Is your approach to life more like a cat or like a dog?

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I’ve often thought we could learn useful attitudes about life from various animals.

I have learned a great deal from my dogs. I have learned for example, that I should always look carefully at the place I am about to sit down. I don’t always turn around three times like they do – and sometimes I end up sitting on things I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s not so silly to turn around three times before sitting down.

This video came across my FaceBook news feed today:

Here’s what struck me:

I know people like this.  This kitty is getting very annoyed that the box is not what he wants it to be. He will NOT adapt.

You know what most dogs would do given the same situation? They would do one of two things:

  1. Sit in it anyways and not worry that it isn’t what they thought it would be.
  2. Play a different game – like toss-the-box, or shred-the-box. When the game was done, they’d probably lay down on the shredded remains and be just as happy.

This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with attitude. What would you do?

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Comments on: The Shadow Scholar – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Shadow Scholar – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The currency of the Academy is supposed to be honesty. That is still true. Unfortunately, it has never been the reality – although I remain convinced that it hasn’t always been as bad as it is now.
This is despicable.
There are people I know personally whom I suspect got their degrees this way. Some have gone on to become department heads and deans. They are often the ones who cry out the loudest and come down on students the hardest – as long as those students aren’t their own of course. Their own students are miraculously never suspect – even the ones who can’t rub 2 words together when they are speaking.
…something about protesting too much, methinks.

There are also people I know personally who conveniently look the other way when students (especially their own) produce work that is suspiciously good. One colleague of mine has theorized that fully 1 in 5 faculty members got to where they are now through some form of plagiarism.

1 in 5.

The corporatization of Higher Ed is a significant influence. When everything becomes about money then everything acquires a price tag.

Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

OOOH, OOOH! I know the answer to that one!

Here’s food for thought:

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. (emphasis mine)

I am not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised.

In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.

Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

You know what’s never happened? I’ve never had a client complain that he’d been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.

Good News Everyone:

“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”.

LOL?

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Update your Damn Webpages!

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I am guilty of some of this myself, but in my own defense, I have over 750 webpages in several websites, not to mention a blog, several photo galleries, and a moodle site (I am not counting my old course websites which would add hundreds more pages). Some of my pages don’t get the attention they perhaps should. What’s your excuse? How many do you have?

If you are a professional, and especially if you are an academic make sure that at LEAST your portfolio is up to date. Academics have GOT to be the worst when it comes to this. I have lost track of how many times I have gone to a faculty webpage trying to find out about what they are doing (or looking for a paper) only to find they last updated their page in 2008!!! Come ON. It makes you look inept. And while I’m at it, how can you claim to be for social networking and sharing knowledge when you don’t even give us links to your papers?

Any time I mention this to the perpetrators they dismiss it by telling me how busy they are. I am not an academic now but I was and I KNOW how busy you are. Keeping your portfolio up to date doesn’t take that long. It only takes seconds if you have your web pages set up right and you put these things in when you get your acceptance notice.

How many of you make your students create portfolios of their work? Do you expect them to keep these up to date? Of course you do. What will they find if they look at yours? If it’s not also up to date, then SHAME ON YOU.

By the way, don’t bother to list papers you have only submitted. These only matter in your annual review. From this end it looks like you are trying to inflate your importance. Listing something that’s been accepted but not yet published is different. At least that’s been reviewed.

Here’s what it’ll take to keep your ‘portfolio’ up to date: 15-20 minutes a once a week. That’s really it. 15-20 minutes. Once a week. I bet many of you spend more time than that flipping through the selections in your ipod in a week. I bet many of you spend that much time playing around with your media player every day. You have the time to keep your portfolio up to date. You just can’t be bothered.

