Blogs: essential for education?

Blogging has become a popular and exciting activity in education. Teachers encourage students to write blogs or assignments, read and post comments on each others postings. It is a good way for communication and sharing ideas. Students will improve their writing and narrative skills with this activity. For seminar courses or courses in humanities and social science, blogging, instead of other traditional ways, may enhance students’ learning. However, for courses in natural science such as math or lab courses, I don’t think blogging is necessary or even useful. When teachers consider to use blogging for education purpose, they should think about the reason to use it, not just because it is popular and fancy. W. Gardner Campbell, Scott Rosenberg,  Tim Hitchcock, Seth Godin and Tom Peters who only emphasize on the goodness of blogging are all from humanities and social science, I think people from natural science probably have different voices.

Blogs are also used in middle and high school. Middle and high school blogging is like a web-based course site (blackboard, scholar, instructure canvas, etc) to provide information to students, parents, administration, or other teachers. Their blogs may include announcements, assignments, and discussion forum. Students can use blogs to discuss various topics and to interact with their teachers. Parents can use blogs to understand what is occurring in the class. The idea sounds great but I am not sure whether effective or not. Because the publicity of blogs may contain information from wrong points of view or extreme points of view which are harmful to young learners.

In order to keep pace with the times, teachers should improve their teaching strategies with new technologies, but they need to be careful, especially for teachers of young learners.

Learning in the information age: Let’s Connect!

No doubt we have heard this statement before “We are now living in the information age”. Yes, this is the age of information in which knowledge is available everywhere and can be easily acquired from a tremendous variety of sources wherever we are. The corner stone of these sources is no doubt the internet. Of course being able to collect information about politics, economy, or any other field of specialization has changed our lives. In addition, being able to connect together and share information through social media, has also a great impact on our lives. All these changes have an inevitable impact on learning and education. According to [1], there is a wide agreement that new models of education are needed to suit this information age, and not simply new models of schooling, but entirely new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity, and pace of our new knowledge society.

According to Wikipedia [2], connected learning is an approach to education centered around the abundance of information and social connections brought by networked and digital media. According to [3] it is not a learning theory and it is not a specific set of learning techniques, it is just a set of principles that allow students to be engaged, empowered, and equipped to learn effectively and continuously through their lives.

According to [1], there are three values that forms the core of connected learning.

  • Equity: Within connected learning, all students should have the same opportunity for learning in terms of finding information and joining institutes. This aligns with the principle of diversity and inclusion in which underrepresented groups are encouraged to have a good education opportunity.
  • Full participation: When learners are actively engaged in education, the community, learning environment, and the civic life all will thrive.
  • Social connection: The learning experience is better when the learning process is part of a valued social interconnection with shared practices, culture and identities.

According to [1, 3, 4], connected learning has six principles in order to realize the previously defined values. These principles are:

  • Interest-powered: Intuitively speaking, when a student is more interested to study a specific subject, his learning outcome is expected to be better as compared to other subjects that he is not interested in. Connected learning relies on the innate interests of the learner and it also views interests and passions as something to be actively developed through the learning process. In addition, learners better engage when they connect what they learn to their short-term and long term goals.
  • Peer-supported: Powerful engaging learning can be achieved in the context of peer interactions between individual learners contributing to each other, sharing information, and give feedback to one another.
  • Academically oriented: Learning outcomes should be linked and directed towards some academic achievements and excellence. Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth.
  • Shared purpose: Connected learning environments are populated with learner peers who share common interests and are contributing to a shared goal. Today’s social media provide exceptional means for common interest learners to connect together, share knowledge, and engage in common projects and inquiry.
  • Production-centered: Connected learning environments are designed around production relying on new digital media as tools for sharing products with wider audience.
  • Openly-networked: Connected learning environments are created around networks of institutions and learning groups in which learning resources, tools, and materials are abundant.

References

[1] http://connectedlearning.tv/connected-learning-principles

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_Learning

[3] http://altlab.vcu.edu/showcase/defining-connected-learning/

[4] http://clalliance.org/why-connected-learning/

Intrinsic Motivation through Connected Learning

Self-determination theory posits that humans have a natural tendency towards growth and development but it does not happen automatically. A nurturing environment is necessary to help people to grow.

