Category: Education Reform

We Need a Language to Talk About Ed Tech

On By teachingcyborgIn Ed Tech, Education ReformLeave a comment

“Communication is about what they hear, not what you say.”
Dave Fleet

 

As our understanding of learning and educational theory has grown how we teach and design educational tools have also developed.  Additionally, changes in society and our daily lives have affected how schools’ function.  We are currently in the middle of vast technological changes in society and our daily lives.  Technology has changed or is poised to change most of the aspects of our lives, communication, travel, entertainment, and shopping to name a few.

It is natural that these technological changes will affect education.  Some of the technologies will affect education because they improve the educational experience, other technologies will change education because they are the way we do things. Guessing how technology will influence education is as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation.”

With my interest in educational technology, I am often involved in educational technology projects, especially concerning the STEM disciplines.  Quite frequently I read an article or hear a talk about a new piece of technology at a school, described many times, as cutting-edge technology.

I often find myself thinking about the term cutting-edge technology, what does it mean?  According to Techopedia cutting-edge technology means:

“Cutting-edge technology refers to technological devices, techniques or achievements that employ the most current and high-level IT developments; in other words, technology at the frontiers of knowledge. Leading and innovative IT industry organizations are often referred to as “cutting edge.””

One of the things I still constantly hear about is cutting-edge mobile phones and apps. I can hear some of you now “Still?” what do you mean by that?  What I mean is that smartphones are not cutting-edge technology. The first smartphone was IBM’s Simon in 1994; the phone came with many features (what we call apps today). Nokia and then Blackberry followed Simon. Finally, we got the iPhone and Android phones. If smartphones and apps have been in existence for about a quarter century are they cutting-edge?

Often, I think what people mean when they say cutting-edge is something new to their school or classroom. I wonder if I’m correct in this thought? If we are going to deal with educational reform and development it deserves clear and critical thinking; for that, we need to be clear in our language.

For a long time, we’ve known that clear communication in education is essential — the publication of a Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain in 1956 simplified communication in educational research. In time this book would come to be called Bloom’s Taxonomy. Over the last 62 years, this book has influenced education especially in the area of assessment.  What some people no longer remember was that Bloom’s Taxonomy was developed to help educators communicate with greater precision.

“You are reading about an attempt to build a taxonomy of educational objectives. It is intended to provide for the classification of the goals of our educational system. It is expected to be of general help to all teachers, administrators, professional specialists, and research workers who deal with curricular and evaluation problems. It is especially intended to help them discuss these problems with greater precision.” Bloom, B. H. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: David Mackay Co. pg. 1.

With the creation of a uniform taxonomy educational professionals could communicate clearly and precisely with each other.  Using the taxonomy, everyone knew what the word analysis meant.

Today we need a language to talk about technology in education.  A terminology about educational technology would not only assist in the clarity of communication, but with the types of technology, we use.

As an example, the emerging area of wearable technologies like the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses, Microsoft HoloLens, Garmin Varia Vision, or Google Glass Enterprise Edition is on the cutting-edge of technology.  The future of this technology along with Virtual Reality (VR) is so open as to be almost indescribable.  The biggest problem with AR and VR technology as well as most cutting-edge technology is the cost.

Should education invest large amounts of resources into cutting-edge technologies or should we wait until these technologies mature?  To discuss whether we should be working with technologies, we need to be able to agree on the type of technologies we are discussing.

In the case of education, we should not use terms like cutting edge, brand new, or emerging when we mean a technology that is new to teaching or worse new to just my school or program.  A new educational innovation could mean a technology that is in use in business or society but has little or no use in education.  A newly adopted technology could mean something that is used elsewhere in education but is new in a specific school or program.

Even if my suggested terminology is not the best (let’s be honest it’s doubtful it would be), I think we are in desperate need of an agreed upon language for the incorporation of technology in education.  As our world becomes more and more technological, we need to have the ability to discuss not only what technology to integrate into teaching but why we are incorporating it. What do you think, have you gotten confused when talking about technologies in education?  Do we need a language for technology? Would a language for educational technology lead to better and more critical discussion of educational technology?  So, when can we get A Taxonomy of educational terms: Technology.

