blogging at 10,000 feet

As it turns out, on my flight back to SLC the wireless access was free. I never really thought I would pay for internet access on a plane, but since it was free I thought I would go ahead and check the scores and my email. But the really interesting thing is that the internet access up here is much better than it was in my hotel room. There, it was worse that a 28K modem. But here it is pretty fast. I guess the thing it makes me remember is the importance of making web sites accessible to people with disabilities of course but also to people with slow connection speeds. Blackboard, for example, does not work well at all when the internet access speeds are slow. Everything takes several minutes to load. So I am a little behind on helping my TA out with his portion ogf the grading, which he cannot do since the internet access where he is is even slower. So with case-based learning, since that is what my students will be learning about next week, videos can be crucially important to help describe cases. But videos can take up a lot of bandwidth. One way to get around that is to use really good compression technologies, and it have multiple options of people who can download lower quality versions if they have slow internet. Now if we could just get blackboard to create a low-bandwidth alternative....

conference reflection

One thing that has always been a problem for me at conferences is figuring out the layout. It always seems that it is not until the end of the conference that I actually understand how to get from one room in one building to another room in another building. So I have been wandering quite a bit today. But that is okay because my presentation went pretty well. People had questions and that is always a good thing. I also remembered what I was going to say pretty well. And some people want to read my paper (being a good academic I wrote out a full length paper before the conference....that's what we are supposed to do but some people do not do that), which is definitely a good thing.
Something I have learned over the years is that conferences are not only about presenting and attending presentations on interesting topics. Rather, they are about building relationships with other academics. Sometimes those other academics are professors, sometimes students, and sometimes industry professionals. Academics just like any other field is social. You have to build off of other's research to do any research of value. The way you know about that research is by a combination of doing a lit search and the snowball method of talking to people you know who do research in the area that you do, asking them for suggestions of what to read, asking people who wrote the stuff that you were referred to for some more stuff to read, and so on. You never can read everything that there has been written on a topic, and if you limit yourself to just library lit searches you can miss important lines of research just by not having the right keywords and so forth. But also there is the file drawer problem, in which people might have done a study that did not give significant or interesting results, and it never gets published, and thus sits in someone's file drawer. The only way you can know about those is by talking to people. Another benefit of building relationships is that it helps when it it time for job hunting and writing collaborative grant proposals. I knew 4 people at USU before I ever interviewed here. I knew them from conferences. Of course I know that they did not give me preferential treatment because I knew them, but I could ask them "what is it like in Logan?" (knowing about where you are interviewing is very important because you come out for two-three days and then if you are lucky you get a job offer which could potentially be the only job for the rest of your life). I could also guess what types of questions they might ask at my job talk.
So in short, yes, academia is a social enterprise just as much as other lines of work, but that is not a bad thing. Rather it helps open our eyes to previous work that might not have been discoverable by just going to the library.

Meetings galore

One of the things that happens at the beginning of a new school year is a bunch meetings - department meetings, college meetings, student meetings, other meetings with colleagues. But that is just part of academia, and it is of course extremely important to meet with students, because as my dean said, one of our most important jobs is to prepare the next generation of researchers. I'm very fortunate to have a lot of good students. We're here at the university to research but also teach.
It's funny that even how far technology has come, face to face meetings are the way things get done. I wonder if western governors or the university of phoenix - totally online universities - also have face to face meetings. Online conferences are making some headway, but even this conference on elearning is held face to face:
http://www.aace.org/conf/ELEARN/
It seems online conferences would be good especially given the current economic environment, and it would also help the environment since hundreds or thousands of people would not have to be flying across the country or the world to the same place at the same time. But I must admit seeing someone in person is very different from seeing him/her on a computer screen. Seeing colleagues in person helps to build collaborations, which is what we as university professors need to do. You can't build a truly successful research program entirely by yourself. Will videoconferencing or other technologies bring us to the point where we could have online conferences in which you can build collaborations in the same way? My guess is right now if you don't already know the potential collaborator, that would be hard. But who knows what future technologies will afford.

