Double Barrel Critique: Flipped Classrooms & MOOCs

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

Jon Beasley-Murray takes a shot at 2 currently trendy educational “innovations”. Well said and worth the read.

First the “Flipped Classroom”:

Essentially, his pedagogical tweaks involve the use of technology to incorporate student feedback and discussion. His technique is for the lecturer to introduce a concept, then pose a question. After responses to the question have been gathered, students discuss their answers among themselves before answering the question again; the lecturer goes over the correct answer and moves on.

The point is that ideally students will have taught each other during the discussion phase, as will be demonstrated by their improved responses the second time they answer the same question. Not a bad idea per se, but hardly earth-shattering.

…

Mazur’s thoughts on pedagogical theory were astonishingly superficial and, frankly, uninformed.

Agreed. (!)

One of the downsides of the wonderful interwebs is that everyone now has the ability to pass themselves off as an expert – and people are (always have been) taken in by slick marketing.Besides, who doesn’t want an easy solution to life’s complex problems?

For as little as $20/year you too can access my half-baked but visually pretty idea……But WAIT, there’s MORE….

Next, he takes on MOOCs:

But I do object to the romanticized pathos invoked by Koller (here and increasingly as her talk goes on): the conceit that Coursera’s object is to lift up the impoverished in Latin America, Africa, and the Third World more generally. Or the notion that North American universities’ participation with her company is the best way to make up for lack of educational capacity in the global South. Beyond the immense condescension and ignorance that it betrays on her part, I bet she isn’t spinning this line to her venture-capital investors. And I’d rather she didn’t spin it to us.

…

In the end, it is the broader issues that Koller and Mazur represent that are of most concern.

The radical educational proposals of the 1960s and 1970s are being rediscovered, now that their promise is finally realizable thanks to technological innovation.

But their utopian thrust has been lost, their politics have been gutted, and everything has to be “monetized” as part of a massive round of enclosures in which for-profit start-ups and mega-corporations colonize the captive educational market.

They turn their backs on a whole field of educational theory and enquiry, in favour of the latest huckster with a fancy website. And they forget entirely what the university is supposed to be about, or what in the 1960s and 1970s we thought it could be about.

We have the means to make a previous generation’s utopian dreams real. But we have forgotten their vision, and want only to buy and sell the means as though this were an end of its own.

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It’s Not Women Who Should Lean In; It’s Men Who Should Step Back – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s Not Women Who Should Lean In; It’s Men Who Should Step Back – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review.

Well worth the read.

When I was still @ UofC I quickly found that the less I acted (and taught) like a guy, the more my students liked it, but the more my colleagues attacked me.

Among the WORST offenders were the other women faculty.

To me, the overconfidence typical of “successful” men has always felt deceitful.

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Games the key to girls’ STEM education | news @ Northeastern

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Games the key to girls’ STEM education | news @ Northeastern.

Girls GAMES, short for Girls Advancing in Math, Engineering, and Science, is a new collaboration between university partners and gaming companies in Seattle aimed at promoting STEM careers for women through the development of educational games. Though the main event is being held in Seattle, a two-??hour event is scheduled for 3 p.m. today in 250 West Village F.

“We know games can engage kids to learn, so let’s use games for real learning, and let’s use games to advance girls’ learning, interest, and aspirations in STEM,” said Tayloe Washburn, dean and CEO of Northeastern’s graduate campus in Seattle.

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Are Rabbits the New Super Meat? – Modern Farmer

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

UEC-2013-06-13_14-43-00_wm Nice article. The one thing I would disagree with though is:

The fact that rabbits require a gentler environment than a factory farm can offer means the market largely relies on family-run operations like his own. “Mother Nature designed them at the low end of the food chain so they die easily. That’s problematic.”

I agree that they aren’t really suited to a factory farm. I *really* disagree that that’s a problem. Quite the contrary – it’s a great selling feature – these animals HAVE to be raised more humanely than pigs and poultry.
We should be moving away from factory farming, not trying to find new ways to add to it.

via Are Rabbits the New Super Meat? – Modern Farmer.

