Learning In a Flat World

During the past spring in the course I co-taught with Jeffrey Nugent, we asked our graduate students in the Preparing Future Faculty program to create a personal teaching project.  Many chose to develop a teaching philosophy.  Several good ones are here and here and here.

It occurred to me that I have not updated my teaching philosophy in quite a few years.  Motivated by the good work of my students, I decided to dust mine off and distribute it here for comments.  How would you “grade” it?  Does it resonate with you?  Does it miss an important element?  Let me know!

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Philosophy of Teaching in a Distributed Online Environment

I was recently asked what I looked for in students, and my response was “I want students to be as excited about learning as I am.”  I have been teaching online for nearly two decades, and one of the exciting aspects of teaching online is that the possibilities continue to grow, and with these possibilities come endless opportunities for learning.

I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses, in education leadership and in business leadership.  My approach is similar in both disciplines.  Students are expected to do more than regurgitate “facts” – they are expected to analyze and critically process existing and emerging information to draw fresh conclusions and applications in an ever changing world.  As such, I am a co-learner with my students as we examine existing paradigms and explore new ones.  The world is not a multiple-choice test but rather one that requires higher order thinking skills.  My teaching approach engages students to think in new ways.

I also have in recent years relied increasingly on a network of learners (Twitter, Delicious, and blogs) for my own personal learning, and through this network have seen the power of social processes for learning.  The reflective nature of blogging for instance requires students to think about thinking, which leads to metacognition and the higher order thinking that I seek.  Each student brings unique perspectives to bear, and when this reflection occurs on the open web, it invites other perspectives from outside the course to push, prod, and provoke new reflections.

I believe that good teaching is good teaching, whether one is online or face-to-face.  My teaching has been informed by Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles of Good Practice in Teaching, which I believe hold equally true online or on campus (Chickering and Gamson, 1987):

“Good practice in undergraduate education:

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.”

An online course is so much more than a correspondence course.  I concur with Palloff and Pratt (2007) that the formation of a learning community is essential in online courses.  If students see me as a real individual, with social, cognitive and teaching presences evident in the online environment…and equally important, they see each other as well, then a community of learners can develop.

My philosophy of teaching evolved from years of teaching both face-to-face and online in military, university, and two-year settings.  As I reflect on my beliefs regarding teaching and learning, I find that my view is threefold:

• to promote positive learning, modeling what I teach and learn;
• to spark learner enthusiasm for learning and peer-teaching;
• and to provide a strong foundation for lifelong reflective practice.

To accomplish this, I apply a variety of strategies based on essential educational principles encompassing learning theory, collaboration, technology application, strategic instructional planning and assessment, constructivism, and reflective practice.  I believe that learning is always evolving, and that I learn as much from my students as they do from me.  I also believe that learning is best when students see the relevance of the learning.  I intend for my ‘passion’ for teaching and learning to always be evident, building a learning community through enthusiasm and empathetic connections with learners.  As a result, my teaching will positively impact the learners, ultimately connecting them to their ‘passion’ and lifelong learning.

While good teaching is good teaching, I strongly believe that the practices one uses for teaching are quite different online.  An expanded version of this philosophy can be found in the White Paper I co-authored with Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, Building from Content to Community: [Re]Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning (May 2009).  With a community of learners, it makes sense to use a number of learning activities and assessment processes, including formative assessment and peer assessment.  This online community is made up of unique individuals, with differing learning styles, background knowledge, and biases.  These diverse perspectives can enrich the learning environment.  My role is to create a safe environment in which this sharing of learning can occur.

The web has evolved in the past six years to be one that is participatory (just look at Facebook).  It therefore makes sense to create active learning opportunities that take advantage of the affordances the new web allows, such as wikis for collaborative authoring, blogs for reflection, and new video tools that allow anyone to publish multimedia.

We teach in a distributed online environment.  This environment allows for multiple means for communication and collaboration.  My role is to be cognizant of my role to model effective learning practices while I actively engage my students.  Together we can learn more than any of us could learn by ourselves.

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Chickering, Arthur W. and Gamson, Zelda F. (1987) “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987, pp 3-7.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A new framework for teacher knowledge,” Teachers College Record. 108(6), 1017- 1054.

Palloff, R. M. and Pratt, K. (2007) Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom, Jossey-Bass.

