Author: chang1230

Interdisciplinary Learning

My research group is part of VTSuN: The Virginia Tech Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. In this institution, we have faculties and students from Geoscience, Chemical Engineering, Material Science, Environmental Engineering, et al. It is great to have people from different research background get together to seek some corporation and share instruments and ideas. For examples, the material science people could focus on the synthesis of materials with great performance and we environmental guys could use the materials to solve some environmental related problems. The topic we both focused on is nanotechnology. VTSuN held seminar and group talking regularly and I found it very helpful and inspired.

In a broad way, my project is also part of VT IGEP. The Graduate School is supporting Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Programs (IGEP) to promote and sustain interdisciplinary graduate education and research at Virginia Tech. VTSuN is a related program of IGEP. Some other projects like Regenerative Medicine, Translational Plant Science and Water INTERface are also involved. I used to take an IGEP class and we discussed a lot about interdisciplinary study and people in the class were from various majors. We wrote a proposal as assignment in this class and the three people in my small group were from totally different research field. It’s a great opportunity to learn something from other major. And we came up with one project which was related to the researches about all of us. During the group meeting of my research group, we were always talking about things which we were all familiar. But in the IGEP meeting, everything is so new and fresh. I really enjoyed the diversity of topics and stories.

 Interdisciplinary Learning

 

Sometimes I prefer have a discussion with a person who has different point view from yours more interesting than with those who always agree with you. By debating, great ideas were always generated. People from different research background would form a discussion like this and produce some interesting things. Last week when I reviewed Jonathan’s syllabus about writing from research. This is a very unfamiliar topic for me and I still find some very useful information. Like as a graduate student, I can still enroll class which is focused on research writing. That will help me improve my writing skills. I suppose interdisciplinary learning would become more popular in the future since cooperation makes us stronger.


I want my voice be heard in class.

 

I have not taught any class yet, but I have heard lots of stories about teaching since my grandmother and my mother are both teachers. My grandmother used to be a mathematics teacher in a middle school. The school had requirements for each teacher such like the average score of the class should reach 85. And math is such an important subject because all kinds of high school have this subject in their admission exam and everyone tried to gain a higher score. My grandmother was a very harsh teacher and always gave many assignments. She complained that some students were lack of motivation especially those who had poor performances. She found that hard to raise their interests and made them involved in the learning process. My mother is a music teacher in another middle school. I would say music class would get more active interactions with students because it’s a more “fun” subject than math. My mother arranged some of the classes to get students share the music they liked. These classes were the most popular part because all the students feel involved. In order to make the classes more fun, my grandmother adopted the method like my mother used to get students share some puzzles regarding specific chapter. Students got very excited about this procedure and lots of discussion were occurred after the share meeting.

In Professor Fowler’s article, he/she mentioned: Always engage with your students; do not do something “to” them, or “for” them, or “at” them”.  I think this is a key factor that every teacher should pay attention to. Teachers may always consider how to get their voice be heard in the class and neglect that the students also prefer to be heard. It is not very different to prepare a syllabus and the slides for lecture. The challenging part is to give the class in an interesting and efficient way.

I also find the tips mentioned in Professor Fowler’s article very helpful, especially the performance of teaching part. It may be helpful to consider myself as a student and consider what I want to obtain from a class. Teachers always want their voice be heard in the class and require students to make notes about each key learning point. On the other hand, students also want their voices be hear. If teachers could handle it better, the learning process would be far more fun!


Grading system is a giant monster

It’s very competitive to get in a top ranking university in China. The admission is only based on one examination (college entrance examination), and there is only one chance to take the examination every year. If you cannot get a good score, you have to be back to high school and wait another year. It’s so cruel and you will never want to fail the exam. There are lots of debates about college admission in China because it seems not reasonable to make decisions based on one examination. But it is how it works now. Based on this situation, grading system is so popular and almost every middle school and high school use the grading and ranking system to evaluate students’ academic achievements.

 

I have very complicated feeling for grading. When I was in high school, every students received a tiny piece of note after midterm and final exams. On the note showed the score and ranking of each subject in the class and the whole grade. And the school asked us to show the note to parents and got them sign the note. I always feel extremely anxious before I got the score ranking note. If I got a nice ranking, it would be very encouraging since the hard work got the gains. But if it is not very satisfying score, I always had a lot of emotions aroused. For one thing, it’s disappointing because it proved a poor performance to some extent. Secondly, there was pressure from my parents. Moreover, everyone is worried about the college entrance examination and want to be completely prepared for it. Overall, I am not big fun of this kind of assessment method. But I cannot say I hate it because it could help me know how I was doing for each subject and make a specific goal for next time.

 

I must say some learning process is not fun at all. Especially for the subject which there are right answers for every questions. Then the teachers need to score the homework and exams. But what happened to the subject which there are no correct or wrong answers? “Learning scientists confirm that it is relatively simple to test for subject matter content recall and difficult to assess independent critical thinking and creativity.” As illustrated in Marilyn M. Lombardi’s article. I used to be reluctant to accept the scores on thesis about history or culture topic. Because there are no correct viewpoint. I do not think the teacher or anyone has the right to say it is good or not.

 

Grading system improve the performance for some people in some subject. On the other hand, it also reduce the motivation for those who cannot adapt to the system. It is like a giant monster which is chasing after me. Sometimes it makes me want to study and work harder to gain a better ranking. But sometimes it makes the whole thing so scary. For the teachers, I would suggest use it carefully and deferentially.


Behave like a robot or not?

