Gathering Data & Wasted Time

Data acquisition is difficult, particularly in education. Data efforts are beginning to align metrics with outcomes, no matter how subjective the outcome may be. It takes creative thinking to measure the human factor but groups like Mission Measurement are bringing a new level of clarity to data in the education space.

Designing an efficient data collection process just became a easier with Google Docs's new Forms function.

Markets, Education, & You

Change is certain. So, it's not too suprising to see articles like this that identify the dichotomy between the static U.S. education system and rapidly changing technologies. It is unlikely a centenarian would recognize much of the modern workplace; however, I might guess that same person would recognize much of the modern learning environment. Perhaps our economies are responding to education's failure to respond to change...

"An educated populace is a key source of economic growth directly, through the improved productivity of workers, and indirectly, by spurring innovation and aiding the diffusion of advanced technologies. Broad access to education was a major factor in US economic ascendancy and in the creation of a broad middle class. The American Dream of upward mobility both within and across generations has been tied to educational access.

Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, technological change has operated to increase the relative demand for educated and skilled workers. In academic parlance, technological change has been “skill-biased” – smart machines require smart workers. Technological change increases the relative demand for skilled and educated workers, but educational advance increases their relative supply. This “race” between education and technology can produce rising, declining, or stable levels of economic inequality.

US economic inequality has been on a roller coaster ride during the past century. Wage inequality and educational wage differentials decreased from around 1910 to 1950. They remained fairly stable until about 1980, after which economic inequality soared. The contrasting descent and rise of economic inequality in the twentieth century is linked to the history of educational attainment."

Marshmellows & Success

Great New Yorker article on developing behaviors that can lead to the success we all seek for our students. If we continue towards the community education model for modern education, this type of behavioral psychology should drive our programming...

What Do We Need to Know...

From Stephan Baker's Numerati blog....A great lens for approaching curriculum design work.

"Here's a question I've been wondering about for years: What do we need to know? In other words, as we make our way through the vast universe of information, with online encyclopedias and networks of friends at our command, what exactly do we need to store in our heads?

It has to be changing. I remember reading in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi about the amazing river pilots in the 19th century who had to keep in their heads every twist and turn of a 2,000-mile river. As they moved encountered boats traveling in the other direction, they would learn about shifting sandbars south of Vicksburg or felled trees near Cairo. And with this information, they would update the river running through their brains.

What does a Mississippi river pilot need to know today? It has to be a lot different, and the same thing goes for practically every profession. How important is formal knowledge, the kind you get in books or even an established Web page? And how does it stack up against the awareness knowledge that comes from what's happening at this moment on the networks?"

Online Course Content

Mizzou is requiring all journalism majors to have either an ipod touch or iphone to access course content this year.

Medill School of Journalism here at Northwestern did something similar a few years ago. Reportedly, most of the students were upset because they didn't actually change the curriculum to USE the technology.

Like I wrote in the in the post below...mimicking a genre is not sufficient to promote the forms of learning that networked publics are using to make sense of information today.

The peer2peer Instructional Model

Teachers always wonder what impact they really do have on their students...

A group of students from my Digital Video Yearbook course at East Grand Rapids Middle School have taken the skills they learned in the course and produced a adventure/thriller movie. I found out about it here.

The coolest aspect of this is the fact that this course was entirely peer2peer based-- I served as the facilitator, provided some general guidelines, and made sure no one made a poor behavior decision (they are/were 8th graders after all). The learning occurs from exploration and peer2peer observation and informal inquiry.

Too often, in an effort to reflect our students' moden literacy practices, we mimick the genres or sharing and assessment dynamics our students use when they have authority over their own learning. In last year's VYB course, I tried to not simulate or mimmick these practices but actually relie on them.

Texting & Better Language Skills

Just learned that a study in Britain has found that there is a positive association between how many “textisms” (SMS abbreviations) that 10- 12-year-old students use and the children’s word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness measures...sample size of 88 children but significant findings nonetheless.

