cognitive dissonance

I realized that I need to return to blogging more regularly, so I can keep my ideas in order.  Build a diary of thoughts regarding learning.  This post was named cognitive dissonance to reflect reflect where I am right now on a great many topics.  So listing these topics and reflecting on them seems in order for now.

1)  Experience vs. Learning:  I've been going through the PLA classes offered at DePaul University through CAEL.  I started these because I wanted to join a discussion about adult learning and different ways of assessing learning.  The courses have blown some of my preconceived idea out the window, and really expanded my perspective on learning and assessment.

One of the major themes that has struck me is the disconnect most people have between experience and learning.  Our learning is based on our experience, but I don't think all experiences lead to learning.  Experience may modify a behavior, but you may not have "true" learning from it.  While this is still an embryonic thought for me, there is an example I can give.  A student sits in a class and experiences a lecture, they cram for the exam, get a good grade and move on.  Did the student learn?  The exam says that they "mastered" a subject, but when they in the next class in the sequence, it becomes clear that they do not understand the subject.  They experienced the lecture, they experienced the exam, but they did not learn.  I guess I need to define learning:  my current idea about learning is knowledge in context.  That a person can relate an experience to the intellectual models of a discipline.  For now, let's call it Bloom's Level 4 (Analysis), but I'm not sure if I can yet really define this by Bloom's.  I should also say that I'm working with college-age students, not younger.  Younger students may need drills, repetition, etc....  That is another topic.

So the question becomes how to translate an experience into learning?  My answer is reflection.  Take knowledge and perceive it through the lens of your academic disciplines.  I need to go further in that, but this is just an initial foray at present.

2) Pedagogy vs. Andragogy:  A friend of mine about a decade ago, who was also a college teacher, said that what we do is andragogy, not pedagogy.  She explained it, and I read up on it, then did nothing with it until about a year ago.  I had to grow a little and question some assumptions before I could come back to this.  In helping my partner study for nursing school, I came upon Erikson's Stages of Development.  People who study education may wonder how I didn't come across it earlier.  I'm a microbiologist and ecologist; it was never a model I came across in my discipline studies.

Having reviewed the Erikson model, and looking at reviews, critiques and uses of it, I've come to realize that it is a powerful lens for educators.  Most students at a college, even non-traditional, fall in the 6th Erikson Stage: Intimacy and Solidarity vs. Isolation – Love.  It is not what happens in this stage, but what has occurred before that is important.

College age students have already past through Erikson Stage 4 (Industry vs. Inferiority – Competence), and Erikson Stage 5 (Identity vs. Role Confusion – Fidelity).  In stage 4, the child is learning new skills and knowledge.  This is the time of their early schooling, and the goal, hopefully, is to lead a child to Industry, meaning that they receive praise for what they are doing, and so continue to grow and learn.  If they don't receive the positive reinforcement, inferiority can result.  But the growth is still directed from the outside, by teachers and parents (authority figures).

In stage 5, an important shifts happens:  before stage 5 growth is due to what is done to you, but in stage 5 and later growth is about what the person does.  Growth is no longer dictated by authority figures.  Now depending on which Erikson scale you look at, college Freshmen and Sophmores are either in this stage or in the next, but the key still lies in the fact that in this stage a person's growth should be self-directed.  I believe a major problem stems from this: this is a time when people should be learning self-direction, but instead society is creating a role for them as a high school student, and our education system dictates what should be learned.  Have we systematically created a Role Confusion in high school students, a Role Confusion that persists into college?

The heading for this topic was pedagogy vs. andragogy.  Is there a difference in how you teach a child and how you teach an adult?  Yes.  Is there a difference in how a child, a college age student, and an adult learn?  I think there might be.  I would say that the college age student will be more like the adult learner in that they need autonomy, but they are unlike an adult learner because they are not a self-actualized learner.  (For me, a self-actualized learner is someone who seeks out learning experiences, and then reflects upon them, turning the experience into learning, i.e., construction of new models, expansion of models, or new insights into models).  Ultimately, pedagogy and andragogy are terms that describe teaching models and methodologies; but they don't address learning.

3)  Learning Outcomes:  Like many instructors around me, I inherited my list of learning objectives from my department and long term faculty.  I looked at them, added them to my syllabus, but really never thought about them.  They were just a list of topics that were to be covered in the class.  Now I'm revisiting them.

For a while now, I have been asking my colleagues, "what should a biologist look like when they leave our program?"  Basically, what are the skills, competencies and knowledge we expect them to leave with?  No one has answered me.  They either want to discuss it in a meeting, think it is a good discussion for just a subset of our students, or it makes them uncomfortable.  Sometimes the answer is "our curriculum speaks to this," but when you look, the curriculum is just a series of classes, not a discussion of competencies.  As stated above, a student can sit in a class, get good grades, but still have not growth in knowledge, ability or skill.

