03.23.07

The Art of Adapting

Posted in Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 3:01 pm by Norm Garrett

We need to adapt.  I know many professors who can’t see that the students that are coming into their classes are different than those of, say, 20 years ago.  First of all, these students don’t much like books and rarely use them.  Second of all, they want learning to be more “pull” than “push.”  But we can’t just throw technology at them.  In the first place, they aren’t all necessarily fond of it and, secondly, does the technology fit the pedagogy?  Further, does the professor know anything about (or have any comfort level with) the technology?

Here’s a great article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about implementing some Web 2.0 practices in our classrooms.  Personally, I am a great fan of social networking in the classroom.  Accordingly, I use RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, and forums extensively in my classes, both face-to-face and distance learning.  But not everyone is comfortable with that.  Still, everyone needs to learn to adapt and there are some good ideas here about doing so. 

11.15.06

Paradigm Shift

Posted in General, Blended Learning, Society and Technology at 10:34 pm by Norm Garrett

Last month I put 20,000 miles on my frequent flyer tally, mostly going to conferences and workshops about educational technology. Having attended many of these conferences over the past 6 or 7 years, I have these observations:

  1. Educators and policymakers are doing all they can to make the current paradigm work. The bad news is that it’s the paradigm itself that is outdated. We are using an early 20th century model in a 21st century environment. Believe me, I know. I have been in this system since 1953 (going on 54 years), which is about 50% of the current paradigm’s life. Think about it. High schools and our current setup have been around since the early 20th century … the last time we underwent any kind of paradigm shift.
  2. In my thinking, no amount of fixing, tweaking, updating, or streamlining of the current model will work. Again, it’s the model that’s wrong, not the way we are implementing it.
  3. While I have been developing some possible ideas that might be included in a new paradigm, my basic question is how you design and implement a completely new paradigm. Where does the process start? Is it a bottom-up or top-down process (does it begin with teachers in the classroom or with educational policymakers?)?
  4. There are certainly many hard-working people out there who are trying to change things. The problem is that they are trying to change things within the context of the current paradigm. Again, this is a paradigm that can’t be fixed. To answer my own question, I don’t think a paradigm shift will be a bottom-up process. Does that mean it’s useless to try? Not at all. Where will the new paradigm come from if we don’t experiment with new ideas within the current one? But it’s not enough. We need to rethink everything from funding to curriculum. That provides the paradigm, the framework within which we operate. Changing things by beginning with instruction (the only thing most of the ed-tech zealots have any control over) is simply not enough to cause a paradigm shift by itself. However, demonstrating completely new models of instruction might provide some impetus for those at the top to begin to look at wholesale changes.

What’s wrong with the current paradigm? I don’t have enough room here, but here are some ideas off the top of my head. Note that these are fundamental flaws of the system and cannot be fixed within the context of that system:

  1. The academic calendar - Why do we still use an agricultural model for an academic calendar that dates back 150 years? Last time I looked, none of my students were needed in the fields during the summer.
  2. The curriculum - We target mediocrity. Just ask any students who are high achievers and they will tell you how bored they are. We are NOT targeting our best and brightest, nor are we doing a real service to the slower learners. The system is tuned for the average. The outliers are not well served.
  3. Fixed Depth - I call this Static Depth Instruction. The course parameters dictate the amount of depth and breadth in a course, not the needs or achivements of the students in the course. What we should use is a Dynamic Depth Instruction model wherein students are dynamically given the depth they want/need, determined as they move through the course. There should be no limits on the depth that could be achieved by a student in a given amount of time.
  4. Curricular Breadth - Students who attend relatively small high schools are given few choices. Even if they attend large high schools, there are severe limitations to the number of choices available to them. Customized, or matched curriculum is impossible. We are limited by space. It’s like the system is a giant bricks & mortar business that can’t seem to figure out how to use technology to augment its offerings with a virtual curriculum.
  5. Funding - Our funding mechanisms are anachronistic.
  6. Administration - The days of the local school board should be over. We are a global society, and our educational system should reflect that. Parochial interests do not serve the system well.

