Oh good grief.
I’ve got this great new idea too. Cars would work much better if we made round things to attach to their axles on which they would roll.
Address of the bookmark: http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/07/is-small-beautiful
On learning styles
This post by James Atherton makes the case that, whether or not it is possible to identify distinctive learning styles or preferences, they are largely irrelevant to teaching, and are potentially even antagonistic to effective learning. Regular readers, colleagues and friends will know that this conforms well with my own analysis of learning styles literature. The notion that learning styles should determine teaching styles is utter stuff and nonsense based on a very fuzzy understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning, and a desperate urge to find a theory to make the process seem more ‘scientific’, with no believable empirical foundation whatsoever. This doesn’t make the use of learning styles pointless, however.
Teaching is a design discipline much more than it is a science. One of the biggest challenges of teaching is making it work for as many students as possible, which means thinking carefully about different needs, interests, skills, concerns and contexts. So, if learning styles theories can help you to think about different learner needs more clearly when designing a learning path then that can be a good thing.
The trouble is, thinking about personality patterns associated with learners’ astrological star signs or Chinese horoscope animals would probably work just as well. A comparative study would be a fun to do and, I think, the methodological issues would reveal a lot about how and why existing research has signally failed to find any plausible link.
There are alternatives. In the field of web design we often use personas – fictional but well fleshed-out representative individuals – in order to try to empathize with the users of our sites and to help us to see our designs through different eyes. See https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html for a thorough introduction to the area. I use these in my learning design process and find them very useful. Thinking ‘how would John Smith react to this?’ makes much more sense to me than thinking ‘would this appeal to kinaesthetic learners?’, especially as I can imagine how John Smith might change his ways of thinking as a course progresses, how different life events might affect him, and how he might interact with his peers.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learning_styles.htm
From discipline-and-punish to a culture of prevention | Philadelphia Public School Notebook
It all sounds so reasonable – reward kids with play money for behaving the way you want them to behave. It is certainly, as the article explains, way better than punishing kids to make them behave the way you want them to behave. But, like all such things, it completely misses the point.
Best quote:
“As the day started, Dallaire said, the boy told him, “‘I’m not going to behave until it’s 9:15.’ And as soon as 9:14 hit, I swear he sat down and started to do the assignment on the board.””
Simply replacing punishments with rewards but without making the process actually rewarding is really no improvement at all. It’s crowd control, not teaching, and it preserves all the extrinsic, despotic, controlling nonsense that kills the love of it in both teachers and, above all, their students.
Address of the bookmark: http://thenotebook.org/blog/158653/from-discipline-and-punish-to-culture-of-prevention#
Surprise! Our Attention Spans Aren’t Dead!
Interesting bit of analysis from Medium, the makers of Pocket (which, self-referentially, I used to save this link to read – and bookmark here – later), showing that users of Pocket save and read articles of 2000-5000 words more often than those of other lengths, equating to around 16 minutes of reading time on average. I don’t think this means that our attention spans are alive and kicking at all – we save things to Pocket (and ReadItLater, EverNote, etc) precisely because we are busy being distracted by other things most of the time – though it does show that at least some of us do spend more than a second or two reading some things.
The most interesting bit of this, though, comes towards the end, under the heading of ‘self improvement’. Pocket is clearly an important part of a self-directed personal learning environment (PLE) for many people and it is highly significant that a very high percentage of what people keep for later reading are all about learning, with psychology (actuall psychology, not self-help nonsense) topping the list of saved articles, with technology, current events, culture, science and history making solid showings.
I have highlighted this role many times in presentations I have given on the subject of PLEs myself. Pocket and others of its ilk (from the more free-form Evernote, Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep to simple browser bookmarks or the elderly but still useful del.icio.us) are important parts of the learning technology assemblies that we make to support our learning. They are a major feature of the teaching crowd, tools that allow us to make sense and meaning of the torrent of knowledge we swim in all the time. In the old days I used to keep paper notebooks but they were of limited use. Now I just have a physical whiteboard pad for odd quick jottings but, if they are important, they always make their way into my electronic notes. The fact that these notes are searchable, taggable, reorganizable in many ways, and all in one place, turns them into powerful and persistent learning technologies that are orders of magnitude more useful than the primitive self-directed learning technologies of the past.
