CDEDU, Day 3, “Through the Lens of Third Space Theory: Possibilities For Research Methodologies in Educational Technologies”, (#csedu14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 3, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, education, higher education, learning, lens, liminal state, students, teachers, third space theory, threshold concepts Leave a commentThis talk was presented by Kathy Jordan and Jennifer Elsden-Clifton, both from RMIT University. They discussed educational technologies through another framework that they have borrowed from another area: third space theory. This allows us to describe how teachers and students use complex roles in their activities.
HALlo.
A lot of educational research is focused on the use of technology and can be rather theory light (no arguments from me), leading to technological evangelism that is highly determinist. (I’m assuming that the speakers mean technological determinism, which is the belief that it’s a society’s technology that drives its culture and social structures, after Veblen.) The MOOC argument was discussed again. Today, the speakers were planning to offer an alternative way to think about technology and use of technology. As always, don’t just plunk technology down in the classroom and expect it to achieve your learning and teaching goals. Old is not always bad and new is not always good, in effect. (I often say this and then present the reverse as well. Binary thinking is for circuits.)
“The real voyage of discover consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (Proust, cited in Canfield, Hanson and Zlkman, 2002)
“With whose eyes were my eyes crafted?” (Castor, 1991)
Basically, we bring ourselves to the landscape and have to think about why we see what we;re seeing. The new methodology proposed moves away from a simplistic, techno-centric approach and towards Third Space Theory. Third Space Theory is used to explore and understand the spaces in between two or more discourses, conceptualisations or binaries. (Bhabna, 1994). Thirdspace is this a “come together” space (Soja, 1996) to combine the first and second spaces and then enmesh the binaries that characterise these spaces. This also reduces the implicit privileging of one conceptual space over another.
Conceptualisations of the third space include bridges, navigational spaces and transformative spaces. Interesting, from an editorial perspective, I find the binary notion of MOOC good/MOOC bad, which we often devolve to, is one of the key problems in discussing MOOCs because it often forces people into responding to a straw man and I think that this work on Thirdspaces is quite strong without having to refer to a perceived necessity for MOOCs.
Thirdspace theory is used across a variety of disciplines at the moment. Firstspace in our context could be face-to-face learning, the second space is “on-line learning” and the speakers argue that this binary classification is inherently divisive. Well, yes it is, but this assumes that you are not perceiving these are naturally overlapping when we consider blended learning, which we’ve really had as a concept since 1999. There are definitely problems when people move through f2f and on-line as if they are exclusive binary aspects of some educational Janus but I wonder how much of that is lack of experience and exposure rather than a strict philosophical structure – but there is no doubt that thinking about these things as a continuum is beneficial and if Thirdspace theory brings people to it – then hooray!
(As Hugh noted yesterday, MOOC got people interested in on-line learning, which made it worth running MOOCs. Then, hooray!)
A lot of the discussion of technology in education is a collection of Shibboleths and “top of the head” solutions that have little maturity or strategy behind them, so a new philosophical approach to this is most definitely welcome and I need to read up more on Thirdspace, obviously.
The speakers provided some examples, including some learning fusion around Blackboard collaborate and the perceived inability of pre-service teachers to be able to move personal technology literacy into their new workplace, due to fear. So, in the latter case, Thirdspace allowed an analysis of the tensions involved and to assist the pre-service teachers in negotiating the “unfamiliar terrain” (Bhabha, 1992) of sanctioned technology frameworks in schools. (An interesting example was having t hand write an e-mail first before being allowed to enter it electronically – which is an extreme sanctioning of the digital space.)
I like the idea of the lens that Thirdspace provides but wonder whether we are seeing the liminal state that we would normally associate with a threshold concept. Rather than a binary model, we are seeing a layered model, where the between is neither stable nor clearly understood as it is heavily personalised. There is, of course, no guarantee that having a skill in one area makes it transferable to another because of the inherent contextual areas (hang on, have we gone into NeoPiaget!).
Anything that removes the potential classification of any category as a lower value or undesirable other is a highly desirable thing for me. The notion that transitional states, however we define them, are a necessary space that occurs between two extremes, whether they are dependent or opposing concepts, strongly reduces the perceived privilege of the certainty that so many people confuse with being knowledgeable and informed. Our students, delightful dualists that they are, often seek black/white dichotomies and it is part of our job to teach them that grey is not only a colour but an acceptable colour.
