World-Shaker

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Gone are the days of reflecting on an assigned reading for an entire class period—or even expecting that the entire class has done the assigned reading. Examining its structure, debating its logic, and savoring its rhetoric would take up time, require sustained focus, and might not necessarily lead to the “right answer”—impediments to busy, parallel-processing students who are anxious to get it right once and for all. These impediments have been replaced with the quicker, more streamlined approach of fast-paced classes, instructor availability “on demand,” and detailed instructions.

But are these efforts shortchanging my students by reinforcing who they are right now — admittedly, as portrayed by media-hyped generalizations—at the expense of who they might become if guided beyond their current comfortable boundaries?

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— Millennial Students and Middle-aged Faculty: A Learner-centered Approach

What Personalized Learning Can’t Do

willrichardson:

Sarah Garland:

The personalized learning that ed-tech pioneers are talking about now involves using data points like test scores, attendance and, perhaps someday, information about students gathered from games or their internet searches, to home [sic] in what students need academically. Maybe more high-tech systems and detailed data would have helped teachers recognize how far behind many students were on the path to graduation.

But would it have helped teachers figure out how to help a student deal with her rage issues so she could get over her frustrations in science class? Or how to keep a young student who was mocked for being gay at school and at home from losing hope and help him stay focused on his strengths? Or how to salvage the academic career of a student whose prospects once looked promising and who suddenly stopped caring about his future?

I still think more and more this is the value that we have to begin to articulate first. I’m becoming convinced that adaptive learning systems will flourish in this “let’s do better on the tests” moment. And while there is a great deal that troubles me about that, I think they have a role to play in learning. But not at the expense of people and places that focus on the more important mindsets that students need to develop to be real lifelong learners, and the challenges that kids need help overcoming to be ready to learn in the first place. 

I feel like a lot of this is borne from the pervasive notion that personalized learning technology is being developed to replace an educator, which just isn’t the case from my perspective. I agree with what you’re both saying, and technology will never replace a teacher’s intuition or solve the personal challenges and issues a student is dealing with. But I do believe it’s a valuable tool in the learning process, especially as we begin to refocus learning to the process of developing and mastering specific skills. 

Personalized learning technology won’t be able to identify a student’s struggle with an alcoholic parent, sleep deprivation or bullying, and it’s not supposed to. What it will be able to do, and more effectively over time, is identify the underlying academic struggles that are preventing them from mastering a skill or concept, and then deliver relevant interventions to help them get up to speed (all while keeping the instructor in the loop about their progress so they can also intervene in a way they think is best).

Most of these systems are underdeveloped because they’re still new. Even the Horizon Report (K-12 edition, Higher Ed edition) lists this as a technology that won’t begin to come into its own for the next 2-4 years. I think one of the interesting aspects, and Sarah alludes to this above, is what “data” will constitute an accurate representation of student learning. This is arguably the first time we’ve been able to collect this data on such a massive scale, and I think it’ll be interesting to watch as people try to pull some kind of meaning from it. 

Thanks for the conversation this morning :-)

Google Now Lets You Use GIFs for Profile Pics

In what may be a sign of their resurgent popularity, Google announced Monday that members can now use animated GIFs for their profile photos.

Matt Steiner, a software engineer at Google, first made the announcement on his profile page. He said GIFs will animate on both desktop and mobile, “like newspapers in Harry Potter.”

Steiner also changed his profile pic to a GIF of himself turning towards the camera and smiling. 

Cheating or collaboration? Do students really not know the difference? →

Such a fascinating article. Share this with your colleagues-it’ll start a conversation. Here was one of my favorite parts:

Cheating and defenses of it appear to be rampant, even in the best schools in America. Harvard recently experienced its largest cheating scandal ever; half of the nearly 300 students in an Introduction to Congress class were suspected of cheating on a take-home final last year.

Students justified their collaboration on the exam, saying that any similarities in test responses were because they shared lecture notes and conferred with one another and the teaching assistants.

In defense of the student conduct, Slate’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote:

In this case, it’s the test’s design, rather than the students’ conduct, that we should criticize. In allowing students to consult a wide variety of sources, the Harvard exam was looking to assess something deeper than how well they could memorize and recall facts. Judging from some leaked questions, the test seemed to be designed to measure how students could think about some of the contradictions inherent in American government. (An essay question began, “Do interest groups make Congress more or less representative as an institution?”) But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?

Harvard didn’t agree, forcing many of the students to withdraw from the university for a period of two to four terms. (Here is a good Harvard Crimson piece on the internal debate over the university’s actions )

How Should Social Media Be Taught in Schools? →

Students may appear to be comfortable using social media, but don’t assume that they know how to use it appropriately in a classroom setting.

