Category: Ed Tech

There is a Lot of Pressure, Partially, Involved

On By teachingcyborgIn Ed Tech, Pedagogy, Research, STEM EducationLeave a comment

“Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.”
James Clerk Maxwell

When learning chemistry gasses get a lot of attention. There are a lot of laws and formulas that relate to gasses. Here is a list of gas laws:

1) Avogadro’s Law
2) Boyle’s Law
3) Charles’s Law
4) Gay-Lussac’s Law
5) The Ideal Gas Law
6) Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures
7) van der Waals Equation (Non-Ideal gases)

I want to talk about Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures. If you look up Dalton’s law like most students would Wikipedia via Google we see that the definition of Dalton’s law is: “Dalton’s law (also called Dalton’s law of partial pressures) states that in a mixture of non-reacting gases, the total pressure exerted is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of the individual gases.” Which comes from Silberberg, Martin S. (2009). Chemistry: the molecular nature of matter and change (5th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill. p. 206. ISBN 9780073048598.

I have not thought about Dalton’s law in years. The last time was when I was helping develop some chemistry labs. Then two weeks ago I ran across a YouTube video from Cody’sLab called Demonstrating The Law of Partial Pressures.

What I found interesting about this video is that Cody built a physical device to demonstrate the law. The device is two pressure chambers made out of copper plumbing parts and glass tubs attached with a simple valve. A quick search online suggests that one of these devices could cost less than $100.00. He uses the device to demonstrate several principles of Dalton’s Law. What I find fascinating about the device is that in many ways this device did a better job demonstrating Dalton’s law then any device I encounter in my high school or early chemistry classes.

With a small amount of work, it should be possible to build a device that was composed entirely of parts that could be screwed together allowing assembly into multiple configurations. A device students use in multiple configurations would expand the options for open-ended inquiry. Multiple configurations would let chemistry students conduct inquiry-based labs. Students could assemble the appropriates so that they could combine 2, 3, 4 or even more samples.

We know that hands-on experiences improve student learning. In the article Physical Experiences Enhance Science Learning, the authors show that physical experiments lead to increased test scores. Additionally, they showed that later recall of the information activated the brains sensorimotor region. Which suggest a mechanism by which hands-on teaching can improve learning. Since hands-on learning enhances science education, we could argue that the current model where we have a 3-4 credit lecturer class and a one-credit laboratory class is backward and we should be running 3-4 credit labs with one credit lectures or recitations. That, however, is an argument for another day.

Since we know the value of hands-on learning lets takes this idea to the next step. Suppose the students not only ran an experiment to confirm and explore Dalton’s Law but they also built and designed the equipment to do the experiment. Would this enhance learning even more? I could see a couple of ways building your equipment could enhance learning. One, this would be a way to expand the amount of hands-on time. Two, building the test apparatus could give the students a better understanding of how the device works. Three, the designing and building process could potentially lead to enhanced ownership in the experiment. The impact of building your research equipment is an area where more research is needed.

However, even with the evidence that shows hands-on learning enhances science education laboratory classes are under increasing attack. One of the most common arguments I hear against hands-on science education is the cost. The device Cody built for his video is relatively cheap if you were to build it for less then $100 this is less then some microscope slides or chemical reagents. There are of course questions about the equipment used in labs. There are many arguments that the lab is the place for students to learn about research equipment. I have had many discussions concerning the design of laboratory activities that started with “my students need to know how to use X piece of equipment.”

While there are some types of equipment that students should have a familiarity with the idea that students need to learn a specific piece of equipment is ridiculous. First, what is the likely hood that a specific piece of equipment is still going to be in use when they end up working in a research laboratory? Second, what are you trying to teach the students? As an example suppose I design a lab to demonstrate the Mendelian laws of inheritance. The students will need to use a dissecting scope to determine the sex of their fruit flies. Should I devote half the laboratory activities and time to the use of the dissecting microscope? Of course not, the microscope is not part of the principle of inheritance.

Beyond the fixation on specific pieces of equipment, there is also a belief that low-cost equipment is unusable. Whether the cost of equipment affects its educational value is an interesting question. Generally, the cost of equipment is directly related to precision, how much precision do we need. If the purpose of a laboratory activity is to show that acceleration due to gravity is independent of mass, do the student need precision out to 10 decimal places? As long as the equipment meets the need for the activity, we do not need to go with the most expensive thing. When we design STEM activities, we need to focus on the learning goals what has the best chance of enhancing the students learning. In regards to student learning, learning is not proportional to the cost of the equipment, and it is not dependent on a specific piece of equipment. Our instructional design needs to be informed and based on what the research says not ideas about the “best” piece of equipment.

