Notes from Wednesday's seminar - Dr. Rich

Convergent Cognition

Trends
1949: Our field started as a result of WWII - the education standardization movement (Ralph Tyler)
1983: "A Nation at Risk" - a back-to-basics movement
1995: TIMSS - found that the US was lagging - pushed forward No Child Left Behind
2001: ESEA
2003: PISA - another study on science & mathematics - the US wasn't as bad as we thought, but not great
2006: PISA - US had the same scores, but a lot of other countries moved ahead of us.

We're keeping the status quo, but falling behind other countries

This "back to basics" trend was meant to give everyone a fair and equal education, but the result is that it's causing schools to get rid of recess, social studies & arts, foreign languages. We're focusing on literacy & math.

3-D images: the same image from a slightly different angle. Combined, they add depth to a scene. This is like first and second languages

The Doctrine of Discipline - the idea that studying Greek or Latin increases mental acuity. In 60s and 70s, studies showed this to be true - students showed that students outperformed peers on standardized tests, learned native language faster.

Studies on sister languages showed that they improved vocabulary.

Non-sister languages: even more studies show that it helps the native language, even if it's not related to the native language at all. It's not just "no harm done" - bilingual students outperform their peers.

Perhaps we should supplement an hour of English with an hour of a foreign language.

So does this just apply to languages? What about mathematics and computer programming?

Studies (1982) showed that success in programming was correlated with mathematics experience. (2002) - even when math was placed last in the model, it still had a significant effect on success in CS courses.

2 complementary tasks help each other - just like 3-D glasses

There are conditions, though - not just any two subjects. Core attributes, applied vs. abstract, independent utility, time & maturity, all make a difference.

Steven Kraschen - The Acquisition-Learning hypothesis

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I really appreciated this seminar. I think this concept is very key, especially in a paradigm where we tend to compartmentalize and think that skills and competencies are unrelated.

I don't have any links to the literature on hand, but I know that neurobiology has been shown to back this up. Especially with situations like bilingual education and music and math. Experience in some areas tends to strengthen brain physiology and increase aptitude in others. (Not that it's linear - I imagine it's a very complex, intertwined process.)

I would like to explore interdisciplinary educational approaches even further - I'll put that next in my queue of cool stuff to read up on.

Career Research Report (a cinematic masterpiece)

This is a condensed version (the highlights of) my interview with Dr. Michael Bush, a professor at BYU whose interests include language, instructional design and educational technology.

I chose to interview Dr. Bush because, while I am interested in an academic career, I wanted to highlight the fact that a varied background and a non-traditional approach can also culminate in a professorship. For this video, I chose to portray what it is about Dr. Bush's job that makes it unique - how he has an opportunity to pursue all of his varied interests even in the seemingly straight-forward traditional job as a French professor.

Parts of the interview that I did not include centered on the competencies required for this career. While a Ph.D. is a must-have for a position as a full professor, Dr. Bush pursued his in a unique way. He began in the Air Force, and in subsequent job experiences, he progressed through his schooling at the request of employers. While he began his career in the military, he ended up back at his alma mater BYU, and is actively involved in creating media for language teaching.

I have included in my video some basic salary information, etc., for the average University Professor, but most of my research revealed that, realistically, it depends what discipline you're in, what geographical area you're in, and what your specific position is. The nice thing about academia is that it exists everywhere - you could teach in New York City or in a small town in North Dakota. Salaries and opportunities may depend on geography, but there is a great variety available.

My research sources also talked about career opportunities - the traditional hierarchy and availability of faculty positions, from adjunct to full professor. There are also possibilities to serve on boards of professional organizations. I was more interested in portraying in my video, however, the variety of opportunities you can make for yourself. Dr. Bush is a great example of someone who has used his personal strengths and talents to excel in his field, pursuing what he sees to be important and compelling research subjects.

