Missing the Irony

Despite a recent post on this blog proclaiming that was committed to more frequent entries, it seems I've fallen off a bit again. I missed an entire month, which is not ideal. It is the case that I worked half-days in July, but the bigger reason is that I've been trying something new and it's taken a lot more time that I had allocated.

I've spent the past three weeks working primarily on writing and revising, to the detriment of consistent blogging. This in itself is not remarkable, though it is very different from my usual slate of tasks. I'm working with co-authors in an attempt to publish our findings from an ethics class last spring. It's certainly not exceptional to submit an article to a journal, and I'd say it's even odds that it will not be accepted in the end. No, the part that interested me was the process, and how I feel about it in retrospect.

When I made a switch in jobs last January, I had a list of things that I wanted to try that were not really possible with my former job: grant writing and experimenting with collaboration and communication tools were a few of them, along with trying my hand at academic journal writing. Academic publishing is an odd sort of writing, with it's own arcane style; it's formulaic, but not in a negative way. If I were reading 20 of these things per week, I'd want some consistency in formatting as well. Regardless, it's something that I have no experience in creating. My co-authors did have more experience, but early on I asked that we agree I would do the bulk of the work and only seek help when I felt stuck. Consequently, as a novice every step took a long time, much longer than I thought it would. But here's the interesting part: it was frustrating, difficult, and fun. And we're already planning the next one.

Those of us who have taken any intro learning theory classes are familiar with the Zone of Proximal Development, the notion that learning happens within the space between what we can do for ourselves and what we can only accomplish with the help of more competent peers or mentors. There are all kinds of examples that pre-date the creation of the label (including apprenticeships, which in my view is how most academic researchers learn their skills) but the main idea is that we should stretch, but have a Sherpa in case we need one.

As we were getting the methods and findings section outlined, I noticed something: the students from our class felt exactly like I did about stretching. We designed a final group video project for the students that relied heavily on the PSU Digital Commons and required a ton of work. The survey data indicated that almost none of the students had any experience at all with video. All the groups scrambled to finish. All of them, at one point, emailed or came in person to grumble about how much time everything took. And yet, on the exit survey their responses to the video project read: too time-consuming; too much work; prefer it to more traditional assessments (paper or presentation); 80% recommend keeping the video project as a part of the class.

I've been as guilty as anyone else in bemoaning the underemployment/underutilization of people that is so rampant in the white-collar workplace these days, and my overall opinion hasn't changed much. But I will say that a foray into something in which you have little experience or confidence, while stressful, is exciting and meaningful. And if you have people around you to give you a nudge when you get stuck, you'll learn something. You'll have to.

Last week, I attended my first American Society for Engineering Education conference in Pittsburgh. Going in, I had some concerns about attending a discipline-specific education conference, mainly due to some past experiences in which the sessions became so weighted down with discussions of specific software, tools and acronyms that I did not get much out of the proceedings. This experience, though, was thankfully much different.

I spent the bulk of my time at ASEE attending sessions in the specific areas relevant to the project I am working on: engineering ethics, globalization, and entrepreneurship. I also attended sessions in the online teaching track, as well as some that were more broadly listed as educational technology.

In the ethics realm, my primary goal was to get a better handle on how other schools are approaching professional ethics education for their engineering students. As I've mentioned in the past, I worked for years on creating online content for courses that were very much fact-based and concrete. Students in those courses spent the bulk of their time labeling, categorizing, and summarizing.

While there certainly are standard concepts in ethics, the primary way for students gain an understanding of these concepts is fundamentally different from the work I had done previously. Memorization of names and labels is useful to a point as a student of ethics; students need to learn how to develop a knowledge structure regarding ethical judgments.

I attended a very interesting session discussing a cognitive flexibility model approach to ethics teaching by folks from the University of Missouri & Virginia Polytechnic. In short, the approach involves presenting students with ill-structured cases, with multiple stakeholders and conflicting interests. This approach facilitates the examination of the case from multiple perspectives. I thought the overall approach was a good fit for the teaching of ethics, and will make a point to explore the literature on cognitive flexibility.

I'll be blogging about more of the ethics sessions once ASEE has the files from the proceedings online and available. In the meantime, one of my take-aways from the conference was the sense that engineering ethics, specifically, can be tough to get across to students. At the same time, there are some very interesting ongoing projects to address the challenges. 