I think that labelling the MOOC discussion as a techno-determinist and shallow argument doesn’t really reflect the maturity of the discussion in the contemporary MOOC space and is a bit of a dismissive binary, if I can be so bold. We did discuss this in the questions and the speakers agreed that the discussion of MOOC has matured and was definitely in advance of the rather binary and outmoded description presented in the first keynote that I railed against. Yes, MOOCs have been presented by evangelists and profit makers as something but the educational community has done a lot of work to refine this and very few of the practitioners I know who are still involved in MOOC are what I would call techno-determinists. Techno-utopians, maybe, techno-optimisits, often, but techno-skeptics and serious, serious educational theorists who are also techno-optional, just as often.
The other potential of Third Space Theory is that it “provides a framework for destabilisation” and moving beyond past patterns rather than relying on old binary conceptualisations of new/old good/bad updated/outmoded. Projecting any single method to everything is always challenging and I suspect it’s a little bit of a hay hominid but the resulting questions clarified that the potential of Thirdspace is in being capable of deliberately rejecting staid and binary thinking, without introducing a new mode of privilege on to the new Thirdspace model. I’m not sure that I agree with all of the points here but I certainly have a lot to think about.
CSEDU, Day 2, Invited Talk, “How are MOOCs Disrupting the Educational Landscape?”, (#CSEDU14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: Avalanche, cMOOC, computer supported education, CSEDU, csedu14, education, educational landscape, FutureLearn, higher education, Hugh Davis, learning, MOOC, moocs, Napster, Saints FC, Southampton, student, xMOOC 3 CommentsI’ve already spent some time with Professor Hugh Davis, from Southampton, and we’ve had a number of discussions already around some of the matters we’re discussing today, including the issue when you make your slides available before a talk and people react to the content of the slides without having the context of the talk! (This is a much longer post for another time.) Hugh’s slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/hcd99.
As Hugh noted, this is a very timely topic but he’s planning to go through the slides at speed so I may not be able to capture all of it. He tweeted his slides earlier, as I noted, and his comment that he was going to be debunking things earned him a minor firestorm. But, to summarise, his answer to the questions is “not really, probably” but we’ll come back to this. For those who don’t know, Southampton is about 25,000 students, Russell Group and Top 20 in the UK, with a focus on engineering and oceanography.
Back in 2012, the VC came back infused with the desire to put together a MOOC (apparently, Australians talked them into it – sorry, Hugh) and in December, 2012, Hugh was called in and asked to do MOOCs. Those who are keeping track will now that there was a lot of uncertainty about MOOCs in 2012 (and there still is) so the meeting called for staff to talk about this was packed – in a very big room. But this reflected excitement on the part of people – which waving around “giant wodges” of money to do blended learning had failed to engender, interestingly enough. Suddenly, MOOCs are more desirable because people wanted to do blended learning as long as you used the term MOOC. FutureLearn was produced and things went from there. (FutureLearn now has a lot of courses in it but I’ve mentioned this before. Interestingly, Monash is in this group so it’s not just a UK thing. Nice one, Monash!)
In this talk, Hugh’s planning to intro MOOCs, discuss the criticism, look at Higher Ed, ask why we are investing in MOOCs, what we can get out of it and then review the criticisms again. Hugh then defined what the term MOOC means: he defined it as a 10,000+, free and open registration, on-line course, where a course runs at a given time with a given cohort, without any guarantee of accreditation. (We may argue about this last bit later on.) MOOCs are getting shorter – with 4-6 weeks being the average for a MOOC, mostly due to fears of audience attrition over time.
The dreaded cMOOC/xMOOC timeline popped up from Florida Institute of Technology’s History of MOOCs:
and then we went into the discussion of the stepped xMOOC with instructor led and a well-defined and assessable journey and the connectivist cMOOC where the network holds the knowledge and the learning comes from connections. Can we really actually truly separate MOOCs into such distinct categories? A lot of xMOOC forums show cMOOC characteristics and you have to wonder how much structure you can add to a cMOOC without it getting “x”-y. So what can we say about the definition of courses? How do we separate courses you can do any time from the cohort structure of the MOOC? The synchronicity of human collision is a very connectivisty idea which is embedded implicitly in every xMOOC because of the cohort.
What do you share? Content or the whole course? In MOOCS, the whole experience is available to you rather than just bits and pieces. And students tend to dip in and out when they can, rather than just eating what is doled out, which suggests that they are engaging. There are a lot of providers, who I won’t list here, but many of them are doing pretty much the same thing.
What makes a MOOC? Short videos, on-line papers, on-line activities, links toe external resources, discussions and off platform activity – but we can no longer depend upon students being physical campus students and thus we can’t guarantee that they share our (often privileged) access to resources such as published journals. So Southampton often offer précis of things that aren’t publicly available. Off platform is an issue for people who are purely on-line.
