Wednesday, December 04, 2013

DET/CHE: Cognition, Learning Theory, Backward Design: The importance of instructional design.

Hierarchy of Instructional Design
Hierarchy of Instructional Design (Photo credit: jrhode)
Jim Monaghan, AVP Academic Technologies/Associate Professor, Educational Technology, CSUSB

Instructional designers take on many roles at campuses. The perspectives of the designers combined with the organizational structure of the campus can greatly impact the results of the instructional design process. This presentation examines the importance of instructional design to the construction of high quality learning environments. Topics to be covered include fundamental principles in cognitive science, learning theories and backward design. Implications for the design of courses which range from technology-enhanced to technology-centric (e.g. fully online courses and MOOC’s) will be presented. Applications of instructional design in strategic planning for learning environments as well as practical considerations for implementation of strategies will be discussed. Advantages and disadvantages of a variety of organizational reporting structures will be explored. Specific ideas participants will take away from the session

• Importance of instructional designers to the development of high quality courses that use educational
technology
• Importance of organizational structure in facilitating instructional design for learning
• Overview of cognitive science that applies to the instructional design process

MOOCs, the model from Thrun,

Its about design, not technology

Design Considerations
Why would online video work?
What do we lose when we record a lecture?
How do we allow for substantive interactions?

He refers to the WASC handbook for interactions online.

What can tech allow us to do that we couldn't do otherwise?

Backward Design
Start with the end in mind - quote from Stephen Covey
Could also be from McTighe

Key elements of ID

What do you want your students to know'
How will you know that students have met the objectives
Interaction
Other considerations

A review of learning theories.
Behaviorism, Constructivism, Constructionism

He claims that drill and practice has its place. [I disagree with
this, I think you can learn the same with contextual learning.]

Social constructivism, situated cognition

Refers to a 1999 paper that applies cognitive science to designing
learning spaces. "Designing Learning: Cognitive science principles for
the innovative organization" Penuel & Roschelle.

What is the role of instructional designers?

CSUSB Online Learning Modules Template

1. Reading
2. Short lecture
3. Discussion
4. Student research
5. Assessment

Where are instructional designers housed in your organization?
Why does it matter?

Access to infrastructure
Access to decision makers
Responsiveness
Agility
Strategic or operational focus
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DET/CHE: Teaching in the Digital Age

Azusa Pacific University
Azusa Pacific University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mike Truong, Founding Executive Director, Office of Innovative Teaching and Technology, Azusa Pacific University
 
The demands faculty teaching in the digital age face are immense rom keeping distracted students engaged (high touch) to keeping current on the latest technologies (high tech).
This presentation will provide some proven strategies on helping faculty meet these challenges.
Specific ideas participants will take away from the session
...
•  Articulate the challenges of teaching in the digital age.
•  Explain how technology can meet some of these challenges.
•  Emplo best- practices for teaching with technology.

Where as other voices are overly critical of MOOCs or on the other extreme overly Utopian, Mike says he is in the middle, looking at technology pedagogically.

He gave an extensive quote from Hamlet's Blackberry.
We need space between our tasks to reflect.

He then talked about the "really cool" Domino's pizza app. "It is
amazing what you can do with ordering pizza now a days."

He is excited about the apps that allow you to buy glasses and take a
picture of a paycheck and electronically deposit it.

You can buy a house online - you can buy a house without even looking  at it.

"We are immensely better because of technology."

We can learn any time, place, and device.

Students are demanding that faculty use more and more tech in the classroom.

Pedagogy - gains, losses, and implications

The essay is a good model for learning critical thinking  - but it is too alphabetic-centric. Word processing helps us but it promotes linear thinking.

Technology - Jose Bowen - technology maximizes teachers face-to-face contact with students. Henry Jenkins says that technology encourages participation. Sugata Mitra - technology self-educates.

He makes the claim that "the internet harms our ability to engage with difficult text and complex ideas" a quote from Nicholas Carr. Clifford Nass says that "Media multitasking impairs our focus, productivity, and creativity." We are losing the ability to focus on one task at a time. He gives the argument of Sherry Turkle's Connected Alone.

He comes back to Wiliam Powers Hamlet's Blackberry.

He then talked about the story in Wired "Minimally invasive learning." - the issue that has "The Next Steve Jobs" on the cover.

