Where I’ve Been Online (Weekly: Aug. 19-25)

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~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~

22 Aug 12

Finland’s Education System: 10 Surprising Facts That Americans Shouldn’t Ignore

Finland has consistently scored among the highest nations in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that measures student achievement across the globe. Another remarkable fact about Finland’s education system is that students are only required to take one test during their entire time as students.

Finland’s academic success has drawn a great amount of attention, leaving many countries wondering if it’s the Nordic country’s teaching methods or if there’s magic water in their fjord. Here are 10 things that set Finland apart from the rest of the world in education.

20 Aug 12

Programmer Competency Matrix

Tags:programming competency career matrix

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Ten skills every student should learn | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com

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Another article that’s been sitting in my to-blog list for a while, but with school starting (or started) all over the globe, it’s worth noting.

Ten skills every student should learn | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com.

This is a good list:

  1. Read
  2. Type
  3. Write
  4. Communicate effectively, and with respect.
  5. Question
  6. Be resourceful
  7. Be Accountable
  8. Know how to learn
  9. Think Critically
  10. Be Happy

Interestingly, four of them (5,6,8,and 9) require curiosity in order to be of any real value. One of the things I have come across far too many students is a real lack of curiosity. Sure, they ask questions, but if the answer doesn’t fall into their laps, they loose interest. Far too many students are unwilling to do the work needed to find out the answers to their questions. That is the path to ignorance.

If I combine the common elements, I could probably shorten this list to just 5:

  1. Be curious.
  2. Communicate well.
  3. Think Critically.
  4. Take responsibility.
  5. Be happy.

Not bad.

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Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Cleaning out some of my backlog of drafts….
This is an older article that’s been sitting in my to do list. The comments are still relevant. If anything, the situation has grown worse in the mean time. This article is about US schools, but the situation is little better in Canada.

Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,” Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. “We ask, ‘How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?’ With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, ‘Is it safe to eat here?'”

Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.

Living off their reputation:

“We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,” the recent federal report “A Test of Leadership” observed. “Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”

The changing economic and global context facing contemporary college graduates convinces us that the limited learning that exists on U.S. campuses—even if it has been a part of the higher-education landscape since the system’s inception—qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be the subject of concern of policy makers, practitioners, parents, and citizens alike.

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Adjuncts’ Working Conditions Affect Student Learning, Report Says – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Adjuncts’ Working Conditions Affect Student Learning, Report Says – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Well what a surprise.

Contingent faculty members who are hired just before the start of an academic term can opt to prep their classes while they’re not on the payroll or resign themselves to teach courses for which they’re not adequately prepared, the report says.

I do a LOT of prep for which I am not paid. Universities COUNT on this.

  • The ‘just-in-time’ staffing model is unjust for faculty and for students and clearly compromises education quality
  • Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions

The question that keeps coming back to me again and again, is “How does this approach makes things better?” and the fact is it doesn’t. Which brings us to the next question: What are universities for? They no longer seem to be for teaching the next generation of scholars, and given the kind of control universities and granting agencies exert on faculty, they aren’t about advancing knowledge either (unless it’s profitable).

So, what ARE they about?

 

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What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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What a Tech Start-Up’s Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Interesting. This confirms some of my own feelings and experiences.

Suggestions:

  1. Do not specify a required number of posts. If you are going to grade, then grade for the quality of the discussion, not the quantity.
  2. Allow anonymous posting.
  3. Have students introduce themselves at the start of the class.

“yet another place for students to grind for grades”:

Professors may want to think carefully before giving formal grades for participation in online discussions, the data suggest. When professors required a set number of discussion posts, the number of submissions was higher than in courses where professors left participation up to students. But instructors reported the highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked.

…

One of the clearest trends was that students at highly selective universities are far more likely to ask questions anonymously than are students at other institutions.

…

In another finding, the practice of asking students to post a comment to introduce themselves correlated with more-robust discussions.

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Problems with Academia, #347: Grades are prized over learning.

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An Academic Ghostwriter Comes Clean – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Emphasis on grades and competition always increase the pressure on students to “win the prize” rather than learn. When most of the rest of the world rewards appearances over substance, people will cave.

As he wrote papers for students across a range of institutions, Mr. Tomar said in the interview, he saw vastly different levels of expectations. The lowest, he said, was at for-profit colleges, where he often saw the same assignment recycled. Sometimes he was hired to complete writing assignments for online discussions at for-profits, where the grades are based on whether the work is completed, not on its quality. Such work received little of his attention, he said, “because it was clear to me that nobody, nobody, nobody cares.”

The rating of schools based on profit, graduate employment, and student satisfaction can be misleading. Is an undergraduate education from an big-name university really better than one from a small school where the teachers know you?

He also aims his ire at more-traditional institutions, and none more so than Rutgers, which he decries as a “money farm” that sold him on an idealized version of Walden Pond but gave him Wal-Mart instead.

There’s an old joke that goes:

What do you call the person who graduated 499th out of 500 from medical school?

Dr.

