February 6th, 2010
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field.
I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition classes. By teaching, I don’t mean that they were teaching how to communicate on the Web as much as how to use the programs, in other words, they were spending class time showing what each button of the respective programs did. In essence, their courses were software instruction classes instead of writing classes and, in my opinion, the students’ writing suffered.
I came to composition instruction fresh from industry, where technology was a tool to get a job done. I wondered how, as instructors, we could use technology to fit our needs, rather than the other way around. This, I found, was not a popular approach in my department. Once I entered grad school, I signed up for the main listserv in the field of computers and composition and made a disappointing discovery — they, too, were focusing on how to fit their lessons around the technology. In fact, in 2005, I attended one of their conferences at Stanford and spent three or four days completely frustrated by the focus on technology, rather than writing. Who cares about Drupal or Flash if the students can’t write?
At that point, Larry Cuban’s Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001), addressed my concerns. While Cuban is skeptical about educational technology, he also reports on successful use of ed tech, and that’s what interested me. In particular, he described Esperanza Rodrigues’ preschool classroom at Benjamin co-op, in the Bay area. In teaching students about shapes, Rodrigues blended strong practice using both offline and online techniques, seamlessly moving between using and not using technology to enhance the learning experience. By strong practice, she had a clear lesson plan and learning goal, she engages the students in the learning process, reinforces the lesson and pushes them beyond their comfort level to a new understanding. In my opinion, Rodrigues demonstrates best practice in using technology in education — she uses it as a tool to enhance a strong lesson plan, it is not the main feature and she has not formed her lesson to fit the technology.
A few months later, I read Richard Mayer’s (2001) Multimedia Learning for the first time. I was happy to discover he was at UCSB and started attending his classes. Multimedia Learning establishes clear, rigorous methods for measuring whether learning occurs in multimedia environments and whether the technology enhances or detracts from the learning environment. Mayer offers research-based recommendations for designing learner-centered multimedia environments. [Note: Rich Mayer is my advisor. My research, thinking, and teaching have very much benefited from his mentorship.]
Around that time, James Paul Gee (2003) published What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which approaches the question of technology and learning differently from Mayer’s text, but nonetheless makes very strong contributions. I was most interested in Gee’s claims about why video games are so compelling. The main take-away messages for me in terms of effective ways to incorporate technology into learning environments were the concepts of active learning (see DH Jonassen for more info), pushing students beyond their zone of proximal development (see Vygotsky for more info), and allowing for risk taking by making the consequences for failure low.
I became increasingly interested in student classroom engagement and wanted to compare engagement in classes that taught the same lesson, but one used the learning concepts I was studying and one did not. My colleague Doug Bradley and I developed a learning simulation in which we incorporated Gee’s and Mayer’s ideas. Not surprisingly, in classes where computers were available, but not used, students had high levels of disengagement, using the computers for off-task activities such as ESPN, shopping, and entertainment (we conducted this study before Facebook was popular). In the classes where we used the simulation, off-task activities were minimal, indicating that students were highly engaged (abstract available on ERIC).
While I’ve read many interesting and useful books and articles on Educational Technology, Mayer and Gee are my main influences. Another text of interest is Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point (2000), Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor, where he discusses why kids love Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. Michele Dickey’s (2005) Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design, published in Educational Technology Research and Development presents research-based findings about engaging students using techniques from video games. Of course, there’s many others.
In her recent interview on Frontline, Sherry Turkle said “The point is we’re really at the very beginning of learning how to use this technology in the ways that are the most nourishing and sustaining. We’re going to slowly find our balance, but I think it’s going to take time…” She said that technology is neither good nor bad, but it is powerful. When considering the history of reform in education, we’ve jumped from one promising method to another. I agree with Turkle that the key is balance. We should prioritize learning and engage teaching methods that will best enhance the learning experience.
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September 17th, 2009
My sixth grade teacher, Mr. Zahn, passed away over the weekend. As I was remembering his class, two things stood out. First, he led our choir and always included Beatles’ songs, even at Christmas. We must have been a sight, a group of 11 year-old girls singing When I’m 64. Thanks to him, I’ve always wondered about the Isle of Wight, but I digress… Second, and actually more importantly, he taught us presentation skills.
The major project of our sixth grade year was a presentation on a European country. Mr. Zahn eschewed the standard pre-Powerpoint presentation format of reading from a ragged notebook page. Instead, he taught us to use notecards, to practice, to incorporate color, visuals, costumes, food, and stories into our presentations. The next year, our school would get their first computers and the following year, my parents purchased our first home computer. Powerpoint would first be released, in black-and-white, a year later. At this point, we had posterboard and our imaginations.
