Author: neginf

Let us stay away from prejudgments!

I am a 29-year-old woman from Iran.  As far as I remember, I have witnessed several evidences of “difference seeking” which I want to share with you, as well as my current believes about how to deal with this universal phenomenon, specifically its reflection in educational environments.

Back to Iran, there are barely international communities who live there for long time. While significant number of tourists visit Iranian heritage sites yearly, not many choose to stay as immigrants,  particularly in the past 40 years.  Well, this may bring about a picture of a quite uniform country with quite similar people of the same nation, skin color, culture and history. This is not really the case, though; in facts, driving from north to south and east to west, one meet totally different individuals. Due to modern urbanism,  many people have been moving to  big cities, such as Tehran the capital city of Iran, where suddenly they find new accents, lifestyles and looks.  And then the “difference seeking” engine starts generating prejudgments:  Turks are this, Kurds are that, Balochs are this, Arabs are that, blah blah blah.

During the past four years of my life in the US, I have experienced another level of living in a multicultural country. The appearance differences are substantially significant,  so that not only all Iranians are grouped in one cluster, but also many times people of our neighboring countries are added to our group, and we make a larger cluster called Middle Easterners! And, again, the same story repeats: Whites are this, Blacks are that, Asians are this, Browns are that, blah blah blah. This time, just the prejudgments are applied to larger groups of people with remarkable visual differences, but the essence of such statements are the same:

  • We have a backpack of features specific to each cluster. Simply, whenever we meet a person who looks like a member of that cluster, without having a enough knowledge about his/her background, we assign those feature to that person.
  • We feel excited to share our backpacks with fellow citizens, and make it updated!
  • After a while, we become even more expert and make small bags in our backpacks, e.g. eastern and western Europeans bags inside the Europeans bag.

Academic environments are of the most diverse places where local/international scholars get together. It is definitely very crucial to train students, faculties and staff of such environments to learn more about (1) the “hidden brain” which implicitly generates the above prejudgments, (2) techniques to terminate/dilute these thoughts, (3) polite yet frank dialogues to deal with discriminating conversations. What if we consider the whole community as one organ whose members endeavor to LEARN, and all speak in one language called SCIENCE? Is not it a more respectful, inclusive and effectual alternative?

Grading or not grading: that is the question!

There have been many critiques on the grade-based evaluations among the resources of this week. Alfie Kohn summarizes some negative side effects, and introduces few alternatives– such as replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation. Although these scenarios seems like “utopian fantasy” at first glance, I will be explaining a case study which proved to me it is possible to get the most out of students’ potentials without threatening them by grades!

I had a graduate level course last year, with around sixty other graduate fellows from several departments at Virginia Tech including statistics, civil engineering, industrial engineering, physics and computer science. Apparently, this was extremely challenging for the instructor to evaluate the students with these broad background in a fair manner. What he did, was to define quite easy homework assignments to involve everyone in the class and guarantee a big chunk of total grade. The final project, though, was open-end and huge. In groups of five, we were required to have many meetings to brainstorm, design algorithms, code and analyze our results. The professor created groups of people from different majors, and organized many “lighthouse sessions” to answer our questions at high level. More interestingly, he collaborated with a sponsor company which provided free food (!) during a lighthouse session, and also considered monetary gifts for the top three groups. Last but not least, the professor invited Virginia Tech faculties and the experts form the sponsor company during the lighthouse sessions to answer our questions. After a while, what happened was that students were not just working on the project to get a good grade. We were competing to do our bests, as we observed how well the professor did to provide everything for us during the semester. We were all so excited and determined. I remember that the last week we barely slept, and worked extremely hard. Our group was not among the top three, but we all were happy at the end because we truly did our bests during a productive friendly teamwork.

In a nutshell, I highlight the role of teachers in deleting or diluting the grade-based system and replace it with more effective alternatives.

Mindful vs. Mindless Learning: a Case Study

To start with, let us define the meaning of these two keywords: mindfulness and mindlessness. According to “Mindful Learning” by Ellen Langer, “mindfulness is a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engages in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context”. On the other hand,  when we are mindless we rely on decisions made in the past. As the result, “we are stuck in a single, rigid perspective and oblivious to alternative ways of knowing”.

When it comes to learning, mindful learning is interpreted as an interactive communication between the students and teachers, which engages the students actively thinking about the topic, answering questions, and most importantly asking questions. In contrast, mindless learning pictures teaching as a way to delivering information; therefore, the emphasis is more on what is taught rather than how it is taught. In other words, “mindful learning=active learning”, whereas “mindless learning=passive learning”.

Honestly, I have been a fan of mindless learning for a long while! In particular, when I volunteered to teach an undergraduate course to the computer science major students in summer 2017, I scheduled the semester very heavily to make sure that all the topics are covered and nothing is missed. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach at the first glance, you can imagine how my priorities were geared towards the delivery of information rather than teaching less but more effectively. Interestingly, students did not reflect any issues regarding this approach in their SPOT surveys! This perhaps  implies that this attitude has become a common teaching philosophy, so that students did not recognize it as a drawback.

