davidwees.com

There is lots of research which shows that human beings are complex.  In fact, although we can be modeled as groups of people mathematically in many circumstances, individual humans are too complex for mathematical analysis to much use in exactly predicting our behaviour.  However humans do follow patterns of behaviour, and we can predict what a possible range of behaviours are we expect to see.  Obviously this is why our social structures work because this predictive ability is easy enough that one can do it without the aid of a computer.

So I was struck by an interesting analogy today after reading part of a post about flipping curriculum.  The problem with current education, the post claims, is that we are focusing on cramming content into courses, rather than working fundamentally on critical thinking skills.  I thought, Yes, I totally agree, and then it came into focus, the reason WHY I agree.

Here's the argument that ran through my head.

Imagine a school without walls and completely online.  Students could log onto any web ready computer, and sign up to join classes.  They could interact via a moderated back channel chat and vote questions to the teacher up or down during live sessions and participate in forum discussions during asynchronous sessions.  Assignments would be handed in electronically, mostly through online individual student blogs.

So I've had a thought about the direction of language learning.  I've been experimenting with 3D interactive worlds (specifically OpenSim), which are programs which let people interact with each other real-time in 3D.  Pretty cool stuff.  This is already being used to help people learn languages as many of the 3D servers offer the ability to communicate with each other via voice and text.

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Yes, I sold my soul to the administration of my school.  In exchange, I got to keep my job.

I read an article one time which questioned why we choose calculus to be the top of the math pyramid in school.  Basically, most of the mathematics students learn once they master the basics aims toward preparing the students to take calculus at the end of K-12 school.  The article I read suggested that statistics instead of calculus should be at the top because it is much more practical to real life than calculus is.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  It was very cool, I knew a lot of the information provided in it but some of the things had a fresh perspective and were collected in one place.

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As the Christmas break loomed in front of me, I began to finally feel more confident in my teaching.  I had more classes which seem to run smoother, not many more, but a few.  A lot of these things though, in reflection, I really don't think had to do with me.

I used clickers in the classroom for the first time today.  For those of you who don't know, a clicker is also known as a classroom response device, and is used to collect immediate student feedback.  Students have a small device, it looks like a remote and on your computer you have a hub of some sort for collecting responses wirelessly from the students, and some software on the computer to process this data as well as display the questions.

How does problem based learning work anyway?  According to Wikipedia, "Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy in which students collaboratively solve problems and reflect on their experiences."  To me this means, choose problems which will reflect your curriculum and which students want to solve.