This piece at Slate is a reminder of how a particular breed of techno-enthusiasm sometimes runs roughshod over experience in American education. Amanda Ripley notes that the best-performing students in the world go to school in classrooms that look a great deal like classrooms in America only, well, less-snazzy. That is, students in South Korea, or Singapore, or Finland sit in rows at desks oriented toward the front of a classroom where a teacher stands. In Ripley's telling, most of these classroom include little, if any, technology. And what technology they include is used for assessment and providing instant feedback to students and teachers, not for learning. Ripley argues that the main distinctions between excellent schools and poor schools are the skill of the teachers (in leading countries most teachers come from the top third of academic performers, in countries like the US the percentage of teachers at the top of their classes is much smaller), and the amount of time spent on task, not access to technology or the design characteristics of the classroom or school.
Now there are a number of ways to explain away Ripley's insights. They may apply only to k-12 settings, not to higher education. Or she may be taking a snapshot of a practice that has worked exceedingly well up until now but is about to collapse. Or they may work well for educational systems focused on performance on tests, but not for those focused on creativity. Or it may be the case that classroom design is largely irrelevant, and that students in the right culture and context could learn as well seated cross-legged in the grass as they do in rows of desks.
I'm not sure any of these explanations really tell us anything, in part because they overlook the key problem with classrooms--we don't have enough of them. That is, the problem facing education in the US (including higher education) is a lack of capacity. In Utah, the state has set a goal of having 66% of adults with a higher ed degree or certificate by 2020. To do that, colleges and universities will have to not just account for the ongoing growth in the student population but also add capacity to graduate an additional 190,000 students. (Given retention rates, the number is actually much higher. Something like 250,000 additional students will have to enter the system to get an additional 190,000 graduates.)
Some people hope to use technology to increase capacity, and that may be part of the solution. But the findings about the settings where students learn well should remind us that technology-driven learning won't do the trick alone. The capacity issue is a huge one because schools are big, expensive, and permanent; and colleges and universities are even bigger, more expensive, and more permanent. What we need is some sort of compromise--technology and capacity together.
Fortunately, the two could align in higher education. The future might look like this--colleges and universities build cheaper, plainer, more temporary buildings, or they take over unused space in the community--warehouses, empty office plazas. (At the extreme you could imagine pop-up schools in the most capacity-challenged areas--schools designed to last only a year or two and then move to other areas of need.) They build no technology into the building except wireless. Then professors and the students go at it, constructing the courses and the learning out of the content available on the web, and building the sort of relationships essential to good learning in any setting.
Cheap schools + cheap technology = deep learning.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Monday, October 25, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Learning Through E-Portfolios
This semester my class has been piloting a new e-portfolio project at Westminster. The overall goal of the initiative is to have all undergraduates create e-portfolios showing that they have achieved the college-wide learning goals. The portfolio would include artifacts and reflections from the student's entire time at the college, and from the co-curriculum as well as the curriculum.
During the semester we have been testing the e-portfolio software (Foliotek) as well as seeing if first-semester students care about things as abstract as our learning goals, can use rubrics, can reflect on ways that their artifacts are evidence of learning, etc. And we have been investigating whether this can happen in a freshman seminar.
I cannot speak for what the students have learned, but I've learned quite a bit about learning goals, definitions, rubrics, and e-portfolios. Here are a few of the highlights:
1. Come around to the learning goals--my students are cool to abstraction, so when confronted with a learning goal like "global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness" they cannot get much traction. But start a discussion about how outlawing DDT preserved the environment in the US while heightening the impact of malaria in the developing world and they connect right away to the goal. Present them with a definition and the class becomes as interesting as a dictionary. Ask them to create a definition based on the DDT conversation and all of the sudden definitions are more interesting. Of course this is true, you will say. But a lot of the work on learning goals/outcomes, whatever its aim, comes across as abstraction.
2. When using a rubric, have students score the work of strangers first--one of our goals was to see if the rubrics for our learning goals made sense to students. So I asked them to use our rubrics to evaluate their work. As is almost universally the case, the students overestimated the quality of their work. Consistently. Through the semester. But when some students used the rubrics to analyze the work of professional journalists writing about science, the rubrics gave them a framework to point out the gaps in professional writing. The lesson? A rubric is a frame that makes sense of the world, not a window into your own soul.
3. Creativity is a good way into reflection--I had students write reflections about their work in critical thinking, ethical awareness, and communication. Their reflections tended not to show much self-awareness. But when I asked them to reflect on their creativity, the reflections were much more powerful. In retrospect, this is understandable. We understand creativity as being personal and internal--something emerging from who we are. Communication is external--a tactic rather than a trait. By writing about their acts of creativity students were much closer to who they think they are, good and ill.
4. A small barrier is all it takes--with something new like an e-portfolio, a small barrier was all it took to discourage students from participating. In the foliotek system a student can begin to create her e-portfolio only upon receiving a user name and password from foliotek. (Foliotek sends them out once we request the creation of an account in a particular student's name.) For students who deleted the email, or skipped it, or who never read their campus email account, the small obstacle of having to hunt down the email was very likely to keep them from getting started on the portfolio or doing good work in it. I know, I know--causation vs. correlation. But when I do it again I am going to make sure I lower the barriers as much as possible for students, because if you don't start you go nowhere.
