Tag: The Reflective Educator (page 30 of 43)

April 16, 2012 / 5 Comments

A problem with digital books

A bookshelf full of books
(Image credit: Harold Bakker)

When I was growing up, my house had a 50 foot wall full of books which our family had inherited from my grandfather with the house. Whenever I was bored, and the weather was ugly, I would pick a book off the shelf and read it. I devoured books from the shelves, some of which were probably inappropriate for my age, and some of which are considered classics. The library available in my home helped me become a better reader because I never ran out of something to read.

This is an experience my son has now, because we have a library of books in his room (albeit a much smaller library). However, as books become digital, it will be much more difficult for our library to be visible and accessible to my son. Parents will tend to make more choices of what their children should read. Licensing on books that prevents them from being copied means that children will likely have to explicitly ask for permission for every book that they read from their parent’s collection. Books will be selected less at random, and because we will be more likely to select books entirely based on our own interests, we will be less likely to be exposed to new information. Note that it would be relatively straight forward to set up "book servers" in houses that could act as personal libraries, and serve the same function, but current digital rights management on books makes this impractical (not impossible, every DRM has its weaknesses).

We are headed toward a society where books are not visible and accessible in our houses. If the books are invisible, they might as well not be there.

April 16, 2012 / 2 Comments

Separate science history from science inquiry

Zombie Feynman on Science
(Image credit: XKCD)

It occurrs to me that we have two goals for science education. One is to teach students what existing science is known, and how it can be applied to our lives, or how it is interesting to us. I call this first purpose, "Science History." The other goal is to teach the process of doing science, of thinking scientifically. This purpose, I call "Science Inquiry."

I think we should separate these two purposes into separate courses or domains, because the purpose of the first is diluting the effect of the second. Many children finish school thinking that science is a collection of facts known about the world, and do not spend enough time learning how those "facts" were derived.

Labs are a good start to learning science inquiry, but many experiments done in labs have issues.

The labs are rarely designed by students. This leads to underestimate the difficulty in designing a good experiment, and to over-emphasize the paperwork portion of science.
The labs rarely take more than 30 or 40 minutes to complete. Students rarely have to repeat a lab because of experimental error. They learn from this experience that laboratory science can be easily parcelled into sitcom-like episodes.
Students do not learn enough about the reasons why we have designed lab reports, and think of the portions of a lab report as blanks to be filled in. Quite often they will fake data so as to complete the boxes faster.

A Science Inquiry course would focus on the process of doing science, and less on the students learning existing scientific knowledge. Obviously students would be likely to find connections between the Science History course and the labs that they design, and hopefully they will also see connections between their Science Inquiry and other domains of knowledge.

A Science History course would focus on what existing scientific discoveries we have made, who made these discoveries, and what are the stories around these discoveries, and how these discoveries impact our lives. It might cover some principles behind the philosophy of science, as well as the connections between science and other domains of knowledge (like math for example).

Right now, many schools see Science Inquiry as optional or even an inconvenience. This suggests to me that some people think that thinking scientifically is an inconvenience or too troublesome to teach, and this scares me. While "thinking scientifically" isn’t the only way to think, it’s an important one, and certainly, we should all learn how to do it. I also think that Science Inquiry is indistinguishable from thinking scientifically. If you remove the inquiry, then it isn’t really science.

April 12, 2012 / 3 Comments

Tinkering for students

I watched Caine’s Arcade yesterday (see below) and while it is a bit sad to me that an amazing kids’ endeavour has turned into an opportunity for a film-maker, the movie itself is very touching. I recommend watching it.

Caine is not an unusual child, but he has had a number of unusual circumstances which have allowed him to create his arcade. First, he has dedicated space that has been created for him to pursue his interest. This is unfortunately extremely uncommon for many children today. He has parents who completely support their son’s exploration, and act as mentors to assist him. He has access to the materials and tools he needs. He is not judged on his creations by a rubric, or by a test, but rather his creations are seen as part of a description of who he is. The creations Caine has made are only physically distinct from him; they can be seen as an extension of himself.