Moral Obligations in Instructional Design

I really appreciated the Osguthorpe article we read (Osguthorpe, R. T., Osguthorpe, R. D., Jacobs, W. J., & Davies, R. (2003). "The Moral Dimensions of Instructional Design." Educational Technology, 43(2), 19-23.) about the importance of conscience in designing instructional systems and materials.

Osguthorpe identifies 5 consciences, which I think are not really distinct entities, but rather 5 facets of a larger virtue - "conscience," maybe, or "morality." I think I would identify the concept as stewardship.

We're used to hearing it as a religious concept, but I think the idea of stewardship applies very well in the professional world. Think of a small business owner versus the manager of a giant national chain store. The owner of the business has a lot of personal interest, and everything he has hinges on whether his business image succeeds or fails. The manager of a chain store, while his own accountability may vary depending on the company, has a certain amount that is out of his hands, and thus a certain area where he is unconcerned with the professional "consciences." (This, coincidentally, is why cashiers at Target talk to each other while they ring up your purchases and don't really care that you're there, while the lady at the independent toy store asks about how old your little sister is and whether she liked that game you bought for her last month.)

It's tempting, especially when you start getting a little prestige that comes with a master's or doctorate degree, to feel like the world owes you something. It's tempting, when you've landed a nice job, to start feeling like the job is there to pander to your personal whims and comforts. It's so easy, especially in my generation, the Entitlement Generation, to neglect our consciences and the entire industry suffers when we do.

This is why I appreciated the Osguthorpe article, and I think we should work to spread this idea and keep reminding ourselves why we're really here.

Classtools.net

I attended the UFLA (Utah Foreign Language Association) conference last Thursday and one of the workshops discussed online tools for foreign language teachers. There was some fantastic stuff available. If I get more time, I'll discuss some of the others but one of my favorites was classtools.net - among their many options is an online Flash editor that lets you build little arcade-style games and then turn them into a webpage or embed them in a blog or wiki. Here's an example - a Japanese reading exercise that I invented for a little girl I tutor:

Click here for full screen version

All I had to do was plug in the questions and answers - the online template builds everything else for you. Check them out!

I'm blogging about blogging in terms of teaching teachers how to teach.

I just ran across this article about teacher educators who train preservice teachers (particularly in English) to use technology in the classroom. This is, coincidentally, what I do.

I'm glad that we're having this metadiscussion. I'm glad that we're in an era where it's OK to say "why am I using this technology?" and to encourage preservice teachers to do so as well, rather than simply assigning more standards and holding technology workshops and throwing ourselves (pedagogically speaking) onto the tracks in front of the oncoming technology train.

I think I'll even bring this up to my 286 students. You think they'd read the article of their own accord? I could make it extra credit. Maybe I'll just summarize it and present it in class. Ah... intrinsic motivation.

Ideas for the issues project

I have been kicking around a few ideas about current issues in the instructional design field that I could tackle for my issues project. I think I'd like to specify towards my interests a bit, since I am pursuing the Second Language Acquistion track. One of the biggest innovations lately in the language teaching field is the idea of immersion learning - in Utah, the state legislature has granted large amounts of money for K-12 programs in Chinese and Arabic, and designers and administrators are now scrambling to try to make it work.

So I'm sure I need to clarify and elaborate this topic a little further, but something about immersion language learning vs. traditional language programs.

In honor of the history of ET

This may not be serious enough for inclusion in my PLE, but I would like to offer it all to you as a tribute to everything that was good and beautiful about Educational Television back in the halcyon days of our youth.


via videosift.com

Skip to my previous blog entry if you'd like to get back to the land where we don't giggle inappropriately in class.

The Learning Sciences, and more cottage cheese

I really appreciated the insights in the chapters by Sawyer and Bransford, et. al. explaining what is meant by the new term "learning sciences" and what exactly it encompasses. I am pretty hesitant to hop on board with new, euphemistic catch phrases, and must admit that I rolled my eyes a bit at the phrase "learning sciences" when I first started reading the article, but I really appreciate the value of what the authors are saying.

