Pondering things technological

When I was a very young teacher in training, I was strongly influenced by the work of the Canadian Marshall McLuhan and by Neil Postman’s book Teaching as a subversive activity. I’ve been prompted to buy Postman’s book again. This time, it will be delivered instantaneously to my e-book reader, which is perhaps ironic, given Postman’s warnings that contemporary mass communications media make it impossible to share serious ideas.


Postman died in 2003, and while much of his work has a slightly old-fashioned tone because of his focus on television, his message is highly relevant. For example, Postman concluded a presentation he delivered in 1998 with these words:

"And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

If we had more time, I could supply some additional important things about technological change but I will stand by these for the moment, and will close with this thought. In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it."

The full text is available at Wikiversity: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neil_Postman:_Five_Things_We_Need_to_Know_About_Technological_Change. It's only a few pages long ... you could read it in your coffee break. It might give you as much to ponder as it did me.

My Other blog

In my last posting, I invited you to subscribe to a Moodle site I had set up, called Teaching Techniques. This site was to be a password-protected site where I collected ideas about teaching strategies and techniques, tailored for those teaching face-to-face and online in universities and other tertiary institutions. I had made a good start, with 16-17 good ideas for content-independent ideas that could be implemented in tutorials and lecture theatres.

In the last couple of days, however, I have transferred that material to a new blog, called University Teaching: strategies and techniques. I've done this for two reasons. The first is to do with my time: I realised that I didn't want to spend time creating Moodle accounts for people. The second is to do with the acquisition of NetSpot (my Moodle host) by Blackboard. I'm just not sure what will happen to the DeborahVenessAssociates Moodle sites in the long-term.

So - the good news is that you can sign up for the new blog all on your own.

Building the Teaching Techniques site

I’ve been having great fun this week, in between doing the tasks associated with my day job. I’ve been building a password-protected website (a Moodle site hosted by the excellent company NetSpot) where I’ve started to gather together an annotated list of the skills that might be selected to go into the kitbag of a very good teacher. Some of them are obvious – questioning technique, for example; others are old favourites revisited – the ERICA technique for teaching students to read content-laden, discipline material; and some are just fun – a web-based app to create make-believe newspaper clippings (already mentioned in an earlier post in this blog).

I expect that this will grow quite quickly. I’ve identified the next three topics already.

Some of the entries are very personal, while others direct readers to further resources. It’s not public, so if any of you, my dear readers, would like to get access, you’ll have to ask for a password. You can do that by emailing me at the address provided in my profile.

Here’s a taster …

***

Questioning students

Too often, teachers rely heavily on the kinds of questions known as display questions. I call them “guess-what’s-in-my-head” questions. Technically, these are questions designed to elicit learners’ prior knowledge and to check comprehension. They focus on declarative knowledge, and they look like this:

• What does … mean?
• When do we use …?
• What comes after …?
• … is [said with a rising intonation and followed by a long pause]? (This one is particularly irritating, I think.)
• What’s the opposite of …?

Equally irritating and equally useless – at least for purposes of engaging learners – are convergent or closed questions. Correct answers to these kinds of questions are narrowly defined and require little reflection or originality. They usually simply require students to remember stuff. They look like this:

• What do we call …?
• When did … do …?
• Where did … happen?

Of course, convergent and closed questions do serve a useful purposes. For example, they can be used to check that students have understood your instructions (“Are you working alone or in pairs? Have you finished? Are you going to write something now?”), to manage the class (“Are you discussing the topic? Can you see the board? Why are you sitting on your own?”), or to check on progress (“Are you ready to move on to the next topic? Do you have any questions?”).

The thing to remember about them, though, as that they are information-gathering; they provide the teacher with information about what the students know (or don’t know). They aren’t very interesting for the students.

The best questions for learning – and you have to teach students to be ready for them – are divergent or open-ended questions. These questions are broad and challenging and they often generate multiple answers. They require a level of thinking that is more demanding. They encourage students to offer opinions, to elaborate, to explain their conclusions, their reasoning, and their evidence, and to engage in discussion. Teachers who use these types of questions are engaging in conversations with students designed to stimulate learning rather than interrogating them about what they don’t know.

