Month: September 2017

It seems the fashion way of making impacts is to critique the old school and say something new. It is justifiable: things keep changing as time goes, and time keeps going. People destroy the old tools and inventing the new tools and call it a revolution. It’s an iteration. The old tools used to be some great inventions replacing their predecessors, and now it should be understood that they are replaced by the new generations.

The evolution is inevitable.

So is the evolution in education. I see many arguments talk about stopping the standard test. The old schools which look serious and hard on students should be changed into joyful places.No students should be blamed.

Here I want to kindly remind you that most tools can excel other tools for a certain purpose. We should acknowledge that competition always exists when resources are limited. And the truth is that the resources are always limited and certain resources are so limited that people can feel the lack of them. In a market,  a supplier, in most cases, won’t get the chance to tell the clients or customers not to buy sofas but to buy chairs because they can only make chairs. They can survive if there are no other competitors and the chair is needed. However, if the chairs market cannot make any profit, they may not survive. I treat the standard tests as requests from the clients, the education system. Education is important to everyone and the educational resources are limited. The standard tests are part of the approaches to grant the education resourced. It should also be noticed that there are always paths beside the ordinary ways for extraordinary students.

The writings of Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (particularly Chapter 3: Embracing Change) got me thinking quite a lot about cognitive flexibility and adaptation in a constantly changing technological world.  The authors point out the insane rate of change, especially in regards to technology, but I think it’s worth mentioning that our ability to adapt to that change is also increasing at an absurd rate.  I think that the more we’re exposed to the digital world, the more literate in it we become.  When we use technology often enough, and in enough of its various forms, we can eventually reach a gestalt and more readily transfer knowledge and skills from one domain into another.  For example, I have some foundation of basic computational skills and literacy, and I think that allows me to generalize my knowledge beyond simply my laptop, my operating system, my video game console interfaces, etc.  I have enough experience with such a breadth of technological devices that when my phone or computer undergo a massive overhaul in firmware/software updates, I can still rely on context clues and prior knowledge to adapt to those changes.

Obviously this flexibility and adaptability was at a very different stage in their example with color TVs.  When this specific technology was the first of its kind, of course no one knew how to use it or what to expect at the outset.  It takes some time to reach proficiency when you’re using a system to go from zero to full comprehension in any context or domain.  We, as a society, had to learn how to use these systems at this time with no prior knowledge, background, or experience to relate it to.  But as these resources continue to expand, and truly explode, we can transition more easily.  We do have a mental prototype or template now for what we expect technology to look like and what we expect technology to be able to do.  We can adapt our prototype when something is similar enough, and we can piece together a variety of knowledge bases to make sense of something a bit new.

Their statement of “When change comes slowly, adaptation is easy” comes off as somewhat too general for me.  I think it’s more accurate to say that adaptation is easy when the changed product resembles the original product, regardless of how slowly or quickly that happens.  When there is no original product with which to make a comparison, slow is better.  But when we have the progression to trace, that adaptation can happen more readily.  I think it should also be noted that this adaptation is possible only with the accompaniment of a mindful approach, such as that described in Ellen Langer’s Mindful Learning.  To me, this means using prior knowledge and experience in a critical manner to evaluate the current iteration in front of you, and then intentionally incorporating the past (familiar) and present (newer) iterations to derive some kind of context on which to move forward.  To employ this approach when faced with a firmware or software update is one thing, but we can, and should, extrapolate this concept to all areas of learning.

Back to the time when pursuing my Master’s degree, a professor shared a very short-story that will be hardly to forget, this helped me to understand the definition of “Ecological Fallacy”.

The story is about a Ph.D. student that was analyzing data from a project that he was unfamiliar with, he received the data base and the main research question: What factors are involved with morning headaches?. From all the variables that he was analyzing, he found a very strong and statistically significant association (p<0.001) between variable “Z” (shoes) and the outcome (headaches). After the relevant result, he quickly went with his advisor to give him the good news. But what he did not realize were all the factors behind the variable. At the end, he “discovered” that 96% of the participants of the study who had a woke-up headache slept with shoes. So, should we all sleep without shoes to avoid wake-up headaches?

What the student never asked was the Why? And the why had a simple answer: one common characteristic among the participants that fitted with his “discovery”, all of them had more than five glasses of alcohol before going to sleep.

