The anthropology of Youtube

What is Web 2.0 and what does it mean for us, not only in education but in society? Anthropologist Michael Wesch tells us. This is an hour-long documentary, but it's fascinating.

Flow

I was just talking with a colleague about long, boring classes. What's the answer to three-hour class periods? Are they just too long, or is there an effective way to handle them?

My experience taught me some interesting things - I was a fine arts major (graphic design) during my undergrad, and I noticed a difference between my studio classes, which were sometimes 4 hours long, and my art history classes, which were hour-and-a-half lecture classes. I loved art history as a subject, but the classes just dragged along and I rarely made it through one conscious. Studio classes, on the other hand, were a very different experience. I would often get to the end of a class period and feel like I was waking up. I almost didn't want to stop tweaking my project. One of my professors made us stand up and do Tai Chi breaks throughout the period so we didn't neglect our bodies and go totally catatonic on him.

What if we could have that experience, a studio work experience, in a subject like art history or educational psychology or even economics? What would that be like?

Well, it turns out that of course I'm not the first one to notice this. Flow is a very real phenomenon, first documented by Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It's a state where time is distorted, focus is intent, and, to be frank, you're just working and learning because you want to. And it's not just art. But here's the question for us as teachers and instructional designers - how do we achieve flow in disciplines that are not traditionally associated with that type of learning? As I was talking with my colleague, I mentioned that I wanted to do some research at schools where they use the Montessori Method - specifically a Montessori highschool if possible. And as I read a little more into the Wikipedia article linked above, I realized that Csíkszentmihályi himself studied the concept of flow in Montessori.

This is a really fascinating opportunity, I think, for some future research ideas that I'm now kicking around. Perhaps in language learning - how do we kick into flow in that specific discipline. Anyone had any experiences where they felt like they were in "flow?"

Back to the education blog

This blog got really boring for a while, and a lot of the entries ended up being notes from class presentations. Ignore those, and we shall continue on.

For my job at the CTL, I'm writing a lit review for a study we're doing on successful technology integration in the classroom. I'm nearing the end, and things are getting big and theoretical. I'm writing the crux of the paper right now, where we're defining and defending our main arguments. I'm going to post what I wrote today here, so I can re-read and revise and evaluate, but also to see if anyone has any thoughts on clarity and organization. I'm still struggling to decide where headers and subheaders go in this section, but here it is so far, in one big rambly chunk:

We have chosen to refer to the underlying concept that influences the success of technology integration in the classroom as agentive valuation. There are other terms in the literature that closely parallel this concept, and some very familiar ones that we will include in our discussion, but phrasing it in terms of agentive valuation allows us to see how key factors like goal orientation, risk tolerance, self- and social-efficacy, and instrumental value all fit together as manifestations of the basic properties and propensities of human beings; agency and valuational behavior.

As research in educational psychology in the 20^th century began to move beyond the controllable stimulus and response observations of B.F. Skinner, psychologists began to explore what was going on within the individual mind of the learner and the new approaches of cognitivism, constructivism and social cognitivism took the standpoint that learners are agents in their own right, driven by more than simply external stimuli (Bandura, 1986).

Bronfenbrenner (1995) proposes as “the first defining property of the bioecological paradigm; namely, … a conception of the human organism as an active agent in, and on, its environment” (Bronfenbrenner, et al., 1995). But even apart from these overarching arguments of big-name therorists, researchers in individual studies in recent years have been defining concepts and operationalizing factors that are actually facets of agentive behavior, though they may not be labeled explicitly as such.

Two widely explored phenomena in educational technology literature and beyond are goal-orientation and risk tolerance. These two factored prominently into the previously-discussed research into why certain teachers may or may not implement technology in the classroom, external constraints being controlled for (Baldwin, 1998; Baylor & Ritchie, 2002; Becker & Ravitz, 1999; Davies, et al., 2008; Diehl, 2005; Dusick, 1998; Ertmer, 1999; Ertmer, et al., 2001; Harrington, 2008; Nicolle, 2005; Orlando, 2005; Sandholtz, et al., 1996; Wagner, 2001; Zhao & Cziko, 2001). But why can we assert that goal orientation and risk tolerance, complex issues on their own, are actually manifestations of agency?

Any choice made by a sentient organism, and we face countless choices on a daily basis, is a process of decision-making weighed in the context of pre-existing goals and previous experience. While goals in the ecological metaphor may be fairly straightforward (the drive to stay alive, the urge to eat and pass on genes), higher levels of sentiency create more complex goals. Human beings operate under a hierarchy of needs to be met, the highest of which are psychological rather than dealing with mere physical survival (Maslow, 1943). These higher-level needs are highly personal and contextual and require something greater than mere instinct to evaluate and execute them; this capacity is agency.

When there are multiple goals and any sort of hierarchy of importance, there is then a necessity to prioritize, to favor certain goals over others. (The process of deciding which goals to prioritize is the process of valuation, which we will address shortly.) These competing implicit goals generate risk. Zhao & Cziko relate the human process of evaluating competing goals and risks and weighing them against perceived outcomes to Perceptual Control Theory, the same principle underlying mechanical devices like the cruise control system on a car (Zhao & Cziko, 2001). In this light, risk tolerance, which is usually addressed in the literature as either a personality trait or a learned behavior or both (Baldwin, 1998; Wagner, 2001), is seen as a measure of the disparity among values placed on competing implicit goals.