Month: September 2017

The Geeky Lovechild of Buddy Holly and Clark Kent

After having completed my B.S. in Biochemistry, all I can say is that most of my classes felt like B.S. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my education and I’m immensely thankful to my parents for being able to pay for as much as they did. Let me clearly state that I do not think my Bachelor’s was a waste of my time. However, I have categorized any class I took that was offered as a traditional lecture style into one single bin in my memory. I can no longer remember who said what or when because all of the information was delivered to me in a large lecture hall, in uncomfortable seats, for 50 to 65 minutes, multiple times each week, with the same droning voice, and the same terrible slide show that was already shared with me prior to class. Rinse and repeat for 16 weeks/semester and 8 semesters.

Not all of my classes were like this, but every class that I hold as a fond memory was not a traditional lecture based class.

I am not an auditory learner, so writing notes from professors while they lecture is not the best way I retain information. My junior year, I took Organic Chemistry (for the second time) with a professor who decided to “flip” the class. I took it because the other professor who was offered had already been my professor the previous spring and I couldn’t get higher than a D on any test. I didn’t know what this flipped class was going to be like, but I knew I needed new. This is where I truly got my understanding of all organic chemistry, and I became one of the top students in his class, where in a previous semester I had been in the bottom 10% of this same subject and unable to continue into my majors courses because I failed this prerequisite.

The flipped class had us watching his lecture videos before class met. I would pause and play ad nauseum as I wrote down the notes to the class and any phrases he mentioned that I didn’t understand, I could pause his lecture and instantly look up. His videos were about 20 minutes long but this way made them roughly an hour per video. We’d be given an average of 3 videos per class meeting. Now when we got to class, we had to bring this packet of problem sets. In class, we would go over the entire packet together with him and the TAs walking through the aisles of the lecture hall. I found myself much more confident in the material as we discussed in class and this had me pose more complex questions. I would ask “what-ifs” more than anything else where previously in any other lecture class my number one question was “Could you repeat that?”.  He had his class times gameified as well. Bonus points on quizzes and tests for asking novel questions, but there was a cap on the number of points he’d give you for the semester. Questions were worth two points if he had to get back to you with an answer. This course motivated me through my increased confidence and I chose to look up lecture videos from educational websites that were like his, Khan Academy is a great one that comes to mind, and I relearned everything that I hadn’t absorbed from the first semester of this course. I started to be the one in my study group that had the answers and could easily explain it. I didn’t have to struggle to make it to class on time because this was my favorite one for the semester.

Historically, my favorite courses from my undergrad were not my majors courses, but my English classes I took for my CLE degree requirements. I got my favorite professor ever by pure chance, he was a Master’s student for the English department here at Virginia Tech and I was in his section of first year English during spring. The best part of his class was that there was no syllabus. We had two assignments, some readings for class, and a large project in the place of our final exam. The theme of the course was Music. Anything we wanted to write for the course just had to fit into Music. Class times focused on readings by authors he enjoyed that wrote about music and we discussed them as a group. Our big project was an album review. The rules: it must be on the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time and you may not have already heard the album before. I decided on Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True to do the review on.

Elvis Costello: The Teenage Years circa 1972

We had this project to do over the break which was perfect because I had uninterrupted time to just listen to this album on repeat. I was at my parent’s house and I had the album saved to my phone; if I brought my earbuds anywhere, I was listening to this album. A solid week during Thanksgiving break was dedicated to this album review for music that was originally released in the 1970s. After this album review on a man who was arguably the “Father of Punk Music” I then began my second project into a history of punk music as well as the societal impacts of the genre in current events at that time. This class wasn’t gameified like my Organic Chemistry, but there were no rules, just the ability to freely express myself on a subject I enjoyed.

These two courses shaped my views of education. I decided that I wanted to educate students in upper level life sciences because its a subject I truly enjoy and it’s one I can allow a lot of freedom of expression into the lesson plans of. I agree with Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown, as we enter the 21st century, we need to look to ways to teach in the 21st century. Blackboards and overheads are a thing of the past. Technology is the future. Gameification provides the platform for changing the classrooms successfully.