Watwood, Britt, Nugent, Jeffrey and Deihl, William “Bud” (2009) Building from Content to Community: [Re]Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning, VCU, http://www.vcu.edu/cte/pdfs/OnlineTeachingWhitePaper.pdf

At a meeting this week, my colleague Mary Secret was discussing her online classes.  Mary has been an active member of our Online Advisory Committee and teaches both online and face-to-face in our Masters of Social Work program.  She had done research in assessing online classes, and she suggested that it would be good if we researched the “voices of our students” online.  That phrase has stuck with me all week…driven by my own students and some fascinating things that I am seeing them do this semester in my class.

In my graduate online class, ADMS 647 – Educational Technology for School Leaders, we have been blogging weekly around a variety of topics.  My students are all Visiting International Faculty working on their Masters in Education, and none had actively blogged before.  The establishment and development of a blog was the first order of business in our class, and they all successfully started a blog on the open web.  As future school administrators, I thought it important that they spend time on the open web, with all the inherent problems that might create.  As their blogs started, they really had no preconceived notion of what I expected, so their posts took on the format of a paper digitally submitted through a blog. During the first four weeks, the students explored and posted their research on a collection of web tools that could be used instructionally.

Their blog posts began to show a shift as they reflected on that initial journey.  In a short four weeks, they had moved from being fearful of the web to being enamored with it.  Their successes at posting multimedia presentations through their blog brought home some of the possibilities that this class was designed to showcase.  Importantly, the tone in their blogs became more personal, and the commenting between and among students  increased as well.

Over the past three weeks, we have explored areas that fall in the seamier side of the web, such as the rise of the cyberbully or the slanderous uses of social networking.  We also discussed a perennial sore point – the degree to which the internet is blocked in schools.  It has been eye-opening to the students – all of whom are practicing K-12 teachers. Their blog posts have become more emotional as they internalized some of the issues educators face on the web.  As that occurred, it appeared that for some, simply typing a response was not enough.

So a fascinating thing has occurred over the past two weeks.  Several of my students have begun to record videos where they talk through the issue under discussion for the week.  To be honest, it caught me by surprise.  I am grading their weekly blog posts, and it is actually easier to grade a text-based product over an audio-based one.  I can also read faster than I can listen…giving me an appreciation now on why some undergraduates listen to podcasts at double speed!  Yet, I find that the ability to hear inflections of voice adds a new dimension to these student blogs.

I am glad that they are not all doing it…though it may catch on.

What I do find interesting is how blogging – and the ownership of a blog – changes a dynamic in student-teacher communication.  When I first started teaching online a decade ago, I tended to have weekly discussions in the discussion boards and papers every few weeks, which I would mark up and return with a grade.  The shift this year to a blog format has allowed both the “discussions” and the “papers” to merge into a new format.  My students have been reflective and operating at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy in their posts.  They have also experimented with incorporation of aspects of Web 2.0 into their posts.  So we have seen, in addition to the videos mentioned above, experimental use of Wordle and Slideshare as aspects of posts.  This has definitely shifted aspects of my class from one controlled by the faculty to control in the students’ hands.  A student-centered approach to learning…what a concept!

It has been 15 years since Barr and Tagg published “From Teaching to Learning” in CHANGE magazine, and yet in all that time, nothing I have done in my classes has had the impact on my teaching that student blogging has.

This was a cute road sign snapped by Major Clanger on the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, between Portland and Beaverton, in Oregon, and posted to Flickr.  What I like about my student voices is that they are very real…and they contain some good ideas.  They use of student blogs is transforming how I teach.

{Photo Credit: yugenro, Major Clanger}

Over the past five weeks, the graduate students in my Educational Technology and School Leaders class embarked on a journey into cyberspace  – a first for many of them and one for many of them as mystical as the illustration here.  Five weeks ago, my students were self-described technophobes.  They were worried not only about taking an online class, but particularly worried about the requirement in this class to blog and, in the first four weeks, to post online a web tutorial that they individually developed to explain to their classmates how to use a Web 2.0 tool in their classrooms.

It frankly was overwhelming to most of them.

Five weeks later, all students have begun to blog.  Last week, all students successfully posted in their blogs their multimedia presentations on their web tool.  Their tutorials covered a variety of web tools that could be used instructionally, as shown on the list to the left.  You can see their tutorials aggregated in our class Google Site page.

I was pleased with the results.  As would be expected, the quality range varied, but each student showed considerable growth in their own learning.  The students primarily used Jing for their presentations, but we had a couple of Camtasia screencasts, one Youtube video and one Screenr.

