is carried on beyond episodic classes, lectures and course
The part of this definition that interests me the most is bursty because of the way it envisions interaction and knowledge building outside the traditional boundaries of classes and lectures. When I think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, and the like, part of their appeal seems to be this episodic nature that perhaps presents interaction requirements as less burdensome and time-consuming, and therefore more likely to be engaged. From the research angle, the challenge is how to capture and analyze these episodic learning bursts. What about the interaction that students take outside the confines of the LMS? I can easily remember conversations I’ve had with students over the years who divulged how they created work spaces outside of the formal learning space (e.g., IM, Google Apps). A big part of this had to do with ease-of-use; these external tools were easier to use than those bundled with the LMS. Nevertheless, this still seems something worth following.