 


All Work and No Play Makes Jac a Dull Instructor

Generally, I’ve always “liked” school. I never really minded going to class in high school. Sure, tests were hard, and studying for them was too stressful for my health, but I never truly hated the concepts of tests and grades and homework. My brother, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. He’s smart, but he dislikes school and everything associated with it. He’s trudging through his undergraduate degree longing for the moment he can be done forever. Over the years, I have noticed that  he is definitely more of a learn-by-doing type of learner; lecture doesn’t do so much for him.  He has a graphic design type of side-business that seems to be doing quite well, and all he knows, he either taught himself or learned through online community.

So reading these articles dealing with reaching those who are “digital learners,” who learn by play and community, really reinforced the idea that communal learning is something I truly would like to incorporate into my classroom in any way that I can. Robert Talbert’s “Four Things Lecture is Good For” reminded me that lectures, though some are inspiring and memorable, are actually not that inspiring and memorable. How many lectures do I remember from high school? From undergrad? Few. In fact, as Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s Chapter “Arc-of-Life Learning” suggests, play and imagination combined for a more emphatic experience. He states that these concepts are “the very heart of arc-of-life learning” (18). The classes I remember from high school tend to be the days of active learning, of play. Any class’s favorite days were the review game days where we split up into competitive groups determined to beat each other by proving what we remembered, the lab days where we got to heat a solution and watch it turn a deep magenta pink. But the question that will probably make its way into every one of my posts now appears: how do I do this in my own classroom? In a writing class?

Thomas and Seely Brown’s chapter differed from my regular type of article reading mainly in content because it dealt so much with games and science. I don’t play games. I’ve never played games. I don’t understand them. But the article was actually really interesting, especially the segment on the little boy Sam, who knows more about technology and codes at the age of 9 than I could ever hope to learn over the course of the rest of my life. Sam grew as a learner, a teacher, and a professional, if you will, because of the collaborative learning community in which he took part (23).

This reminded me of the concept of peer review. I supposed I could even refer to it as a type of pedagogy. And it’s one that I have scheduled a lot of into my semester. Why? Because I believe that it teaches my students about audience. They’re writing for more people than just the instructor. It helps their writing become more clear. If their peer can’t understand what they’re saying, the likelihood of my understanding it goes way down. It helps them learn in a hands on way. Spotting problems in another person’s project is easier than spotting the problems in their own. As they practice finding issues in writing, I hope recognizing problems in the writing they produce becomes easier. But I’m always on the look out for more group work ideas and interactive ways of teaching concepts. I truly think my students have more fun when they have a sort of game or group work to take up class time. I think they learn more, too. But that’s the hard part, I think–coming up with ideas.

Why do you Feel Sleepy during Lectures?

Last year I took a class that was taught by my advisor. This is usually a big class with around 80 students or more. I used to sit in the first row and sometimes, in the middle of the class, I used to look back, and guess what? I always see a couple of students sleeping. At that time, I could not understand why there were sleeping because I was so excited in that class (The motivation and excitement of the first semester at VT).

Now, trying to understand the students’ behavior, maybe, the class was too long. Well, this is not a maybe, this is completely true! The class was 3 hours long! and what could be worse? The class was almost at end of the day, from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm. At that time, everyone is tired from a long day and I guess everyone wants to go home!

As professors, we should consider the average human being’s attention span when planning the length of a lecture1. It turns very difficult for students to keep their attention after have been seated for more than an hour looking at a lot of slides. Depending on the length of the class, the amount of information received could be overwhelming for some students. Next day, they would probably not recall all the information given in the lecture1.

In fact, one of the things that I really like about the classes in the United States is that most of them are usually 1hr or 1 hr 15 min long. When I was doing my bachelor and my master in Colombia, 2 hours in a class were an eternity for me!  Believe me, most of the information provided by the professors during these 2 hours, sometimes, was very unuseful. So,

Do you carefully think about the content that you want to convey in a lecture? Are we preparing the students for the real world? or Are we just transmitting them things that they never are going to apply in their careers?

