03.23.07
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.
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10.04.06
Posted in General, Learning Styles at 10:41 am by Norm Garrett
I was recently reading an excellent article entitled Academic Generations: Exploring Intellectual Risk Taking in an Educational Leadership Program, by Carolyn Ridenour and Carla Twale.
Education is a culturally conservative profession that rewards conforming rather than bold behaviors. In fact, McCarthy (1999b) characterizes educational leadership programs, in particular, as complacent and unresponsive to needs for reform. After her national study, she concluded that educational administration is fairly self-satisfied, indicating perhaps, less inclination to take risks. Nyquist (2002) calls for innovation in Ph.D. programs; but innovation often involves risk. She calls on doctoral programs to espouse and support creativity and adventurous research, a move away from what traditional educational leadership may have valued. While teaching growth and change to students, the faculty in the field of education may be slow to change their programs or to purposefully take risks.
This is an interesting statement, but not one that is at all surprising. In their oft-quoted paper about 21st century skills, the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory said this about risk-taking:
Risk taking is the willingness to make mistakes, advocate unconventional or unpopular positions, or tackle extremely challenging problems without obvious solutions, such that one’s personal growth, integrity, or accomplishments are enhanced.
The very nature of learning requires risk taking. Asmall child would never learn to walk, talk, or socially interact without taking risks, experiencing successes and failures, and then monitoring and adjusting accordingly.
Quantum leaps in learning, solving problems, inventing new products, and discovering new phenomena require risk taking. Risk taking within the learning environment requires a willingness to think deeply about a subject or problem, share that thinking with others to hear their perspectives, listen to their critiques, and then build on those experiences toward a solution or solutions (Dweck, 2000; Weiner, 1994). Too often, students are engaged in learning activities that focus on the “right answers.” Instead, students should be encouraged to engage in discussions about numerous approaches—and potential solutions—to a problem (Brophy, 1998; Vispoel & Austin, 1995).
Given that we need to teach students to engage in risk-taking, why aren’t we willing ourselves to take risks in the classroom? Education, as is pointed out above, is slow to change. Why is that? I would submit that most educators enjoy their comfort zones and like to settle into them, resulting in a generally risk-averse population. What are the fears (risks) of trying new things in the classroom? Here are a few:
- Failing in front of students
- Failing in front of colleagues
- Having classroom failures result in displinary action
- Looking stupid to students
- Losing control of the classroom
- Receiving a poor teaching evaluation as a result of failures
On the other hand, we can stay in our comfort zone and accomplish all of the following:
- Follow routine
- Bore students
- Not fail in front of students, but not challenge them either
- Get adequate teaching evaluations because we are not “rocking the boat”
- Not have to use new technology, since we can always use older technology with which we are more familiar
In higher education, many of our students look to faculty as examples. How can we talk about taking risk and changing the world (for the better) when we are not willing to do it ourselves? That is a question we all need to ponder.
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10.02.06
Posted in General, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 1:46 pm by Norm Garrett
A recent paper entitled Technology in Schools: What the Research Shows, published by Cisco Systems and the Metiri Group outlines the current state of research in a variety of technologies. Here is a key quotation from the report:
The research on the effect of technology in learning is emerging. Overall, across all uses in all content areas, technology does provide a small, but significant, increase in learning when implemented with fidelity. While this statistic is encouraging, the real value to research lies in the identification of those technology interventions that get sufficiently positive results to warrant the investment. Most educators are looking for the value proposition that will significantly advance learning, teaching, and school system efficiencies. Taking advantage of these leverage points requires serious review of specific research studies that specifically address the needs and challenges of specific schools and serious attention paid to leadership development, professional development for teachers, school culture, curricular redesign, and teacher preparation.
While this report focuses on research in the K-12 area, some of it is also applicable to higher education and it bears at least a brief reading. We in higher education have to keep in mind that what affects K-12 education today affects our students of tomorrow. While we in higher education are often heard complaining about our incoming students (and often their lack of sufficient preparation) we have to keep in mind that if they experience a complete paradigm shift when they enter our halls, they are on a path for difficulty, if not failure. In actuality, it may not be their lack of preparation, but our inability to teach them in the manner in which they are accustomed to learning. Before we throw all of the blame on our students for not being adequately prepared, maybe we should check out our own (often archaic) instructional methodologies, as they may be, at the very least, contributing to the problem.
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02.14.06
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.
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02.09.06
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:
- We are afraid they will “get off track” and not pursue what we think is important
- We think they will be wasting time and effort on superfluous material or content
- We don’t trust them to think for themselves
- We don’t think they know enough to know what to pursue
- We don’t think they will do any work at all if they are just “turned loose to pursue their own course”
- We don’t think they have the skills to engage in independent learning
- How will we test them on what they are supposed to learn?
- How will we fit unstructured learning into a structured syllabus and curriculum?
- 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?
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02.08.06
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):
- Ability to identify the “essential elements in a problem as well as the interaction between those elements”
- Ability to “assign relative values to essential elements of a problem and use those values to rank elements in meaningful ways”
- Ability to “construct relationships between the essential elements of a problem that provide insight into it”
- Ability to “create and apply criteria to gauge the strengths, limitations, and value of information, data, and solutions”
- 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.
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01.21.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Learning Styles at 11:25 pm by Norm Garrett
The study of learning styles is one in which you tend to see numerous models, with a great deal of disagreement as to what really constitutes learning style, how it relates to personality, and how you can determine one’s learning style. That said, here is an interesting site that I ran into on Merlot. The site uses a particular learning style model that utilizes four distinct continuums: Visual/Verbal, Active/Reflective, Sensing/Intuitive, and Sequential/Global. This model differs from many others, but works just as well as any.
The point is not to determine which of the numerous models is correct. Rather, the object is to illustrate that any given classroom probably has a very ecclectic collection of learning types. You can use any model to do this. These professors, at North Carolina State University, have posted an online instrument you can take. More illustratively, you can have your students take it and then take a look at the diversity in learning styles that they exhibit. The 44 question survey is easy to take, doesn’t take long, and is scored immediately. The result can be printed. I’m going to ask my students to take the survey and I’ll put the results here. As for me, I was in the middle of the continuum on two of the scales and at the extreme end of the other two. Kudos to these faculty for posting this … it’s a great tool.
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