Etale – Life in the Digital World

interdisciplinary musings on life and education in the digital world

Archive for category education

Is Lecture Really Bad?

Jul 17

Posted by etale in education | Comments off

No, lecture is not bad. In fact, it can serve as a powerful and effective tool for learning. Some of the same people who ridicule lecture as an unhelpful dinosaur in the digital age are also huge fans of YouTube, TeacherTube, Kahn’s Academy, iTunes University, and TED Talks. While not all, many of the “favorites” of people who advocate for such online resources could be categorized as lecture. Granted, they are often wonderfully engaging and creative lectures, rich with illustrations and other media. Yet, they are often still just lectures. When a lecture is recorded and distributed on the web, it does take on some new and powerful features. You can can pause, fast forward, rewind, and replay at will; and that gives the power to the learner rather than the lecturer. You can also often reuse, re-purpose, and redistribute them. That is no small matter either. And yet, all of these added features are built upon an age-old method of content distribution…lecture.

My problem with many of the bumper sticker critiques of lecture is that they are just that, bumper sticker comments. They can be rhetorical statements that too often do not leave room for good, healthy, lengthy dialogue about the benefits and limitations of a teaching method that has at least contributed to the development of some of the world’s greatest minds. Given this fact, perhaps there should be room for more discussion than simply lecture=bad. In fact, approaching the topic in such a dogmatic way, leaving little room for other perspectives, seems to be falling prey to the very same spirit that leads some to conclude that lecture=bad. Instead, here are some simple questions that I offer to guide a substantive discussion about the strengths and limitations of lecture in an increasingly digital world. I invite you to suggest additional questions as well.

What do I want the students to learn and what is the best way to help them learn it?

Is lecture a part of the learning experience or the entire learning experience? If it is part of the learning experience, do learners know how to “use it”?

To what extent can skills and mastery be acquired by lecture? What else is needed and how can we plan for it?

If there is a goal to a given learning experience, how can we help the learner’s check their progress toward that goal? And what do they do if they are not progressing?

What are the benefits and limitations of recorded lectures compared to a live unrecorded lecture?

What is the appropriate length of a lecture for a given topic or audience?

In what ways can visuals and illustration enhance a lecture?

What are the best reasons for using or not using lecture as part of a specific learning experience? What are the alternatives? What are the benefits and limitations of the alternatives?

Do I think of teaching as about educating a group or educating a group of individuals? How does my answer inform my teaching strategy choice?

Those are a few questions to get us going. Now it is your turn.

Word Cloud of President Obama’s Speech in Cairo

Jun 7

Posted by etale in blog, books, education, educational technology, great ideas, reviews | Comments off

This was created from the transcripts released at whitehouse.gov on June 4, 2009. I removed the title and all references to “(Applause)” as I just wanted it to represent the words spoken by President Obama. Do you have any interesting reflections or observations? Here is one. If you look at the word cloud and the full transcript, you will not find the words “terrorism” or “terrorist.” Instead, President Obama opted for the word “extremist” and he used it 18 times.

obama-in-cairo

Five Technologies / Movements that Will Turn Textbooks into Antiques

Jun 6

Posted by etale in blog, books, digital scholarship, editorials, education, educational technology, sites and sources | Comments off

Open Source Textbook Initiatives - Historically, textbooks have been the single largest line item on many school budgets when it comes to curriculum. We now see initiatives like Curriki and the California Open Source Textbook Initiative that might challenge this. Imagine a day when that line item is cut or reallocated toward people (curriculum specialists, instructional designers, etc.) and support technologies. With Open Source Textbook Initiatives as well as WikiTexts, we get a text that is continually being updated (not having to pay for a new version / edition every few years?); that can be easily customized to meet the needs of a given course, school, district; that can be used as a whole or in part; and that can be easily distributed in a variety of formats. Oh, and it many cases this option might be free or, if one needs a paper version, the cost of printing.

Electronic Reading Devices – The Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Netbooks, and a variety of emerging devices make it possible to deliver content, even entire textbooks and course readers electronically. These technologies are bridging the paper and electronic world of text and other media. While the book is an amazing technology, it has limitations that can be overcome by these new devices. With an iPhone or similar reader, I can be on a hike in the local forest and have immediate access to all of my texts; not to mention the ability to make use of the GPS capabilities, communication tools, and the ability to record or discuss my experiences (record notes, take and share pictures, watch video tutorials on how to identify poison ivy, email someone, talk to someone live or asynchronously, mark my current location on a map). Rather than walking through the woods with a backpack full of books (not that anyone would do this), I have my textbooks in my pocket (backpack optional, bug spray required…at least here in Wisconsin).

