Jason Schmidt's List: Engagement Links

• The literature shows that more recent, sophisticated applications of the technology produce greater positive gains than older applications
• Concordia researchers are looking not so much at whether computer technology in the classroom has a positive impact but under what circumstances - why and when does it have a positive effect, Schmid said. "And what are the conditions that make that possible?"
• "Where technology does have a positive impact is when it actively engages students, when it's used as a communication tool, when it's used for things like simulations or games that enable students to actively manipulate the environment."
• For example, rather than just reading about photosynthesis in a science class, with a computer simulation you can change the conditions - increase or decrease the amount of light or water to dynamically examine the phenomenon

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• "I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David Ensign, a professor of law at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. "But I do think many have the impression that any use of material in education is fair use."

• Credit: Getty Images

    

   As tech-savvy teachers integrate more multimedia work into their classroom, they also face a thorny question: Who owns the visual, audio, and moving images they download and pop into their presentations? Get that answer wrong, and you may get dinged with a hefty fine. 

    

   "I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David E
• "I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David Ensign, a professor of law at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. "But I do think many have the impression that any use of material in education is fair use."
• I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David Ensign, a professor of law at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. "But I do think many have the impression that any use of material in education is fair use.
• I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David Ensign, a professor of law at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. "But I do think many have the impression that any use of material in education is fair use.
• I don't think most teachers willingly ignore copyright issues," says David Ensign, a professor of law at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. "But I do think many have the impression that any use of material in education is fair use.

• Students weaned on tech are demanding more in terms of riveting class material. Consequently, teachers are scouring online sources looking for video, audio, snips, clips, and Web sites they can add to their presentation --  anything to capture and hold their students' attention. 

    

   Seems simple, but there's a catch. "Fair use in the educational setting is defined more broadly but does not encompass all uses," warns Ensign
• Ensign says a teacher may not be allowed to show the film The Lion King to the class simply because it was raining and the kids were squirrelly. It could be shown only if the class were doing a study of Disney films or were engaged in the study of a related subject.
• One easy out: linking. Ensign says he doesn't paste copyrighted material into his lessons and course plans -- he links to it. Commenting on a quoted passage is also fair use, as blogs do.
• Before dismissing these options, educators should realize that failure to honor copyrights can cost them personally. "Teachers and librarians don't realize that although they're acting on behalf of the school and are not benefiting personally," Ensign warns, "it doesn't mean they're not personally liable."

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• It’s only been in the last two centuries that we’ve used formalized systems of mass public education (aka industrialized education).
• personal learning is not cost-effective, and so we currently educate students in batches of 20, 30, or even 200 students at a time
• we can use technology to deliver those lectures to thousands, or even millions, of students at a time, but a lecture does not automatically produce learning any more than attending a class does
• in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again
• AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20–50 years, but we can’t wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?
• traditional media, like books, now have parallel digital systems that allow for note taking, highlighting, and bookmarking (e.g., Kindle, Nook, or iPad)
• for deep learning to occur, we need to have repeated exposure to the information, along with some time in between for reflection. We need to give our brains a repeated opportunity to process the information we take in so that it becomes knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. This means we’re going to have to find time in our busy lives to reflect on the information that flows past us on a daily basis, and we’re going to need some kind of technology that keeps us on track with our learning goals.
• Facebook, now with 500 million users, has disrupted normal social interactions in a little over six years. Micro-blogging exploded when a Web site simply invited us to answer the question: What’s on your mind? Twitter users now send more than 50 million tweets per day, and big news stories break first on Twitter—in real time and with eyewitness accounts. As big as Twitter is, there were more people playing Farmville (a social media game on Facebook) at its peak than there were active Twitter users
• the trick to developing a personal learning system is to abandon thinking about how to build it from within the existing educational system and to begin pondering how such a system could be developed outside of education
• For a personalized learning system to take hold inside education, it will have to be built on the outside
• In the same way we’ve integrated buttons like Twitter’s “Tweet this” and Facebook’s “Like” at the end of videos, articles, and other media, imagine we now add a button for “Learn This.” Clicking this button (anywhere you find it) would bring you into an interface to help you learn the content.
• learning should simply be by way of Socratic questioning, where questions are used to analyze concepts, to prod at the depth of knowledge, and to focus on principles, issues, or problems
• Socratic questions are elegant because, unlike with other formats (e.g., multiple choice), learners must self-generate the answers rather than rely heavily on the ability to recognize a correct answer when they see it
• If your rating of understanding is low or spotty, the system would offer to send you back to the source for another look. Notice that there is no need to develop software to verify the answers to questions—if you aren’t good at rating your own understanding (we call this metacognition), this will come out later in the process, and you’ll have to learn to get better at it.
• as the connectedness of the system matures, the need to write your own Socratic questions would lessen
• Any content that exists on the Internet (or is connected to the Internet) would be tagged with Socratic learning questions and metadata for subjects.
• Learners would have their own bank of questions, personalized to their own learning interests. As a result, instead of learning that is designed around a physical place (e.g., schools), an educational space (e.g., learning management systems), or a person of authority (e.g., instructor), this system is designed around the learner
• If readers or viewers had the ability to quickly add reputable questions to their learning bank, this would be a value-added service
• Books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (W.W. Norton, 2010) cause us to question whether we might be trapped on the information superhighway—stuck on the line between data lanes and unable to scoot forward or backward.
• An entirely new ecosystem could grow up around this Socratic learning system.
• When you need to learn something new, you could subscribe to a curated collection of questions on that topic.
• The truly fascinating shift is that you wouldn’t necessarily start by consuming the media that goes with the questions. Instead, you would simply start answering the questions in your bank. As you encounter learning questions that you can’t answer, you could dive into the content at those points in time—this is the exact point between boredom (with things you already know) and frustration (with things you don’t know), the point to engage in learning.
• Skills like critical thinking and creativity are often lost in education (especially in science and technology) because there is such an incredible amount of content to cover.
• if the content knowledge moved outside the educational system, then educators could focus on the learning that surrounds technical knowledge instead (e.g., problem solving, analysis, creativity, applications)
• Because every student has different interests and career ambitions, I would also require that each student find an additional 100 questions tagged with both calculus and tags that are of interest to that student. For a student studying to be a doctor, questions tagged with medicine or epidemiology might be appropriate. For a student going into business, questions tagged with marketing or management might be more appropriate
• As the learning coach, my job is no longer to “deliver content” to the students
• When it comes time to certify the learning for each student, it is done by an oral interview in which I have access to the common questions and the personalized questions for each student. Even if I’m not an expert on all the personalized questions, the answers are provided and the content is related to a subject of my expertise. Again, I only have to ask about a random selection of questions to be able to assess understanding. At the end of the semester, all students have learned their own personal versions of calculus, while still learning a core of common material.
• While this might still be a hard sell for the average adult, there will be subpopulations, such as early technology adapters, who will see the immediate value in cultivating and learning from their own question banks. Children who grow up learning with a Socratic question system might gain learning values naturally and carry these to their adult lives
• The content for a system like SOCRAIT already exists; it is the architecture and interface we are missing.

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• All of the technologies for something like this already exist. All it would take is a way to centralize the services and make it happen. - Jason Schmidt on 2010-12-14