“A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.” This is a description of robot in Wikipedia. The way that a robot is working is very similar like mindlessness process. Instead of thinking by themselves, robots always follow the designed produces to solve problems. What makes human beings different from the robot is the mindfulness learning process.

As defined in Ellen J. Langer’s paper, “Mindfulness is a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context”, I think “mindfulness learning” is a great word to describe the initiative learning process. On the other hand, I would take mindlessness learning similar like a spoon-feeding classroom in which teachers simply give information and answers. Students will accept whatever the teachers give and pay less attention to other related questions. Some people would prefer mindlessness learning since it’s easy and energy-saving. Others would prefer mindfulness learning due to the participation and creativity. Which one is the smarter choice?

robot_human

I would like to share my opinion about this question based on my experience. My major is environmental engineering. For undergraduate education, I took classes like environmental chemistry, microbiology, hydromechanics, electrotechnology, water pollution control engineering, etc. All these subjects are related to wastewater treatment and I have obtained abundant information about wastewater treatment technological process. Then I took a project design class which required the students to design a wastewater treatment plant, which including the parameter setting, construction, instrument selection, workman assign, etc. The design is totally different from just taking classes because it need comprehensive understanding of the project and involved extensive problems regarding various aspects. Different from memorizing reaction equations and formulas, I would say this process is consist of a lot of mindfulness learning. However, I do not think I can make the design if I have not taken the previous less mindfulness courses. So my choice of the way to learning depends

Even though I always consider initiative learning more efficient and impressive than passive learning. I would admit that it is easier to get some fundamental background information by mindlessness learning first. Then save some energy to do a great job in the following progress.

 


Follow the teacher’s lead or yours?

The advantages about lecture in Robert’s post: “Four things lecture is good for” totally make sense. But learning from lecture in classroom seems passive for me. It’s a teacher’s responsibility to set up a class with logical arrangement. Then during the lecture, students should follow the teacher’s lead to move from point to point. The size of the class is always large and the teacher cannot stop for every question the students have. If you get confused for one point, you are forced to continue with the lecture which may lead to more confusions. During primary school, classroom with lectures seems fine for me. When I entered middle school, I felt more efficiency by learning from textbook and reference books all by myself. Because I can follow my lead instead of the teacher’s. I am not saying we should all quit from classes, of course I still need help from teachers to solve some problems that I cannot figure out all by myself. My idea is to use the lecture less in class and give some assignments about pre-view before class. And then let the students raise questions instead of the teacher.

The story about Tom, who was diagnosed with diabetes, is a great example for learning outside of the classroom. Tom gained both medical information and emotional support from a website called Diabetes Daily. Compared with the booklets and pamphlets given by the hospital, the website provided more comprehensive information about every aspect of diabetes. Instead of thinking in a doctor’s way, the website gives tons of lectures from a patient’s view. The doctor might have told Tom what diabetes is, what he should do, how this illness is going to change his life. But all this information seems dry! Things changed when Tom got the information from the websites because one question lead to another, he could find the answers step by step with his own pace. I had similar experience when I prepared GRE. A forum with more than ten thousand members shared the notes, study plans, experiences in examinations, etc. It’s far more interesting than taking a tutorial class which always last for more than 3 hours full of lectures. However, there still are some problems for how this kind of forum work. For the patients, it’s hard for them to tell whether the specific medicine works. It would be a better idea to confirm with the doctors. And also for GRE examinee, I still need a teacher to give the official correct answers.

Most of the learning process always start with a lecture and then the Q&A part. Now days, online course, blogs and forums all give tons of useful information. It might be a good idea to follow your own lead first to learn. And then go to the lectures for your questions to gain deeper understanding.


Networked Learning: Put Your Ideas in a Blog!

Blog is an almost perfect platform to show who you are and what you think. It is an active site for both the writers and readers based on comments and responds to comments. Get involved in blog community, one can gain more than expected.

Compared with twitter, I prefer blog. Twitter is simple and convenient for information fragment and people only spend several seconds on each post. On the other hand, blog requires more serious thinking about the topic. Put a link of the blog on twitter would be a great idea to get more audience. “Hashtag” is useful tool to find the blogs you are interested. My current research is about nanotechnology. When I just searched “nanotechnology blog”, I got a link for “Top 5 Nanotechnology Blogs”. At least 4 posts were really interesting and I searched more about the writers. In my opinion, that is a great example how a networked learning is established. I would consider networked learning as a more active learning than listening a lecture in the classroom. Whenever I find something interesting in the blog, I can just stop and pay more attention to the specific idea. On contrary, I have to follow the teacher’s lead in class for one lecture.

1

I attended a conference this summer. The conference was arranged with a super busy schedule for two days with about 200 talks in different sessions. The talks which I was interested sometimes have a conflict in the schedule and it made me quite depressed to miss one of them. That would be very helpful if this conference held a blog and allows the attendees to post their talk on it. Even though I missed some talks, I can still get a general idea about the talks and then have some communications with the authors. Since this conference is held every other year, it will help the members of the conference to track the researches if the talks are presented on the blog. For example, I can search the talk of one specific person which was given on last conference and consider the progress obtained.

It may cost considerable time to maintain a high quality blog and update in time. But once you get enough attention and comments from the audiences, the writer could obtain more suggestions to get improvement.

2

Actually I am a big fan of blog and have kept a blog for more than 10 years. Instead of writing about research and learning, most of my blogs were about daily life and the thoughts related to the past, present and further. It is popular between my friends, and I think it is a good way to let people to know me. Maybe in the near further, I will start a blog about my research and put all my ideas in it.

Images：http://thebeginnersguideto.com/?page_id=19

               http://markdalton.net/pulling-new-followers-blog/