Plester, B., Wood, C., Joshi, P., (2009), Exploring the relationship between children's knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 1, 145-161.

I am currently working on a paper/design that attempts to put this part of the "shift" into practice...

Digital Kids-- Redefining School

PBWiki- Assessing Collaboration

PBwiki became PBworks today. If you're using wikis in your learning environment, you probably know about PBwiki already.

Wikis come closer than any other platform for developing constructivist learning opportunities as the strength of a wiki is always in its connections to other information. For the classroom, I think the strength of the wiki is in its capacity to assess collaboration. Collaboration can be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively with a clarity that is difficult to develop in curriculum.

Cognitive Transfer & Learning-- take 'er slow

Dan Schwartz gave a great talk to the NU engineering faculty (and a few of us LS folks) yesterday on knowledge transfer. He highlighted the naive belief that efficiency works in education. He suggested that this was particularly so in the U.S. where we define success often by the degree of efficiency (low variability, high accuracy, and rapid); e.g. tests are often timed (the SAT, etc.) and we're obsessed with Piagetian stages relative to our eastern counterparts.

He claims:

• We must distinguish between different types of expertise; e.g. routine expertise:high level of efficiency at a recurrent task or adaptive expertise: capacity to transfer information across diverse contexts. Any superintendent or business exec with his/her head outta the sand understands the costs involved in training, and that exec also understands the tomorrow will not have the same needs as today, so the need for adaptive expertise has never been greater...
• No "master" (e.g. Mozart, etc.) made any significant contribution to his/her field without ten years of experience.
• The stigma of inefficient learners prevents us from innovating and re-structuring our mental models; i.e. any time we innovate we will appear worse for a while (e.g. Tiger Woods took a year off to re-work his stroke).
• Homework vs. hobby dichotomy: homework is motivated by punishment and by belief of increased satisfaction; while, hobbies are motivated by perceived gradual improvement.
• Adaptive expertise derives from 1. Knowledge of general principles, skills, etc. & 2. Knowledge of contexts to which they apply. (Typically, we teach students 1 but not 2).
• Surface features are very important for retention/recall. If we teach concepts more abstractly they will transfer better because surface features are minimized. (Stop telling students what steps to take as they simple focus on the steps; instead, discuss the concepts required to complete them).
• For students to develop adaptive expertise and the ability to learn across environments we need to develop their deep cognitive structures.

Wired magazine's article on memory and Jill Price is an excellent image of current efforts to reform curriculum. Price's amazing memory is not a result of any anatomical difference; rather, her ability to remember every specific of her past is a result of an extensive self-constructed knowledge system with connections that are regularly reinforced.

As students and teachers, we should remember that the patterns and connections between the ideas that we learn and teach are far more important than the individual ideas.

Instructional Response to New Literacies

Literacy is a social practice-- we should teach it as one!

As a society, we have focused on linguistic elements of literacy for a long period of time probably because linguistic evolution was occurring so rapidly as a response to rapidly increasing populations that were interacting at unprecedented levels. Lewis and Fabos suggest that we are moving to a design orientation to literacies now, and perhaps this is a response to the evolution of design potential afforded by multimodal technological tools across populations? Such thinking follows Lankshear & Knobel’s (2003) suggestion that new literacies result in new production practices relating to producing, consuming, and representing knowledge. Too often we focus on the technological tool and not the practice that that tool develops. This could be a symptom of rapidly evolving technology and the inevitable uncertainty that arises with it; however, we need a framework for understanding technology in instruction. Essential questions like why do some types of text engage you need to be examined for students for students to be effectively employ their repertoire of skills.