In preparation for our presentations, he first discussed the content. We needed to know our countries backward and forward. We should thoroughly present details of the country following his guidelines (history, traditions, major cities, population, etc.). Then he educated us in the need to engage our audience. Mr. Zahn’s background was in theater and music. He discussed the importance of visuals. At the very least, everyone should include a map, flag, and some representation of traditional costuming of our chosen country. “A” students, he said, wore costumes and transformed the classroom into the country for the day. He said we shouldn’t just rattle off facts about the country, but instead tell its story.
The popular countries — England, Ireland, Scotland, and France — got picked quickly. I chose the USSR — in the late 80’s a controversial choice, but my grandmother had just traveled there, so I knew I’d have plenty of visual aids. It was rumored impossible to receive a 100 percent score on the country presentation — Mr. Zahn didn’t even give one out each year, so the bar was set high. In addition to using an entire red posterboard for the flag (some kids brought in homemade flags and costumes), I borrowed some of my grandma’s photos and created a collage. We ordered pumpernickel bread with honey butter from a local bakery (not quite borscht, but more palatable to 6th graders!). As I was preparing, Julie Phillips delivered her presentation on Ireland. She arrived dressed in costume, with a wand-like pointer. She was well-practiced and delivered a highly polished presentation. Her posters were impeccably designed and featured cut-out pictures from travel magazines. Julie received the coveted perfect score.
As we watched the presentations, Mr. Zahn would point out what made the use of visuals strong — how color maps were more effective than black and white, how labeling the capital helped us see it better. He commented on students’ use of notecards or memorization. He used Julie as an example of memorizing her presentation, but practicing it enough that it sounded natural and not like a recitation.
My dad and I kept brainstorming about ways to make my presentation unique. We wanted to show the richness of Russian culture despite the Cold War tensions. We decided we should play music in the background — something none of the other students had done (my presentation was last, since I’d chosen such a large country). So, on the day of my presentation, I passed around food and brought in Russian dolls and wooden cart-type toys for my classmates to check out. When I started discussing the Russian Revolution, I played music softly on the record player and discussed, as students were avoiding eating the pumpernickel, the lack of food, the cold winters, etc. In hindsight, it was my first multi-media presentation!
Before Powerpoint, Mr. Zahn taught our sixth grade class the importance of presentations, with an emphasis on engagement. He said that presentations were mostly informed performance…we needed to know our content and thoroughly prepare, but also engage our audience through story and visuals. Mr. Zahn followed a social constructivist method of teaching; empowering us to own our content by teaching it to others. We actively participated in the subject matter of the class in nearly every subject. He modeled for me what good teaching is: engaging students and empowering them to take control of their learning experience. Without realizing it, I’ve carried those lessons into my academic career and shared them with colleagues and students.
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August 21st, 2009
Great news about online learning from the Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning report released by the U.S. Department of Education in June — students perform better in online environments than in traditional face-to-face instruction. But, how do we know this? The study is based on a meta-analysis of roughly 99 studies published between 1997 and 2008. What is unclear from the report is (1) what types of learning were measured in the included studies — comprehension, retention, transfer, none, all of the above? (2) duration of studies — were these effects consistent over time? (3) how learning was measured — e.g., multiple choice, essay, one test or multiple tests? Most importantly, the report says nothing about the consistency of measures across the included studies.
The majority of studies considered in the meta-analysis were split between undergraduate education and graduate schools or professional training programs. Professional training programs cover a broad area of learning, much of which has been shown to benefit from online education. Therefore, the inclusion of professional training programs may positively skew the results.
Interestingly, although much of the publicity surrounding the report applies the findings to K-12 learning environments, only 5 of the 99 studies focused on K-12 students. The majority of the research considered learning outcomes for college students, graduate students, and adults enrolled in professional training programs (participant ages ranged from 13-44). By its own admission, “most of the studies were modest in scope,” with sample sizes ranging from 16 to 1,857 (less than 5 of the studies had sample sizes over 400). While effect sizes were weighted based on sample sizes, these low sample sizes are worth noting when applying the findings to practice.
Search for Conclusive Evidence
Meta-analysis serves as an informative first pass, but should not be the final destination. National studies that systematically measure effects of technology engagement on learning over time, such as the UK’s CIBER report on the “Google Generation’s” information use or “UK Children Go Online,” provide strong examples for large-scale evaluation of the effects of technology on learning. The results of the Department of Education’s meta-analysis should not result in wholesale adoption of online curricula, but instead inform future large-scale comparative studies of online education.
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