Tinkering to me means, the ability for kids to create and explore in ways not bound by the current rules and structures of schools. The original explorations of programming using Logo to me were more about tinkering than computer science. Unfortunately, over time, tinkering on a small scale looks like a useful activity for students to do, and so it gets scaled up. For example, this page about using Logo in learning now includes sample projects with "step by step" instructions. When creation becomes scripted, it ceases to be creation, and becomes assembly.

So instead of scaling up tinkering, what I’d prefer to see is individuals given freedom and resources to produce what they think tinkering space should look like. Instead of thousands of identical tinkering spaces, each space should be unique and suited to the community in which it exists. The explosion of art work created in community centres has happened not because we tried to create a formal structure for people to do art in society, but because we provided spaces and resources for these centres to develop.

I’d like everyone to have the opportunity Caine has, to explore the world and build extensions of themselves in it.

April 12, 2012 / 1 Comment

Computing in schools

A possible future for computer science in schools

Gary Stager posted "Dumbing Down" a few days ago, which is a passionate plea for computers to be used for computing in schools. He writes:

Although I’m only 48, I have been working in educational computing for thirty years. When I started, we taught children to program. We also taught tens of thousands of teachers to teach computer science to learners of all ages. In many cases, this experience represented the most complex thinking about thinking that teachers ever experienced and their students gained benefit from observing teachers learning to think symbolically, solve problems and debug. There was once a time in the not so distant path when educators were on the frontiers of scientific reasoning and technological progress. Curriculum was transformed by computing. School computers were used less often to “do school” and more often to do the impossible.

Gary’s argument is (mostly) sound, and indeed, I argued for almost exactly the same thing in the keynote I presented in Alberta in February. Of course, both of our arguments have a flaw.

Our purpose in introducing computing is to both use the full power of a computer in schools. Indeed, the way we currently use computers in schools is much like using cars for their heaters; sure the cars will keep us warm, but it completely misses their potential as transportation devices. This analogy is somewhat apt, since the computer (as Dr. Papert has pointed out) can be used to transport kids to Microworlds.

Peter Eden said:

“I am interested in your comment that the power of computers as a tool is almost superficial until you learn to program. Others peoples’ programs are like using the computer to do something that can be done by other means. Word processing is really just typing. Many maths programs are really just calculators. A database is really just a record keeping system. But once you begin to program a vast new world opens up. Everything you program becomes a new tool. Because its your tool you can modify it. You modify it in ways you never imagined when you began.” (Peter Eden, personal communication, January 29th, 2012)

So we agree that learning how to program is an excellent endeavour, and one that basically everyone should learn how to do. What I think Gary and I disagree about is whether or not this particular learning should happen within the formal structure of schools.

Gary points out in his article that they had "tens of thousands" of teachers involved in learning how to program so that they could teach their students. Tens of thousands is a lot, but there are millions of teachers world wide. Tens of thousands is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who are teachers.

If we were to teach them all (or a sizable subset of all of the teachers) how to program so that they could teach their students, we’d have to institutionalize learning how to program, and I think that this would be a disaster. We’d end up with benchmarks, prescribed curriculum, and standardized testing.

I did a mathematics degree, and one requirement of the degree was that I take a course in computing, which I think is a perfectly sensible requirement. The problem was, I had to do a 1st year computer science course, and this course was ungodly boring. It was so boring, that despite attempting twice to finish a 1st year computer science course, I gave up, and did a "Computing for Mathematicians" course instead. Of course, I knew how to program already, so the programming skills themselves were not very useful to me. However, what I learned from this experience is that it is tremendously easy to take something full of life and turn it into something deadly dull. If every student was forced to endure the same kind of learning I experienced during that 1st year computer science course for 12 years without the opportunity to opt out, none of them would ever touch a computer again.

