"Fundamentally, they were learners..."

On page 20 of What the Best College Teachers Do, in summing up the qualites of outstanding teachers, Ken Bain writes, "Fundamentally, they were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students' development..." 

My quest is to understand learning. We never arrive. To me that's part of the joy of learning. There's always something more, something new, something deeper. And one of the things we constantly need to learn about is our students. In many ways they keep changing; in many ways they stay the same, but without an understanding of "where they're at", we will never be able to foster learning in them.

As I read this book, I keep seeing the connections to the book some of us read last semester, The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull. A neurobiologist and director of a university teaching center, Zull sits in a wonderful spot to put together the things we have learned about learning from the "outside" with the chemistry and physiology of the brain on the "inside". Two things have absolutely stuck with me from that book. One is that to learn anything, it must be connected, physically, to something we already know. The other is that we really don't learn much of anything (not as "deep learning') if we don't want to, so the ability to motivate students and make learning important and meaningful for them is absolutely necessary. We can't do either of these things well if we don't know anything about our students.

Musings on "The Art of Changing the Brain"

 I'm a little behind in my reading. I've only made it to the low 50's, but it's all good stuff. As I read on page 51 of The Art of Changing the Brain:

"It is not surprising, then, that cognition also triggers our internal reward system. We enjoy real learning, and we want to learn."

It reminded me of a similar quote from James Gee:

"It should be noted that humans and

other primates find learning and mastery deeply, even biologically, pleasurable under the

right conditions, though often not the ones they face in school."
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/The_Ecology_of_Games.pdf]
Since Zull insists that everything is biological, I'd say these guys agree.

I enjoyed the discussion of the four things brains use to survive - cognition, control, fear, and pleasure. When we are trying to make an environment conducive to learning, we really have to keep these things in mind. Zull stated earlier in the book that people are always learning; they just might not be learning the things in your syllabus. It gets back to the kinds of motivation people have for learning. I know plenty of students who are most interested in gaming the system. They are "learning" how to get the grades, but they may not be learning much about the subjects in which they are enrolled. These students are finding a way to control their school environment because, in many cases, what they are being told they will learn in the grand opening statements of the syllabus are not the things they are being held responsible for. It's a common disconnect in education. An instructor states that they want the students to learn critical thinking and then gives a bunch of multiple choice tests over content. Why should the students give critical thnking a second thought in that class? Their very pragmatic brains figure out that they just have to memorize stuff.

I also enjoyed his approach of looking at the evolution of the brain to help understand why we think and process things the way we do. Fear and pleasure are just things we are going to have to deal with in teaching and learning. Insisting that those approaches aren't "scientific" or that we should be able to "get past it" or be "totally rational" is probably not realistic. People have emotions and feelings, especially in our society where we put so much value on education. Our self-esteem may be very wrapped up in how well we do in school, so learning becomes a tangled mess. I'm just happy to know that learning is somehow tied to pleasure. Otherwise, I think we would be sunk.

Gaming Education

I just saw this infographic (tweeted by someone I follow) and am still in the process of digesting it. I really hope games (not just video games) are changing education.

There is so much written on this subject that I can't imagine I would add a whole lot to the conversation. There is just one thing from the section below "It's not all fun and games" where some concerns about games in education are raised that I would like to comment on.

"Some teachers worry that games motivate students to achieve defined win states rather than to seek knowledge."


I'm pretty sure that much of what goes on in mainstream education at pretty much any level has to do with achieving defined win states. Most students are gaming education. I guess the good news is that, as with many games, they learn something along the way in spite of themselves.


Via: Online Colleges Guide

Confessions of a video novice

You would think I knew more about video than I do. I can fake my way through, like the time my kids were working on a video for a film festival at school. My two younger sons and a few of their friends were working on an entry for the comedy category of the school's first film festival. They had shot a lot of scenes (it was a documentary on tools, and it won first place), but they found they didn't have the proper software to get it off the video camera and onto my son's computer. I came home from work to find them frustrated and worried that they weren't going to be able to pull this whole film-making thing off. When I walked in the door, they all came running up the stairs spouting all the problems they were having. All I said was, "I'm not sure how to fix this, but I have a Mac in my backpack." We plugged the video camera into my Mac, iMovie opened, and the rest is history. I looked like a genius, but I didn't really have to do anything.

Fast-forward about a year. As I said in a previous post, I finally joined the smartphone brigade, and I didn't mess around. I got an HTC EVO 4G, and I have to say that this phone is rockin'. I considered the slightly smaller version, but the bigger screen was a draw for my aging eyes, and the 8 megapixel camera intrigued me. I just took about a minute and a half of video (lovely footage of my garden, don't you know), dumped it onto my computer, imported it into iMovie, and all I can say is Wow! That is one heck of a camera on that phone. If I ever thought I might want to buy a video camera, I'm done with that idea. I've got one.

For me, once again, a lot of my interest is academic. I'm working with plenty of people who need video to teach their classes - intro videos for online classes, videos of people solving problems, videos of lab techniques - you name it. Figuring out the workflow for posting these kinds of things still isn't easy at a lot of institutions unless you want to use YouTube, and many universities and faculty members are uncomfortable posting videos that are part of course work on YouTube. There are some possibilities on the horizon (Kaltura, for instance), but for some reason at IU, it has taken a lot of time for people to come around to an easy video solution for course-related video. Considering the quality of video that you can produce at any moment, we've got to do something about that.

Well, at least we can stop buying video cameras for people to check out. Just about everyone has a pretty decent one in their pocket. Now what do I do with it? I'm not sure, but watch out. I'm going to go get a YouTube account...