I cannot speak for what the students have learned, but I've learned quite a bit about learning goals, definitions, rubrics, and e-portfolios. Here are a few of the highlights:
1. Come around to the learning goals--my students are cool to abstraction, so when confronted with a learning goal like "global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness" they cannot get much traction. But start a discussion about how outlawing DDT preserved the environment in the US while heightening the impact of malaria in the developing world and they connect right away to the goal. Present them with a definition and the class becomes as interesting as a dictionary. Ask them to create a definition based on the DDT conversation and all of the sudden definitions are more interesting. Of course this is true, you will say. But a lot of the work on learning goals/outcomes, whatever its aim, comes across as abstraction.
2. When using a rubric, have students score the work of strangers first--one of our goals was to see if the rubrics for our learning goals made sense to students. So I asked them to use our rubrics to evaluate their work. As is almost universally the case, the students overestimated the quality of their work. Consistently. Through the semester. But when some students used the rubrics to analyze the work of professional journalists writing about science, the rubrics gave them a framework to point out the gaps in professional writing. The lesson? A rubric is a frame that makes sense of the world, not a window into your own soul.
3. Creativity is a good way into reflection--I had students write reflections about their work in critical thinking, ethical awareness, and communication. Their reflections tended not to show much self-awareness. But when I asked them to reflect on their creativity, the reflections were much more powerful. In retrospect, this is understandable. We understand creativity as being personal and internal--something emerging from who we are. Communication is external--a tactic rather than a trait. By writing about their acts of creativity students were much closer to who they think they are, good and ill.
4. A small barrier is all it takes--with something new like an e-portfolio, a small barrier was all it took to discourage students from participating. In the foliotek system a student can begin to create her e-portfolio only upon receiving a user name and password from foliotek. (Foliotek sends them out once we request the creation of an account in a particular student's name.) For students who deleted the email, or skipped it, or who never read their campus email account, the small obstacle of having to hunt down the email was very likely to keep them from getting started on the portfolio or doing good work in it. I know, I know--causation vs. correlation. But when I do it again I am going to make sure I lower the barriers as much as possible for students, because if you don't start you go nowhere.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Kindle, E-Readers, and the future of books
Last week my wife gave me a Sony E-Reader for our anniversary. I picked it over the Kindle because Sony has access to all of the Google Books and its store has a way for me to check out library e-books. (I also picked it because I always try to pick against whatever seems to be the hot trend, and Kindle is definitely that.)
I'm in the middle of reading three books on the reader--a mystery, a non-fiction work on buddhism, and an 1823 publication on what we would call peer-led education today. (The latter is actually a fascinating book. Here is a link to the Google Books version.)
My verdict? That the reader is as good as the content that you load onto it. The mystery is outstanding, the buddhism book is a more touchy-feely than I think the subject merits, and the 19th century education philosophy book is a slog but worth it.
On one hand this is a pretty dull conclusion. But a lot of the discussion about technology and education ignores it, focusing instead on the medium. The question we ask is "how cool is the tool?" not "does the tool help students do what they need to do?" I understand the desire to "prove" that the Kindle is great, or that the I-Pod can be used for education, or that OpenCourseWare is the future of education. But too often the discussion gets no further, in spite of the fact that crummy content (think Liberace on the I-Pod) makes any tool useless.
Granted, I am already a multi-platform reader. No day goes by that I don't read a newspaper, magazine, book, and computer. So adding an e-book doesn't represent a barrier to me. And adding an e-book might present a barrier to certain people. (Though assumptions that technology will be an impediment to the poor and marginalized may not be true, if the examples of cell phones in the developing world are any indication.)
But if educators are going to make any meaningful use of e-readers, we will need to get past the debate over the technology. The medium is not the message. The message is.
I'm in the middle of reading three books on the reader--a mystery, a non-fiction work on buddhism, and an 1823 publication on what we would call peer-led education today. (The latter is actually a fascinating book. Here is a link to the Google Books version.)
My verdict? That the reader is as good as the content that you load onto it. The mystery is outstanding, the buddhism book is a more touchy-feely than I think the subject merits, and the 19th century education philosophy book is a slog but worth it.
On one hand this is a pretty dull conclusion. But a lot of the discussion about technology and education ignores it, focusing instead on the medium. The question we ask is "how cool is the tool?" not "does the tool help students do what they need to do?" I understand the desire to "prove" that the Kindle is great, or that the I-Pod can be used for education, or that OpenCourseWare is the future of education. But too often the discussion gets no further, in spite of the fact that crummy content (think Liberace on the I-Pod) makes any tool useless.
Granted, I am already a multi-platform reader. No day goes by that I don't read a newspaper, magazine, book, and computer. So adding an e-book doesn't represent a barrier to me. And adding an e-book might present a barrier to certain people. (Though assumptions that technology will be an impediment to the poor and marginalized may not be true, if the examples of cell phones in the developing world are any indication.)
But if educators are going to make any meaningful use of e-readers, we will need to get past the debate over the technology. The medium is not the message. The message is.
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