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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08.30.06
Posted in Society and Technology at 11:43 am by Norm Garrett
When we are computing in the public space, we need to pay extra attention to security issues. While I enjoy sitting in an Internet cafe with my laptop and surfing around, or using the Internet via a free wireless connection provided by my hotel, I am acutely aware that these may not be the safest of environments in which to engage the world.
Here is an interesting post entitled “10 Top Tips for Protecting Yourself at Hot Spots.” It is an excellent list but, more importantly, it points to the fact that we must be vigilant when using the Internet and that this is particularly important when we use it in a wireless environment. The article has some good suggestions. The bottom line is that we must be responsible for our own security because nobody else is going to do it for us.
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08.24.06
Posted in Uncategorized, General, Conferences at 9:48 pm by Norm Garrett
Well it has been a good summer and I got a lot accomplished. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to keep up the blog but I’m back at it now. Currently, I have several projects in progress that I worked on feverishly over the summer. The research I did was time-consuming but rewarding and I will be sharing some of my findings over the next few months on this blog.
Among other topics, much of my time has been taken up with writing grant proposals and papers for conference presentations. My next presentation will be at ELearn 2006 in Honolulu in October. This is an excellent conference for educational technology and its use in higher education. If you’ve never been, consider it (this year would be a good year to start since it is in Hawaii).
It’s good to be back at it and have another first week of the semester under my belt.
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05.26.06
Posted in Conferences, Archives at 2:05 pm by Norm Garrett
This year’s version of the annual Faculty Summer Institute, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a good one. Overall, the conference went well and the enthusiasm of the participants led to some really good collaboration opportunities. This year, the organizers tried something new: Everyone was allowed to select a particular track they were interested in and learning teams were created around those tracks. The learning teams met three times during the 4-day conference and then were given five minutes in the closing session to present some of their ideas. The end result was a good list of resources and ideas that I still have to sift through. I’ll be sifting through them in the next few weeks and presenting salient points here. Judging from the presentations, there were some excellent ideas to consider and I look forward to looking at them all in detail.
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05.21.06
Posted in General, Society and Technology at 10:28 am by Norm Garrett
Those of us who engage in website development, blogging, and podcasting need to be aware that anytime we put something before the public (which you are doing if you are connected to the Internet), copyright law may apply. The Creative Commons website has a wonderful legal brief on podcasting that is both understandable and straightforward. It is a must-read if you are podcasting, blogging, or putting any form of content before the public. As educators, we often immerse ourselves so much in “fair use” in the classroom, that we don’t realize that when we do things outside the classroom, the same rules may not be applicable. I highly recommend that everyone read this brief, whether you are podcasting or not. It’s a great primer on copyright law and the Internet.
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05.20.06
Posted in Conferences, Tools at 9:53 am by Norm Garrett
It is interesting how the concept of RSS feeds is finally beginning to take off. Last week I presented a webinar for the Instructional Technology Council (a community college consortium) and had 30 participants from all over the country. They asked some really good questions at the end of the presentation and we even went 15 minutes over our allotted time trying to answer them. My face-to-face session at their conference in Savannah, Georgia, last February was well-attended and participation from the group was excellent.
Yesterday, I got a call from a writer for Distance Education Report, a scholarly journal on distance education. We talked for 45 minutes as I explained RSS to him, how it works, and how it can be used in the classroom to create learning communities that are peer-to-peer, self-organizing, and easy to use in the classroom setting. We had a wonderful conversation about RSS. Even as a technical writer, he had no idea how it worked and was eager to understand not only how it worked, but how it could be used in education (particularly distance education).
This week I am presenting a double-session hands-on workshop and a 75 minute forum on using RSS, blogs, and wikis in learning communities. Again, these will be well-attended based upon pre-registrations. So it seems that interest in RSS technologies and how they work is rising. At the beginning of 2005, there was a major survey done of Internet users where one of the questions asked was if they had ever heard of RSS and, if so, whether or not they were using it. Only 5% responded that they knew what it was and only 1% were using it. Those figures have to be a lot higher now, as awareness has increased. It would be interesting to see that survey repeated now and to examine the results.
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04.26.06
Posted in General, Learning Theory, Society and Technology at 7:57 am by Norm Garrett
I have always noticed that technology seems to have a direct inverse relationship with age. This has been the case since the early days of the PC (the past 20 years or so). Case in point: My mother still insists on calling an airline to make reservations, even though they are now charging extra for that. She has no use for the Internet, doesn’t understand it, and still can’t figure out how my Dish Network DVR lets me pause live programming.
Here is an interesting article on what some educators have done about this. First hurdle: Admit that the students know more than you do about some technologies. These educators did that and enlisted the aid of some savvy students to help them integrate technology. It’s a great idea.
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03.24.06
Posted in General, Learning Theory at 9:12 am by Norm Garrett
I was reading my subscribed RSS feeds the other day and I came across this site that just fascinated me. After I had spent nearly an hour playing around with it, I thought that I needed to share it here. The site has been set up by George Mason University and it deals with the linquistic characteristics of a variety of English speakers. You can click on a spot on the globe and then listen to a native of that area read an English paragraph. What’s really interesting is to see how different all of the native speakers of English are. It’s also fun to quiz someone else and see if they can pinpoint where a speaker is from.
Included in the site are demographic data about the speakers and the phoenetic text of their rendition. The site demonstrates how a project can be disseminated with the Web in ways we could never imagine before. If you visit the site, think how an English or foreign language teacher might use the site to demonstrate linquistic concepts. Kudos to GMU for this.
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03.22.06
Posted in Web 2.0 at 9:35 am by Norm Garrett
I just read an excellent blog post (on WebMonkey) by Tim Ziegler. It is one of the best analyses of Web 2.0 that I have read. It is thorough and separates the hype from the facts. Web 2.0 has become an interesting subject because it is viewed (depending upon the perspective) as everything from a panacea to all of our ills to being dead in the water and nothing more than overblown hype. In between, there are many viewpoints:
- Web 2.0 will greatly enhance our ability to collaborate, which is a good thing
- Web 2.0 will greatly enhance our ability to collaborate, which is not a good thing
- Web 2.0 will give power to the masses
- Web 2.0 will give the masses information overload and, more importantly, serious information quality problems
- Web 2.0 will allow ordinary people to publish, giving that power to the masses
- Web 2.0 will fill our lives with trivial, unsubstantiated, poorly researched (if researched at all), and ubiquitous junk information
Are any of these true? Certainly, some must be. Read Tim Ziegler’s post to get a better handle on it and see what you think. What do I think? I think the jury’s still out. There is an old saying among programmers and software developers that goes like this: “Do you want your software developed quickly, correctly, or cheaply (select any two)?”
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