It is common for instutions like schools, to take endeavours which are exciting and interesting on a small scale, and attempt to bring that exact same experience to everyone. Unfortunately, most often these endeavours pick all of the wrong parts of the activity to "scale up." In scaling up mathematics education, we took an experience where people mostly played around with ideas, and turned it into fill-in-the-blank worksheets, completely destroying the purpose of learning mathematical thinking. Computer science in schools would fall into the same trap as science education has, which is that people think the purpose of science education is to teach facts about science, instead of a way of thinking.

What I would prefer is for space to be created outside of instutions for this type of thinking to occur. Much like we have community centres for art, and for physical activity, we could have recreational centres for computing. Instead of instutionalizing (and eventually centralizing) the learning of computing, I’d like to see it de-instutionalized. I’d like to see a thousand different models for learning computering rather than the inevitable staleness that would occur if it were introduced en masse to schools.

April 6, 2012 / 0 Comments

The language of technology

Technology has a language, a history, and it shapes our culture. While the focus of this article is on the language of technology apparent in Microsoft Word, every technology we use has similar traits.

Check out the "ribbon" (or menu bar) of Microsoft Word.

First, when you examine Microsoft Word, and many other programs like it, you’ll notice that there are many visual cues within the program as to how it works. What is less obvious is that each of these visual cues relies on the person viewing it to understand what the cue means. These visual cues are a form of language, and it is often this language which poses a significant barrier to using the technology. If you don’t understand the language being used, then every function of the program you want to use requires you to memorize the sequences of steps needed for that function.

Look at these examples of how language is used in Microsoft Office. It’s probably somewhat obvious what B, I, and U stand for, but what does the little triangle to the right of them mean? My mom didn’t know what the ~~abc~~ meant, and I know some people don’t know what the x₂ and the x² mean either.

Formatting

The question mark might be obvious, and it might not. It doesn’t look like a button, so one might not know that one can click on it for additional information. Further, buttons themselves are a form of language, and so even if this were shaped as a button, someone could conceivably not know it was something to be clicked on.

Help icon

In the margin bar, there are a couple of interesting 5 sided polygons lined up on top of each other. These are intended to indicate the different types of margins and indents you can apply to the document. Why are these icons chosen?

Margins

The origin of the icons chosen for the shape of the margin/indent icons in Microsoft Word appear to be very similar to the shapes originally used to represent the same functionality on a type-writer. Why those shapes were chosen for the type-writer, I don’t know.
Typewriter
(Image credit: Awkward Science)

More examples:

Tabs

Triangle drop down

As a final example, look at the Save file icon. Virtually none of your students will know the origin of this icon since none of them likely grew up using a computer with a floppy disk drive. Still, they know that they click on it to save their work, but this is language they’ve learned from us.

Save icon

Instead of thinking of teachers or children as being digital immigrants or digital natives, we should think of their exposure to the language of technology, and how knowledge of this language influences their ability to use technology.

March 30, 2012 / 7 Comments

Another alternative to the traditional conference

(A typical conference presentation – Image credit: Emmanuelvivier)

I’d like to propose an alternative to the typical conference model. Chris Wejr got me thinking after he sent me a message suggesting that we host a conference sometime in 2013 that he called a ‘hybrid conference’ and this post by John Burk also influenced my thinking as well.

A typical conference

Some of the problems with a typical conference for many people are:

They don’t know anyone at the conference before they attend it, and so connections they could potentially make at the conference are not made,
At the conference itself, too much time is spent by presenters talking, and not enough time is spent by participants assimiliating what they learn,
Most conferences have no follow-up after the conference.

The best parts of a conference (in my experience) are:

The ability to meet and discuss ideas with other people in the same field as myself,
Being inspired by people doing amazing projects, and who give awesome presentations/keynotes,
Learning about ideas outside of our own personal areas of expertise, in other words, being pushed by others to improve ourselves.