Like all prospects of panacea, there’s a catch: farmers have yet to figure out a way to produce rabbits on an industrial scale, which means that getting them into grocery stores, whether consumers want them or not, remains problematic.

OOOH, OOOH, I know! People can raise their own!

2012-04-13-11-05-09_wm Just think …. people can have 3 or 4 rabbits – they can use their own lawn clippings to supplement their feed, and they can use the manure to fertilize their gardens. Heck, they can even use the manure to fertilize their house plants – rabbit pellets really don’t smell and come in nice little time-release capsules.

Of course, if they use the lawn to feed their rabbits they shouldn’t be spraying it with anything (a GOOD thing) …. AND, if they use the manure to fertilize, they also won’t need as much factory-made fertilizer (ALSO a good thing).

AND …. they will be forced to get back in touch with a part of the natural world that many (if not most) urbanites seem to have forgotten.

I wonder what the impact would be…. less use of chemical herbicides and fertilizers. Less garbage (rabbits are now eating all the lawn clippings). Less demand for factory raised meat. Healthier diets (rabbit meat is really good for you). New markets would spring up for things like custom butchering, and tanning of hides (maybe we’ll even find more environmentally friendly ways to process hides). The ripple effect could be substantial.

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Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

I came across this today – it’s not new – but if you’ve ever questioned the efficacy of the Lecture as instructional technology, have a look:

Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing.

Worth remembering: “A heavy workload and a lack of freedom in learning is associated with students taking a surface as opposed to a deep approach.”

2013-06-29_09-36-55

1. If students didn’t have as many lectures they’d learn less.
1.1 “Lectures should last an hour. If I can stay awake for an hour, so can they”.
1.2 “Its the only way to make sure the ground is covered”.
1.3 “Lectures are the best way to get facts across”.
1.4 “Lectures are the best way to get students to think”.
1.5 “Lectures are inspirational: they improve students’ attitudes towards the subject, and students like them”.
1.6 “Lecturers make sure that students have a proper set of notes”.
1.7 “Students are incapable of, or unwilling to, work alone, so its good for them to have full timetables”.
1.8 “The criticisms one can make of lecturing only apply to bad lecturing”.
1.9 “The value of lectures can only be judged in the context of other teaching and learning activities which make up the course”.

2. Why is there so much lecturing going on?
2.1 We are ignorant
2.1.1 We are ignorant of the evidence about the effectiveness of lectures
2.1.2 We are ignorant of alternatives to lectures.
2.2 We are overworked
2.2.1 Alternatives to lectures may appear to involve more work
2.2.2 Changes take time to introduce
2.3 There is a shortage of resources
2.3.1 There is a shortage of books
2.3.2 There is a shortage of other learning resources
2.4 Our attitudes obstruct change – we use lectures as a coping strategy
2.5 There are institutional constraints which support lecturing:
2.5.1 in the way teaching hours are counted;
2.5.2 in the relationship between individual courses
2.6 Course validation and other external forces often support lecturing
2.7 We don’t know how to design courses

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Can Digital Games Boost Students’ Test Scores? | MindShift

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Can Digital Games Boost Students’ Test Scores? | MindShift.

I’m always being asked for references to sources that “prove” games are useful. Well, here’s one:

A new SRI study released today suggests they do — at least in the subjects of science, math, engineering, and technology. According to the report, which is an analysis of 77 peer-reviewed journal articles of students K-16 studying STEM subjects, “when digital games were compared to other instruction conditions without digital games, there was a moderate to strong effect in favor of digital games in terms of broad cognitive competencies.”

More specifically, “students at the median in the control group (no games) could have been raised 12 percent in cognitive learning outcomes if they had received the digital game.”

However, it is important to remember that “instructional technology only works for some kids, with some topics, and under some conditions – but that is true of all pedagogy. There is nothing that works for every purpose, for every learner, and all the time.” (Mann, 2001, p. 241)

This applies to games too.