If you don’t want to look like a tech-pretender then make sure that at least your publications and course links are up to date. If you don’t have access to your own page then set one up to which you DO have access. You don’t need an admin assistant to manage your personal webpages. If your webpages are set up in a way that make quick mods awkward, then FIX them. If they are hidden behind a wall so that only people in your own institution can see or find them – then get with the 21st century. As far as I’m concerned stuff hidden behind walls doesn’t count.

If you are in a tech-related field and you don’t have a web presence – SHAME ON YOU. What decade do you think this is?

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Horses, Buggies, and Trendy Sheep: Appropriate Technology and Modern Times

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Do either of these descriptions fit you? (be honest now – no-one is looking)

Overloaded

Overloaded

Horse and Buggy Educators

Are you one of these?

At one time you were at the top of your game. You are a good teacher but the rapid advances in technology over the last 10 years (and especially the last 5)  have gotten ahead of you. You know your teaching skills are still sound. That should be enough. You aren’t convinced that technology makes a difference as long as you are a good teacher. You feel you have no time to learn these new tools. Besides, your style of teaching doesn’t require anything beyond an overhead and the occasional posting to BlackBoard. After all, the technology is simply the medium for the content – you are what makes the learning happen.

You should know this: Good teaching is not enough. Yes, I know it is really hard to keep up – and even harder to know which new technologies are worth investing the time to learn. Problem is, at some point, your lack of technical savvy will overshadow your teaching talent. You will loose credibility and become ineffective in spite of your ability. At some point, sticking to your old familiar tools will make you look too old to understand your students and you will loose that vital connection to your students that is essential to learning. They won’t learn from you if they don’t respect you, and they won’t respect you if you don’t make an effort to understand their world.

2008-01-22_17-30-29_001b_wmBandwagoners

(a.k.a. dedicated followers of fashion)

Perhaps you are more like this?

At the other end of the spectrum we have the trendy sheep: bandwagoners who try to be currant by effusing over every new technology. You never tire of repeating the phrase, “The medium IS the message.” (By the way, if you haven’t done so lately – go and read the rest of the chapter that contains that quote. It really isn’t quite as simplistic as all that.)

You pride yourself in your ability to blog, tweet, digg, cast, share, crowdsource, and social this-and-that. You buy anything made by Apple and think everything they have is groundbreaking (and original). More and more items on your desk and in your house and yard start with the letter ‘i’ or the word “smart” (even though most of them actually aren’t).

No-one can tell anymore if you are a good teacher or not because most of what you do is connect to other people’s stuff. Some of it is probably brilliant, but understand that 90% of what’s out there is crap. Always has been and likely always will be.

You should know this: your students, for the most part don’t respect you either. It is one thing to be “with it” and know what’s going on, but at some point it goes beyond that and you become a groupie. Yes, you can impress those who know less than you. That’s not really anything to be proud of.

The Solution

Oddly, the solution for both problems is essentially the same. Sadly, it’s going to cost you time. And some humility. Both groups of people tend to display peacock sized pride over what they do. Neither group typically understands the technology (yes, even those dedicated followers rarely understand how anything really works – just because you know how to use something doesn’t mean you understand it.)

Take it slowly. Choose some technology or approach to explore and find out more about it – and that includes finding out what people who use it are saying AS WELL AS finding out what the detractors are saying. Think about ways to use this tool in your teaching. Then try it. Give it a decent try. Keep track of what you like and don’t like about it as well as what your students think. Don’t be afraid to let them know you are ‘experimenting’ – ask them for help and opinions. And, learn about the tool you are using so you are more than a mere ‘user’.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’. (Edward Tufte)

The tricky part is to be able to look critically at each tool you try. Horse-and-buggiers (HaBs) tend to be overly critical and quick to judge, whereas bandwagonners (DFoFs – dedicated followers of fashion)  are rarely critical at all, and often don’t get around to evaluating whether or not this tool is actually helping.

Some tools will end up being useful for you and others won’t.

There are some very useful tools out there amidst all that din. Very few are good for the range of things their flatterers claim they are. Some may take years before they are polished and truly reliable. There is a very broad happy medium. Find it and use it.