Last year, I became aware of the Bolonga accords, and this year I've agreed to help our VPAA on a project supported by the Lumina foundation regarding learning outcomes.  Of course, my core interest is in finding new methods of assessing the learning outcomes of my classes.  From what I have written above, I am starting to realize that student reflection on material is a key to learning.  Incorporating that reflection is difficult.  One thing that has to be done though is to convert the learning objectives into learning outcomes, and communicate these to the students.  Not just show them the list, but really help them to see them as their guide.  One other thing to do is to help them build their own learning objectives.

4)  Digital and Information Literacy:  College-age students may be able to text faster than lightning, but do they know how to perform an effective search?  Do they know how save files in different formats?  Do they know how to use most of the tools provided to them?  While many keep insisting that they do, my experience is that they don't.  Unless it is about games, shopping, social networks, or news, most of my students struggle to use digital resources.  I am guilty of taking digital and information literacy for granted.  I learned how to use card catalogs and annual abstracts, and my thought was "so why can't they?"  I have been appalled at what my students consider acceptable resources.  This goes beyond just citing Wikipedia (which they know not to do), to finding obscure and blatantly false material.  Oh, and when you ask a student why they can't reference Wikipedia, the almost universal answer is "because it is not accurate."  Yet it has shown to be accurate in a lot of disciplines (luckily biology is one of those).  So why can't they use it?  It is an encyclopedia.  They never learned that an encyclopedia is never considered an acceptable academic source.  Heck, they have problems understanding why we always italicize the scientific names of organisms:  they are all in Latin.  You italicize foreign words (basic English).  So, I'm going off topic.  The realization is that students don't know how to deal with information or digital tools.

I'll get back to this later.  :)

21st Century Universities #change11

Drs. Irvine & Code proposed an interesting challenge in their introduction this week, a question that I have been reflecting on for a few months.  Since October I have been catching up on my reading about the state of Higher Education.  A bleak picture is painted by many authors, not just in terms of the rapidly changing face of HE, but also the students who come out of our programs.  I see the outcomes yearly.  There are students who have poorly grasped even a fraction of what was offered to them.  They chose easy routes with instructors that posed no challenge, or they crammed/dumped to pass an exam.  Over the last few years, I've been radically altering my teaching in hopes of challenging and inspiring students.

But, to the challenge at hand.  The question revolves around "...  let the learner choose the delivery method they want for course enrollment."   It is an exciting proposition, but there is one flaw that I see, and it is a flaw I see with many new systems.  Do the students really understand their choices?  Do they really know which delivery system best suits them?  

 Please understand, I don't think University administrators know what is the best modality for students, and ultimately students will be their own best advocate.  Yet, you first have to lead the student to understanding how they learn; help them find the best fit for who they are as a person.  In my current version of the class Principles of Biology I (an introductory course for biology majors), I'm using the concept of a MOOC to help students become more independent learners and show them the power of learning networks.  Let me restate, I'm Leading Them to a new style of learning.  I've recognized that the majority of my students don't possess the skills to tackle learning by themselves.  Most of them have been taught as if they were children, and not adults.  Education has become a chore, and learning is many times lost.  So I've taken a middle road between the complete freedom of a MOOC and the structure of a class.  But what does this have to do with the challenge at hand?

How does the student learn which teaching modality works best for them?

New projects starting while others end #change11

I've been keeping up with information, but have not had a great deal of time recently to sit down and actively keep up this blog.  The Change 11 MOOC has inspired me, and this includes the presenters that I've gotten to watch.  So, now my redesigned Biology course is going live. 

This is a hybrid face-to-face / online class, and I'm using many of the MOOC concepts.  I've also invited friends to join and to send their students.  For those who are interested, the course syllabus can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/hybridbiol2107/ and the social network structure for the MOOC is at http://biogsu.org/oxwall/. 

I've actually referred to this in my notes as a pMOOC (for pseudoMOOC). 

Unlike the MOOC concept that depends on self-actualized learners, the pMOOC is designed to take students who are use to being spoon fed and move them throughout the semester to a more adult learning model (so a move from pedagogy to andragogy). 

Now that this has started, I can get back to some other things (getting everything running has been the worst part).

Goals #change11

Last weeks discussions regarding David Wiley's challenges to the MOOC participants, and Tony Bates webinar today, have really encouraged me to sit down and reflect on what I want to do in my classes.  Next semester I am presenting a Hybrid online/F2F class in biology.  This project is based upon an internal grant sponsored by our Center for Instructional Innovation.  Since joining the #change11 MOOC, I've had a lot of ideas about how to handle this class, and a lot of inspiration for other projects.  What follows is the basic ideas about the class.  This is still a work in progress.  But first, this class.

