HW#9 - Weekly Ed.Tech post

What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

I liked what Carrie said about designing in the classroom keeping in mind universal interface design principles.  This makes a lot of sense especially when designing 'explorations' in math and science. 

Robin made a good point that how I believe people learn, will determine how I teach so that people can learn.

What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

Going back to what Robin said about Theoretical frameworks and Pedagogical frameworks, I had hoped that this course would open a window on current cognition research and pedagogical models for the applicaton of the research, in the context, of course, of technologies more current than markers, whiteboard, and DVD players.  We have covered a lot of ground in the course so far, but I don't have a sense that I am any closer to a framework in my mind that will allow me to utilize all these ideas with my students (at least not without a lot of trial and error).

Here's a 1997 example of the things I'd like to explore more - Educational Technology's Effect on Models of Instruction . A more contemprary version of this that will tie all the loose ends together. 



What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

I was impressed with the response time of the motion sensors ($100) we attached to the TI graphing calculators. Jim and I used them to measure a falling object. I wanted to see if they could be used to find the acceleration due to gravity (2nd derivative of distance), and for the students to then see if it was the same or not for a range of objects.


Although we weren't successful, it should work in principle. Here are some tips: The resolution is 1mm, so do not sample faster than that. Don't hold the probe, you will introduce too much noise.

Here are more links from Vernier

Sample Experiments


Looking for ideas of how to incorporate Go!Motion into your classroom? Here are three exciting sample labs to get your class in motion!

Air Ball! - Elementary Level

Graphing Your Motion - Middle School Level

Air Resistance - High School Level

Uncover more great ideas with our curriculum for math, physics, physical science, and more!

[I wonder if the prevalence of laptops/netbooks in the classroom means the demise of the graphing calculator.  At $200+ some of the TI graphing calculators are bumping up against the price of a 8.9" netbook.  Vernier has a series of USB sensors, which means students can do data collection and analysis directly to their laptops just the way real scientists in fancy labs do.  The motion sensor we were playing with was in fact USB, so we had to plug it into an adaptor just so we could use it on a graphing calculator.]

If there was a genetic test that predicted poor parenting/teaching skills, would you take it?

An excellent article in the Science section of the NY Times covers some of the recent research on oxytocin in humans.

The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness


New research suggests that oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust.

November 24, 2009 - By NATALIE ANGIER - Science
 

In their sample of 192 male and female college students, the researchers found that those carrying the so-called A version of the oxytocin receptor, which previous reports had associated with autism and poor parenting skills, scored significantly lower on the eye-reading task and higher on the stress-prone test than did subjects with the G variant of the receptor.

What, exactly, makes a teacher effective?

The Gates Foundation just gave $290M to education.   A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities to "develop objective and reliable measures of effective teaching"

When I googled "What makes a teacher effective?" one of the first hits was a sample of quotes collected for a UNESCO book entitled What makes a Good Teacher? (1996). Over 500 children from some 50 countries aged 8-12 contributed their opinions.

Sensitization - keep whispering it

You don't have to teach everything.  Sometimes just whispering it is enough.

Yesterday my wife got a 4-page mailer via her employer. It was subtitled "Healthy Employees, Healthy Companies."  The cover story was "Appreciating the Moment: Defining Mindfulness." 

I would have normally tossed this mailer into the recycle bin without another look, but the Mindfulness theme caught my eye, and I ended up reading the entire thing.



By design, or otherwise, the back-page article was "A Guide to Multitasking" - which to me represents the other side of this coin.

We all recognize meditation (of any variety) as a common strategy for practising Mindfulness.  So imagine yourself meditating your way to multitasking.



[Btw, one of the articles was about the Power Nap, something I have come to strongly believe in.]



