McEducation: Comments

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:44:13 -0500

Well, going back to obsession as an indicator of expertise, I think there is a gap in expertise. Most Ed Tech people don't have experience teaching (which is not the same as educational theory or instructional design) and almost none spend the lion's share of their time thinking/reading/obsessing about teaching. This is not a criticism, it is simply a matter of priorities, and as you said a scarcity of time. While I dabble in technology and enjoy thinking about it, I obsess about teaching. It is simply my contention that for most Ed Tech folks that equation is reversed. The implications of this reversal, however, I think are profound in terms of how they/I approach the questions and problems of how to incorporate technology into teaching.
It is the job of folks in Ed Tech to be obsessed with technology, it is the job of content experts to be obsessed with their content, all I am saying is if you are trying to make changes to teaching it is imperative to have someone at the table that is obsessed with teaching.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:39:46 -0500

I'm just not sure that there's a gap in expertise where we're making decisions about building/implementing technology. Granted some Ed Tech people come from an IT background and may put tools first, but many are from an Education background and understand educational theory and instructional design very well. The problem is with process, and basic practicality. It's expensive to identify, evaluate, implement, and support a comprehensive set of tools to meet every instructional need. So what happens, in the case of many of the examples we saw at ELI, is that the ed tech groups at these institutions build lowest-common-denominator solutions. Invariably, as you say, the faculty are upset because those types of solutions barely meet their most basic instructional needs. Actually they might meet many of the logistical needs of instruction very well, but not so much the pedagogical. Instructional designers are an amazing resource, there's just simply not enough of them. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's as much a matter of a different kind of expertise as a process that brings in the existing pedagogical expertise at the right point in the decision making.

- Chris Millet

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:47:01 -0500

Chris,

I have to say I only partially agree with you on this. I agree that being obsessed about technology is part of your job (just as being obsessed with teaching is part of mine). My point, I think, is that because we approach problems from our experience (and our obsessions), this tends to be a lens that we often don't recognize in how we make choices/recommendations. When you say:

"But by and large, that initial tool evaluation is informed by sound educational decision making and regular dialogue with teachers."

I disagree with this. Initially tool evaluation is framed as a question of affordances of particular tools. There is not a pedagogical, but a technological imperative. What is this tool capable of. I think that is a useful conversation, but it is not the first conversation to have if you are trying to impact teaching and learning. I can extend this into the second part of what you said. Largely the regular dialogue you have around tools is with content area experts, most of whom are not trained as nor are the obsessed with teaching. There are always exceptions, but this is the rule. My point is not that there should not be both parts of the conversation, but more which conversation should be first. In some cases the tool's affordance conversation may make sense to come first (as when you are thinking about adopting and supporting a tool into a large and diverse university context), however when working with an individual on a particular pedagogical problem the conversation should not start with the affordances of the tools that were adopted by the large university, but with a problem of practice connected to the teaching. Defining this problem of practice is often not something that can be done by either the ed tech professional or by the content area expert, but requires another kind of expertise. I think that the de-emphasis of pedagogy in favor of technology is a central cause to a lot of the perceived tension between ed tech and teachers/faculty over adoption. Ed tech people often voice frustration with faculty for not adopting tools that are perceived to improve teaching and faculty often complain that ed tech people don't support the tools they need to solve their problems. I don't see that so much here at PSU, but it was clear to me from ELI that it is a general pattern in most of the rest of our world.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:22:52 -0500

Ellysa,

Thanks for the Sente suggestion. I will took a look and it seems pretty impressive. It gets some of the things that I was hoping to see. I would love to see how you made is custom for PSU. I like the syncing features for the libraries and it seems to be better at a lot of things than Papers. Did not get a sense that it does citations well, but maybe you can't have everything.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:37:01 -0500

Scott - Being both an educational technology professional and a graduate student in the College of Education, I tend to come at this from two angles. While we shouldn't design instruction around tools, one of our obligation as educational technology professionals is to explore new technology tools that become available to us. Certainly we can't look at them all, but we use our experience and educational backgrounds to decide on some subset that look like they have a potential to positively impact teaching and learning. That exploration should lead to some categorization of tools that can inform the practice of educators so that when they have an instructional problem, they don't have to engage in the long and expensive process of evaluating tools, or feel forced to use one tool for everything because that's all they know. In that sense, there is a scarcity - a scarcity of time to learn or develop new tools or develop teaching strategies that incorporate new tools. It's probably a problem that educators sometimes think that us ed tech professionals are haphazardly throwing tools into their teaching process, when what they should be getting from us is well-informed advice on what technology (if any) is appropriate for their instructional needs. But I don't think the problem is obsession with tools, per se. Our obsession keeps us tapped into a technology landscape that is, as you know, changing at an insane rate. We NEED to be obsessed, or at least very passionate about tools, and I think that's possible without jeopardizing sound educational judgement. It's very easy to rationalize why a particular tool fits a certain instructional need, especially when you've spent a ton of money developing and promoting it, or when you're just so excited with how it's affected you personally. But by and large, that initial tool evaluation is informed by sound educational decision making and regular dialogue with teachers. One thing we need to keep working on is systematically categorizing and articulating the value of each tool we evaluate . As you suggest, we need to be able to say "Is multi-channel student discourse important in this classroom? If so, Twitter may be appropriate". But we have to know what Twitter is first.