 

This is a typical example, where following the instructions, in this case protocol and statistical analysis, is not enough. The Ph.D. student was doing his task without motivation, passion and he just found an isolated fact due to his automatic pilot behavior and mindless approach.

“We are poorly served by mindless learning”. Ellen J. Langer

What would have happened with this student with a bit more engagement or curiosity? Perhaps, he would have been aware of more than one perspective to build his conclusion. Well, at least his experience helped me, to be more conscious and to become as mindfulness as I can. Moreover, this story is the how of my understanding of “EcologicalFallacy”.

Practicing mindfulness as students or professors might have positive results such as a decrease in implicit biases (as the student on the story). Educators have a big role to engage students and to facilitate curiosity. Personally, I think that education is not a mechanical system and, as professors we have the challenge and responsibility to create the environment, provide the accurate tools to develop critical thinkers.

The evidence is robust about how environments have the power to change experiences and can influence actions, perceptions and decisions. A theory that have helped to build healthy environments and to design policies is the “Nudge” theory, which can provide a different perspective of how environments are a key factor to influence an outcome.

 

About the Author

Sofia Rincon Gallardo Patino, is a Mexican dietitian and a public health researcher.

This blog is going to be messy, a conglomeration of scattered thoughts on a topic that I recognized was an issue throughout my entire history of learning. In the “When Practice Makes Imperfect” chapter in The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer mentions  the “inventive transformations of the routine” and follows it up with an example of traditional methods of learning classical piano (24). This example immediately through me back to how I learned pieces for piano recitals. I grew up taking piano lessons. Once a week from elementary school through my junior year of high school, I was at a lesson practicing pieces in front of my teacher that I may or may not have had time to practice during the week before the lesson. I liked playing piano, but I hated piano theory and I hated public performance.

These sentiments mostly stem from how I “mastered” recital pieces and the crash-and-burn experience I had from this method of learning. See, I was a rote memorization learner. I practiced and practiced and practiced until my fingers were on autopilot and my mind had seemingly nothing to do with what was going on with the keys. Rote memorization. It worked at home. It even worked at recitals. Until the one time it didn’t.

One night, while performing in public, my fingers blanked. I simply could not remember the next two lines of music. I sat with my back to audience in utter mortification trying to recall the next notes, but I couldn’t. Though I wanted to get up and flee the room, I was finally able to jump ahead in the piece and finish it, but I had failed. My automaton fingers had failed. My memory had failed. And failure is bad, isn’t it? I had learned the basics of performance and the piece itself in a “rote, unthinking manner” and had become less than mediocre by the end of the process (Langer 14). It took me a long time to even think about performing in public again. I’d still rather not.

I saw this same thing happen to a number of us students in high school. We memorized the facts that needed to be learned, took the test where we may or may not have recalled the memories, and then discarded the memorized facts to make room for new ones. Sometimes, we were successful in this method of learning; sometimes, we crashed and burned. Hard. So while reading the “seven pervasive myths” that Langer lists in the introduction to the book, I saw that I had adhered to at least four of those myths just by how I learned piano alone (2).

I appreciated this section on mindful learning because I think it applies to some of my lessons this week in First-Year Writing. In teaching writing and critical thinking, rote memorization is a little more difficult to come by. Because in many area of the humanities, there are no wrong answers. We don’t necessarily memorize. But when we’re taught writing, we do practice the basics so that “they become second nature” (Langer 2). As my students begin to write their first paper, I want to talk about the difference between high school contexts and college contexts. Example: the five-paragraph essay. It’s taught in high school because of its relative easiness to explain and because of its usefulness in writing the types of essays high schoolers have to write. I mean, a oddly high percentage of my essays in high school were timed. Because that’s real life, right? No. Because that’s the AP Test and the SAT writing section and maybe even the GRE writing section for many of us, if we’re honest.

Though I understand that the difference between college and high school may not be that different for some students, for many it is. Students practice writing this type of essay so often that it becomes second nature. It’s the formula they need to succeed. But writing is so much more messy than that formula. Thinking about how to analyze, organize, and write about new concepts and perspectives takes more time than 45 minutes. Now, in college, the basic five paragraph essay isn’t as useful. It’s actually more confining.The five paragraph essay isn’t wrong; it was appropriate for some people in a certain time. It’s just one way of writing in a certain context.  This college context is different, and it’s time for learning to build on itself and evolve. So now, many students will now have break themselves of the basics that have become second nature and try something new.