If you have 13,000 people you can’t really offer to mark all their essays so assessment has to depend upon the self-motivated students and they have to want to understand what is going on – self evaluation and peer review have to be used. This is great, according to Hugh, because we will have a great opportunity to find out more about peer review than we ever have before.
What are the criticisms? Well, they’re demographically pants – most of the students are UK (77%) and then a long way down US (2%), with some minor representation from everywhere else. This isn’t isolated to this MOOC. 70% of MOOC users come from the home country, regardless of where it’s run. Of course, we also know that the people who do MOOCs also tend to have degrees – roughly 70% from the MOOCS@Edinburgh2013 Report #1. These are serial learners (philomaths) who just love to learn things but don’t necessarily have the time or inclination (or resources) to go back to Uni. But for those who register, many don’t do anything, and those who do drop out at about 20% a week – more weeks, more drop-out. Why didn’t people continue? We’ll talk about this later. (See http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com) But is drop out a bad thing? We’ll comeback to this.
Then we have the pedagogy, where we attempt to put learning design into our structure in order to achieve learning outcomes – but this isn’t leading edge pedagogy and there is no real interaction between educators and learners. There are many discussions, and they happen in volume, but this discussion is only over 10% of the community, with 1% making the leading and original contributions. 1% of 10-100,000 can be a big number compared to a standard class room.
What about the current Higher Ed context – let’s look at “The Avalanche Report“. Basically, the education business is doomed!!! DOOOMED, I tell you! which is hardly surprising for a report that mostly originates from a publishing house who wants to be a financially successful disruptor. Our business model is going to collapse! We are going to have our Napster moment! Cats lying down with dogs! In the HE context, fees are going up faster than the value of degree (across most of the developed world, apparently). There is an increased demand for flexibility of study, especially for professional development, in the time that they have. The alternative educational providers are also cashing up and growing. With all of this in mind, on-line education should be a huge growing market and this is what the Avalanche report uses to argue that the old model is doomed. To survive, Unis will have to either globalise or specialise – no room in the middle. MOOCs appear to be the vanguard of the on-line program revolution, which explains why there is so much focus.
Is this the end of the campus? It’s not the end of the pithy slogan, that’s for sure. So let’s look at business models. How do we make money on MOOCs? Freemium where there are free bits and value-added bits The value-adds can be statements of achievement or tutoring. There are also sponsored MOOCs where someone pays us to make a MOOC (for their purposes) or someone pays us to make a MOOC they want (that we can then use elsewhere.) Of course there’s also just the old “having access to student data” which is a very tasty dish for some providers.
What does this mean to Southampton? Well it’s a kind of branding and advertising for Southampton to extend their reputation. It might also generate new markets, bring them in via Informal Learning, move to Non-Formal Learning, then up to the Modules of Formal Learning and then doing whole programmes under more Formal learning. Hugh thinks this is optimistic, not least because not many people have commodified their product into individual modules for starters. Hugh thinks it’s about 60,000 Pounds to make a MOOC, which is a lot of money, and so you need a good business model to justify dropping this wad of cash. But you can get 60K back from enough people with a small fee. Maybe on-line learning is another way to get students than the traditional UK “boarding school” degrees. But the biggest thing is when people accept on-line certification as this is when the product becomes valuable to the people who want the credentials. Dear to my heart, is of course that this also assists in the democratisation of education – which is a fantastic thing.
What can we gain from MOOCs? Well, we can have a chunk of a running course for face-to-face students that runs as a MOOC and the paying students have benefited from interacting with the “free attendees” on the MOOC but we have managed to derive value from it. It also allows us to test things quickly and at scale, for rapid assessment of material quality and revision – it’s hard not to see the win-win here. This automatically drives the quality up as it’s for all of your customers, not just the scraps that you can feed to people who can’t afford to pay for it. Again, hooray for democratisation.
Is this the End of the Lecture? Possibly, especially as we can use the MOOC for content and flip to use the face-to-face for much more valuable things.
There are on-line degrees and there is a lot of money floating around looking for brands that they will go on-line (and by brand, we mean the University of X.) Venture capitalist, publishers and start-ups are sniffing around on-line so there’s a lot of temptation out there and a good brand will mean a lot to the right market. What about fusing this and articulating the degree programme, combining F2F modules. on-line, MOOC, and other aspects.
Ah, the Georgia Tech On-line Masters in Computer Science has been mentioned. This was going to be a full MOOC with free and paying but it’s not fully open, for reasons that I need to put into another post. So it’s called a MOOC but it’s really an on-line course. You may or may not care about this – I do, but I’m in agreement with Hugh.