 

Thanks for Listing to My Musings

The Teaching Cyborg

The Language of the Field

On By teachingcyborgIn Education Reform, Pedagogy, Textbook2 Comments

“All I know is what I have words for.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are many components to a bachelor’s degree, part of the goal of the degree is to give students a wide range of skills and knowledge.  The single largest component of the degree is the disciplinary component.  While there is often overlap in basic skills in addition to the content knowledge of the field students learn how to think, analyze information, and communicate in and outside their field.

Throughout four (sometimes more) years that a bachelor’s degree takes students to build their skills.  Over the last decade or two, there has been a significant focus on the teaching of higher order thinking skills. Whether or not this focus on higher order thinking skills has been successful, I think, like many things we have embraced higher order thinking skills without a lot of thought, this focus on higher order thinking skills above everything is causing damage to our educational process.

While I agree that the introduction of higher order thinking skills can and should as early as possible, it is critical to realize that higher order skills don’t work independently of the so-called lower order thinking skills.  I remember consulting with an instructor that was having trouble with his student’s test performance; his students were performing significantly lower than students in other classes.  He brought in a couple of tests for me to look at, one of my first questions was what are your goals.  He said he was focusing on higher order thinking skills.

His tests had some of the most thoughtfully written questions I had seen.  It was composed almost exclusively of open-ended and long answer word problems.  Even though the questions were excellent, I immediately had an idea of what the problem was.  Most of the questions relied heavily on discipline-specific language.  Since he was teaching a lower division course, I asked if he is sure that his students understood the meaning of the words he was using, after a little discussion he realized he was assuming information about his students that he didn’t know.

After making some changes and including some content about language his student’s scores improved, which shows its essential to keep all skills in mind.  I have never liked the idea of defining skills as lower level and higher level. I think these skills are more of a gradient than levels.  Additionally, characterizing them as lower level and higher level suggests a hierarchy of importance that is not true. The skills we are teaching in a course should be dependent on the goals of that course not some external evaluation about the “best” skills.  However, that is probably a discussion for another day.

Continuing with the devaluation of “lower order thinking skills” I have been thinking about how this might be affecting textbooks.  In many fields, textbooks are used extensively in the introductory courses.  One of the most important things that take place in these introductory courses is teaching the students the language of their field. Since learning the language of a field is the main component of introductory classes textbooks should support learning the discipline language.

I have been looking at several textbooks lately especially open source textbooks, and I think I have started to see a problem.  Imagine you are a student working on a homework assignment, and you come across a word you don’t know or remember.  Yes, today I know it is likely that a student will Google it.  Let’s suppose instead they go to their textbook; how do they look up the word.  The student could look it up in the glossary.

Surprisingly this could be a problem; if you go to the back of many textbooks, you will find there isn’t a glossary in the back.  It turns out that many of the new books both open source and some commercial are designed to be customized.  You only choose the parts of the book that fit your course if, and I do mean if, the textbook has a glossary it has probably been divided into small sections and placed at the end of every chapter.

So how are you our student supposed to find the word you are trying to look up.  Since you can’t remember what the word means, in which section do you look?  You probably start with the most recent section you read if it’s not there well then, I guess you look through the entire book till you find the definition.

While we are currently trying to solve many problems with textbooks, cost, compatibility with curriculum, and accessibility we need to be sure we don’t introduce new problems by not paying attention to what we are doing. Students are not going to want to use textbooks that are difficult to use.  While many of the problems go away with the use of digital textbooks, isn’t the search function simply fantastic, we need to design textbooks for both digital and print.

While I understand the idea of designing textbooks so that you can pick and choose which parts you want to use splitting up the glossary confuses me.  It should be relatively apparent that separating the glossary into a lot of separate section through the whole book makes the glossary harder to use.  I wonder if this glossary design is because book designers think lower order thinking skills like memorizing definitions is unimportant.

Independent of the reason for this separate glossary model what is wrong with having a single glossary in the back of the book?  Why does it matter if the glossary has words in it that don’t appear in the text?  A single glossary in one place (I don’t care if it’s in the back) is much more usable than a scattered one.

I suppose if you think have extra words in a glossary is a problem the glossary could be laid out in a separate section like in an appendix.  We could label glossary sections by chapter and page, and each would be a separate section.  For example, G.12.2 would be the glossary for the 12th chapter second page.  Then you could leave out the unused parts of the glossary.

While a glossary organized by chapters might still require some searching by a student (if they don’t know what chapter a word they are looking for comes from), they would at least know where in the book to look.  Of course, I suppose if we are talking about Open Source textbooks we could edit the glossary and remove the extra words.