I read about the Digital Research Tools wiki via the Wisconsin Union Blend blog. Many of the tools listed are well-known; I was more interested in how easy it was to find information. Tools are categorized under a general heading that is a response to the brief statement "I want to..." Seems very simplistic, but then that's the idea; something similar for teaching tools might be helpful to faculty and students. Members of the community could add categories and tools, as well as edit descriptions. Some of the tools include reviews by community members. My guess is that the reviews are an ongoing process.

Very nice, and learned a little about data visualization and tools for comparing resources.

After a very long hiatus, it's time to start blogging in this space again. Since the last update I've changed jobs and became a parent for the first time. Blogging was not the highest priority; essentially this space became one of those neglected, snow-covered campus bikes I see chained to light posts (who are these people who leave their bikes to fend for themselves anyway?). But things are settling down to a manageable rhythm so it's time for a reboot.

That said, I'm taking a less formal approach this time around. One thing I learned during my time off from this blog is that I had been over-thinking my past entries, approaching them more like formal writing assignments. They were long. I actually outlined them before writing. When our son was born, we started a blog as a way to update our families in Texas with stories, pictures, and video. All of the posts to the baby blog are short, sometimes one or two lines to accompany a photo. That experience has helped me see that I can be short at times with this blog's entries, which will make me much more likely to update with new content.

I'll be spending the bulk of this summer conceptualizing approaches to enhancing engineering education in three key areas: ethics, globalization, and entrepreneurship. I also have some conference travel coming up that I'll be posting about.

 

In keeping with the Stubbsian Facebook theme of the week here at ETS, the allfacebook blog has a post about a company called Lookabee that facilitates teacher creation of course apps in Facebook. The article specifically references functionality like:

• posting documents
  
• student assignment submissions
• quizzing/testing

It's a short post, so not a lot of depth is provided. The project itself is a pilot program that instructors can choose to sign up for. Doubtless there are already apps that allow for these functions; what I found of interest in this case was that Lookabee appears to be offering to guide instructors in the configuring/setup of apps.

The Lookabee site mentions access controls for instructors, which addresses one of the most glaring issues. There are a host of other questions that one could ask as well (content creation, security, advertising, business model) but of interest to me is the notion that the social networking sites and CMS developers are racing to incorporate features from each other's realms into a consolidated product.     

Programmers can likely speak to this better than I, but it seems like Facebook's open platform gives it a significant advantage over proprietary CMS products; at the same time, Facebook holds a huge advantage in popularity over the open source CMS offerings.

So here it is, a couple of days from the start of a new semester and the good folks at Google decide to release a new version of Earth that includes an ability to explore the stars. We have been working very hard on course materials for a course called Astronomy 001: the Astronomical Universe. It's essentially intro astronomy, and is very popular among undergraduates.

I've only been playing with the new Sky features for a few hours, and already I can see the potential for several of the topics Astro 001 covers. The sections on constellations & views from different parts of Earth can currently be handled using software like Starry Night, but Google Earth has that whole "free" thing in its corner. But you can also animate the motion of the moon (phases) and motion of the planets (for concepts like retrograde motion, etc). With GE Pro, one can record movies of tours. It's also possible to add image overlays (including Google SketchUp 3D models) over the Sky view.

Unfortunately, most of the lessons that would benefit the most from Sky come early in the semester, so it's not likely we can do much with it for the fall semester. But I'm excited about thinking through its potential with the Astro faculty, and perhaps we can plan for its use come spring.

Note: I'm re-publishing this post because the of confusion surrounding its original title "Reviving Keller." Turns out it gave the impression that I might be doing some construction work on Keller Bldg.  

I've been working on a re-design of a college algebra course here at University Park, and I'm starting to get excited about how it's coming together. The strategy that we choose will become the approach that is used for all sections come fall semester 2008, so the stakes are high. In short, we've settled on a "personalized system of instruction" (PSI) from ID yesteryears. The course details are as follows:

Course Characteristics

• High-enrolling lower-division course (1,600-2,000 students per year)
• Bi-modal distribution of student ability. The class is split into two groups: students who are too advanced for the subject matter (but are required to take it anyway, for various reasons), and students who struggle with math and need to pass this one class to fulfill a requirement.
  
