Month: February 2016

  Imagine walking into a Starbucks looking for coffee, but the baristas insisted you needed coconut water instead because that was what they believe everyone should have. What if they even refuse to show you coffee and label you “resistant” for insisting? Most people would be livid and call for the manager, yet we have allowed …

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Neil Postman asserts that meaning and significance are assured only when our learning fits within a grand narrative that motivates and guides us. I do agree that a grand narrative can help motivate students to learn; however, I think this is not the only route to meaning and significance. To the extent that I can ascertain my true motivations without much bias, I think my learning is motivated by curiosity alone and I find meaning and significance in what I can do with what I’ve learned. I’ll give an example. When working on a particular statistical model, I often wonder what happens when you violate one or more of the assumptions, so I explore this via simulation. The simulations are usually very interesting to me and I may then alter the model to accommodate the assumption violations. I may end up with a new model that is useful for improving inference in ecological studies and thus the management of wildlife species or just general ecological knowledge and I find meaning and significance in this, but that was not the motivation. It was curiosity. I like to break things and then fix them.

Again, I see that a grand narrative can help motivate learning and convey significance, but if Langer’s mindfulness ideas have merit (I think they do), then shouldn’t our narratives be individualized? Can we convince all learners that their grand narrative should be improving the well-being of a global society? Probably not. And what does the well-being of a global society have to do with art history or other seeming unrelated topics? Maybe the narrative does not to be grand and maybe we don’t need just one. Perhaps we can be motivated in different areas by subject-specific micro-narratives. I don’t really know what this even means! Personally, I don’t recall any of my teachers trying to motivate the students with a grand narrative, especially not one of a religious or nationalistic nature. If I had to say what my grand narrative for life is, it is a combination of scientific skepticism, worldview naturalism, and secular humanism.  I would probably need to find another narrative to motivate me to learn art history and find meaning in it!

Does anyone have any thoughts on narratives, the grand narrative recommended by Niel Postman, or alternative narratives? What motivates you to learn and find significance in what you are learning?

What if Sir Ken Robinson was to give the same talk today, would he still mention Finland as a country on the top of the education system, would he still mention “No Child Left Behind” act as a topic for irony? Two and half years have passed since sir Ken gave his talk and the world did not stand still in these years. With the complete assent to sir Ken’s talk, I want to highlight some changes that have occurred with the focus on some related points.

In the past few years, Samsung has outperformed Nokia especially after adopting Google’s Android operating system. Nokia was famous by its slogan “connecting people” however, Samsung came out by a more rigid slogan “Inspire the world”.  Looking at the fact that Nokia is Finnish and Samsung is South Korean, did South Korea outperformed Nokia in any other field than cell phones ? The answer is yes. According to http://www.mbctimes.com/, the Finland’s education system was on the top rank until 2012. However, today we can see that South Korea has snatched the lead from Finland and became on the top of the rank. With many similarities between the two systems especially in the aspects related to respecting teachers and providing exceptional environment to them, and the most important no school’s dropout.

In South Korea about 93% of all students graduate from high school on time compared to 75% in the united states according to abc news.  The country is now 100 percent literate, and at the forefront of international comparative tests of achievement, including tests of critical thinking and analysis. However, having a system without school dropout and that’s ranked on the top of world’s education systems does not mean that the system is perfect. On the contrary to the Finnish system, I can feel that the South Korean system is not applicable every where. The system is mainly successful because of the nation’s culture which traditionally values conformity, order and hard work.

This success comes at a price according to a TED talk. Students are under enormous pressure to perform. Talent is not a consideration because the culture believes in hard work and diligence above all. Andreas Schleicher said that Koreans believe that they have to get through the really tough school period to have a great future. Classes also are larger with about forty students per class with the teacher’s goal is to lead the class as a community and help develop peer relationships.

So, having two successful but different education systems,  the Finnish and the South Korean, which one is better to adopt? Actually, it depends. Some other countries with similar cultures to South Korea have already applied similar techniques and were able to achieve great success in their education systems, speaking about Japan, Singapore  and Hong Kong. These countries also has outperformed Finland in the rank. However, we can see that this type of education, under pressure, is not suitable to other countries like the United States.

The united states education system has gone up in the rank in the past few years but still not in the lead. It was ranked 17th in 2012 and  moved to the 14th in 2015. With many criticism to the No Child Left Behind act, in December 2015 President Barack Obama signed a legislation replacing it, named Every Student Succeeds Act (EESA). The new law modified parts of the previous law but did not eliminate provisions relating to the periodic standardized tests given to students. However, the law makes significant changes to the role of tests in state education systems. For example, it requires states to include a broader set of factors in school accountability systems rather than just test scores. It is aimed that this new law overcomes the drawbacks of the previous one.

I think that Michael Wesch hits the nail on the head in his article Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance when he states in the first two sentences that,

The most significant problem with education today is the problem of significance itself. Students – our most important critics – are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education.

