Category: Greatest Hits

Places & Spaces | Seeing Beyond the Book

For decades textbooks have defined the way we teach. Assigning readings and questions chapter by chapter has become so rote that even the teachers must be becoming bored. When meaningless lectures repeat material that can be found in the book, students (understandably) stop going to class. They lose interest and they fall behind. It is not that I have anything against textbooks or books in general, in fact I have enormous respect for the time, discipline and knowledge that goes into aggregating expertise in a given field and presenting it effectively in a couple hundred pages. My issue is with “teaching by the book” and teachers fooling themselves into thinking that, even before the digital age, this was an effective means for “information transfer” (Robert Talbert alludes to this in his post). This pedagogical strategy cannot possibly keep up with the eruption of new information that has come with the internet. There are now too many dynamic connections and ideas hidden between the lines for educators to cling to the static chapters in a text.

Here on campus we have some amazing resources, and among them Newman Library may be the most impressive. Of the 2 million volumes now available across the various branches there is certainly something there for every motivated learner. The problem is that not every learner is motivated enough to go out and find the right resource. And even the most motivated among us might not have the time or the energy to trace the connections between resources. I wrote this post in Newman and as I was walking through the stacks searching for inspiration I noticed myself looking at my cell phone more often than at the bindings of the books. Even in the education section I found nothing of interest. It wasn’t until I saw past the stacks and stumbled upon a more modern means of information transfer that I finally found what I was looking for.

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The Places & Spaces exhibit in Newman Library is an amazing example of interactive, imaginative learning. Geophysical and temporal mapping and data visualization literally help you transcend space and time and trace connections between diverse ideas and trends. There are macroscopes (defined by the curating organization as “software tools that help us focus on patterns in the data that are too large or complex to see with the naked eye”) that trace the history of science and the language patterns that have evolved in global academic research across millennia. They are interactive and turn the learning experience into an inquisitive game, just like Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown advocate in A New Culture of Learning. Other visualizations delve deeply into the connections in the human brain, the sequenced genomes of 191 species, and the evolution and structure of science itself. They range from purely analytical to abstractly creative and aesthetic- catering to many different styles of learning and capturing the attention of visitors interested in vastly different things.

Books are no longer nearly enough to engage the imagination of digital learners. We need to visualize the incredible connections enabled in a networked world and present them in ways that are not just digestible but also inspirational for students of our technological age. If you have not yet checked out the Places & Spaces exhibit in Newman Library, I would strongly recommend you do so. Walk right through the stacks and find something a bit more awe-inspiring on the other side. It is an amazing example of how modern educators can stop teaching by the book and instead start using new tools and technologies to help students see beyond the book.


The imaginary pig cadaver

This summer, I worked as the student coordinator for the German Fulbright Student Summer Institute here at Virginia Tech. For three weeks, 24 German Fulbright students toured campus, hiked the surrounding area, and explored the Blacksburg community. During that time, the students also took two courses: Communicating Science and Scientific and Technical Writing. Essentially, these classes are designed to help students better share scientific topics with the everyday person. But on a deeper level, the courses allow students to make connections across cultural barriers, develop confidence, and enhance awareness for others. I never got to sit in on a class, but from what the students told me, every session was full of high energy activities that pushed them out of their comfort zones while also helping them feel connected to their fellow classmates. As a result, the students felt more than comfortable presenting a topic of their choosing to the class at the end of the three weeks – this was set up sort of like a Ted Talk. They’re awesome.

Every time the students talked about their classes, I cringed out of embarrassment – I’d never feel comfortable doing the activities they did! Improv exercises, dancing, singing, you name it. But I soon realized that the “active learning” made them excited to go to class, and therefore, eager to participate, no matter how embarrassing. Plus, a significant portion of course time was spent working in pairs or in groups, allowing them to form special bonds, and a sense of teamwork. While their final speeches were given individually, there was a lot of collaboration that went into the speeches. And that collaboration was evident in everyone’s support and glowing reviews of each other’s work.

Outside of class, we took the students on a handful of tours, from the VTCRC to the CUBE, to the DREAMS Lab. Amazing things are happening at all of these places, most of which goes right over my head. Aside from the language barrier, I think the German students had a good grasp on what was happening during these tours (they’re a crazy smart group!). But even if the topics are complicated, I feel there’s probably a better way to share the research or business models with the public. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the tours. My mind was blown at every stop, and I’m so proud to attend an institution where all of this important work happens. However, if the goal is to get more people interested in such topics, or to at least update outsiders on what’s going on, I think the approach to learning could use some updates. Perhaps the way learning occurs in these STEM classes is more exciting, I don’t know. Whatever the case may be, I hope that I can provide some insight or guidance for these tours in the future.