For a student to be able to make the most of the learning environment and opportunity, he/she should be motivated. Intrinsic motivation, in particular, is necessary for sustained effort and deeper learning. Each student is a different individual and their interests may differ widely. To connect the subject content to each of the varied interests of the student is not an easy task. Hence, it may be difficult and require lengthy preparations to foster intrinsic motivation in students.

This is where I felt that connected learning environment could play a vital role. When we let students to work on ideas that they value, allow them to set goal(s) on their own, and provide support to help them achieve those goal(s), we could potentially help them foster a deep sense of motivation to master the skills necessary to achieve their goals. There are three main aspects that needs to be paid attention to:

  1. Personalization: Students should pick up the topic that they are interested in. This should be personal and should not be enforced upon them based on the syllabus/standards. Allowing students to work on projects and ideas that they value will encourage students to learn in a greater depth and will also help them imbibe the idea of learning being a lifelong process.
  2. Autonomy: Studies have found that autonomy leads to greater motivation and hence allowing students to determine goal(s) on their own is highly important. Some learning goals may not be as ambitious as a teacher may want to have, but teachers should not try to change the goals. Instead, they could help students learn more during the process, or encourage them to add goals once the earlier goal is achieved.
  3. Teacher and Peer Involvement: In the digital world, there is a plethora of information available. It is easy to lose ones way within the pile of information. There are also issues with privacy and security in the digital world. Hence, teacher’s support and guidance, is imperative to enhance students’ learning experience.  The guidance should be of the “right amount” – not so much that the student feel being spoon-fed or become heavily dependent but also not so less that students are overwhelmed.
    Additionally, students should be encouraged to collaborate with their peers. Learning from peers, working in collaboration, seeking support and feedback, and providing support and feedback are valuable skills. However, considering student’s autonomic choices, collaborative and peer learning should not be enforced.

If we create such an environment, students will be highly motivated to learn. Connected learning environment, as discussed in this video, if executed well, promotes such an environment.

 

 

Connected Learning: is it good for elementary schools?

During past eight years, I have passed around sixty courses in three different universities. Each time I think about those courses, I find I only remember and apply six or seven of them! Only seven of sixty courses! The question is why only seven and what happened to other courses? I have asked this question more than one hundred times from myself. Why do I only remember and use seven of them?

I think the answer is that I was only passionate about those seven courses. As an engineer, I liked to solve problems in real life and those courses taught me techniques and tools to solve real problems.

I have no doubt that we need a better education system and the traditional education system is not effective enough. However, is the connected learning the solution?

Honestly, I do not know much about the learning process and last week was the first time I heard about the connected learning approach. I think the connected learning is ideal for university students, especially at the graduate level. The reason is simple: the university students almost know how to learn by themselves and they know the grades are not important (especially at Ph.D. level). However, I am not sure that the connected learning approach can be effective by itself for other lower levels. Although the traditional system is not good enough, it has a lot of benefits and advantages.  For example, the grading system may have some negative impacts but it increases the competition spirit and push students to spend enough time to learn some basics that they will never become interested about them! These basics are almost needed for everyone and without pushing some students to learn them, they will not learn. Generally, I believe the connected learning should be used to improve the learning process along with the traditional educational system and the use of connected learning approach should be proportional to the grade and age (and the person).  I may change my mind when I learn more about the connected learning approach.

Connected Learning: Grade School vs. College

I love the idea of connected learning. I think that too much of our education from grade school to college is kept completely separate from the rest of our lives. Students put in their time with classes and homework, but are rarely excited enough about the material to explore it outside of that. Especially at the grade and high school level, the emphasis on standardized testing is a big part of that. The “facts that all students should know” are taught, but they never really get to engage with the subject and delve deep into it. I would love to see a system where a second grade class spends an entire period talking about the sun, or raptors, or pandas, just because someone asked an interesting question and started a discussion.