Online Social Networks and Mashup Technologies - I already mentioned wikis, but this deserves a separate category. In the first item, I was thinking more in terms of systematic organized projects. However, online communities and social networks make is easier for educators and course designers to learn about a variety of individual sources, organize them into themes/topics/units/chapters, link to them or embed them in a central course resource location, and bypass the use of a textbook altogether. If I am teaching Geography, I can use Google Earth and Google Maps, embed links to relevant sources right into my course blog/wiki/iGoogle page, create or borrow YouTube videos for mini-lectures, have students contribute their own resources… You get the idea. Before long, I have a customized, powerful, content-rich, multimedia textbook for my class. It really isn’t even a textbook is it? It is a multimediabook. Why would I even consider using a traditional textbook if I have the time and resources to do something like this? Maybe I just answered my own question. How many educators are willing to set aside the time and resources to do this? This does require creativity, the ability to analyze and synthesize information, and good instructional design sense. Take a look at the National Educational Technology Standards for Students and Teachers. These are the very skills that we are expecting of the current and upcoming generations of students, teachers, and administrators in the k-12 world. And they certainly seem to be abilities that we should expect from University professors who carry titles before and after their names that are supposedly connected to mastery or expertise in one or more disciplines.

Custom Texts / Readers - These have been around for years, especially in higher education. A professor creates a collection of articles, book chapters, and essays; and it is sold as an inexpensive text at the University or nearby bookstore. Now let’s add the digital element. Imagine a bookstore that will take a box of articles, books, essays, disks, files on flash drives, images, audio files, and video clips. They will take care of getting all of the necessary copyright permissions, then, based upon the instructions of the teacher or design team, they build an indexed electronic text that could be purchased online and made immediately available to students. If something changes mid-year, even mid-semester, the text can be updated with the new resources with minimal effort or cost. If a student has a learning disability, the content can be easily converted to a form that works best for that student. The instructor could even gain permission from students and include examples of exceptional student work in the next version of the reader. I may be stretching the boundaries of reality a bit, but imagine this. Imagine that people put their readers on the web for others to purchase…a ready-made option for the lazy (or busy) instructor. And those student examples that were included? What if the students received a small source of revenue out of the deal? Now that would be a brand new motivation for students to perform well on an assignment.

Hybrid Organic Textbooks (HOT) - We already have a decade of textbook companies building electronic versions of their books, rich with web-based resources, multimedia resources, pools of quiz questions, even full learning activities. In fact, some of these web-enhanced textbooks have become so full-featured that the textbook and web-based resources become the entire course (something that I lament…the last thing that we need is to further confuse the words “textbook” and “curriculum”. I’ll save that for another post). However, there is potential here. Imagine if textbook companies embraced the best of grass roots social media while also providing a core paper / electronic hybrid resource. This might include a paper-based text that could also be used on a mobile reader or device. At the same time, the publisher would have a web presence, adding new and quality resources to the text. Add to that a dynamic community and repository of client-produced lessons, resources, images, videos, discussions, keypal programs, scheduled guest presentations, and collaborative activities. Now we get true convergence of paper-based textbooks, web-based supplements, open source texts and wikis, electronic readers, and grassroots social networking. If publishers or a small group of motivated educators can catch this full vision, then everyone will get a chance to experience a powerful and positive disruption in k-12 education. Do I have any venture capitalists readings this post?

10 Graduate Degrees that Would Not Exist Apart from the Media Revolution

Jun 6

Posted by etale in blog, e-learning, education | Comments off

Here are ten graduate degrees that caught my attention; courses of study that challenge people to think about and help shape life in the digital world. If it were not for the media revolution of the past fifty years, these degrees wouldn’t exist. Perhaps the last one in the list would…but I doubt it.

MA in Telecommunications with an emphasis in Digital Storytelling - Ball State University

MA in New Literacies – University of Sheffield

PhD in Media Psychology – Fielding Graduate University

MS in Game Design – Full Sail University

Master of Internet Studies – Curtin University

MA in Social Media – Birmingham City University

MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz

MBA with a specialization in E-Business at Eastern Michigan University

Master of Distance Education at University of Maryland University College

Doctor of Ministry in Leadership in Emerging Culture at George Fox University

Digital Scholarship and Faculty Celebrity?