Lastly, if you think that a divided glossary is the best thing to do there is one other potential solution.  That solution would be to include all the words in the glossaries in the index.  Listing the glossary words in the index would give the students a single place they could look to find the definitions.

As we design the next generation of textbooks and learning materials we always need to remember that the most critical design consideration needs to be usability.

 

Thanks for Listening to My Musings

The Teaching Cyborg

You Don’t Own Critical Thinking

On By teachingcyborgIn Education ReformLeave a comment

“I don’t want people to say, “something is true because Tyson says it is true.” That’s not critical thinking.”
Neil Degrasse Tyson

The Pink Panther movies are ridiculously hilarious. I’m not talking about the Steve Martin films but the original Peter Sellers movies. One of the great stories in these movies is the interactions between Peter Sellers Inspector Jacques Clouseau and Herbert lams Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus. Their interactions are funnier because Clouseau doesn’t understand how much Dreyfus hates him.

“Dreyfus: The beggar was the lookout man for the gang.
Clouseau: That is impossible. How can a blind man be a lookout?
Dreyfus: [Insinuating Clouseau] How can an idiot be a police officer?
Clouseau: Well, all he has to do is enlist…
Dreyfus: Shut up!”
The Return of the Pink Panther – 1975

Over the course of several films, the interactions with inspector Clouseau slowly drives Dreyfus insane. A twitch in his eye foreshadows his descent into madness.

Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus Eye Twitch The Return of the Pink Panther 1975
Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus Eye Twitch The Return of the Pink Panther 1975

Lately, the term critical thinking is starting to do drive me a little crazy. It seems once, or twice a week I see or read another article bemoaning the loss of some form of education, liberal arts, social sciences, arts, or a type of degree english, history, foreign language, etc. Many of these articles suggest that without the their “stick” we will lose critical thinking. There was an article the other day that argued we should be getting degrees in the humanities and the reason, in the humanities we learn to communicate (speak), to work in teams, and here my eye twitch twitch critical thinking.

In another article, they argued why it was wrong to pursue degrees in computer science and programming and instead we should be getting degrees in the social sciences because they learn communication skills, problem-solving a couple of other things and twitch twitch critical thinking.

In a third article, the argument was to learn emotional intelligence and big data analysis we needed social sciences and anthropology. Furthermore, these skills in emotional intelligence and big data were needed to learn twitch twitch ” And then… I will kill you! Kill you!” (Charles Dreyfus The Pink Panther Strikes Again 1976) critical thinking.

Article after article all seeming to claim that without their field we will lose critical thinking. The idea that critical thinking is dependent on any one field is frankly ridiculous. The truth of the matter is that any field and any education can teach critical thinking.

Learning to design and write computer software is an enterprise in critical thinking pick up a book on program architecture. Learning to write a story especially something like a novel (creative writing degree) requires critical thinking. Learning to design research experiments in any of the science fields is the definition of critical thinking. Constructing logical arguments, supporting or contradicting a point in philosophy is critical making.

I could continue with examples in fields of study until I ran out of fields because like I said no single field or type of study owns critical thinking. Arguing that your field is needed for critical thinking probably does more harm than good by alienating everyone else that you just said couldn’t teach critical thinking.

While we all (hopefully) agree that critical thinking is important and the stories of schools cutting critical thinking are quite troubling, we should be all working together to make sure critical thinking is supported and taught regardless of what the student studies.

As to arguments concerning declining enrollments in many fields and types of education the solution is not to try to lay claim to things that belong to everyone. You’re also not going to solve the problem by trying to force an individual into programs with claims of fundamental importance if it isn’t true. Even if it’s true, the real problem is the students are not engaging or interacting the same way as they were before.

If we want to reverse these trends, we need to figure out why the students are not interested. Then engage the students, the argument that I’m a professor, and I understand all this information, and you should believe me isn’t going to work. To get the students into the classroom, we need to answer their questions and concerns honestly, and directly. We need to remember that their concerns while different than ours, are completely legitimate to the students and treating them any other way than respectfully will not help the situation.