On the college level, at least in some subjects, I think connected learning would be more difficult to implement. In a philosophy class or an English class, a student might blog about an interesting book they read and invite comments from their classmates. In a class about database management, no one is going to blog about the interesting database they saw or tweet out the exciting article they read about databasing. Even for those students who want to delve deeper, they won’t have the requisite skills to do so until they’ve completed the course. I just don’t know how the students could engage with the material outside of class while they’re still taking it. If anyone has any thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

Updating our educational experience by Connected Learning

During the first week of the Contemporary Pedagogy class we had the opportunity of watching three documentaries related to Connected Learning. Before I start talking about my point of view, I need to confess that this was the first time in my live that I heard such term. Im a PhD student from the the Civil Engineering department without any idea of what Connected Learning could be or with what purpose was created. After a couple of random searches I found the following definition of Connected Learning (http://connectedlearning.tv/frequently-asked-questions#pastandpresent):

Connected learning is a model of learning and social change that is not defined by a specific technology, tool, or technique. Instead, connected learning is defined by a commitment to social equity and progressive learning, and seeks to mold the uptake of new technologies and techniques based on these commitments.

This definition seems to broad to me. From what I understood Connected Learning is the way of learning from everything in every possible way without thinking that learning can be achieved in this unique way that can’t be changed. From the three videos I decided to talk about the case of the ninth-grader Charles Raben, What Does Connected Learning Look Like? During the interview, this young boy said something that caught my attention. He believes that learning can happen anywhere. There is so much truth in those words since in fact you can learn from your daily experiences, from the people that you meet everyday or even from what you overheard from other peoples conversation while having a coffee.

Charles decided by himself to leave the usual daily learning experience at school by helping a newsstand operator that was going to lose his license in the state of New York. He had the opportunity of learning how to acquire signatures for a petition and during that process he was able to feel the sensation of achieving something in his life. He acquired a whole new experience which may not be related to his math or science class but he had the chance to see that in every person that we meet there is a new story to learn that hasn’t been written in a book.

From my point of view, us as future professoriate, we need to consider every possible approach and never stick to one idea. Is not too late for current professors to direct their effort into this emerging way of bringing a new learning experience to their students, because at the end the students will pass on what they learned from those experiences and they will put it into practice to achieve more thing in life.

A skeptical look at academic blogging

While the theme this week is Connected Learning, the blogs by Scott Rosenberg and Tim Hitchcock are focused on the benefits of blogging, the former making the case for blogging in general and the latter making the case for academic blogging, specifically. As I’m generally a skeptical person, I want to address what I think is an overselling of academic blogging, rather than the blogs on Connected Learning, which I largely agree with.

I’ll start by saying I’m not opposed to the idea that academic blogging is beneficial for some people—I just think these two blogs do not take a critical and nuanced look at the costs and benefits of blogging. A much more nuanced and balanced take, in my opinion, can be found on the Dynamic Ecology blog, in a post entitled Should you start a science blog? Ask yourself these questions.”

This blog goes through the reasons that science blogging may or may not be a good idea for any particular person. To me, the most important point that is not considered in the assigned articles is that of opportunity costs. You could be doing countless other things with your time besides blogging and each of these other activities has an expected benefit to your academic output. You should allocate your time proportional to the expected value of the academic (and non-academic) metrics you care about. Successful blogging is a large time commitment –you need to blog frequently, probably every week, for a long time, perhaps months, before you have likely accumulated more than a few readers.  And then, you must keep it up to keep your readers coming back.  If you don’t enjoy it, are not very self-confident, or are not a fast writer, blogging will take even more of your precious time. If you don’t have much of interest to say, the benefits of blogging will be reduced. The vast majority of blogs never get off the ground and the time spent trying to gain an audience is at least partially a sunk cost. However, some people succeed, and these are probably the self-confident people with interesting things to say who enjoy blogging and are fast writers (more often than not). So I see academic blogging as a gamble with the odds determined by factors such as those I’ve just outlined.

The author of the post, Jeremy Fox, who has been blogging for years sees the best way to benefit from academic blogging is if people who have power over your career, such as an advisor or department head, value your blogging. Otherwise, in general, he thinks blogging isn’t likely to have much of an impact on your career in terms of publication output, getting grants, job prospects, tenure, etc. The main benefits he sees are that he enjoys blogging and can have in-depth conversations with colleagues (as opposed to on Twitter), mentor students, perhaps influence the direction of his field, and educate the public.

