Taxonomies Are Worse Than Taxes!

So what’s all this fuss with learning taxonomies anyway? For instance I don’t really see much/any difference in Bloom’s vs. the SOLO taxonomy. Many of the verbs used are the same (when comparing SOLO to the revised Bloom taxonomy) put in a slightly different order.  Also, they’re both based on a hierarchical system [in my opinion, whether it be a pyramid (Bloom) or steps (SOLO)]…meaning you have mastered all lower levels when you are at ‘X’ level (i.e. in Bloom’s revised you must understand before you can apply, or in SOLO you must be unistructural before you can be multistructural). I guess I am just not sure yet how any of that informs my teaching practice other than the idea that the students must know some vocabulary/facts before they can move on to understanding and applying. However, I heard many people discuss in class that they must see the big picture/context then find out the details and then see those details again in the context of the big picture. That’s why they don’t like Bloom’s, but does that not also argue against SOLO? Is the unistructural (identify, name) component of SOLO different than the remembering base of Bloom’s?

It doesn’t feel like these inform my teaching practice and therefore they don’t seem useful to me. I guess also the general point of the taxonomies also seems somewhat obvious to me. Yes you need to know the vocabulary of a topic and remember it before you can go on and understand it. You need to understand it before you can apply or evaluate it, etc…

I found in class that while I understood what the Bloom’s and SOLO taxonomies were getting at, they didn’t necessarily resonate with me. I think that Jeff being able to categorize most in the scientific disciplines by the SOLO taxonomy made me want to disagree with that taxonomy (but that might just be my whole not wanting to fit into a standard category, similar to Laura not wanting to be confined by structures). I also agree with Laura’s general thesis that taxonomies may not be that useful in practice.

Micro/Immuno Blogger also brings up the point that teachers tend to teach based on how they learn/their preferred taxonomy, however this may not resonate with their students! So could these taxonomies be more of a problem then a solution? I think both Laura and Micro are getting at the same thing…as teachers/learning facilitators maybe we just need to listen to our students more.

I’m hoping this is one of those cases where I just don’t ‘get it’ yet. Anyone want to help me along here?

Here’s a great resource on Bloom’s taxonomy (they even apply the taxonomy to learning about the Goldilocks story, cool idea).

Cognitive Dissonance About Learning Styles

So last week in the class discussion I harped a bit on the idea of whether there are different ‘learning styles’ or not. Up until a few months ago I was in the camp that says yes people have different ‘learning styles’…but then I stumbled onto the evidence that this may not be true. So this idea has stuck with me because it created some cognitive dissonance…based on the fact that my previous bias was to believe that there are different learning styles. This feeds into the concept we discussed during class that a student’s prior knowledge may shape the way they learn. I find that when I come across an idea that flies in the face of my previous knowledge that topic tends to get consolidated into long-term memory pretty quickly (i.e. I don’t forget what I thought I knew before, or what I think I know differently now).

One of the assigned readings for class was written by Dan Willingham, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Virginia. It just so turns out that he is a proponent of the idea that different learning styles do not exist and on top of that the scientific research of learning styles shows no evidence that they exist. He’s got a whole webpage of answers to questions about learning styles on his website for instance. So let’s delve into these questions and answers to see if we can get at whether or not learning styles exist and whether it effects our practice as teachers??? That’s what really matters in the end, right?

So here’s a bit of a redux of the key information from his learning styles page. First off you might be surprised to find out that Willingham DOES think that people learn differently…but that it is mostly related to ability and not ‘style’. He further argues that what most people mean when they say ‘differences in style’ is really ‘differences in ability’. That differences in ability exist is not controversial (i.e. some people deal with space better or have a better ear for music). His basic premise is that if people really do have different learning styles (e.g. people who think in words are ‘verbalizers’, but people who think in pictures are ‘visualizers’) then they should do better in a task when the information is presented to them in the way they think they prefer to learn. Turns out the data does not back that up however. So while we cannot say right now whether the ‘learning styles theory’ is right or wrong (will we ever be able to say one or the other?)…we can say that right now the current evidence does not support that theory. One important distinction that Willigham makes is that ” learning styles is not a theory of instruction. It is a theory of how the mind works”. He goes on to say that teachers should probably still present the same material multiple ways (text, animation, etc.). However, the reason this practice may be effective is not necessarily because people have different learning styles but because of the repetition of presenting the same material different ways or that one type of presentation ends up being best for that type of material. Moreover, he does not discount what teachers have learned through their experiences in the classroom, in fact praising the knowledge that can be gained through practice.