I could go on about this, and will in future postings. There are a lot of hard-working early adopters out there that are grabbing onto technology and enhancing their teaching with it, mostly on their own time and without much in the way of accolades or funding. In fact, many of them reap the disdain of their late majority and laggard colleagues for pushing forward and trying to improve instruction. They know the system is broken and are doing everything they can to start a bottom-up movement to change it. Unfortunately, we are talking here about needing a white knight to show up and get something done at the top. That white knight might be the disruptive technology of the world marketplace and the paradigm shift it will force. How long will we have to wait for that and might we react to late to save our competitive position in the world? Only time will tell.

02.21.06

Future Jobs

Posted in General, Blended Learning at 9:27 am by Norm Garrett

I gave a presentation last week at the ELearning 2006 conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which I made the statement (taken from a variety of futurists) that in the year 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because 80% of the technologies that will exist and that will create those jobs do not exist today. If you question the reality of those figures, or at least the spirit of them, then just look back 15 years to 1991. In 1991:

  1. The Internet was not accessible to the public
  2. The Web had not been invented yet
  3. There was no such thing as a web browser or web server because the web hadn’t been invented
  4. Nobody had ever heard of TCP/IP outside the halls of academia and the scientific community
  5. We were transitioning from MS-DOS to Windows
  6. Local area networking was only marginally functional
  7. Company that nobody had heard of: Cisco
  8. Companies that hadn’t been invented yet: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon
  9. Virtually nobody had ever heard of email, much less used it, unless they were in academia
  10. Gopher was the best source of documents on the Internet
  11. Newsgroups was where most interaction took place
  12. There was no such thing as .COM. There were only .GOV and .EDU
  13. The term ISP (Internet Service Provider) hadn’t been coined yet as none existed
  14. The best way to collaborate was dialing in to CompuServe with a 2400 baud modem
  15. The term eCommerce would not be coined for several more years
  16. Although computer viruses existed, they were spread by trading floppy disks
  17. Trojans, spyware, spam, and bots did not exist and wouldn’t for several years
  18. The typical PC had 32 mb of RAM (if you were cutting edge) and a 40 mb hard drive
  19. A normal PC, not especially cutting edge, cost in the neighborhood of $3,000
  20. The cutting edge processor was the Intel 386

Now, if you think of all the jobs that exist today because of the Internet alone (which didn’t exist back then, at least in a form the public had access to), you get the idea of how much things have changed over the past 15 years. Since the pace of change has increased, the difference between our world now and the world of 2020 will be even more pronounced.

We need to educate our students to live in that world, a world of which we have absolutely no knowledge. The skills we give them will need to be skills that allow them to adapt, to self-teach, and project. Are we moving in that direction or are we cruising along teaching the same way we did 40 years ago, for a world that our students will never know?

02.14.06

Push vs. Pull Validated

Posted in Future, Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 9:18 am by Norm Garrett

After my post about push vs. pull learning, I flew to Savannah, Georgia, to make a presentation at the ELearning 2006 conference. On Monday, February 13th, we listened to keynote speaker Marc Prensky, noted author and futurist, speak about “Engage Me or Enrage Me,” emphasizing how we need to deal with the wired generation as they come through the school system. If you say that the wired generation is everyone born after the Internet went public then we shall say, for purposes of argument, that it’s everyone born in 1994 or later. That means that the front of the wired generation is now in 7th grade. In higher education, we’ll get them in about 6 or 7 years. Given the speed of curricular change in higher education, that’s the blink of an eye.

Marc gave several keys to dealing with these students and be able to glimpse their world. One of the main keys he discussed is the idea that learning can’t be push (predominantly the current model), but must be pull. He then went on to talk about engagement of learners, which is a prerequisite to pull learning. If you are interested in Marc’s ideas, you can visit his website.

02.09.06

Push vs. Pull Learning

Posted in Future, Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 10:43 am by Norm Garrett

I spent much of the morning today learning to use a new Java IDE (Eclipse) that I will need to be teaching in a year or so. As I progressed through the tutorials (which are excellent), it dawned on me that I was very much engaged in what I would term pull learning. In pull learning, I decide what I want to know about and pursue it. It is what I spent much of graduate school doing (once I got past the required doctoral courses). It is what original research is all about. In fact, it is clearly the model that most of us follow in our personal lives and is the foundation for what has often been termed life-long learning.