Technology's proper role is to supplement the learning.
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DET/CHE: What Students Really Want

California State Student Association
California State Student Association (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Anthony Gibson, Chief of Staff, California State Student
Association, CSU Sacramento
James Harrison, Technology Affairs Senator, Santa Clara University
Dwayne Mason Jr., California State Student Association, CSU Fullerton
Brett Roberts, Technology Officer, California State Student Association, CSU Monterey Bay
Specific ideas participants will take away from the sessio
 
A broader understanding of student activism 
 
Student thoughts on
  • student access,
  • mobile computing and online learning initiatives 
  • Components of the student initiated CSU technology strategic planning
Online education - Anthony Gibson
        "It is not about the past, its about the future."
        The CSSA is publishing a white paper.
Required Learning - it can't be mandatory
Implementation - it is not about replacing the current system but
about giving instructors a tool to make it better.
Encouraging the flipped classroom EdX vs. Udacity
Quality - online education is more than a YouTube video
Faculty - an essential component to the solution
        No faculty member should be forced to teach online
The Platform
        Like a university campus, its what allows online education to exist.
The student showed an iPad commercial and talked about the rapid
change in technology.

Classroom technology - Brett Roberts
Current
        Cannot be outdated
        Incorporate popular technologies
        Breaks learning curve for students
Call to action:
        Keep up with popular technologies

Affordability
        Technology is expensive
        Free online resources
                www.merlotx.edu
        The students need to know!

Accessible
        Computer labs, rental programs
        Most students have smartphones but not all
        Implement technology and train users

General requests - Jimmy Harrison
        Important to understand student sentiment
        Students and faculty come from different times

        Guest wifi networks
                For visiting parents
                For visiting competitors
        Student wifi
        Consolidated Internet Hub
                One portal for all online education
                Email, Files, discussions
                One log-in for students=increased participation
        Mobile Interaction
                Social Media interaction
                Connect students to various events on campus

        A lot of faculty feel that technology is an annoyance and inconvenient
        The teachers need trainin
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Tuesday, December 03, 2013

DET/CHE: Education Nation: 6 Leading Edges of Innovation

Cover of "Education Nation: Six Leading E...
Cover via Amazon
From the program:

"Milton Chen, Senior Fellow and Executive Director, emeritus at The George Lucas Educational Foundation. San Francisco Bay Area. milton.chen@edutopia.org Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools School systems are reinventing themselves, focusing on their growing edges of innovation in districts, states, and nations. These Edges are redefining the nature of “school” as it was known in the 20th Century and include
  1.  the Thinking Edge,
  2.  the Curriculum Edge, 
  3.  the Technology Edge, 
  4.  the Time/Place Edge, 
  5.  the Co-Teaching Edge, and
  6.  the Youth Edge. 
The Six Edges form the framework of Dr. Chen’s 2010 book, selected as one of the 10 best books of 2010 by the American School Board Journal.

The Edges address fundamental shifts to our thinking about schooling; ways in which technology is transforming when, where, and how students learn; and roles of teachers and students as teachers form teaching teams with other experts. Students are assuming more responsibility for their own learning and assembling their learning pathways from an increasing variety of educational courses and experiences. Dr. Chen will show examples of these innovative practices from Edutopia.org, the Lucas Foundation’s multimedia Web site and its archive of documentaries, available for free download and embedding, with foreign language captions from Google Translate.

High Tech and High Touch can come together in powerful learning to 'strengthen human connections' and indeed, communities."

Français : 66ème Festival du Cinéma de Venise ...
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Milton Chen was a researcher at the Sesame Workshop [Why are we calling it that instead of the Children's Television Workshop?], an assistant prof at Stanford school of education, and executive director of Edutopia. He is interested in project based learning.

He encourages us to write the gov about the 10 billion dollar surplus to send it to edu. He recounts his journey to the US from China. Kids can learn a lot more than we think they can if we give them the right media. They were told that they could not use television in the 70s for teaching. This is much like what we are going through with online learning.

He talked about George Lucas' involvement with education. Lucas not a successful student. He showed the "Academy of Achievement" website. the site tells the stories of how famous people came to do their work. Lucas went to community college and got into USC.

 *NB - If he is so smart, why does he feel like he has to keep changing his damn films?!

 Chen notes that there were these "lucky accidents" that got Lucas where he is today.

