ITiCSE 2014: Monday, Keynote 1, “New Technology, New Learning?” #ITiCSE2014 #ITiCSE

Posted: June 23, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This keynote was presented by Professor Yvonne Rogers, from University College of London. The talk was discussing how we could make learning more accessible and exciting for everyone and encourage students to think, to create and share our view. Professor Rogers started by sharing a tweet by Conor Gearty on a guerrilla lecture, with tickets to be issued at 6:45pm, for LSE students. (You can read about what happened here.) They went to the crypt of Westminster Cathedral and the group, split into three smaller groups, ended up discussing the nature of Hell and what it entailed. This was a discussion on religion but, because of the way that it was put together, it was more successful than a standard approach – context shift, suspense driving excitement and engagement. (I wonder how much suspense I could get with a guerrilla lecture on polymorphism… )

Professor Rogers says that suspense matters, as the students will be wondering what is coming next, and this will hopefully make them more inquisitive and thus drive them along the path to scientific enquiry. The Ambient Wood was a woodland full of various technologies for student pairs, with technology and probes, an explorative activity. You can read about the Ambient Wood here. The periscope idea ties videos into the direction that you are looking – a bit like Google Glass without a surveillance society aspect (a Woodopticon?). (We worked on similar ideas at Adelaide for an early project in the Arts Precinct to allow student exploration to drive the experience in arts, culture and botanical science areas.) All of the probes were recorded in the virtual spatial environment matching the wood so that, after the activity, the students could then look at what they did. Thus, a group of 10-12 year olds had an amazing day exploring and discovering, but in a way that was strongly personalised, with an ability to see it from the bird’s eye view above them.

And, unsurprisingly, we moved on to MOOCs, with an excellent slide on MOOC HYSTERIA. Can we make these as engaging as the guerrilla lecture or the ambient wood?

hysertia

MOOCs, as we know, are supposed to increase our reach and access to education but, as Professor Rogers noted, it is also a technology that can make the lecturer a “bit of a star”. This is one of the most honest assessments of some of the cachet that I’ve heard – bravo, Professor Rogers. What’s involved in a MOOC? Well, watching things, doing quizzes, and there’s probability a lot of passive, rather than active, learning. Over 60% of the people who sign up to do a MOOC, from the Stanford experience, have a degree – doing Stanford for free is a draw for the already-degreed. How can we make MOOCs fulfil their promise, give us good learning, give us active learning and so on? Learning analytics give us some ideas and we can data mine to try and personalise the course to the student. But this has shifted what our learning experience is and do we have any research to show the learning value of MOOCs?

In 2014, 400 students taking a Harvard course:

  1. Learned in a passive way
  2. Just want to complete
  3. Take the easy option
  4. Were unable to apply what they learned
  5. Don’t reflect on or talk to their colleagues about it.

Which is not what we want? What about the Flipped Classroom? Professor Rogers attributed this to Khan but I’m not sure I agree with this as there were people, Mazur for example, who were doing this in Peer Instruction well before Khan – or at least I thought so. Corrections in the questions please! The idea of the flip is that we don’t have content delivery in lectures with the odd question – we have content beforehand and questions in class. What is the reality?

  1. Still based on chalk and talk.
  2. Is it simply a better version of a bad thing?
  3. Are students more motivated and more active?
  4. Very labour-intensive for the teacher.

So where’s the evidence? Well, it does increase interaction in class between instructors and students. It does allow for earlier identification of misconceptions. Pierce and Fox, 2012, found that it increased exam results for pharmacology students. It also fostered critical thinking in case scenarios. Maybe this will work for 10s-100s – what about classes of thousands? Can we flip to this? (Should we even have classes of this size is another good question)

Then there’s PeerWise, Paul Denny (NZ), where there is active learning in which students create questions, answer them and get feedback. Students create the questions and then they get to try other student’s questions and can then rate the question and rate the answer. (We see approaches like this, although not as advanced, in other technologies such as Piazza.)