 

Last week in class we were discussing that nowadays because everything you can learn from the internet, the traditional class-room type of lecture should be gradually evolving to be in  “discussion” style, rather than giving them information/knowledge that they can simply find online.  In my opinion, teachers are storytellers, who can combine the existing knowledge and correct information to become stories that are interesting to students.  In the past when most of knowledge have to be found in books and publications, these information have been through serious reviewing process and constantly corrected by authors or publishers. In comparison, students can learn almost everything on the internet so easily through Wikipedia, YouTube, Blogs and etc. However, it is necessary for students to be able to evaluate whether those information are correct, and this ability should be cultivated during their college education, so that they will easily become a life-time self-learner. As a result, just like Thomas and Brown’s book said in their book,

“Wikipedia allows us to see all those things, understand
the process, and participate in it. As such, it requires a new kind
of reading practice, an ability to evaluate a contested piece of
knowledge and decide for yourself how you want to interpret
it. And because Wikipedia is a living, changing embodiment of
knowledge, such a reading practice must embrace change.”

On the other hand, how to become a good storyteller in lectures? How to create meaningful  and interesting discussion in class but still can make sure to have enough time to  give them a well-structured knowledge? These are the issues that I need to think about and overcome.

Reference: Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, A New Culture of Learning (2011), pp. 17-38 (“Arc of Life Learning” and “A Tale of Two Cultures”)

 

 

Mindless, Mindlessness, Mindful, Mindfulness… Mind…. What?

I did not know how many words you can create with the word mind. This is the first time that I read all of these at once!!

Over the years, teaching has focused on what professors teach instead of how they teach¹. This traditional approach promotes Mindlessness because different perspectives of learning are neglected in the classroom. As Ellen Langer states:

“we are stuck in a single drawn distinction from the past”

and the reality is that we are in constant change as the philosopher Heraclitus said in his famous quote!

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Memorization and repetition are not the most suitable approaches to learn. I learn best by understanding and thinking instead of repeating (like a robot) something that I do not understand. Unfortunately, oftentimes, we do not apply what we learned in class. At present, everyone can access the internet and find what the professor is teaching. So, the question is,

How do you add value to the class?

As a professor, we have to motivate students to look at the information given from different perspectives or point of views¹. Diversity is everywhere, especially in a classroom. We will have students from different disciplines, socio-economic status, countries, etc.. What a better scenario to promote Mindfulness.

Last week, we were asked how we learn. I took the answers and I created this word cloud to see if we are stuck in the past. Judge for yourself. What do you think?

Teaching by fostering Mindfulness should not be only an approach or idea that you can find on a paper. It should be applied on a regular basis in a class. Engaging students in the classroom is not an easy task but it will help them to see things from a different perspective. They will learn and enjoy the process.

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http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/stable/20182675seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

When I got my first laptop in 2007, I found that every few days a small window popped up telling me that some software or system drivers would be updated during next boot. This was quite annoying since it made the startup period extremely long, and several reboots could occur during the installation process. In the end, I changed the “Auto Update” to “Notify Me When an Update is Available” option and enjoyed a peaceful and undisturbed working environment. Once a while, I would check the update list and only selected those that seemed to be necessary for my laptop. The available updates accumulated over the time, and eventually I gave up checking the list. Luckily, things went on smoothly for the following year, and I gradually forgot about all these update issues.

In 2009, I was dragged into the World of Warcraft by my classmates and became a little abscessed with this fascinating world. However, upon installation, I could not open the game client properly. With the help of my roommate, I finally found out that the problem was my outdated video driver. It required substantial upgrade (about 2 hours) to meet the minimum requirement for this game. I spent the rest of that day updating lots of my software and other patches and thrilled to discover lots of new and easy-to-use functions in my current software. The computer also ran much faster due to some major optimization in operation system.

Computer is a simplified version of our human brain, and it needs our humans to turn on the “Auto Update” function to achieve continuous evolving. Without this major learning process (i.e. installation of various patches), computers will not be compatible with many new software or games and may be abandoned in the end. For our humans, we are lucky enough having direct control to our own brain and can easily embrace all the changes and new knowledge via continuous learning. In order to keep up with this digital era, we should hold an open mind to all the new things. For example, my parents have never used a smartphone before, and in their mind phone should only be used to contact someone. Once I introduced all the fancy new functions on the smartphone, my parents were amazed by the all the convenience this tiny device could bring. Last year when I got back home for Christmas, my parents taught themselves of all the new functions on smartphone. Right now, with the help of a smartphone, they can easily purchase anything with “Alipay” without concerning short of cash or receiving forged note. This is an example of how technology can change our life, but it can only happen when you embrace it positively.