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How to add more game to your class.

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News: Gaming as Teaching Tool – Inside Higher Ed.

I’ve seen this kind of angle before – I think it has a lot of potential and deserves more attention.

One of the key lessons we can learn from a gaming approach is that it should really be OK to get things wrong and to try again. That is after all how most of us actually learn. Traditional school doesn’t really foster this approach. How many assignments allow for re-submission? How often do we provide multiple (and alternative) ways to earn marks?

Do we give the impression that everyone essentially starts off with an ‘A’ and then they LOSE marks by screwing up? I think the very notion that something is OUT OF X implies that if you get less than X you have LOST something. Notice that videogames often don’t give a ‘perfect score’ or maximum value. They may set a minimum needed to go on but you always get to keep trying till to get there.

It wouldn’t really be that hard to use a game model for assessment in a course. Here’s one who’s done it: The Escapist : News : Professor Abandons Grades for Experience Points.

There is a minimum level and number of points you must achieve to pass. Each task is assigned a number of points. We can offer points for attendance, for questions asked, and answered. Even if you needed, say, 100,000 points to pass, you can offer 10 points for something and people feel like they’re making progress. You offer more points to things that are more important and fewer to things that aren’t.

This offers a great deal of flexibility and based on my personal experiences with a bonus point system I used in my classes, students seem to view things differently when you use ‘points’ instead of grades or percentages – even though it ends up translating to the same thing. This seems to be true even when they know it is the same. When told that offering a bonus for doing something and taking off a mark for not doing it end up having the same impact on the overall grade, the student said, “Sure, but the first one feels better.”

I’ve used bonus points in my classes for years to encourage innovative approaches and embellishments to assignment solutions that were not called for or anticipated in the specifications. Bonus points were assessed separately form the regular assignment specifications as a way of encouraging students to enhance their solutions, but at the same time making it clear that these embellishments are not considered to be part of the normal requirements. This way students know that they are not penalized for not doing extra, and can be assured that they can still earn an ‘A’ on an assignment by doing a good job of the problem as specified. This is important.

This system was originally instituted as a means of justifying a shift into the next higher letter grade for students whose final percent put them close to a letter-grade cut-off. I translated bonus points to actual percentage points at a ratio of 10:1 (10 points = 1%), but with an upper limit such that students could only increase their final letter grade by one step. In other words, a student can raise his or her mark from a ‘B’ to a ‘B+’ by earning sufficient bonus points, but it is not possible to raise a mark from a B’ to an ‘A-‘. On a practical level, if a letter grade step spans a 5% spread, this means that the maximum number of bonus points that could be used to affect a grade is 49. Bonus points typically ranged from 2 to 10 points for any one embellishment. For example, suppose a programming assignment called for a Java implementation of a simple calculator that implements 4 basic operators (+, -, *, /) and arguments consisting of single-digit numbers. A 2-point bonus might be to allow for natural numbers rather than single digits, and a 10-point bonus might be to implement a fully-functional standard calculator.

This bonus point system had several very positive effects. First, students rarely try to argue to have their grade ‘bumped up’ if they find their final mark is near a letter grade cut-off at the end of term. If they have earned bonus points throughout the term then they have probably already been shifted up, and if they have not earned sufficient bonus points, they realize it will be difficult for them to make the case that they deserve the higher grade. Second, average students can achieve full marks on an assignment without doing ‘bonus’ work, while above-average and exceptional students can be offered additional challenges and then be rewarded for meeting them. In the classes I taught, about 90% of students earned at least some bonus points. Average bonus point scores ranged from 4 to 33, with class maximums ranging from 54 to a record 149 points. It is worth noting that the students who earn the highest bonus points are often those for whom the points will have the least effect, as most of them would have earned an ‘A’ in the class in any case. When asked, these students say that they use these points as a means of keeping score. Finally, most students report that they appreciate the open-endedness of this system, as they feel it gives them some control over their own work and encourages them to try things they might not otherwise try, knowing their efforts will be recognized.

