An interesting article (thanks to Mary Pringle for alerting me to this).

The claimed finding is that fact retrieval is improved through taking tests. Or, to put it another way that better reflects what is actually being researched here, taking tests improves the ability of students to take similar tests. Hmm. That’s news?

Any sensible pedagogical design will include something like tests (maybe not with that name) as an integral part of the learning process. It is an essential part of the metacognitive process and fits well with work on learning cycles by Lewin, Kolb and others over the past hundred years or so, and aligns perfectly with a constructivist view of knowledge. We need opportunities to connect new knowledge with old and to apply it. It’s not the end of the process but it’s an important step along the way. Testing forces us to confront our beliefs, reflect on our knowledge, apply it, think twice about what we know and don’t know, identify the flaws, take remedial action, and to do it in a (typically) ‘safe’ context before we have to apply it for real. 

Like almost all such articles where people attempt to ‘experiment’ with different approaches to education, there appear from what is reported in NYT to be at least a couple of gaping methodological flaws:

1. The amount of time spent on task seems to have been largely ignored. By my reckoning, the control group in the first experiment (reading only) spent 5 minutes on the task, the repeat-reading group spent about 20 minutes, the concept mapping group spent an unspecified amount of time (probably extended because of the extra cognitive load involved in the diagramming process, so time actually thinking about what was being learned was not that great) and the test group spent at least half an hour, all of it relating to the content to be learned. The conclusion that might be drawn from this is that the longer one spends thinking about something one has learned, the better one will have learnt it. Indeed, looking at the results and bearing this in mind, it is surprising that the control groups did not do worse than they did.
2. To make it even less reliable, it appears that no account has been taken of the fact that those using tests were actually practicing the very skills needed to do better on tests – exam technique can be learned just like any other skill.
3. It is not clear whether or not feedback was given on the results of the test. If it were, the simple fact that caring was shown by whatever or whoever gave the feedback would have had a notable effect on learning. Even if not, tests would have highlighted to the learners what they did and didn’t know more effectively than concept maps or reading – that’s why we give learners opportunities to practice applying their knowledge.

What this study (on the face of it, it’s not an experiment because of the lack of proper control for highly significant variables) does suggest is that the simple application of concept mapping does not greatly improve fact learning as a matter of course. This is obvious. We know that tools do not improve learning: it is not the tools themselves but how they are used that turns them into a learning technology. The devil is in the detail: how much preparation was provided for those using concept maps? How much time and effort was spent in the mechanical process of map construction relative to time spent in reflecting on what had been learned? Were users of concept maps provided with sufficient training to allow them to use the tools to identify gaps in knowledge as well as connections? Were they able to get feedback or share maps with others?

Perhaps I am being unfair to the researchers and I’m looking forward to seeing the real article to find out more about how the study was conducted – sadly, Science does not make articles published online available as part of AU’s access package so we have to wait till it appears in the journal itself before we can read it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?ref=science

This is your brain on Twitter/facebook/email/iPhone/TV/crack cocaine. Very simple and what should be an obvious message for site designers in online learning: never show exactly the same page twice. In learning we move from one novelty to the next – that’s part of what makes it such fun. One problem with a typical coursel site that shows a static content hierarchy (rather a lot of LMS – based courses) is that the jump-off page tends to vary little. In a program I used to run I insisted that the entry point for every course was the discussion forum, driven by Michael Moore’s transactional distance theory more than anything else. However, it was a pretty good motivator too, bringing people to the sites more frequently than those for static content course sites. I thought it was just because people like to socialise and also had to keep visiting in order to know what was happening. Turns out that dopamine may have played a role in this too!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-poldrack/multitasking-the-brain-se_b_334674.html

Disfluency turns out to be rather good: people seem to learn better from things that are harder to read. Time to rethink those strategies about always making things as easy and clear as possible!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-benefit-of-ugly-fonts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Why did it take so long? Internet Exploder is about passable nowadays but not even close to best of breed and the extreme lack of trust in it that Microsoft meticulously cultivated over a decade or more should have put it to bed much sooner. Despite well publicised recent successes such as its ability to trap more malevolent sites than the rest (necessary, one might argue, because it is notably more vulnerable when it reaches them) and some long-needed if half-hearted improvements in security, speed and standards-compliance IE remains, at best, a mediocre alternative to Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. It is interesting, therefore, how a technology that is manifestly inferior to virtually all of its competitors should still occupy one of the top two places in the charts. Force of history (the big one) driven by preferential attachment and the Matthew Principle, spawned by uncompetitive practices and aggressive marketing together with some very unwise choices by Netscape at precisely the wrong time in its history might help to explain a lot of it but, given the trouble IE has caused and the ease with which it can be replaced,  I can’t help feeling there is another dynamic at work.

Pleasingly, Landing visitors seem to know better and we have seen far more Firefox users on the site than any other browser by a very sizeable margin. Indeed, even Safari seems to give IE a run for its money and Chrome, while still very much a minority browser, is starting to show up on the charts as more than just a flat line near the bottom of the Y axis.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jan/04/internet-explorer-falls-behind-firefox-europe

Big numbers. Very big numbers. Open courseware has been wonderful for MIT and wonderful for learners around the world. The costs of infrastructure to support this may be high but the payoffs seem more than worth it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/year-end_stats_from_mit_point_to_increasing_popula.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Fascinating: I particularly like ‘the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly’ – that one took a moment to absorb but makes great sense. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-netflix-uses.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Alas. 

Many years back I cursed del.icio.us for taking ideas many others (including me) had created and building something brilliant and profitable out of them. But it was a fine site and, dammit, they did build a really great system that justly deserved its success and that was streets ahead of anything the rest of us were trying to do. So now I curse Yahoo (as usual) for giving it their inimitable kiss of death.

Address of the bookmark: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

Later today I’ll be giving a talk at the AU Learning Services conference, so here are my slides.

Softening the machine (note – only available to logged in users) BIG DOWNLOAD ALERT! May slow down the server if many people do this at once. UPDATE: Scribd version of the slides for viewing in a Web browser, no big download needed, at http://tinyurl.com/37hpr37

For those who want the condensed version, here is a stream of consciousness brain dump on the message I am trying to get acroos:

Like all educational systems, Athabasca University is a machine, composed of many technologies. Some of these are directly about teaching, some with processes around it, some with helping people to work together and more. Because Athabasca developed as a distance institution in the industrial age of distance learning, based primarily on the postal service and telephones, both its institutional and teaching processes became brittle: essentially, Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance that treats distance as a continuum between structure and dialogue puts us in a tricky situation: limits on dialogue inevitably mean an increase in structure. Technologies developed from the Web 1.0 era that enable richer and more inclusive communication are changing that but they are based on a model of closed groups, focused and task-centric. And that tends to be the nature of dialogue, both in teaching and in the daily workings of the university. The real social connection stuff is still largely left to happen in more or less occasional face to face meetings. Web 2.0 technologies open that out and level the playing field, enabling serendipity, creative engagement, filling those spaces between the islands – that’s what the Landing is about, in both teaching and in ‘learning organization’ terms. However, the Landing is a soft technology: it offers enormous potential to increase the ‘adjacent possible’ but that comes at a price in terms of difficulty of use. The harder technologies from which most of Athabasca’s processes are built have the big benefit of making it easier, but at a cost of constraint. So, we are evolving the Landing so that it can make hard things softer, but also hard things softer. And it’s worth putting in the effort because the payoff can be large.

Nice article from Discover Magazine, 2005, on how Web 2.0 is different in the ways information and ideas spread when compared with simple hypertext.

Address of the bookmark: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/emerging-technology