These questions look like this:

• What is the nature of [a concept … justice, truth, beauty]?
• How do we know what we know?
• How did you come to [a particular] conclusion?
• Why is it so?
• What else led you to this conclusion?

Consider the following series of questions:

1. Was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo?
2. Who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo?
3. How was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo?
4. Why was Napoleon at Waterloo? How do you know?
5. What would have happened if Napoleon hadn’t lost the Battle of Waterloo? Why?

We can be sure that students who can answer the last two question sets, outlining their evidence and explaining how they came to their conclusions, are going to do a lot better on any test about the Battle of Waterloo than students who can answer only the first three questions.

Once your students have become comfortable with divergent questions, you can introduce a structured questioning activity in each class or lecture.

Try the Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce technique. It goes like this.

1. Explain the technique.
2. Pose: Pose the question/s, reminding students that you don’t want them to answer immediately.
3. Pause: Tell the students to hold the thought, to think, and to think again. Be clear: no one is to speak until invited. (At this stage, you may wish to introduce small group discussions, or give students opportunity to write about the topic. Once they have an answer, have them sit and wait, reflecting on their answer, until you are ready to select someone to provide an answer.)
4. Pounce: Identify the student who is to answer; name the student (A). Wait for A’s answer. Don’t give the students any idea about your opinion of the answer.
5. Bounce: Once you have student A’s answer, bounce to student B and ask B to give his or her opinion of A’s answer. Bounce to student C: what does he or she think of B’s comment? Use reflective listening techniques: “A has told us that …; B thinks that …; C has thrown in the idea that …”.

6. Finally, sum up the conversation and clear up any remaining misconceptions.

***

Feedback is very welcome.

Augmented Reality and my friend Matt

Today I had lunch with a friend, who is working on an amazing project with the InSPIRE Centre at the University of Canberra.  Matt Bacon is working on a project to investigate the educational value of augmented reality (a-r) technologies with a group of equally talented people - Robert Fitzgerald, Anna Wilson, and Danny Munnerly.  Wow.

He's already planted an a-r forest in the foyer of Parliament House in Canberra, and has promised to put something in the corridor outside my office. Augmented reality gives anyone with a viewing device access to information overlays of the world around them. These overlays contain information in the form of images or video or text, e.g. newly created objects or tags made up of data pulled from the Web. The overlays are being created willy-nilly by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

So, say you are sitting at a cafe on the campus of the Australian National University, and you want to know if anyone nearby is tweeting. Using the augmented reality viewers on your iPad, you can see where the tweeters are. If anyone has taken photos nearby and made them public using something like Instagram, you can see them using the a-r viewer.

Or ... say you are viewing Canberra from the Mt Ainslie lookout and you are wondering what it looked like before Lake Burley Griffin was full. If someone had built the 3-D image and uploaded it, you could hold your smart phone up, and see this alternate view.

I'm pretty sure we are going to hear more about this.

Oh ... and if you are in the foyer of the Australian Parliament House, and you want to see Matt's forest, you will need a smart phone or a tablet loaded up with the appropriate viewer (Junaio or Layar). Once you have opened the app on your device, search for AR Studio. Let me know what happens if you get there before me.

The scholarship of teaching (as research)

I've long admired Rick Reis's newsletter from Stanford, Tomorrow's Professor. He is alert to important trends, drawing our attention to and providing brief but powerful analyses of key issues. His recent post on "the scholarship of teaching and learning as 'research' " is no different. This issue has been of concern to academic and educational developers for some time, and it is good to see the evidence Reis provides that this concern is seeping into the disciplines.

His latest post draws heavily on the work of Mary Taylor Huber, one of the best-known Americans writing on the topic, but his comments will resonate with Australians who have engaged with the conversations here about the implications of TEQSA and discipline-based standards documents, as well as those who have ever put together portfolios for promotion that include evidence of excellence in teaching, or prepared paperwork that includes written learning outcomes for courses or programs.