Let’s not be a slave to science. Just because the current evidence or lack of evidence does not support a practice does not mean that practice is invalid…we may not know the reason why it is valid yet. Although, I believe if something works in practice the scientific evidence tends to support that practice eventually.

Now with all of that said the big question raised this week was ‘Should the research literature on teaching/education inform practice?’ Now I know I come into this with a bias as a research scientist but when asked that question I want to sprint to the highest mountaintop and scream YYYEEEESSSS!!! In fact I have trouble comprehending how someone could think that educational research should NOT inform practice in some way?!?!?! The key I think is in a few distinctions.

1. Even if there is no current scientific evidence to say that a teaching practice is valid does not mean that the teaching practice is invalid. (lack of evidence does not disprove anything)

2. Be sure to know whether the evidence is for or against a theory of learning/how the mind works or a theory of teaching practice. For example, even though the evidence does not support the learning styles theory of learning does not necessarily mean there needs to be a change in practice (presenting the same material in multiple ways).

Wait…What Happened???

I felt like I had fireworks exploding out of my head as I left class last week. In fact I wanted to write this post that night about my thoughts on the intense discussion, but instead I mulled it over first to get my head in order. I mean how did we get from a discussion on the appropriate use of technology in the classroom to epistemology in what felt like less than 30 seconds?!?! Newsflash: Nothing in this class is as simple as it seems initially! It seems that plenty of other class members were spurred on to mention the class discussion in their blogs: see Teaching and Tech in Higher Ed, Laura’s Blog, Caribou Cafe,  and Vitality in Learning for some examples and interesting insights.

I do agree that the philosophical discussion we got into as a class is an important one to have when it comes to teaching philosophy and research into learning/education among other topics. I’ll agree that the place for the discussion was great as we were in a room full of people trying to become better teachers…where better to have it? However, was it the appropriate time to have the discussion? I think this same type of discussion has surfaced at least once or twice in class besides this past week so it is good that the instructors allowed for it to take place. However, I suggest that instead of letting it weasel it’s way into multiple class discussions that as a class we should set aside a time to discuss the different philosophies or opinions on teaching philosophies, epistemology, and educational research methodology and analysis (qualitative vs. quantitative). These were the major categories we breached that jumped out to me anyway. Now I know it’s not possible to cover all those topics in one class period, but as the instructors like to mention almost nothing we try to cover in one class period can be done in that time frame. Instead we are given a survey of the topic at hand and then additional resources for further exploration. Why not do the same for the philosophical lenses that a person can view teaching or education through? I certainly was not even familiar with half the terms thrown around during class (positivist, post-positivist, constructionist, etc…) Now I’ve looked them up and have a better understanding for the future…a great learning exercise for me.

I know the name of the class is ‘Teaching, Learning, and Technology in Higher Education’ and that does not suggest we have to discuss different philosophical lenses and their relation to teaching. However, if those are the types of discussions that tend to surface during a class such as this anyway (and that the instructors want to surface), then maybe it would not hurt to present some of the most salient points of some philosophies earlier in the semester. It certainly would be a very interactive class period for the instructors to put out some of the philosophical lenses and then ‘riff from there.’ I would certainly find that to be class time well spent and feel less blind-sided when those types of discussions surface. Just a thought…anyone else think this might be a good way to go? Or can offer other improvements?…we do have pretty receptive instructors here and that’s not something we are always offered in other classes.

Curating the Web as Practice for Curating in the Classroom

This past week in class we talked about curating the web to find interesting sources and have them brought to us and aggregated through applications like RSS feed readers (Google Reader for instance). We can curate the web for our own selfish purposes but also curate and share our resources to the public at large or a select group/class. When we share our sources we are in a sense saying here are the sources I find important or intriguing…maybe even putting our stamp of approval on it one might say.