Let’s back to the class that I took last year. What I really liked about this class is that my advisor always incorporated some stories from either his own experience or life1 These helped us to understand a concept easily. Even his sense of humor made the class more enjoyable. His jokes broke the wall between students and professor. The class was very active because we had to do several exercises. I consider this as an active learning2 in my field (civil engineer) because students can work in teams for problem-solving. They actually felt very comfortable working with a partner during the class. They did not have the pressure of being evaluated, they generated discussions, and felt free to ask questions. This is something necessary during heavy classes because all the exercises look so good in the slides, and the solutions even better! But,

Do you really understand everything just by looking at the solution in the slides or in a book?

I totally agree with my advisor when he says that

“It is not until you do it that you learn how to do it” Don’t you agree?

Another reason that comes to my mind when I think why students feel sleepy during lectures is the lack of motivation or interest in the class or the topic. For me, this is the root of the problem. If you are motivated, you do not care if the class is late or long. You always have a positive attitude and try to do your best. So, when I read the following statement, I was not surprised about it:

“Students quit and fail not because they lack funds, but because they lack motivation and interest2”

This year, I am the TA for the class that I took last year. On the first day, I had to introduce myself. Usually, my advisor asks me to talk about where I am from, my background, and my office hours. However, I decided to do something different this time. This is what I told students:

You guys are so lucky for having the opportunity to take a class with one of the most well-known scheduling experts in the industry. In my case, I had to come from Colombia, which is thousands of miles away, just to have the chance to work with him. I can tell you that I have no regrets! I know that you have a lot of work to do in this class! But believe me, at the end, everything will pay off and you will learn so much!  So guys, don’t waste your time on Facebook or using your cell phones. Instead, work hard and learn from the best!

I know that I was out of the script as my advisor said but I felt that I should motivate the students in some way. You know what? It worked! Students are so interested in the class, they are paying attention, they are working on the class exercises and asking questions. They are taking notes instead of using their cell phones or laptops. It is really cool! I think that they just needed some kind of motivation.

Now, in this new learning era, as instructors, we have the challenge of taking advantage of the unlimited resources that the internet gives us and combine them with an environment that allows students to build and experiment the topics, concepts, ideas, examples, etc. in a different way3.

We have to be very creative!

1http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/13/four-things-lecture-is-good-for/

2http://www.chronicle.com/article/Setting-Students-Minds-on/126592/

3http://www.newcultureoflearning.com/newcultureoflearning.pdf

Passive sitters: “they make excellent cannon fodder”

The one thing that intrigued me the most from this week’s readings didn’t actually come from the readings themselves. It was, rather, the contrast produced by the first comment following the “Setting Students’ Minds on Fire” article and the article itself (I’d link straight to the comment  if I knew how).

The article painted this colorful picture filled with students that were excited about learning. They were invested in the content, and they were invested in the game. They were so invested it was hindering other students’ ability to party, which as we know is the priority of weekend college nights.

That first comment though, reminded me much more of the reality of my own schooling. The commentor, username richardtaborgreene, described what he learned through his school years, and it was mostly how to sit while being just aware enough to get decent grades. He had learned to be what he calls a “passive sitter.” Which is what the world wants… right? Passive sitters are perfect for corporate jobs, the commentor continues, because “they make excellent low cost machine substitutes… [and] excellent cannon fodder” when wars should arise.  Passive sitters are easy to manipulate and make other people rich. The commentor describes school as a prison forcing students to assume the role of passive sitters while tamping down their excitement to learn about what interests them, and suppressing real learning.

The commentor says that he first experienced a type of inspired learning that more resembles that actual article he was commenting on at a mass research event hosted by IBM 40 years ago.  Where he, along with his team, was able to go “from zero to as good as world best experts in 3 days!!” and said that “NO UNIVERSITY ever exposed [him] to as much learning, as fun-ly gained, and as much educating, as powerfully delivered, in equivalent time periods.”  The commentor seems baffled that universities don’t engage in such events, but corporations do.

