maureen greenbaum's List: innovative pedagogy

• key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the "information-gathering" part of education — before they come to class.

• "It used to be just be the 'sage on the stage,' the source of knowledge and information," he says. "We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information."

  Mazur sees himself now as the "guide on the side" – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

• don’t just bring the assumptions and limitations of the previous technology into the current technology. Learn the limitations and possibilities of the new, and make the thing that best meets your goals with those opportunities and constraints.
• Skills that don’t have highly formal credentialing are probably the easiest — cooking, fixing a car, operating hardware or software. Eventually these textbook apps might end up being able to replace not just the books, but many of the teachers as well.

• Technological changes are increasing exponentially
• I’m fortunate enough to teach in a 1:1 school with all my students having tablet pc’s. We use webtools, social media and a zillion other technology tools for both teaching and productivity.
• about 200 years, since the introduction of the blackboard in 1801, education in America has been relatively static and so has professional development
• all teachers need to know how to teach online
• change your view of professional development from a once in a while event to ongoing, daily growth.

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• ancillary argument: if we allow students access to their phones, to computers, and to the Internet then we are encouraging, or at the least enabling, poor listening skills.

• Here’s the reality:

   
   
  • Technology is here to stay; and
   
  • Administrators, educators, parents and students all have a responsibility to figure out the best way to incorporate it into the academic environment.
• students reading books on Kindles, emailing assignments directly to the teacher, and incorporating YouTube and Twitter into class presentations, simply banning technology in the classroom will not work.
• find creative ways to incorporate technology into the classroom thus satisfying the need for a “technology fix.”
• captivated student is an attentive student. The teacher that finds ways to keep her students engaged is less likely to have to deal with the 21^st century form of note passing known as texting.

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• Accreditation:
• Stanford
• Mozilla's Open Badges project
• Robot Grader / Adaptive Learning: The investments late last year in Knewton and Grockit were an indication of big things to come in 2012 for adaptive learning. It's the promise of big data and machine learning -- that the millions of students that are taking computerized courses that get their lessons gauged to their skill-level. It's the promise of a personalized education, so the story goes. WIth the interest in these sorts of algorithmic answers to grading and content delivery, there'll be a lot of efforts this year to refine these approaches to instruction and remediation. The online Artificial Intelligence classes at MITx and Stanford will be at the forefront of new tools for assessment -- the first robot grader
• how does technology change "the work," the labor of teaching -- that includes teaching online, maintaining online forums for student engagement, being available/accessible to students online (i.e. 24/7) versus offline, etc. etc. I think we'll see a lot more upheaval around this topic in 2012, particularly in a tough economy, in an institution increasingly reliant on adjuncts and robots.
• . Students are already angry about textbook costs, and I don't believe we'll find them too loyal to the printed textbook. But the alternative has to be cheaper and "better." It has to suit their needs for note-taking and sharing.

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• “Three C’s”. Create, Curate and Collaborate.
• We must teach students skills to engage in non-routine cognitive work.
• “crap detection” (Howard Rheingold) but also “gem detection” to determine the truly remarkable content.
• key component of creative class jobs is collaboration

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• The time is past for the rule-and-rote method. The rule can be learned better by a manual application than by committing a sentence to memory.

   

  The emphasis in that last sentence is mine. The source is the book Electricity for Boys by J.S. Zerbe. The publication year: 1914.

• So, educators, the next time you get criticism for having students learn the abstractions and methods of a subject through hands-on work with professional technological tools — instead of just lecturing to them ala “rule and rote” — just remind people that this isn’t some new-fangled, untested idea cooked up in a university education department. It’s pretty much just teaching the way students from any time period tend to learn best.

   

• Vice-chancellor of Macquarie University Steve Schwartz argues that e-books “are the format of the academic future,” primarily because “embedding audio and video within text makes the book more interactive. Users can also personalize their learning experience by changing the fonts and font sizes to suit their needs.”
• “despite the widespread availability of e-Textbooks, the digital forms of many textbooks are much less popular than the hardcover versions. In practice, students who purchase e-Textbooks generally only do so when the bookstore has run out of hard copies and the student is desperate for the material.”
• there is disparate and limited research on how often students actually read their course material on e-books and if they benefit from them. There is evidence, for example, that e-books are actually detrimental to in-depth learning.

• One recent study of the difference between reading and studying with e-books and traditional print books found that

   
   
  • More repetition was required with computer [or e-book] reading to impart the same information.
   
  • Book readers seemed to digest the material more fully: they “knew” the material rather than “remembered” it, meaning that information was assimilated into their own body of knowledge.
   
  • However, the same study also pointed out that “when the exact same material is presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student performance.”
   
   

• In A Nook or a Book? Comparing College Students’ Reading Comprehension Levels, Critical Reading, and Study Skills, researchers Jordan T. Schugar, Heather Schugar and Christian Penny at West Chester University of Pennsylvania found that

   
   
  • “Students in both the Nook and the traditional text groups did not significantly differ in terms of their recall of idea units, their inclusion of supporting details, or the level of their text comprehension.”
   
  • E-book readers and print readers did not show a significant difference in the comprehension of material
   
  • The level of complexity in student responses was not affected by the medium on which students learned material.
   
   

  Though recognizing some of the limitations of this particular study (the subject group was small, self-selected, and enrolled in a course that was required and of low-interest to them), it shows that students can learn very well if an e-book is the medium they use to read assigned texts.
• Is Reading Itself the Problem?
• many studies have shown that students at all levels of education are more resistant to reading in general, and that the skills that reading helps develop have declined sharply
• The problem, therefore, may not be the use of e-books or e-readers at all, but one rooted in the general disenchantment with reading that most students seem to exhibit

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