Recently in learning Category

I recently finished the Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which is just a brilliant and scary book about how we eat and how these choices impact our world. Not surprisingly this got me thinking about education. I have two points here:

First, a lot of the book is about corn as a very successful monoculture. Humans cultivate it in huge swaths of our country to the exclusion of almost anything else. Corn, with human help, wipes out everything else. As a result we have a tremendously unstable ecological situation where corn is (almost) the only organism and the corn is totally dependent on humans to reproduce. The only goal is yield per acre, and whatever has to be done to the corn or the environment to improve yield is being done.

This is an exact analogy for our educational system. We have an educational monoculture founded on the same principles - yeild - the most output possible per unit input. What does this mean in education? It means higher test scores per dollar. If your school is not producing an adequate yield (AYP in NCLB terms), then it is time for you to shut down. The emphasis on yield is forcing schools to create a monoculture of students. Students should all be the same and maximize yield.

Macronutrients as the be all and end all.

On my way to work today I was listening to ETS talk, a great podcast that originates with Educational Technology Services (thus the ETS) here at PSU. [Minor disclaimer - I have been a guest on the podcast]. The director of ETS and the podcast's host is Cole Camplese [second disclaimer - Cole is a friend of mine], who does a lot of interesting work / thinking around how to integrate technology into learning and teaching. In episode 22 of ETS talks, one of the regulars, Allan Gyorke, begins a discussion was about developing a boot camp so that faculty here could start to think about how to really integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their courses. What struck me was that while talking about moving the conception of technology toward this new paradigm, they were also talking about teaching and learning using the equivalent of a Web 1.0 metaphor (or maybe Web 1.5). I think this is really common not only in the learning design community, but in the teaching and learning community in general (e.g. Colleges of Education). Maybe we can expand our thinking about teaching and learning by remembering it is a form of technology. On a fundamental level, teaching is the ultimate (and by that I mean not greatest, but original) technology. If we define technology as a tool that helps us accomplish a task, then it becomes clear that teaching is a technology. In fact, it is the technology that sets us apart as a species. Humans ability to teach each other, and by doing so transmit information from generation to generation, is what makes us so successful. Alan Kay said "technology is only technology to those born before technology." [Thanks to Cole for that quote] Obviously, there is no one around to remember when teaching was technology. If we are willing to conceptualize teaching as technology, then what does it mean for us to think of teaching as a 2.0 endeavor? I think what it means is the "teacher" needs to give up the idea that they own the technology. We (the teachers) have to give it away. I posted about an un-conference the other day as an idea of how to reconsider academic conferences. This is, in some ways, an extension of the un-conference idea. I will try and use the idea of the ETS boot camp as an example. They proposed getting a group of learning designers together, getting them in groups and setting them a design challenge from a faculty member. They would solve this challenge using social software tools and then present their solutions to a panel of faculty for evaluation. Then these ideas / design projects would be made available for others to see as exemplars of how to integrate social tools. Given the metaphor for teaching, this is good pedagogy. Now let me propose an alternative that attempts to change the metaphor [recognizing this is not fully baked]. Create a social space that is open for proposals from the learning design and faculty community at PSU. Anyone can make a proposal for development - e.g. I am interested looking at how del.icio.us could be used in an undergraduate course in science teaching or I am interested in thinking about how YouTube might be used in any course. The people in the community would "vote" for different proposal by adding their name to the proposal. When a proposal reaches some critical mass of people signed on, perhaps a mix of designers and faculty, it becomes a real group. The group is given resources - i.e. physical space, online space, other resources from ETS, etc. Once the group is up and running, others may join. The group sets up its own meeting times and goals and its only responsibility is to report back to the larger community, maybe in a on-going blog that includes products that can be shared. This creates a system that is responsive to need and not "owned" by the teacher (in this case ETS). Imagine a university that worked this way. Students or faculty could make course proposals to the community. When a critical mass was reached the course becomes reality and then other can join. You could set criteria like enrollment limits and how the course would count toward a degree, etc. You might end up with a proliferation of courses about The OP, but you also might end up with a incredibly dynamic, innovative and powerful learning community. Talk about an open university. The Un-university? University 2.0? Just a thought.

In developing curricula for science education we base our work in part on the misconceptions students bring with them to the classroom. As part of my research I examine classroom science practice, and in particular the practice of one exceptional Chemistry teacher that is a part of my research group. He has infused his curricula, which he developed from scratch by himself, with a great deal of the history of chemistry. One of the units he does on burning involves having students do a series of experiments and then they are asked to draw on these experiments to support or refute phlogisten theory. This got me thinking about curriculum development and its relationship to the history of a field. My question is: has there ever been a curricula designed (in science or not) that uses the historical development of ideas in a field as a analog to help structure activities in a classroom?  For example, in Physics this would start with the Aristotelian ideas that are considered core misconceptions current students have when entering Physics classes. You would design a set of experiences that challenge these core Aristotelian misconceptions. Then work through the ideas that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, etc. in response to particular problems. The idea is not to focus on the history per se, but on the problems in the disciplines that great scientists grappled with and solved.  For example, using the data that supported a geocentric model of the universe, what were the weaknesses of the model, and what was the final piece of data that caused the revolution to a heliocentric universe. To analogize to learning theory, you could view the revolutionary moments in the development of a science discipline as a reorganization of the facts of the field analogous to an accomodation in conceptual change. In this way you can use a map of the history of the discipline as a sort of roadmap to the likely development of an individual's understanding of the discipline. The development of scientific disciplinary culture becomes an analog for the development of individual understanding of the ideas of that culture. I know there have been curricula that focus on the history of science and primary source readings, but has anyone every considered history as an analogical guide for curriculum development? Thoughts would be appreciated.

