iterativelearning

When it comes to academic research, lots of improvement has happened in terms of making more journal articles available in electronic format. But what has lagged behind somewhat is making electronic copies of book chapters. How often have you been in a situation where you only need one chapter from an edited volume, but because that volume is in high demand, there’s a long line of hold requests? I’m not a librarian and so I’m not in the loop on all the developments regarding journal or database pricing, etc., but it would be nice if some kind of arrangement could be worked out so researchers could obtain select copies of chapters with the same ease they now retrieve copies of individual journal articles.

From the research corner … Weston & Bain have a good article in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment – The End of Techno-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change.

They agree with the Techno-Critics that there’s been a lot of exaggeration when it comes to describing the link between tech and learning improvement; they agree because of the conspicuous lack of empirical data. But rather than throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, as the Techno Critics are prone to do, they suggest six extensions of Jonassen, et al.’s notion of tech as cognitive tools. For example, one of the six recommends not only involving all members of the school community but positioning each as an active agent in assisting with defining … clearly articulated roles, responsibilities, and performance measures. This emphasis on specific roles for stakeholders is one way to keep the focus on concerns related to learning rather than technology.

Allan Collins and Richard Halvorson recently published Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. Today, Dr. Collins was at Penn State where he gave a great talk that related to some of the points outlined in his book.

One of the many thoughtful points I jotted down was: School will become less important as a venue for education Interesting in this is how it suggests a shift, … a shift, for example, that moves the student more to the center, and more as the one who assumes control over their learning. And as they assume more control, it becomes interesting to see what sorts of creative directions the student can then take it.

Zotero is a great research tool for students and academics. I find it immensely easier and more intuitive to use than EndNote, RefWorks, and other sorts of similar packages. If by chance you’ve been missing out on all the fun, you can get a quick overview here. Their latest and greatest effort is a standalone version that would work with browsers beyond the ever-extensible Firefox.

One thing Zotero makes easy to do is sharing. It’s drop-dead easy to create groups ( essentially, click the group folder icon and send email invitations). One thing I’ve noticed with Group libraries though is the lack of a search function within a specific group’s bibliographic library. This isn’t a big deal if the group doesn’t have a lot of cites that they’re sharing, but if there are a bunch of cites being stored there (e.g., more than 50), searching for them becomes a little unwieldy because you’re going to have manually click through multiple screens. I don’t know how widely the Groups feature is used among the Zotero community, but if it’s a feature under consideration, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.

Looking for a list of qualitative research tools? Looking for a tool to collect data? Analyze data? Dynamic mapping? Transcribing? The Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT) is definitely a good addition to the academic researcher’s toolbox. In my web perusals, I haven’t been able to find anything that comes close to its scope and comprehensiveness – kind of a research tool headquarters. Lisa Spiro of Rice University does an excellent job as the wiki’s editor, and true to the wiki spirit, it thrives on contributions from others. Check out the guidelines for the details.

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Rice University, Lisa Spiro

As a bit of an extension on the previous post, when I think about campus computer labs, one of the most common uses that I’ve seen them serve over the years is printing. My guess is that’s still one of the big functions they serve today. But with the big improvements in screen resolution, wide adoption of handhelds, and emphasis on Going Green I wonder why this trend persists? It seems to me that as ebooks continue to improve and become more mainstream (e.g., Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and the wild vortex of rumors circulating about Apple’s upcoming hardware), will this do anything to reduce the reliance on hard-copy? And is the preference for printouts coming more from students or faculty?

A quick follow-up on my previous post: I regularly read Doug Belshaw’s blog because he covers a variety of things related to educational technology and teaching. On top of that good stuff, he also shares some of what he’s doing in terms of his graduate thesis (dissertation). In many ways, I find the informal sharing of research through blog posts to be more valuable than what I’d get from a conventional academic conference. At the typical conference, I get the highlights, which can be valuable in certain situations, but with blogs, I get more insights into processes that led to the highlights.

Jeffrey Keefer has an interesting post on doc students using the blog to share or chronicle their academic/research journey (e.g., Why do this via a blog? How does it feel to be public with your thinking?). At the end of his post asks, I wonder if there is a research problem and question in here?.

I think there is. One angle might be reluctance. Blogs often represent a person’s fragmented, truncated, rough-hewn thinking on something. They’re not something that’s polished and subjected to numerous R&R cycles as is the case with traditional journal publishing. But I think that precisely because the research journal has been the dominant model in higher ed for so many years that it’s difficult for some to bring the messy, fragmentary thinking that leads into those more polished journal pieces out into the open. For the reluctant doc student, there is the question of value: what value do I get by sharing my fragmented, iterative thinking? Will it go into a community? How active will the community be in reciprocal sharing?

When it comes to technology and the classroom, it’s hard not to hear at least one person mention Twitter. Among higher ed faculty, you can find your Twitter aficionados and your detractors. Mashaable Mashable reports on Purdue University’s development of their own customized application (Hotseat) that combines both Twitter and Facebook. After looking at the intro video [scroll to the bottom of the post to see it], they’ve configured it with the same 140-character limit, but have added a voting feature. So, for example, a professor could see how voting patterns identify specific content areas that need further elaboration. In theory, this would help faculty more quickly get a read on confusion. Another possible advantage is that unlike clickers, the language and terms of the communication is being determined directly by the students.

What’s interesting from a research standpoint is how this isn’t a story of one early-adopter faculty who has a techie-fondness for Twitter, but rather one of a school and its broader, more systematic effort to see if this technology actually resonates with students.

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Instructional Design, Mashable, Purdue, Educational Technology

In a couple of my classes, we’ve been surveying different learning theories and one we’ve been focusing on recently is Behaviorism and its predilection for measuring only that which can be observed (e.g., stimuli and response). In an interesting coincidence, I came across one of Daniel Pink’s recent TED talks where he argues against what amounts to a kind of behaviorist (i.e., Carrot & Stick) approach to managing the workplace. More specifically, he references some studies by well-known economists who found that when managers assigned workers to projects that involved “even rudimentary cognitive skill” that rewarding them (read: Behaviorism) with more money didn’t improve performance, and in fact even lowered it. The emphasis, he argues, should be more focused on intrinsic motivators such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In terms of educational contexts, an easy analog to this would be an undue focus on grades as an incentive. What can we educators learn here? I think this talk by Daniel Pink would be a good one to use in ed-psych classes.

[Credit: Presentation Zen]