"Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective"

In another example of the Chronicle of Higher Ed's misunderstanding and misapprehension of education, technology, and online learning, they have published an article called "Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning" By David Sheih. There is nothing wrong with reporting the results of a survey. That is what they should be doing: reporting. But what I don't understand is why they find that so significant when other stories should be taking precedence. If they are going to have a tech section, they should be writing more about web 2.0, new trends in learning theory (Connectivism perhaps?), the open source movement in the changing economy, and a hundred other topics besides something that has been pretty much settled since the early 90s.

I am not sure that I see any relevance in a survey of what faculty and administrators "feel" about online learning. There is already enough research to show that there is No Significant Difference in the learning between online and face-to-face students. I have taught online and off and also work as an instructional designer. In my experience, face-to-face and online take the same amount of time. What I find is that instructors who say that it takes more time have not been properly trained in how to teach online. They are often not taking advantage of the full range of tools available to them and have unreasonable expectations of themselves and their students (24/7 faculty availability; 24 hour turn around on all postings, emails, and assignments; futzing around with email attachments instead of using the LMS, etc.) It is not the same as teaching face-to-face and when instructors try to replicate the face-to-face experience online they run into trouble.

The print version of the Chronicle is worse. They have headlines in the tech section like "MIT Lab Gets New Wall Sockets and Plugs" with pictures of administrators at ribbon cutting ceremonies wondering what the new holes in the wall are for and why they were so expensive. The real news about the faculty and administrators who think that online learning is less effective is how little they know about online learning and the possibilities of online teaching.

Wake Up Mr. Chips its the 20th Century!

Mark Edmundson, English teacher at the University of Virginia, has written an anti-educational technology essay in the New York Times called "Geek Lessons." His major claim against technology is that it is merely an attempt for teachers to become popular: they are just pandering to the students. He has a lot to say about what good teaching is - predictably, it is all about the professor. It is clear from the article that he has no experience with technology in the classroom or what teaching with technology is about. He says that "good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives." Why can't someone do that using technology?

We use technology not because it is new, cool, or fun (although it can be all three), but because it is an opportunity to teach multi-modally (visual and audio learning), extend the community of the classroom beyond the walls of the brick and mortar classroom, to democratize education by making it available to those in remote areas or who must work and raise families.

One of the reasons why there are so many grants around for technology and fewer to send professors off to Europe for a semester is that technology can, for instance, solve real problems like making education accessible to those with disabilities. Other reasons that administrators may like technology is that the research shows that the higher the interactivity of a class, the higher the retention rates; technology can be a tool for making courses interactive.

I find teachers like Edmundson a bit sad - if their teaching style is such that it would not survive a laptop in their classrooms, what does that say about what is being taught and most importantly, how it is being taught. Edmundson gets that the culture is changing and the students expectations are changing. They are no longer satisfied with the "sage on the stage" style of teaching. They are no longer satisfied having to learn using three hundred year old methodologies. Does Edmundson accept handwritten papers? I doubt it. He does himself, tech-friendly faculty, and his students a great disservice by dismissing these cultural changes as merely selfishness on the part of the students.

I agree with Edmundson when he says that "Good teachers...can induce to struggle to affirm intelligently what you've previously believed in indolent, unconsidered ways." This includes an uncritical relationship to technology. By leveraging new technologies in our teaching, in thoughtful ways, we show the students that technology can be used thoughtfully. Edmundson's essay assumes that technology is a tool of passive consumption. He does not have that thoughtful, critical relationship to technology so he assumes that others don't either.

I hope that the editors of the Times will seek to balance this perspective by talking to other professors out there who have this critical engagement with educational technology like David Silver at the University of San Francisco or George Seimens at the University of Manitoba.

Health Information Management 101

I am very excited about this syllabus I wrote with Charlene Gore for a class that we co-teach, Health Information Management 101. This course is a credit/no credit, two unit, student success course where we teach the students all of the technology they will need to be successful in the HIM program: their learning management system, web 2.0 tools, and Second Life (it is used on campus). The idea is to get all of the technology, formation of learning networks, and information access all in one class. This lets the teachers leverage the technology without having to teach it. We hope that this is rolled out campus-wide one day. The bump in the road is that it takes teachers willing to embrace web 2.0 technologies, a leaderless model ala "The Starfish and the Spider" (learning is lead by students in small groups facilitated by teachers), and portfolio assessment. The course is still in refinement and we would love feedback from others who share a similar vision.