I have just returned from the annual meeting of the National Association for Research on Science Teaching (NARST) in New Orleans, LA. What struck me clearly this time was the completely outmoded way that conferences (not just NARST) are run. I have been reading about the concept of an un-conference recently in Fred Stutzman's blog. The idea is based on Open Space Technology. Generally, the idea is that of a self organizing conference. People are invited and then create an agenda on the fly (sometimes in advance via Web 2.0 tools) including break-out sessions based on emergent issues of interest. How would this work in an academic research conference? That is the question I have been wrestling with. One of the difficulties is that most universities tie reimbursement for conference travel to presenting, so no presentation means no reimbursement. This makes a conference without a fixed agenda very difficult to populate. One solution is to allow all participants to be named as presenters. The solution I think is strongest, is to sandwich the unconference between poster sessions. In the morning have a poster session with refreshments. People are official presenters so there is no issue with support. Then there is a large middle section that is unconference. Then in the evening there is a poster session again with wine and cheese refreshments. It seems to have potential for a really powerful microtime learning community. I just found out today that one of my amazing colleagues here at PSU, James Nolan, has been using Open Space Technology in his work with teachers in PSU's professional development school. I am hoping to see this in action and report back how it updates my thinking on the academic unconference.

I was listening to Fresh Air with Terri Gross on NPR this morning (the podcast). She was interviewing a consultant that works with politicians and businesses to help them develop and use "words that work" (his book title). He was talking about the difference between climate change and global warming. His point was that climate change was more accurate and less extreme than global warming. He made this same sort of comparison for a number of other politically charged terms (e.g. death tax vs. estate tax, drilling vs. exploring in ANWAR). What I found so ironic is that he is arguing that his language is more true than the other choices. The idea that his ideas are expressed accurately without the bias of value. It is a fundamental of constructivist learning theory that each individual constructs their own understanding. You (as a teacher or a politician) can only introduce things into the environment, not transmit them into another person's head. This means that when I say death tax it can not possibly mean the same thing to you as it does to someone else. Saying that death tax is more accurate than estate tax is just absurd on the face of it. Each phrase is chosen to make a particular type of argument about the value of the tax. The main goal of language is essentially rhetorical - an attempt to have others see the world as we do. In this way language does not have an absolute meaning, only a meaning grounded in the experiences, context and interpretation of the people speaking and hearing it. This is the difficulty I have with absolutists of all stripes. The idea that there are right answers in the area of human interactions (like teaching). Malcomb Gladwell (author of Blink and The Tipping Point) has a great talk at TED about this very issue. He manages to make some profound points about the nature of scientific reserach on human behavior while using chunk tomato sauce as a exemplar. Great stuff.

I was reading an aricle in Wired about machine translation and was struck by the connection to learning theory. The upshot was that new, much more accurate translation software is being written by creating context for the language being translated. The software takes a section of text in Spanish, say 8 words long, generates a list of possible translations in English and looks on the web for the frequency of each translations appearance in English as a measure of likelihood it is the best translation. It then moves one word ahead and repeats the process with seven words from the last set, plus the next one in the sequence. It continues like this selecting the most likely candidates for each set of 8 words and then produces a translation based on the most likely of all possibilities. Essentially what the algorithm does through brute force is create an understanding of language in context. The reason that I think this is so interesting is that it supports the idea language is contextual. As language is the primary tool for learning, by extention this means that learning (or knowledge) is contextual as well. If you can't learn the word "bank" without having a context for the word, then you can't learn about sedimentation collecting on the bank of a stream without that taking place in a context. The context of the learning is as critical as the content. For me this shatters the idea that is fundamental to so much of how we assess learning (e.g. NCLB & standardized tests) -- that knowledge out of context has meaning and that measuring knowledge out of context is a meaningful way of understanding what a student knows. If a computer cannot understand things well without a context, must it not be even more true of people?

I have been reading the new Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. In his introduction the editor, Keith Sawyer, mentions untested ideas about learning. One of the ones that I found most critical is the idea that the sequence and content of ideas children should learn is decided by (content) experts, not by studying how children actually learn. What this means is that high school Physics, for example, is taught based on how experts in the field of Physics see the organization of Physics as a discipline. This in no way represents any consideration of how these concepts are best learned. In fact it does not even represent how human beings, over the course of the development of Physics, have developed these ideas. So, for example, would it makes sense to start teaching kids Physics by starting with the ideas the Greeks had about it and then showing them how those ideas were overturned? Maybe or maybe not. The point is we are not basing our choices on how students learn best, but on how experts view their field. Who then should be making decisions about how Physics should be taught? Well (no surprise here), people like me. Those of us who instead of studying Physics study how people learn Physics and thus how to best teach it. This highlights one of the most difficult things about expertise in education - it is widely considered to be part of everyones everyday experience, and thus true "expertise" in teaching and learning is suspect. Physics professors assume they know something about education because they are assigned to teach a section of introductory Physics. How do they usually choose to teach? The way they were taught. If you did this in Physics -- do things just like your teacher had done them, without ever testing it empirically -- we would still believe what Aristotle did about the world (or the cavemen). It simply does not makes sense as a way to improve our understandings of the world. The counterintuitive notion for me is that the discipline (e.g. Physics) has taken decades if not centuries to develop, and it has changed over time as naïve or intuitive notions about the world have been emirically tested. Most students, however, have many of the same naive notions about the world, but we assume giving them the current structure of the field will clear all that up for them. We need to understand how people learn and use that understanding to help them move from naive conceptions to deep conceptual understanding of the ideas in a discipline. This is not the way that we think about schooling.