Apart from Pocket – a convenient, simple and very usable tool – having experimented with a great many alternatives I now almost exclusively use Apple Notes for original jottings because I like the simplicity, the cross-platform capability, the fact they are auto-saved in multiple redundant online accounts as well as locally and, above all, the fact that (underneath it all) they are actually saved as emails in IMAP folders, so are open, standards-based and not bound at all by proprietary tools. That matters: things like EverNote, Keep and OneNote are functionally great but they are built to lock you in. I forgive Pocket that flaw because it is a one-trick pony, does provide a useful RSS feed and little would be lost if I jumped ship to another tool at a moment’s notice. I stick with it because it is a high quality piece of software that does what I need. We need such things to build robust personal learning ecosystems: small, robust pieces, interconnected and replaceable. This bookmark is just another one of those pieces – part of the public face of my PLE. And it too is not bound to a single tool. You can also find it at https://jondron.ca (or will be able to when it gets harvested some time within the next 24 hours!).
Address of the bookmark: https://medium.com/@Pocket/surprise-our-attention-spans-aren-t-dead-154ce24e5aab
The Voice Magazine – Interview with Vive Kumar
Vive Kumar waxes lyrical on the differences between online and face-to-face learning, the value of analytics, and the importance of culture and spirituality in learning. Good, thought-provoking stuff. I too get a bit sentimental about some of the things about physical proximity that Vive misses in the online teaching environment, but I think there are lots of positive differences too, not least the control it offers, the student-centred shifts in power relationships it almost enforces, the rich variety of pace that it effortlessly supports, and the huge knowledge-forming benefits of reified dialogue. Also, overcoming the challenges and understanding the nature of those differences is one of the main things that keeps it interesting for me. It’s different, but that’s often a good thing.
I have greatly enjoyed this series of faculty interviews in AUSU’s Voice Magazine (and been the subject of one of them, as have Terry Anderson and George Siemens). It’s really helpful in starting to make those human connections that Vive talks about in this interview. I have also really enjoyed the student interviews with which they are interspersed, that help to provide a glimpse of the human beings that we normally only see in caricature through their learning interactions. A great series. The Voice magazine is a treasure that I only discovered as a result of being interviewed. For those that work at Athabasca U or that want to understand its culture and processes, it’s a great read. It’s a bit hard to navigate around it at times, but it’s well worth the effort.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/featuredisplay.php?ART=10501
How Do You Motivate Kids To Stop Skipping School?
Not like this!
This article starts with the line ‘it seems like a no-brainer’ and indeed it is. The no-brainer solution to low attendance is to make the schools relevant, meaningful and interesting to the kids.
However, bizarrely, that is not what seemed obvious to the writer of the article, nor to the ones that carried out this harmful and doomed research, who thought the obvious answer was an incentive scheme, and inflicted it on 799 kids, mostly age 9. Basically, they told the kids they would get two pencils and a cute eraser if they turned up 85% of the time during the 38-day study.
It seems that they did not bother with a literature review because, had they done so, they would have found out right away that rewards are totally the opposite of what is needed to motivate kids to attend school. There is over 50 years of compelling evidence from research on motivation, in many fields and from many disciplines, that demonstrates this unequivocally and beyond any reasonable doubt. The only possible consequence of this intervention would be to demotivate the kids so that, at best, they might revert to former behaviours at the end of it, and that many would be even less likely to attend when it was over.
Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what they found. The reward program did indeed increase attendance while it was in effect (this is the allure of behaviourism and why it still holds sway – it does achieve immediate results) and, when it was over, kids were indeed even less motivated to attend than they had been before, exactly as theory and empirical research predicts. In fact, many of the kids got off very lightly: formerly high attenders and those that were not great attenders before but that succeeded in getting the reward only fell back to baseline levels as soon as it was over, which is actually pretty good going. A more significant reward or longer study period might have had worse consequences. Unfortunately, the effects on the ones that were the real target (those who were initially low attenders, 60% of whom failed to meet the goal) was disastrous: once the intervention was over, these already at-risk kids were only a quarter as likely to attend as they had been before the intervention began.
One of the surprised researchers said:
“”I almost felt badly about what we had done,” she says. “That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all.”
