A new semester means a new set of students doing my “internet stalking” quest. This an adaptation of an assignment created by Robert Runte (ULeth), where students choose an anonymous blog and try to find out as much as they can about the person/people behind it. This is an exercise about privacy. The point of the exercise is to discover just how easy it usually is to find out information about people even when they don’t share it freely. I am looking for suggestions: if anyone has or knows of a blog that does not identify the blogger(s) that they think might be suitable for this quest, please share!
I start class by explaining to the students that they have been cast on a reality TV show called “Survival of the Fittest”. This is the letter I give them: (all materials can be found in this shared document).
Dear Students,
In an effort to supplement my teaching salary, I have volunteered all of you to be part of a new reality show called Survival of the Fittest. The producers of the show and I are very excited to begin this endeavor. Survival of the Fittest is a game where you are a member of a team and need to only stay alive for the duration of the show in order to win. There will only be one winning team in the game. Winners will receive bragging rights along with extensive knowlegde of ___________________.
In order to survive, you will need supplies such as water, food, weapons, and a bit of good luck. Other teams may try to sabotage you, so be alert. Anything could happen in this game as the “game-creators” are attempting to put on a good show and boost television ratings.
To begin, you will be flown to a remote location without any communication devices available to you. You and your team will have the opportunity to earn supplies to help keep you alive. Guard these supplies with your life, as you may need them to survive.
I wish you luck and may the best team win!
Sincerely,
I have two concerns with this design:
1. There is a risk that the narrative will overshadow the actual learning objectives of the course of unit. The ‘content’ is depreciated to become little more than the thing you need to do to win the game. Good gamification should do the opposite: it should focus attention on the content. I don’t have a problem with narratives per se, but they need to be specifically tailored to the content of the unit. A narrative into which we can “drop” course content is really not much different from a game wrapper. If there are ANY people in your class who don’t like the narrative, then it becomes a barrier to learning. If all you are doing is switching one group of disengaged learners for a different group of disengaged learners, you are not making progress.
2. Only SOME students like competing against each other. They tend to be the more extroverted students. Introverts are often put off by competition. I think punitive measures (like losing health) interfere with learning, unless the ‘failure’ is directly related to the thing they are trying to learn.
I’m afraid I can’t remember who should get credit for this photo (it’s not me). This is partly why I came to think about education the way I do. This was what my 1st year experience looked like.
Every student in every class deserves an answer to these 2 questions:
Why am I doing this?
What is it good for?
If you can’t answer those questions clearly and honestly, then you really need to take some time to think.
Warning: Some may find this inflammatory.
That’s not to say that everything you teach needs to be immediately and practically applicable, but if you can’t connect the dots for your students so they can see what’s valuable about what you are asking them to learn, then you haven’t given enough thought to your teaching. If you don’t give even that much thought to your teaching, then you shouldn’t be teaching.
I’m not the first person to coin the term “Teaching out Loud“, but I interpret it somewhat differently. The approach advocated by many of those who use the term seems to me to be closer to “Teaching Boldly” (or “Teaching Loud”) than it is to Teaching out Loud.
It’s time for educators to teach out loud. To have the courage to teach the way students learn. To have the courage to try new things. To have the courage to fight for their students.
First let me say, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. I actually think it’s a great idea and I do this myself. BUT, this is not what comes to mind (at least for me) when I hear the phrase.
What comes to mind for me when I hear “Teaching Out Loud” is more in line with the concepts associated with “Think Aloud” idea in psychological and educational research. The basic idea is that the ‘subject’ says what they are thinking about as they complete a task. The goal is to learn about the thought processes the subject is using. Given that, “Teaching Out Aloud” should be about the teacher explaining their reasoning and thought processes while teaching.
My view of “Teaching Out Loud” (or: Becker’s Teach Aloud Protocol) involves letting my students know why I am asking them to do what I am asking them to do AND telling them what I want them to get out of it. This goes beyond the typical learning outcomes listed in course syllabi (most students never read those anyways). It requires me to be deliberate about every single thing I do in class. I have to be very clear on why I am asking them to do this, and how it will benefit them. I also have to be prepared to explain to my students why I am doing it the way I am. I am not only justifying the instruction – I am also justifying my pedagogy. In this way, I am treating them as fellow adults (I should be able to do this in university) by inviting them into my circle.