winding down

so as we are winding down the summer session I have had the chance to reflect a little on online courses. Though some people lament that you don't always have the human connection in online course that you do in face-to-face courses, I think it all depends on how you structure the course. I took a lot of pains to center the course on student-student interaction, and to have students construct their knowledge through their own effort and interactions with fellow students to the extent possible. Of course teachers are involved in online courses, and this course was no exception, but I tried to be careful to not insert myself into discussions too soon for fear that students would see my contribution as the final arbiter, as if there is nothing else to discuss. Though of course I have a phd in curriculum and instruction, I don't know everything there is to know about learning theories, and my students this semester have such a wealth of teaching experience that it would be a crime for them to not be encouraged to share with each other the insights they have developed. Theory should inform practice just as practice should inform theory. Just as good businessmen learn as much or more from their customers and business partners, professors learn from their students. Not that students and customers are the same thing. I think my students felt a personal connection. I know I feel like I know my students well even though i have only met in person two of them. But I suppose I will see most of them in person for graduation next year.
Of course online courses bring some other benefits....students can be anywhere there is an internet connection, so they can get an education and not have to quit their jobs. Or they can go on vacation during the semester. But face-to face courses are good too. Our department is likely going to have an online MS program starting in 2010, but we are still going to have campus MS and phd programs. For a phd program, it seems to be better to have an on-campus program due to the extensive one to one research mentoring. And many potential MS students just want to have the option of a campus program. And lets face it, Cache valley is beautiful:
http://www.tourcachevalley.com/
So with the online ms and med programs we can reach more people.

one size does not fit all

As I have stressed to my students, learning theories are not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. That is, there is no one learning theory that predicts all learning equally well. Rather learning theories provide different tools that all can be put in a teacher's toolbox. So this week we are talking about case-based learning. It is a very interesting theory, and true enough many students can learn many subjects very well through cases. Sometime they can help you learn content that you cannot learn very well without cases. For example, AECT's professional ethics committee presents cases illustrating the application of ethics principles to realistic situations. It helps show how principles can be applied to real situations. And because readers can relate to the situations, they can see how the principle applies to their lives. But what is important in case-based learning is not the cases themselves, but what students do with the cases. Students need to debate the cases, apply principles to them, and so forth to gain the full potential benefits of case-based learning.

Theory and Research: the link

One of the interesting things about learning theories are their value to both practice and research. They help explain and predict learning. As an education researcher that means it helps both for research and teaching. Though they didn't help me predict accurately the way my students would interpret my initial assignments for the class, they do explain the interpretations. I guess the way I would look at it is from a schema theory point of view. All my students have different schemas and for the most part my communication with them is asynchronous and mostly test. So schema theory is a great way to look at it. Students interpreted my assignments a little differently than I had thought initially. Now I have modified/clarified the assignments and all is well it seems. Perhaps the assignments fit better with their M. Ed. class schema?

Thoughts on Piaget

Piaget is an interesting character. He didn't really study in the education field...he was a psychologist. But he is one of the most influential figures in education, though sometimes for the wrong reasons. For instance, his idea of genetic epistemology is one of his more famous theories, but somehow people lost the point of it. Perhaps it was through bad translations (I speak French and have read both english and french versions of some of his works and there are sometimes some issues in the translations), or people's natural tendency to simplify things. What piaget said was that there were stages in children's cognition that all children go through in the same order no matter what culture they were from. But he never said anything like "Once kids hit their 14th birthdays, they will be able to reason formally." And he never said that when students struggle with something teachers should just throw up their arms and say "my students can't do that because they are in X stage." Rather he said that one should push the limits of students' thinking to help push them to the next stage. Ultimately that is what teachers are in the business of.