 

A dominant problem in our educational system is that we lose the student by silencing their voice. We do not make the education relevant to their lives, and therefore they do not engage.

It is my opinion, though, that as we discuss solutions to this, we go too far. We, as people, have a tendency to rebel against one extreme by running to the other. When it’s cold outside, my mother cranks the heat in the car until I’m sweating. When all pop music sounded the same, we ended up with such levels of individuality that some music became hardly musical.

I think this can happen in education too. Today, Christine Ortiz, the Dean of the Graduate School at MIT announced that she is taking a leave to start a new university with “no majors, no lectures, and no classrooms.”

Too often we ignore the input of the student crying “This isn’t relevant to me!” But we need not run so far that we ignore wisdom of the faculty member saying “I know it’s a stretch for you, but this is really important for you to learn.” How do we provide a meaningful and significant experience for the student without losing the direction of their education?

The nice thing about the car heater is that it usually ends up at a comfortable temperature after a little bit of sweating. And thanks to those that have continually pushed the boundaries of music, we’ve ended up with so many original masterpieces.

We need people like Dr. Ortiz to help us push the pendulum in a new direction. I can’t wait to see where we end up.

Why is education significant to you?
What do you think of Dr. Ortiz’s new university?
Where do you think education is headed?

It was always challenging for me to find an appropriate method to teach some courses for undergraduate level. I saw several methods of teaching during my bachelor because I passed several courses with different instructors those had their own method of teaching. Some instructors used the blackboard or whiteboard and they preferred to ask the students to write the notes during their lecture. I remember 10 years ago when I entered to the university, most of the instructors have used blackboard and whiteboard but they wanted to change their mind to use video projector for presenting their lecture by PowerPoints. So, I experienced both sides of teaching methods (using blackboard and PowerPoints). However I believe that we may need to recruit another method to optimize our time.

I personally tried to implement different method of teaching when I had the opportunity to teach some undergraduate and graduate courses in the past years. For example, I was a co-instructor for Bio-instrumentation course. I utilized several learning assessment tools. I asked the students to form their groups, then design and perform an applied project regarding biomedical engineering. They needed to collect the data from the patients in the hospitals and clinics. I taught them some topics related to instrumentation and asked them to apply this knowledge during their data collection.  In the end, they submitted their results as conference papers. I wanted to get feedback from other experts practically, therefore I encouraged them to submit and present their projects in an International Biomedical Engineering conference. The reviewers rated the papers and the average score was about 4.2 out of 5. This grade meant that the papers were between very good and excellent domain. Two papers got the best paper awards from that conference.

I also asked the students to fill out the evaluation form beyond official one from the university. They stated that this way could improve their understanding regarding Bio-instrumentation because they used the knowledge practically.

Subsequently, using the novel method for teaching related to the course’s topics may has an effect on the consequences of teaching significantly. I do not claim that my method may work for any courses but I concluded that if the instructors try to utilize innovative ways for teaching, the students will appreciate it and learn the topics more effective. What do you think? Did you have any specific experience regrading new methods of teaching?

I think the readings and videos this week made some interesting and well-founded critiques and analysis of the state of education and teaching. Conceptualizing education around the learning experience as opposed to the information learned offers a powerful tool to re-imagining what it means to be well-educated. I would contend that what you know – or even how much you know – has little to do with whether or not someone is well educated. But if I’m going to talk about what it means to be educated, perhaps I should say something about the goals and purpose of an education.

 
The purpose of an education is often connected to larger views about society, self-hood, ethics, and so on. It seems to me the current dominating attitude is that education is an investment in future workers so that they may be more productive later on – that is, schools are primarily economic tools to further corporate profits. I believe schools should primarily be seen as tools for serving and improving democratic society. With this view of schools, it is relatively easy to see that the purpose of an education should be to instill people with critical thinking skills, a social conscience and sense of justice, the capacity to understand individual consciousness, and to generally produce cheerful people with amiable ties and attitudes towards the rest of their community. But I have to question how realistic it is that you can teach people to be this way. Can you?

Ultimately, a good education mostly prepares one for more education. It seems then that to be well educated is simply to have the desire to continue learning. But how can teachers help to ensure this outcome – that their students become enthusiastic, self-directed, intellectual explorers capable of challenging themselves and others with interesting questions? In addition, how to you convince students that they should have an interest in thinking this way? How do you inspire the intrinsic motivation to learn for the sake of expanding one’s intellect?

Unfortunately, I don’t think you can teach these things. This is tangentially related to a theme that ties together many of Herman Hesse’s – one of my favorite authors – novels: that there is a certain knowledge and wisdom that can only be gained through experience. I think the democratic and humanitarian values we should really want to teach our children are the very things we cannot directly instill in them.