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The Teaching Cyborg

We Can Rebuild It, Better, Stronger: The Augmented Textbook

On By teachingcyborgIn Ed Tech, Education Reform, TextbookLeave a comment

“VR and AR will eventually converge, and smart glasses will take over our digital interactions.”
Carlos López (Founder @ Oarsis)

Augmented Reality (AR) is a process that uses technology to overlay digital content on real-world objects.  The digital content can be provided by, smartphones, glasses, and screens.  While AR is still an emerging technology, the buy-in from major companies like Microsoft with the HoloLens, WebAR support in Google Chrome using ARCore, and Apple’s augmented reality development kit ARKit, likely mean this technology is here to stay.

While the form factor used in AR will undoubtedly go through multiple iterations the primary function overlying digital content will remain constant.  AR is a great place for higher education to embrace technology and stay current rather than playing catch-up.  While wearable AR tech is not yet coming place, we can use the near ubiquitous smartphone with augmented reality.

There are already educational AR tools developed both inside and outside of education.  The Dinosaur 4D+ flash cards by octagon studio bring Dinosaurs to life.  Using an app installed on an Android or Apple device the flash cards allow you to explore and interact with the cards, as you can see here.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has a blog post by Larysa Nadolny Worksheets for the digital age: AR interactive print.  The author gives a brief overview of the creation of these AR worksheets using existing technology.  Case Western Reserve is using AR to help teach anatomy, using the Microsoft HoloLens.  Students can see the anatomical process in active 3D.

Publishing companies are also starting to use AR in their books.  Carlton Books has two categories of AR books an educational category including titles like Explore 360: The Tomb of Tutankhamun and iExplore – Bugs that use AR apps to bring the content to life and let the readers interact with it.  They also have a new category of fiction novels they are working on; the first is The Ghostkeeper’s Journal and Field Guide a book that uses AR to enhance the story and engage the reader.

Many companies are producing AR books. Currently, the publishers are mostly focusing on the children and youth market.  These books have evolved from some simple animations like moving gears and simple 3D animals to full multimedia that include animations, sound, and interactivity.  Some of these books like the previously mentioned The Ghostkeeper’s Journal and Field Guide were written to include the book and its AR content as part of the story.

I have previously discussed how storytelling is a powerful educational tool (you can read about it here), I wish it was used more in textbooks.  If AR can enhance storytelling like these publishers are suggesting it should also enhance learning. While some people think the AR in books is gimmicky, I think anything that increases engagement with books is good.  Also, with regards to AR being gimmicky while Arthur C Clark said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” technology doesn’t have to be “magical” to be effective in learning.

This discussion of AR and books brings me back to the idea of textbooks.  The addition of augmented reality to textbooks can enhance education.  Let’s start by thinking about the basic content in a textbook.  We could add something simple like sound.  Imagine a music appreciation course; the textbook could describe techniques used in improvisational jazz.  Say for instance arpeggio, where the musician plays the notes of a chord one after the other instead of together.  Think how much easier this would be to understand if the textbook could play clips of music with and without arpeggio.

In biology, we often talk about how seasonal changes affect the local ecology and behaviors of organisms.  A great example of this is the Amazon Floodplain forests.  A large area of the Amazonian forest that is flooded every year in the rainy session when the Amazon river is overflowing its banks. Textbooks will often show flooded, and dry pictures to show the effects of the flooding.  With AR you could show a time-lapse video of the flooding and retreating water to get a better idea of how the water affects the landscape.

Something I remember from my days as an undergraduate in chemistry and biology is the difficulty students have learning to translate a 2D model into 3D.  Molecules are 3D objects when writing about them; we need to represent them on paper.  A simple model would be the wedge and dash model used for methane below.

Structure of Methane By NEUROtiker Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.
Structure of Methane By NEUROtiker Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

In the diagram, the solid wedge means the atom is projecting out of the paper towards you while the dotted wedge means the atom is projecting away. I was one of the lucky students I have always been able to picture the 3D shape of from these drawings rather easily. However, I have known a lot of people that have real trouble seeing the 3D form.

Now imagine if the textbook had AR we could design interactions that not only projected the molecule in 3D but let the students manipulate, rotate, and zoom in and out to examine them.  AR projections would be especially useful when you get into more complex structural issues like stereochemistry, were molecules have the same formula but differ in their shape.