Educators Baiyun Chen and Thomas Bryer from the University of Central Florida conducted research on instructional strategies for social media last year, and they pointed out that, “one of the common themes in previous research is that students use social media for personal reasons, but rarely for educational or learning purposes.”

With this in mind, teaching students how to appropriately use social media becomes not just a good idea; it becomes a school’s responsibility.

Click through to learn why this is actually a great thing.

BBC News: Face to face with Facebook friends →

I tried embedding this video, but alas, it’s one of the few BBC wants to keep on their site. It’s definitely worth a look, though. Here’s part of their synopsis:

Have you ever wondered whether the hundreds of people you share personal photos and stories with on Facebook are really friends - or mere online acquaintances?

Ty Morin, a recent college graduate from the US state of Connecticut, decided there was a big difference between communicating en masse and making a genuine connection with the people important to him.

He decided to travel around the US and beyond to meet all 788 of his Facebook friends face to face. He is recording each meeting for a documentary and photography exhibit on online connections.

This actually started out as a Kickstarter project. You can view that video here:

"At the heart of the matter lies technology. My pre-1980 birth date means I do not share my students’ lifelong history with digital technology. Neuroscientists tell us that this history has shaped the cognitive functioning of the millennial generation, strengthening certain neural pathways through repeated use and weakening others through infrequent use. Student comments such as “I don’t like reading” or “I can text and listen to you at the same time” suggest that these strengthened and weakened pathways are the polar opposite of those that exist in my own brain. I am, therefore, despite more than 20 years of postsecondary teaching, sometimes completely confounded by the way my students think— and not always certain that the fault for this confusion is theirs."

— Millennial Students and Middle-aged Faculty: A Learner-centered Approach

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This is what 1 byte of data used to look like.

If you were to open a plaintext document, press the spacebar once, and save it, you would still need about 300 of these to store that document.

(Source: reddit.com)

1993 View of the Future by AT&T

It’s kind of spooky just how accurate this is. 

(by jsrambler)

"We short-circuit this process of subconscious learning when we rush in too soon with an answer. It’s better to allow that confused, confounded feeling to last a little longer—for two reasons. First, not knowing the single correct way to resolve a problem allows us to explore a wide variety of potential explanations, thereby giving us a deeper and broader sense of the issues involved. Second, the feeling of being confused, of not knowing what’s up, creates a powerful drive to figure it out. We’re motivated to look more deeply, search more vigorously for a solution, and in so doing we see and understand things we would not have, had we simply been handed the answer at the outset."

— Why Confusion Can Be a Good Thing

Need help monitoring the noise levels of younger students? There’s an interesting free iOS app for that called Too Noisy that gives live feedback to students based on the noise levels in the room. 

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Blended Learning: A Disruptive Innovation [INFOGRAPHIC]

Infographic Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Are We Teaching Kids To Be Too Dependent on Technology? →

A surprisingly provocative take on this question. 

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10 Reasons Facebook Fails Education

Absolutely spot-on. Here are two from the list:

7. Ideas are dead.

Just as discourse is dead on Facebook, along with that comes the sharing of ideas. I think Facebook belittles idea sharing. Big ideas are reduced to quote sharing (which I admit I do).  Just as the consumption of video on the Internet has been reduced to 1-4 minutes max, just the same, the sharing of ideas on Facebook has been reduced to a sentence. This has turned my Facebook wall into a warped version of the Hallmark store.

6. Over-notified.

Besides being added to groups that you’re not asked to be in, asked to use or install apps, or invited to too many events-  the notifications in Facebook also requires too much management. To add to this, many people  are still crossposting from their other social networks; I find that Facebook is cluttered, and not filled with much substance. Cross-posting from Twitter is a behavior that’s frustrating. If I just read your post on Twitter, seeing it on Facebook, belittles the share. And, just from observation, it looks lazy. I realize that you can change settings on Facebook, mute people’s posts and such, but that’s way too much management involved.  It shouldn’t be this hard. Educators like Miguel Guhlin have started over completely- removing almost all of his friends, and asking you now to “Subscribe” to his posts.  That’s certainly a strategy. Is that too much?

"Challenging books promote reading for pleasure, help improve standards and lead to better overall academic achievement and social mobility.
It appears that beyond a certain age, young people may not be being encouraged to read at the appropriate level of difficulty for their age – perhaps because it is assumed they can already read, and their literacy no longer needs development."

— Secondary school children ‘shunning difficult books’