Recently in Learning & Instruction Category

Today's Faculty Focus, "Can Clickers Enhance Student Learning?" by Mary Bart, is a synopsis of points made by Dr. Peter M. Saunders, director of Oregon State University's Center for Teaching and Learning in a recent online workshop. Here are best practices she reports that Saunders made in the workshop. (an audio tape of the online workshop can be purchased from Faculty Focus for $259)

• Limit the number of clicker questions to five per class
• Use PowerPoint to prepare, manage, and display questions
• Reserve questions for specific learning outcomes and goals (What do you want to stress? What cognitive skills do you want to develop? What do you want to reinforce?)
• Allot enough time and use an on-screen timer.
• Check for ambiguity
• Create questions that support peer discussion and instruction
• Use a variety of assessment question types
• Bring index cards for students who forget their clickers
• Consider not just the answer, but the cognitive processes used

Wednesday morning the Arizona Technology Council hosted Innovation Through Intersections - Solving Today's Technology Challenges on campus so I decided to take advantage of the convenience of attending a lecture that sounded pretty interesting. The speaker was Mary Contini Gordon who worked for 20 years for Hughes/Raytheon. Over the past seven years she's been in Tucson leading an innovation center staff and working with "technology and business development leads to create and apply approaches to solve tough problems."

Dr. Contini Gordon recommended two books during her talk - I ordered one and bought the other Wednesday afternoon. The first is Franz Johanssen's The Medici Effect and the second is Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Education. Christensen wrote The Innovator's Dilemma which I read several years ago and found extremely interesting.

If you ask me what is one thing I brought back from her lecture I'd say it is the idea of Wicked Problems. Wikipedia explains wicked problem as "a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems." The simpler way to see it is through its relationship of having both societal and technological pieces. Often we see the technological solution without considering the impact it has on people. then it is that impact on people that becomes the overriding concern and often counters the intended benefit that the technology brings.

The Webinar I attended was hosted by Higheredhero and Higheredhero announced and sold it as "Advanced Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." The presenter, though, titled it " "Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." Since it turned out not to be advanced I didn't get much out of it. There's some info that I'll pass along to Ron Landis in the event he needs to look at recording lectures in more classrooms without developing the sophisticated set-up that was placed in Centennial Hall.

For anyone who works with faculty and/or finds keeping up the wealth of resources we have at our fingertips/keyboards, take a look at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know About... series. Each 7 Things a two page PDF that explains What it is, how it works, where it is going and Why it matters to teaching and learning, as well as, tips on engaging instructors.

The most recent is on Second Life. Other 7 Things topics include Ning, Lulu, Flickr, and Google Aps. Well worth checking out.

Today's eSchool News Online features this story: "Open-content learning portal debuts 8,000-plus digital learning resources available to teachers and learners at no cost," by Laura Devaney.

It seems that a"new online content resource center, formally launched March 9 by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), will make more than 8,000 classroom materials available to teachers, faculty, and learners worldwide, at no cost." Apparently the resources are available in the OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons. [FYI, getting into these two websites before timing-out has been intermittent this morning.]

Something I find interesting in the report, as well as most appropriate, is making these teaching and learning materials available by "using web 2.0 social networking features, such as tagging, ratings, comments, and reviews." At this point, any new DARM tool ought to be incorporating the community-building features inherent in Web 2.0 design. Check it out and share what you think. Hopefully it will be something useful.

One of my LTC colleagues posted a message today alerting us to an article on ZD/Net that reports on remarks made by John Seely Brown at a conference held at MIT last week. Its title is "Futurist: To fix education, think Web 2.0," and is written by Martin LaMonica.

The article takes what many of us have been saying for the past 6-7 years about "student centered learning," or as I like to say "moving the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side." Only Seely Brown apparently wrapped his comments around the interactive and personalized nature of Web 2.0 [Wikipedia ]. Here's a quote: "Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education, he said." I hope he's not faced with making the same proposals when Web 3.0 is popular.

BTW, if you are not all that familiar with Web 2.0, I did a short talk about Social Computing [Wikipedia] last Wednesday at the UA's School of Information Resources & Library Science [PDF 2.8MB] that includes a section on Web 2.0. Be glad to discuss the topic with anyone who is interested.

Yesterday I read through James E. Zull's book The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning, © 2002, Stylus Publishing. Zull applies common neurobiological principles to the practice of teaching and learning. It seems to me that what he shows in terms of brain function, closely relates to constructivist/ experiential learning principles. The learning cycle, he says, arises naturally from the structure of the brain.

Concrete experience comes through the sensory cortex, reflective observation involves the integrative cortex at the back, creating new abstract concepts occurs in the frontal integrative cortex and active testing involves the motor brain." (p. 18)

Zull tells us that without biology, the learning cycle is theoretical; but with biology, we can come closer to fact. Our brains process our experiences and convert those experiences into knowledge. From that knowledge we can reflect on what we have learned, and explore the possibilities, and test different alternatives. This opens the way for new ideas.

The point to understanding this approach is to think about how we teach. If this application of biology to learning is correct, it seems to support teaching students in ways that give them more opportunities to learn by doing.

Anyone else read this book? Let me know what you think.