Aug 9

Posted by etale in digital scholarship, education | Comments off

Digital Scholarship? I just returned from the 2008 Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in Madison, WI. This is my third year and it is always a wonderful source of ideas. One idea that I’m walking away with is from Curtis Bonk and George Siemens. In a forum, they talked about the notion of digital scholorship. Having just re-read Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered and being a student of digital culture, this captured my attention. I’ll likely post more about it over the ucomcing days/weeks/months, but here is a good article that is related. It describes what might be considered digital scholarship as well as what Curk Bonk described as faculty celebrities.

Thanks to YouTube, Professors Are Finding New Audiences – Chronicle.com

E-Learning Courses are Easier to Scrutinize

Dec 23

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, education, educational technology | Comments off

Secretary Spellings Encourages Greater Transparency and Accountability in Higher Education at the National Accreditation Meeting

This isn’t new, but it is important.  We’ve heard news about this movement for the past several years.  Spellings was talking about transparency in order “to provide families with valuable information about institutions so parents and
students can make informed education decisions.”  I remember Darcy Hardy mentioning something similar at the 2006 Distance Learning and Teaching Conference- that there is a growing demand for evidence that a higher education institution is actually resulting in student learning.  We want to know that a diploma means something and that students with that diploma actually have the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be successful beyond college.  This growing trend to be more transparent about student learning outcomes as well as student performance after graduation is something that accrediting agencies will look for more and more in the upcoming years. 

I know that Spellings was talking about transparency on a University level, but this also leads me to think about transparency in a different way, on the course level, and simply transparency of the details of a given course for use by the instructor.  Consider a typical collaborative e-learning course.  Discussions, correspondence, instructional materials, and learning activities are captured, easily available for scrutiny during the course and after it is complete.  As an instructor/facilitator, I find this a priceless opportunity for careful review and discovery of what did and did not work.  If several students struggled with a particular unit or assessment, I can track activity levels of students, how frequently they logged in, and how much time was spent on a given activity.  This doesn’t work perfectly.  For example, if a student visits a page and simply prints it out rather than reading it online, then it may look as if the student only spent thirty seconds on the page, when they may have spent an hour.  Instructors can use all of this captured data for course improvement, research (granted all of the appropriate IRB measures), as well as interventions with individuals students who are struggling. 

The amount of data available for review is sometimes overwhelming.  Print off a single-spaced script of threaded discussions from a sixteen week graduate course with fifteen students and you are likely to have 300-500 pages.  And the fact that all of this data is in digital form allows you to engage in all sorts of discourse and content analyses. 

I realize that this is not really what Spellings was talking about.  But the ability to carefully review and scrutinize e-learning course quality is amazing.  When I have presented overviews of e-learning to groups who are skeptical that one can receive a good education online, I often encourage criticism and skepticism, but only if it is across the board, applied to all learning environments.  I explain that, “E-learning courses receive the scrutiny that all courses deserve.” 

While it is easier to review the details of an e-learning course, what Spellings is talking about is outcomes.  From the perspective of accrediting agencies and prospective families, they want to know if students are actually learning anything.  That can be demonstrated by end results, often without showing how they got there.  But I am too much of a process person to accept a set of numbers as an adequate measure.  I also want qualitative data.

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I was Wrong

Dec 22

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, education, news | Comments off

Lecture HallLast week, soon after I had posted about Open Yale Courses, conversation about it started on the DEOS listserv. While I’ve been an avid lurker for years, I had never contributed. So, I chose Open Yale as my first opportunity. Some critiqued the initiative and similar ones as promoting poor e-learning courses. My response was that these are not really e-learning courses, that they serve a different purpose. I was surprised to find that some saw fit to judge them as full e-learning courses, criticizing Yale for producing courses that lack the characteristics of an effective online course. Who would mistake these for actual online courses, I thought? Well, perhaps I was mistaken. Since that post I have found more than a few people referring to these projects as free online courses.

Today on Lifehacker there was a link to the Education Portal, a page entitled: Universities with the Best Free Online Courses. I guess people are calling them courses.

What is interesting is that a few people fear these open course initiatives are a threat to online learning. After all, these are free, right? I don’t think they are much of a threat to face-to-face or e-learning courses, but that they are wonderful resources in the spirit of the open source movement. At the same time, if anyone should be threatened by these efforts, it is the professor who insists that one-way lectures to a hall of 200+ students is good education. How is that better than these freely available lectures from top schools in the country? At least you can pause and replay the free online versions- not a small feature when considering teaching and learning effectiveness.