The most appealing side of the "learning sciences" is that they seek to integrate several different disciplines - psychology, anthropology, sociology... and I think this is vital to really understanding how people learn and then formulating our best approaches to teaching. The less fragmented our disciplines, the more effective and comprehensive our research is going to be. Isn't this what educational theorists themselves are promoting in the curricula we've been designing?

Authentic practice is an important part of the learning sciences approach, which I appreciate. I also like how Sawyer pointed out that as useful as professional experiences are for learners, we also have to find a way to tailor these experiences and make them age-specific. This reminds me of a project I worked on in 6th grade. We were working on independent study projects and the teacher took us as a class to the Denver Public Library. I had a heyday - it was the biggest library I'd ever been in and they had seemingly thousands of books on the subject I was researching - Ancient Greece. I went home with 14.

I had been more eager for the project, though, than I was really emotionally capable to handle. I spent most of the several months I had allotted to me for the project reading random passages of the hugely divergent books, most of which were way beyond my comprehension level. When it came down to the project's due date, I used a children's book on the Greek Gods and wrote a simple summary book-report-type project. The goal of the independent study and the trip to the library - teaching us what authentic research experience was like - was totally lost on me. In retrospect, I think that closer coaching by the teacher and some age-appropriate guidelines would have been more helpful than just setting me loose in the adult world.

Another aspect of the readings that I appreciated was the explanation of intrinsic learning vs. informal learning vs. formal learning. It seems that I've picked up on these phenomena but have yet to see them articulated so well. So much of what we have been talking about in terms of learning theory has been frustrating to me because it exists only in the world of formal learning, when I have been eager to point out the fact that humans are learning all the time. It intrigues me to study further why there is such a disconnect between these three "strands" of learning. Bransford, et.al. point out:

Many children who fail in school demonstrate sophisticated competence in non-school activities. In particular, learners from nondominant cultural or lower SES backgrounds appear to learn resourcefully and productively outside of school, even though they may not do well inside school (e.g., McLaughlin, Irby & Langman, 2001). These asymmetries raise important questions about the design of our school systems and what resources allow for success out of school. (Bransford et. al., p.25)

The difference between intrinsic (mimicry) learning and informal learning is subtle and interesting enough, and I think lies somewhere in the gap between everyday experiences (which are perceptible to our senses) and abstractions (which are not), but the difference between informal learning and formal learning (like the smart children who do poorly in school) still puzzles me. Why the disconnect? What is the difference? And what is the justification for having schools at all if we can't bridge the gap?

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I've been reading another book called Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies by Diana Laurillard that elaborates on the distinction between authentic experience and abstraction, very helpfully. I tend to be an enthusiastic supporter of authentic experience as the only real teacher, but Laurillard brings up some important points. She uses the example from Brown, et.al. (Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.) that we read in class, the example of the dieter trying to figure out how to take 3/4 of a 2/3 cup serving of cottage cheese. Rather than having to figure out a formula, the man has an enlightened moment where he pats the cottage cheese into a circle, cuts it into four quarters, and eats three of them. This is all well and good, Laurillard points out, but what about a situation that does not lend itself as well to the situated cognition approach?

Suppose the weight-watcher were trying to work out his share of a discounted car hire with a couple of friends and had to figure out the logically equivalent problem of one-third of 5 percent off the total cost? The unity between problem, context and solution is not quite so apparent here. The point of an academic education is that knowledge has to be abstracted, and represented formally to become generalisable and therefore more generally useful. (Laurillard, p.16)

She goes on to argue the need for abstraction, and that competently presented. Rather than depending on a single situated context, a concept needs to be represented in multiple contexts before it will be recognized and become generalizable. The cottage cheese problem is possible in an informal learning setting. The fraction formulas necessary to work out the rental car problem are more reminiscent of formal learning environments. Is there no way to reconcile the two?

