Martin Weller provides a compelling vision of University 2.0, or perhaps Learning 2.0 in this post (by way of The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog). I found the original post broader and more interesting than the Chronicle synopsis.
If you’re interested in how institutional higher education can remain relevant in the 21st Century, you’ll want to read this.
Injenuity has an awesome post, which speaks to my previous post on change.
It made me think.
In a recent conversation, Gardner and I talked about whether or not one can be open to genuine teaching innovation without considering new media. This is a different question from whether or not (some) technology is embodied in all teaching practices, which I believe is true. For this conversation, Gardner was specifically referring to the tools of Web 2.0. I think this question relates back to the panel discussion I moderated at the Faculty Academy this Spring. Why are faculty so resistant to incorporating new media in their teaching? Why are they so conservative to change in their teaching generally? And what was apparently of interest to Gardner, why am I not? Why I am open to trying new things?
One of the observations that we came up with is that most faculty seem to see choices as constraints. There is an issue of path dependence here: During the 1960s, there was a theory of business investment called “Putty-Clay.” The idea was simple: a business could build any size factory it wished—investment opportunities were malleable like putty. But once the decision was made, they became hard like clay. Once the investment was made, the firm had to work with the factory it had built, whether business increased or decreased. This is an example of path dependence. Where we are now, what our options are now, is based on our history. Decisions made in the past, limit our choices in the future. I could (perhaps) have become a physical therapist, but once I began graduate study in economics, that decision put me on a different path in life.
What does this suggest about teachers and change? I can only speak from my experience, which is, of course, subject to the fallacy of induction. Lecture notes are an example of path dependence. They are also a metaphor, I think, for our teaching in general. When I began teaching at UMW, I taught eight courses/six preps the first year. I had complete lecture notes for only one of those courses (Environmental Economics, which I had taught twice as a graduate student.) I also had partial notes for principles of micro and macro economics. (I had taught a one semester Intro to Economics course in graduate school.) That left three courses to develop from scratch, two of which I had never even taken as a student. Those first few years, course development was a real time sink, and by course development, I mean just putting together rough lecture notes. While I no longer teach some of those courses, the ones I do teach still reflect, at least in part, those original lecture notes. Putting those notes together took so much effort that I am reluctant to get rid of them. It’s like writing. Those lecture notes are part of my identity. Throwing them away would be like throwing away part of my self.
Over my career, I have revised my courses, sometimes very substantively. But why has it been so difficult to make the decision to do so? For a number of reasons: Because my old courses worked adequately. Because substantive rethinking of a course takes a huge amount of time and effort. Because throwing away my previous course is painful.
Gardner asked me some probing questions which revealed some interesting thoughts and which he urged me to blog about. That was the impetus for this post. I think many faculty see choices as constraints. Choices that they have made in the past become constraints on their future behavior. That’s the idea of path dependence again, but the thing is, this path dependence is not absolute. Just as businesses can decide over time to either expand or contract the size of their factory, so can faculty revisit their past choices. When looked at in this light, constraints become choices again. I think to a modest extent, that’s what I do.
Why am I willing to do this? Why am I not satisfied with the status quo of my courses? I’m not sure. One thing I know is that I’m regularly inspired by what I learn at workshops offered by our Writing Program, our Speaking Program, our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, and most recently by our First Year Seminar Program. I hear things at those events and find myself thinking: What a cool idea! I could use that to teach [insert course or topic]. I don’t feel that way about every idea I learn about. But I do about enough of them that I regularly have rich ideas about ways to tinker with my courses.
I may be poking the bear here, but I’ve been following the discussion of EduPunk and have a few questions I’d like to raise. I’ll admit that I haven’t given this as much thought as I’d like to, and I also admit to being naive in the ways of the world, but can EduPunk ever be mainstream? The way it seems to be defined now, I don’t think so. If not, how can the majority of faculty be brought into the good practices EduPunk espouses? I think this question is related to the point JJulius makes here.
If the crux of EduPunk is radical first adoption of cutting edge technologies, whatever they are, then no. But if it means radically rethinking how we conduct higher education, then perhaps.
Is the purpose of EduPunk to provoke a change in mainstream academia? Okay, then what do we call those who adopt the new paradigm? What do we call the system that our IT staffs design to make the new paradigm easy to use and scalable?
I can imagine a learning management suite of tools, small pieces, loosely joined, that faculty are trained to choose from as they build their own course environments, and I can imagine that these environments are linked, like a bee hive to form a university’s online persona. I can imagine the tool suite having many default settings based on what the majority of faculty are using, but also allowing innovators to choose alternatives to better fit their own teaching needs. Would this be EduPunk or just Blackboard Version 15? If it results in most faculty using better teaching practices, don’t think it ultimately matters.
Garr Reynolds.
If you want to design presentations that people will find compelling, instead of the standard “Death by Powerpoint”, check out this video: Presentation Zen
(Thanks to Tim O’Donnell who turned me on to this.)
One of the things I haven’t done particularly well over the last two years in my First Year Seminar on globalization is the research paper assignment. My first attempt was Version 1: The Expert Study, essentially a research paper by a different name. Some papers turned out quite well, but many did not. Looking back, I’m embarrassed to see what little guidance I provided, but here it is. To be fair, we also spent a fair amount of class time discussing what should go into the assignment. I wrote about this in a previous post (which despite the title is mostly about the research paper).
