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.