Read the full posting at http://derekbruff.com/site/tomprof/. Reis introduces the posting with this:

The good news is that disciplinary cultures themselves have become friendlier to pedagogical concerns over the past twenty years, with scholarly societies devoting more air-, column-, and cyberspace to teaching and learning in their conferences, journals, and web sites. The sciences, especially, have been encouraged by National Science Foundation programs to strengthen science education. But other fields too—sometimes spurred by the drive from accrediting bodies to articulate student learning outcomes—have stepped up to the plate.

In the next 12-18 months, every Australian university will be paying much closer attention to the aligned curriculum, learning outcomes, statements of academic achievement, and every related issue. Will we also see a greater recognition of the time and attention these require when it comes time for promotion?  If not, I can see no way forward except a complete bifurcation of the academic life, with teachers on the one side and researchers on the other. This would, in my opinion, come at the expense of the richness and depth of academic work and of the learning experience Australia provides for its university students.  (That's not to say that at any one point in a person's career there might be a greater focus on one or the other - for example, PhD theses rarely get written by those who are focussing all their attention on teaching.) However, the truly interesting academics (substitute "lecturers" or "faculty" here, depending on your preferred country of residence), in my experience, are those who are equally interested in creating knowledge through their research, and in sharing the impetus for their research, their methods for creating that new knowledge, and the new knowledge itself, with both their peers and their students through both their writing and their teaching.

I think we at risk of losing something very important, so I hope posts like Reis's are being discussed across the country. Fingers crossed, eh?

Reflections on ASCILITE 2011 Hobart

 

Hobart from Mt Wellington



This year’s ASCILITE conference in Hobart was very well attended, with nearly 500 participants from 90+ institutions. I certainly took away at least two new ideas and several other things to think about.

The keynote speakers were:

• Gilly Salmon, who reprised her books on “e-moderating”

• Simon Buckingham Shum, who delivered an extremely important presentation on learning analytics by videoconference from the UK, suggesting that we need to move on from counting clicks to looking at data that will actually inform – evidence of critical curiosity, meaning making, changing and learning, learning relationships, strategic awareness amongst the students, resilience, and creativity



Mt Wellington viewing shelter doors



• Sharon Kerr, who spoke on the way new technologies and easy-to-use devices like the iPad are reshaping our view of assistive technologies for students with disabilities, and may actually be re-defining our concept of “disability” in the learning context

 

Tasmanian wildflowers



The paper co-authored by our colleagues from CECS – Lauren Thompson, Kim Blackmore and Malcolm Pettigrove – was one of two papers selected as Best of Conference. The paper – Leading change: applying change management approaches to engage students in blended learning – reports on one aspect of the ANU-UniSA Hubs and Spokes Project. The other Best of Conference paper was Linda Corrin’s paper entitled Exploring medical students’ use of technology. The refereed conference proceedings are available online. In the pre-conference workshop I attended, there was considerable discussion about TEQSA, assessment strategies and practices, and issues of curriculum alignment.

Among the other presentations of interest (to me, at least) were these:

1. Kennedy, Jones, Chambers & Peacock’s study examining the reasons academics use – or don’t use – university-endorsed (and unendorsed) learning technologies

2. Ryan, Hinton & Lamont Mills’ presentation of the finding of their investigation into the impact of learning technologies on academic workload, where they found



Yoni Ryan, Leone Hinton and Andrea Lamont-Mills



a. that a distance education model of curriculum design brings with it an increase in academic workload before the beginning of the study session, but often a reduced workload during the semester,

b. that there isn't a clear workload model in the universities they visited that takes account of changing practice in the light of increased use across the sector of learning technologies, and



c. that while academic staff understand that teaching online has become a requirement, they are often unwilling to reduce face-to-face contact because they believe that to reduce face-to-face contact, even when they have increased online contact, they would adversely affect the quality of teaching and learning

3. Karanicolas, Green, Willis & Snelling’s reflections on the relative value added by their own curriculum innovations, including those supported by learning technologies

4. Allen & Coleman’s paper on the ways they are cultivating and assessing creativity with the help of an e-portfolio tool