This past weekend, they each reflected on their journey in their blogs.

I had to smile at one observation.  She noted that she goes to Quote Garden whenever she is stressed and needs inspiration due to feeling overwhelmed…and my course had driven her to this site more than she cared to admit!  Many of my students talked about their initial fears, anxieties, stress, and even tears, but then remarked on the joy they felt as they achieved success.  As one noted:

“…At first, I was sceptical and was of the opinion that this [class] should have been a face to face class where we are actually taken into a lab and shown how to use {these} tools.  But I will retract on that; one of my most satisfying moments was actually when I did the first recording and playback after many failed trials…”

What was most interesting was the shift in tone in their posts.  The tone had shifted from concern to elation and confidence.  As one noted, “Who knew web 2.0 tools could be so cool?”  This Wordle below is a compilation of their 13 blog posts, and I cannot find any negative words listed.  What I see are positive action words.

“Use” and “Using” are two words that stand out, as does the word “students”.  Several members of the class discussed how they were already incorporating some of these tools into their teaching practice.  I loved the fact that one first-grade teacher was having her 6 year olds develop Jing videos!  Others had begun to experiment with wikis, photostories, and Glogster.

Several noted that their exploration of blogs in this class had opened their eyes to the use of educational technology by other teachers.  They also had been surprised when they approached their local school technology people and found that these “experts” had never heard of Jing, Slideshare, or other web tools we were exploring.  What I liked was that they felt empowered to share their learning with these people and their fellow teachers.  More than one noted that they had approached their principal about sharing and found their principal supportive.

We had mixed reviews when it came to the question of openness on the web.  One noted that she had become “more open minded about technology and that using the web to communicate and share information doesn’t have to be a scary experience.”  Another said that she was “a little more open minded about the use of technology not only for my own personal growth but in the classroom and in sharing with my students.”  But another candidly noted that her “reluctancy is not in the use of technology but in making my page public.”

Several commented about how I had organized this online class and introduced the topic of Web 2.0.  One said that she was looking for more scaffolding of her learning from me but learned that I wanted her to explore…and she learned that she could explore and learn.  Another remarked that she had put down YouTube in the past, but never realized what a wealth of knowledge could be found there.

This course ultimately explores how schools plan for and fund technology for their schools.  It could easily be a fairly dry course about boxes and wires.  By introducing Web 2.0 as the first module, I believe that my students are in a more knowledgeable position to wrestle with the ethical, legal and political issues associated with the use of the web instructionally, and therefore better able to articulate a vision for educational technology in their schools.  To borrow from Michael Wesch, these future administrators have moved from knowledgeable about educational technology to knowledge-able.

{Photo Credit: Rig329}

I am about one-third the way through Charlene Li‘s and Josh Bernoff‘s 2008 book, Groundswell.  The groundswell that these two analysts from Forrester Research discuss is the impact of social media on businesses. Striking a similar theme to that espoused by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and David Weinberger in Everything is Miscellaneous, Groundswell looks at what happens when ordinary individuals link up and get what they need from other individuals without relying on traditional institutions like corporations.

From their perspective, many businesses see the fact that people are discussing their products and services on Facebook, Twitter, and in blogs as a threat – out of the control of their PR and marketing departments.  Yet, as some businesses have learned, it is also an opportunity.

The focus in this book is not on the technologies of social media, but rather on how these technologies create new opportunities to build relationships.  In looking at numerous technologies, they ask specific questions:

• Does it enable people to connect with each other in new ways?
• Is it effortless to sign up for?
• Does it shift power away from institutions to people?
• Does the resulting community generate enough content to sustain itself?
• Is it an open platform that invites partnerships?

When they work with a company exploring social media, they do not focus on the media first.  They ask about the company’s customer demographics, their objectives, and their strategy.  Only when that is laid out do they then look for good social media tools to fit their customers, their objectives, and their strategy.

They suggest that social media can be used five ways.  First, it can be used to listen to customers – a continuous stream of monitoring rather than snapshot surveys.  Second, it can be used for two-way conversation with customers.  Third, it can be used to energize enthusiastic customers to market for you.  Fourth, it can be used to build embedded self-directed support for the use of your product or service.  Finally, it can be used to systematically improve your product or service by empowering customers to help generate improvements.