learning theories

so now in my learning theories class we are on meaningful learning. I like Ausubel's theory. I remember one of his quotes that went something like this "The most important thing to know about students is what they already know....learn that and teach accordingly." Or something like that. I think it is a very truthful statement. Connecting new material to already known material is always a good thing. Using analogies to already known material is helpful. So for example if I am trying to teach the game of cricket to an American, I might use the analogy of baseball since some of the facets of the game are similar. Students can learn what is different and similar between the games. That will help the new information to be better remembered and also make it so that less information needs to be learned.
Now Ausubel based his whole theory on studies of verbal learning....so learning how things are rather than how to do things or solve problems. But the principles can be applied to procedures or problem-solving also. So the big six could be compared to the scientific method for example.
The most important thing to remember as an instructional technologist learning about learning theories is that the greatest value of learning theories is that they help explain that if you have X learning situation and use strategy Y, then learning is likely to occur. They help ground the creation of instruction in knowledge of how people learn. After all what use is theory if it cannot help us refine practice? Locked up in an ivory tower theory does no one any good, but when applied they can do a world of good.

what is learning?

Since my students are writing about this I thought I should do it too. So what is learning? It is the age old question. If you ask B.F. Skinner he would say that it is response strengthening. If you were to ask Lev Vygotsky he would say something entirely different, probably the construction of knowledge about the world through social interaction. So is one wrong and the other right? No. There is an element of truth in what each of them said. Theories are all about explaining and predicting phenomena. For a phenomenon as complicated as learning, there are bound to be different theories. While theorist now tend to not look at the mind as a black box as did behaviorists like Skinner, there still is no interpretation of what learning is that can be considered the only correct interpretation. The brain is a complex organ...the most complex in the human body. There is some research now into the physiological changes in brains when learning occurs. However it is not clear that knowing this will really help us understand more about learning and be better able to explain and predict learning. Of course I am biased as an instructional technologist, but to me the most important thing to think about when discussing learning theories is the extent to which they can provide guidance on instructional strategies that will lead to learning. If they don't do that they are not much good to me.
I think a good definition of learning is a change in the ability to use information to solve problems. Problems are where there is a difference between the current state and desired state. There are obviously different types of problems. Some may just be a difference between one's current knowledge and desired knowledge, or others may be roofs that leak. If you don't already know how to solve the problem you have to learn. I noticed a slight leak in my house and to fix it I needed to learn about flashing...no not the raincoat kind but the metal stuff that covers transitions in roofs. I learned about what it is and how it should be attached to the roof and how to fix it if it is not working right. Luckily a lot of information to help people learn about that is online. But it takes good information literacy to use it appropriately. Anyone can publish online and so I wanted to make sure any information I found was from a reliable source. So I looked for information from reliable sources and made sure that at least two sites said the same thing, and went to work and fixed the problem.

in Georgia

Since we are talking about learning theories you all might find it interesting that I am in Georgia to work on a grant proposal with collaborators at the University of Georgia. What we plan to do is to embed motivational strategies into computer-based scaffolds, which you will be learning about later this semester. Well, you will be learning about scaffolds. But remember, just because I research about scaffolds does not mean that I think that social constructivism is the only learning theory worth knowing about. You can draw strategies from all sorts of learning theories. Learning theories are not like theories in some fields, for example physics, where you have a theory that hold sway for several years and then gets supplanted by something that describes reality better. Different people learn different content differently. Behaviorism, which we will be covering next week, is still relevant, especially in the context of physical and special education (and pet training) and in providing extrinsic motivation (which some people do not like but still is a common form of motivational support). It really provided the foundation for disciplined inquiry into learning and for the field of instructional technology.
To understand learning theories you have to keep an open mind when reading about them. You may not fully agree with all their assumptions about learning and about learners, and that's okay, just think that it could contain an element of truth and continue to read. Even though my research is all social constructivist I still admire and use learning theories like behaviorism and the people who formulated such theories.

back in Logan

So I got back to Logan. My cat really wanted to go, but he had to stay back in Utah:

The conference was fun. I got to see a lot of people I know and meet some new people. My presentation went well. It was on Monday. It was a bit chilly by San Diego standards. One day it was so windy I thought I was back in Indiana.