• All sections of the course use a common textbook

The main issue that the department is looking to address is the diverse skill levels of the students in the course; it's too difficult to teach to the ends of the spectrum simultaneously.

After meeting with the head of undergraduate studies about possible ideas, we're now working on using a personalized instructional approach, essentially a modified Keller Plan. Features of this approach historically include:

• Content chunked into small modules
• A mastery approach to materials; students will have to pass an exam to proceed to the next exam
• Immediate feedback and self-assessment/practice activities
• Reduction in lectures and demonstrations

For our purposes, we will not be reducing lectures and demonstrations. Instead, the lectures will continue as normally scheduled, and students can opt to attend the ones that they feel they need help with. Otherwise, we'll be tracking the Keller approach pretty closely utilizing technology tools that weren't available the last time this strategy was en vogue (late 1960's).

Redesign Features 

• Student assessment via 12 mastery exams. Each exam will take place in the new secure testing facility at PSU, and be deployed within our course management system (ANGEL). ANGEL will restrict access to the exams to only allow IP addresses from the facility.
• Practice and self-assessment activities will take place via WebAssign, using practice questions provided by the textbook. These problems provide immediate feedback to students, and can also link directly to relevant portions of the course text. In addition to the problems and feedback, WebAssign allows for a variety of other instructional approaches including stepped solutions & streaming video demos of solutions.
• The lectures will continue as scheduled. Essentially, this will allow a student who might be struggling with the materials to attend the course just as they would any other. The only difference will be that, instead of 3-4 graded exams, they will we required to complete up to 12 mastery exams.
  
• Tutoring will provide guidance for advanced students who do not want to wait for a lecture topic that is scheduled to come later in the semester. This will allow for true individualized pacing through the course.
  

There are some issues still out there: how to ensure that students keep up and don't procrastinate through a self-paced course; how many attempts should students get at each exam, and how often; and whether or not this approach might lead to a reconceptualization of the lecture time (open "problem sessions" instead of structured presentations). It's an interesting challenge, though, and one that could have a positive impact if we can pull it together in an integrated way.

My work as an instructional designer at Penn State is primarily at the course level; I am assigned to a particular course, and one or more faculty members are also assigned to the course as the content experts. If the course includes the development of multimedia elements (as they often do), part of my job is to help coordinate the creation of these elements. If the multimedia elements are not too advanced, I can sometimes chip in and help out. For the most part, though, I stay out of the way of the experts: primarily my uber-talented and perpetually overworked colleagues Mark & Dean.

Since the summer I've been working on articulating what I consider to be an important evolution: a push toward the development of small, easy content creation tools that allow faculty to generate some multimedia content on their own.

The development of such tools moves content creation toward ownership by the content expert. This has several advantages, the most obvious being efficiency and accuracy. An astronomy professor knows exactly what they want to say. If it were possible to create instructional materials directly, control of when and how that happens is in the hands of the content expert. Consider the use of PowerPoint and other presentation tools for lectures; there is typically no need for an instructional designer to act as an intermediary between the knowledge and the technology in these cases. The tools are simple enough to allow for the direct creation of materials.

A note of clarification: there will always be a need for multimedia content creators, simply because the demand will continue to increase as the level of sophistication of the media tools improves. Furthermore there is the issue of fundamental artistic talent; easy to use tools won't help someone with no sense of perspective, use of negative space, shading, etc. So I guess what I really have in mind is not necessarily the artistic/illustrative work, but more of the simple functional tasks.

By way of example, my colleague Mark and I worked on a multimedia module as a test case for the creation of a small, reusable content creation tools. Mark, I believe, shares my opinion on the long-term benefits of direct content creation. Earlier this year we discussed a vision of a “toolbox” of small applications that would be available to anyone. The initial project centers on the creation of self-assessment "hint" activities that can be incorporated into online course materials.

The hint activity allows students to ask for additional information while attempting to solve a problem. The number of questions and hints can be determined by the faculty member. The actual content in the “question,” “hint” and “answer” fields can include text or images (pictures, photos, graphs, etc.).

Here’s an example of the interface for a lesson of college algebra. I created similar activities for statistics that incorporates more graphs, tables, and images. The overarching idea is to reduce the barriers to content creation with tools that are simple and easy to use, but produce something of acceptable quality. In other words, get out of the way of the content experts. This is still a work in progress, of course, and we haven't had much time at all to work on it. But I like the basic idea of progressively releasing information (or "hints") to learners. 

