Running Towards Publication, Then Walking Away – Culture Digitally.
This article caught my eye for a number of reasons.
For one thing, I’m just finishing a book and so I’m thinking about this a fair bit, but for another, I do not have a permanent position at any institution, and haven’t had one for some years. This means I am spared the usual annual reporting that most salaried academics must endure every year (or in some cases two).
These days, I mostly publish things that I think people might be interested in learning about – usually based on feedback. And, really, publishing is supposed to be about sharing knowledge, not feathering caps.
As the risk of sounding too obvious, something is clearly out of joint when the most important things a scholar writes, the things that might influence conversations, get cited, and get taught, appear in venues that are automatically discounted by backward-thinking tenure committees that still focus on journals and books as the only or most important publication outlets. – See more at: http://culturedigitally.org/2015/06/running-towards-publication-then-walking-away/#sthash.G4ouVlUS.dpuf
Poor Norm. He is doomed to be compared against whoever signs up for the same class as him.
I recognize that it may not be practical to do this individually in a large class – but it is possible in smaller classes. What is possible, even in a large class (I know because I’ve done it) is to set up a collection of content, methods and work for the students and then let them choose from a variety of tasks. This of course means that you, as the instructor (or course designer) must actually design all (*) of your assignments before the term starts. It also means you must have your assessment schemes set up at the start of term too. Students deserve to know how they will be assessed before they start an assignment.
We can take this same approach to the design of allowable paths through a course. Although most of us learned our disciplines through lectures and textbooks that were organized linearly (see Figure 1), there is nothing inherently natural about this approach and there is very little evidence to suggest that this is an appropriate way to learn. It gets done mostly because it is easiest and most ‘efficient’ for the institution and the instructor, not because it is best for the student.
If instead of thinking about subjects as an ordered set of topics, we consider the actual dependencies of various topics, concepts, and skills, we can use that to create a flexible learning path (Figure 2). Clearly, some things must be addressed in a specific order, but others will be order-independent, and some are truly required while others can be optional. This has the added benefit of making relationships between the various topics explicit.
In a gamified course, all students start off with a score of zero, and everything they do adds to their score (in my version they are guaranteed never to lose points they have earned(**)). If they blow an assignment they simply earn fewer points and must either re-do it or do something else to earn the points they need. There is no one thing they can do that will prevent them from earning an ‘A’.
As much as possible, students should spend their time learning by doing rather than listening to lectures, reading textbooks, and watching others. Sometimes teaching via lecture, assigned reading, or video is appropriate, but it is far too easy to simply choose a textbook and then follow that chapter by chapter. We need to focus on what students can do – beyond writing exams – to demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter. Assignments (quests) should focus on what students can do to demonstrate mastery of the material rather than simply being able to repeat what they’ve been told.