This book was written two years ago and only surfaced on my radar recently.  If anything, social media has become even more of a force in business since 2008.  When I recently mentioned a problem with my home internet on Twitter, Comcast tweeted me back within ten minutes and gave me the tip I needed to correct the problem (which was not Comcast at all but my home wireless router).  I was not even asking for help and I got it – this is the new world of business social media.

So where is the groundswell in higher ed?

Granted, many universities (mine included) have begun to use Facebook and Twitter to connect with students.  Yet the “average” class is still an isolate lecture-dominated space.

Derek Bruff alluded to this in an interesting 5-minute Jing presentation a few days ago called “Revolution or Evolution? Changing Instructional Practices in the Academy”:

Derek suggested that mainstream faculty were not ready to leap to embedded use of social media as part of their instructional process without taking small steps first – gradually evolving.

Yet I wonder if we in academia will have the luxury of slowly evolving?  Rob Tucker in a post in O’Reilly Radar called “Disintermediation: The disruption to come for Education 2.0“, notes that when “we talk about Education 2.0, though, we are prone to think that we can design it – that we can consciously and deliberately lay the groundwork for its effective implementation. Our deliberation, though, may be less powerful than the larger forces driving its rapid evolution. One such force will certainly be disintermediation.”

He compares what is happening now in education to what happened to the travel industry.  Computers and the internet initially made travel agents more productive and were embraced by the industry.  But then average individuals gained the ability through sites like Expedia and Travelocity to cut out the travel industry and make travel arrangements themselves.  As a result, the number of travel agents fell by 45%.

Rob asks if the same thing is now occurring in education?

Good question.  Anya Kamenetz in DIY U seems to advocate against traditional (and costly) institutions of higher education in a world where open educational content is freely available (or that is my impression – it is the next book on my summer reading list).  As Derek notes, whether we use social media in classes or not, our students are already connecting to a larger and informed world than what is inside the four wall of our traditional classrooms.

So I return to Groundswell and suggest that it provides a strategy for examining social media as an enhancement for learning.  Rather than willy-nilly jumping on Twitter or Facebook or a Ning, these researchers suggest that we first examine our students and where they lie on their Social Technographic Ladder:

Social Technographic Ladder

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As many have noted, there is no such thing as a digital native or digital immigrant.  So age has little to do with where our students are on this ladder.  One of my heroes from the world of work, Tom Peters, blogged recently about how he had fallen in love with social media – blogging and Twitter in particular.  Tom is even older than I am!  So individuals across the age spectrum are now using social media.  Our students are quite diverse, and understanding their use of social media will help faculty members customize the learning process to fit their use.

Second, we need to look at our learning objectives for our course/lesson and ask how social connections and networking might leverage the learning planned for our course.  I agree with Derek that this is untapped potential for our classes.

Only after we look at our student base and our learning objectives can we then look at the possible options in social media that could enhance the learning.

As Rob Tucker noted at the end of his post, this will be messy and trial and error will have to occur:

“What is certain is that disintermediation rarely has a delicate touch. It will change the way we teach and change the way we learn in the decade and decades ahead.”

It is not that the groundswell has not occurred in higher education, but that too many are ignoring its potential.   To ignore it any longer is to risk losing relevance in a world where networked learning is becoming the norm.

I would be interested in your thoughts.  Has the groundswell begun to move beyond simple recruitment and advising to actually impact teaching and learning at your institution?

{Graphics linked from the Groundswell website}

My colleagues at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Jeff Nugent and Zach Goodell, have been co-teaching a graduate course this semester here at VCU.  Teaching, Learning and Technology in Higher Education (GRAD-602) is designed to provide students in the Preparing Future Faculty Program with an introduction to contemporary instructional practices and exploration of relevant issues that can serve as both a foundation, and a process for continued growth and development.   I joined Jeff last night as he took their 25 graduate students on an exploration of the changing landscape of learning.

Using clickers, Jeff polled his students on their perceptions of whether:

• instructional technology has fundamentally changed the way higher education instruction is delivered
• instructional technology has fundamentally changed the way students learn
• instructional technology has fundamentally changed the way they as faculty teach

The room was a bit bipolar…which made for some very rich discussion.  What struck me was the difference I was seeing between this next generation of faculty and similar discussions Jeff and I have had with current faculty.

In the first place, about half of the students had their laptops open on their tables and used them to check facts or search out new items to bolster their discussions.  The group struggled with whether things had “fundamentally” changed, pointing out on the one hand that the give and take between faculty and students really had not changed, yet on the other hand, that access to information made the give and take different.  International students highlighted that the digital divide was more a case of access to the web rather than access to technology itself, contrasting Africa, India and China to the United States.

