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?
A quick post on a little idiosyncrasy with Zotero.
Normally, when I click the icon in the address bar, Zotero automatically downloads the cite to whichever folder I have highlighted (e.g., Instructional Design), but when using Gale this doesn’t seem to happen. Not a big deal in the grand scheme, … so I’d do a quick global library search, then find, select and drag it to the desired library.
Still curious, though, and looking for an opportunity to procrastinate, I did a little investigation. It turns out that the Gale cites are downloaded as a top-level item to the main, “My Library” folder. While it still requires a drag-and-drop, I’m spared the extra step of entering a title search.
Maybe there’s a work-around or something obvious I’m missing. If not, I hope this little tidbit is helpful.
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.
When Web 2.0 first started to catch fire among faculty teaching online, the widespread assumption was that the NetGen students would be extremely adept at using the tools because they used them all the time to connect with their friends, check out new music and videos, and so on. But some recent research has been chipping away at this assumption (e.g., Digital Learners not Digital Natives and Not so techno-savvy).
Continuing this trend is a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on researchers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teacher College who looked at students taking online classes from various community colleges in Washington state. One of the key take-aways was how this assumption overlooks the factor of socio-economics:
People assume this generation is super-technologically sophisticated, but that’s not necessarily true, especially in the community-college population, which tends to be low income, disadvantaged …
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 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?
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)?
One of the many interesting educational trends that has attracted a fair bit of attention as a result of Web 2.0 tools is what’s simply referred to as, Informal learning. Despite the rather generic term, it’s generated interest among learning researchers because it looks at what drives people to learn without the formal structure of a class or training session.
Lifehacker has a nice example of this with their Lifehacker Night School series. In this series (which is free), they’re reaching out to people who want to know what’s happening under the software hood, but feel a little overwhelmed about exactly where to begin. Beyond the videos, Adam Dachis (the author of the tutorial) has corresponding posts that expand on some of the major points and define key terms. So if you’re feeling the need to release the inner nerd in you, go check it out.
On the research front, 2011 marked the introduction of a new version of ProQuest; unfortunately, I recently found out that it doesn’t play friendly with Macs.
Here’s a quick synopsis of my experience.
After doing my usual university-credential login, I went to download a pdf and was greeted with a message to install missing plugins.
Initially, I tried skipping over the plugin-install prompt (figuring it was to install Adobe Reader which I already had), but ran into a dead end. So even though I have the full Adobe CS Suite, I went ahead and complied on the second go-round and clicked the button to install the plugin. I was hoping my plugin acquiescence would solve the problem, but that was not to be the case as I was then greeted with this sad output:
Feeling it was time to take it to the next level, I shot off a quick email query to my university library and got a very prompt and helpful reply explaining that the problem was with ProQuest, and they were aware of it, but didn’t have a timeline for fixing it.
So what’s a Mac-research-geek to do? Start a support group? (Marginalized Macs?) I thought that with all the massive popularity of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad that this compatibility problem would disappear. But apparently not. Up until now, I’ve had no problem with ProQuest whatsoever. I understand that these things take time, but it would be nice if they at least gave us Mac users the option of using an older, more compatible version. They could even spice it up with a clever little marketing tagline: Old School.