The other thing about MOOC is that we are looking at big, big data sets where these massive cohorts can be used to study educational approaches and what happens when we change learning and assessment at the big scale.
So let’s address the criticisms:
- Pedagogically Simplistic! Really, as simple as a lecture? Is it worse – no, not really and we have space to innovate!
- No support and feedback! There could be, we’d just have to pay for it.
- Poor completion rates! Retention is not the aim, satisfaction is. We are not dealing with paying students.
- No accreditation! There could be but, again, you’d have to pay for someone to mark and accredit.
- This is going to kill Universities! Hugh doesn’t think so but we’ll had to get a bit nimble. So only those who are not agile and responsive to new business models may have problems – and we may have to do some unbundling.
Who is actually doing MOOCs? The life-long learner crowd (25-65, 505/50 M/F and nearly always have a degree). People who are after a skill (PD and CPD). Those with poor access to Higher education, unsurprisingly. There’s also a tiny fourth cohort who are those who are dipping a toe in Uni and are so small as to be insignificant. (The statistics source was questioned, somewhat abruptly, in the middle of Hugh’s flow, so you should refer to the Edinburgh report.”
The patterns of engagement were identified as auditing, completing and sampling, from the Coursera “Emerging Student Pattersn in Open-Enrollment MOOCs”.
To finish up, MOOCs can give us more choice and more flexibility. Hugh’s happy because people want do online learning and this helps to develop capacity to develop high quality on-line courses. This does lead to challenges for institutional strategy: changing beliefs, changing curriculum design, working with the right academic staff (and who pays them), growing teams of learning designers and multimedia producers, legal matters, speed and agility, budget and marketing. These are commercial operations so you have a lot of commercial issues to worry about! (For our approach, going Creative Commons was one of the best things we every did.)
Is it the end of the campus? … No, not really, Hugh thinks that the campus will keep going and there’ll just be more on-line learning. You don’t stop going to see good music because you’ve got a recording, for example.
And now for the conclusions! MOOCs are a great marketing device and have a good reach for people who were out of reach before, But we can take high quality content and re-embed back into blended learning, use it to drive teaching practice change, get some big data and building capacity for online learning.
This may be the vanguard of on-line disruption but if we’re ready for it, we can live for it!
Well, that was a great talk but goodness, does Hugh speak quickly! Have a look at his slides in the context of this because I think he’s balanced an optimistic view of the benefits with a sufficient cynical eye on the weasels who would have us do this for their own purposes.
CSEDU, Day 1, Keynote 2, “Mathematics Teaching: is the future syncretic?” (#csedu14 #csedu #AdelEd)
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: blogging, community, computer science education, computer supported education, csedu14, design, education, educational problem, heresy, learning, student perspective, students, syncretic, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentThis 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.
CSEDU Day 1, Session 1, “Information Technologies Supporting Learning”, Paper 3. (#csedu14 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, csedu14, education, higher education, learning, learning environments, moocs, time, time factors Leave a commentThe final talk, “The Time Factor in MOOCs” was not presented because the speaker didn’t show up. So we talked about other things.
I can only hope that the problem with the speaker was not timezone related!
CSEDU Day 1, Session 1, “Information Technologies Supporting Learning”, Paper 2. (#csedu14 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, csedu14, education, grey literature, higher education, learning, learning environments, MOOC, moocs, motivations, Southampton, Su White Leave a comment(I seem to be writing a lot so I’ll break these posts into smaller pieces. If I can fit these two talks into one post, I will. Apologies, dear reader, for the eye strain.)
The second talk was “MOOCs for Universities and Learners” presented by the irrepressible Su White (@suukii, material available here), from Southampton, who I have had the pleasure to meet before. Manuel Leon, the third author, is one of the PhD students who will be helping out and is also from Barcelona. Southampton has done MOOCs in the FutureLearn context. There’s quite a lot on offer in Future Learn and Southampton wanted something multi-disciplinary so they chose Web Science, which is also what MOOCs actually are so it was all somewhat self-referential in the good sense of reinforcement rather than the bad sense of Narcissus. The overwhelming lesson, not in the paper, is that getting academics to do stuff for this kind of environment is like herding cats once you start dealing with a team of excerpts. Goodness, they have a MOOC manager. (I don’t even know the poor person but I want to send them a nice calming box of chocolates.) There is a furious level of activity in an engaged on-line community and keeping up with this is very tricky – FAQs really help!