What assurances do we have that this person actually knows anything? What assurances do we have that the person who graduated 3rd knows more?

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On Jazz Teaching and Lesson Sequencing

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I was drawn into 2 conversations today: one about jazz teaching, and another about lessons and topics, and how they don’t always mesh nicely.

Lessons & topics:

Animated example of LZ77 data compression algorithm. (C) K.Becker

Michael Pershan‘s blog post about sequencing lessons:

A quick thought on sequencing within units

So instead of trying to craft my units into well-told stories, what I think I need to do is craft every lesson into a good story, and use my units to develop themes and concepts.

Why would we think that knowledge should fit neatly into lesson sized chunks? We seem to – I struggled with that too for many years until I finally accepted the fact that concepts don’t necessarily fit the format of formal education, no matter how much we may want them to.

I guess what’s different about this for me is that there’s no particular day when I can say, oh, we handled composition today. Learning of any single topic is being distributed over an entire unit. But those units are also connected to each other, so the big themes, ideas and skills need to be distributed in a similar way over the entire course.

The tricky part about this (aside from the actual teaching, I mean), is that neither you nor you students can sit down at the dinner table at the end of the day and say what you learned (or taught) in a single sentence. That doesn’t mean you didn’t learn something. (A word of caution though – this may also mean you actually DIDN’T learn anything new.)

Jazz Teaching:

Teaching Numbers Systems using Multiple Intelligences (C) K.Becker

I first came across the term “Jazz Teaching” in 1999 through an article written by Paul Weinstein. It profoundly affected how I thought about teaching. It was incredibly liberating – I was headed in this direction already in my teaching, and having someone else describe what I was doing gave me the validation I needed. Having a cool name to put to it didn’t hurt, of course.

Today, Frank Noschese tweeted about it in a conversation with Michael Pershan: (here are a few snippets)

FN: In the beginning, my planning took a content focus — WHAT do I want students to know. Now my planning is task focused — the HOW.

FN: While lessons are similar each year, I don’t think I’ve done the exact same lesson twice. Probably not good for my sanity.

MP: Are these decisions that, you feel, there’s an optimum solution to, or is it different with each batch of kids?

FN: Kids, time, what I want to emphasize, equipment … Lots of factors.

FN: I’d say experienced teaching looks a lot like jazz.

Jazz involves: improvisation, experimentation, hooks, bombs, attitude, and, the occasional nugget. Good teaching involves all those things too. And, like good jazz, good teaching demands that you understand your subject well enough that you can shift, adapt, and improvise on the fly. In order to do that, you need enough experience that your repertoire of tools, approaches, examples, and so on is wide AND that you have tried most of them on sufficient numbers of students that you know each has merit. Once you possess sufficient tools and experience, you can try new things on the fly and adapt them to the situation as needed.

While I will grant that there may be the occasional virtuoso, almost no-one is talented enough to teach this way when they are just starting out. Remember that 10,000 hours thing that Malcolm Galdwell talked about in his book Outliers?

Good teaching takes talent, a great deal of experience, and a willingness to critically examine everything you do in the classroom, every day.

You also have to recognize that the teacher should never be the star: it’s not about you. It’s about what you are trying to share.

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In Instructional Design, the “Tech” is Easy, Right?

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When will people learn?

There’s a discussion going on one of my LinkedIn lists again (ELearning 2.0) about whether or not instructional designers need to know tech. To be fair, there are quite a few people who have chimed in to say YES. Of course, these are all people who actually HAVE some real tech background. Those who don’t are the ones saying it isn’t needed.

One commenter came right out and said they thought it was easy to hire the tech, but, of course, the ID is HARD (emphasis mine).

Sigh.

No wonder tech guys have no respect for the education types.

I’ll admit that it is difficult to get the pedagogy right. BUT, it’s ALSO difficult to get the tech right. That’s partly why there is so much mediocre elearning out there.

There is a tendency among educationists to dismiss the “tech” as something that’s easy to hire done. After all, the medium is simply the vehicle for the instruction, no? This approach implies a lack of respect for (and understanding of) the technical part of the design and ultimately restricts the overall design to only that which is permitted/easy based on the currently available applications. Describing the tech as “easy” reinforces the lack of respect most tech folks have for people in education.

As someone who has decades of experience in BOTH, dismissing either one as “easy to hire” is a mistake.

Truly sound design requires a proper synergy of both, and that requires a thorough understanding of the technology (and not just how to use apps*) AND of the pedagogy. It also requires respect for the body of knowledge that exists on BOTH sides.

I’m primarily an instructional designer these days, but I know enough tech to command the respect of the tech people who work for me, and I KNOW what’s easy, what’s hard, and what’s possible. In return, my tech people respect me for what I know about pedagogy.

*It’s no coincidence that the majority of the world’s greatest race car drivers are also mechanics. Without a thorough understanding of how the engine, suspension, etc. works and behaves, it is impossible to take advantage of what that machine has to offer. The same idea applies to technology.

I would recommend reading  Douglas Rushkoff’s book: Program or be Programmed

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