A textbook on public speaking could include actual audio and video clips of famous speeches.  A math book could include video clips were professors solve example problems with explanations.  We already know that publishers are taking advantage of AR especially in the case of books for young audiences.  However, AR textbooks are starting to appear, Introductions to Graphics Communication is a college-level textbook using Ricoh’s Clickable Paper.  Publishing companies in Japan have released textbooks with AR; you can read about them here.

Even with the availability of many AR platforms some of which are Augment, Blippar, HP Reveal, Daqri and Layar that offer educational pricing.  I have not seen any Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks with AR content even the textbooks developed with large federal or privet grants.  In addition to whether governmental and privet organizations will be willing to pay to update these OER textbooks in a few years, are we also going to end up in a situation where we have different classes of textbooks? Is there going to a case where if you can afford it you get a different textbook?

Augmented Reality is a technology that higher education needs to embrace.  We need to develop not only resources using AR but the tools, preferably in a free and opensource platform, we can use to incorporate into any resource where it makes sense.  Textbooks are a resource where AR makes a lot of sense.  Like I have said before we are in the middle of a revolution regarding textbooks it is critical that we don’t focus on just one aspect of the textbook.  We need to think about what we want a textbook to be in total, and one of the things we should add is AR.

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The Teaching Cyborg

Researching Prototyping and STEM Education

On By teachingcyborgIn Ed Tech, Research, STEM and Society, STEM EducationLeave a comment

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.”
Malcolm Gladwell

Microscopes are an essential piece of scientific equipment they gave us the ability to view parts of the world that we can’t see otherwise.  The invention of the microscope lead directly to germ theory which revolutionized healthcare. Throughout my career I’ve done a lot with microscopes; research, teach, maintenance, and I’ve even worked with a group to make them remote controlled.

Microscopes can also be extremely expensive, I worked with a microscope that cost a million dollars, and some microscopes cost more than that. Microscopes are particularly crucial in pathology and medical diagnostics. Which in some cases can be a problem; the cost of microscopes can be limiting in some areas of the world.

Take for instance sub-Saharan Africa; malaria is one of the most common causes of death due to illness in this region. According to the CDC 90% of all the worlds malaria-related deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa. Which is sad because malaria is completely treatable especially if identified early. The problem is malaria can present like the flu. Without going to it all the reasons the only way to conclusively diagnose an active malaria infection is by a stained blood smear observed under a microscope.

In the United States, this is not a problem if your local medical office doesn’t have a diagnostic lab; one is available within a few hours by medical courier. However, in places like sub-Saharan Africa diagnostics labs can be prohibitively expensive and far out of reach. A basic diagnostic microscope is going to cost several thousand dollars; a clinical centrifuge will also cost a couple of thousand dollars. In addition to the cost, this equipment can be difficult to transport and set-up.  The diagnostic equipment also requires electricity something that is not commonly available. So, you also need a generator and fuel.

In addition to malaria, poverty severely impacts sub-Saharan Africa. According to the World Bank in 2015, 66.3% of the population live on $3.20 a day or less $1160 a year, 84.5% lived on $2007.50 or less a year.  One of the effects of poverty is a lack of infrastructure which makes it difficult to access many areas. 

A potential solution to this problem came from Dr. Manu Prakash an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford. In 2014 his group developed the Foldscope a small microscope built from paper, an LED, watch battery, and spherical lens, it has magnification from 140X to 2000X. The Foldscope cost less than a dollar to make.

In 2017 his group developed the Paperfuge a hand-powered centrifuge with speeds of 125,000 RPM it costs about $0.20.

The Foldscope and Paperfuge don’t require power they’re small and easy to transport and we can easily replace them because of their low-cost. These pieces of paper can change diagnostics in remote regions drastically.

So, what do the Foldscope and Paperfuge have to do with STEM education?  Historically building, prototyping, and testing a new device was a long and expensive process. The cost limited the development of products to a few high-end research institution and large companies.  In today’s world of desktop manufacturing and prototyping, the cost to prototype has come down and is readily accessible to most schools and institutions.

With desktop tools available you can imagine building research/teaching programs around social and educational problems. On the educational side tools like the Foldscope and Paperfuge can be used by groups of students to do fieldwork.  Imagine taking groups of students out to a field site and giving all of them a microscope and centrifuge to do examinations.

Alternatively, we could use the Foldscope and Paperfuge as a model.  Schools and classes could partner with a community organization to develop tools to deal with problems and issues these organizations are facing. Students will start by learning the science behind the issues and the existing solution if there is one. Then as a laboratory component, students would use modern desktop manufacturing tools to design, prototype, and test solutions. We could adapt this type of program to any level of school. Additionally, they would combine science, engineering, and community service in one class.