I think there is a lot of psychology going on here that people are not examining. People like to keep score, and having to be explicit about the requirements you set for your students and how they can meet them has got to be a good thing. I suspect it is unlikely to become popular because too many teachers (at all levels) don’t *really* know what they want from their students. It is so much easier to set a typical test than to decide what they should be learning and figure out how to determine if they did that.

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Students May Not Be as Software-Savvy as They Think, Study Says – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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I’ve been saying this for years:

Students May Not Be as Software-Savvy as They Think, Study Says – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Below is a talk I started giving in 2005.

Just because people know how to use a tool doesn’t mean they understand that tool. Most of the talk is not about that (the relevant slide is #7), but we really need to get over being impressed by all the gadgets and start looking at what they are, what they can do, and what we need to know in order to use them effectively. Almost always,  you need to know more than how to turn it on and press play.

Sometimes we defer to the ‘superior savvy’ of students because it saves us having to learn it ourselves. We don’t actually look at what they are doing and how they are doing it. For example, even though most people say they know how to ‘Google’, the truth is that most don’t actually know how to find things OR to determine if what they found is worth believing.

Why Games 07

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What do programming languages and educational technologies have in common?

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Quite a lot as it turns out.

They are both tools used to solve problems.

Both are complex.

Both inspire cult-like emotional attachments to specific tools.

Practitioners in both fields are still looking for the panacea that will allow people without knowledge, experience, or imagination to produce stuff that can be used.

Both are the means to an end and have very little value in and of themselves.

Both require a deep understanding of the technology upon which they rely.

Practitioners in both fields often lack that deep understanding.

Oct. 14, 1985: C++ Adds to Programming | This Day In Tech | Wired.com.

Here are a couple of quotes that would apply equally well to either:

I consider the idea of one language, one programming tool, as the one and only best tool for everyone and for every problem infantile. If someone claims to have the perfect language he is either a fool or a salesman or both.

Sometimes, it is more important to have the right problem than the best solution

When done well, software is invisible. There are several processors in my little camera, but I don’t think of my camera as a computer. There are dozens of computers in a modern car, but we still think of it as a car.


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The Decorative Media Principle

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I’ve been looking around at a lot of educational sites and I keep running into the same thing. Many of them LOOK nice – I mean: they have nice colours, cute or otherwise appealing characters and graphics; some of them even have good interface design. The problem is that in far too many of these sites the promise implied by the visual appeal is not fulfilled by the content.

These places are shallow and demonstrate what I have called “The Decorative Media Principle”.

The challenge of integrating learning objectives with the delivery medium is far from new. In some instances, it is easier than in others. We’ve been doing this sort of thing for decades, such as in worksheets for drill and practice. It is common to create a visually pleasing background connected with the current theme – especially in the lower elementary grades. I’ve done it myself: in my “Ducks in the Classroom” project I have vocabulary and word games that can be created on a pleasing backgrounds that connect with the words used in the exercise – a nest, words enclosed in images of eggs, duck footprints, etc. (Some worksheets are here, and decorations here) This idea of ‘decorating’ a worksheet works well for a great many themes, and can be applied quite effectively and generically. Need a worksheet related to Louis XIV? Add some pictures, maybe a few quotes, and if skillfully done, we have added value, fun, even connections for the learners to capitalize upon. So the serious part underlining this principle is that, at least sometimes, the ‘decorations’ can help learners form connections by giving them visual ‘tags’ upon which to hang ideas and facts. Adding to the visual appeal can boost the impact of what you’re trying to get across, and this sometimes works even if the connection between the decoration and the content is weak.