What really punctuated the difference between current faculty and new faculty was when Jeff showed the slide below:

He asked the class to stand, and then remain standing if they recognized and were familiar with ten of the items shown.  Almost the entire class remained standing.  When we have used this slide with groups of current faculty, we usually get no greater than six items where the majority in the room is still standing.

He then asked them to remain standing if they personally used at least five of the items shown.  About half the class sat down, but I was impressed at the number still standing.  He upped the question to personally using at least ten, and then only myself and two others remained standing.  I have to admit that given that my job involves exploration of this landscape, I had better still be standing, but it was also rather interesting that the oldest person in the room was one of the three standing!

Jeff then asked them to stand if any of their professors used more than three of the items in their instruction, and again, only a handful stood.

To me, this was a recognition of the disconnect between where our students currently are (as reflected by this room of bright graduate students) and our faculty in their instructional practice.  I am heartened that the next generation of faculty may break this mold.  Faculty tend to teach the way they were taught, but this next generation of faculty is bringing new practices to the classroom.  They are also asking the right questions about impacts on teaching and learning, as opposed to gadget of the month.

I am looking forward to joining this group as they continue to explore through the semester the intersections of teaching, learning, and technology in higher education.  They are blogging about their journey, which makes for some interesting reading.  Check them out at Jeff’s Netvibes site.

{Photo Credits: San Jose Library, smannion}

Jim Groom pushes the envelope all the time, which is why we love him!  The person who coined the phrase “edupunk” is back as Rorschach from the Watchmen with a warning for “so-called professors” – you cannot, as Jon Mott suggested at ELI, have corporate learning management systems like Blackboard and edupunk style learning co-exist.  To be free, you must let go of walled garden systems and embrace open education.

Check out Rorschach’s EdTech Journal below:

We need people like Jim to push us out of our comfort zone, but I am not sure we need to totally abandon the LMS as Jim suggests.  If I had to guess which specific presentation upset Rorschach, it would have to be Jon Mott’s presentation on The Genius of AND: Reconciling the Enterprise and the Personal Learning Network.

Jon’s presentation really resonated with me – I am a believer in “and”.  This concept of “and” has come up several times in recent weeks.

Enterprise LMS’s like Blackboard do some things very well, such as administer rosters and handle grades in ways that satisfy FERPA regulations.  You can easily enhance Blackboard by adding aggregated blogs through Netvibes or collaborative spaces for tasks like wikis.  It is not a case as Jim suggests of “open” or “closed”, but rather “open” AND “closed” as the situation fits.

In working with a program looking at online instruction, it seemed that the discussion was leaning to one of “asynchronous” or “synchronous”.  This is another area where AND fits well.  The decision to use synchronous or asynchronous should be based on the learning objectives and the audience, not based on an EITHER/OR model.

In a bit of synchronicity, my office mate Bud Deihl had a blog post that mirrored some of what Rorschach bemoaned.  In “Technology in the Classroom is a Given“, Bud noted that we should not be debating whether or not to integrate technology into the classroom.  Our students are already carrying sophisticated technology in the form of smartphones, netbooks, and laptops into our classes.  As Bud challenges us, we should be looking for AND situations to go ahead and incorporate these technologies into our learning environments.

Jim A.K.A. Rorschach – Keep pushing us to be pure.  We need these mirrors held up to us.  But I will continue to be the so-called professor looking for that middle ground where I can use both traditional and networked learning.

It has been a while since I blogged, partly due to semester start-up and partly due to spending a lot of time in Twitter and Facebook.  However, yesterday we did something rather neat that takes more than 140 characters to share.

There has been a lot of buzz this week about the iPad and tablet PC‘s.  Tablets have been around for  awhile and they give you the ability to use s tyllus for drawing or inking on documents and virtual whiteboards.  Here at VCU, Jeff Nugent has run a faculty development project for several years that equips faculty participants with Lenova ThinkPads to use instructionally.  These cohorts meet periodically to share lessons learned and look for innovative ways of using tablets in the classroom.  Giving faculty the ability to draw out and explain their computations real time is a big plus for tablets.  However, in most teaching situations, the faculty member is shackled to the podium, in that we have not found a good system that allows for wireless projection from the tablet to the older mounted LCD projectors in the classrooms.

Jeff had a brainstorm earlier this week, and together, we tested it – and it worked!