I got a best paper award, but apparently it is made of lead crystal, so the airport screeners weren't too happy with it. But I got it back to Logan.

gearing up

so I am gearing up to go to San Diego for the american educational research association. It is always a good time and very stimulating intellectually. 20-25,000 people representing all flavors and types of educational research. It is definitely the place to be as an educational researcher. Purdue will have a reception so I can go there....and USU, in conjunction with BYU and U of U will have one also. I present on monday and then get a best paper award on wednesday, so that will be fun. But apparently it will be colder in san diego than in logan utah. Go figure. I wished it was warmer so I could go to the beach.
So what does this have to do with education you might ask? Well, aside from it being an education conference, I think some of my greatest learning in graduate school happened at conferences. Not so much in being exposed to new ideas, though that was part of it. But also in understanding the academic game. I know it may sound harsh and self-deprecating, but I think it is accurate to call the academic system in a way a game. It has rules and regulations and certain ways things work, and you really have to get beneath the surface to understand that. You can't just read it in a book. You need to learn through acculturation, as Collins Brown and Duguid - dubbed by a certain instructional technologist as the situated learning crowd - aptly noted. It's unfortunate that many graduate students do not get to experience presenting at conferences, as it gives great experience for preparing for the job hunt, is well regarded by search committees, and can potentially help students to realize the nature of the academic enterprise. Academics, like anyone else, are humans. They want to work at work and not work when they are not at work. So when you see a famous scholar outside of the conference hall, you say hi and talk about non-work stuff. When you present the goal is not to give a flawless presentation that leaves the audience with no questions, but rather you want to intrigue the audience about your paper enough to have questions and want to read it.

making progress

I am making progress on my second bathroom renovation. This has turned into a real project. I had to replace the subfloor, strip wallpaper, fix holes in the wall, rip out the old brown vinyl vanity, replace the toilet flange and the pipe leading up to it, and so on. I found some swinging 70s wallpaper hidden beneath the outer layer of wallpaper (see previous post), and I wonder if the bathroom had a disco ball also back in the day. Now I am tiling. Of course with tiling you have to cut some pieces of tile to fit the room. That has been a real time consuming task. I got the tile that I and others thought looked the best in the bathroom. It's porcelain and apparently the hardest tile you can get. It takes my wet saw a lot of time to cut through it. That makes me think that it will be durable, but pity the fool who drops anything on my bathroom floor! I am quite sure anything dropped will shatter to pieces. Under my tile I have a heating system that is hooked to a programmable thermostat. So I can set it to warm up the tiles just in time for my morning shower, which on fridays this semester is pretty early since I teach at 7:30. Then I can set it a little later for other days. I know my cat is looking forward to having heated tiles. He'll be sitting there all winter.

So what does this have to do with education? Well, just as with being a good teacher, success in home renovation projects requires a lot of patience. Sometimes things don't work right, like corroded toilet bolts will not come off, hacksaws will fall apart, batteries will run out of juice at just the wrong time, and when cutting pipe you have to recut 10 times to get it to the right length. You have to be able to roll with the punches, try new strategies (like a hacksaw and chisel for the toilet bolt...please note, using a hacksaw and chisel is not a euphemism for ways of dealing with students, it's what I really had to use with my toilet bolt), and keep your eyes on the end prize: for my bathroom renovation, a shiny new bathroom that is beautiful and sanitary, for teachers, motivated and learning students. That is, the measure of success of a teacher is not necessarily that students learn everything that they will need to know in one fell swoop, but that they learn some of what they need to know and are motivated to learn the rest.

Bathroom renovation

As the tiling adventure continues... I set to work on another bathroom a week or so ago. This one was upstairs so it had a plywood subfloor. But yes it had carpet. And the plywood underneath was rotten. This has turned out to be quite the project. I have had to do plumbing, demolition, reconstruction of a subfloor, wallpaper stripping (two layers!), and then I will do tiling and painting. Learning about all this stuff has been interesting. I have had to look online for multiple people who say the same things, ask at lowes/home depot, and so forth. I've been learning a lot and I appreciate being able to know how the job is getting done.