So why do we insist on using the push model 90% of the time in higher education? We attempt to stuff our students’ heads full of what we think is important and then check on them to make sure the stuffing hasn’t fallen out. If that’s not the model we use to learn, then why do we use that model to teach our students? If our students are to learn to think at higher levels, as I discussed in my previous post, then why aren’t we more engaged in pull learning? I think our fear of pull learning stems from several things:

  1. We are afraid they will “get off track” and not pursue what we think is important
  2. We think they will be wasting time and effort on superfluous material or content
  3. We don’t trust them to think for themselves
  4. We don’t think they know enough to know what to pursue
  5. We don’t think they will do any work at all if they are just “turned loose to pursue their own course”
  6. We don’t think they have the skills to engage in independent learning
  7. How will we test them on what they are supposed to learn?
  8. How will we fit unstructured learning into a structured syllabus and curriculum?
  9. How can we be assured they will know enough to progress to the next course in the sequence?

Well, you get the idea. This is the tail wagging the dog. The structure of the curriculum and the traditional methods of instruction are dictating how we move forward. Can’t we think in other terms, ignore current structures and come up with some new ways of doing things? Maybe we need to use a bottom-up approach where we decide how best to communicate content, then build an entirely new curricular structure around that. Maybe the Carnegie system is outdated. After all, if the structure is so rigid that we have lost all true flexibility, what does the future hold?

02.08.06

Can College Students Think?

Posted in Blended Learning, Learning Styles at 5:59 pm by Norm Garrett

I was reading the website of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory in the area of higher-order thinking and sound reasoning and was particularly focused on five identifiers they list for students who are higher-order thinkers. While this site is aimed at K-12, this is equally as applicable to higher education.

Reading the identifiers made me wonder how many of my students (seniors and graduate students) have these abilities (paraphrased from the original list … use the link to see them in their entirety):

  1. Ability to identify the “essential elements in a problem as well as the interaction between those elements”
  2. Ability to “assign relative values to essential elements of a problem and use those values to rank elements in meaningful ways”
  3. Ability to “construct relationships between the essential elements of a problem that provide insight into it”
  4. Ability to “create and apply criteria to gauge the strengths, limitations, and value of information, data, and solutions”
  5. Ability to “build new solutions through novel combinations of existing information”

It has been my observation in over 30 years as an educator that undergraduate education often falls short of developing these characteristics in students. I think that we begin to build them at the graduate level, but don’t think “outside the box” enough to develop them in undergraduates. Of course, that is a generalization that doesn’t always apply, and where it does apply, it might be somewhat discipline-specific. Still, it is clear that we need to make an effort to do better at active learning concepts (where these characteristics are typically developed) and begin to remove some of our dependence on doing things the way we were taught decades ago. Just because it worked for me doesn’t mean it will work for my grandchildren, who are working their way through the school system now. My 2 year old granddaughter can use the computer. She can’t read, but she can use the mouse, point to icons, and click on them. I know plenty of 70 year olds who can’t do that. We have an inversion when it comes to technology. The younger they are, the more comfortable they are with it. Todays students demand (and deserve) a better approach to learning and one that is more in synch with the way they have grown up.

We can begin to solve the problem if we will opt for interactive approaches to our teaching. There is still a place for the synchronous/non-interactive activity (i.e. lecture), but its use should be significantly curtailed in favor of both synchronous and asynchronous interactive activities. Let’s not shortchange the future.

12.30.05

The Blended Learning Book

Posted in Blended Learning at 10:27 pm by Norm Garrett

I have been reading a book entitled The Blended Learning Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Lessons Learned, by Josh Bersin. This book is a great handbook on blended learning. While it is written primarily for the private sector (business training is the emphasis), many of the ideas and research it contains are applicable to about any educational setting.

One of the interesting concepts that is discussed in the book is the idea of content durability, i.e. the idea that content of certain types can expire. One of the problems with content that is developed using some of our current paradigms (RSS, blogs, etc.) is that the content is not easily managed for validity and currency. This is an essential aspect when managing knowledge (the kind of content that is considered an asset in most businesses). Since the book is narrowly targeted at business and corporate training, it is, at times, difficult to transfer some of the ideas to public sector education. That said, the concepts presented are timely and constitute an excellent introduction to the concepts of blended learning.


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