My education certainly has looked more like the comment than the article.  Most of my classes were lectures. Some tried to include group work, but it was forced and not terribly effective. I had a few seminars where we the students did most of the talking and were encouraged to “learn from each other,” but that didn’t take much more effort than a lecture. I’ve never felt that inspired learning though. I’ve never been so engaged in a class, or in a portion of a class that I couldn’t switch school off for a while to engage in other activities. I’d like to experience that, though. More than experience it, I’d like to provide my students with that experience. Which raises the question: How do I, having never experienced this ” mind set on fire” learning, teach in that manner? How can I make that transition from perpetuate-or of passive sitters to a pilot light? Where do I find my English classroom equivalent of the IBM mass research event? Or will I have to come up with my own (a daunting task to say the least)?

Choose your love, love your choice

High education faces variety challenge during the 21 centery.-the digital era. There are a great many methods that student access the information, books, Ebook, the internet, forum, online course, and tutorial.  How the high educational institutes keep the state of major educational center? What the students will experience in their life time? It is the questions that educator needs to face and think about.

Studying in the classroom is the major part of this step in our learning life. As we all know at the first class in each semester, the professor always gives us the syllabus and announced the schedule of the semester. Then, students will introduce themselves, like the name, the study background, the purpose of the study. Is anyone thinking about why the professor plans to do this? Communication and cooperation are the important part in learning. Even in the studio course, these are many group works and discussion in the class. It is not a chance to sharing the thoughts and ideas, but also the ways to enhance the ability of social communication. Learning from others and studying with classmates is the essential part, which the access of learning from the virtual world would never be replaced. Moreover, the another task for the professor is how to guide the student in further research independently. There are two different reasons to select the major: to choose the major followed by the mind, or select the major depends on the salary. It is easy for the professor to instruct the first type of student. They have a clear goal and schedule. But, it is a challenge for the professor that how to lead to the second type of students in the specific research area which they are not familiar and interested in.

A group of approaches that professors would use during the process of teaching in the digital era. The lecture is not the only ways in the class. As the student in the digital media, or be a teacher in the future. The main purpose for the students in this area is to use the digital media to enrich our learning and daily life. Therefore, learning from the game is a trend that widely used in the institutes that education is the main responsibility.  For an instant, my classmate Lisa Liu graduated on May 2017, her final project “Forbidden City In The Immersive Virtual Reality World” is a VR game which presents the history of the Forbidden City. The audience not only to appreciate the historical heritage in Beijing but also learn the historical background and aesthetic information about this Empire building. Besides, outside classroom learning is the essential part in the rest of life. In other words, the ability of self-learning is be training in the school. Where to learn and how to gain the information efficiently is the big task student faced after they graduate. The Master said, “When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teacher I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.”

“Choose your love, love your choice”

 

 

A Quick Note on Flipping a Classroom

The concept of the Flipped Classroom is not complex, but often requires a great deal of thought and planning on the front-end to make it work.  From a K-12 perspective, it is typically worth it, particularly to develop skills and competencies that are ‘basic’ (such as word patterns or sight words for young children, or multiplication facts for older ones). High school science and math teachers have found it useful to ‘flip’ instruction to video or audio presentations of the lessons so that their class time can be utilized for collaboration, confirmation and creation of deeper understanding.

See the following for more information and examples of how Flipping has been implemented:

Tucker, B. (2012). The flipped classroom. Education next, 12(1).

Bishop, J. L., & Verleger, M. A. (2013, June). The flipped classroom: A survey of the research. In ASEE National Conference Proceedings, Atlanta, GA (Vol. 30, No. 9, pp. 1-18).

Herreid, C. F., & Schiller, N. A. (2013). Case studies and the flipped classroom. Journal of College Science Teaching, 42(5), 62-66.

One particular application in a university setting caught my attention during the 2017 VT CHEP Conference (Feb. 2017). Two professors from Radford University have been flipping their Calculus class for majors for 3 years now and are seeing dramatic differences in the number of students able to pass the end-of-course exam.

Adams, C., & Dove, A. (2017). Calculus Students Flipped Out: The Impact of Flipped Learning on Calculus Students’ Achievement and Perceptions of Learning. PRIMUS, (just-accepted), 00-00.

