For the student, a major difference is that she can’t sit back and expect to be taught. She has to actively navigate the virtual environment to learn. -Jim S
In my experience, therein lies the problem.
You describe a “guide on the side” ideal of learning, a style I endorse. When I first started an online school, we set up all our courses like this, from the start, and immediately ran into significant problems with student failure. It led me to do a presentation at a national conference I called “The Trap of Best Practice.”
So far, this conference is really interesting, with much diversity in interest. The thing today that’s standing out to me most (probably due to my fascination with the LMS) was the session on LMS futures. This blog post really sums up the discussion, highlighting an interesting disconnect between LMS vendors and users.
I’m not getting to as many sessions as I’d hoped, but I’m editing a ton of recordings, so see a lot about what’s being discussed. :)
Added 26 July 2010: If you would like to read up on the Twitter back channel (which I highly recommend), please search for the hash tag #et4online to see first hand responses from conference attendees. Continue reading →
Two articles that appeared in my Google alerts today (7.17.10) grabbed my attention. Both were out of California. One was a San Francisco Chronicleeditorial blasting the University of California’s vision of an internet-delivered bachelor’s degree program.
The other was an op-ed by James Fay and Jane Sjogren, sharing their vision of a hypothetical Golden State Online, or GSO, a “stand-alone online community college campus.”
On the surface, the visions seem to be quite different, and the viewpoints are obviously different. However, below the surface, both visions share a common flaw — they’re based on models of online learning that are, in my opinion, simply not sustainable.
This got me thinking about an alternative model that would be infinitely sustainable. After a few starts and stops, I came up with an eco-smart model for online learning, or E-SMOL. Continue reading →
I am core faculty for the M.A. program in Literature and Writing at Vermont College. In the last decade, Vermont College was bought by Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio. I live full time in Tucson, Arizona. I attend faculty meetings in Ohio and Vermont by conference call, and nearly half of the participants in any meeting are phoning in from all parts of the United States.
Last semester, two days before classes started, I took over a course that a colleague had developed; he was unable to teach for health reasons, and so I had no choice but to use the syllabus and the course site that he had developed. I went through the semester following the syllabus he had created and the discussion prompts that engaged the students each week in a conversation about the materials. I scrambled to keep up with the reading each week; I have a Ph.D. in literature, but my specialty is nineteenth century poetry and fiction, while his was drama and postmodern literature and theory. Reading even a part of what he had assigned was enough to stretch me, and I could only imagine how the students who were attempting their first graduate work might have felt. Continue reading →
Three of the four articles that make up the spring 2010 issue (v42n3) of Journal of Research on Technology in Education caught my attention more for their assumptions than their stated purposes. These assumptions highlight, for me, some of the weaknesses inherent in efforts to introduce technology into schools and colleges.
In “Technology’s Achilles Heel: Achieving High-Quality Implementation,” the “heel” for Gene E. Hall is school and college administrators. According to Hall, “Education technology scholars and practitioners are engaged with some of the most promising and interesting innovations.” However, these innovations don’t find their way into classrooms because of the failure of administrators to implement them. Thus, our enlightened ed tech guiding lights are “confronted first hand with the challenges associated with disappointing implementation efforts and failures to go to scale.” Continue reading →
I am presently attending the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) “Linking Through Language” conference in Jerusalem. (Click here to see the first-day report.) One of the keynote speakers was David Crystal, a renowned linguist. His keynote plenary lecture was called “Myths and Realities of English on the Internet.” As an educator interested in both language and technology issues in education, I found his talk engaging and interesting.
Since the theme of the conference is “Linking Through Language,” Crystal opened up his remarks by referring to the Internet as “the language linker par excellence.” After hearing his talk, I think he would agree with Tom Preskett’s article from April 8, 2010, Social Media Doesn’t Threaten Literacy! Among other things Crystal pointed out that in order to text using abbreviated words, one needs to know how to spell the word to start with so you can leave out the proper letters. He also cited anecdotal evidence from teachers showing that students do not carry over these habits into formal writing to a large degree. Continue reading →
It is with some humility that I undertake to comment on Mr. Prensky’s article, “Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools.” It touches on many ideas in which I have an interest, beginning with the oil spill as learning opportunity on which I provided an earlier comment (see “Opportunities to Learn from Oil Spills“). His idea is much more bold than mine, and I bow to his audaciousness.