Despite my less rosy view of academic blogging, I’ve actually been wrestling with starting a blog for a while now. I would like a place where I can explore ideas in my Ecological Statistician niche with other ecological statisticians and wildlife biologists, but I’m still unsure about the net effect it will have on my career and I have plenty of other things I need to be doing.

Trying to change in a static culture

I really like the idea of connected learning and I think it is a powerful and necessary one. It would be the height of foolishness, if we have this incredibly useful tool  (the internet) for research and information and collaboration and discussion, to not use it and to confine ourselves to a single classroom at a single time, not opening ideas up to the world at large. And certainly, as time has gone on, it has become increasingly necessary to rethink not just what we teach, but how we teach and why.

There has indeed been a lot of discussion and debate about how to rethink what we’re doing and how to incorporate this technology into our experiences. Even in fields that very often welcome new ideas (usually the humanities), it isn’t always easy to introduce new methods.

To me it seems like even more of a struggle to make it work in STEM classes. While STEM fields will often readily accept new technology, there’s a pervasive idea that there’s a certain “correct” way of teaching things, particularly in Engineering.

As both a student and a (new) teacher in an engineering discipline, I want (and need) to rethink my ideas about how to teach, because I don’t want to just teach the way I’ve been taught–that was the aforementioned set way of doing things and it was very formulaic. Predictability can be good, but often at the expense of creativity.

Now, when I see all these ideas being thrown around about online meetings, blogs, discussion, outside collaboration, students running the show, etc., I get immediately disheartened that I’m teaching in the field I am.

This semester, I’m teaching a course on the design and computer modeling of metal castings. I think there are definitely opportunities for collaboration and discussion, because even after all sorts of equations and calculations, Design never has a single, clear-cut, “correct” answer. That being said, I think I would struggle mightily to incorporate many of the other elements of Connected Learning into my class. Not just because I can’t necessarily see a use for them, but because of the students themselves.

Metal casting, as it exists at Tech, is one of the least academic fields we have. Virtaully everyone (if not actually everyone) in the undergrad casting program is interested in one thing: a job. They’re taking casting classes so that they have a better resume and can give better interviews and be better at their future jobs, and they’re taking all their non-casting classes simply because they’re requirements and the students just want a good enough grade to graduate. They don’t seem to care very much about how they’re being taught or learning for the sake of learning–they just want jobs.

I can’t blame them, but it gets frustrating when your students are only there to get better jobs, rather than thinking about why they’re being taught and why they’re learning.

I know these kids; I’ve worked with them for at least a semester already, if not a year or two. I know they don’t give a rat’s ass about what pedagogy or praxes their professors are using. Hell, last year I saw one of my professors try something completely new in one of his classes (I was a TA, not a student), and it failed miserably. The students didn’t keep up with it, the professor couldn’t enforce it, and everyone was back to business as usual after a few weeks.

And most of those students are the ones I’m teaching now.

So, I definitely want to rethink my preconceived notions about teaching and to do my best to create a dynamic, engaging classroom that isn’t just the “sage on a stage” lecturing for an hour (as so many of the classes I’ve taken have gone), but it will certainly be a struggle to do so in the environment where I work.

Connected Learning: Gateway to the Future

The Connected Learning movement could not make its role as education’s savior any clearer. I look forward to learning more, but I am not sold. By nature a skeptic and realist (What scientist isn’t?), my experience has led me in a different direction than Connected Learning, as defined by those at http://connectedlearning.tv/ . While I in no way desire to tear down the methodologies outlined by the movement, I simply think this blanket approach is blind to its shortcomings.

Allow me to digress. My PhD work is in the area of Urban Forestry. Specifically, I am interested in woody plant physiological ecology (aka, ecophysiology). My work is all about natural, biological processes, to which “technology” falls so short as a subsidy. I am absolutely in agreement that education needs reform, but in my field, the reform needs to happen in terms of connecting with the subject matter, natural systems.