Chen moved on to the Edutopia and Lucas filming cases of project-based learning and multimodal teaching and learning. They made the film "Learn & Live" about children doing research with a "very expensive" connection to a remote high magnification microscope with video conferencing. They made a VHS tape and a book. Today we just publish to the web. A few years later, the NSF funded an online scanning electron microscope where students can schedule time and view insects that they have collected and sent in. He talked about how much money we spend on education and yet we are static with our education levels. He asks us to think about using the non-cognitive side of learning (like meditation) and the emotional side of learning - the 8 intelligences: verbal, logical, visual, musical, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, naturalist. We are more than the sum of our SAT scores. He is excited about the school gardens movement. Alice Waters started this in Berkeley. He then discussed his book "Education Nation" which was the best of the Edutopia website. He wants us to be an "education nation" where edu is the highest priority. "Education today is the economy tomorrow." US educational stats are grim. Other countries have a higher regard for education. Some have images of people learning.

We have a strong informal education system though. Blending formal and informal schools through universities, media, museums, companies, churches, and youth groups. Most countries have another month of learning - 200 days vs our 180. The leading edges of innovation: thinking, curriculum, technology, time/place, co-teaching, and youth. Innovation is a "must do" not a "nice to have." Google is 15 yrs old, Youtube is 8 and every minute 100hrs of new videos are uploaded. He discussed Clay Shirky's "How social media can make history." We are in a time where we can not only learn any time and place, but any path at any pace.

Thinking edge: Growth vs. a fixed mind set. Students and teachers have to change their beliefs about students being good or bad at subjects. "You get better at something by doing it." We have new roles for teachers - this is the end of the solo practitioner and the rise of the team collaborator. Teachers = mentors, team leaders and students, team members, scholars. Change the vocabulary.

We then watch "Digital Youth Portrait: Luis." - a high school senior is involved in media and online culture. He makes films and is actively engaged in his education via technology. He believes that this is the modern student. We need more flexibility in learning - students need choices. He sees badging systems, alternative, flexible ways of showing what you know.

Make learning more visible and shareable. Peer-learning is very important - a powerful teaching tool - collaborative learning. The Institute of the Future website. Every technology has a light and dark side. We need digital literacy and digital citizenship. Tech can be distracting, a medium for bullying.

 He is not concerned with corporate influence in education technology. But interestingly enough is that exactly what happened in a previous meeting - we let the corporations drive the discussion on plagiarism and "cheating."
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DET/CHE: The Art & Science of Education

Town plan of Imola
Town plan of Imola (Wikipedia)

I am at the Directors of Education Technology and California Higher Education conference in San Jose this week (DET/CHE). This is my first time here and I am presenting on MOOCs, eLearning, and Instructional Design. I am excited about the location. We are in downtown San Jose which has the Tech Museum right across from the San Jose Museum of Art. Interestingly enough, the Tech Museum is looking more like an art museum (Fritjof Capra spoke there recently on Leonardo Da Vinci) and the art museum is running an exhibit called "The Genius of Everyday Things." And this is how it should be. There is a long history of art and science working and playing together. It is only in the last few centuries when specializations and their theoretical baggage seem to have separated the two in academia. I like the Merriam-Webster definition of Art: "something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings." That should at least also be the definition of instructional design if not education itself. I have a number of postings to this blog on art because art talks about how we see and experience the world and is about expressing our connection to it. Education is an opportunity to erase those artificial boundaries and to acknowledge that we experience the world with all of our senses and not just the ones for writing papers. Like Art (with a capital "a") education is also an opportunity think about how we see and experience the world and navigating our connections to the people and ideas around us. It is not an accident that George Siemens sees the role of the teacher to be a curator and "sense-maker" rather than a subject matter expert or funnel. (See p.15 of Siemens' "Learning and Knowing in Networks.")

The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San ...
The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose; the white line in the sky is an airliner on approach to San Jose International Airport during the exposure time (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Tech Museum is running a program on the movie Star Wars which really has nothing to do with actual technology. It has everything to do with how artists imagine technology. And if Star Wars was not a great story, no one would care. You would never see a tech museum do a presentation on "Plan 9 from Outer Space." It was the art of Star Wars that fired the imagination.

Lets tear down those walls. If you are here at this conference, I think it would be worthwhile to take the time to visit the art museum. I would love to see the three organizations (DET/CHE, Tech Museum, and the Art Museum) coordinate a presentation someday!
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