The same principle often works reasonably well for instruction delivered via a website – so long as the website is primarily organized as ‘print transferred online’. Taking online delivery a step further, the principle still largely holds, even when there are various interactive elements on the website or CD. The Hatching Project Candling Tutorial is a case in point. It includes many images, video, and self-tests, and it has received many positive reviews from all over the world, but aside from the non-linear interconnections, it is still many orders of magnitude less complex than a computer game.

Unfortunately, when applied to fully interactive media (specifically games), this ‘Decorative Media Principle’ does not translate well. It is simply not enough. The result is often a game that is little more than a wrapper for the instructional materials. Sometimes it doesn’t even have that – it’s just a wrapper. Ever get a bag of wrapped candy and find one that is just wrapper and no candy? THAT’s what I’m talking about.

Rather than incur the wrath of well-meaning, but misguided edutainment developers by giving specific examples, let me offer a purely hypothetical description. Imagine a game that starts off as many typical commercial games do, with cool images and some sort of backstory – you are the world’s last hope, and must use your superhuman powers to save mankind, and some sort of quest or challenge that must be overcome – defeat the enemy, or recover the lost treasure. But then, when the gameplay reaches a crucial moment, a new screen pops up showing what any child over 6 can identify as an “exercise”, and the world-saving task to be accomplished turns out to be solving a quadratic equation. The answer to this equation, for some thinly justified reason, is the key. Even though the resultant number has no connection to the rest of the story, it is some kind of magic number that defeats the enemy. Even worse, this ‘embedded worksheet’ looks nothing like the rest of the game – in fact, it looks suspiciously like the paper worksheet that was used in the same class the year before. This is what has become synonymous with ‘edutainment’, and it’s not good.

Chicktionary

To be fair, there are some wonderful examples of fun games that employ this principle effectively – to remain with the hatching theme, examine the kewlbox.com game called Chicktionary (formerly Fowl Words). This game is little more than an interactive worksheet, but the artwork, sounds, and design make it a great deal of fun. Part of what makes this particular game work is that it does not pretend to be more than the simple puzzle it is.

Privacy Playground: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs

The other day I came across another example that offers a stark contrast, and I am ashamed to acknowledge that this is a Canadian production.  It is part of a website about internet security for kids called, Privacy Playground. Visually, it is quite nice and the cartoon characters are even sort of cute. We get the first hint that something may be amiss when we meet their main emissaries: the CyberPigs. My first reaction to this was, “You’re KIDDING me!” THIS is what they have decided to call the good guys? How stupid do they think kids are? Do they have any idea how much credibility they loose by showing how out of touch they are? Every kid I’ve showed this to thinks this is a joke. But OK. Let’s move on. This site advertises various games featuring these CyberPigs (they are kind of cute, but that does not make up for the deeply misguided choice of animal).

Privacy Playground: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs

The “game” is a perfect example of my decorative media principle when it has utterly failed.  After sitting thorough numerous screens full of “lesson” set-up, we get the “game” part:  a yes-no question!! You CAN’T be serious! How dare they call this a game.

There are countless examples of the decorative media principle in action – some that have “games” and some that don’t. One of the conclusions I am coming to is that the mis-application of the decorative media principle is something that starts in early childhood. Here it comes from a pure and innocent desire to make things more attractive. There’s really nothing wrong with that, and this kind of experimentation and practice deserves to be encouraged. However, at some point we need to grow beyond in those situations where we actually want to communicate something.

At some point we need to help kids understand that it’s NOT OK to spend 95% of the time you spend working on a presentation trying out different fonts and backgrounds and hunting for clipart and only 5% of your time on content. At some point teachers need to be less impressed with how things look and pay more attention to what is actually communicated.

This applies to everyone else too. The medium is only PART of the message, folks.

Reference: Chicktionary: Farm Fresh Goodness [PC] (2003), Blockdot, Inc., (Developer), Kewlbox (Publisher) Game Site: http://www.kewlbox.com/games/gameDetail.aspx?gameID=117

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