So where is FutureLearn today? There are nearly 30 institutions involved to date. Su sees a strong link with what went before, with OER and student desire for different learning approaches. The team wanted to know what motivated students and they wanted to be prepared and wanted to collect data from real live students. This includes the institution’s motivations and the student motivations. For the HEI, motivation was assessed by literature meta review and qualitative content analysis, with student motivations run with a survey on mostly qualitative grounds. The literature meta review was conducted over more than 60 articles including journal articles and “grey” literature, with a content analysis of the journals, using Herring’s (2004) adaption, after Krippendorf’s (1980) with categorising sources. (Grey literature includes magazine articles but are curated sources where authorship and provenance are both valued.)
I can’t draw the diagram but the perspectives were split between journals and grey literature, with open movements, evolution in distance education and disruptive innovation in the journal side, and sustainability (are MOOCs just a trend), quality (will they offer the same quality we get now) and impact (will the shake and change education) from the non-academic side including true believers and skeptics. A lot came out of this but Su noted the growing cynicism one develops reading the grey literature which appears to fall more into the zone of dinner party argument and that merit deeper exploration, while often not getting to that point. Are MOOCs the next stage in the slow progress from correspondence courses past flexible learning, Web 2.0 to MOOCs?
So what did they do? An online survey to find out the learners’ motivation to study: who are you, what is your education, what is your MOOC experience and (very importantly IMHO) what is your motivation? (I’m a big fan of Husman 2003 so this is very interesting to me.) In the motivations, the target communities were Spanish, Arabic and English, with wide dissemination and then the slide flipped so I lost it. 🙂 From the survey, they had 285 participants, with mostly male but that’s probably a cultural artefact because of the Arabic speakers being 77% male. Overwhelmingly, the platform was Coursera, followed by EdX, Udacity and Khan. They do it because it’s free, they have an interest and they are interested in the topic. Very few do it to get a taste of the University before enrolling – note to University administrators! Learners value free and open, convenience for time scheduling and moving, and over 60% are personalising the experience as part of planning their future.
So many issues and questions! Are there really pedagogic possibilities or is this an illusion? How do we deal with assessment? It’s notionally free but at what cost: reputational damage, cost of production and production values. Are we perpetuating old inequalities: are we giving them an illusion of value? Some stuff can’t be done online and you end up with unequal educators, with star performers creeping into local markets and undermining the value of a local and personalised experienced. Finally, we see the old issues of cultural imperialism and a creeping homogeneity that destroys diversity and alternative cultural perspectives. The last thing we want to produce is 99% the same and 1% other as the final step in a growing online community. The other never fares well inside that context. There are of course issues with the digital competency of the student, dropout issues and the spectre of plagiarism. Su’s take was that some people will just cheat anyway so focusing on this is wasted effort to some extent but certification changes when you make it something that the learner seeks, rather than the MOOC imposes.
MOOCs can be a great catalyst and engine for change – you can try things in there and fold them back into your curriculum. They’ve had 20,000 students and now have a lot of data on students. Hugh David will be talking on Wednesday about what they’ve discovered (taster for tomorrow). Institutions are going to have to become more agile and have feedback into the curriculum at a speed that we have not necessarily seen before. (In one generation, we’ve gone from courses that last for decades to courses that last for years to courses that last for one instance and then mutate? No wonder we’re tired!)
Learners are doing the learning: if they want to be a tourist, then that’s what is going to happen. You can’t force someone to finish a book – we wouldn’t call a book a failure if some people didn’t finish it! Are we being too harsh on the MOOC in how we assess the things that we can measure?
Ok, I can’t keep this short, sorry, readers! The next talk will be in another page.
CSEDU Day 1, Opening Panel, “Shaping the Future Learning Environment – Smart, Digital and Open?”
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: cognitive psychology, computer supported education, constructivist, CSEDU, CSEDU2014, education, future learning, higher education, learning, learning environment, open approaches, students, syncretist Leave a commentOnly 32 papers out of 250 were accepted for the conference as full papers (12.8% acceptance, highly respectable) and were identified as being of “outstanding quality” – good work, PhD Student T and the CSER team! After the opening address, we went to the first panel, chaired by James Uhomobihi and Markus Helfert. The four keynote speakers are also on the panel but I’ll add more on them during their sessions.However, in summary, we had an academic, a maths instruction evangelist, a psychologist and a representative of engineering society bureaucracy (not as bad as it sounds). Everyone was saying how happy they were to be in Barcelona! (And who can blame them? This is one of my favourite cities and should be on everyone’s bucket list.)
Larissa Fradkin: “Mathematics Teaching: Is the future syncretic?”.