- Chris Millet

Comment on "Obsession with tools"

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:08:31 -0500

Hi Scott,

I completely agree. The needs of the user are important---not the tools themselves. Unfortunately, the tools are shiny and often detract attention from what's really needed and necessary.

I worked that same notion into the new charge for the Libraries' reference management team: This Team will investigate, narrate and support the reference management workflow mandated by our users' different research needs and levels of scholarship. Do you think that encapsulates your idea?

I was thinking about your workflow after our meeting, and coincidentally, I think I found something that might work well for you. Sente is somewhat like Papers but provides more searching capabilities within the interface as well as Word integration. I posted a short report on it here: http://www.personal.psu.edu/esc10/blogs/E-Tech/2010/02/sente-vs-papers.html
I'd be happy to show you how I customized it for the Penn State environment.

Let me know what you think, and thanks again for the ideas you shared with me last week!

- ELLYSA STERN CAHOY

Comment on "Who is a dime a dozen?"

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:53:23 -0500

I do wonder about the economics of it all. Not being an economist (or a higher education finance person), I don't really understand how all this happens. My biggest question is the same as yours: the large lecture classes. If so much of the financing model (allowing for small doctoral seminars of 5 students to be the same part of a teaching load as a 300 person lecture, encouraging faculty to seek external funding to allow for course reductions, etc.) is predicated on students seeing value in sitting in an auditorium and listening to someone talk 15 times (or 30 times) in a semester, how long before they see through that and don't agree to participate? Not sure. There is an interesting critique around this issue by Murray Sperber called "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education". Maybe your reference to football tickets was more apt than you suspected.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Who is a dime a dozen?"

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:07:34 -0500

I have long been of the belief that if the academy does not figure out how to recognize and reward good teaching with the same diligence that it rewards good research, the change will be made by the consumer... er... student. "I see what you did there".

A non-PA Resident attending Penn State University Park can expect to pay $36,220 for tuition, room and books. In state? You can go for the bargain basement price of $24,626. Per year. Thats nearly $100,000 for an in state, public school education.

For a long time, I think there has been an institutional arrogance regarding the cultural significance of the academy. An assumption that you can't put a price on the value of a college education. And that has permitted a very lax stance on the actual "education" that occurs within these hallowed walls. But a college education isn't getting any cheaper and, as this economic climate has shown us, rising costs (particularly exorbitant ones) tend to be put under the microscope sooner or later.

Am I predicting the death of the university? No, not at all. But we're very rapidly speeding towards a day of reckoning when academic prestige becomes an unaffordable luxury for the average American. And those who can afford to sign away their lives away to student debt are going to start asking a few more questions besides "how do I get football tickets" and "where is the best party school". When that happens, the 500 person classrooms, GA taught lab sessions, and a P&T process that places no premium on teaching is going to start to look a little suspect for the price of a new Mercedes every year.

Great post Scott. I couldn't agree more. I only hope we can, as a community, see and fix the problem before it is fixed for us.

- CHRIS STUBBS

Comment on "Here we go again"

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:30:29 -0500

I agree completely. I think the thing that we are seeing with the iPad is the creation of the computational appliance. I think that is why so many hard core geeks are bemoaning it. It just like the hard core gear heads who bemoan the modern automobile that can't be tinkered with or modified. The reason the iPad is going to be revolutionary is not its form factor or its specs, but in its ability to disappear into our lives and become a semi-transparent technology artifact. It will be an interface to everything.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Here we go again"

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:43:16 -0500

interesting thread Scott,

I think your Spinal Tap connection i right on, you could also say, we're sort of creating exploding drummers... I would say that I'm sort of a child of the technology era- maybe more of an early adopter, but I see technology improving things in different ways than it's being talked about.