I wonder if that is similar to the role of the educator/learning facilitator in a course or classroom as well. Are we not trying to take a broad subject and distill it down into digestible pieces or curate it showing our students it’s most salient points or it’s essence? Some of these ideas are brought forth in this Edutopia blogpost. I mean what does it mean to curate anyway…a standard definition is along the lines of ‘to select, organize, and look after items.’ Perhaps just by choosing a specific textbook for a class we are curating in some small way. We are choosing for our students their major source of information besides what we spout off during classtime.

Interestingly curators of museums etc. tend to hold an advanced degree in their field, which suggests to me that ‘curating’ a subject requires a deep knowledge of that subject (whether it be for a museum or a classroom). That by no means implies you need a Ph.D. in something to teach it…but I think it gets at the idea of requiring a deep knowledge of a subject to also be able to succinctly get at it’s most important aspects.

So isn’t this practice of web curation, especially if we do it related to a subject we will teach, really good practice for the same act in a course or classroom? We are gathering and organizing for ourself and others select sources of information that we find valuable…and when we teach and provide even a set of notes or powerpoint for our students are we not doing something similar? We are selecting and organizing sources and information for them and trying to focus on important aspects of a subject.

Thoughts???

P.S. Check out Evolution of Academia’s post for a few sources on how to write a statement of teaching philosophy…

Digging Diigo

There’s a reason the instructors in GRAD602 mentioned that the majority of people that have come through the class seem to get the most out of social bookmarking sites such as Diigo. That is because once you start using Diigo you have a moment where you look down at your feet and say ‘ Hey…wasn’t I wearing socks today?!?!?’ Then you realize yeah you were wearing socks but Diigo just took those socks and rocked them right off across the room and you didn’t even notice…maybe even more impressive than it’s ability to help you organize the web and share it with others. Now I’m relatively new to Diigo (using it for about two weeks). However due to the uses mentioned in class, what I’ve found tooling around the website, and reading how others use the program, I’m pretty sure I’ll use this application or something like it the rest of my life.

Talking about Diigo has reminded me of some insights within Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (Note: I am not familiar with the literature on social epidemics and/or types of social communicators, so if the ideas I lay forth from this book come from some previous literature as well please enlighten me on it). In his book Gladwell discusses people with three types of social gifts or communication skills. Connectors know a large group of people and disseminate knowledge to the masses more quickly because of their large social network. Mavens/information specialists are the kind of people who acquire a ton of different pieces of information and enjoy passing it along to others. Lastly, are salesmen/persuaders who are charismatic and find it easy to get people to agree with their opinions or premises. (Play a fun game for a minute and try to figure out which category you might fit best into. Let me know in the comments…I see myself as a maven/information specialist for instance!)

Now let’s look at these categories of people in relation to the opportunities Diigo offers. We’ll start with information specialists as Diigo seems especially well-suited to their abilities. If you’re the kind of person whom likes aggregating a lot of information from various sources then Diigo will become super useful, because it helps you organize this information and find it easily when you want to pass it along to someone else. Moreover, passing this information along becomes easy as you can make your links public and/or pass them along to a specific person or group within your Diigo network.  One of those people you pass your sources along to might be a connector with a large social network, which means your useful information just got passed along to a very wide audience through the connector’s network. Moreover, it was all easily done through one program. Now seeing how a persuader might benefit from Diigo is less obvious to me. I think that the persuader could perhaps use the annotation tools in a way to help get across salient points or insights within the bookmarked articles to help pass along to people the key information from these sources. Overall, I think we can see that social networking online, especially when used by some of these categories of communicators, allows for information to move quickly and broadly. I mean how about the Harlem shake blowing up on Youtube recently as a for instance…

While I think the capabilities of Diigo fit well with the ideas Gladwell put forth a more important question is ‘How could this be useful in an educational setting?’. I found some interesting points related to this question on Nate Kogan’s blog. In the linked post he argues how Diigo could become useful in giving him insight into his student’s research process. By being able to look at both their sources through shared Diigo libraries along with the annotations on those sources a teacher can see a student’s thought process as they are working on a research paper for instance. Now if student’s also connect to each other’s Diigo networks then they can share some important sources and also might help develop a sense of community among the students. He’s also quick to note the downsides of shared Diigo networks among students researching similar research papers. One is would sharing annotations on sources be considered cheating? He argues: ‘I think that examining a peer’s Diigo library is not cheating, unless the active reading notes are copied verbatim or two students have an identical set sources.’ I agree with that general thought and the ideas presented in his post that I have reiterated in this paragraph…but I encourage you to click the link above and give the whole article a view.