I concur in the concept that the words “relevant’ and “authentic” have become overused and have lost meaning. They also represent a long-ago era of education that didn’t work then. Like so much in education, moderation and balance make things work. I believe that there’s nothing wrong with injecting some relevancy and authenticity into a classroom as long as you don’t base your entire curriculum on those concepts. I’m not so sure that “real” has any more meaning than those words, however. Continue reading →
I am presently attending the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) “Linking Through Language” conference in Jerusalem. (Click here to see the day two report.) This evening’s opening presentation, sponsored by the British Council, UK, was interesting and had an unexpected element. David Crystal, a renowned linguist, and his wife had prepared a presentation/performance called “Speaking Shakespeare: Fact and Fiction,” described in the program as “a light-hearted romp through Shakespeare.” Continue reading →
Here’s an idea to get at least something positive out of the Gulf oil spill. What if volunteers (or BP, under presidential order) collected samples of the tar balls on the beaches, sealed them in plastic bags, and then shipped them to every school in America for all students to analyze in their science classes. We could even throw in some oil-covered sand and feathers for good measure.
Doing this would involve every school kid (and science teacher) firsthand in the problem. They would see and smell, for themselves, just what the spill is actually producing, rather than just hearing about it on TV. Their awareness, as citizens and scientists, would be greatly enhanced. Continue reading →
Here’s an article with a generalization that goes against the grain of everything most educators believe about access to computers for children from low-income homes. Randall Stross, in “Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality“* (New York Times, 7.9.10), says that studies by economists indicate “little or no educational benefit” is gained.
Stross writes, “Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.” Continue reading →
Morgan Sims, a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, is a writer and social media consultant who loves all things tech and social media. She works indirectly with companies such as InternetServiceProvider. She spends most of her free time with her puppy, cooking, and staying active.
First, a bit of background. I have been working in advocacy for STEM and related technologies, lurking around the edges of computational science for some time thinking about ways in which to incorporate new kinds of thinking for students in our schools. I have attended the leading Supercomputing Conferences and brought teams to the events to try to change teaching and learning so that computational thinking, with games and simulations, could find a prominent place in the forefront of those inserting STEM into the curriculum. However, I am not sure the conference is always happy with the outcomes of teacher participation since it’s difficult to gauge the longterm effects of what happens in the classroom and some presenters don’t have a very high regard for the ability of teachers to work with technology.
But this CS4HS workshop in Boulder was different. Its focus was on teachers, and it was par excellence! Continue reading →
OK, this takes the discussion even further away from its original topic, but I found myself fascinated by several aspects.
First: Why do science projects essentially have to be labs? If science is fundamentally a way of thinking, why not also do projects that teach students how to think scientifically without having to use a lab? Field work? Conceptual work? Thought experiments?
The flight of the Solar Impulse is truly a technological tour de force. I was very impressed by the charts and virtual cockpit with the map of the plane’s progress. I didn’t even know that this amazing flight was taking place until Claude‘s note. Then I saw the headline in the NYT, “Solar-Powered Plane Flies for 26 Hours.” I have to wonder how many people see that headline and realize immediately the remarkable fact that such a flight requires flying a solar-powered plane for hours in the dark.
We see plenty of emphasis on STEM education in the U.S. these days. I am very biased toward the S (science) part of the acronym but see the importance of technology as a means of engagement. Mathematics gets enough attention on its own and can be better taught, IMO, in conjunction with science, technology, and engineering until students have enough sophistication to study things like group theory that are much more abstract. But I’m biased, as I said. Continue reading →
I’m doing a lot of consultancy this month in various contexts under various titles designated by my clients. These include etutoring and master class in blended learning. The latter of these is good for my ego but is perhaps a bit grandiose. The content is never exactly the same since different emphases are required as the contexts change. As long as my overall message is the same, I am happy.
Titling is an issue I need to get to grips with. I haven’t hit upon a one that I’m fantastically happy with. I’ve been using Web2.0Learning a lot, but I don’t want to be totally web 2.0 tool focused, and the content often reflects this now. Continue reading →
Yesterday (29th), I wasn’t able to google a transcript or video of the keynote so I can’t comment on the value of Rischard’s ideas. But I am concerned by the nature of the negative feedback quoted by McLeod. The majority seemed to be aimed at the low-tech and poorly designed PowerPoint slides and the lack of animation in the speaker. Little was said about the actual ideas.