One of the sources of inspiration for this idea came from a trip to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Learning Technologies conference last year. While there, I learned about a reusable instructional content creation tool from the University of Wisconsin called the Concept Tutor. The things I liked about it: it's contained; its wizard is pretty good; it lets one use graphics, animations, etc; and most importantly, a test with a real-life faculty member showed it could be used successfully.Like a "hint" activity, concepts are ideal because they can be easily deployed across virtually all academic disciplines.

There are other small tools out there like Hot Potatoes that allow for the quick creation of quizzes and crossword puzzles. Dan Lim has some Flash games that are easy to use. But I think there's an opportunity within Penn State to work toward creating some tools ourselves. I'd be willing to bet that World Campus, Liberal Arts, Arts & Architecture, and many others are creating or soon will be creating some forms of content creation tools. How great would it be if these were shared in a common "toolbox," along with examples & documentation? And tools could be added to the box as we all move forward.

For my part, I make a point to ask faculty I meet (either through work or socially) what kinds of tools they might be interest in or perceive a need for. Some of the tools that come up already exisit, and many are highly specific to one discipline. But some are easily generalizable across disciplines, and would be valuable.

At the risk of becoming a shill for the NYTimes technology section, there is another story today about Kaplan's use of iPod content for ACT & SAT prep.

 
It's a short read, but some items of note include the use of a MySpace page for disseminating info (much like the Digital Commons commons team is using Facebook to get the word out and build a community), as well as the brief reference to vocabulary-building manga.

I'd be interested in seeing the math versions to get ideas for our college algebra project. Might get some good ideas about chunking the content, as well as how best to divide the content topically.  

 

Last year I had an inquiry from my brother in law regarding resources for mobile learning (mlearning) pedagogy. He's an English instructor living abroad, first in North Korea, and currently in Osaka, Japan. Along with some colleagues, he's decided to enter the mobile English instruction market. The approach is pretty straightforward: a combination of language drills, activities, and games, along with live tutoring via MMS . Clients respond with pronunciation assignments, etc. Though they had ample experience with classroom and individual tutoring, the move to mobile devices represented unknown territory from a teaching perspective. I offered some resources that I thought might be of help, though most were not specific to language instruction.

Yesterday in the NYTimes, there was an interesting article about the growth in content produced specifically for mobile devices. Because the article appeared in the "Money" section, it focuses primarily on how successful these efforts might be for broadcast networks, etc. One of the interesting items, however, was the chart I included with the post. Demographically, our primary audience of learners is leading the way in consumption of mobile content. Yes, this is a notion that is widely known by tech folks. I still found it of interest, because it bolsters my efforts to create mlearing content for blended courses. And sometimes popular press can help sway those in position to make decisions (and approve purchases of ModBook tablets).

In the next several weeks, we'll begin the process of creating narrated screencasts of algebra solutions for one of the blended learning courses I'm currently working on. These screencasts will provide step by step demonstrations of sample problems, with the hope being that anytime access to these short (2 minutes or less) solutions might be of use to students. As a part of a blended course, they seem to make sense; increased access to course materials and learner control over content review are two of the primary goals of our initiative. One step that we're taking is the creation of mpeg-4 files in addition to streaming the screencasts . The hope is that the bite-sized chunks of content might be a good fit with portable devices. In addition to fieldwork data collection and location-aware activities, these self-evaluation content pieces are perhaps among the more obvious uses of mlearning tools. However, our goal is not necessarily to break new ground on this one. Instead, we're shooting for a good fit pedagogically.

In a 2005 presentation at the mLearn conference, Jill Attewell detailed some important aspects of mlearning implementation, including the notion that re-purposing materials originally developed for desktop computer delivery may not play to the strengths of mobile technologies. I believe this to be an important caution, for technical reasons (content not created speficially for mobile devices will not perform as well as custom content), as well as pedagogical ones (aspects of locationality, relationality, or appropriate chunking will not be the same for desktop vs. mobile). That said, nothing is perfect right out of the gate, and I believe that valuable lessons can be gleaned from successes as well as disasters.

Will students use it? Would they, say, review simplifying rational expressions while sitting on the bus? Maybe. I guess we'll find out.