We used our licensed web conferencing system – Wimba Classroom – to act as a wireless projector.  As shown below, we added a fictitious student account to our Blackboard class.  We then logged into Blackboard on the podium computer as this student, and then entered the Wimba room we had set up.  On the tablet, we logged in as the instructor, entered the Wimba room and then shifted to sharing the desktop of the tablet.  The podium computer then projected what we had showing on our tablet.

This gave us the ability to freely move around the room, hand off the tablet to students and let them work problems from their desks, and even capture the screen as it unfolded using the archive feature of Wimba.  In computational classes like math, physics, or other sciences, your students can now become more actively engaged with lessons.

None of us likes being tied to a podium, so this workaround opens up lots of possibilities in our classroom teaching!  Our current cohort of tablet users were excited about the opportunities this affords them.

{Photo Credits: Oliver Regelmann, Wm Chamberlain}

Michael Bugeja’s opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job,” struck a nerve today.  He started by noting that for “most of this decade, professors embraced the pedagogy of engagement, wooing students via technology and ignoring the costs because traditional methods, from textbooks to lectures, purportedly bored students who multitasked in the wireless classroom.”  He then noted the massive cuts occurring across higher education, and suggested that these “facts alone merit an immediate technological and curricular assessment, or else hundreds more professors and staff members could lose their jobs in the coming weeks and months. You may lose your job.”

Bugeja raised the valid point that too often technology decisions are made without factoring in true costs, but he then suggests that teaching centers (like the one at which I work) are part of the problem for pushing the use of technology for teaching and learning.  His final paragraph reads:

• “I challenge anyone objecting to these arguments to look in the eye of secretaries, janitors, adjuncts, advisers, and professors of eliminated programs and say that avatars, clickers, social networks, and tweets—and the pedagogies, IT expenses, and teaching centers supporting them—are more important than feeding their families. To believe we can afford both indicates how incapable many of us are of making the difficult choices that the times require.”

It would be easy to dismiss this article if I did not think that his way of thinking was not reflective of many in mainstream faculty.  I have seen a number of faculty in higher education, as well as teachers in K-12, who see technology as an evil.  In many ways, they want to wall off their classes from the outside world.

That image of a wall is particularly relevant today, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  President Reagan has always been one of my favorites, and one cannot think of him without hearing his exhortation:

“Mr. Gorbachev…tear down this wall!”

That is the line most remember, but I like his comments later in the same speech, in which he stated “this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.”

Bugeja’s comments to reduce technology in order to save jobs ignores the realities of a changing world…much as the Berlin Wall did.  Technology in and of itself is not evil, and technology integrated into education is opening minds, not closing them.  The participatory web and open access to information has created freedoms that never existed in the past.  Those freedoms directly and positively impact learning.  As Derek Bruff noted in a comment to Bugeja’s piece:

“…point out that Bugeja has focused here on the cost of instructional technology, but not on the benefits to student learning. There’s plenty of research that shows that student learning is positively affected by instructional methods that involve more active student engagement before, during, and after class. Technologies that support or facilitate such instructional methods are certainly worth exploring, if our goal is student learning. When conducting a cost-benefit analysis, it’s only appropriate to spend as much time thinking through the benefits as it is thinking through the costs.”

“…if our goal is student learning…”  Well said, Derek!  If one shifts the microscope from technology to student learning, one might find many traditional classrooms in trouble!  President Reagan made his speech in 1987, and during that same period, Chickering and Gamson developed a seminal work on teaching and learning, their Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Instruction.  They synthesized fifty years of research on teaching to develop these principles:

Good practice in undergraduate education:
1. Encourages contact between students and faculty
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Encourages active learning.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Rather than cast technology as an evil, I would suggest that technology is a powerful tool that encourages contact between students and faculty, provides avenues for reciprocity and cooperation among students, creates new venues for active learning, enables more timely and prompt feedback, and gives new opportunities to keep students on task.  High expectations can now be communicated in multiple ways across social media that students are using, and these diverse and multiple paths respect the talents and new ways our students are learning.

We certainly need to be fiscally prudent with taxpayer and tuition-funded monies, but now is not the time to build walls and isolate our students from a 24/7 wired world.  Instead, we need to actively help our students create the learning networks that they will need to thrive in the 21st Century.

So to Mr. Bugeja and others who agree with him, I say “Tear down this wall!”