That's what I want to discover. I want to keep reading the research and I am especially interested in alternative approaches to formal education such as the Montessori system. I see the value for abstraction and carefully constructed guidance of a student's experience, but I am still very conscious of those who learn in informal settings and are very intelligent but who get lost between the cracks of formal education. I'm excited that what we've read so far has brought me exposure to at least the beginnings of these compelling questions.

The history of ET

I really enjoyed reading the Molenda chapter (Molenda, M. (2008). Historical foundations. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. van Merrienboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 3-20). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [ereserve]) on the historical foundations of educational technology. Too often, especially in today's parlance, we equate technology with computers and we forget that educational technology is anything that people design and use to facilitate instruction. It was cool to discover the history of blackboards, of all things.

One concept that really got me thinking was in the history of educational radio (and later television) - the fact that because of the nature of the medium, the educational content was slightly altered. Because radio signals crossed borders and school district boundaries, it was impractical for educational radio programs to be curriculum-specific. So, instead of direct transmission of specific lectures and courses of study, the medium kind of naturally became more general and thus supplementary to instruction rather than all-inclusive. The text also mentioned that there was also a corollary with the fact that teachers didn't welcome a full takeover of their classroom duties.

My question is - how did this shape the nature of educational programming and then did that in turn shape future advances in pedagogy?

I wonder this because I grew up on PBS. I absolutely loved Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact and Square One TV as a child. These were the fun, after-school programs that I enjoyed, and I never had a problem with the fact that education kept going after class was out for the day. In fact, I never knew that I was supposed to be being educated while I watched them. To me, that was entertainment - especially Reading Rainbow. I would go to the public library on weekends and look for the books I had seen on the show, then pick my own favorites and daydream about the day that they'd let me be on the show and give a report on my favorite book. It was fun; I don't know that a curriculum-specific pre-recorded talking head would have been. I wonder if the fuzzy nature of broadcast technology that then led to a more supplementary approach to educational radio and television didn't just save the genre. Because they were supplementary, they were able to overlap with entertainment, and because educational things started becoming entertaining I was able to adapt to a culture of learning at home and on the weekends that then favorable affected my attitude towards school.

Not that I credit capitalism with this development of educational media that merged with pop culture - it's interesting to note that the commercial broadcast entities never seem to produce anything of much substance. It was the national corporations abroad - the BBC, CBC and NHK, for example - that had a civic conscience to fulfill and it was the privately funded but morally motivated PBS and NPR that filled that role in the United States. It's interesting that only those entities with some sort of moral or civic obligation that seem to promulgate educational media in the mainstream.

As far as the effect of these early media on pedagogy, I depart a little bit from the article in my musings but still appreciate how the authors illustrate the link between shifting pedagogical beliefs and the evolution of corresponding technologies. I imagine that the types of media we have available today are having a considerable impact on pedagogical approaches. I hesitate to take the gung ho "Computers enable Constructivism" approach that I see taken for granted in so much of the contemporary literature (I'm currently working on a research project on technology integration and it's nearly ubiquitous, this belief that computers will turn teachers into Constructivists), but I definitely see a link between the media available and the common approach to how to teach it.

But even outside of the classroom and the teacher's direct control, I wonder what internet technologies, which are the ultimate example of "supplementary" ET rather than strictly curriculum-controlled, will do to our approaches to teaching and learning. Is the universality of Wikipedia, for example, vastly re-shaping the way students look for information? Will there be other educational entities, outside of the control of the school systems, that succeed in educating the next generation the way that I was educated by Mr. Rogers and the Bloodhound Gang? I'd be fascinated to do further research and find out.

Authenticity

One of the factors I chose to discuss in my Beliefs About Learning paper is what I chose to call authenticity. What I meant by that is the concept that includes authentic activity and learning by doing and all of those concepts. The idea of education being inseparable from real life.

Today's seminar - Stephen Ashton's presentation of what makes a good children's museum - is making me think along similar lines. It's the authentic that really appeals to the minds of children and, I'd imagine, adults.