Taking these thoughts into account, my second attempt was Version 2: The Collaborative Research Project. In this version, I provided a lot more structure, and asked students to work in groups instead of as individuals. Additionally, the product was a series of class presentations, where I hoped students would learn from what the other groups had done. Unfortunately, the outcome was similar to Version 1: Some were good, but many really weren’t. The sharing of work, which occurred both within and across groups (via presentations) was an improvement over Version 1, but there was little or nothing in the way of tangible products. For example, while one group provided a decent powerpoint presentation which we ended up posting on the course website, another group gave an extemporaneous talk with essentially no notes. I wonder what the rest of the class took away from that?
In both cases I underestimated first year students’ abilities to give me what I wanted. The first time, I found that most really didn’t understand how to write an analytical, thesis-driven research paper. The second time, I discovered that first years don’t really know how to work effectively in collaboration with peers.
Perhaps a better way to look at this is that I didn’t put enough thought into the assignments. I knew what a university-level research project was (it was the part of a first year seminar that I (thought I) understood the best) so I didn’t think to spell it out in detail for my students. Or rather, the students that I usually teach know what university-level research is. But most first year students aren’t at that point yet. Clearly this misconception was my fault, and I’d like to rectify that next year.
This post is going to sketch out my ideas for Version 3, drawing on what I learned from the FSEM Workshop this summer. I like the idea of an “expert study” where students develop expertise and become the class expert on a topic. The key is to design an assignment where first years can genuinely do that.
What I have in mind is a very structured research project – one organized around a large number of stages, more than I typically ask for in my upper courses. The idea is to take the normal stages in a research project and break them into smaller steps. The focus of the project will be for each student to explore and evaluate the effects of globalization on a specific foreign country, and to become the class expert on that country. The students will choose the countries they study, but I’d like to have a sampling of countries from different parts of the world, different stages of economic development, etc.
Students will begin by investigating the history, geography, political system, economy, culture and language of the country in very factual ways, along the lines of what’s provided by the CIA World Factbook).
Students will then move into more analytical issues, applying what we are doing broadly in the class (the effects of globalization on employment, income and other aspects of the economy, politics, culture) to their specific country.
The project will culminate in a research paper addressing the question: Is globalization (on balance) good or bad for your country? The paper will essentially cumulate the previous project assignments.
Through sharing of work, and peer review along the way, students will hopefully learn more about the broader issues we explore in class in the context of their country.
One concern I have is that all that structure could trivialize the assignment. Or that it will inhibit the quality of the projects of the best students, in order to bring up the bottom, like the Virginia Standards of Learning/No Child Left Behind does. But after overshooting the last two years, I’m willing to risk undershooting this time.
Thoughts? Do you think this will work? What do you see as potential problems?
Interesting post on the Digital Natives blog about backchannels and class participation.
Alan Charles Kors has a deeply thoughtful and provocative critique of higher education in the US today. I challenge you to read it. (If you can’t get to it via the link above, let me know and we’ll try something else.)
Edit: Gardner points out that this article is a reprint from a special issue of The New Criterion on education.
Foreign Policy magazine has just published its second annual list of the world’s 100 top intellectuals. How many are you familiar with?
(Thanks to the Chronicle for this.)
This post is about another question that I’ve been considering for nearly six months. It’s actually come up in three different contexts, first the UMW Teaching Center, second the Economics Education Research group, and most recently the FSEM Workshop. I guess it’s time to make my thoughts public and see what we can do to make them operational.
One of the great pleasures I’ve enjoyed over the last three years I’ve been blogging is the opportunity to listen to and participate in high level intellectual discussions on teaching and learning by very bright members of the academy. I alluded to these in my previous post. A key element of the UMW Teaching Center should be to host similar discussions among UMW faculty. Discussions can, of course, be conducted in a face-to-face venue, but past experience at UMW has shown that these have only limited staying power. What we need is continuing discussion.
So here is my question: How might one design an online environment to support and facilitate a serious intellectual conversation among faculty across the internet, most of whom have little experience with instructional technology? The environment should have several characteristics:
• It should be easy to learn and use; participants should be able to tune in and tune out at their leisure, much like Twitter.
• It should record everything so that when participants tune in, they can quickly and easily get up to speed on the current conversation thread. This is also like Twitter.
• Ideally, it should push the content to participants, rather than making them go to the content. This suggests asking participants to use a feedreader. The problem with web-based feedreaders, such as googlereader or bloglines, is that they require participants to go to the website. As straightforward as this sounds to the Web2.0 savvy, faculty with little experience using social software will perceive this as a significant hurdle, and for many this will keep them from participating. Trust me on this. One way around this would be to recommend a desktop-based feedreader like SharpReader, which notifies users when they have new feeds. Would there be a way for email to notify participants who don’t use a desktop-feedreader? If so, we could avoid feedreaders entirely, which would make the system simpler, and therefore more likely to be used by the faculty at large.
• The environment should be a one stop shop, where all contributions to the conversation (e.g. posts and comments) should show up. While participants could subscribe to multiple blog feeds of those who are posting, for the reasons outlined above, this would be an additional and unnecessary hurdle.
• The environment should support different conversation threads, perhaps through categories or tags.
• It should enable participants to redirect or forward posts from other online conversations to show up in this environment. Ideally, it should allow content providers to write on their own blogs and have those posts show up in the online environment.
• It should enable participants to link to outside static resources, such as podcasts or videos of conference presentations. Ideally, these should probably be organized separately from the conversation threads.
At present, I’m thinking that this type of environment could be constructed using a WordPress Multi-User platform. We would need a small core of contributors who would commit to providing enough content to keep other faculty interested enough to follow along and hopefully more actively participate. Those contributors would have author privileges on the blog, and there would need to be an easy way for anyone who wanted to contribute to ask for those privileges. A couple of Jim Groom’s recent posts (here and here) suggest that these ideas may not be science fiction.
What do you think?