Especially in the context of EdTech and online learning, there’s lots of talk about ramping up innovation and creativity. But what exactly do these terms mean in practice? When we, as instructors, ask our students to do this, how do we define this for them? Mary Sheridan and Jennifer Roswell have a nice take on the term,
… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)
The O’Reilly Tools of Change site has an interview with Matt McInnis of Inkling who talks about what they see going on in the digital-textbook market. For instance, McInnis mentions students’ preference for downloading specific chapters rather than entire books. Feature-wise, he mentions they integrate Google Search and Wikipedia. On this latter point, it seems like another good addition would be Wolfram Alpha. What student wouldn’t want a quick, reliable reference for checking anything that can be quantified?
If you’re not familiar with it yet, ds106 has been doing all kinds of innovative and creative things when it comes to extending the online learning space. And today, I spotted another one of their creative samplings — this one for sparking student interest in one of their future learning adventures.
I’m using VoiceThread in the EdTec class I’m teaching this summer and was curious about students’ perceptions of this tool versus the more text-oriented medium of the blog. I wasn’t looking for anything scientific, just some informal, preliminary feedback, but one of the more interesting comments had to do with how our blog was organized. For this student, she found the standard chronological sequence problematic because it didn’t allow her to follow a thread by topic, which made reviewing the conversation that took place there a more disjointed experience.
As anyone who has taught online already knows, blogs certainly have solid potential as a platform for facilitating discussions, but as blogs mature, students can perceive them as just another assignment-box to check. Aware of this reality, teachers then don their creativity caps with the hope of designing blog assignments that encourage discussions to flow more organically, where students are participating in more self-directed styles. Who knows, maybe a more topically organized interface would allow for better usability, and therefore help faculty with meeting this goal? Perhaps the topics could be arranged in one or more circles with each topic being click-able. And to add a little more usability sugar to the mix, maybe topics could be named (e.g., folksonomy) and managed by assigned student-facilitators. Perhaps it’s time to think about alternative designs for the education blog.
Last Christmas, I had a little time to catch up on some novels and so I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to my iPhone. Unfortunately life intervened and I didn’t have a chance to finish it, but it jumped back to the top of my To-Read list after just finishing Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U. Part of her book describes how people use social networks (or social networking practices) to hack their own educational experiences and in the process of doing this, she gives a shout-out to Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom.
Cory Doctorow described an entire economy that ran on whuffie, a reputation-based currency.
With this Sci-Fi vision in mind, Kamenetz then follows this up with an interesting question that relates to motivation and the design of online learning contexts:
What if there was a way for students to start building whuffie from their first class, freshman year?
I like this more incremental and holistic approach, because especially when I think about collaboration in online learning, it’s often difficult to expect students to form and establish cohesive groups with people they’ve likely never met and more significantly, for projects that are confined to a traditional 16-week term. If students began building online identities and reputations (whuffie) early on in their collegiate experience, then ideally, teachers could think about how collaborative designs could be linked to that existing network.
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?
As luck would have it, FastCompany reports on a University of Washington study that relates to my previous post. One of the culprits that this study identifies with ebooks is lack of cognitive mapping that would provide cues helpful to navigation (e.g., Where am I?) and retention (How can I make a note of this when I need to remember it for the test?).
So here we’re reminded of what’s become something of an aphorism in the instructional design world: think beyond the tools. And when you’re talking about ebooks in educational contexts, student needs differ from those of the general-purpose, leisure reader. Unlike the leisure reader, students need to exhibit and demonstrate understanding to their teachers (at the very least) and genuine options for interaction can facilitate this.
“As an increasing number of states and educational institutions declare their commitment to moving to digital-only platforms for educational texts, it seems wise to consider a fundamental question about the future of educational materials, in terms of both content and delivery:
Why is a book the best metaphor for envisioning this future?”
I think Michael Mayrath, Priya Nihalani, and Scott Perkins nailed it here. This question comes out of a study they ran at Abilene Christian University in which they developed a mobile app for students in a general level Statistics class.
The whole article is worth reading, but I’ll just focus on one part that kind of lingers with me. For designers involved with this kind of work, approaching them as Apps rather than ebooks seems like it could also influence their thinking at a subconscious level, since when you think about it, the word ebook still has a whole lot of analog connotations and as a result, might still constrain their vision for designing something more genuinely innovative.
Whether as part of their formal research agenda or just general curiosity, there’s been a very noticeable trend among educators who are interested in whether Twitter is something more than just sharing what you had for breakfast or similarly superficial topic. Can it, for example, promote student engagement? One of the more memorable launch-points for me on this question was Rey Junco’s presentation via the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
More recently, the March issue of the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching has a piece by Badge, et al., who look at Twitter use among two groups of students (one undergrad, one grad) as a result of loaning them iPod touches. Within the undergrad group, they observe evidence of an emergent community of practice (e.g., Wenger) when they noticed that students continued to use Twitter even after returning the devices. Perhaps this also sparks another line of investigation … when or how do we identify distinctions between emergent communities of practice and sustained CoPs? 6 months? 1 year?
As luck would have it,