This movement to a meta discussion about literacy instruction is also important for the likely evolution of literacy in our students’ worlds. The amount of time students are actually engaged with in-school literacy activities will certainly become less and less. The evident discrepancy between current in and out of school literacies will only increase if we do not move literacy instruction to a “meta” level as Lewis and Fabos suggest. Their practical suggestions for moving instruction provide realistic questions that should be posed to anyone trying to teach students about voice, style, narrative tension, flow, etc.

Responding to Modern Literacies

How can organizations (not just schools) respond to new literacies?

New literacies shifts our mindset in a few ways...

Bookspace to Cyberspace
Published to Participatory*
Individuated to Collaborative
Author-centric to Distributed
Expert-oriented to Collective Intelligence

*The battle to define Web 2.0 has been great...After the dust settles, I anticipate web 2.0 being defined by one word, PARTICIPATION.

Our organizations may respond to modern literacy by:

• Increasing focus on collectives as the unit of production.
• Distributing expertise/authority.
• Creating open/fluid collective spaces.
• Fostering relations in emerging digital media spaces.

The Microsoft school reflected some of these design considerations in 2006, but most promising is the development of the thousands of inexpensive collaboration apps that enable all organizations to respond effectively.

Digital Literacies

Post-structuralist language theory guides any discussion of literacy today. The forms literacy occupies continue evolve. Loaded words like "multi modal" offer a nod to the complexity of our current state. The days of structural pedantic grammar are relatively simple in complexity compared to today's media rich world. The socially recognized ways of communicating continue to expand. How do we teach a discourse that continues to be ever more broadly understood?

I think we should begin to think about literacies as "socially evolved and patterned activities" that are particular to certain contexts. Our teaching should probably be an examination of these contexts rather than a memorization activity. Any literacy calls us to generate and communicate meaning, and this meaning is only understood within a specific context. Curriculums should guide students sense making. If we do that, I think the meaning for our students will be clear.

The literacies that dominate today are different than the expert dominated literacies of the past. Today's literacy is more participatory, collaborative, and distributed than anything we've confronted before. It's more fluid and less abiding than any curriculum has ever tried to teach. If we ground it in the context of the new literacy space which is online and offline we can begin to make sense of the experimentation that defines literacy today.

SNA

In fall 2008, I was lucky enough to enroll in a Social Network Analysis course. Since then, the network perspective has stuck w/ me, and I have found my self wondering where an idea exists in a network and how it might/ or might not change within the network.

I applied my SNA course work to my work in the cognitive science foundations in my final paper where I discussed professional development from a network perspective. (I'll link the paper shortly).

Ideas never exist in a vacum (we're social creatures after all), so it only makes intuitive sense to study the social context of those ideas. SNA does provides the medium for us to understand this context. We used Pajek, a free SNA software, with data that NU had already collected. Data collection is mind numbingly complex, but the central concepts of SNA can be understood by simply manipulating the data.

For teaching, SNA says:

• Weak ties are important: Innovation usually happens when we interact with those that are not clones of ourselves.
• Strong ties are important too: The sense of community that stems from strong ties is important for sharing ideas, i.e. learning.

So...not much of a suprise here...organizations need to balance. I suppose balancing is what makes great leaders and organizations great.

Karl Fisch discusses Personal Learning Networks here.

Compulsive Sharing, Part 1

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

WHAT IS LEARNING SCIENCE?

Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that works to further scientific understanding of learning. Research focuses on the cognitive, social, and design considerations of learning environments. In many ways, it simply attempts to ground research on curriculum design, instructional methods, and policy in a scientific understanding of learning. The complexity is great here b/c learning (& knowledge) is regularly understood to be socially constructed, so arriving at qualitative and quantitative evidence is difficult.

LS researchers use Design-Based Research methods in which interventions are conceptualized and then implemented in natural settings in order to test ecological validity.

I see LS as a pragmatic approach to education reform. From my experience, LSers work hard to develop new theories and frameworks for conceptualizing learning, instruction, design processes, and educational reform in the face of cognitive, biological (neuroscience), social, and technological advancements.