A different conference model

First, we would assign people to cohorts (based on their interests, or on questions they answer during registration) after they register, and setting up email lists (since most people are more comfortable with email than with other social media, and it would automatically provide records of the partiicpant conversations) for those cohorts, along with a facilitator for each cohort. The job of the facilitator is to provide information to the cohort about the conference coming up, and to encourage conversation and introductions between participants before the conference. These cohorts would also be sent links to video presentations (which should be broken into small chunks and include searchable transcripts of the video) that they can watch in advance of attending the conference. Ideally, presenters would be part of these cohorts.

The people would then attend the conference, and potentially move around through their sessions (which would have to be scheduled in advance, like a typical conference, but with input from the registrations) as a cohort, with sufficient opportunities during the sessions to connect and discuss the ideas, or at least between sessions. Ideally each session would be run more like a workshop, rather than a lecture, since most (if not all) of the people in the cohort would have already listened to the presentation. In some of the more advanced sessions, participants would produce a product as a result of their time together.

Social media could be used during the presentation as a back-channel, so that people from outside of the conference could learn from the participants, and share their ideas back to the conference.

Naturally, most participants attending the conference would know some other people there. They would have conversations, and they could choose to eat together. Obviously, if one wanted to continue through the conference as a solo participant, this would still be supported by this model, one would just choose not to interact with their given cohort.

After the conference, the cohort email lists could be used for follow-up, as well as other social media. People would be expected to continue to ask questions and discuss ideas, as well as share their successes (and failures) back to the group after attempting to implement whatever strategies, techniques, or resources they learned about through the conference. Provided the participants made the effort to seek follow-up, they would have an avenue to receive it.

This conference format would help mitigate some of the problems with the typical conference format, while not taking away any of the benefits. It would further have the benefit of allowing people who could not afford to attend the conference in person to still participate in many meaningful activities related to the conference itself.

It would definitely require more work from participants than is typically expected for a conference, and I’m sure this would turn some people away from attending this conference. That being said, those people I think rarely get very much out of typical conferences anyway, and I’d rather not build a new conference model based on the lowest common denominator.

Do you see any flaws with this model? Can you think of any ways of improving it?

March 20, 2012 / 4 Comments

Math in the real world: Gardening

My uncle called me today, and asked me a math question. Normally, I get called and asked technology related questions, but occasionally people remember that I have a mathematics background and call me in to assist.

My aunt wants to build a raised garden bed with a very particular shape. My uncle has been tasked with building it. She wants 3 of the sides of the shape to be 4 feet long, and the 4th side to be three feet long, and the whole shape should form a trapezoid (with a line of symmetry down the middle of the trapezoid). It took a little bit of chatting on the phone to get this to be clear, and I can see how being able to send each other pictures would have been really useful. To be able to build this shape as accurately as he would like, he needs to know all of the angles of the shape, so he can cut the pieces of the wood with the angles in the right position using a miter saw.

Trapezoid garden bed

I looked at the shape and decided that the fastest solution would be to build the shape in Geogebra, and measure the angles, which resulted in this.

Not the exact solution, but close enough that my uncle would be able to use the miter saw (which has a maximum accuracy of 1 degree, according to my uncle) and cut the wood for his shape. It took me about 3 or 4 minutes to draw the shape in Geogebra and measure the angles.

After my phone call with my uncle was over, I decided that I should double check this solution though, and verify that I knew how to solve it.

I drew an imaginary line across the shape, and labelled that side x. This allowed me to create a pair of equations using the Cosine law, and I ended up with the following equation to solve:

First equation

which simplifies to:

Second equation

and finally leads to this calculation:

Third equation

On my calculator, that leads to a value of the smaller angle of about 82.8° and a larger angle of 97.2°, which means that my diagram that I drew for my uncle is fairly close. Wanting to be sure that my answer was correct, I also checked it using Wolfram Alpha, and on my graphing calculator.