Is active learning the answer? Maybe. Could we have played some kind of game, created something ourselves, watched a video. . .danced or sung a song? Maybe! But these tours were quick and jam packed, so maybe a simple change in the setup is all that’s needed? Moreover, Robert Talbert suggests in “Four things lecture is good for” that we shouldn’t be quick to make lectures a thing of the past. For tours with these high-level scientific topics, a lecture might actually be ideal – but those doing the lecturing have to understand the purpose and the context. Also, it was evident during every tour that these scientists and researchers are fiercely passionate about their work. And according to Professor James Gee in “Digital Media – New Learners of the 21st Century”, having a specific passion is important. But as the world develops, the information about which people are passionate will change, too. Therefore, what’s even more important than having a specific passion is being passionate about learning. I think if this mentality were more popular, we’d all do a better job at sharing our particular passions because we’d want others to understand them so that we can swap ideas and opinions. It’s quite isolating to be so passionate about something that we aren’t able to share with other people.

Again, I was truly in awe of all the tours during the Fulbright Student Summer Institute. I’m sure I learned a lot more than I realize, but through all the powerpoints, lectures, and scientific vocabulary, all I really remember is being asked to imagine a pig cadaver as a crash-test-dummy at the Center for Injury Biomechanics. Poor little guy!

 

I can’t play because I might lose

There is one problem with making learning into a game--you might lose.  As you were thinking about the stories and examples given in the readings for this week about getting people engaged in learning using 21st century tools or creative games, did you notice all of the failures and near-failures? Douglas Thomas, who created a… Continue reading I can’t play because I might lose →


Lessons from Music

Those of us writing posts for GEDI have likely adapted to and done reasonably well in the current education system. All of us are graduate students who love school so much that we would want to spend a few more years in it. But not every student feels this way. Lectures and coursework could come off as boring and obligatory. Some students might even find school not worth their while to want to make it through to the finish line.

The question of how to engage students and make learning effective is at the heart of education. (Just what did I learn back in history class?!) I’d like to share a pedagogy used by one of my piano teachers that has resonated with me and is relevant to the topic.

This teacher, let’s name him Mr. Motif, loves to repeat himself. I often think, “Why does he have to say the same thing five times in five different ways? How onerous!” Sometimes, he would even make me do ridiculous looking physical motions and emit weird sounds. But I have come to realize that Mr. Motif’s method worked, no matter how tedious it seemed at times. Because out of the many ways he tried to convey one single idea, at least one of them stuck.

Mr. Motif’s teaching method reflected the diversity in modes of learning and internalization. A single way of teaching will not likely resonate with every student. In fact, the word “teaching” implies a one-way transaction in which the student is passive. For some, being talked at might only result in words being bounced off.

Which brings me to the other reason for what I believe to have attributed to the success of Mr. Motif’s method: between the listening, physical motioning and sound emitting, I was an active participant who was able to make meaningful interpretations in a way that worked for myself.

I was excited after reading about the intellectual games played in Reacting to the Past. I saw the possibility of not only active participation but also individual student customization. By being an active game participant, the student could have the freedom to role play, essentially being responsible for his or her own learning. I could never have imagined that a pedagogy I have been used to on a one-on-one basis could be applied to a full-size classroom. Given the chance, I would like to try playing, even if it means braving through history class again.

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Musical motif: a short, recurring musical idea.

Bumper to Bumper Learning

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A computer read me the essays for this week’s post while stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the middle of Manhattan. A friend’s wedding took me nearly 500 miles from Blacksburg and I knew I would have to multi-task a bit to stay caught up with my coursework.  I discovered an app called VoxDox that takes article URLs and dictates them with a robotic voice reminiscent of Kraftwerk albums from the mid 1970’s. When a big build up at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel stopped me dead in my tracks I just pressed play, turned up the volume, and listened to a tinny rendition of Gardner Campbell’s “Networked Learning as Experiential Learning” (2016) drown out the honking horns of far too many aggressive New York City drivers.

At first it felt incredible. While most people may have lost their cool in the two hours it took me to drive from Brooklyn to Jersey City, I had an enormous smile on my face the whole time. I was beating the system. I was getting work done while driving. Multi-tasking and simultaneously mastering the 21st century educational system. But as I swerved to avoid a massive bus that had to weave at weird angles through a grid-locked intersection, I realized my situation was not so ideal. I was distracted. I was absorbing about every other sentence at best. And I was about 90 minutes late for the rehearsal dinner.