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The Teaching Cyborg

We Have Always Argued Against Ed Tech

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“Classrooms don’t need tech geeks who can teach; we need teaching geeks who can use tech.”
David Guerin

One of the arguments I often hear when it comes to educational technologies is: “we’ve always done it this way.” The idea that we have always done something is such a typical answer about why we use a technique that I once informed a group of academic professionals that I banned that answer from the discussion, and told them if they use it I will ignore everything they said.

Whether or not I would have ignored what they said shall remain a mystery. However, the statement was shocking enough to get the audience to stop and think. Aside from the fact that it is just a lazy answer, it is consummately untrue. What this statement means is in my 10 to 30 years of teaching this is what I’ve always done, or this is what my classes were like when I was a student.

Nothing we do in education has been a part of education since educations inception. Blooms Taxonomy (Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain) was published in 1956, 63 years ago. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (1956) and the Kolb Experiential Learning Theory (1984) have both influenced how we teach.  The theory of constructive in education (the late 1800s), the Socratic Method (5th – 4th century BC) and the invention of written language (earliest known 3400 – 3300 BC), in their time all changed education. All these developments fall far short of the 150 – 200 thousand years since modern humans evolved in Africa.

Teaching has occurred from our earliest ancestors take the form of oral histories or skills passed down from elder to youth in small groups likely the family. I would guess this type of education, accounts for more than 90% of human existence. It is not until the advent of modern civilization about 10,000 years ago that some forms of education even became possible.

We always view changes in education with skepticism. Socrates is an excellent example of this. Today we have the Socratic method as a teaching style. However, we do not have any written words directly from Socrates about his beliefs in teaching. In his writing, The Phaedrus Plato writes about an exchange between Socrates and Phaedrus to demonstrate Socrates dislike for the written word because he felt it made the mind weak and would decrease memory.

So, there you have it Socrates someone still admired thousands of years after his death for teaching was opposed to the technology of writing. According to stories he was often found teaching outdoors while sitting on rocks. I would almost be prepared to say the man was a technophobe. But for the fact that he ran his family’s stone masonry business.

Today the value we place on good written communications makes the teaching of writing and its act an essential part of modern education. The benefits of long-term storage of knowledge, the sharing of the thoughts and ideas of a master, makes books valuable to learning. The formation of the modern University was dependent on the rarity of early books. Try and think about what modern education would be like without books.

Technology has defined the shape of the modern classroom. Some because it is just what we do and how we live in our modern world, electric lighting, heating and air-conditioning, and A/V systems. (If you happen to be fortunate enough to live in the developed world.) Other things whiteboards/smart boards the modern descendant of the slate because it solved a problem. The slate (chalkboard) was used in the classroom because the teacher could present to multiple students at once. Is there a real difference for the students if we show material on chalkboards versus whiteboards?

Some people argue, in some cases correctly, society has driven changes in the classroom because of changes in the underlying technology of society. A great example of this is computers and printers. When I was in middle school, I turned in all written assignments in hand-writing. In high school, we had the option to turn it in typed or hand-written. In my undergraduate days, we had to use computer printers on all our assignments. Nowadays I work with people that except writing assignments as digital files or blog posts. These changes have mirrored the changes in how we write in our day-to-day lives. Remember we do things like we always have.

However, the changes from the handwritten to the computer word processor isn’t universally like. For instance, the teaching of handwriting (cursive) has all but disappeared from modern education. The Common Core Standards prefer the keyboard over hand-written words starting in elementary school. Some research, however, suggests that the elimination of hand-writing will affect the development of the brain, especially concerning reading. The effect of handwriting on the development of the mind is an area where more research is needed.

It is essential to be critical about changes in education after all the goal is to provide the best educational experience we can. However, a knee jerk rejection to something, because it is “technology,” is as equally harmful as excepting everything without thought. After all, everything we use and work within the classroom is technology. So, why do we resist change? Part of the reason for this resistance is our psychology as humans; there are psychological effectors that affect our approach to change.  Alternatively, as Ronald Heifetz says, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss.” The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.

Like so many things the truth about resistance to ed tech is more complicated than our expectation. Regardless of which side of the ed tech debate you belong to do you ever think about why the other side is doing what they are doing? If you’re in favor of a new piece of technology have thought about why people might be resisting the change, is there a better way to present your idea? If you are resistant to the idea of new technology, have you thought about why your resisting? It is import that we all engage with new technology so that it can be used thoughtfully instead of being imposed from the outside.