After I told my uncle the solution, he told me that my aunt had suggested drawing the diagram carefully on a piece of paper and measuring the angles with a protractor, but he had complained that solution wasn’t "mathematical enough." Of course, this leads to a discussion of what it means to do mathematics, anyway.

Does it matter which way I solve this problem for my uncle? Which of these techniques would you classify as "mathematics"? All of them? None of them?

March 20, 2012 / 9 Comments

We need social media etiquette

We need to develop social media etiquette. Some of the conversations I have seen on Twitter have been out of control rhetoric, other tweets have just contributed to the noise, and benefitted no one. During our discussion on how to make Twitter more accessible to new people, I tweeted some "rules" that if all followed, Twitter would be a lot more accessible and usable for everyone.

Of course, these rules are just my interpretation of what should be useful, and probably need to be reworked. Also, the idea for this comes from the email charter, which I strongly recommend you make an effort to implement for yourself.

The network is capable of only so much information. Don’t overload the network.
Be kind to each other, and assume that tweet did not convey the message intended.
Links are a way of sharing extra information in a conversation. Use them sparingly.
When you see a question asked, answer it, even if your answer is to redirect the questioner to another source of information.
The purpose of the social media is not to gain influence, it’s to communicate ideas. Don’t forget the social in social media!
Where reasonable, give attribution to ideas that you find & your sources of information.
Take some time to think about what you are tweeting. Is this contributing to the conversation?
It’s okay to disagree with someone, but do it respectfully. Don’t tweet what you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
Be safe. Stop before you click on a link & think, does this link have a context which makes sense?
Stop making lists of the "best people" to follow on Twitter. This is completely subjective & exclusionary.

There are other "rules of Twitter etiquette" out there. Here is a page for Twitter etiquette that @jlubinsky found and here’s another article on Twitter etiquette shared by @PivotLearning. There are also other useful resources on social media etiquette here, here, and here, as shared by @erringreg

How would you edit this list? Is it necessary?

March 18, 2012 / 3 Comments

Intuition and research

There are a number of things which have been discovered over the years through research which are not entirely intuitive. In fact, many of the results that have been discovered are down-right odd.

If you pay people to perform simple, routine tasks, in general the more you pay the person, the better they perform. Oddly enough, if those tasks require even a bit of cognitive effort, extra pay reduces performance. What!? How does this apply to education? Well, first it seems that it would drive a nail into the coffin that we should give teachers merit pay (as opposed to just paying all teachers more) for improved student performance. It also suggests that other rewards, which are commonly used in education, may have the opposite of the intended effect; they may reduce performance.
If you tell children how to play with a toy, they are less likely to perform irrelevant actions with that toy; but they are also less likely to do anything novel with it, or discover anything beyond what you told them about the toy. One would think that if one knew how to use a toy effectively, you’d have a base of knowledge necessary to expand upon and to make new discoveries. It turns out; sometimes even a little bit of knowledge is too much.
In a pivotal study done in the 1980s, researcher Jean Lave sought to find out how successfully people applied math in their everyday lives. Her surprising answer is that people actually use mathematics reasonably reliably, at nearly 98% accuracy in the supermarket, for example. What is somewhat shocking is that when the very same people were given a pencil and paper test on the very same skills they had successfully solved in the supermarket, the percentage they got right dropped to 59%. The conclusion Jean Lave had was that the subjects were using strategies in the supermarket that they had developed themselves, but fell back into the strategies they had learned in school for the test.
What do you think would happen if you didn’t teach arithmetic at all to students? In a highly unethical study done in the 1930s, a group of students was given no arithmetic instruction at all until 6th grade. Instead, the students spent this time discussing things that came up in their lives, and some practice in measuring and counting. In 6th grade, the students were taught arithmetic. At the end of the 6th grade, this group of students (who came from the poorest parts of the district) exceeded their peers from the other schools in solving story problems, and had caught up in arithmetic. In other words, not teaching math for 5 years (and spending this time reasoning through discussion instead) improved their mathematical reasoning skills.
A longer work week does not necessarily lead to more productive employees. In fact, most often it reduces overall employee productivity. 40 hours a week seems about optimal (for maximizing productivity, if not morale). What are the implications of this research on education? Should we be looking at less time in school (or at least doing "work" like activities for students) rather than more?