Academics have a huge amount of knowledge and skill. However, we need to remember that outside our fields and academia your audiences have probably not read that paper that “everyone” knows. Take some time and instead of saying “like we all know” spend some time explaining the information, after all, if you want more students the people you need to convince probably don’t know what you know.
Thanks for Listening to My Musings

The Teaching Cyborg

Re-Envisioning the Ph.D. +13 Years

On By teachingcyborgIn Education Reform1 Comment

“Education is not the learning of facts; it’s rather the training of the mind to think.”
Albert Einstein

 

13 years ago, this month, the Woodrow Wilson foundation released the report THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education. The responses Ph.D. project was an attempt to test and evaluate programs that addressed “issues” with the Ph.D. The work revolves around four principles:

Principle one: a graduate school for real
The first principle of Woodrow Wilson’s initiative on the doctoral degree may appear at first bizarre or tautological. Every gripe, every conclusion from all the reports and our attempts to turn the reports into action prove one thing: the Ph.D. degree requires strong graduate schools and graduate deans with real budgets and real scope—a far stronger central administrative structure than typically exists at present.
THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education Page #6.

Principle two: a cosmopolitan doctorate
The second principle is a sibling to the first. Just as individual programs need to be connected more to each other in the shared experience of a strengthened graduate school, the doctorate in totality and every discipline will benefit enormously by a continuing interchange with the worlds beyond academia. The doctorate needs to be opened to the world and to engage in social challenges more generously. A responsive Ph.D. has implications for degree requirements, for the right administration of programs, for time to degree and the job search, and for improving the diversity of the Ph.D. cohort.
THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education Page #7.

Principle three: drawn from the breadth of the populace
Clearly, an expertise gap besets the United States. The Ph.D. cohort, source of the nation’s college and university faculty, is not changing quickly enough to reflect the diversity of the nation. The next generation of college students will include dramatically more students of color, but their teachers will remain overwhelmingly white.
THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education Page #9.

Principle four: an assessed excellence
The doctoral degree stakes a strong claim upon quality. Whatever the degree variously means, it guarantees that. And yet doctoral education, keen to interpret all phenomena expertly, almost entirely fails to interpret and evaluate itself. The quality of doctoral education depends upon assessment with reasonable consequences. Excellence is a receding horizon. Progress toward it is measured by 9 THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. the degree of success in achieving concrete objectives—objectives that can be redefined as circumstances require. Attainment of specific objectives can be rewarded through commensurate increases in valued resources. Numerous participants in the Responsive Ph.D. have established robust programs for connecting resources to outcomes in this way.
THE RESPONSIVE PH.D. Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education Page #10-11.

My interest in this report has to do with The University of Colorado Boulder’s involvement with the project. Four years before the report was published seven graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder were asked to provide feedback on several questions to the graduate school advisory council that was working with responsive Ph.D. project.

I was one of those graduate students. I’m also a bit of a pack rat, just recently I ran across my notes from this committee. I thought it might be interesting to look back and see how my thoughts have changed. The group of graduate students was asked several questions specifically what we thought about; Research, Teaching and the Responsive Ph.D., Interdisciplinary, Teaching and the Ph.D. Path, Mentoring and Advising, Scholarly Citizenship, and Time-to-Degree.

A lot of the questions concerning the Ph.D. and whether the degree was meeting current needs revolved around two points. One) most Ph.D.’s will not pursue careers exactly like their faculty advisers, they may even have different interests. The focus of research to the exclusion of all else limits the possible uses of the degree. While research should remain the focus, additional opportunities should be available to the students. Two) there are many underrepresented groups in Ph.D. graduates compared to the general population. Do specific aspects or approaches to the degree that limit the access of these groups?

What follows is excerpts from the graduate student presentations to the graduate advisory council. These presentations were created and assembled by the entire committee composed of graduate students from seven different colleges at the university

Research, Teaching and the Responsive PhD
Students often wish for a field of study that sharpens their research skills. However, many students would also like to develop complementary skills such as teaching. Many students report that their departments do not encourage development in teaching. The committee feels a paradigm shift is needed that recognizes both research and teaching as important components of the Ph.D. process.

Interdisciplinarity
Training opportunities should be available for interdisciplinary work. As a grad student, we had very little idea “research wise” what was going on in other departments and colleges. Additionally, it was often hard to take courses outside of our department. We also feel that graduating with a broad and diverse knowledge base would enhance our employ-ability both in and outside of academia. Schools should develop programs to encourage interdisciplinarity in graduate students.