Just as I was getting out of the car after class last night, I caught this teaser on KUOW. "Multitasking Zen University of Washington professor David Levy wants to know if meditation can make multitasking at work less stressful. So he's conducting an experiment with a Zen teacher, a neuropsychologist and a volunteer group of office workers. [The original interview aired on the 14th, but I believe it is going to repeat today at 2:21pm. ]

See how just one article on Mindfulness sensitized me to two other articles that I would surely have otherwise missed?

As if to underline this, yesterday both NPR and the NY Times carried articles on a report in Science magazine Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep.  One of the authors quoted in the NY times piece - Sounds During Sleep Aid Memory, Study Finds  - speculates this can improve SAT scores, and maybe even help footballers learn the playbook.]

“It’s not really that you reminded them of what they needed to know,” Mr. Stickgold [one of the scientists interviewed for the article] said, “but rather you reminded them of a larger memory that they needed to know. ”


So here's a classroom application.  As a student falls asleep in class, as they all surely will, don't wake them up.  Think of it as a power nap, and just whisper a cue that will help them consolidate whatever they heard before they fell asleep.

 [Note: the new beta editor in blogger is so sloooow.]

Cultivate mindfulness.

While we deal with many of the same pressures that my mentor felt -- decreasing autonomy, increasing administrative requirements, less control over our practice -- the demands on our attention have gone, well, viral.

 Pauline Chen in her NY Times column: DOCTOR AND PATIENT; Practicing Mindfulness as Well as Medicine


So here's yet another similarity between teachers and physicians.

In this ever-widening sea of distractions, all that once gave meaning to our work -- ..., the lifetime relationships -- have turned quaintly insufficient.

Doctors who are burned out are more likely to depersonalize their patients, to treat them as objects rather than as individuals suffering from disease. These physicians exhibit less empathy and are more prone to making errors. And they are more vulnerable to depression and more likely to leave a profession that is already facing severe shortages in specialties like primary care

Part of the solution? Cultivate mindfulness.
 

The doctors became more mindful, less burned out and less emotionally exhausted; several of the improvements persisted after the course ended. And those changes correlated with a significant increase in empathy and other attributes that contribute to patient-centered care.

HW#8 - What are the principles behind 'engagement' in game design?

This week each team reviewed their game. Carrie left us with the question "What are the design principles you see in these games that you can use in your class?"   This is good question.  

I also briefly chatted with Jim (a coach) about 'challenge' in games (video/computer or otherwise).  In a previous conversation Jim cut through all the jargon and called it the 'carrot'.


The thing I have been mulling over is how elusive 'engagement' is.  

I do know that it is extremely difficult to design continuously increasing challenge into a software game. Part of the art of game design probably lies an intuition of what constitutes 'challenge.'  At the same time, I am assuming that 'engagement' / 'challenge' has been deconstructed quite extensively in Game Design Schools (e.g. Nintendo).  

I'd like to get an overview of the literature (from gaming or pedagogy) on engagement/challenge, especially with regard to keeping the carrot ahead of the horse.  Also, what are the parallels between the gaming genres and the classroom.  What is the overlap with 'learning styles?'  [responds to What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?]


Jim pointed out that you get to choose the comptuer game you want to play.  What engages one person is quite different from what engages another.   Games fall into specific genres because of that.

It struck me that in school the students don't get to choose the 'game.'  They have to play all of them.  So, as a game designer, the teacher can't cater just to the fan-base of one particular genre. [responds to What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?]



The most significant thing I learned in class this week was, however, not related to gaming. Rather it emerged from Collins & Halverson's summary of the reasons that technology does not gain a foothold in classrooms.  The summary itself was not noteworthy, but it certainly helped consolidate a perspective that I am exploring for the first time [see my last few blog posts].

Pedagogical ideas and tools operate in a marketplace.  Although things like production (e.g. research, policy, etc.), advertising and marketing (e.g. blogs), and fashion are aspects that describe the marketplace, in the end the consumer/purchaser is the teacher.  And the teacher is notoriously tight-fisted.


[If my native spelling shows through in this post, it is because Google removed the spell-check in their new WYSIWYG editor.]