What these studies show is that our intuitive sense of what may be true is often not true, or at least can be shown to be not true under certain circumstances. We must then shy away from relying entirely on our intution, especially when examining large-scale educational practices. We must do a better job in education in funding and supporting effective research in our schools. We also need to be less reactionary when it comes to approaches that don’t fit into our personal perspective on how certain things should be taught, and focus more on dialogue and research to satisfy our reactions.

March 16, 2012 / 8 Comments

Rethinking the standard school schedule

Race to Nowhere

I just read an interesting article on the Salon about how long work weeks produce lower quality work, and that it seems that about 40 hours a week is when the maximum productivity occurs. Of course if this applies to workers, then it presumably (or a similar number) applies to students as well.

So an obvious question is, how many hours are students in school?

In our school, students start school at 8:30am and are at school until 3:30pm with an hour for lunch. This means that they "work" about 6 hours each day*. If they have 2 hours of other "work" to do each day, then they would be working a productive 40 hour work. If they are working more than this, then their productivity drops and one would expect reduced gains for additional time worked, and tremendous drops in productivity after a few weeks of increased work load. What is often forgotten in these types of calculations though is all of the other work students do outside of school.

When students spend time doing adult-type work, like an after school job, or they participate in after school sports, or tutoring, or another school, they are adding onto the total amount of work they have done in a week. The most important work that they do, of course, is learning. This analogy between the 40 hour work week, and how many hours students "work’ at learning has an important caveat; 40 hours may be way too much "work" for students, especially younger ones.

You may notice at your own school that students productivity drops after a few weeks in school. In fact, I can remember this effect quite clearly as we talk about it nearly every year. According to the article, people can sustain slightly greater amount of effort for small periods of time, but each week of extended effort has an additional toll on productivity. So by this logic, the drop-off in student output that educators frequently notice may be due to the over-extension students have been through during the previous weeks.

A potential solution, proposed by a colleague of mine, is to take the month of August (or July) and expect students to come to school during this month, for 4 days a week. This would produce 16 – 18 additional days per year of school, which could be used to offset 16 – 18 long weekends during the rest of the school year. Students would have the same amount of over all time spent in school, but it would be more balanced through-out the year.

There is some support from parents for a change like this in education. The parents behind Race to Nowhere know about this issue intimately. They have been pushing for a shorter week for students for ages. Further, by reducing the length of the summer, students who do not participate in learning activities in the summer would be less likely to experience the ‘summer-time drop.’ Unfortunately, students who normally spend their summers doing highly engaging learning activities would lose some of this time. On the other hand, they would gain many more long weekends during which they could choose to enrich and extend themselves.

There are some organizations which are calling for an extended school day. Kipp Schools are a famous example of a school system where students spend much more time in school. The attempts from these organizations to extend the school day are misguided, at least if you believe the research on productivity versus hours worked. There is some research showing that the increased school year and increased school days at KIPP schools improve student results, but that research has been recently contested because KIPP schools tend to be more selective in their enrollment than the neighbouring schools.

We have to be careful to keep separate ‘seat time’ from productive learning time. Students who are more alert, more productive, and more engaged in what they are doing will learn more. Simply being in school longer, or working longer at school work, will not ensure that students learn more. We need to remember that the same principles that apply to our own well-being apply to students as well. There are philosophical reasons to be opposed to excessive amounts of work for students, it seems that there may also be some research to support these claims.

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