Almost? Seriously. This borders on child abuse. I generally think of research ethics boards as an arguably necessary evil but, when I hear that experiments like this are still going on, I could easily become a fan.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/22/407947554/how-do-you-motivate-kids-to-stop-skipping-school
The new axis of evil — Canada: One third of American 8th graders think we live in a dictatorship
You could look at the ‘fact’ that a third of American 8th grade students think Canada is a dictatorship as just another tragi-comic indictment of the US educational system, or of the blindness of the US to the existence or validity of any other country, or of a failure to get the message across about Canada, or that the message about Stephen Harper’s style of government actually has got out, albeit in a slightly distorted form. All likely have a glimmer of truth.
But, actually, the headline from The Province newspaper is false: I am pretty sure that very few US 8th graders really think that Canada is a dictatorship. They just don’t know. It was just a vaguely plausible option on the MCQ (note that the actual candidate answer did not mention dictatorship, though it was implied), so they made a disinterested guess because that’s what they have been taught to do. There’s no belief implied at all.
Should a kid in early teenage know about the political systems of other countries? Why? On the whole, things matter if they matter to those around you, and/or because you are curious about how they work, and/or if it has relevance to things you do or want to do. it is far from clear that any of these conditions is true for the kids in question. If it is forced down your throat with the threat of reward (or punishment) but no one you care about cares about it, it doesn’t inherently interest you, and it doesn’t address any actual need you have, then why on earth should you learn it? But why are the kids not interested enough to know this? The answer lies, I think, in the means used to discover what they do not know.
Educational systems that are designed to churn out kids that get the right answers on tests like this have two main options. The first is to build rich, curiosity-driven learning communities in which teachers and learners share the journey, enthusing one another, supporting one another, discovering paths, sharing delight in their discoveries, and overcoming challenges together. This is how learning happens lastingly, efficiently and meaningfully. But, and it’s a big but, such a path may not cover what will be on the test at the time the test needs to be taken. There’s a great deal of intrinsic reward in such a path for all concerned but the extrinisic reward structures (most especially those tests), for both teachers and students, tend to actively militate against it. It certainly doesn’t help when all (teachers and students) are forced to do the same thing at the same time in lock step, whether it makes sense, interests anyone or has any relevance or not. The second path to getting those test results is much more direct: apply coercion (reward or punishment) and make students ‘learn’ what will be on the test. With enough pressure, it can work well enough to get the required test results, even though in the process it has disempowered teachers and learners, forced them into a controller/controlled relationship in which maintenance of discipline becomes a major teaching function and, as a result and perhaps most heinously of all, has likely destroyed any innate and lasting interest in the topic for the vast majority of students. To add the final cherry on top, the vast majority of what has been ‘learned’ will be forgotten once the need to pass the test has passed. Only the greatest teachers and most passionately interested learners can overcome this systemic failing. It’s not the kids that are ignorant. It’s the people who designed and continue to support the system used to teach them.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/news/national/axis+evil+Canada+third+American+graders+think+live/11063581/story.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews
Why do we not ban use of cellphones in online learning?
Banning mobile phones is cargo cult science is a good, laudably brief, dismissive, critical review of the dangerously-reported recently published study by the London School of Economics that, amongst other things, shows a correlation between banning of mobile phones in schools and improved grades. As the title of the post suggests, the report does not show that banning mobile phones in schools is what improves grades in any way at all, despite the fact that the report writers do seem to believe that this is what they have shown: indeed, they recommend banning mobile phones as a cost effective measure to improve grades! That is so opposite to the obvious conclusion it is not even funny. To me, it shows a terrible failure at a massive systemic level. It’s not cellphone use that’s the problem – it’s the teaching. More precisely, it’s the system of teaching. I am sure that the vast majority of individual teachers are doing wonders, under extremely adverse circumstances. But they are doing so in a completely broken system.
The interesting thing for me is that this would never come up as an issue for online and distance learners. Well, almost never: perhaps occasionally, study guides might recommend you set aside undistracted time for some (not all) kinds of study and webinar leaders might suggest that participants switch off phones and other distractions. But this is only at most a bit of practical advice, not an edict.