When I was little I went frequently to the Denver Children's Museum. It was a great facility, with a lot of fascinating exhibits, but the one that will always stand out in my mind was the one that was the old standard that was always there... the little Safeway store. It was a small replica of a grocery store, scaled down to child size. There were small shopping carts (the novelty of a small shopping cart in itself being enough to get my little heart racing) and aisles filled with fake food. Fake meat, fake jugs of milk, fake boxes of food. And you'd walk around and shop and put them in your cart and then you'd go check out. And here's the really cool thing - you could also be a checkout person. There were Safeway aprons you could put on and you could scan the food across the beepers and it would actually beep. And there was something so exciting about getting to make the food scanner thing beep. It was deeply and profoundly fulfilling.

Why was it that, out of all the scientific and artistic and extraordinary educational exhibits, the one that held my childhood fascination was the miniature grocery store? I'd venture to say that it's the same principle that keeps children playing with baby dolls and wooden hammers and fake money throughout the ages. They want to play with things that they see their parents using every day. They want to do real things.

I want to keep thinking about this and deciding how it applies to instruction in general. I don't think it ends after elementary school - or rather, I think it does, too often, when we get to junior high and have to start studying "real" things like algebra textbooks. And that's also, incidentally, when students start getting jaded, when it stops being cool to like your teachers, when education really becomes entrenched in its utilitarian ruts. And I think that's really what my concentration needs to be.

Some more on my two factors... after group discussion

Talking about these two ideas (mine were emotion and authentic activity) really made me examine my thoughts, specifically how complex they get when you move into how to implement them into specific methods.

The most troublesome was the idea of emotion as a tool. Did I mean to say it was tool when I first brought it up? I'm not sure, but it gets pretty scary when you say it that way. I thought of some of my best emotional experiences in class, and they were always centered around good discussion or interaction, not usually engineered by a teacher. When a teacher engineers something to be emotional with the specific intent of using that emotion somehow, it's usually pretty transparent, and nothing is less emotionally effective (or more counterproductive) than transparent emotional manipulation. We came up with some pretty good examples of good use of emotion and bad uses of emotion. For example: a really engaging discussion can sometimes happen when a controversial topic is brought up. Students who might not have cared about a topic before are now personally involved. But what if it becomes contentious? (And I don't mean to say that anything critical or any sort of disagreement is contentious - I mean specifically the presence of malice) Then you've turned a really good emotional opportunity into a really negative experience, and probably just deepened participants into their trenches.

There's also the danger of sentimentality and cheap shots - playing on emotion in an artificially manipulative way.

But I still think that in spite of the dangers of excess, instructors need to be aware of and work with the emotional factors in the material. It's going to be there no matter what approach you take, and it will be worlds better if the emotional current in your classroom can be something somewhat more effective than "This is soooooo boring."

Two most important factors for learning

These past few weeks of research, both the literature we've been reading for class and a lot of the articles I've come across at work (I'm a research assistant currently working on a project on technology integration in the classroom), have really made me think about how we actually learn. It's easy for me to understand and give credit to a well-stated theory at the time that I read it; it's harder to come to a decision on what I actually personally believe.

I think that throughout all of the literature that we've studied, there are some recurrent themes that I keep latching onto. I hesitate to give any of them a name straight out of someone else's framework, but there are some concepts that come very close to what I would describe as my personal philosophy. These thoughts are indeed heavily influenced by what I've read and studied (especially a lot of Constructivist thought that I was exposed to as an undergrad), but when it came down to deciding how to articulate what I believe are the most important factors for how people learn, I had to rely mainly on my own experience. As a student, there have been experiences that have really resonated with me, and there have also been teachers and situations with which I've always felt a vague sort of frustration and consternation, even if I couldn't articulate what it was that I disliked. Drawing on those personal experiences and trying to distill them to their important basics, here are the two most important factors for learning I could identify:

Emotion
There is something vital about the connection between learning and emotion. Our most persistent memories are the ones that were etched onto our minds in times of emotional extreme. Emotion is the most direct tool we have to access and create memory and understanding. I find myself really drawn to the work of Damasio and his findings on the importance of emotion in Neurobiology.