The Course:
The course is the first semester biology for our biology majors.  This is a heavy content class, with much of the content being required for later classes.  Students who do not take the time to incorporate foundational concepts tend to do poorly in later classes.

The Goal:

• Encourage students to become active, independent learners.
• Encourage students to learn the foundational concepts of biology.
• Encourage retention of the foundational concepts of biology.
• Encourage students to see the connections between different concepts of biology; to build in their mind a picture of the systems of living organisms.

Management:
The majority of students in this class are use to directive styles of instruction, and do not see themselves as independent learners.  The instructional management of this course will start off heavy, with additional resources provided to the students.  These resources will included online presentations, notes, links, and helpful hints.  As the semester continues, fewer instructor notes will be made available. Students will be asked instead to contribute notes, interpretations and content to the course wiki.

Framework:
The class is hybrid online/face-2-face, meaning that each week, students will come to the lecture hall for face-2-face time, but then the remaining time will be online work. 
Online work

• ePortfolio of work including a blog of daily activities.
• Comments on the blogs of other students.
• Access to online tutorials.
• Online quizzes based in a learning management system.
• Papers submitted for calibrated online review.
• Participation in webinars, online help sessions, and discussion boards.
• End of semester reflective paper (based on Prior Learning Assessments)

In class work

• Time in class will be mainly devoted to question and answers, mini-lectures (5 minutes on a specific topic), case studies, and activities (such as working with molecular models).
• There will be two assessments to determine comprehension and synthesis of information.

Student Assessment:

• 1/3 of the student's final grade is determined by the performance in lab.  The instructor has very little influence over lab, so this is something I will have very little control over.
• Students will receive points for daily blog activity starting during the first week and proceeding through the 15 weeks of he semester.  I should note that points are awarded on "sound participation."  What this means is that the student has posted a reflection on the topic, the post is intelligible and logical.
• Students will receive points for the completion of online quizzes.
• Students will receive points on in class assessments.
• Students will receive points for the end of the semester reflective paper and all calibrated peer reviewed papers.

Course Assessment:
Qualitative studies have never been my strong suit, so I'm working on ways to evaluate the effectiveness of the course.  Some of the assessments will include:

• Survey of Student Satisfaction
• Review of Student Participation and Survey by external observer
• Comparison of results of standard departmental questions between sections.

This is the current scheme of the course.  Comments welcome.

Opening statements on Open Content #change11

The work of David Wiley as an innovator and advocate are impressive, especially his current work on open textbooks.  The expense of textbooks is a topic that is dear to my heart, for as a science educator, I see the burden placed on students.  I guess it is one of the reasons I provide all of the lab materials to the students free of charge.  Of course, this makes me consider about opening up this material as open content.

I have yet to get through all of the sources provided, but my first concern regarding open content would be the quality of the material.  What is the review process?  Who are the reviewers?  What is the review criteria?  These would be my first questions (which of course may already be answered in the sources provided by David Wiley).

As to the challenge put before us, I would say that is two fold.  First is to provide and help students find open source material to further their biology education.  Even with a starting point provided, students often explore links and other sources when reviewing materials online.  As such, they become actively engaged in the material, which is a positive result.  For example, online games that allow you to look up answers through search engines provides a great example of becoming actively engaged in learning.

The second part is to encourage students to produce open content of what they have learned, be it a video, blog, song, or whatever creative outlet sparks their interest.  With varying levels of success, I have had students prepare videos on specific topics.  The greatest success was with a group of medical microbiology students who made videos on the immune system (some of their content is still available on our campus iTunesU site, if you can find it).  In the future, I would like to let them work through their own creative outlets, but still convey some accumulated knowledge.

This is just a brief introduction.  I need to consider this weeks challenge in more detail before I start building a map or other resource.

Collective Learning - Final Thoughts #change11

After my epiphany regarding collective learning, I've taken a chance to rethink my views on the topic and Professor Littlejohn's work.  Due to meetings, I was unable to attend the presentation on Friday, and hope to view it later this week.

First, collective knowledge is a reality.  No human holds the sum total of all knowledge, so we have to use external sources of knowledge to supplement our understanding of topics.  In the sciences, collective knowledge has been tapped for centuries, as can be seen with the correspondences between intellectuals and scientists since the 1600s (and earlier if you keep going).  In our modern world though, there seems to be disparity between academic disciplines in how, when, or even if, collective knowledge is tapped.

During a meeting on Friday, I had an opportunity to talk to people from English and Art about collective learning.  It was agreed among them that they preferred to work alone.  Collective learning, if any, was relegated to conferences and meetings.  From reading Professor Littlejohn's work, it seems that this is also the case in business and corporate collective knowledge.  I also realized that in academic settings, this can also be the case.  It can be amazing how many faculty members (both new and older) don't know how a university is administered.  There are at times some strange misconceptions that could be solved simply by asking.