I just finished reading Dan Willingham’s (2009) book, Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. It is an excellent book full of practical suggestions to improve teaching, both online and in the classroom.

Dan Willingham is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia.  His research focuses on the brain basis of learning and memory and the application of cognitive psychology to education. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine.

In this book, Willingham asks the question many of us have asked.  After all, students are born as naturally curious creatures, so why are they turned off by education, even when they are paying to attend?  Why can they remember the most trivial detail from a TV show or the words to a popular song, but not remember the answers on our tests?  Willingham submits nine principles that he states explain this disconnect.  Through these nine principles, he first attempts to explain how the minds of students work and then relate how to use that knowledge to improve teaching.

Principle 1: People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

Willingham states that our minds are not especially well-suited for thinking; thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain.  So rather than thinking in most situations, we revert to relying on our memories – following courses of action we have taken previously.  Paradoxically though, people tend to find successful thinking pleasurable – we like to solve problems, provided they are not too tough.  John Medina (2008), in his book Brain Rules, stated that we are all powerful and natural explorers, and Willingham would agree.  For problems to be solved, he suggests that the thinker needs adequate information from the environment, sufficient room in working memory, and the required facts and processes stored in long-term memory.  In translating this to our classrooms, he suggests that we stage our instruction so that students have relevant problems to solve, respecting in the process their cognitive limits.  Varying how these problems are presented to students and changing the pace can keep us from losing the attention of our students.

Principle 2: Factual knowledge must precede skill.

Willingham states that there is no doubt that memorizing lists of dry facts is boring, but it is equally true that trying to teach students to analyze or synthesize in the absence of factual knowledge is problematic.  These skills require extensive factual knowledge.  He quoted Einstein, who said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”…and then spends the chapter refuting Einstein.  From his cognitive perspective, knowledge is more important in that it is the prerequisite for imagination.  For Willingham, this implies that in every course reading is fundamental.  We should ensure that a knowledge base is in place before requiring critical thinking.  This does not mean that boring presentations are okay.  One of Medina’s Brain Rules: We don’t pay attention to boring things.  Willingham suggests that one solution is look for some of that knowledge base outside of class – meaningful and pointed assignments using TV and internet videos can provoke learning.

Principle 3: Memory is the residue of thought.

Humans cannot store everything that happens in memory.  So the brain selectively stores memories.  And if one has to think about something carefully, the brain reasons that it might have to think about it again in the future, so it is a memory that should be stored.  Medina stated this in two of his rules – Repeat to Remember and Remember to Repeat.  Willingham provides some interesting research on memory.  The lesson appears to be that material to be learned must spend some time in working memory (they think about it), but equally important, students need to think about the meaning of the material.  It does you little good to use a clever video as an attention getter if at the end of class, the students remember the video but not the material covered.

Principle 4:  We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.

We want students to be able to apply our lessons in new contexts, but the challenge is that the mind does not like abstractions.  The mind prefers the concrete.  Cognitive research therefore suggests that understanding abstractions is really remembering in disguise.   If students are given lots of examples of a concept, the chances improve that they will then see how to apply a concept to new situations.  Many of us have experienced the students who parrot our words back to us…but appear to not really understand.  They exhibit shallow knowledge of the material.  Students with deep knowledge tend to understand not just the parts but the whole.  Therefore, it helps students to not only provide examples but to also ask them to compare the similarities and differences between examples.  Deep knowledge should be your goal, but Willingham also argues that we should be realistic about just how deep our students can get in our short time with them.  At best, we are launching them on a voyage of discovery.

Principle 5: It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell (2008) stated that what Tiger Woods, Mozart, and Bill Gates had in common was ten thousand hours of practice.  Willingham agrees that practice is crucial – it helps one gain competence, helps one improve, helps protect against forgetting, and helps in transfer to new situations.

Principle 6:  Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.

Willingham notes that experts did not start out thinking as experts; they thought as novices.  From his point of view, students are ready to comprehend but not ready to create knowledge.  We should therefore not necessarily place students in positions where they are expected to create new knowledge (unless our reason is to have them take the journey, not create the destination).

Principle 7:  Students are more alike than different in how they think and learn.

There will probably be some push-back on this principle, but Willingham basically states that there really are not different learning styles.  He argues that what we consider as styles are really differences in cognitive abilities.  From his point of view, there is little substantive research that demonstrates the existence of multiple intelligences.  So rather than focusing on differences in students, he suggests focusing on differences in content.  Delivering the same content in multiple ways creates multiple examples and provides change, which adds interest.  Medina might agree with Willingham.  He suggested in Brain Rules that instructors should stimulate more of the senses – and that vision trumps all other senses.