All of my memories of school as a child have strong emotional connections. Who were my "best" teachers? Without fail, they also happen to be the ones with whom I felt emotionally safe. What are my clearest memories of things I learned? They always have an emotional connection. I may never forget the geography of Africa, because I remember a giant map of the outlines of the countires laying on the floor of my elementary school gym on "Africa Day." We had been studying Africa for a couple months, and Africa Day was the day we got to take a simulated trip (including a "plane" made out of rows of chairs and a boy in our class dressed like a pilot) to Africa, and we got to eat peanut soup out of wooden bowls and listen to Ladysmith Black Mombazo. It was emotionally exciting, compelling and interesting, and so I will always associate the fact that Kinshasa is the capital of Zaire with that pleasant memory.

Authentic Activity
Several of the authors we've read have spoken of the importance of authentic activity. I really liked the idea of the Cognitive Apprenticeship. But I think even in layman's terms, you will find almost universal interest in education that has real-life application.

As a high school and then a post-secondary student, the days where eating African food in the gym was an effective educational motive for me were past. (Though, come to think of it, I think it still might work. Maybe we can do that for class next week?) But other things got me motivated to work in the midst of an environment that was, frankly, usually pretty unmotivational.

I find it ironic that to this day I spend most of my academic energy in discovering and then constructing a way to fulfill the bare minimum requirements for courses that I take. Very rarely is it the actual material, the actual content that I end up learning. It's so easy to default to the "learn to the test" mode. I think that's a pretty common problem - American students are very good at figuring out what to learn to pass the school model and then spending their energy doing so. Too often, the actual content - the art, the math, the history - is a tenuously connected sidecar to "learning the system."

The times that I have really learned, really grown and really progressed have been the times that I was doing something real. In the workplace this happens almost naturally. 90% of my expertise on Adobe design software comes from the things I had to figure out to make an ad print correctly in the 4-color press or manipulate an image quickly for a picky poster client. Even though I spent four years in school learning the software, I never really learned anything until I needed to. This isn't limited to the "real world," however. Academia can become the real world and can prove extremely effective when the situations are right. As an undergraduate in an advanced French grammar course, I helped translate a website from French to English for a nonprofit humanitarian organization my professor worked for. She saw a real world need - a way for this organization to reach an anglophone audience - and combined it with our need to learn effective ways to translate. We were actually motivated to do a good job - to do more than the bare minimun - when we realized that our work was meaningful and real.

It's funny that this concept is driving me right now as well. Rather than simply reporting on two factors for learning to fill the requirements for my class, I'm aware of the fact that my mom and a friend from high school and who knows who else can access and read this blog, and so I'm being more conscientious in the way I write and present my ideas. Theory in action, ladies and gentlemen!

Thoughts on Situatied Cognition and philosophical underpinnings

First of all, I appreciated the comment Dr. Graham made on Monday that we be careful not to confuse underlying philosophies with instructional approaches, or even instructional theories with learning theories. After reading the Schuh and Barab article (Schuh, K. L., & Barab, S. A. (2008). Philosophical perspectives. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. van Merrienboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 67-82). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [paper]), I think I was a little prone to simplify and think - "Oh, if I used a situative cognition approach, I would have to be a relativist, and I'm not a relativist." So it was nice to be able to separate that out, and to realize that there are still various philosophical camps even within these broad categories.

I really enjoyed the Brown article (Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42. [online]) It seems so intuitive, and so vital, even though it's a little different than the way our educational institution is used to making things work.

I'm going to appeal to Rousseau again, because I am fundamentally a French major and will always remain such. :) One of the most seminal works I ever read was for a course on philosophy of the Enlightenment era - a French Department course. Among the many Rousseau works that we studied was his revolutionary book on education, Émile. Émile is the name of a boy, and the book is a hypothetical look at his life. He is raised by conscientious parents who want something different for their son - he has a tutor, and rather than attending school and being instructed in the classical pedagogical model, he spends his days doing real-life tasks, taking walks, buying groceries, all of this being guided and facilitated by his tutor. Through this hypothetical child's life, Rousseau shows us what a real education, a situated education, can do for a child.

