Instructor Broadcasting: courses about participants, not instructors

Nice and short from George Siemens (http://www.elearnspace.org/) in talking about Stanford U. (http://www.ai-class.com/) massive open AI course.  His point is not so much about the specific course, but about the overall direction of course design.  Or, to paraphrase another famous quote: "it's the learner, stupid"

"Quick advice to Know Labs: whatever your platform becomes, design it to optimize learner sharing of their sensemaking artifacts, not instrutor broadcasting. It's an obvious statement, but if you want to unleash the creativity of participants, tools need to be designed for them, not for instructors"

Spaced Repetition and Retrieval Practice (a.k.a. making students work to learn)

Nice to see some real innovation in learning discussed on the main thought pages of a major newspaper.  It's this kind of research, and this kind of information sharing, that can make a difference in the work of schools and teachers.  This seems like common sense, doesn't it? 

"When we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or
likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over
time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the
representation of the information embedded in our neural networks."

and...

Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so
that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading
over material, or even taking notes and making outlines, doesn’t have
this effect.

and...

When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or
problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their
brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result
is that students learn the material more thoroughly.

In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.

Mind, Brain and Education methods may seem unfamiliar and even counterintuitive, but they are simple to understand and easy to carry out. And after-school assignments are ripe for the kind of improvements the new science offers.

Thanks to Annie
Murphy Paul: Teasing the brain to make homework count | Dallas Morning
News Opinion and Editorial Columns - Opinion and Commentary for Dallas,
Texas - The Dallas Morning News for good work in bringing these small but important findings to the fore.

Multitasking vs Time on Tasking? Let the debate continue!

Cathy Davidson, of Duke University, brings us this fascinating summary of a variety of topics - yet all tied together well.  The essay alone compels me to want to read her book.  Highlights that caught my eye:

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (8/31/11)

It's not easy to acknowledge that everything we've learned about how to pay attention means that we've been missing everything else. It's not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.

Time on Task or time on tasks??? - revisited?

Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and
workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the
institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th
century taught us that completing one task before starting another one
was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like
the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention
to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to
task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly
line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade
school to graduate school.

Collaboration by difference

We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference."
Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It
signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time
cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act
in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the
main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and
staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and
rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture,
age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a
point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run
to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be
efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome
that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.

Turning over traditional notions of evaluation

Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing
more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be
judged by teachers.

And in a classic moment of reflection, Davidson admits in her own courses a need to relearn:

They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for
testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the
new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on
products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from
sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that
content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed
that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final.
Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn't
get more 20th century than that.

Fascinating essay.  My compliments to the author and her exploratory work - and for the willingness to be open about its results.  Her book: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,  Viking Press.

Goals for First Day of Class - Case Study

Of use and interest...from Merlot's ELIXR project.

Students Love Technology

Via: OnlineEducation.net