So Diigo can be used as a quick look inside how a student organizes their research sources (via a shared Diigo library with instructor and/or the entire class) and what information they seem to take away from a given article (via annotations and highlights). I also think Diigo can easily be used as a way to share extra sources of valuable information between teachers and students. By having a Diigo group for a class the sharing can become a two-way street instead of just from instructor to student. These all seem like valuable tools to extend classroom topics outside of the classroom. It might also encourage those students really interested in a specific topic by giving them extra sources to explore with very minimal extra work on the instructors’ part. Sounds like a win-win-win to me 😉 …

Twitter, Facebook: Different Types of Networked Communication

One purpose of technology in and around the classroom is to enhance student engagement. Now there are a million ways to enhance engagement and technology really helps increase both student-faculty and student-student contact since e-mail, discussion boards, blogging, Twitter, Facebook etc. all allow for asynchronous communication. By allowing for non face-to-face contact at any time day or night technology has opened the door for more access to faculty or other students when the student encounters a problem. What about allowing access to other ‘experts’ in the field besides the professor though? One way technology allows us access to those we don’t personally know is through networked communication and we know there are a whole variety of networked communication applications at our disposal…but how do we use them and which ones do we use?

Among this myriad of social media networked platforms much attention in the education field has been paid to Twitter. Why is that? Is it the cool little blue bird icon? Maybe…but what is it that Twitter offers that these other platforms (Facebook, Blogs, Bookmarking sites) do not? One possibility is the ability to easily communicate with or learn about resources from leaders in a given field of study.

With so many options to use technology in the classroom how do you choose the best one? Well we’ve talked about using the 7 principles as one way to guide you as to which technologies are best. But a fair amount of the technologies allow you to accomplish the same things…to me mainly enhancing student-faculty contact, student-student contact, and allowing for extension of the classroom discussion outside the classroom (maybe under the category of time on task). But heck I can do that on my blog, facebook, twitter, etc… Perhaps the best technology is the one that most people are likely to use or feel most comfortable using… (i.e. almost everyone already has a Facebook account). People are starting to come to that realization in relation to getting people to exercise as well. Different forms of exercise (weightlifting vs. cardio vs. yoga and on and on) might have advantages over other forms but in the end whichever one the average person is most likely to do and enjoy will be the best for them.

Given that Twitter and Facebook are two of the most common social media tools used in and around the classroom what might be the advantages and disadvantages of each when it comes to the network you interact with?

Your Personal Learning Network: In Horton Hears A Tweet Dunlap and Lowenthal discuss the idea of a personal learning network, or a group of like-minded professionals with whom you can exchange ideas, advice, and resources¹. These can include the leaders of a field whom without social networking most students might not have access to. In Facebook you would have to become friends with these professionals to look at their content which would require a symmetric relationship (each person friends the other); however, in Twitter you could follow these leaders without them ever having to do anything or accept your following (asymmetric relationship). I think this might make students more likely to attempt to peer in on the thoughts of those leading the field, which means they are more likely to grow their personal learning networks (PLNs). I think that by seeing the big ideas of these professionals it might help inspire students or even help them understand what are the core concepts of their field. One core difference between the two networking sites that is hinted at by the cartoon above is that in Facebook you mainly follow people you already know (although most people’s friends include a large group of people they know little about), but in Twitter you might follow people you find interesting but do not know and this could expand your horizons on a certain subject matter.

Avoiding extraneous information: In each of these social media sites it would be easy to get caught up in looking at information posted by your friends/people you follow that have nothing to do with growth in your area of learning. How do you avoid that? Well if your class is setup on Facebook as a private group you wouldn’t necessarily even have access to the personal information about each of the members of the learning group, so when on that page you would arguably be less distracted. Moreover, in Twitter instead of just reading all the tweets of those you follow you can search the specific hashtag that relates to your topic of interest and see the global conversation on that topic. Unfortunately in that case you are not just looking at comments from one person on the topic but instead everyone. Like any good technology there is a way around that though. For instance, if you search by both the person’s twitter account name and the hashtag of your area of interest you get their posts on that topic only and posts others have made that reference them on the topic. So you can avoid extraneous information on either site with a bit of work or a good setup. (i.e. it’s all in how you use it).