From Wikipedia: Syncretism /ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/ is the combining of different, often seemingly contradictory beliefs, while melding practices of various schools of thought.
Everyone was asked to give a position statement, which is a different take on panels for me, very interesting. Larissa had slides and she identified the old problem of the difficulty of teaching mathematics, alluding to the US mathematics wars. Are MOOCs the solution? We were promised a great deal yet much of it has not yet appeared. Well, Coursera materials appear to be useful, or useful in principle, but they don’t work in some classroom so they have to be localised. What is the role of the faculty member in this space? It’s a difficult question and the answer depends on time, teacher interest and student sophistication. We inherit the students that our preceding teachers have produced so text books and curricula have a big impact on the students that get turned out, if educational resources are presented in an unquestioned way. Trudging through exercises and content is one way to get through but what does it do? Does it teach? Does it prepare students for tests? Texts and resources are often, despite what publishers and authors claim, unaligned with the curriculum.
Schmidt’s last study (ref?) shows that quality teachers and quality materials are the top two considerations for inhaling student learning. We can produce well-crafted eBooks and MOOCs with editable and updatable content to give a flexible product – but the “rush to market” product doesn’t meet this requirement. The cognitive tutor was mentioned as AI-enriched educational software, under John Anderson’s model, but they are incredibly difficult to develop. There are tools out there that combine cognitive psychology and AI, CIRCLE and AutoTutor. However, most tool development is driven by psychologists and cognitive scientists rather than discipline experts and this can be a problem.
The speaker finished with a discussion on a semi-traditionalist semi-constructivist approach to rigorous instruction that required much less memorisation, focusing on conceptual understanding and developing more master than a straight constructivist approach. (Not quite sure of the details here but this will be extended in a later talk.)
Erik de Graffe gave his first slide from tomorrow on Team Learning in Engineering Education, starting with the statement “people are not born to work in a team”, which is an interesting statement given the entirety of human society. Students do like working together but the first meeting of the group can be challenging and they don’t know how to start. (Is this a cultural artefact based on the isolation and protection inherent in privilege? Time to get our Hofstader’s cultural dimensions hats on because this sounds a lot like a communal/separate categorical separation.) Erik noted that “team” is a word for animals harnessed together to apply more force in one direction – which is not what we want in a human team. (Although this is perhaps another cultural insight). Erik’s second statement is that communication is highly inaccurate: cog scientists estimate that the amount of information we process from the potential information around us is less than 1%. Most of the information that reaches our sense are ignored and yet we still make decisions. (Given I’m listening to the speaker while summarising another discussion and some slides, I’m wondering if this is the best way to express this while not identifying the difference in task focus and activities that are relevant to the task at hand.) Erik believes that on-line will make this worse. (I really need to go to his talk to see the evidence and caveats in all of this.) Erik then projected his own behaviour in on-line meetings and low attention to the general case – if Erik is in a meeting with you, get him to leave his camera on or he will be off making coffee. 🙂 Erik then moved on to virtual identities that allow people to do things in the alternative reality that they wouldn’t do in real life. Urm. I need to see the talk but this all seems a little dated to me but, hey, what do I know until I’ve seen the talk?
The next speaker, Steve, asked us if we shut the door while teaching (I don’t usually unless the noise get stop bad because it improves air flow, rather than for pedagogical or privacy reasons) but segued into a discussion on openness. Steve then referred to the strange issue of us providing free content to journal publishers that we then pay for. (I wrote a little something on this years ago for SIGCSE.) Steve then referred to the different time in closed and open access journals – the open access journal was “in print” in four weeks, versus the 18 months for the closed access, and the citation counts were more than an order of magnitude different. You can also measure the readers in an open access format. Open access materials are also crucial to scholars – Steve licenses all of his materials under Creative Commons so you can use his work and all you have to do is to acknowledge the source. When you open your content, you become an educator for the world. If people need education, then who are we to not provide the materials that they need? When you become an open scholar, you must prepare for criticism because many people will read things. You be also be ready for dialogue and discourse. It’s not always easy but it is very valuable. (I agree with this wholeheartedly.)
The next speaker, José Carlos Quadrado, President of IFEES, tries to infect people with good ideas about Engineering Education as part of his role. Is the future learning environment smart, digital and open? Talking about smart, an example is the new smart watch, a watch that is also a phone or linked to a device – what do we mean? When you have a smart phone, you have approximately 1.4 tons of technology from the 1980, which makes us wonder if smart means leaner? When we are going digital is this replacing paper with silicon? How do we handle factual authority when we have so much openly available where the traditional peer review and publishing oversight mechanisms are eroding and changing rapidly. (Another slightly creaky perspective although with a great deal of self-awareness.)