(link is to abstract only – I’ve requested a copy of the article from Iliad and will share it when available)

 

There are a few other studies/journal articles related to higher education via Google Scholar if you search for “Flipped Classroom”

Week 3: Engaging the Imaginations of Digital Learners

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Praying Mantis on Tinker Cliffs

Now that we’ve thought about networked learning as experiential learning it’s time to think about how we learn and how the web has facilitated a shift in the way we think about different kinds of learning and learning experiences. The readings for next week develop some of the ideas we addressed in class about participatory cultures, gaming, and arc of life learning. Different people (teachers and students) respond to learning environments in their own unique way and there is no “one size fits all” approach to engaging today’s student. But most people  agree that imagination is an essential component of motivation, and next week is all about firing up the imagination for digital learners. For your posts, please read materials and write about whatever issue (or set of issues) resonates with you the most. Feel free to use Hypothes.is to engage others around specific issues in the readings (especially in the Thomas and Brown selection.) This should be an interesting session, and I am eager to read what you have to say.

A sadly pragmatic take on Dr. Wesch’s TED talk

The TEDxKC video “What Baby George Taught Me About Learning” by Dr. Michael Wesch, was inspiring but seemed a bit too idealistic. At one point he lamented the fact that despite all of his efforts, his students were still most concerned about their grades, rather than learning the material. But how could that ever not be the case?

If we are totally honest, the majority of students at any college are attending primarily for the job opportunities their degree affords. Certainly “expanding our horizons” and improving our understanding of the world is a great benefit – and I recognize that this was the original aim of tertiary education – but few could afford this experience if it didn’t also provide significant employment benefits. This has never been more true than it is today, when student loan debt is crippling, tuition costs have skyrocketed, and most white-collar jobs absolutely require the once-optional BA.

Doing some back of the envelope calculations, just 30 years ago, a year of tuition at VT cost the equivalent of about 500 hours of minimum wage work. One could pay for the entire year’s tuition with a summer job. Today that figure is closer to 1900, almost a full year of full time work. Couple that with the fact that 30 years ago a BA was mostly optional, while today it is required to manage a Starbucks. Add to this the fact that a degree from a good school like VT can be worth over $500,000 over a 20-year period. Can you really blame students for obsessing over grades?

By the time students reach Dr. Wesch’s class, they must have invested tens of thousands of dollars, likely put themselves deep into debt, and know their grades will literally dictate the rest of their lives. A few bad grades could make the difference between getting into a good grad school with funding, or paying their own way at some R3. It could be the difference between even getting into med school at all, or in getting an internship with their dream employer instead of ending up in a cubicle farm in a job they hate.

Until this changes, students will always prioritize grades above actual learning, especially in an elective subject.

I admire Dr. Wesch’s idealism, and I hope to encourage students to love both the material and the act of learning itself, but we cannot allow ourselves to forget how important grades are to these students. If they are truly concerned about their futures, learning will be the last thing on their minds.

How did we go from learning from the Cosmos to learning by blogging?

There was once a time, before the invention of any means of immortalizing thoughts (art, writing etc.), when our ancestors learned from looking up at the stars. Over eons, they figured out that patterns in stars in the sky coincided with seasons and passage of time on Earth. Discovery was guided by experience and knowledge was passed from generation to generation via word of mouth. All was well.

And then writing and art was invented and suddenly, our species had a way to preserve knowledge and immortalize it. This ushered in the golden age of discovery and learning and it lead to us being more aware of our place in the Cosmos. I have been re-watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and a theme central to the series is the story of human discovery and knowledge creation.

Over time, our learning became confined within four walls of a classroom and unless you were a Pauli, Tesla, Faraday or Einstien, trailblazing the path of knowledge creation, chances were, you were reading about their accomplishments in books. “Formal education” somehow got confused with a rigid system of portioned dispersal of knowledge rather than encouraging free thinking and creativity. This one-size-fits all approach governed the way people learned for generations.

Then, the internet was born and everything changed. Suddenly, we found all of our collective knowledge in the palm of our hands (barring access restrictions, of course) and technology is continuously changing the way we learn. In my relatively short life, I have seen the internet become as universal as radio and TV and the tools such as blogging become a platform for micro publishing our thoughts and ideas. I have seen course materials transform from monstrous textbooks to pdfs on an LMS such as Canvas. I can’t remember the last time I bought a textbook. It is not surprising that this is the 3rd time I have had to blog as requirements for a class. Although I don’t blog outside class, I understand why instructors choose it as a tool to encourage learning from peers and free thinking. It gives me great hope for the future as technology is increasingly used to supplement the deficiencies of traditional classroom instruction.