HIM101 Syllabus - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: HIM101 Syllabus

Everything Old is New Again

Something about these old books from the 60s makes me sneeze. They really don't make paper like they used to. Some salient quotes from R. Buckminster Fuller's Education Automation (1962):

"I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be a number one amongst the great world industries, within which will flourish an educational machine technology that will provide tools such as the individually selected and articulated two-way TV and an intercontinentally net-worked, documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set."

This sounds like YouTube. I am sure though he was not thinking it also hosting re-runs of "Hogan's Heroes." There are some great pieces of film that are winding up on YouTube that you just can't find anywhere else (like "Why Man Creates").

"We would also find that generally speaking the geographically larger the physical task to be dome, the duller the conceptual brain that is brought to bear upon the integration of the scientific discoveries and their technically reaqlized applications."

The above is an early argument for open source. There is no way that one person, one company or even a handful of governments is going to bring education to those that need it most. The message that fuller has is that we need to give people access to the information and the networks (two-way TV set). Today's education is still a system of one-way delivery. The interaction that is inherent in the network is everything.

"I would counsel you in your deliberation regarding getting campuses ready now to get general comprehensive environmental controls that are suitable to all-purposes like a circus. A circus is a transformable environment."

This is why I like what Howard Rhiengold is doing with his "Co-Lab." It is an extremely flexible collection of tools. It can be added on to a commercial learning management system (the "duller conceptual brain" that Fuller was writing about) or be used as a stand-alone LMS itself. I like being able to chose what tools I use rather than having them chosen for me out of the box.

"You don't need a detailed drawing; we do not make that kind of communication to craftsman anymore; but all of the schools go on teaching that we do. The data no longer goes to the craftsman; it goes to the tools...What we want is the man who gets the fundamental concept, the information significance, and can do some comprehensive thinking regarding that information. He will put the data into the information machines, and it will be processed by automation into physical realization of his effective thinking. We don't need many of the myriad of 'things' we have had in schools."

A side note about Connectivism: So whenever I am faced with a new theory of learning, the first question I ask is "So what?" How does this theory describe what we do? How can this theory tell me about how people learn, and therefore, how I should teach? I want any new theory to be like an information machine; I can give it my data and get out of it a realization of effective thinking. Knowing that some information is more significant than other information is currently one of the top critical skills. I know how constructivism approaches this problem: we apply information to our experiences and the experiences of others and we create new knowlege. The goal of education is to create places in space and time where this can happen. Teaching is to facilitate this interaction. This fits my experience in the classroom and online. My questions about constructivism (and they are questions because they are unanswered - there is nothing rhetorical about this) ask if the creation of a network isn't just the future of constructivism? Is it focusing on the network rather than the people and experiences? The connection rather than the connected?

Web 2.0 Student Success

Char Gore and I are creating (and co-teaching) a class for summer and fall called "Student Success" or something generic like that. It will go through the curriculum committee again with something more descriptive maybe. It is a credit only, two unit course that will be multimodal which means that the students can take it completely online or come in once a week to the lab where we will be basically doing a workshop. The whole point of the class is to give new Health Information Management students the tools to succeed in college and in real life by introducing them to the tools to manage their work, manage information, and to build communities. The class is based on the "15 Minutes" article by Stephen Abram who has a particularly useful blog. There are no papers in the class. It is portfolio assessed. The students start a blog and learn about new tools each week and embed and link to those tools in their blog and write (or record/podcast/film) about what they found helpful or difficult. They will also look for other tools like the ones we recommend and evaluate them (free research for the next iteration of the class). At the end of the class, they will have a portfolio of tools and a network of colleagues. Our goal is to eventually bring the class to the whole college. It serves as an introduction to the our learning management system and Elluminate as well.