(click on this figure to be directed to the original source)

I know keep learning new things can be scary to someone, considering this process always start with stepping of your comfort zone. But in higher education, you need to stay on the “same page” with most of the people. For example, our graduate students need to read new research papers every week or even every day to absorb new knowledge. To me, I can keep my mind at its best state and come up with lots of fresh research ideas via timely “upgrade”. So don’t turn off your “Auto Update” function, stay positive, be brave enough to step out of your comfort zone, and embrace changes and new knowledge with passion. This is when the magic can happen in this digital era.

My undergraduate engineering education appears blurry at best, and it wasn’t until graduate school that I felt like I was learning and was being mindful about it. Langer¹ defines mindful learning as being able to “draw novel distinctions” so that we are more sensitive to “context and perspective.” In engineering education, I think we could further specify mindful learning as being aware of context, limitations and implications (of theories, frameworks, systems, designs). As a simple example, when confronted with an equation, a mindful way of learning would be understanding the assumptions and limitations inherent in the math, and the context in which this equation could be suitably applied.

This topic of mindful learning is near and dear to me, because I felt like I wasted four precious, irreversible years not learning as much as I could have. There was a number of reasons for the so called “mindlessness”:

1. While I agree with Langer  that the term “basics” may not be applicable to everyone, I do think there are fundamental concepts in engineering that should be learned as the necessary prerequisite to more advanced material. Some examples include the equation of motion, static analysis, etc. For this reason, the engineering curriculum was understandably mostly content driven. However, these fundamentals were delivered on a problem-by-problem format that screamed “this is how and where you apply this formula” and often with little relevancy to real life problem solving. Students learned to solve these individual problems by following established procedures, and would do so repeatedly for a number of similar questions, but would they be able to apply these concepts in a foreign setting in which the problem scope was not clearly defined?
2. It was difficult to be a mindful learner under stress and sleep deprivation. In the Canadian education system where I went through undergraduate, it was normal (mandatory) to have 6 or 7 courses per semester in which lectures, tutorials and labs took up 35-45 hours per week. This did not include the time it took to complete assignments, projects and studying for tests. Under bombardment of course content and time constraint, students often chose the easiest route that would maximize their grades. It became a game of guessing what will be covered on the test, and memorizing key solutions so as to get by. I didn’t think there was enough time (and I didn’t have the energy) to truly absorb the material, let alone to reflect and extrapolate. The mentality was simply “to get things done.” While I might come off as complaining, I honestly did not think that overloading students was truly conducive to learning. What further perplexed me was that the heavy curriculum had to physically take place on campus even though the majority of students commuted an hour or more to school (one way). Was it a wonder that early morning and late evening classes were mostly empty? Perhaps the one thing I did learn from undergraduate studies was time management.
3. Do we place enough faith in our undergraduate students? I hesitate to answer, because in my own experience, the better learning material had always seemed to be reserved for the graduate students. By “better,” I mean the presentation of material with qualifying statements, with all its uncertainties, and not simplified so that it was only correct…for the time being. (You will learn the real thing in graduate school!) There are of course benefits to simplifying certain concepts in introductory courses, but I think instructors should be responsible for framing the concepts in a way that allows room for discussion, questioning, and exploration of the open ended aspects. I often hear professors say that “it’s too hard” for the undergraduates and that “they won’t get it.” Is it fair to place limitations on the students’ intellectual development without even giving them a chance?

It is impossible to turn back time, and I am pretty sure I would not want to suffer through the same delivery of that curriculum again. I can only hope to draw from my own experiences as a student and move forward as a teacher. If engineering education needs to be content driven, then perhaps it is only logical to explore various methods of content delivery. As I was writing the second point about balancing time, travel and workload, it occurred to me that uploading lectures online, such as in video format, and allowing students to learn the material whenever, wherever, however, might be more suitable for a student population that is geographically dispersed. While this entire post might seem like an angry diatribe (and I apologize!), I am glad at the possibility of transforming an unpleasant experience into a stepping stone for a better educational experience for others.