To me Twitter may be best used to keep a conversation going outside of the classroom through the sharing of links to interesting articles or blogposts. It’s easy to fit a quick phrase and link in a tweet. If we’re using Twitter to just post reminders about the assignment due tomorrow or the test next week however, then we’re just using it to use it. We’re not using it for any of it’s advantages over other methods, I think a big mistake. By posting your resource on Twitter you are leveraging the main advantage of networked communication, which is getting your idea out to many people very quickly. You could do that through any networked communication, so really it’s all in how you use it. So why Twitter? Why not just post it as a status update on Facebook or a wall entry on your private class Facebook page. Perhaps the information is meant mainly to reach your students, but it would also be useful to anyone interested in that topic. By pasting a Twitter hashtag on it for your class you make sure the students can see it, but by also putting a different hashtag on there for the Twitter community in that field at large you make sure anyone interested in that topic can see it as well.

Right now I look at it as Facebook can be used in relation to a class to enhance contact among a set group (i.e. the instructor and all the class participants); however, Twitter may be more useful to extending the discussion to a larger group within a given field. In that light Facebook may be better for undergrad classes in which the subject is not necessarily a primary topic of study for all class members, while Twitter may be more useful for people whom are further on in their education path (late undergrad, early graduate school) for enhancing their personal learning network within a given field of study. But that is just one way to look at it…

1. Kate Messner, “Pleased to Tweet You: Making a Case for Twitter in the Classroom,” School Library Journal, December 1, 2009.

Technology: Saving Dogs and Promoting Student Engagement at the Same Time!

This post will discuss a learning exercise I participated in as part of graduate school through the lens of Chickering and Gamson’s “7 Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.”

In graduate school I was involved in computer simulation for a Medical Pharmacology course as both a student and an instructor. The purpose of the simulation was to teach students autonomic pharmacology through showing the cardiovascular effects of various drugs on a dog. The simulation showed ‘live recordings’ of a dog’s response to different drugs. Now one non-teaching related advantage of this simulation was that only a few dogs were experimented upon and euthanized for the purpose of teaching autonomic pharmacology by measuring their cardiovascular responses. This simulation is used year after year for medical and graduate students and has gotten rid of the ‘need’ to experiment on a large group of dogs every year. While that’s an important point I want to throw in there let’s look at how well both the entire learning exercise and the computer simulation technology itself promoted student engagement as assessed by the 7 principles of good practice.

1. Did it promote student/faculty contact?

• I could go either way on this one. The students worked in small groups around laptops to complete the assignment. This did not directly involve the faculty. However, they did have to check their answer with the instructor for each question posed before moving on. Moreover, many groups asked the instructor for help when getting stuck…it seemed they were more likely to do this as a group than individually. I would say that while the technology itself did not promote student/instructor contact the group set-up made contact more likely because they could ask questions as a small group instead of as an individual (making them less afraid/nervous).

2. Did it promote cooperation among students?

• Again working in small groups obviously promotes student-student contact and cooperation among students. Did the simulation itself promote more interaction than if it were small groups working on similar problems without the simulation? Now that I am not as sure about. I think most problem-solving exercises in small groups promote this type of interaction with or without technology.

3. Did it encourage active learning?

• I believe working in small groups itself promotes active learning as the students talk to each other about what they are learning and their thought process during problem-solving. I think the simulation promoted active learning on top of the group component by allowing students to experiment with different drugs on the dog and then try to block the effects they caused with one set of drugs using a different set of drugs. They had to talk out the problem-solving required to complete the computer simulation and write down how they solved the problem. In this sense I think both the exercise itself and the technology promoted active learning.

4. Did it encourage prompt feedback?

•  This exercise promoted prompt feedback because as soon as the groups thought they had an answer to one of the problems they needed to check with the instructor that both their answer was correct AND how they came to their answer was logical rather than due to just guessing. I would say the technology itself did not enhance the prompt feedback…it could have been setup to do so but that role was given instead to the instructor.