How effective is this? Performance in PeerWise correlated with exam marks (Anyadi, Green and Tang, 2013), with active student engagement. It’s used for revision before the exams, and you get hihg-quality questions and answers, while supporting peer interaction. Professor Rogers then showed the Learning Pyramid, from the National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine. The PeerWise system plays into the very high retention area.

pyramid

Professor Rogers then moved on to her own work, showing us a picture of the serried rank nightmare of a computer-based classroom: students in rows, isolated and focused on their screens. Instead of ‘designing for one’, why don’t we design to orchestrate shared activities, with devices that link to public displays and can actively foster collaboration. One of Professor Rogers’ students is looking at ways to share simulations across tablets and screens. This included “4Decades“, a a simulation of climate management, with groups representing the different stakeholders to loo at global climate economics. We then saw a video that I won’t transcribe. The idea is that group work encourages discussion, however we facilitate it, and this tends to leading to teaching others in the sharing of ideas. Another technology that Professor Rogers’ group have developed in this space is UniPad: orchestrating collaborate activities across multiple types of devices, with one device per 6-7 students, and used in classes without many researchers present. Applications of this technology include budgeting for students (MyBank), with groups interacting and seeing the results on a public display. Given how many students operate in share houses collaboratively, this is quite an interesting approach to the problem. From studies on this, all group members participated and used the tablet as a token for discussion, taking ownership of a part of the problem. This also extended to reflection on other’s activities, including identifying selfish behaviour on the part of other people. (Everyone who has had flatmates is probably groaning at the moment. Curse you, Love Tarot Pay-By-The-Minute Telephone Number, which cost me and my flatmates a lot of dollars after a flatmate skipped out on us.)

The next aspect Professor Rogers discussed was physical creation toolkits, such as MaKey MaKey, where you can build alternative input for a computer, based on a simple printed circuit board with alligator clips and USB cables. The idea is simple: you can turn anything you like into a keyboard key. Demonstrations included a banana space bar, a play dough MarioKart gamepad, and many other things (a water bowl in front of the machine became a cat-triggered photo booth). This highlights one of the most important aspects of thinking about learning: learning for life. How can we keep people interested in learning in the face of busy, often overfull, lives when many people still think about learning as something that had to be endured on their pathway into the workforce? (Paging my climbing friends with their own climbing wall: you could make the wall play music if you wanted to. Just saying.)

One of the computers stopped working during a trial of the MaKey MaKey system with adult learners and the collaboration that ensued changed the direction of the work and more people were assigned to a single kit. Professor Rogers showed a small video of a four-person fruit orchestra of older people playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. (MORE KIWI!) This elicited a lot of ideas, including for their grandchildren and own parent, transforming exercise to be more fun, to help people learn fundamental knowledge skills and give good feedback. We often heavily intervene in the learning experience and the reflection of the Fruit Orchestra was that intervening less in self-driven activities such as MaKey MaKey might be a better way to go, to increase autonomy and thus drive engagement.

Next was the important question: How can we gets to create and code, where coding is just part of the creating? Can we learn to code differently beyond just choosing a particular language? We have many fascinating technologies but what is the suite of tools over the top that will drive creativity and engagement in this area, to produce effective learning? The short video shown demonstrated a pop-out prefabricated system, where physical interfaces and gestures across those represented coding instructions: coding without any typing at all. (Previous readers will remember my fascination with pre-literate programming.) This early work, electronics on a sheet, is designed to be given away because the production cost is less than 3 Euros. The project is called “code me” from University College London and is designed to teach logic without people realising it: the fundamental building block of computational thinking. Future work includes larger blocks with Bluetooth input and sensors. (I can’t find a web page for this.)

What role should technology play in learning? Professor Rogers mentioned thinking about this in two ways. The inside learning using technology to think about the levels students to reach to foster attainment: personalise, monitor, motivate, flexible, adaptive. The outside learning approach is to work with other people away from the screen: collaborate, create, connect, reflect and play. Professor Rogers believes that the choice is ours but that technology should transform learning to make it active, creative, collaborative, exciting (some other things I didn’t catch) and to recognise the role of suspense in making people think.

An interesting and thought-provoking keynote.