After I had read Émile, I was left with that fantastic fuzzy feeling, and then brought back to cold hard reality. Who could possibly afford a private life-long tutor for each of their children? How could an education like this ever be feasible? After having read these most recent articles, I have some ideas. (Brown might call Émile's experience a cognitive apprenticeship, and explore "methods [that] try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident - and evidently successful - in craft apprenticeship.")

I've also been reading a couple other heretical books of late. One is John Holt's How Children Learn. Long admired by homeschool advocates, Holt is of a rather situativist viewpoint. In fact, some of what he wrote in 1962 is a pretty clear rebuke of the then-common Cognitive viewpoint:

Everything I learn of organisms, including what these people [Cognitive Theory advocates] tell me, leads me to conclude that they are not like machines at all. one famous experiment with rats showed that their behavior changed markedly for the worse in almost every respect when they were crowded into a small space. Other experiments with rats showed that their performance on tasks could be strongly affected by how their human handlers felt about them; rats who had been described to their handlers as smart performed better than identical rats described to their handlers as dumb. Do machines get nervous and break down when we put a lot of them in one room? Do they work better if we talk nicely to them? Some might say that we could someday design computers that would do that. I doubt it very much. But even if we could, the fact that we might make certain machines a little more like animals does not prove tin the least that organisms are, or even are like, machines.(Ibid., 11)

Holt began his work as a teacher and sought to reform the education system, but after years of promoting his theories, became disillusioned and promoted homeschooling, or rather, a line of thought that he called unschooling, which is not, when you look at it, all that different than Rousseau.

Am I promoting that we pull all our kids out of public school? No. (Well, maybe, on some days. But I can't do that and continue in my line of work.) I do strongly believe, though, that institutionalized education, by adopting some of the philosophies of the Situated Cognition advocates, can approach what Roussau and Holt were aiming for. I think that cognitive apprenticeships are possible. There's no way we can afford a private tutor for every student, but there's no way a single tutor would have the expertise desirable for every subject anyway. So why not expose students to a variety of coaches (experts, facilitators) who can conduct mini-apprenticeships throughout their experience? Why not be more flexible on which skills need to be masters at which grade level and instead let students explore the various disciplines through their own natural curiosity into avenues of interest? A student who doesn't naturally enjoy math but does like to cook is going to recoil at a worksheet full of equations, but will find himself deriving and using mathematics of his own accord if he has to half a recipe. These same principles we find in the Utopian texts of Rousseau and Holt are perhaps not too far-fetched if we are willing to re-examine our existing paradigms.

Radical Behaviorism

Reading the Driscoll chapter (Driscoll, M. (2000a). Radical behaviorism, Psychology of learning for instruction (2nd ed., pp. 31-70). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. [ereserve]) on Radical Behaviorism was very interesting. I think the fact that I read it directly after having read the Schuh article on the philosophical perspectives of learning styles really affected the way I looked at the presentation of Behaviorism.

The Schuh article, and our current cultural context in general, presents Behaviorism as the Big Bad Antiquated Giant. There aren't too many B.F. Skinner proponents writing and speaking out there these days. But reading the chapter on Behaviorism opened my eyes to how prevalent Behaviorist assumptions really still are.

I think that the Behaviorist viewpoint is pretty universal still in the realm of animals. (Unless, perhaps, you've read Temple Grandin.) The way we treat our pets is almost completely based on Behaviorist principles. And this is because most of us look at animals like black boxes. We have no idea what's going on inside. We know that we can't appeal to a dog's ability to reason, so any sort of instructional principle that would rely on reason would fail. So instead, we swat them on the nose with a rolled-up magazine. But there's something deeper there - even within animals - that we can see and sometimes it's a little bittersweet that we can't touch it. You see your dog reacting out of sheer fear, and you want to just reach out and make it understand. "It's not because I'm mean! I just can't have you chewing on my throw pillows!"