5. Did it emphasize time on task?

• This exercise required spending some time at the beginning of class explaining how to use the computer simulation software which was ‘time away from task’ if you will. Moreover, the simulation software allowed students to just ‘play around’ looking at the effects of various drugs on the cardiovascular system. Now I wouldn’t say that the simulation itself emphasized time on task and in fact in some ways could promote ‘goofing around’ using the software. However, I also think the freedom the software allowed to play around may have helped learning of the effects of certain drugs even if they were not critical to the questions laid out for the students to answer.

6. Did it communicate high expectations?

• The exercise itself communicated high expectations in my opinion as it required the students to both come to the correct solution and show that they got there through logical reasoning and could back up their final answer. Now the simulation itself did not communicate this but the exercise as a whole did. They were not graded on just being present and guessing the right answers, they were also graded on how they problem-solved…I think those are high but acceptable expectations.

7. Did it respect diverse talents and ways of learning?

• The complete exercise involved a short 15-minute lecture on the autonomic nervous system before starting the computer simulation. So students received information verbally, via text on the board, and via visual output from the computer which I think respects at least 2-3 ways of learning. I think the group-work also respected diverse talents as the person in the group best at using technology could be the one running the simulation, while others lead the problem-solving component and others wrote down the logical process that led to the conclusion/answer.

Okay so that was alot, now let’s redux it. Hopefully, you’re seeing a pattern similar to what my brain recognizes from my thoughts above. That is the setup of the learning exercise is what is really critical to promoting good practice/engagement/learning. Now the technology used can either enhance or decrease the value of the exercise but by itself the technology does not really promote good practice. In other words: It’s all in how you use it! You could take a great learning activity and absolutely ruin it with misuse of technology or even overuse of technology. At the same time I don’t think you can take a ‘bad’ learning exercise and make it the bee’s knees just by adding in some technology. I am pretty sure this is the point the instructors are trying to get at in general. While I knew it in the back of my mind already I think through the teaching vignettes and analyzing the learning exercise above this idea was brought to the forefront.

I also noted that not all of the principles were necessarily used by this exercise and I don’t think they needed to be. For instance I’m not sure time on task was emphasized in this case, but I feel the freedom for the students to ‘play around’ with the simulation and learn some things that weren’t necessarily required was just as useful to them overall. To paraphrase a quote that has at least been attributed to Mark Twain ‘Don’t let your schooling interfere with your education.’

Overall, I think the dog simulation was a great exercise  and the technology certainly enhanced at least one good practice (promoting active learning). Now it would  still be a good exercise based on the set-up without the simulation technology, but not as good. In fact I am not sure that the professor who came up with the exercise has ever even read Chickering, but I do think it’s worth an e-mail to him to let him know that through the lens of the 7 principles and promoting student engagement to enhance learning he’s got a pretty solid exercise. It’s no surprise that the students say the dog simulation is one of their favorite activities in that Pharmacology course, especially considering almost all other classtime is lecture…

What do you think? Does technology promote good practice or does it only enhance the good practices already inherent in an exercise? Could time on task not be all it’s cracked up to be/does allowing for autonomy also promote engagement/learning?

Blogging as Practice for Writing a Dissertation

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about a first person account of blogging as part of the dissertation process.

For anybody still looking for article to comment on for class this might fit the purpose pretty well since it’s also intimately related to our class topic of Blogging in Academia. I don’t currently have a Twitter account but maybe someone who sees this can tweet it up with the #GRAD602 tag so others can read it as well.

My initial thoughts upon reading it are:

1) This person’s account may be most relevant for the ‘softer’ sciences if you will since most in the ‘hard’ sciences are more concerned about publishing results/thoughts via blog and ‘scooping’ of those results.

2) The point about using it as writing practice is valid across all fields, and we know how having an audience can be important to the refinement process.

3) A great point is made about using it as a networking tool and getting your name out in a field. This is especially true  if you can attach your blog to an online entity in your field or occasionally write blog posts or articles for them.

Also, another recent post on The Chronicle about blogging by a mid-career professor.

Geez Dad…Why Do We Have to Blog? Gaaaawwwddd…

So an interesting topic came up this week…why blog? Why blog as the writer but even why read blogs? Perhaps is it even fair to assign/require students to blog?