Teaching and learning tools have changed a great deal over the same time but have our pedagogical approaches also changed or been truly enhanced by this? There were some pretty broad generational (X vs Z) comparisons that I question the validity of. The notion that students of today couldn’t sit throughout this session is not something I agree with. Again, the message from the panel, with a couple of exceptions, is pretty dated and I have a bit of an urge to get off a lawn. Oh, and we finished with an Einstein quote after a name drop to a famous scientist. Look, I accept a lot of the things that are being said on the stage but we have to stop acting as if natural selection works in 18 months and that the increasing sophistication of later generations is anything more than an ability to make better choices because more and better choices are available. Oh, another Einstein quote.
I realise that I have started editorialising here, which I try not to do, but I am being bombarded with position statements that are leaden in their adherence to received wisdom on young people and those smart young. These issues are just clouding the real focus of the systems that we could use, the approaches we could take and the fact that for every highly-advanced Z Westerner in a low power-distance, highly self-centred approach, we have 100-1000 Pre-X non-Westerners in a high power-distance and communal environment.
We’re in question time. Erik asked about the ship analogy – when ships were made of wood, men were made of iron, and by moving to iron ships, we weakened people. Erik then went on to the question “Do smart phones make stupid people?” which basically nails down the coffin lid on all of the problems I’ve had with this opening. Steve, in response to another question, raised the connectivist argument for networking and distributed knowledge storage, which smart phones of course facilitate. Sadly, this foray into common sense was derailed by some sophistry on young people trying to be smart before they are clever.
There was a good point made that Universities will continue to be involved in quality education but they are no longer the bastions of information – that particular ship has sailed. Oh, there we go, we’ve dipped down again. Apparently we have now changed the way we buy things because we are now all concerned with perception. People are buying smart phones, not because they are smart, but because they want instant gratification. Generation Z are apparently going to be the generation that will reject everything and walk away. Eh, maybe.
Perhaps I shall come back to this later.
CSEDU 2014, Day 1, (6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education) (#CSEDU #CSEDU2014 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, computers, CSEDU, CSEDU2014, education, higher education, learning, thinking Leave a commentHello again, fearless readers. I’m in Barcelona to present a paper on behalf of the CSER (I’ll talk about this a bit more later but we’re very happy to be here). It’s very early for Barcelona, which is far more of a late night town, but we’ll see how we go with getting delegates into the room. It’s 9 minutes to the session and there are 8 people here. 🙂
As per my recent practice, I’m going to try and live blog the sessions if I can, except for my own, and I hope you find it useful. Here we go again!
Ahhh, Barcelona!
Education and Paying Back (#AdelEd #CSER #DigitalTechnologies #acara #SAEdu)
Posted: March 22, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: ACARA, advocacy, collaboration, community, cser, cser digital technologies, curriculum, design, digital education, digital technologies, education, educational problem, educational research, Generation Why, Google, higher education, learning, MOOC, Primary school, primary school teacher, principles of design, reflection, resources, school teachers, secondary school, sharing, teaching approaches, thinking, tools 2 CommentsOn Monday, the Computer Science Education Research Group and Google (oh, like you need a link) will release their open on-line course to support F-6 Primary school teachers in teaching the new Digital Technologies curriculum. We are still taking registrations so please go the course website if you want to sign up – or just have a look! (I’ve blogged about this recently as part of Science meets Parliament but you can catch it again here.) The course is open, on-line and free, released under Creative Commons so that the only thing people can’t do is to try and charge for it. We’re very excited and it’s so close to happening, I can taste it!
Here’s that link again – please, sign up!
I’m posting today for a few reasons. If you are a primary school teacher who wants help teaching digital technologies, we’d love to see you sign up and join our community of hundreds of other people who are thinking the same thing. If you know a primary school teacher, or are a principal for a primary school, and think that this would interest people – please pass it on! We are most definitely not trying to teach teachers how to teach (apart from anything else, what presumption!) but we’re hoping that what we provide will make it easier for teachers to feel comfortable, confident and happy with the new DT curriculum requirements which will lead to better experiences all ’round.
My other reason is one that came to me as I was recording my introduction section for the on-line course. In that brief “Oh, what a surprise there’s a camera” segment, I note that I consider the role of my teachers to have been essential in getting me to where I am today. This is what I’d like to do today: explicitly name and thank a few of my teachers and hope that some of what we release on Monday goes towards paying back into the general educational community.