 

CSEDU, Day 1, Keynote 2, “Mathematics Teaching: is the future syncretic?” (#csedu14 #csedu #AdelEd)

Posted: April 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This is an extension of the position paper that was presented this morning. I must be honest and say that I have a knee-jerk reaction when I run across titles like this. There’s always the spectre of Rand or Gene Ray in compact phrases of slightly obscure terminology. (You should probably ignore me, I also twitch every time I run across digital hermeneutics and that’s perfectly legitimate.) The speaker is Larissa Fradkin who is trying to improve the quality of mathematics teaching and overall interest in mathematics – which is a good thing and so I should probably be far more generous about “syncretic”. Let’s review the definition of syncretic:

Again, from Wikipedia, Syncretism /ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/ is the combining of different, often seemingly contradictory beliefs, while melding practices of various schools of thought. (The speaker specified this to religious and philosophical schools of thought.)

There’s a reference in the talk to gnosticism, which combined oriental mysticism, Judaism and Christianity. Apparently, in this talk we are going to have myths debunked regarding the Maths Wars of Myths, including traditionalist myths and constructivist myths. Then discuss the realities in the classroom.

Two fundamental theories of learning were introduced: traditionalist and constructivist. Apparently, these are drummed into poor schoolteachers and yet we academics are sadly ignorant of these. Urm. You have to be pretty confident to have a go at Piaget: “Piaget studied urchins and then tried to apply it to kids.” I’m really not sure what is being said here but the speaker has tried to tell two jokes which have fallen very flat and, regrettably, is making me think that she doesn’t quite grasp what discovery learning is. Now we are into Guided Teaching and scaffolding with Vygotsky, who apparently, as a language teacher, was slightly better than a teacher of urchins.

The first traditionalist myth is that intelligence = implicit memory (no conscious awareness) + basic pattern recognition. Oh, how nice, the speaker did a lot of IQ tests and went from 70 to 150 in 5 tests. I don’t think many people in the serious educational community places much weight  on the assessment of intelligence through these sorts of test – and the objection to standardised testing is coming from the edu research community of exactly those reasons. I commented on this speaker earlier and noted that I felt that she was having an argument that was no longer contemporary. Sadly, my opinion is being reinforced. The next traditionalist myth is that mathematics should be taught using poetry, other mnemonics and coercion.

What? If the speaker is referring to the memorisation of the multiplication tables, we are taking about a definitional basis for further development that occupies a very short time in the learning phase. We are discussing a type of education that is already identified as negative as if the realisation that mindless repetition and extrinsic motivational factors are counter-productive. Yes, coercion is an old method but let’s get to what you’re proposing as an alternative.

Now we move on to the constructivist myths. I’m on the edge of my seat. We have a couple of cartoons which don’t do anything except recycle some old stereotypes. So, the first myth is “Only what students discover for themselves is truly learned.” So the problem here is based on Rebar, 2007, met study. Revelation: Child-centred, cognitively focused and open classroom approaches tend to perform poorly.

Hmm, not our experience.

The second myth is both advanced and debunked by a single paper, that there are only two separate and distinct ways to teach mathematics: conceptual understanding and drills. Revelation: Conceptual advanced are invariably built on the bedrock of technique.

Myth 3: Math concepts are best understood and mastered when presented in context, in that way the underlying math concept will follow automatically. The speaker used to teach with engineering examples but abandoned them because of the problem of having to explain engineering problems, engineering language and then the problem. Ah, another paper from Hung-Hsi Wu, UCB, “The Mathematician and Mathematics Education Reform.” No, I really can’t agree with this as a myth. Situated learning is valid and it works, providing that the context used is authentic and selected carefully.

Ok, I must confess that I have some red flags going up now – while I don’t know the work of Hung-Hsi Wu, depending on a single author, especially one whose revelatory heresy is close to 20 years old, is not the best basis for a complicated argument such as this. Any readers with knowledge in this should jump on to the comments and get us informed!

Looking at all of these myths, I don’t see myths, I see straw men. (A straw man is a deliberately weak argument chosen because it is easy to attack and based on a simplified or weaker version of the problem.)

I’m in agreement with many of the outcomes that Professor Fradkin is advocating. I want teachers to guide but believe that they can do it in the constriction of learning environments that support constructivist approaches. Yes, we should limit jargon. Yes, we should move away from death-by-test. Yes, Socratic dialogue is a great way to go.