For instance my previous post was about a topic that had been rolling around my mind for probably at least the past 2-3 years. I had discussed it with maybe 2-3 people in my life but certainly not at length. One reason is that in my social circles that topic does not come up often/ever. This blog and GRAD 602 gave me the perfect reason to finally discuss it ‘aloud’. Frankly having an audience and beyond that having an audience that might actually respond and discuss the topic further was integral to the process. Don’t get me wrong, writing that post was also certainly self-reflective. It forced me to refine my thought process a bit which is perhaps one purpose of blogging anyway. However, I think having an audience is finally what drove the idea out of my brain through my fingers and into this vast storehouse of info we call the internet.

Also, why read blogs? I read them to learn and to be entertained. I’ve been reading blogs pretty consistently for about 5 years give or take (+/- 6 months for all the scientists and statisticians out there).  Most of them revolve around exercise/nutrition and I’m into that whole Paleo thing if you’ve heard of that bandwagon…but don’t get me started because this blog would in reality never end. Aha…but maybe that gets to another point of why blog and why read other blogs. Deep interest in a topic! It came up in class this week about the time required to create blog posts and read everyone else’s blog posts amid all other job and life responsibilities. And it’s true it can be a huge timesink. I’ll be honest my previous post probably took me 2-3 hours to ‘craft’. That could be because I’m still inefficient at it or perhaps the type of metacognition that I’m/we’re trying to achieve just takes some time. Either way I feel that like most tasks you need to complete in life you can either look at it as a ‘chore’ or you can do something to make it fun and exciting and draw your interest into it. I mean heck we can even go to Viktor Frankl on this one if you want. You know the concentration camp survivor and father of logotherapy. Some thoughts from Man’s Search For Meaning that could be related to dealing with completing tasks you may not have chosen for yourself:

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

He describes that while you can’t control what happens to you in life always you can ALWAYS control how you respond to it and how you think about it. That applies to having to write blogs…you can look at it as a chore or as an awesome learning experience replete with opportunity (or any other way YOU want to think about it really). The choice is yours! But enough of my digressions for now…

While you can make blogging fun or daunting depending on your opinion it does not change the fact that in the case of GRAD 602 blogging is an assigned task. For instance in Stephen Downes’ article interviewee Will Richardson remarks:

By its very nature, assigned blogging in schools cannot be blogging. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to blog are blogging for an audience of one, the teacher.

He makes a good point in that if it’s an assigned and graded assignment students will do it because they need to and put in the information they think the teacher wants to see. But Richardson also thinks blogging holds real value as far as enhancing critical thinking saying that blogs offer:

great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking.

There you have the same man arguing both the inherent merits and problems of assigned blogging in education and a man who has done extensive blogging himself. So how then to assign blogging but make it more then just the student trying to satisfy his/her teacher. That’s probably one of those million dollar questions plenty of educators want the answer to. I’d argue that GRAD 602 offers a pretty interesting model. Yes here once again we are ‘forced’ to blog if you will, but while it needs to relate to the topic of the previous class session we are free to discuss whatever aspect of the topic we want and incorporate our own non-assigned readings. Moreover, we have access to the blogs of the other students and are encouraged to read and comment on at least 2-3 of them. So this fosters some interaction among students outside of the classroom and makes the blogging less between just a student and teacher. It can also be anonymous since our name does not have to be associated with it and it’s not necessarily hosted on the school’s blogging platform.

What could be done differently? Perhaps instead of everyone having to blog for class it could be one of the options for the individual project, although that would decrease the amount of blogs and the possibilities for interaction via blog. For right now other than that I think it’s a pretty good model…but I’m also someone who has always been interested in blogging.Anyone else out there have ideas on how to make blogging as an assignment ‘more betterer?’ I always figure if we’re gonna criticize something than we should at least offer up some helpful solutions.

What do others have to say? Cogitationi talks about blogging reluctantly, for revolution, and for ecstasy. The blog ‘Teaching and Technology in Higher Education makes some good arguments about why forcing students to post may not be the best idea, especially related to online identity.

So in the end while this blog may be assigned I’m looking for a way to make it fun by incorporating readings from other aspects of my life that i find interesting. I encourage others to do the same and make it their own. Curate your corner of the web however you want, but most importantly have fun doing it.