You know who this is for.
My first thanks go to Mrs Shand from my Infant School in England. I was an early reader and, in an open plan classroom, she managed to keep me up with the other material while dealing with the fact that I was a voracious reader who would disappear to read at the drop of a hat. She helped to amplify my passion for reading, instead of trying to control it. Thank you!
In Australia, I ran into three people who were crucial to my development. Adam West was interested in everything so Grade 5 was full of computers (my first computing experience) because he arranged to borrow one and put it into the classroom in 1978, German (I can still speak the German I learnt in that class) and he also allowed us to write with nib and ink pens if we wanted – which was the sneakiest way to get someone’s handwriting and tidiness to improve that I have ever seen. Thank you, Adam! Mrs Lothian, the school librarian, also supported my reading habit and, after a while, all of the interesting books in the library often came through me very early on because I always returned them quickly and in good condition but this is where I was exposed to a whole world of interesting works: Nicholas Fisk, Ursula Le Guin and Susan Cooper not being the least of these. Thank you! Gloria Patullo (I hope I’ve spelt that correctly) was my Grade 7 teacher and she quickly worked out that I was a sneaky bugger on occasion and, without ever getting angry or raising a hand, managed to get me to realise that being clever didn’t mean that you could get away with everything and that being considerate and honest were the most important elements to alloy with smart. Thank you! (I was a pain for many years, dear reader, so this was a long process with much intervention.)
Moving to secondary school, I had a series of good teachers, all of whom tried to take the raw stuff of me and turn it into something that was happier, more useful and able to take that undirected energy in a more positive direction. I have to mention Ken Watson, Glenn Mulvihill, Mrs Batten, Dr Murray Thompson, Peter Thomas, Dr Riceman, Dr Bob Holloway, Milton Haseloff (I still have fossa, -ae, [f], ditch, burned into my brain) and, of course, Geoffrey Bean, headmaster, strong advocate of the thinking approaches of Edward de Bono and firm believer in the importance of the strength one needs to defend those who are less strong. Thank you all for what you have done, because it’s far too much to list here without killing the reader: the support, the encouragement, the guidance, the freedom to try things while still keeping a close eye, the exposure to thinking and, on occasion, the simple act of sitting me down to get me to think about what the heck I was doing and where I was going. The fact that I now work with some of them, in their continuing work in secondary education, is a wonderful thing and a reminder that I cannot have been that terrible. (Let’s just assume that, shall we? Moving on – rapidly…)
Of course, it’s not just the primary and secondary school teachers who helped me but they are the ones I want to concentrate on today, because I believe that the freedom and opportunities we offer at University are wonderful but I realise that they are not yet available to everyone and it is only by valuing, supporting and developing primary and secondary school education and the teachers who work so hard to provide it that we can go further in the University sector. We are lucky enough to be a juncture where dedicated work towards the national curriculum (and ACARA must be mentioned for all the hard work that they have done) has married up with an Industry partner who wants us all to “get” computing (Thank you, Google, and thank you so much, Sally and Alan) at a time when our research group was able to be involved. I’m a small part of a very big group of people who care about what happens in our schools and, if you have children of that age, you’ve picked a great time to send them to school. 🙂
I am delighted to have even a small opportunity to offer something back into a community which has given me so much. I hope that what we have done is useful and I can’t wait for it to start.
ASWEC 2014 – Now with Education Track
Posted: March 12, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, ASWEC, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, higher education, learning, measurement, principles of design, resources, software engineering, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentThe Australasian Software Engineering Conference has been around for 23 years and, while there have been previous efforts to add more focus on education, this year we’re very pleased to have a full day on Education on Wednesday, the 9th of April. (Full disclosure: I’m the Chair of the program committee for the Education track. This is self-advertising of a sort.) The speakers include a number of exciting software engineering education researchers and practitioners, including Dr Claudia Szabo, who recently won the SIGCSE Best Paper Award for a paper in software engineering and student projects.
Here’s the invitation from the conference chair, Professor Alan Fekete – please pass this on as far as you can!:
- Keynote by a leader of SE research, Prof Gail Murphy (UBC, Canada) on Getting to Flow in Software Development.
- Keynote by Alan Noble (Google) on Innovation at Google.
- Sessions on Testing, Software Ecosystems, Requirements, Architecture, Tools, etc, with speakers from around Australia and overseas, from universities and industry, that bring a wide range of perspectives on software development.
- An entire day (Wed April 9) focused on SE Education, including keynote by Jean-Michel Lemieux (Atlassian) on Teaching Gap: Where’s the Product Gene?
Nick Falkner 