The point here is that command-and-control teaching methods of traditional classrooms have no meaning or relevance in online learning. This makes it all the more odd that we continue to see substantially the same pedagogies being used for online teaching as those found in the over-controlling environment of teacher-led classrooms. Obvious culprits like lecture-based MOOCs are just the more visible tip of this weird bit of skeuomorphism but the general principle runs across the board from instructivist textbooks through more enlightened uses of social constructivist methods in discussion forums. Too often, implicitly or explicitly, we act under the illusion that how we teach is how people learn, as though we still had students trapped in a classroom, controlling (almost literally) their every move. The unholy and inseparable continued twinning of fixed-length courses and the use of grades to drive student progress is very much to blame, though a lack of imagination doesn’t help. These technologies evolved because of the physics of classrooms, not because they are good ways to support learning. In almost every way, they are actually antagonistic to learning. Online learning can, does and should liberate learners, giving them control. So let’s stop teaching them as though we were the ones in charge. It is crazy that we should voluntarily shackle ourselves when there is absolutely no need for it.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.educate1to1.org/banning-mobile-phone-is-cargo-cult-science/
Interview with George Siemens in AU student union's Voice magazine (part 3)
Final part of a three part interview with George Siemens (following from the first and second parts), in which he describes some thoughts about the future and nature of educational systems, and in which he has some great stuff to say about motivation and assessment in particular. I like this:
“Make things relevant to students, but also give students an opportunity to write themselves into the curriculum. That is, to be able to see the outcome of the benefits, the way in which it can make them a better person, and the way it can make the world a better place. You can’t directly motivate someone, but you can set conditions under which people of different attributes will become motivated.”
Exactly so – it’s about creating conditions, not about telling or controlling. It’s about making and supporting a space (physical, virtual, social, conceptual, organizational, temporal, curricular, etc) that learners both belong to and own.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/featuredisplay.php?ART=10462
Hacking Our Brains: Motivating Others By Snatching Back Rewards
Ingenious approach to extrinsic motivation – give something, then use the threat of taking it away to ‘motivate’ people to do what you want them to do. It’s an old idea, but one that has not seen as much use as you would expect in things like student grading or occupational performance assessments. Though tied up in language of the endowment effect, the essence of this method is punishment rather than reward, and we tend to be more punishment-averse than reward-seeking, so it works ‘better’. It’s still rampant behaviourism, presented in a cognitivist wrapper to make it look shinier.
As with all forms of extrinsic motivation, this does two things, both inimical to learning. Firstly, it leads to a focus on avoiding the punishment, rather than on the pleasure of the learning activity itself. I don’t see this as a great leap forward from rewarding with grades in a learning context – it just makes it even more extrinsic and even more likely to destroy any intrinsic motivation a learner might have had in the first place so that, once punishment has been avoided, the value of the activity itself is diminished and, mostly, the things that make it useful are forgotten. Secondly, it is an even worse assertion of power than a reward. Again, I don’t see this as having any meaningful value in a learning context. It teaches greater compliance, not the topic at hand. That’s a bad lesson, unless you think that education is preparation for life in which you should be a compliant tool that reluctantly does the bidding of those in power through fear of punishment. A society organized that way is not the kind of society I want to live in. Surely we have grown out of this? If not, surely we should?
The notion that people need to be forced to comply in order to learn what we want to teach them is barbaric, distasteful and, ultimately, deeply counter-productive. Countless generations of learners have had their love of learning viciously attacked by such attitudes, and have learned with less efficiency, less depth, and less value to society as a result. It’s a systemic failure on an unbelievably massive scale, embedded so deeply in our educational systems we hardly even notice it any more. Done to one person it is bad enough but, done systematically at a worldwide scale, to ever younger generations of children, it hampers the intelligence and compassion of our species in ways that cut deep and leave us bleeding. Despite this, most of us still manage to come out of this without all of our innate love of learning completely destroyed. Our intrinsic motivation can be a powerful counter-force, just occasionally what we are taught aligns well enough with what we want and need to learn, we discover other ways and things to learn that are meaningful and not imposed upon us, and there are quite a lot of great teachers out there that manage to enthuse and inspire despite the odds stacked against them. Few if any of us survive unscathed, though most of us get something useful here and there despite the obstacles. But we could be so much more.
Address of the bookmark: http://readwrite.com/2015/05/07/reward-then-deduct-loss-aversion-brain-hack