Students – Page 2 – Self-Directed Professional Development

Freshman Don’t Do Optional

NCAT: Learning MarketSpace April 2006

The latest newsletter from the National Center for Academic Transformation shares some key lessons learned from their ongoing program in course redesign. The Center has supported the redesign of 50 courses to increase learning while reducing organizational costs. (The Center is headed by distinguished William and Mary alumna Carol Twigg–another English major doing quite well in the field of Educational Technology.)

The lead article in the The Learning MarketSpace, April 2006 is entitled Freshmen Don’t Do Optional and confronts a common misunderstanding of courses redesigned by the center. While most of the redesigned courses have offer greater flexibility in times and learning methods than the courses they replaced, few are “self-paced”.

Each has discovered that students need structure (especially first-year students and especially in disciplines that may be required rather than chosen) and that most students simply will not make it in a totally self-paced environment.

Three key findings:

Lesson 1. If you know that engaging in a particular learning activity will result in increased learning, you must require students to participate in it.
Lesson 2. It’s not enough to require participation–you must give course points for doing so.
Lesson 3: It’s not enough to require participation and to give points for doing so—you must also monitor whether students are engaged and be prepared to intervene if they are not.

This is one area where high-tech definitely can complement high-touch in courses in which content mastery can be measured fairly precisely. In traditional classes, it’s hard to tell how much time each student is spending and to find ways to encourage students who aren’t investing the time to be successful. Technology enhanced assignments can provide faculty members with much more information about how much time students are investing in their work and how well they are learning the content.

The entire article is worth reading to get the detail to support the bullets.

Another Glimpse into the Future?

Link To: Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom

One of the themes I’ve been returning to often is that the K-12 teachers in the trenches are shaping the future for those of us in higher education to a far greater extent than most of us in the college and university arena realize. Here’s a partial program lineup from the Illinois Technology Conference, courtesy of Will Richardson.

* “No more excuses, it’s time to start blogging” full day workshop by Steve. (No seats left)
* “iPods in the Classroom” full day workshop with Karen Percak. (Full)
* “Read, Write and Blog” full day workshop with Susim Munshi. (Full)
* “Wikis and Weblogs as School Communication Tools” full day workshop with Tim Lauer. (No seats left.)
* “The New Read/Write Web: Transforming the Classroom” and “What’s Up with Wikis?” by, um…that would be me.
* “Blogging– Revolutionize Education” by Susim Munshi and Susan Switzer
* “Got Wikis?” by David Jakes
* “Web Based Communication Tools for Schools” by Tim Lauer
*Flickr in the Classroom” by David Jakes
* “Using iPods for Student Learning” by Karen Percak
* “Podcasting 101” by Steve Dembo
* “Telling the New Story” by David Warlick
* “Radio For Kids, By Kids” by Tony Vincent”

Interesting implications….

Enhancing the Value of Student Jobs.

Link to: Earn more, learn more | csmonitor.com

One of the initiatives we’re exploring at William and Mary is a student fellowship program where students will work closely with faculty on technology related projects. Our goal is to create opportunities for students to work closely with faculty in ways that are directly tied to teaching or scholarship. We see this program as providing substantial learning experiences for students, as well as sources of income for them.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, other institutions are seeing the value in helping to change the culture of student jobs to more meaningful work. One of the most aggressive of these has been at Rhodes College.

At the same time, conversations with older alumni revealed that many remembered campus jobs as essential learning experiences. Current students, on the other hand, often felt their talents were being wasted on menial tasks.

Meaningful jobs that require substantial amount of flexibility and learning can be an important factor in making our campuses more engaging for students. It’s worth taking at look at other places where we might be able to stretch students’ horizons by involving them in authentic work of the university.

Humanities Labs

Link to: Inside Higher Ed :: We Need Humanities Labs

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been a member of a fairly large faculty committee from Arts and Sciences charged with developing a strategy for allocating space that will be made available when the School’s of Education and Business get their own buildings. The committee members are thoughtful, committed and dedicated to trying to use this opportunity to strengthen departments and programs that need more space to grow and develop.