I am excited and hopeful about how technology is going to affect pedagogy in the next decade, while I prepare myself to be an academic (whatever that might mean).

Reflections on Publicness, Learning, and Teaching

Managing publicness of our roles as an instructor is a challenge. While this admittedly varies by discipline, those of us in the social sciences may use our own perspectives and publicness as opportunities to encourage more meaningful and personalized engagement with the materials. My first year of teaching I sought to restrain and tamp down my personality, but let my charisma, curiosity, and knowledge in the topics (national security and international security) shine through. Yet this year is a completely different scenario. I teach the Arab-Israeli Dispute. This topic has deep personal meaning forged from visceral firsthand experiences complemented by an array of connections to research on the politics of architecture, space, and aesthetics. As a result, I’ve refocused a bit to ensure my personality feeds into the charisma, curiosity, excitement, and knowledge of the topic.

I feel by injecting more of my personality and a heavier fingerprint on the syllabus I have created a more engaging, yet more personalized learning environment for the students in which they feel comfortable expressing themselves in their own voice. While this is apparent in the syllabus – I’ve framed the readings as “provocations” or “pieces of a mosaic that they are to assemble”, and this follows through into the classroom (we have brief reflection exercises and group discussions) and assignments (each of which they are tasked with reflecting on materials and their own position with regards to assembling the mosaic).

Yet the most important facet of this course is to connect their own agency to the creation of history. The last section – of four – is titled: “Israel, Palestine, and You”. This section is dedicated to reflecting on the ways more recent history has shaped their perspectives as well as to shore up the idea that they are participants in the writing of history. In other words, the goal is to shatter the notion that history is an abstract topic, but one in which they not only are shaped by, but simultaneously, have the capacity to shape. I will do this by bringing in (or skyping in) an Israeli and a Palestinian toward the end of the semester.

The hope is the students recognize that they are participants in history, and due to this – the hope is – it fuels their curiosity and confidence to think and engage with topics beyond the classroom not necessarily to become advocates for a cause, but as confident and knowledgeable advocates for themselves and their views.

This very much places students at the center of the learning experience similar to the “experiential learning” advocated by the likes of Kuh. This experiential learning is similar to “research”, but I think the research is more oriented toward their own reflections. It’s a two-way process – the more they encounter those different pieces of the mosaic, the more space they are given to reflect on and wrestle with questions and in so doing, they increasingly feel more comfortable with their own perspectives. This experiential learning approach is modeled on a trip or powerful experience in that the more impactful learning occurs afterward when the trip-goer reflects on their experience.

While I like the idea of introducing public writing, the topic of the course could lead to an unwillingness to be as assertive or comfortable with their posts as one may prefer. One of the common threads for all of the students in the course is that many claimed “they wanted to learn more to feel comfortable discussing the Arab-Israeli situation.” I think giving them some space – unimpeded both by their colleagues, and to a degree, me – is necessary for them to wrestle with the personal and wider ethical or theoretical questions.

This does not mean I do not believe in collaborative learning. Quite the opposite, I simply take the stance that collaborative and deeply personal learning share parts in the learning process, but – like different research methods – are more appropriate for difference scenarios and topics at different times.

In a similar vein, I agree that learning and education can be amplified by the reliance on technological instruments, I think the risk is that those devices become distractions in the learning experience. I can relate this to a personal experience.

While I think it is great to have a blog to share research, thoughts, or experiences, I think handing a paper to a colleague for review or having a chat over coffee – much like what Tim Hitchcock claims – are equally effective for developing and sharing research. The fear is that writing a blog entry can serve as a distraction – both in terms of news sites or other looming deadlines. I find that more often than not I do my best work, when I disconnect from the digital architecture within which our lives are embedded. I am not advocating a luddite position, I just think enough self-reflection helped me realize the importance of space, time, and attention in being the best scholar, teacher, and overall person I can be.

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