Of course, this too can easily become just another academic exercise in intellectual masturbation, so it requires an additional step: I must ask my students to critique what I’m doing, AND I must be willing to consider those critiques WITHOUT penalizing my students in any way. I need to ask:
How did it go?
How can I improve this so it works better? Perhaps, it didn’t work at all and I should completely re-think the whole exercise.
A different approach that is also part of my Think Aloud Protocol has had a surprisingly profound impact on my whole philosophy of education. It’s this:
What if I don’t?
In other words, what is lost if I DON’T do this? What is lost if I DON’T set a hard deadline? What if I drop the typical rule that says students can’t submit the same work in two (or more) different classes for credit? What do I or my students lose if don’t have a high-stakes exam?
This has changed so much for me that I have started applying it to everything I have ‘usually’ done in my classes. Occasionally, I decide that this strategy or exercise is indeed very useful, and I keep it. More often than not, I discover that the reasons for doing something, or for doing them a particular way are very thin, and I am able to let it go and replace it with something more thoughtful and deliberate.
A curious thing has been happening in UK education and it’s a trend that’s occurring globally as the craft of teaching is being transformed into a “science”. The Economist recently published an article titled “How to make a good teacher” that proclaimed: “The premise that teaching ability is something you either have or don’t is mistaken. A new breed of teacher-trainers is founding a rigorous science of pedagogy. The aim is to make ordinary teachers great, just as sports coaches help athletes of all abiliti
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has a long history of releasing policy statements on media which are both wildly alarmist and grossly inaccurate. These include their controversial claims about “Facebook Depression” in 2011, their problematic and unrealistic recommendations on screen time, and past biased statements regarding media violence, which once infamously inflated the number of studies by a factor of about ten (mistakenly claiming 3500 studies existed when, in fact, there were a couple hundred). In July, 2016, the AAP have added to their unscientific litany a new policy statement that reads as strangely defensive and frustrated (indeed, ironically enough, even “aggressive”) but distorts the research evidence as more consistent and worrisome than it currently is.
When will they ever learn? Had I said that iPads in the the schools were not the answer four years ago at the height of the love-affair with the iPad, I’d have been thought a crank.
(For more, just try the iPad or iStuff tag on my blog).
My former supervisor thought I was out of touch. People I met a conferences thought I was weird. Well, apparently, I was right (not for the first time). Gee, spending 35+ years in tech and teaching novices about computers and programming for most of that time actually taught me something. How about that.
After the California debacle, schools in five states (Virginia, California, Maine, Texas and North Carolina) are starting to swap out tablets for the laptops they should have purchased in the first place. It started with a survey in Maine, where teachers and students expressed a preference for laptops over tablets. (That’s a novel approach asking the users what they want, as opposed to shoving inappropriate tablets down their throats.)
To be exact, 88.5% of teachers and 74% of grade 7-12 students wanted laptops, not iPads. The observations were clear, that while iPads may be appropriate for young children, they are not suitable for older children who need to acquire writing and other more sophisticated skills using tools that don’t work on iPads,
“shortcomings for older students”
“provide no educational function in the classroom”
“students use them as toys”
“word processing near to impossible … I applaud this change.”
“largely students’ gaming devices”
“a disaster”“WE NEED LAPTOPS!!!” a student said, three times.
Apple has caved in and swapped the tablets for reduced price MacBook Air laptops.
A popular Cornell professor tries to help language-arts types learn how to “make math” instead of just studying it.
Twelve years of compulsory education in mathematics leaves us with a populace that is proud to announce they cannot balance their checkbook, when they would never share that they were illiterate. What we are doing—and the way we are doing it—results in an enormous sector of the population that hates mathematics. The current system disenfranchises so many students.