Thanks for Listening to My Musings
The Teaching Cyborg

Genetics, Sorry Its Actually Math

On By teachingcyborgIn Ed Tech, Pedagogy, STEM EducationLeave a comment

“The truth, it is said, is rarely pure or simple, yet genetics can at times seem seductively transparent.”
Iain McGilchrist

Depending on the type of biology degree a student is earning the classes taken can vary. However, in a lot of programs, you will take a basic genetics course as the second or third course of the introductory sequence.

Sometimes I think genetics is a lot like the game of GO simple to learn but challenging to master. Genetics relies on simple rules and principles. These rules and principles can combine to form surprising complexity. There are only five types of genetic mutations and three laws of Mendelian inheritance. A Punnett square (a tool to analyze potential outcomes of a genetic cross) for a cross between to heterozygous (Aa) parents has four boxes. A Punnett square for a five gene heterozygous (AaBbCcDdEe) cross has 1024 boxes.

However, for all the simplicity of basic genetics, many students drop out of biology during or after that first genetics class. So, if the foundation of genetics is simple why do so many students leave or fail genetics. The reason is math, invariably a week or two into a genetics class I always hear students say something like “I choose biology, so I didn’t have to do math.”

Thinking biology does not use math is a funny statement to anyone that has completed any science degree because we all know science always includes some math. Most science degrees require at least some level of calculus graduate. For most biology students’ genetics is the first time where a lot of math is part of the biology.

Beyond the fact that genetics integrates math the bulk of the math is statistics, you could even say that genetics is statistics. Even if the students had statistics, it was probably not embedded into biology. While students might know the basics of statistics, they might have problems with transference, the ability to take preexisting knowledge and apply it to a new situation.

If students are having problems with transference concerning the principles of statistics, or even worse have not had a statistics course, they are not going to be able to focus on biology. Think about a simple piece of information; we tell the students that the probability of a baby being a girl is 50%. Then on a quiz, we ask the students this question (I have seen it used) “In a family with four children how many are girls and how many are boys?” The answer that the instructor is looking for is two girls and two boys. However, I know families that have four girls, or four boys, or three girls and one boy, or 1 girl and three boys. If a student put down one of these other answers, it is technically correct because all these options have happened.

While one problem is the poorly written questions, there is also a problem with understanding what a 50% probability means. One of the most important things that students need to understand is that a 50% probability is a statistic based on population. It is entirely possible for probabilities to vary widely with small sample sizes, as the sample size gets larger the probability of heads to tails to get closer and closer to 50%.

A simple way to think about the sex ration is coin flips. When we flip a coin, we say you have a 50% chance of getting heads. Now suppose I flipped a coin three times and got tails on all three, what is the probability that the fourth flip will be tails? There is two answer I hear most often 6.25% and 50%. The correct answer is 50%. You see every coin flip is an independent event that means each coin flip has a 50% probability of coming up tails.

Coin Toss by ICMA Photos, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Coin Toss by ICMA Photos, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Now if we were to flip a coin 200 times in a row, the total data set would average out to be close to 50% heads to tails. However, even in this larger sample, there are likely to be several relatively long runs of heads or tails in some case more than seven in a row. People can quickly detect fake versus real data directly from the fact that most faked data does not have long enough runs of heads or tails, you can read about it here.

Therefore, one of the most important things we can teach students is the principle of significance. Students need to understand that it is not essential to merely show that probabilities and averages are different but that the difference between them is significant.

What does all this mean for genetics education? First, students should have a basic understanding of statistics before they take genetics. I believe that if statistics are not required to take statistics as a prerequisite for genetics you are not seriously trying to teach genetics to everyone.

However, even if the students have a foundation in statistics genetics lessons should be designed to help the students transfer knowledge from basic statistics into genetics. The transfer of information is also a situation where technology can help. In many math classes especially at calculus and above students often use software like Mathematica to solve the math equations once the student determines the correct approach and writes the equation.

In a genetics’ class students don’t need to derive or prove statistical equations. The students need to know what equations to use and when to use them. There are several statistics analysis software programs available. We should let the students use these tools in their class, a lot of professional scientists do. If we made statistical analysis software available, then students could focus on learning what calculations to apply were and focus on the biology that the statistics are highlighting.

What do you think should we design genetics classes to try and reach all the students? Could statistical analysis tools help the students taking a genetics class? Have you tried helping your students transfer knowledge from their statistics class to their genetics class? How often do we consider transference when we design new courses, should we be doing it more?

Thanks for Listing To my Musings

The Teaching Cyborg