Teaching and the Ph.D. Path
Since many academically employed Ph.D.s do not end up employed in R1 universities but other school and universities with a higher focus on teaching we feel that many Ph.D.s are being under-trained. Since most Ph.D.s come from R1 institutions these institutions, need to give more training to develop students teaching skills.

Mentoring and Advising
The current structure of the Ph.D. programs often limits the knowledge and advising available to students. Since advisers often only know about their careers. Especially in the STEM fields, a second adviser would be helpful.

Scholarly Citizenship
Many schools talk about citizenship and the importance of citizenship. Many projects occur but are often self-established by individuals. What could universities or graduate schools do to encourage and teach us how to establish projects around scholarly citizenship?

Time-to-Degree
One of the biggest concerns presented is time-to-degree. How do we include all the things we listed while shortening or at least maintaining the time-to-degree? The easiest way to do this is to focus on the requirements or skills that are necessary for the degree and to remove as much of the extraneous work as possible.

These short excerpts summarize what the graduate students (the seven on the committee) thought about the questions. After rereading the final documents, I’m not sure that our input had any impact on the final report. Conversely, the project included 20 schools, and I don’t know how many of the schools involved graduate students so we may have represented a very small part of the project.

The bulk of the report was composed of “white papers” about the programs that addressed the issues that the report brought up. A question I had was how many of these programs are still functioning? Conducting a quick web search, I was able to find current program information on 27 of the 41 programs, which means 66% of the programs are still functioning. 66% is quite good for universities where programs often vanish after grants or projects are over.

Let’s go back to the questions if I was asked these questions today how I would respond?

Research, Teaching and the Responsive Ph.D.
It is true still true that most Ph.D. students will not end up in careers like their advisers, especially if they’re getting their degrees from R1 institutions. However, the Ph.D. is a research degree. The central core of the degree should be and stay research. The only thing I would like to see would be more teacher training since the Ph.D. is also a teaching degree.

Interdisciplinarity
There’s always been a tremendous interest in interdisciplinary because of how interdisciplinary teams have solved problems. However, actively trying to create or force interdisciplinary does not work. The only thing I will say is that a student should be able to take any class or collaborate with any group that makes sense for their research. Departments shouldn’t limit their students to only what is available within their department.

Teaching and the Ph.D. path
As I said before if we’re going to call a Ph.D. degree a teaching degree, then we should include teaching as part of the curriculum.

Mentoring and Advising
Mentoring and advising are a critically important part of graduate education. Mentoring can impact everything from how you deal with imposter syndrome to what career path you take. Schools and departments should encourage students to talk and interact with as many people as possible. The Ph.D. is a research degree you should choose your adviser for their research abilities. If you get more out of a relationship with your primary adviser that is great. However, your research adviser should be chosen predominantly for their ability to help you get through your research.

Scholarly Citizenship
The purpose of the Ph.D. is to learn a skill set involving research and problem-solving. These skills are tremendously useful in many fields, and careers, how graduates choose to use them when they graduate should be entirely up to the graduates. However, if you want to be involved in citizenship (or community service) as part of your degree and you should choose a school or program that is already doing this type of work. I feel trying to force faculty to include “citizenship” in the research is directly contradictory to academic freedom. If we choose to believe in academic freedom, faculty must have the right to choose or not choose to do something.

Time-to-Degree
Time-to-degree comes up more than just about any other problem, people still discuss it regularly. I think this is probably a more complex issue than it seems. The biggest advantage of shortening the time-to-degree is a reduction in costs, which is, a very important consideration. The drawback is the amount of knowledge there is to learn nowadays. On top of the amount to learn we are living and working longer. With this increase in knowledge, we are starting to see more and more specializations in degrees at the bachelor’s level which I find sad. Personally, if there is a way to deal with the cost I would almost wish we gave the students more time to learn their field and all it has to offer.

13 years on I think the whole idea of re-envisioning the Ph.D. was ridiculous. While it is true that we did and still do have issues with diversity in advanced degrees the solution is not to change degrees but to engage and support the underrepresented. Also, if the Ph.D. is not suited to a job or career path again, the solution is not to change the degree. The Ph.D. is perfectly suited to its uses. If something different is needed, we should create a different degree not change one that already works. For the time being, I think I will close the door on the re-envisioned Ph.D., maybe ask me again in 15 years.

 

Thanks for Listening to my Musings

The Teaching Cyborg