T2T - The Teacher to Teacher marketplace

In an earlier post I had commented that teachers will use those technologies that improve their efficiency or efficacy.

And, lo and behold, in today's NY Times Winnie Hu describes the emergence of an online marketplace for Lesson Plans [Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions .] This is so exciting, as it represents the thin edge of the wedge. If teachers are shopping online for anything to do with their pedagogy, that cracks the door open just enough for any manner of technologies to start streaming into their classrooms.

Out of curiosity I went to the two sites mentioned in the article (Teachers Pay Teachers, and We Are Teachers) and searched for the following terms:

• Geometer's SketchPad: (11 items on TPT. On WAT there were 23 hits, but all from the publisher)
• Yola: (zero hits)
• VocieThread: (0 on TPT, and 3 on WAT)
• Wordle: (5 on TPT, 0 on WAT)
• SchoolTube: (zero hits)

[Note: there is an entirely different discussion on what one feels about teachers selling lesson plans. Which I personally believe is a waste of time - the discussion, that is.]

The search-bar as address-bar

Over the past 5 years I have noticed that people who have grown up with Search Engines will type web addresses into the search bar.

By this I mean, that instead of clicking on the address bar and typing "Google " or "YouTube " they will type "Google " in the search bar, and then select a link from the resulting page.

Obviously I find this real strange. Today I finally realized why this strategy works. If you are typing in the search bar, then you can type as fast as you want and not have to worry about misspelling or about backspacing to correct mistakes. e.g. You can type "goggle" or "gggle" or "ggle" and even Bing will return Google.com at the top of the list.

Seriously, why even bother teaching spelling anymore?!

[I just now reflexively ran spell-check on this post before hitting the publish button, and discovered that I had misspelt misspelling]

Bumps in the road to using Technology in education

In class this week, we read chapters 2 & 3 of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson.

[This book, by well-regarded authors , came out this Sept. It has received favorable reviews/comments by many important names in the field. ]

Chapter 2 sets up the primary arguments from the proponents in this discussion. The first of the points made in this chapter can be summarized by this sentence. "Enthusiasts argue that trying to prepare students for the 21st century with 19th-century technology is like teaching people to fly a rocket ship by having them ride bicycles."

While it makes sense to lead with this argument, given how widespread it is, to me it is like suggesting that we should be worrying more because the education system is not preparing children well enough to drive cars. There are some skills one can learn when one needs to - like driving a car, or learning to use a word-processor (I am fairly sure that none of these authors has been complaining much that their education did not prepare them adequately for learning to use word processors once they were invented). Separately, of course, there are literacies one must acquire. There, again, the education system of the past has not prevented academics like these to move from blue-tinted 35-mm slides to bland Powerpoints, to multi-media, and so on. While some people seem to suggest that these are literacies, I think that misses the distinction between presentation and content.

Chapter 3 then presents the skeptics point-of-view. Predictably, given their primary theses, Collins and Halverson don't do as good a job summarizing the reasons why it is difficult for Technology to get a foothold in the classroom. Here are the primary barriers they see to technology use in schools.

• Cost and Access
• Classroom Management (also see Authority and Teaching below)
• What computers can't teach (Many social skills, and Teacher as Counsellor)
• Challenges to instruction (taxes already stretched teachers)
• Authority and teaching
• Assessment (emphasis on standardized tests holds back transformation of the system)

I have not read the rest of this book, so I don't yet know what they propose. But the tone in the first two chapters unnecessarily sets up a Us versus Them confrontation. Why do people keep doing this? If you want to change the status quo, support what is good in the present system and tap into people's existing wishes to improve. Why bash them for being dinosaurs? Notice in the list of 6 items above that there is only one item which suggests that teachers can do somethings better than computers.

I feel the authors missed at least two other points.