This semester, I am privileged to develop a graduate course in math/computer science with my advisor. As opposed to me, he put his emphasis on the engagement of students through several lab sessions, projects and presentations. In the beginning, I frowned upon his proposed syllabus, which was very different than the standard ones– those basically cover the major sections of a textbook. Instead, he selected fewer topics but added more hands-on projects and Q&A sessions. Furthermore, his presentations are often made of a few slides containing methodologies and formulas followed by several slides on the real-world examples. Expectedly, students are more involved during the class and follow the topics enthusiastically.

One may argue that an undergraduate course is significantly different than a graduate course in terms of the of the opportunities that the instructor have to customize the syllabus. This is a vey legitimate argument. But, what I am willing to accentuate is the paradigm shift from the conventional easy way of passive teaching to the new and challenging way of active teaching. In my opinion, once this philosophy is set, the courseware to make it happen will flourish accordingly.

 

Video Games as Learning Tools

I met her when we were 18 years old. Freshman computer science students full of dreams, questions and of course energy. But she was different.; when we were all working hard on our course projects and lacking sleep, shes was playing video games. When we were  all studying hard and getting prepared for the final exams, she was playing video games. When we were celebrating the end of semester, guess what, she was still playing video games!  Kamelia has been a close friend of mine for more than a decade. We spent undergraduate and Masters programs together. I remember from the first day of our friendship, she clarified for all the classmates that ”I chose computer science because I want to become a game developer!”. This motivation might be common for many students in the U.S., but at my home country, IRAN, gaming is more like a hobby than an inspiration for choosing a major.  Kamelia, though, was brave and persistent. She worked as a game developer in a company for couple of years after graduation in computer science with a minor in psychology. Later, she started her PhD at the University of Luxembourg working on “Computer Games to Treat Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder”.

Following are what I learned from Kamelia completed with the crux of resources on this topic:

  • Video games != waste of time. From educational point of view, you can potentially learn what you struggle to listen during a class or among the impractical homework assignments, in an entertaining game experience.
  • Video games == problem solving. All video games are sets of problems which the player should solve. Does not this sound like another form of learning?
  • Video games contain “Embedded Assessment”. A good game, in general,  is designed so that its players cannot go to the next level unless they qualify. This certainly removes the conventional test-and-grade system and replaces it with more encouraging play-and-win system.
  • Gaming based therapy programs help cognitive scientists to address learning issues  and ultimately improve mental health. This is particularly beneficial when it comes to children who are less willing to spend time in hospitals and clinics. You may find the related following TEDx talk interesting.

Networked Learning

In this blog I’m going to summarize what I have found interesting in the resources, as well as the reflection of my personal opinions.

What kind of educational experiences change lives?  This is the main question studied from different angels in “Networked Learning as Experiential Learning”. At some point, the author compares the traditional networked learning experiences via hard copy books available in the libraries, with the digital networked computing in the cyberspace. Undoubtedly, the emergence of digital books and later Learning Management Systems (LMS) and related apps has been a paradigm shift in modern education. In my opinion, as we are still learning how to implement the digital educational system effectively, it is important to bolster it with the conventional physical version. For instance, I have always thought that given accessible, inexpensive lightweight Ebooks, they should certainly beat the market . I was totally surprised when I found an opposite trend in “7 Reasons Why Ebook Sales Are Falling–and Print Book Sales Are Rising Again“. One can definitely find similar examples comparing modern LMSs vs. traditional systems, where the latter is mostly based on in-class and face-to-face communications and evaluations. From my point of view, depending on the course subject, students’ age, the level of course and many other factors, keen teachers sought for a good balance between the two modern and traditional forms of course materials to improve the educational experience.

In”Twitter and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research” the author emphasizes the importance of public involvement in academia through social media and blogging. This was an appealing article for me, as I have always overlooked the productive consequence of public engagement in the digital world. It is argued that while many journal articles are merely published to serve the needs of big publishing, it is required for researchers to make use of public channels, e.g., Twitter and blogging , to ENGAGE the readers in academic dialogues. The author believes such virtual conversations simply demonstrate the underlying passion for a subject, and must be publicized to foster the concept of active engagement. He, particularly, encourages early career scholars to expose their research ideas publicly. While they might be afraid of being criticized or see their ideas stolen, the author explains that this is a beneficial resolution in long term to build an audience for their work in the process of doing the work itself. Finally, a very practical tip is proposed which I am eager to try in my future classes: embedding blogs in undergraduate assessment. This sounds like an effective win-win method for undergraduates to improve their academic writing, and for teachers to hear all passive voices and feedbacks.

Three useful ideas to work on the web openly were suggested in the corresponding manifesto: have control over your digital identity, publish your work publicly in a standard format, improve the network effects of your digital work by adding well-structured URLs and tags and applying metadata. In another resource for this assignment, Seth Godin describes blogging as a free functional solution to acquire metacognition of thinking about what you intend to say. He clarifies if you stick with it, regardless of number of your followers, you will good at it and ultimately will be heard.

Last but not least, Dr. Michael Wesch modestly narrates what he learnt from his toddler, George, who endlessly tried to learn how to walk down the stairs. It was absolutely a touching TEDx talk in which the lecturer talked about his journey to get to know his students and their concerns. Spending a lot of time and having one-on-one lunches with his students, Dr. Wesch finally came up with the conclusion that most of them struggle to answer these three principal questions: who am I? what am I going to do? am I going to make it? The speaker presents a novel collaborative model for setting up the course projects which truly impressed me. I am very excited to implement his idea in a future class.