The videos and readings this week made good arguments for how teachers can better foster a learning environment that facilitates the self-learning of students. However, I did not see much about how teachers can lead by example through their own learning. For instance, I am teaching an engineering lab course, but I try to inspire students to become more independent learners with my behaviors outside the classroom. I am always reading (typically fiction) when I walk through campus and have donated a small library to the MSE undergraduate lounge. This being my first time teaching, I have many opportunities to share what I am learning with my students from the experience. If we want to educate people well we first have to inspire their confidence and curiosity to learn – the best way to do that is through our own example.

Immediately following last Wednesday’s class I heard something that changed the way that I look at not only this course, but also the way that I perceive learning. To start, I got into the habit of listening to podcasts because I had a job a couple of years ago that required me to travel over an hour for work. To kill the time–and prevent myself from dying in a fiery, though peacefully somnolent, accident–I figured that podcasts would be a good way to keep me focused and entertained on my way to and from work. I’ve since kept up this habit, and am now a shameless addict. I can hardly spend time alone, or do chores, or run errands without my earbuds in. Wednesday evening, on my way home, I listened to a podcast produced by Cracked.com, a comedy website that I find entertaining occasionally.

In it the podcasters were talking about the generation gap is a myth, how we have this perception that each successive generation is essentially getting dumber, and things will never be as good as they were in the “good ‘ol days.” One of the most intriguing explanations for debunking this myth was the Flynn Effect, which according to every lazy researcher’s friend, Wikipedia, is “the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day.” Essentially, James Flynn, a political scientist, studied the scores for IQ tests across generations, dating back to the 1930s. What he found was that not only are we progressively getting smarter with each generation–students 10 years younger than the previous generation are on average 3-5 IQ points smarter. If tested to today’s standards, students in the 1930s would be classified as mentally retarded. But before all you Beliebers start handing out dunce caps to your grandparents for not understanding your music or Youtube or who think that a “tweet” is just the sound a bird makes, know that it’s a little more complicated than that.

Flynn figured out that each generation’s intelligence grows, so does the environment around those individuals. Intelligence and environment are relative to each other, and as the environment of an individual grows more and more complex, that individual must learn how to adapt to his or her environment in order to thrive. Think about it: since 1930, not only has literacy risen exponentially, but thanks to the web, we have a seemingly infinite amount of information at our fingertips. We multi-task, and speak in jargon. Our outreach grows more and more expansive everyday. We’ve had to grow more intelligent because our environment is consistently growing more and more complex, and vice versa. We are all bricoleurs, as Claude Levi-Strauss says, craftsmen using the tools available to us to thrive in an ever more complex world. Flynn calls this “equipment.” To throw someone from the 1930s into today’s world would, aside from making a trite movie premise, be like asking a blind man to describe color. By conventional standards, he would be ill-equipped to accomplish such a task.

Speaking of color… To better illustrate the complexity of our world compared to that of the past, let’s look at the work of Homer. In 1858, scholar and future Prime Minister of Great Britain William Gladstone, noticed that Homer had a few turns of phrase which seemed a bit peculiar to modern audiences. One famous example is when describing the ocean, Homer calls it “wine-dark sea.” I’ve only been to the beach a handful of times, and not once did the water look like red wine–and you can rest assured that if it did, I would have stayed comfy and cozy in my air-conditioned hotel, thank you very much. This isn’t the only instance of this kind of strange color description “Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet; honey is green.” Gladstone’s explanation was that colors, as we know them, didn’t exist back in the time of ancient Greece. Blue, as we conceptualize it, didn’t exist. In fact, further academics found that the same is true for all cultures. Of all the colors to be studied, blue is consistently last on the list. The reason for this is that blue, aside from the sky and the sea, maybe a bird here and there (and blue eyes), doesn’t naturally occur often in nature. There was no reason to differentiate blue things from other non-blue things because there were so few of them. If you wanted to something was blue, you could compare it to the sky in spring or the sea on a clear day. The world was not complex enough to need differentiation between blue and non-blue.

Now all of this brings us back to our discussion for class. Taking what Ken Robinson said about learning, about fostering a love of learning, “a curiosity,” we should keep in mind that using the tactics that worked to teach students for past generations, are not always the appropriate tools to teach students today. We have evolved beyond the “traditional” modes of teaching, beyond chalkboards and handwriting. We now live in a multi-modal, ever-changing, ever-consuming, complex society, that is constantly evolving and expanding. Students today use the tools available to them to learn, and those tools are very different than they were 10, 20, 50 years ago and have more untapped potential than ever before. If we are to usher education and pedagogy in the 21 Century and beyond, we need to do so by staying ahead of the game, by learning new trends, new technology, to constantly continue to grow, change, and evolve, alongside our students. Progress only moves in one direction and we have to keep the engine running, otherwise we are all lost in our own “wine-dark sea.”

To check out more on the Flynn Effect here is James Flynn presenting a TED Talk.

To read a rather fascinating article about the color blue in culture, check this out.

And to check out the podcast that sparked this whole post, click on this link. Disclaimer: there is some adult language, as it is a comedy podcast. However, if it is your thing, I recommend checking out more of their episodes.