Likewise, I am wary of focusing on Connected Learning as the answer to all our educational maladies because of the isolationist nature of social media and distance learning. In reality, do we really have greater access to universal knowledge than we did before mainstream internet use? No. Is universal knowledge more accessible, yes, but not by much. Libraries are founded on the principle of accessibility of knowledge transfer. What the internet does provide that libraries do not is opinion-driven, subjective, false knowlege–around every corner.

We, as educators, should reprioritize face-to-face interaction within education, cooperative work, and contextualized learning. Last week, I was researching qualities of great educators, and even now in 2016, educators recognized for their work are those that contextualize the learning. Not once in my research did I come across anything that resembled Connected Learning. Instead, I saw physics professors that put their life on the line demonstrated principles that they whole-heartedly believed in and wanted to imbue to their students. I saw chemistry professors that gave tangible demonstrations of the subject matter that drew students in with oohs and aahs, opening the eyes of many and strengthening the foundation of the knowledge being transferred.

In my own experience, it was only a year ago that I attended my most life-changing course and met my professional mentor. All that I spoke with in the class had similar experiences, and the professor has received much recognition for his remarkable methods. The technology used in the course: a white board and an old-school overhead projector with transparencies.

By no means am I against Connected Learning, but I don’t think it needs to be our focus at this point. I daresay we have out-of-touch educators and relational education has been lost in mainstream education. Also, I believe we use a blanket method to educate, especially in primary and secondary school. We think everyone needs to reach the same standards of learning, when we should inspire students to find their skills and follow their desires (trade school should be just as encouraged as higher education). Within higher ed, we need to remind ourselves of the role of grades and achievements as competitive indicators for employment instead of thinking every student capable of 4.00 GPA. Grade inflation is out of control, yet the quality of education is dropping because we focus on catering to the lowest common denominator. Lastly, we need to help students advance in team problem solving. Having spent years in the industry before beginning my PhD, I can attest to college graduate inability to work in teams and think critically.

Only by addressing these issues can we then reap the benefits of Connected Learning. I am afraid we are merely venturing down a rabbit trail, skirting the issues that should be our main concern. But I am cautiously optimistic that I am missing much of what Connected Learning has to offer. I am very concerned how social media is becoming so intertwined with education at the expense of true collaboration….


Connected Learning Before the Blog

Credit: Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub

http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic (infographic not properly embedding…)

Connected Learning Before the Blog

I’ll be honest. This infographic makes about as much sense to me as the raw data from an MRI scan.

I pulled up this graphic the way I might a dictionary. I wanted a definition – “what is connected learning?” But in reality, I am rarely ever satisfied looking up just the definition of a word. I never feel that I know a word until I know the history of the word – the roots and the parts of a word. And now pedagogy is treating me a bit like the English language. I am walking into a lingo with which I am not familiar.

I’m catching bits and pieces: Connecting learning is about “how to learn and how to engage and how to be flexible and adaptive and find communities and have ideas about things that [one] want[s] to do now.”  Connected learning is about “how to learn and how to engage and how to be flexible and adaptive and find communities and have ideas about things that [one] want[s] to do now” (https://vimeo.com/37639766).  These sound like great things, but I just walked into a room in which everything is strung together, connected to everything else, and I’m not really sure I can tell you at first glance what it is I am actually looking at.

Here is the framework outlined by the Connected Learning Research Network. Here is the framework and terminology they present.

  1. The contexts
    1. Peer-supported
    2. Interest-powered
    3. Academically oriented
  2. The properties
    1. Production-centered
    2. Shared purpose
    3. Openly networked
  3. The design principles
    1. Enable everyone to participate
    2. Make learning experiential
    3. Provide constant challenges
    4. Allow for reflection, planning, and connecting the two

And holding all of these characteristics together, is the idea that media magnifies.

This is still very broad, so I decided if I am going to really understand what we mean when we say “connected learning,” I need to know about the history of this too, not just the definition.

The “connected teaching” model was developed by Mary Field Belenky in 1986 in her book “Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind.”   In 1990, the method was described as an efficient way of engaging a diverse group of students, by Charles S. Claxton in his paper “Learning Styles, Minority Students, and Effective Education.”  While the praxis has changed to include technology at the core of connected learning, the idea has always been to find ways to engage people with diverse backgrounds.

 

 

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