And so I came to the conclusion that just like George Kuh had warned against in his monologue mentioned in the first paragraph of Campbell’s post, I had alienated myself from my own education. In my case it was not due to a desire to meet minimum syllabus requirements or to the university’s focus on developing core competencies. My alienation was due to the extreme accessibility of technology and an irreverence to the importance of contextual learning. I am continually amazed that we now have nearly unlimited and unrestricted access to information. But sometimes there is just too much of it and when we find it in the wrong places at the wrong times it can be very counterproductive. This is the crux of procrastination and the danger in distracted learning. It was also remarkably similar to my situation in traffic. Too many cars on insufficient roadways, ill-prepared to handle the flow of traffic.

I love the idea of networked learning. You can learn absolutely anything. You can learn it absolutely anywhere.  You can gain insights from brilliant minds regardless of physical proximity. It has the potential to transform access to knowledge and the collaborative creation of truth. It’s miraculous. But we all need to keep asking ourselves how much bandwidth we really have. When and where are we best suited to learn? In what ways can we best tap into these seemingly infinite wells of information? Every person has their preference and every person is different. The more we ask and probe the better chance we will have to design the next generation of adaptive platforms for networked learning that organize and present the material in more manageable, personalized ways.

How many uncoordinated honking cars can you really shove down the throat of the Holland Tunnel? But once those cars are connected and correlated, aware of the space around them and the best collective way to get to their respective destinations, there’s no slowing them down. The same goes for learning. Once we perfect networked learning and give it more awareness and intuition, there’s no bottleneck. Give it contextual awareness and make sure it is delivered in an appropriate place and an appropriate way for each individual and suddenly there’s no more concerns with bandwidth. There is just an awe-inpspiring capacity to drive forward the collective intelligence of the human race.

\\ For the record I had to re-read the essays before writing this post and I did indeed make it across the Hudson River in time for the wedding. //


Peanuts and barfblog: Influential in Networked Learning

Before classes began last Monday, I decided to take a pre-fall course where I traveled to various farms, processing facilities, and Agricultural Research Centers (ARECs) throughout Virginia. Being a bit new to the state, I thought what a better way to get more familiar with what Virginia agriculture has to offer than by being physically present and seeing it with my own eyes. As a Food Scientist, my classmates and I are often taught about how to excel within the food industry in a classroom setting, however, it is not uncommon for Food Science students to have never set foot in a food processing environment. Through this course I was able to take peanuts right off of the line and watch them be packaged into their containers. This was experiential learning at its finest. I probably got more of out of this three-day course than I would have a course lasting the duration of the semester. I was also able to meet Weed Scientists and Plant Pathologists that I otherwise would have probably never crossed paths with. These individuals serve as microbiologists in some capacities and therefore our work intersects quite frequently although collaboration is just beginning between departments.

Gardner Campbell’s “Networked Learning as Experiential Learning” article connects both experiential learning with facets of the Wide World Web. I enjoyed the comment that “one does not need permission to make a hyperlink.” This is true. It takes intrinsic motivation to go out and do this on one’s own. Some things like this just can’t be taught and it often takes trial and error rather than reading from a manual.

My previous Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Ben Chapman, runs a food safety blog titled barfblog. This blog works to communicate food safety news and information to the general public in a way in which is quick and easily understood. Dr. Chapman first began to construct the blog format when he was a student himself. Him and his PI have since grown the blog to have about 60,000 followers. The blog posts are converted into tweets and other forms of social media outputs. Dr. Chapman is able to use the analytics to support receiving funding to continue to run the blog as the way we communicate our research findings is changing. In return, Dr. Chapman always encouraged his students to pursue these types of their endeavors on their own. I currently write for the Institute of Food Technologist Student Association blog, Science Meets Food, and additionally contribute to Don’t Eat the Pseudoscience, a science-based seeks to workgroup that seeks to make food easier to understand for everybody in a fun, personable, and relatable manner using videos and social media platforms.

This might be one of my favorite statements of all times.

[“The best (and most successful) academics  are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breadth. Twitter and blogs, and embarrassingly enthusiastic drunken conversations at parties, are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.”]  -Tim Hitchcock

I will be honest in the fact that I Snapchat-ed this quote to my group of peers that I collaborative with on research. Even one of the individuals responded with “this is so us.” Hitchcock is spot on when he says that we become better and more successful researchers when we align with others. Through conference networking and being introduced via other students, we have created a small group of food science students involved in food safety work that remain virtually connected pretty much at all times. We have friends from across the nation and even in other parts of the world that I often call on when I get questions that I cannot answer.

I also enjoyed when Hitchcock acknowledged that social media provides an audience that is ready to “cite” your work. The work typically does itself when people become interested in the work you post on social media. Shares and retweets are simple and are almost second nature to the majority of individuals. Although Hitchcock seems to get it, there are still many researchers, especially in the hard sciences, that may not fully accept the idea of implementing social media and using daily life in general to promote research. It can sometimes be deemed as being unprofessional although I believe that these ideals are beginning to catch on.