However, as always, if someone says “Socratic dialogue is the way to go but I am not doing it now” then I have to ask “Why not?” Anyone who has been to one of my sessions knows that when I talk about collaboration methods and student value generation, you will be collaborating before your seat has had a chance to warm up. It’s the cornerstone of authentic teaching that we use the methods that we advocate or explain why they are not suitable – cognitive apprenticeship requires us to expose our selves as we got through the process we’re trying to teach!

Regrettably, I think my initial reaction of cautious mistrust of the title may have been accurate. (Or I am just hopelessly biassed by an initial reaction although I have been trying to be positive.) I am trying very hard to reinterpret what has been said. But there is a lot of anecdote and dependency upon one or two “visionary debunkers” to support a series of strawmen presented as giant barriers to sensible teaching.

Yes, listening to students and adapting is essential but this does not actually require one to abandon constructivist or traditionalist approaches because we are not talking about the pedagogy here, we’re talking about support systems. (Your take on that may be different.)

There is some evidence presented at the end which is, I’m sorry to say, a little confusing although there has obviously been a great deal of success for an unlisted, uncounted number and unknown level of course – success rates improved from 30 passing to 70% passing and no-one had to be trained for the exam. I would very much like to get some more detail on this as claiming that the syncretic approach is the only way to reach 70% is essential is a big claim. Also, a 70% pass rate is not all that good – I would get called on to the carpet if I did that for a couple of offerings. (And, no, we don’t dumb down the course to improve pass rate – we try to teach better.)

Now we move into on-line techniques. Is the flipped classroom a viable approach? Can technology “humanise” the classroom? (These two statements are not connected, for me, so I’m hoping that this is not an attempt to entail one by the other.) We then moved on to a discussion of Khan, who Professor Fradkin is not a fan of, and while her criticisms of Khan are semi-valid (he’s not a teacher and it shows), her final statement and dismissal of Khan as a cram-preparer is more than a little unfair and very much in keeping with the sweeping statements that we have been assailed by for the past 45 minutes.

I really feel that Professor Fradkin is conflating other mechanisms with blended and flipped learning – flipped learning is all about “me time” to allow students to learn at their own pace (as she notes) but then she notes a “Con” of the Khan method of an absence of “me time”. What if students don’t understand the recorded lectures at all? Well… how about we improve the material? The in-class activities will immediately expose faulty concept delivery and we adapt and try again (as the speaker has already noted). We most certainly don’t need IT for flipped learning (although it’s both “Con” point 3 AND 4 as to why Khan doesn’t work), we just need to have learning occur before we have the face-to-face sessions where we work through the concepts in a more applied manner.

Now we move onto MOOCs. Yes, we’re all cautious about MOOCs. Yes, there are a lot of issues. MOOCs will get rid of teachers? That particular strawman has been set on fire, pushed out to sea, brought back, set on fire again and then shot into orbit. Where they set it on fire again. Next point? Ok, Sebastian Thrun made an overclaim that the future will have only 10 higher ed institutions in 50 years. Yup. Fire that second strawman into orbit. We’ve addressed Professor Thrun before and, after all, he was trying to excite and engage a community over something new and, to his credit, he’s been stepping back from that ever since.

Ah, a Coursera course that came from a “high-quality” US University. It is full of imprecise language, saying How and not Why, with a Monster generator approach. A quick ad hominen attack on the lecturer in the video (He looked like he had been on drugs for 10 years). Apparently, and with no evidence, Professor Fradkin can guarantee that no student picked up any idea of what a function was from this course.

Apparently some Universities are becoming more cautious about MOOCs. Really.

I’m sorry to have editorialised so badly during this session but this has been a very challenging talk to listen to as so much of the underlying material has been, to my understanding, misrepresented at least. A very disappointing talk over all and one that could have been so much better – I agree with a lot of the outcomes but I don’t really think that this is not the way to lead towards it.