5. Palmer’s confronting findings that demonstrate that without thoughtful curriculum re-design, when courses are taught online, student satisfaction scores drop significantly; that is, it’s not enough merely to add some online aspect to a traditionally-designed course, the lecturer has to re-think and re-design

6. Lever, Gluga & Kay’s presentation about a University of Sydney curriculum documentation database that will provide reports on curriculum alignment, and the issues that arose during the building of the database

7. Dolan’s moving presentation about the impact of the earthquake on the use of online learning technologies in the short-term and in the long-term at the University of Canterbury, where higher usage – driven by necessity in the early days – has persisted even as the buildings and face-to-face systems have been rebuilt

There were many other valuable papers, I am sure, but of the sessions I attended, these were the speakers who caught my attention.

Shane Evans and Kathy Savige from UNSW@ADFA

This annual conference is increasingly providing a forum for those who are interested in more than online tools. Those who attend are examining changing practice in among university teachers, looking at the ways institutions are dealing with these changes through policies, institutional policies and procedures, and the implications of these changes for the kinds of teacher education preparation, professional development programs, and professional support that universities need to be putting in place to ensure that their teaching staff have not only the discipline knowledge required of a university teacher, but also a thoughtful, informed, reflective approach to their teaching practice.



Alex Knight, Marina Lobastov and Yvonne Wisby
nearly at the top of the University of Tasmania



After the conference, Marina Lobastov from the University of Tasmania gave a small group of us a private tour of some of their new teaching facilities, where some of the more recent ideas about learning spaces are being put into practice.

Then I explored the Huon Valley - what an amazing place that is ...

The backyard for my Huon Valley forest dwelling friends

Dale the Dog decides that swimming isn't for him

Teaching the language of the disciplines

Earlier this week, I attended the launch of a book. The people around me are constantly publishing monographs and scholarly articles. Some of them are good, some of them are mind-boggling boring (to me ... not to everyone). Some of them deal with narrow academic studies, some are the result of years of focused attention on a PhD topic, and some of them emerge from wide, cross-disciplinary thinking. Many are predictable, if worthy. Few are unexpected, if you know the people involved.

This one took me by surprise, perhaps because I didn't really think about what would be likely to emerge from a meeting between an energetic teacher of Chinese and a thoughtful, quiet scientist with research interests in virology, innate immunity and bio-statistics over a cup of coffee in a seminar about university teaching.

This pair are both committed teachers. Their book came about because of a discussion about how the scientist might best teach the language of his discipline to his students, and because there was a very practical problem to solve. Brett knows the language of his discipline, but was having trouble teaching it to his students. Felicia knows how to teach languages, but didn't know the language of Brett's discipline. They set about learning about each other's areas of expertise. Felicia attended every class Brett taught for a whole semester. Brett spent hours learning about the language teaching techniques that Felicia uses.

Dr Felicia Zhang, the teacher of Chinese, suggested to Dr Brett Lidbury, the scientist, that he incorporate language teaching techniques and practices in his biology classes. Then they brought in Dr Alice Richardson, a statistician, to check the results. They invited a whole raft of other people to think about the issues and to contribute their tips and tricks ... and came up with the script for the book.

It seems like a pretty good idea to me. After all, one of the first things that discipline novices have to conquer is the language of their new discipline.  If you don't sound like a physicist or a biologist when you talk about physics or biology, you probably aren't one, right?

from left to right: Dr Brett Lidbury, Dr Felicia Zhang, and Dr Alice Richardson

Take a look. The book is full of concrete suggestions about how to teach the language of science. I'm pretty sure most of the ideas could be adapted to other other disciplines as well.

Zhang, F., Lidbury, B., Richardson, A., Yates, B., Gardiner, M., Bridgeman A., Schutte, J., Rodger, C., and Mate, K. (2011). Sustainable Language Support Practices in Science Education: technologies and solutions. US: Business Science Reference. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sustainable-Language-Support-Practices-Education/dp/1613500629. 

Isn't it great when the people you know teach you something unexpected, unexpectedly?