No Information is an Island

We are entering the digital era, and everything gets digitized: we work with Microsoft Office software at work, purchase goods via PayPal, monitor everyday exercise or even sleep habit with fitbit, and post daily life experience on social network. Almost every behavior is influenced by Internet to some extent, and we really enjoy the convenience, efficiency, and stability it brings. As it comes to the learning process, the conventional “schooling” is also greatly transformed by Internet towards an advanced form of networked learning. Learning process is now not limited within an isolated classroom or a single textbook. You can easily have access to all the information and knowledge, jump into a discussion on online forum consisted of diversified groups of people, and express your opinions anytime/anywhere. The Internet-based learning, being one form of “connected learning”,1 bridge all the information and opens a new door for higher education with enormous benefits.

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Digital Platform in 21st Century

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But still, when this networked learning gradually extended to every classroom, there still have several challenges to be properly addressed. Using a laptop or PC for learning process can always be a distraction in conventional classroom or study room, especially for those freshman. New concepts tend to be boring, and complicated equations are always tedious. With a laptop on the desk and a whole world of interesting things happening every seconds, the lecturer can easily lose control to young students. This challenge urges lecturer to rethink about their way to deliver key information and make their fast-paced class more intriguing and understandable. On the student’s side, more self-control is preferably required for enhanced learning efficiency.

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Online Education vs. Traditional Education

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Networked learning via Internet requires more critical thinking for all the information. The traditional textbook-centered learning approach tends to deliver safe and well-confirmed knowledge to all learners. As Internet being a massive flee market of information and knowledge, students should carefully read through all related information online and rule out fake claims and incorrect messages. This process can be rather difficult for those students stepping into a new and unfamiliar area. Though more practice can certainly help, teachers should provide proper aid at starting period to help students understand fundamental principles and guide them through screening stage.

 

The last challenge for networked learning online is to effectively convey your points and messages in a professional way. As Doug Belshaw mentions in his blog, “ensure your data is readable by both humans and machines”.2 Students tends to treat Internet as a casual space, and hence their writings may have lots of oral language, confusing abbreviations, and/or random tags learned from social network, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It is better to separate the writing pattern of insightful blog with that on social network to promote deep and more efficient communication. Having more practice in professional blogging can definitely help, but it could be better if university can offer workshops on professional blogging for freshman. Online blogging and forum certainly provides us a channel to access the professional and unique perspectives from others, post our own critiques, and eventually understand the original information better via comprehensive discussion. No information is an island in this digital era, and no learners should be separated from others.

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No Academic is an Island

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Reference

  1. For Ito’s most recently published thoughts on this topic, see Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015).
  2. Doug Belshaw “Working Openly On the Web”

Thoughts on the Relevancy of Networked Learning in Engineering Education

Until last semester, when I took Preparing for Future Professoriate, I didn’t even know that blogging was a school thing. I asked around, and it came to my attention that the majority who did blog as part of coursework requirement were outside of engineering. The initial shock was tempered by the statistics, and it served as a beginning to my reflections on the engineering education experience.

Let me start by saying that I find blogging fun. That what I’m currently writing will be (please?) read by not just a person who assigns the grade but a collective audience that interacts. Words now have the potential for greater meaning and outreach, whereas they used to be archived and gathering digital dust after given another checkmark.

So why is blogging less prevalent in engineering education?

One reason could be that the curriculum is geared more towards problem-solving. Presently, it’s hard to imagine learning the mathematical and technical fundamentals other than through the more traditional methods (i.e. the chalk and blackboard lectures). There is also the issue of meeting ABET requirements, so that the engineering program maintains accreditation (see link below). Hence, the student contract, or the syllabus.

http://www.abet.org/accreditation/why-abet-accreditation-matters/

But there are engineering topics that cannot be taught in the traditional sense. One of my most memorable undergraduate experiences was a course about entrepreneurship in the energy sector. The class wasn’t so much a lecture as it was a discussion on why certain people, policies, technologies succeed or fail. I learned so much from my peers, who unfortunately probably didn’t learn as much from reticent me. As with all complex problems, the solution cannot be taught or given. But the problem can be discussed, and ideas can be bounced off one another, hopefully providing participants with broader perspectives that can lead to forward-moving decisions. It’s what happens in meeting rooms, conferences, political stages, where big issues are given voice. If discussions are integral to real life, why shouldn’t education reflect that?

I know a number of students who chose to go into engineering because it represented the path of least resistance – more numbers, fewer essays. Boy were they in for a surprise! Writing, and communication in general, occupy an enormous chunk of an engineer’s time. Practice makes better, and there’s no better motivator (in my opinion) than to practice writing for an actual audience. It could even be a more comfortable channel of communication for the less outspoken, such as myself. Again, it’s this element of relevancy to life that I think can enrich engineering education.

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