Principle 8:  People do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.

Alvin Toffler (1970) in Future Shock noted that the illiterate of the twenty-first century would not be those who could not read and write, but rather those that could not learn, unlearn, and relearn.  Willingham suggests that intelligence is not a fixed trait, but rather a malleable one that can be impacted through hard work.  Labeling students as dumb or slow becomes self-fulfilling.  He suggests rather that we focus on and praise effort and process, not ability.  If we treat failure as a natural part of the learning process and encourage hard work, we create a more positive learning environment.

Principle 9: Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved.

The previous eight principles apply equally to use as teachers.  We therefore need to practice, reflect on our processes, and seek feedback to improve.

Willingham concludes by noting that cognitive science can help us improve education, but it is not the whole story.  Classes are not just cognitive spaces but also emotional, social, and even motivational spaces.  Small and Vorgan (2008) in their book iBrain suggested that due to a generation immersed in digital media, a new digital divide is developing where younger students are comfortable online but lack social skills, whereas their older teachers are social but need to hone their technical skills.  Willingham would suggest that understanding cognition can help balance these conflicting concerns in the classroom.

His final thought bears repeating:  “Education makes better minds, and knowledge of the mind can make better education.”

Yesterday was the final day of Blackboard World 2009.  It was an enjoyable conference.  I met some interesting colleagues who are all grappling with best ways to teach online.  It was great seeing old friends from Georgia Virtual Technical College.  Twitter as a backchannel was going strong, and I added quite a few new contacts in Twitter.  The hashtag #bbworld09 allowed us to attend a session but keep up with several other sessions simultaneously.  Yet, as compelling as the digital links were, I think I enjoyed most the quiet retrospective back in the hotel room with my colleague Bud Deihl about what the two of us were experiencing.

Thursday was only a half day.  I started the day the way I start every day – up before the sun, coffee, and a review of emails, tweets, Google Reader, and Facebook.

Before the closing keynote, I attended two sessions.  Kathy Keairns of University of Denver discussed leveraging Web 2.0 tools for teaching, research, and fun.  I liked that she provide her wiki handout link.  She focused on four tools:

• Jing

- A great screencast tool that I frequently use
- Free but limited to 5 minute videos

• Picnik

- Free online image editing tool
- Works in the cloud, no downloads
- Good for quick resizing, cropping, and neat effects like Polaroid view

• dVolver

- Cute and quick animated video program’
- Text based cartoon – no audio (other than canned music)

• Gabbly

- Chat Box on the fly
- Just add ‘gabbly.com/‘ in front of any URL

After her session, I attended an interesting session by two gentlemen from England.  Mark Kerrigan and Mark Clements discussed using Web 2.0 as an assessment process to improve institution retention and learning.  They noted that students come to college to get a degree, but the reality they find is that they are enrolled in 24 siloed courses.  At University of Westminster, they have integrated a process where by every student is assigned a “tutor” – what we would call an academic advisor.  After every major learning event in each course, the students are automatically sent a questionnaire/ survey, with the results forwarded to their advisor.  The students are also encouraged to blog about their learning journey after each learning event.  The advisors use the survey results and the blog reflections to help the students see the relevance of their course work and the interconnections with their chosen degree.

U of Westminster is much smaller than VCU, yet I could see parallels between their effort and our Focused Inquiry program for first year students.  Their use of social media could enhance our process in which our students are together with each other and the same faculty member for both FI One and Two.  Food for thought!

The closing keynote was Lester Holt of NBC News.  He gave a very engaging presentation on the parallels between how journalism has been evolving and how education has been evolving. One comment I liked is that both good journalists and good teachers are in the business of informing and provoking deeper understanding.  He said that Brian Williams reminded them all the time that they were writing the first draft of history.

He focused on the timeshift that was occurring, where the new generation of students expect and demand both their news and their learning on demand 24/7.  NBC is partnering with Blackboard to provide its archived news material for online learning (details and costs about NBC Learn to be provided later).  Lester noted that he was not a super student, preferring hands-on to book learning.  He suggested that he might have had better grades if he had had the online opportunities today’s students have!

His keynote was upbeat and a nice way to end three days of learning at Blackboard World 2009.

{Photo Credits: Sheila Chandler, Glenn Harris}