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Teaching Programming Skills

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Katrin Becker

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

I came across this article recently: Tynker Launches Revolutionary New Platform for Teaching Programming Skills to Young Learners Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) April 11, 2013

You know……
I’m starting to think Syntax really IS important.

I recently finished teaching a 1st year programming class in Java. The last time I taught 1st year programming (I mean, really*) was in 2006.

Kids have changed.

* I taught a programming in Alice course in 2008 & 2009, but that’s different.
Read on to find out why.

Now, the kids in this class were of typical intelligence and potential. It was a relatively small class so I got a chance to get to know them (at least, the ones who showed up to class on a regular basis)

As i had done throughout the term, I gave them a ‘free’ work period for their lab on their last assignment. It was a great turnout – almost everyone was there (which is quite impressive because the lab starts at 8am). At one point I looked around the room and it struck me – this did not look like a bunch of people working on a programming problem. I asked them how many were having trouble, and almost everyone put up their hands. For the most part, they were just sitting there – no paper, no notes, just staring at the screen probably wondering why they didn’t know what to do.

I felt like I had failed them, but at the same time I realized there was a limit to what I could do in a single course – and trust me, I had pretty much tried everything I could in the time I had.

So much for digital natives. They may be whizzes at texting (I confess to some envy here as I am not) and they may spend the majority of their waking hours connected, but using is not the same as knowing.

SO much of the tech world is apps written in ways that people don’t need to learn anything – you don’t need to learn anything about the application, or indeed, even the task that the application is design to facilitate.

In many ways this is good – computers are supposed to make our lives easier, ….
BUT (see also Are we teaching our kids to NOT learn?)…..

BUT….. this does NOT help anyone learn logic, and logic is ESSENTIAL to programming. AND, learning the picky details of programming language syntax is a integral part of programming literacy.

024 Also, it turns out, fluency in logic is essential to problem solving in the general sense (an ability which has serious implications to our continued societal evolution & development).

Problem solving requires attention to detail.
You need to notice things.
You need to be willing to try things – test stuff, you know, let’s see if this idea works.
You need to be able to decompose a problem into smaller, more manageable parts.
You need to be able to recognize and characterize SYSTEMS.
You need to be able to look at something from various levels of abstraction – sometimes simultaneously.

So, here’s a BIG problem:

When learning programming using drag and drop tiles (Alice, Scratch, Tynker http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/12/why-your-8-year-old-should-be-coding/, …) they DO NOT learn syntax because we’ve decided it’s not important.And for getting young kids excited about programming, I agree that it’s a great approach. But…..

Stop.
Think about this for a bit.

When you have a visually pleasing graphical interface that hides the structure of the programs you are creating, what people end up doing is just blindly trying stuff. Drag a tile in – see if it does what I need. No? OK try a different one. There’s no analysis – no thought, just play.

Play is great and all, but it turns out you need the rest too – you really do need the structure. You need to learn how to analyse a problem; how to understand a system.

I never realized until this course just how important my original training in CS was. While I would not advocate going back to programming on cards, I learned some very valuable skills because I could not simply sit down at a computer and start to code. I learned to spend the time to understand the problem; I learned to do hand execution; and to “play compiler”. I had to – I often only got one chance per day to test my program (that’s ONE RUN PER DAY). Our assignments were no less complex than ones typically handed out today – so on a typical 2 week assignment we would get AT MOST 10 chances to compile and test out programs (data centers were often closed on the weekends). When you only get 10 tries you MAKE SURE each one is going to count.

Can you even imagine how today’s students would react if you told them they would only be allowed one single compile/run in a 24-hour period? We had 2-hour labs way back then too. What did we DO for 2 hours if we couldn’t repeatedly change a line and compile to see if it worked?

Here’s what we did:

We learned how the compiler worked so we could parse our own programs and find bugs before the compiler did.
We did hand execution of our programs to verify that our logic was sound.
We learned how to do what the program said rather than what we meant during hand execution.
We learned to proofread.

We need to help students learn these skills. This is REALLY important.

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