Is this a case of an audience so conditioned to lecture as motivational entertainment that substance is no longer an issue? Or was Rischard’s presentation really that poor in terms of performance and substance?
Subjects and Procedure: “Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same” (abstract).
The following excerpt is from page 45 of “Final Report: Governor’s Reset Cabinet” (Oregon, June 2010). The focus of this section is “virtual education”:
Virtual Education
Oregon should create and fully support a statewide public virtual learning system. The use of online or virtual learning has come of age in recent years. Today’s technology makes it possible to provide educational opportunities to remote areas of the country. Florida, for instance, has over ten years of experience with providing a statewide virtual system. In that state’s experience, the highest demand areas are in credit recovery and dual credit classes, where students earn both high school graduation and college credit. The average student is not enrolled full-time in a virtual program, but takes one or two online classes per semester. Continue reading →
While I agree completely with Jim’s comments, John Adsit’s additions point to a broader problem, one that I’ve also seen. This problem transcends the technocrats issue.
Few people in education (including technology specialists, teachers, and administrators) can see outside of the box in which they’ve placed themselves. John is a rare exception.
When computers first entered classrooms (focusing on K-12 now), they were used in very conventional ways. The first educational apps were basically drills. Many still are. These can, with slight loss of efficiency, be done well with paper and pencil. No quantum leap in real learning occurs. Continue reading →
John Adsit’s recent comment on the limitations of imagination with regard to change points to arguably the greatest obstacle to reformation of schools and colleges in the U.S. and the world. Educators, as a group, seem to be incapable of thinking outside the box. Asked to imagine different ways technology can be used to improve the ways in which we teach and learn, the results are almost always dismally familiar. Rather than changes that are surprising, fresh, new, different, outside-the-box, sustainable, and cost-effective, we come up with more of the same, with an emphasis on more. That is, we need more smart classrooms, more tech specialists, and more dollars to do more of the same.
One of the reasons for this lack of imagination is our choice of change agents. In the vast majority of colleges, when change and technology are the topics, the faces around the conference table belong to technocrats: administrators and staff from information technology and distance education departments. If subject-area teachers are included, they are more than likely present because they have earned part-time or associate status in the technocracy. Continue reading →
On 10 June 2010, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty appeared on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” One of the topics they touched on was online learning in higher education. The audio clip below is an excerpt from the TV show.
The following are transcripts of key comments by Pawlenty:
Do you really think in 20 years somebody is going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about Econ 101 or Spanish 101? Continue reading →
I will call her Jennifer. I was thinking about her a couple of days ago when I fixed up a neglected corner of my garage, a corner where my children and their friends had penciled in their names and some attempts at adolescent humor. “Jennifer was here” was written next to a heart.
My wife and I met Jennifer soon after our younger son entered high school and needed a ride for his first date. My wife was their chauffeur, and she told me that Jennifer was a wonderful, sweet girl from a very nice family. Their dating relationship, like so many at that age, did not last all that long, but they remained very good friends. She was frequently among those who hung around our house, which for some reason was the place to be for that group. She was a friend to both my sons, and we were always glad to see her. Continue reading →
The June 2010 issue of Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT, v6n2) contains 23 papers. Listed below are highlight statements and excerpts from ten of them. The selections and foci are based solely on my interests in online learning.
1. Online is the “emerging standard of quality in higher education.”
“It is clear that the experimental probability of attaining higher learning outcomes is greater in the online environment than in the face-to-face environment. This probability is increasing over time. . . . The distance learning approach is becoming the ‘normal science.’ Yet, this is not fully comprehended by the various decision making institutions where the gate-keeping positions represent, by and large, the past paradigm. Therefore, distance learning is still treated as the anomaly (‘step child’) instead of as the emerging standard of quality in higher education.” Mickey Shachar and Yoram Neumann, Twenty Years of Research on the Academic Performance Differences Between Traditional and Distance Learning: Summative Meta-Analysis and Trend Examination.
The following are excerpts from “Online Learning,” a section in “2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates.” According to Gates, “The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one.” He says, “If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without innovation in health, education, energy, or food, the picture is quite bleak. . . . In the United States, rising education costs will mean that fewer people will be able to get a great college education and the public K–12 system will still be doing a poor job for the underprivileged.”
1. Hybrid approach: “The Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning.”
2. Cost effective: “With the escalating costs of education, an advance here [online learning] would be very timely.” Continue reading →
By John Adsit
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