This past summer I was on a project with Landscape Architecture and in our second week, my MacBook Pro's graphics card kicked the bucket (you could say it went to 11). So I took my iPhone and I bought a VNC client, and for the next month, that is how I got things done on my mac like transferring image files and even a little ftp work with Coda. So what's the point and how does that relate to the iPad?

This is just my own take on this so I'm curious wat others think:
Weight-
the iphone weighs 135 grams, about a 1/4 lb;
the MacBook Pro, 2,490 grams, about 5 1/2 lbs;
the iPad weighs about 70 grams, or 1 1/2 lbs.

Now add external hard drives, power supplies, books, etc...
Before you know it you are easily carrying around 15-20 lbs in your bag

I have problems with my back so if I had the choice between carrying 5 lbs around all day or 20, you know what I'm choosing. If my back or shoulders are really bothering me, it affects my work. I have a hard time focusing, and the result of carrying all that weight around can cause a lot of pain that keeps me from maintaining focus.

I believe that we're going to see people (you'll see me doing it anyway) using their iPad as a controller for their desktop machines. I don't need the iPad to run 4 apps at a time because with my VNC client running, I can harness the power of my full blooded computer. I can use the mail, browser and calendar (for the most part) from the local apps, and run photoshop via vnc.

I'm excited for it- It's easy of course to boo the thing, but I'm going to take advantage of it- big time.

- GARRISON GUNTER

Comment on "Here we go again"

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:42:47 -0500

I agree Sameer. I am sure that you could gain a lot of insight into the way technology and culture interact by doing the kind of work that you are doing. Taking technology away from it's culture of origin and seeing how it gets adapted tells you a lot about both cultures. It reminds me of the Coke bottle in "The Gods Must be Crazy".

Thanks for the comment.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Here we go again"

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:04:13 -0500

I followed your link from facebook and got here and decided to be a part of this interesting conversation (i hope its okay). So, from my little experience with the computers in the HImalayas heres what i think: Human culture and technology are continually co-evolving in a dynamic relationship. All technologies develop in a particular cultural context as the result of changing needs or constraints. But once developed, a technology changes the culture that gave it birth. When a technology spreads to another culture, the cultural context affects the speed or way in which the technology is adopted and how it is used. The diffusion of technologies to other cultures changes those other cultures as well. The changes in culture that one technology creates may then incite local adaptations of the technology, or they may result in technological rejection.
Case in point: The computers in the Himalayas (technology which got somewhat rejected -due to lack of adaptation/electricity) or the cell phones which got accepted in the mountains at a super fast rate.

- SAMEER HONWAD

Comment on "Here we go again"

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:33:04 -0500

Not sure about that, but I am sure it would depend on the metric. The question I have is related to your first question. Does technology FORCE change? This is one of the operating assumptions about emerging technology is that it can somehow create change because of its nature. It might be a chicken and egg question, but do the social norms shape the technology or vice versa? I think it may be generational to the extent Alan Kay describes "technology is only technology to people born before technology" and so for teachers they really have to change social norms first, because it is technology to them, while their students don't see it as technology and just see it as part of their ordinary social practice.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Here we go again"

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:55:45 -0500

Using some metric, was there an increase in the quality of education from the pre-chalkboard age to chalkboard age? If so, would this be due to the advent of chalkboard, chalkboard coupled with changes of teaching practice, or neither.

Don't the changes in mental processes brought about by new technology drive changes in teaching practice moreso than the need for a better teaching practice drives a change in technology?

I guess the question I think of when something like the iphone or ipad comes out is, "how will this force education to change (along with society)?" not "how will this improve education?" "Education" is a moving target.

Just thinking out loud. To be honest, I really struggle with what "education" really means, so I'm probably too far out in the deep end with this comment.

- Brad Kozlek

Comment on "Here we go again"

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:57:02 -0500

I am guessing it applies to many fields. Technology is always viewed as the magic bullet that will cure the ills of bad practice. Too bad.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "Here we go again"

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:50:46 -0500

I agree with you Scott. It kind of reminds me of a quote by one of my graphics instructors:

"Photoshop does not make you become a better graphic designer, it makes poor graphic design easier."

In some ways this could easily transfer over to education. In the past we have looked at the potential of the new device and hoped that if we put it in place the best usage will naturally evolve. Often we just revert back to our standard strategy and say this is one louder.

- WAYNE E ANDERSON

Comment on "My conversation with a gaming master"

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:38:17 -0500

As a veteran high school English teacher, turned technology-training professional (and gamer), I can't resist weighing in here:

Technology does not replace quality teaching, but quality teachers think creatively about ways they can immerse their students into their subject areas. In the K-12 arena, my colleagues may have students dress in character, create posters, or write short fiction or poems to this end. With technology in their classrooms, they have students create podcasts, videos, newsletters, Websites, blogs, and presentations.