Sadly, already someone has asked to translate the speaker’s slides into German so that they can send it to the government! Yes, text books are often bad and a lack of sequencing is a serious problem. Once again I agree with the conclusion but not the argument… Heresy is an important part of our development of thought, and stagnation is death, but I think that we always need to be cautious that we don’t sensationalise and seek strawmen in our desire to find new truths that we have to reach through heresy.

 

SIGCSE 2014: Collecting and Analysing Student Data 1, “AP CS Data”, Thursday 3:15 – 5:00pm (#SIGCSE2014)

Posted: March 7, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The first paper, “Measuring Demographics and Performance in Computer Science Education at a Nationwide Scale using AP CS Data”, from Barbara Ericson and Mark Guzdial, has been mentioned in these hallowed pages before, as well as Mark’s blog (understandably). Barb’s media commitments have (fortunately) slowed down btu it was great to see so many people and the media taking the issue of under-representation in AP CS seriously for a change. Mark presented and introduced the Advanced Placement CS program which is the only nationwide measure of CS education in the US. This allows us tto use the AP CS to compare with other AP exams, find who is taking the AP CS exams and how well do they perform. Looking longitudinally, how has this changed and what influences exam-taking? (There’s been an injection of funds into some states – did this work?)

The AP are exams you can take while in secondary school that gives you college credit or placement in college (similar to the A levels, as Mark put it). There’s an audit process of the materials before a school can get accreditation. The AP exam is scored 1-5, where 3 is passing. The overall stats are a bit worrying, when Back, Hispanic and female students are grossly under-represented. Look at AP Calculus and this really isn’t as true for female students and there is better representation for Black and Hispanic students. (CS has 4% Black and 7.7% Hispanic students when America’s population is 13.1% Black students and 16.9% Hispanic) The pass rates for AP Calculus are about the same as for AP CS so what’s happening?

Looking at a (very cool) diagram, you see that AP overall is female heavy – CS is a teeny, tiny dot and is the most male dominated area, and 1/10th the size of calculus. Comparing AP CS to the others. there has been steady growth since 1997 in Calculus, Biology, Stats, Physics, Chem and Env Science AP exams – but CS is a flat, sunken pancake that hasn’t grown much at all. Mark then analysed the data by states, counting the number of states in each category along features such as ‘schools passing audit/10K pop’, #exams/pop and % passing exams. Mark then moved onto diversity data: female, Black and Hispanic test takers. It’s worth noting that Jill Pala made the difference to the entire state she taught in, raising the number of women. Go, Jill! (And she asked a really good question in my talk, thanks again, Jill!)

How has this changed overtime? California and Maryland have really rapid growth in exam takers over the last 6 years, with NSF involvement. But Michigan and Indiana have seen much less improvement. In Georgia, there’s overall improvement, but mostly women and Hispanic students, but not as much for Black students. The NSF funding appears to have paid off, GA and MA have improved over the last 6 years but female test takers have still not exceeded 25% in the last 6 years.

Why? What influences exam taking?

  1. The wealth in the state influences number of schools passing audit
  2. Most of the variance in the states comes from under-representation in certain groups.

It’s hard to add wealth but if you want more exam takers, increase your under-represtentation group representation! That’s the difference between the states.

Conclusions? It’s hard to compare things most of the time and the AP CS is the best national pulse we have right now. Efforts to improve are having an effect but wealth matters, as in the rest of education.

All delivered at a VERY high speed but completely comprehensible – I think Mark was trying to see how fast I can blog!

 

Great News, Another Group Paper Accepted!

Posted: June 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Our Computer Science Education Research group has been doing the usual things you do when forming a group: stating a vision, setting goals, defining objectives and then working like mad. We’ve been doing a lot of research and we’ve been publishing our work to get peer review, general feedback and a lot of discussion going. This year, we presented a paper in SIGCSE, we’ve already had a paper accepted for DEXA in Vienna (go, Thushari!) and, I’m very pleased to say that we’ve been just been notified that our paper “A Fast Measure for Identifying At-Risk Students in Computer Science” has been accepted as one of the research papers for ICER 2012, in Auckland, New Zealand.

This is great news for our group and I’m really looking forward to some great discussion on our work.

I’ll see some of you at ICER!

Click here to go to the ICER 2012 Information Page!

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