Within such a gifted group of scholars and teachers, I’m finding myself constantly cast as the skeptic challenging whether our current teaching methods will continue to be effective a decade from now–particulalry in light of the changes already underway in computers hardware and software, the immersion in technology by high school students and in the expectations they’ll bring to the college between now and 2016. I’m not convinced by the argument, for example, that jamming the wireless on student laptops so that they have to focus their attention on the lecture is good pedagogy. I think we’d be much better served by trying to come up with ways to more fully engage students as participants in the lecture experience–an idea that didn’t meet with enthusiastic support from my colleagues on the committee.

I’ve also tried to raise questions about the future of humanities research, particularly at the undergraduate level. It seems to me that in order to “compete” with the sciences for space and funding, the humanities will have to find additional models of research that embrace the more social, collaborative practices that contribute to student learning. (In this case, both faculty and graduate student members from the humanities are the skeptics as to the degree to which scholarship in the humanities will–or should–become more communal.) This article by “dissertation coach” Gina Hiatt suggests that graduate departments might benefit from re-framing their roles:

If humanities departments were to proceed as outlined by Kunstler, they would go beyond counting their peer-reviewed publications, and move into creating lasting legacies and nurturing breakthrough thinking. Kunstler identifies the attributes of organizations likely to spawn such changes, including the following: “workers immerse themselves in others’ ideas and work, absorbing creative influences,” and “mentor relationships abound.”

I haven’t read Kunstler’s book, but from the references in this article, it seems to be very much in line with the learning ecology approach that John Seeley Brown has been developing. It will be interesting to see to what extent humanities departments do adopt some more collaborative approaches to research.

Screenagers Provide Internet Content

Link to: The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries – New York Times

Add “screenager” to the lexicon of terms to describe the current generation of K-12 students who are finding new ways to use the internet to express themselves as “content providers”.

Using the cheap digital tools that now help chronicle the comings and goings of everyday life – cellphone cameras, iPods, laptops and user-friendly Web editing software – teenagers like Melissa are pushing content onto the Internet as naturally as they view it.

The article, which appears in the business section of the New York Times, was triggered by the release of another report by by the Pew Internet and American Life Project which notes:

Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.

Much of the article focuses on the potential impact of the attitudes of these kids towards downloading and consuming music. (Most agree that it is easy to grab music off the internet. About half said that downloading copywrited material was wrong; an equal number didn’t care about copyright.) The article (and the Pew Report) confirm that that many members of this generation are taking a much more active relationship with their media environment.

The Pew survey shows “the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”

“Subverting” it? Now where have I heard that word before?

A Notion Even More Idealistic Than Honor Codes

Link to: Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :

Will Richardson has some thoughts on ethical issues that challenge our current thinking about good and evil in the world of blogs, wikis and other social sloftware. At the end of a presentation he was giving, one of the particpants commented that her school was having problems with blogs because students would post questions and answers to tests between periods so that later classes would know what to expect. (When I was teaching 4 sections of 12th grade English 35 years ago, it probably took all of 5 minutes after the end of my first class for my test questions to be in the public domain. Now it only takes a minute.)

Will’s first response is telling.

What a great use of the technology, not from an ethical sense, certainly, but from a collaboration and information sense. This is the new reality of a Read/Write world where knowledge is accessible, number one, and knowledge is shared instead of being kept closeted, number two. These kids are finding ways to share the information they need to be successful at what they are doing.

Back in the olden days, my students and I had this ongoing dance about tests. I knew that they had the questions from previous classes. They knew that I knew and that I was clever enough not to ask the same questions. They spent an amazing amount of time trying to figure out what was left that hadn’t been asked yet. By the time three classes had reported out, those in 7th period had it pretty well knocked.

Will says that making four tests isn’t the answer.