It gets even more difficult to swallow when it's applied to humans. To what extent is a child like a dog? There is something creepily dehumanizing about the military and other situations that routinely use Behaviorist principles to "train" humans. That's what Behavorist instruction is fundamentally - it's training rather than teaching.

However, there are certain facets of Behaviorist instruction that we use every day. Most fascinating to me was the example given in Driscoll's chapter about using Behaviorist training methods (Frequency Interval for rewards and suchlike) to discipline yourself. When grading papers, for example, after every 15 papers, you get to take a break and have a snack. I think this would be a very helpful method for me, who tends to have to force willpower on myself with systems of self-reward. So why, if I think it a dehumanizing, impersonal principle, do I use it on myself?

I think maybe the only answer is that there are certain tasks and behaviors and stages in life for which these types of approach are fitting, even appropriate. There are types of information that has to be learned in a drill-and-practice way. I've found that myself in studying character-based language. There's no amount of intuitive reasoning or creativity or group work that will help me read Japanese. That's a situation in which what's going on in my black box doesn't actually matter.

But how do we keep it relegated to the domains to which it belongs? Where do we draw the line between humans and animals? How do we keep ourselves from letting it take over our view of what human beings are and how they work? That's where we have to differentiate and use careful study of the theory in our practical applications.

Personal Learning Environment

• What is a personal learning environment (PLE)?
• What elements make up a PLE?
• How is a PLE different from a Learning Managment System?
• What are some examples of PLEs?

Internet Research: Find answers to the following questions:

• What is an RSS feed?
• Find 2-3 RSS feeds related to Instructional Technology that you would like to follow throughout the semester.

A Personal Learning Environment is basically an organizational tool that allows you to customize your online resources. I am using blogger - it allows me to follow other blogs and feeds as well as post my own thoughts and responses. It also allows you to communicate and interact with other students, peers and instructors.

According to Learning Technologies Centre, the elements of a PLE exist on both the desktop and the web. These elements include production tools (Wikis, blogs, YouTube), collaboration tools, communication tools (Skype, IM), storage tools, aggregators, social networking sites and more.

These differ from Learning Management Systems in that the latter are software programs designed and implemented by an outside sources. The PLE is self-centric, and specific to each individual user.

The RSS feeds that I'm using as part of my PLE can be found in the "blogs I'm following" and include the Journal of Educational Psychology and Learning and Instructional Design.

On My Blog Title

It's hard not to be pretentious when you're writing a blog. The very act of creating it is telling the world "My everyday thoughts are so profound that you should read them." The fact that my whole culture and especially my generation thinks this way doesn't help. The fact that I try fruitlessly to kick against the pricks - to try to transcend my dang generation - only makes me sound like a snob. So to soften the blow of publishing my ego in yet another format (I'm afraid I exist in numerous incarnations online. Numerous.), I've appealed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the title of my blog.

Rousseau was egotistical, but he was brilliant, so we forgive him. His Confessions was presciently postmodern in expecting the readership of the world to care about, much less accept his justification for, his moral shortcomings. But, to be fair, he never intended it to be on the discount rack at Barnes & Noble either. But when you read enough of him, you really do soften to the guy. Émile just tugs at your heartstrings. And perhaps his most endearing work of all is his Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire - the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. The guy just liked to go on walks through Paris when he was getting old. And there's nothing egotistical about the random errant genius liking to take walks.

So I'll strive to keep the thoughts expressed in this blog appropriate to the spirit of the Rêveries. The title sounds a little morose, like I'm bemoaning my solitariness. Nothing of the sort. I live with a French girl who likes to talk about love, culture, and Gene Kelly. I work with fantastic, compassionate colleagues. And I also have a lawn gnome named David who travels the world with me. No - the solitude of my existence is only for literary effect.