 

To my blog buddies…my apologies for my verbosity in blogging. You had no choice in whose blog you would have to read so I hope you can keep those Viktor Frankl quotes in mind while you’re wading through these posts 😉

We’re Teaching You How to Think

This guy knows all about ‘thinking’…

We’re teaching you how to think...what a bold statement.

It has it’s presumptions…one being arguably that there is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to think and that any one person would know the ‘correct’ method better than anyone else.  While that is certainly a worthwhile discussion to have, let’s not get stuck on that aspect of the idea here.

We’re teaching you how to think…

I started hearing that phrase when I was in graduate school from my advisor. I didn’t necessarily agree with it at the time and I’m not sure even now I am 100% on board with it. My advisor’s point was that I wasn’t there necessarily for them to teach me all the nitty gritty details of my field (which I had to learn anyway) but rather how to critically evaluate findings in my field, including my own. Critical thinking, now there’s a valuable skill. Heck, it’s not even field-specific. Two thumbs up!!

We’re teaching you how to think…

Could that be one purpose of higher education? It’s becoming more and more apparent in the field of education that a certain small group of people (we’ll call them teachers/experts) no longer hold the ‘rights’ to detailed information on a subject (or subjectivity…right Michael Wesch?). It used to be you came to the classroom to listen to a speaker lecture because in his/her brain was knowledge of a subject that you could find few other places or perhaps nowhere else. While there have been many technological advances that have increased knowledge dissemination (printing press, etc.) maybe none has been more important than the good old interweb. To paraphrase Jeff Nugent, ‘you can now publish in every major media format for free and broadcast it to anyone with an internet connection!’ Well isn’t that dandy! Perhaps one microcosm of this great ability is Wikipedia. To paraphrase Michael Scott ‘ the great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can write whatever they want about any subject’.

Oh wait…maybe that’s also the problem?!? Hmm…here’s where that critical thinking component comes in again. So we’ve gone from an era when knowledge was in the hands of a few to a time when almost anyone in the developed world has access to more knowledge than they could possibly comprehend in their lifetime or even lifetimes. Talk about two different ends of a spectrum. So to me that begs the next question…if the purpose of coming to class is no longer to receive information you cannot find anywhere else then what is it? Perhaps it’s to learn how to think or how to critically evaluate that now ubiquitous information. Now that sounds useful.

As Michael Wesch put it:

As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.

Now that line may leave you thinking that Michael Wesch really likes using commas, which is a good point. I’d argue he really likes plays on words (knowledgeable and knowledge-able, subject and subjectivity…right?). Neither of those is the major point though. I’d wager that in this era if the role of the student has changed than perhaps so has the role of the teacher/learning facilitator. I’d argue that students now need critical thinking skills more than ever because of the abundance of information at their fingertips. So maybe as teachers we need to focus on how to sift through all that information and evaluate it’s validity and model to students how to do the same. It’s not that because of ubiquitous information we don’t need teachers. In fact because of this information overload perhaps we need teachers more than ever to distill the essence of it, those guiding principles if you will.

Some people may argue that ‘open learning’ may also be launching an attack on the teaching profession. There seems to be a myriad of definitions for open learning. For this purpose let’s think of openness as related to content. If there is all this freely available content/courses online from such higher learning institutions as Harvard or MIT why do I even need an instructor/educator??? But as Dave Cormier and George Siemens argue:

Open learning does not negate the role of the educator. Instead open learning adjusts the role of the educator… Educators continue to play an important role in facilitating interaction, sharing information and resources, challenging assertions, and contributing to learners’ growth of knowledge.

Interesting, I would add modeling critical thinking to that list of educator roles. But even in this time of open courses, some online courses do have an instructor or facilitator. Whether the person leading a course stands in front of you in a room or interacts with you through video or a discussion board even though they are 10,000 miles away, I believe they are important to learning. One of the ways they are important is in guiding you to the places that store useful information and helping you examine the validity of that information. One might even say they’re teaching you how to think… or perhaps better put teaching you how to think critically…

So what do you think? Is it possible to teach someone how to think? Is that one of the ever-changing roles of the educator in this era of information abundance due to technology? Who knows for sure…but it’s certainly worth talking about!