A big push is under way in higher education to measure how students are learning and how good lecturers are at teaching them. Universities can track how much time a student spent on a learning module or how often they accessed a journal article or online book. Some universities are starting to use these “learning analytics” to study how students are accessing data. But that is currently all they can do – because of the limits of using this kind of “big data” to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning.
In the UK, the government has confirmed plans to measure teaching excellence at universities in England via a new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The Queen’s Speech revealed that a new Higher Education and Research Bill will be introduced to take forward regulation around the ideas set out in the higher education white paper.
Currently, the TEF plans to align teaching excellence to university’s scores on the National Student Survey, data on how many students finish their course from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, and on the proportion of graduates in employment using a survey of students conducted six months after they leave university.
Universities will also be able to submit qualitative and quantitative evidence of up to 15 pages to explain and contextualise their metrics. This is where it gets sticky: will the people with the highest quality teaching and learning shine through or will the people with the best stories and prettiest data win in the end?
The fluidity of metrics allows for more wiggle room than the government thinks and that wiggle room will allow for gaming the new system, no matter what the white paper claims. For example, there is the possibility of linking data that measures what has happened with events that may or may not be related – such as tracking a student’s participation in online discussions and their ratings of the way their lecturers use technology.
What metrics miss out
Yet teaching and learning are more than just analytics. It is not possible to measure good teaching by simply looking at lecture attendance or examining how many pages a student read on an e-text.
Current practices in learning analytics are focused on exploring big data, something that students produce en masse. One example of this is keeping track of attendance at lectures, correlating that with the number of hours spent reading an e-textbook, and using that data to predict success on a specific assessment. This can’t be linked to employability, nor can it be linked to the relative excellence of the instructor. Likewise, teaching intensity cannot be linked to a specific number of hours or type of teaching style.
What makes a great teacher? Matej Kastelic/www.shutterstock.com
Research into learning analytics is growing apace but is still nascent – so it is a problem that politicians have decided to use it as a promised messiah to define and measure excellence.
This is not to say that learning analytics are not useful – they are very good at doing specific things that can possibly improve the student experience. For example, metrics can identify students who do not access the class materials or attend the lectures. These students can be taken aside and asked if they need additional support.
But here is the conundrum: there is no empirical data that says that all students who display these behaviours need additional support. Learning analytics are increasingly being seen as a universal panacea for anything that may ail education. But this has not proven true in the last ten years: we have terabytes of big data on student learning but very little empirical research on its actual impact. Outputs and outcomes in terms of lectures attended are not measures of impact on the individual lives of university students.
The introduction of learning analytics as a measure of teaching excellence will have one definitive outcome: spurious correlations. Lest we forget, correlation does not equal causation and the best that learning analytics can currently do is correlate that more years of completed education correlate to a higher graduate earning potential. That is not enough to undermine the years of educational research that stresses the importance of relationships and presence of teachers in the classroom.
Game on
Suggesting that universities use solely qualitative measures to examine teaching and learning is not practical, but there needs to be a balance between what the statistics may reveal and the actual teaching and learning experience.
The government has charged the Higher Education Funding Council for England – now to be subsumed into a new body called UK Research and Innovation – with the task of developing a system of checks and balances to measure teaching excellence so that universities do not try and game the system. These measures are slated to go live in year three of the TEF roll out.
The next three years are likely to see a rash of university policy and practice that will not encourage collegiality – nor will it help to build bridges between innovative teaching practice and quality learning. Instead it may produce the same wheeling and dealing that the Research Excellence Framework does, except this will be much more frequent. The game has officially changed.
A new semester means a new set of students doing my “internet stalking” quest. This an adaptation of an assignment created by Robert Runte (ULeth), where students choose an anonymous blog and try to find out as much as they can about the person/people behind it. This is an exercise about privacy. The point of the exercise is to discover just how easy it usually is to find out information about people even when they don’t share it freely. I am looking for suggestions: if anyone has or knows of a blog that does not identify the blogger(s) that they think might be suitable for this quest, please share!
When will they ever learn? Had I said that iPads in the the schools were not the answer four years ago at the height of the love-affair with the iPad, I’d have been thought a crank.