The answer, I think, lies in teaching our students how to correctly and ethically borrow the ideas and work of others and in demanding that they not just use them but make those ideas their own. That they take the ideas we have tried to teach them and connect them to and show us that they can teach it to someone else with their own spin on it, their own remix.

I like this vision, unconventional as it might be, but getting large numbers of faculty to buy into it will be an enormous challenge. Running papers through Turnitin.com is certainly easier.

Swimming in an Ocean of Media

A new report confirms that Americans “swim in an ocean of media” The study of media use in the sociological Mecca of Muncie Indiana found that more than two-thirds of people’s waking moments involved some sort of media usage. A third of the day is spent exposed multiple types of media at the same time, which the study calls Concurent Media Exposure, though I’d suspect most of us know it as “multitasking.

The results of this study were widely reported in a USA TODAY report.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2005-09-27-media-study_x.htm

The USA TODAY report was based on an article originally published in the Christian Science Monitor.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0928/p13s01-lihc.html

The Christian Science Monitor report was triggered by a report issued by the Ball State Center for Media Design. The study, which is available for sale on the center’s website, used 150 trained observers to gather data using naturalistic methods. USA Today describes the study methodology:

Researchers watched the behavior of 394 ordinary Midwesterners for more than 5,000 hours, following them 12 hours a day and recording their use of media every 15 seconds on a hand-held device.

Key findings:

The newspaper reports of the study called into question some of the key assumptions of much of the writing of Net Gen, Generation M, and Digital Natives that only the young engage in “Concurrent Media Exposure.”

One theory the study lays to rest, Mr. Bloxham says, is that this media multitasking, which the researchers call Concurrent Media Exposure, “is the province of only the young or the tech savvy.” All age groups multitask, he says, though the pairings may differ. Those over 50, for example, were more likely to combine TV viewing with newspaper reading. Younger people might listen to music while sending instant messages.

Television remains a key part of the media mix.

Watching television remains by far the most popular media-related activity. More than 90% of those studied viewed TV, for an average of about four hours per day. About three-quarters used a computer, for a little more than two hours per day.

Thanks to: The Kept-Up Academic Librarian for a lead on some valuable additional information from Campus Technology magazine.

Brain Plasticity: Is the Internet Really Changing Us?

Any attempt to make broad statements about the technical abilities of our students is met with a variety of responses. Some folks are quick to embrace the heuristic value of terms like the Net Generation or Digital Natives. Others are equally as quick to attack such broad generalizations as counter productive, claiming that such stereotypes hide differences among students that are more important educationally than broad differences between different “generations”. Others accept the premise that many students’ capacities to use different types of “sensory input” have changed, but reject the corollary that schools and universities need to adapt to those changes.

As Sheryl points out in her post, it’s not just kids who are being changed, it’s all of us who are being constantly exposed to ever increasing amounts and types of media. I’m not sure if this is mainstream science or not, but increasingly I’m seeing references to processes by which human brains can actually reorganize to make better use of the rich information sources available to them through the process of “brain plasticity”.

A field of neuroscience, brain plasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt and change physically and functionally throughout life.

This research holds that our brains are being “massively remodeled” by our exposure to the internet, reading, cable and satellite television with hundreds of channels and hundreds of hours of ads, by video games, by modern electronics, by ubiquitous access music, by cell phones, digital photography and by the other gadgets that make up the “tools” of modern life.

Some researchers claim that understanding the concept of brain plasticity and adapting learning experiences can result in dramatic increases in learning. Mike Merzenich, a PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins, claims to be utilizing these methods in older adults:

We have been training 70- to 90-plus-year-olds to be more accurate aural-language receivers and language users. After 40 hours or so of training, the average trainee’s cognitive abilities are rejuvenated by about 10 years, i.e., their performance on a cognitive assessment battery is like those of an average person who is 10 years younger.

Here are a couple of interesting, though non-scholarly, articles on the relationship between technology, learning and intelligence.

Are we getting smarter or dumber? | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

[print version] Intelligence in the Internet age | CNET News.com

The Kaiser Family Foundation did a detailed report that outlines the extent of media exposure by children 8-18 years old.