Tiling

So for my weekend adventure this week I set to tiling my bathrooms. I bought a house when I moved to Logan that had three bathrooms, all with carpet. It kind of boggled my mind that one would have carpet in the bathroom, but I had seen it in other houses in Logan so I thought to myself: Maybe it's a Logan thing. After all there are some places in the world where people put carpet in the bathrooms...Great Britain being one. I personally think that carpet in a bathroom is the worst possible thing that you could have in a house. You come out of the shower and step in the carpet making it wet, and then it is wet for at least ten hours. That is not sanitary. I had never tiled before but I thought to myself: how hard can it be? I'm patient and pretty good at following directions. So my dad said that Lowes and Home Depot have free classes on tiling. I went to Lowes and they said they used to have in person classes but now they have all their stuff online. That was fine with me, but the tile I finally selected for my first bathroom was from Home depot. I went to get the tile and lo and behold they still had an in person class. So I thought to myself I might as well give that a shot since I am here. But it turned out the employee who usually did these classes had forgotten that he was supposed to do it. I was the only one there and he showed me what I needed to know. Then I got home, sized up the tiles and saw how they would fit. Then today I mortared them down to the floor. Now I need to wait to put in the grout. I am sure I would have done okay with Lowes' online training. Maybe I should check it out now.

Skiing take 3

Yes, I went skiing again. And I seemed to do a lot better than the first two times. Maybe next time I can give a blue diamond hill a try. But what I am going to write about today is the methods by which children learn to ski. At Beaver Mountain there appeared to be several different strategies. Some kids took lessons from ski instructors. Since I was riding the lift by myself for the most part, some of these kids rode the lift with me so there was an adult to make sure that they were safe. Essentially these lessons seemed to be demonstration and practice. The ski instructor would demo a technique and then the kids would practice. I was able to steer to avoid people much better yesterday, so that was very helpful because sometimes there would be a class of 6 or so kids all practicing.
But some parents showed their kids how to ski. In those cases, there seems to be three methods. Some simply allowed their kids to try under their supervision. Some had leashes attached to their kids to help make sure the kid could not get too far away. And then some parents skied holding their kids right in front of them. So I was wondering what would have worked the best for me when I was a kid. I actually was a very rambunctious kid, so my mom sometimes had to have a leash on me out in public to keep me from running out of view. So I am guessing my parents would have gone the leash route. But maybe they would have had me take lessons?

Skiing, take 2

I went skiing again today. I seemed to remember much of what I learned about skiing from last week. But it seemed that there were more people out today, and so I had a few more issues trying to avoid people. For the most part I only wiped out trying to avoid people, which is good progress I guess.

So since this is an education blog, let's talk about education. According to behaviorism the way people learn is to give them stimuli to provoke a behavior, and then to reward them, and then to either (a) have them do a slightly more complex behavior, and reward them, and so on until you have them doing the target behavior (shaping), or (b) have them perform the next step in the overall task and reward them, and so on until they have performed all steps of the task successfully (chaining). Unfortunately that does not work so well at Beaver Mountain. Basically there is a tiny hill called Little Dogie that is not very steep at all, and then the next hill, Little Beaver, is very steep. So when I learned from Doug last week it was more or less behaviorism in action, at least initially. Doug showed me how to slow down, I practiced, and so on. Skinner would be proud. This week it was more learn by doing. I had to just go at little beaver and hope that I did not crash into anything and that I was learning along the way. And of course I fell a few times, but less than last week. But as Schank says, one must fail to learn. We'll see next time whether I learned anything this week, but I do feel a little more comfortable. I'm able to turn pretty well for the most part now. Slowing down when I am going super fast, not so much. But it went a lot better this week, and hopefully being able to slow down will come with time.