Gaming in education is not new. From my own junior high years, I remember playing The Oregon Trail and a space blobs game in Algebra where you'd zap the blobs with linear equations. Granted, these weren't the best games in the world, and back in my day computes were what sat in the back of the classroom for the first person who finished with his or her work, but today's games could offer much, much richer experiences.

The problem comes when someone thinks the computer is a replacement for teaching, like television as a substitute for parenting. No magic tool will do the work of a good educator or turn a bad educator into a quality teacher, but I wouldn't deny a tool from a quality teacher's arsenal just because others may wield it incorrectly.

- Nikki Massaro Kauffman

Comment on "My conversation with a gaming master"

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:48:22 -0500

You got me with the studiocode piece at the end.

I don't know if my attitude is typical of my peers, but I do think that there is an implicit message that serious game designers send, perhaps without knowing it. You can even see it in your comment about your cousin. History (or at least that particular history teacher) was lame (in his estimation). The solution - a first person shooter about WWII. I am oversimplifying what you said to make a point. And I don't think it is as much about the teacher as it is about the interaction around the game. If your cousin is going to learn anything meaningful (e.g. history of WWII) then he needs to engage in a conversation with someone who can help him contextualize the experiences that he had in the game into a meaningful, real world context. Without that he is just playing a first person shooter that happens to be set in Stalingrad. That conversation does not have to be with a teacher, but it does have to be with someone who knows something about history.

I agree with your overall point, that games are just a tool in a good teachers' repertoire. Just like a book requires a conversation (often) for a student to really get a rich understanding of it, a game does too. What worries me a little is that as computers become more sophisticated it seems that their is an implicit belief that they can be both the tool and the conversation.

- SCOTT P MCDONALD

Comment on "My conversation with a gaming master"

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:43:03 -0500

Rare is the day that I am referred to as a "gaming master". I think I'm going to have to change my business cards!

In regards to your response, I most certainly appreciate what you are saying and I would be curious to know whether or not such sentiment is prevalent among your peers (or among students for that matter). If so, its a notion that groups like the EGC are going to have to work hard to dispel.

For me, "teacher proofing" an educational game experience is about making the game work "for" any instructor, rather than the game working without one - the idea being that you shouldnt have to be a teacher who moonlights as a professional gamer to use a video game successfully in the classroom. I believe that video games can have a major impact on education, but even being the obsessive that I am, it would be folly to assume that a game could ever replace the intangible things that a good instructor can do. Nor should they.

Looking back at the email I sent you, I suppose I should also clarify myself. I think that video games can be an extremely engaging way to support education, but thats not to say that they are more engaging than a good instructor. I can still remember, nearly verbatim, the best lectures I've ever attended - some of which amounted to little more than a teacher and some chalk. Games don't represent a better way to engage students, just a different way. And in that difference there is an opportunity to engage a different group, a group that might not gravitate towards or appreciate the traditional.

A few years ago I was visiting some family over the summer and one of my younger cousins happened to be playing Call of Duty 1 - a shooter game set during World War 2. While he was playing we were talking and I asked him what sort of stuff he was doing in school. As he went down the list of his favorite subjects, I decided to ask him about History (seeing as how he was playing a history themed game). I'll never forget his response: "dude history is lame and boring"... as he was playing through the Battle of Stalingrad. As it turned out, he knew a lot more about history than he realized, it had just been given to him from actions on a screen instead of words on page. There was nothing wrong with his history teacher (I don't think) nor was there anything wrong with the history textbooks he was learning from. But they didnt connect with him. So who was really loosing out in that scenario? Obviously my cousin was, but you could just as easily argue that the study of history was also missing an opportunity to engage a future student, hobbyist, or contributor to the field.

I think you make a great point about the nature of "the next great thing" when it comes to technology and learning. But then there were great teachers before there were disruptive technologies. There were great teachers before studio code and there were most certainly great teachers before games. These things are all just tools and no matter how flashy, exciting, or cool they look, that is all they will ever be. And as is the case with tools, they don't do much of anything on their own. But in the hands of the right person... well thats a different story entirely.

- CHRIS STUBBS

Comment on "Seeing is the Key"

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:17:26 -0500

Your stated goal was to demonstrate the value to non-educators, specifically business people, of your research interest. You start out well in this regard, but by the end I am not certain why an approach to science education as you describe is important to me. What am I and my peers missing out on if students continue along the trajectory you describe? Where is the economic beef?

- ORRIN MURRAY