1. The primary flaws in US education are not related to Technology.

Among the camp that believes that the primary purpose of education is to prepare a skilled workforce (and thus maintain an economic advantage in a competitive global economy), there is widespread concern about how the 'quality' of US education is steadily deteriorating when compared to the emerging threats. While Technology can certainly help recover some of the lost ground, it is not the primary solution - for the simple reason that India and China and Singapore are S.Korea are not closing the gap with Technology.

2. Universities are setting the agenda for High Schools.

For all the the reforms and transformations that are proposed in schools, educators on the ground are stuck with having to 'prepare' their students for college, not for the future. Whatever one may say or hear about the workplace of the future, just-in-time learning, and the like, it is the colleges that call the shots on the pre-requisites for admission and that in turn determines what schools will do (in large part because of the earlier mentioned reason that a college education is necessary for economic advantage).

Pragmatically, what technologies will end up in my classroom

" Given the view of schooling in the readings for this week, which technologies do you think are most likely to be taken up in schools? Why? Which technologies push your thinking about teaching and learning? Why? Do these two lists necessarily line up? "

1. Teachers will use those technologies that improves their efficiency or efficacy. Technologies that either distract the teacher or distract the students are unlikely to be used.

2. Technologies that allow customization, either by personal engagement with individual students, or by individualization of content to the students need,

• Online Rubrics - No I would not use this. Too much work for too little benefit
• Online Grades - Yes, I would use this, but I expect to use what is already in place at each job-site

This list was so, so, so comprehensive, I did not know where to start as a beginner (plus you can't click on the links!!)

http://file2.ws/web16

Jim recommended this site, so I will try it.

Web Tools 4U2 Use - www.webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com

What value video games? Engagement v. Apathy.

David Domke: The Journalism Revolution Is Now

Domke, Chair at the UW Dept of Communications, bemoans all the unwanted changes that have resulted in the new 24/7, blogospheric, talking heads style of journalism. One of his gripes is that journalism is no longer reflective.

But then he turns the coin over, and says that public engagement in issues of the day has gone up substantially. And that he'd take engagement over apathy any day.


The parallels one can draw from this talk with regard to education depend on where you stand....

The notion of what is 'news' and what is 'truth' has changed substantially in the last 10 years. From a time when a few institutions controlled what is the news, and we chose which ones to trust, we now have thousands, if not millions, of view points. It is 'journalism of the many' and 'how do you know what the truth is anymore?' But, at least, people are engaged.


Have the consumers of education become apathetic?

Is it worth it to trade 'being reflective' for 'engagement' in the classroom?

The scariest part is should the institutions of the past (schools) surrender control of what is the truth, in return for student engagement? Will they no longer be viable, like today's print newspapers?

Sasha Barab and other Educational Video Games

Jumping off point =
Educational Video Games With a Mix of Cool and Purpose
NY Times, November 2, 2009 - By STEFANIE OLSEN - Technology




Gamestar Mechanic is an educational video game that asks players to solve a set of puzzles in order to win enough power to design and create their own video games

Quest to Learn (see links from Institute of Play), a New York City public school focused on game-based learning that opened in New York City this fall. A nonprofit group called the Institute of Play set up the school, and its executive director, Katie Salen, helped design the game with financing from the MacArthur Foundation.

Despite popular titles like Math Blaster, the educational games industry eventually collapsed because of price wars, misguided consolidation and an inability to keep pace with changes introduced by the Web.

James Paul Gee, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who was an early adviser to the software company Tabula Digita , said that in the last two years the company’s 3-D multiplayer games for math and science have evolved into exercises for improving children’s test scores as the company sought wider adoption.


Quest Atlantis, one of the most widely adopted critical-thinking games in schools, has a science section that deals with water quality. Inside a 3-D national park where the fish are dying, students must interview local interest groups, test water samples and figure out what is happening to the fish. Quest Atlantis was created by Sasha Barab , a professor at Indiana University, with backing from NASA, Food Lion and the MacArthur Foundation. Mr. Barab said the game covers some of the core science curriculum for tests.