Speaking with Understanding About Net Gen Learners

Link to: CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » NetGen Learners: Where’s The Action? Check the Assumptions at the (Classroom) Door?

I’ve just gotten back from the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) fall forum at Estrella Mountain Community College, part of the CogDog’s own Maricopa system. The forum convener was Diana G. Oblinger, one of the editors of the e-book Educating the Net Generation and the vice president of the ELI. As you can imagine, there were a significant number of references to the book throughout the meeting, and it was very useful to have a comprehensive reference work available (on-line and for free) with the ideas of a dozen or so thoughtful people on the topic.

As CogDog notes, we’re all surrounded by anecdotal evidence that this generation is different.

A colleague recently shared her story of her youngest daughter going off to her first year at a university. Mom helped her move, and then, waiting for some information, waited patiently while no phone calls came to describe how things where going. Mom simmers a few days saying, “I will give her time.” Finally, the older daughter, who is graduated now, calls her younger sister and asks, “Why you have not called Mom? She’s going nuts.” The response? “I wrote everything on my blog! If she just read that, she would know how I am doing? Why do I have to call all these different people to tell my stories, when they could just read my blog!!!!”

(Unrelated note: Our CIO just found out that his daughter keeps an online journal. He’s more of a believer in Web 2.0 than he was a few weeks ago.)

I agree with the major points of this post that we need to be more critical about our professional gatherings and responses to some of the points in Educating the Net Generation. It is indeed a “Good Thing” that we are seriously questioning our assumptions about learning as “presenting the material”. (I also agree that we have to be careful about the ” subtle danger of assuming every room full of students from the defined age group are all game playing, multi-tasking, IM-ing, MTV mindset sterotypes.”)

However, I think we also have to be a little careful to be sure that we don’t under-estimate the value of carefully thought out presentations at professional meetings and gatherings. Gardner Campbell has written about the value of the “explaining voice” in conveying the meaning of poetry:

There’s something about the explaining voice, the voice that performs understanding, that doesn’t just convey information or narrate hermeneutics, but shapes out of a shared atmosphere an intimate drama of cognitive action in time….When we hear someone read with understanding, we participate in that understanding, almost as if the voice is enacting our own comprehension. We hear the shape of the emerging meaning, and intuit the mind that experiences that meaning even as it expresses it, and it’s all ours.

I think we need presentations that mirror the kind of thoughtful understanding that comes when a faculty member who really understands a poem reads it in person. That experience goes well beyond the power of a podcast even from an expert like Gardner. Well designed presentations from professionals who have personal experience struggling helping students actually learn with technology will bring our professional conference the kind of authenticity they need. I’d like to see more presentations with that kind of voice before deciding that most “content” could be served up as well on line.

(I do admit that I’ve heard more than my share of presentations this summer than seemed like the presenter had just read the World is Flat while on the plane. Those would have been far better by just playing one of the on-line sources of the author explaining his own work.)

The Highly Designed Dorm Room

One of the highlights of working with students in our fall startup program has been watching the interaction among students and parents in decorating their rooms. Can’t say that I’ve seen anything like this, though.

Patrick Baglino, a Dupont Circle designer, works with multimillion-dollar budgets. He’s decorated mansions in Spring Valley, New York lofts in SoHo, homes in Kalorama and Georgetown, waterfront condos in Florida. He also does dorm rooms.

A recent makeover for two friends at Georgetown University included Ralph Lauren bed linens, window treatments from Anthropologie and a $1,200 Angela Adams carpet. Total price: about $5,000, not including Baglino’s fees.

One interesting statisic was that the average entering freshman spends $1,200 on school items. (This must exclude computers, I would think.) Aggregate figures are pretty impressive:

The breakdown: $7.5 billion on electronics, $8.8 billion on textbooks, $3.2 billion on clothing and accessories, $2.6 billion on dorm or apartment furnishings, $2.1 billion on school supplies, and $1.5 billion on shoes.