Aggie basketball

So I finally made it to an Aggie basketball game, the one against Louisiana Tech. I had read about how wonderful the student section is at Aggie basketball games, and I must give them credit...I've been to basketball games at the College of Wooster (a division 3 school where I went to undergrad with a very strong basketball tradition), and to games at two other schools with strong basketball traditions - Ohio State and Purdue. At Ohio State I have been to games both in St John arena and Value City Arena (I know, what a ridiculous name). At Purdue I have been to games in storied Mackey Arena (where the court is named after one of the coaching greats, Gene Keady). I have never encountered a student section that is as well coordinated and vocal as that of Utah State.
So what does this have to do with education, you might ask? Well, I would have liked to have had a video recorder to record the students while they were doing one of their cheers or signing. So when I got home I decided to check youtube for the aggie fight song. wasn't quite sure what it was called but it was cool when they were playing it and the students were waving their arms in unison. And lo and behold I found it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A24gog3CSSA
And I remembered that this week I had talked to my students about copyright, and mentioned that a lot of stuff in youtube is in violation of copyright. It's important stuff, as teachers can be sued or fired for using materials in violation of copyright. Unfortunately it is also a subject that has a lot of grey areas, something some of my students did not seem to like too much. So I thought to myself, "is this clip in violation of copyright?" Though it does have some subtitles, it did not seem to be a professional job, not meaning that it was bad but meaning that it did not seem like something out of a television studio. That's good, as if someone recorded it off TV, then that would be a copyright violation. So if it is just a homemade video, then it is probably not violating copyright by puting a link to the youtube page here.
Well, tomorrow it is my second attempt at skiing. I may become a real Utahn yet!

skiing

I went skiing yesterday for the first time. Well, actually I went once when I was 12. But that was back in Ohio and I wiped out on the bunny hill, twisting my ankle. I had decided then that skiing was not for me. But since I had moved to a state where there are real mountains, I thought I would give it a try. So what does this have to do with instructional technology you may ask. Well, obviously if you don't know how to do something, you have to learn. So how did I learn? Well, they do offer group classes at Beaver Mountain on how to stop, how to turn, and so forth. But the time they offered lessons wasn't right for me. So my friend Doug, who is relatively new to skiing, said he would help me learn the basic skills. He demonstrated how to stop, and I practiced. He did a pretty good job, and after a few runs on the little dogie, the least challenging of the runs at Beaver Mountain, I tried my hand at the Little Beaver. Little Beaver was very challenging...I wiped out a few times. But I was able to get myself back up.

I guess you could say that Doug helping me learn how to ski was a case of peer tutoring. Doug was not an expert skier, but he was able to demonstrate what he had learned and talk about some of the things he experienced and learned as he was practicing. So that was very helpful. Peer tutoring has been shown to be effective in helping students learn many different subjects at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. While I am still far from perfect skiing, I got a good start. Now as soon as the soreness wears off, I will give it another try.

UEN

UEN is a pretty neat tool for Utah educators. I have used wimba in the past to bring guest speakers into the classroom. Students love to be able to have experts in various areas speak to them, and I don't have the budget to pay for travel expenses. But with wimba all a speaker needs is a web cam and a computer with an internet connection. This would be great for elementary teachers, who could have people from different cultures speak to their students.

online education

In an interesting twist of fate, ever since I graduated with my Ph. D. in educational technology I have gotten a large number of snail mail letters imploring me to "finally complete my education so I can get ahead"  from institutions such as University of Phoenix and Argosy University. There's not too much farther one can go after a Ph. D. Even if one could, I am not so sure I would want to. I am wondering where this surge in such letters has come from. Did Purdue sell my address?

Blogging about my students blogging

Since I am having my students blog about blogging in their future classrooms, I thought it only fair for me to blog about them blogging about blogging in their future classroom. Whew, that was a mouthful... Reflection is an integral part of teacher education. As such, teacher educators should be mindful to encourage reflection among preservice teachers. It is one of the best ways to get students to translate theory into practice. One of the ways it can help is the use of blogging in conjunction with field experience or student teaching. When preservice teachers try a technique they were taught in methods classes the first time, it is likely that it will not work as planned, or at least not for all students. If preservice teachers reflect on what went well and what went not so well, they can think about why. Such reflection works better when the reflector can do so as soon as possible. With a blog, preservice teachers can reflect on a day's experience in a school that evening. And their comments can shortly be read by other preservice teachers as well as experienced teachers, who can provide insight as to what can be done better.

Back to this week's assignment, I will find it interesting to see what all ideas my students have for the use of blogs in the classroom. Obviously they all want to teach different levels, and even two students who want to teach third grade will likely have different takes on how blogs can be used in the classroom. Collective intelligence can be a powerful thing, and hopefully students will gain new ideas from reading each other's posts.