This brings us to my first key in Collective Learning:  ask questions.  I feel we have built a culture that really does not like to ask questions, that it is seen as some type of weakness to look for knowledge from those around you.  Even my students are at first hesitant to ask questions, but it is the fastest way to access collective knowledge.  If one person doesn't know, they may at least know someone or some reference that can provide the information.  Does asking a question show a lack of knowledge, yes, but it also shows that you are cognizant of your lack of knowledge and are actively trying to correct that lack of knowledge.

My second key in Collective Learning: ask for feedback.  Culturally, we are also afraid of criticism, and this leads us to the self-destructive path of trying to be a lone wolf in our work.  Instead of going over to a colleague and saying "could you look this over for me?", we will sit alone and go over the work again and again until we convince ourselves that it is perfect.  This comes for a meeting I just had (about an hour ago) with a student over a lab paper, and then another about a test.  Instead of getting feedback from an external source, both just convinced themselves that their work or knowledge was perfect only to find out that it was not at the expected level.  We tap into collective knowledge when we get feedback.

The third key in Collective Learning is be open to new ideas.  I was at a meeting with other faculty members from around the university working on a new idea for the college.  What I discovered was that the older faculty members mainly focused on "tried and true" methods of doing things, while younger faculty members wanted to do projects that would carry with it name recognition (making a name for themselves).  None of the ideas were new, none were revolutionary, none were going to go to that mythical "next level."  Would they work?  In their own way, but there was limited openness to anything untested, untried, or innovative.  Collective knowledge is not stagnant, it is not codified and unchanging.  It grows as individuals and organizations grow, and you should experiment.  That is why being open to new ideas is so critical.  New ideas allow collective knowledge to adapt and expand.

Finally, be willing to answer questions and give feedback.  The worst thing for an eager learner is to come face to face with someone who won't help them.  Always take time to answer questions and to give feedback.  This is the only way for collective learning to be provided to the next generation.

Yes, I have focused on person-to-person communication of knowledge, but that is because people will know where to go for the information.  You could do a Google searches for information, and get back 1,000 sites of varying degrees of relevance.  Instead, you could go to someone in the "know" and ask them where they would start looking for the information.  In general, you'll get a better way of finding a useful site, and you will be a connection in your individual learning network.

The Phenomena of Emergence (Collective Learning #change11 )

Yesterday, I joined the CIDER meeting Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0.  One of the other audience members made a comment to me that got me thinking.  We were talking about emergence, and I made mention of mathematical complexity.  The response was that we were discussing social emergence, and that math was just a metaphor.  That is what got me thinking.

A little background.  Chaos theory was just becoming big when I started my masters.  One of my professors, knowing I had a strong background in math, talked with me about it.  It also came up in a class on modeling ecological systems.  I kept up with complexity and chaos theory off and on since then (but it never became a major calling for me).  As a scientist, I also have been taught the supremacy of mathematics since I was in high school.  So saying that math was just a metaphor was odd, since all complexity theory ultimately originates in mathematics.

The specific thing that was discussed was regarding the imitation of the system, and that small changes at initiation can have a dramatic effect.  My ultimate idea here is that one person could throw the group dynamics into a spin and radically affect the forming social network.  But I sat with the idea of math as a metaphor, and that is when I was struck by an amazing similarity between what is being discussed with collective learning and emergence.  One point I made regarding codifying collective learning is the unpredictability of the initial system.  But it is not just the initial system, it is the individual(s) that make up the collective.

Where did this come from?  What the conversation reminded me of was a work of Science Fiction:  Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series.  If you are not familiar with the series, in the first book, a mathematician develops an algorithm to predict large scale societal trends in the future.  A foundation is built to "oversee" these trends, working for a "better" outcome.  The problem comes in the second book, because the one thing the algorithm can not predict is the actions of an individual, and one individual throws the entire system into chaos.  I know I have left a lot out, but this is just meant as a breif overview.

What is the point?  Ultimately, the individual is the important element in the collective.  How do you maintain a collective when one individual disrupts the collective?  With a large enough population, the collective maybe able to maintain itself, but a small one may not survive.  Think about that one disruptive student in a class.  How much of a problem do they make for the learning of others?  This is not to alienate one person, or to even say one system is better than another, but if you ignore that one individuals actions, it can have a damaging effect on any collective you try to build.  This becomes a question of leadership/management ultimately, but it can not be ignored when trying to build a #collective.

And how does this deal with math...well except for the reference to an algorithm to predict future societal trends by one person, which is in many ways analogous to small changes in initial state altering the behavior of the system, not much. :)