Going mobile

OMG, I finally got a smart phone. I knew I needed to catch up with the rest of the world, especially the college student world, in order to be effective in my job as an instructional technologist. I want to be able to understand firsthand what the affordances of truly mobile technology mean to my ability to engage with things I'm learning. I've had an iPad for just under a year, but I wax hot and cold with that. It's not quite mobile enough because I'm really a hands-free person. I don't want to have to carry something as big as an iPad - a smart phone still fits in my pocket. 

So what does it do for me? It makes email even more intrusive, which may not be my favorite thing, but I think it makes it much easier to keep track of my thoughts. You may not think my thoughts are all that important (but, hey, you're reading this), but my work life is getting increasingly fast-paced. Thinking about the things that are important to me, like how mobile technology is affecting education let's say, is hard to do in the middle of the whirlwind that is my life, professional or otherwise. When I read something, think of something, see something, I want to be able to note it. I may not be able to think about it at that moment, but it keeps it from flying in one side of my brain and out the other. 

I've heard people say that their lives are on their phones, and I always thought it was kind of sad. The truth is that our lives are increasingly in the cloud - that's getting increasingly scary, but it's so darn powerful and convenient. It is both compelling and insidious, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. All I know is that I'm typing this in Evernote, so I can access it anywhere on all my devices...

Back to what it means to me and my brain. I'm dealing with information overload just like everyone else, and I think I'm finding that time and organization to reflect and digest some fraction of the information is important to my thought process and my ability to learn from everything that is coming at me. I've only had it for a week, but it makes it possible for me to carve out some extra time to think about things and be able to pick up from where I left off. 

What will it mean to teaching and learning? Can we convince students that their classes should be part of their lives that go on on their phones? Better yet, can we find a way to make education important enough and authentic enough to be part of their lives? This is a big key. Right now mainstream education is in its own silo for many students. Until it becomes connected to things that students do and see on a day-to-day basis, it will stay there. Not all learning has to be uber-academic learning. We are not fostering intellectual curiosity in our students because we are generally ineffective at getting them to care. I've seen glimmers of hope that having students on the lookout for examples of things they are learning as they go about their business really increases their engagement with the subject. That connectedness goes a long way towards developing curiosity, and smart phones can help students, notice, comment on, and share the connections they are seeing. And when they share them, they are likely to make a wisecrack about them - the wisecracks are often insightful, you know. Let's set the students free (at least a little bit) to wisecrack about how they are beginning to participate in the disciplines they are learning.

Basketball, course design, and giving up the ball

I had an epiphany in the shower today. You have to love showers. I might speculate that one of the reasons the Dark Ages were so dark has to do with the fact that people rarely bathed. But back to my epiphany. It has to do with something I noticed when I coached a lot of basketball players between the ages of about 8 and 12. Often the very talented kids knew very little about basketball. They didn't know how to play defense or pass or move without the ball, and it was very hard to teach them these things. They relied on their physical ability (they were just better athletes than the other kids they were playing with) and did quite well in their particular context, which was parks and rec basketball. I was always trying to teach them the things I knew they would need if they ever wanted to move on to a higher level of play. I knew that at the next level, everyone would be a good athlete, and they wouldn't be able to rely on just their athleticism.

This seems like a long-winded intro to what I really want to discuss, but I am starting to find similar issues with people who teach. Some instructors are very "engaging" (my whole engagement spiel is the topic of another post). They are good in front of a classroom, they're just funny enough, they have a knack for making things interesting, and students generally enjoy their classes. They get good teaching evaluations (you notice we haven't broached the subject of learning in their classes), and oftentimes it just seems to come naturally. Some of these instructors are relying on their "athleticism" as a speaker, but they don't really know much about teaching and learning. They are doing what they saw other professors do, and that seems to be working pretty well in their context, which is the college lecture hall.

How can I have the nerve to say some of these people don't know much about teaching and learning? First of all, why should they? Knowing anything about teaching, let alone learning, is rarely the most important prerequisite for securing a tenure-track position at a large Research-1 university. I'm not making any accusations here; I'm just telling it like it is. I work with many instructors on many aspects of teaching, but, just as I noticed with kids playing basketball, the holes in their preparation often surface when they have to move to another context. In my case, I have worked with many instructors as they have designed and implemented online courses. I used to say about basketball players that they didn't know what to do if the ball wasn't in their hands. This was about the worst thing I could say about a player. After all, considering that there are 9 other people on the court, 90% of the game goes on when you don't have the ball in your hands. For an instructor in a course with 200 students - well, you do the math.

Moving to any kind of a learner-centered context means giving up control - you don't have the ball in your hands all the time anymore. You need to know a lot more than just lecturing, no matter how good you are at it. What are the students doing while you are not talking to them, and how can they possibly be learning anything if you are not directly involved? And what about the students? Many times they think they would rather sit passively and be talked to (this has been referred to as the "bad bargain" we have with students - professors won't demand much of their students, and the students won't complain). The active learning and constructivist movements in education beg to differ.

In my profession, instructional technology consulting, it is my job to help teaching faculty members navigate this huge paradigm shift in higher education. Although I have "technology" in my title, I'm finding that we sometimes have to dig pretty deeply into basic course design principles before we get near the technology. The most gratifying thing I hear faculty members say when they are busy redesigning courses for online or blended environments is, "I'm going to use some of these tools and techniques in my face-to-face courses, too." We may find that the move to online learning in higher education has the  biggest impact on teaching and learning simply because it is necessitating the redesign of so many courses (Dzubian, Hartman, and Moskal, 2004).

Once again I'm enjoying teaching people what to do when the ball isn't in their hands.

Dzubian, C.D., Hartman, J.L., and Moskal, P.D. 2004. Blended Learning. ECAR Research Bulletin, V. 2004, Issue 7, pp 1-12.