Month: August 2021

Professional<>unbiased

The following is a repost of something I wrote in 2011. I have been reading about memory and the value of revisiting memories you find difficult to recall without cuing. There is a connection here. I decided my own writing would be interesting to re-examine as it reflects thinking I was doing at a given point of time and how the possible relevance may have been forgotten. The post concerned my reflection on expertise and how it is accepted or rejected. Thinking about what I was thinking about.

From 2011

A recent interview by Steve Hargadon (Future of Education) featured Douglas Rushkoff (Program or Be Programmed) (also see this etsy post). The simple version of the message, I think, is that we should participate now to shape how our digital tools are used because these tools will end up defining our future. I admit to not having this book on my reading list at this point, but some of the ideas did seem interesting.

The author’s response to a particular question caught my attention.  The question directed at Rushkoff pretty much amounted to “Why do some who produce content deserve to be paid for their efforts and others do not?” So, the questions are being asked of a multi-book author who is compensated for his writing activities. And, the question is related to the premis offered by that author that we need to understand the technologies we are creating because our experiences and our assumptions end up being shaped by these creations. Part of the background for the question was related to participatory culture (e.g., bloggers) and the opportunity for so many to offer their opinions and how such opinions may influence others.

The author’s response focused on journalism and argued that journalists should be compensated while bloggers possibly should not because of the preparation, evaluation, and integration that went into the products generated by journalists, but not necessarily the products generated by bloggers.

This got me thinking about the topic of “what are we willing to pay for?” I agree with Rushkoff that we may fail to appreciate expertise when a technology system offers no apparent way to differentiate the process that went into the generation of an information product. On the surface Rushkoff’s position makes some  sense, but it occurred to me that while one might conclude that the processes of preparation, evaluation, and integration warrant compensation should one necessarily conclude that those who are paid have engaged in these processes?

We typically pay someone else for services we are either unable or would rather not perform for ourselves. A journalist potentially has access to information sources the rest of us do not have and has the time to carefully evaluate these sources in order to provide a more concise and accurate account for us to consider.

However, the confabulation of payment with a title can lead to other problems Rushkoff did not identify. Perhaps we are now at the point where definitions of “the press” and “journalism” are somewhat ambiguous and assumptions associated with these terms problematic. “Gets paid” seems an agreed upon characteristic of both the official “press” and the occupation of “journalist”. What about characteristics such as “objective” or “critical”? How about “entertaining” and “agenda supporting”?

I completely agree with Rushkoff’s argument that we need to pay attention as technologies evolve because our technologies end up shaping us. Blogs are the least of our problems. We should have been more aware as cable television allowed the creation of “channels with a perspective”. We now think we are being informed by paid professionals who remain employed by a broadcasting company because they can take a given event and interpret it to conform to the philosophy or bias of the channel that employs them.

I think we need some kind of rating system that better defines the basis for the analysis that goes into the preparation of the content we consume. The disclaimer “the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position of this station” needs to be reworked for certain programming. Perhaps the statement should read “the views expressed here reflect the predictable bias of this station”. Keeping the spin going in the same direction may take considerable talent.

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Mastery Learning

I have been writing about and conducting research on mastery learning since the late 1970s. I always thought some of the core concepts (learners develop knowledge and skills at different rates, ignoring such differences leads to failed understanding and learner frustration) were recognized by educators, but largely accepted as the way things have to be because of practical demands of group instruction.

Since I began working with technology in the late 80s and even more so when the Internet allowed wide access to designated resources, I thought technology might overcome some of the practical challenges. There have been hints that others have recently come to the same conclusion. Kahn of Kahn Academy fame described one potential application of the tools he and colleagues were creating as offering a mastery approach (One World Schoolhouse).

Even more recently, a group labeling itself the Modern Classroom Project has proposed an instructional approach that sounded very much like mastery learning to me. You have to work at finding references to mastery learning in the description of their approach, but I was pleased to read this post from the Cult of Pedagogy blog which is based on an interview with Kareem Farah of the Modern Classroom group entitled “How to setup mastery grading in your classroom”. I don’t like the emphasis on “grading” in the description, but the content provided is quite useful.

If the idea of individualizing for mastery interests you, I offer a broader perspective on the basics of mastery learning on my site.

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A slice of PISA

I was exploring for new resources for my Fall grad class and I came across this McKinsey and Company. The pdf contained a number of findings based on an analysis of the 2015 PISA data. Educators will recognize PISA as the Programme for International Student Assessment an internal assessment of student achievement often used to question the effectiveness of U.S. K12 education. That perspective aside, PISA does more than compare the achievement nation to nation because it also collects questionnaire data from students and educators allowing researchers to relate these data to the achievement data.

The researchers from McKinsey had used these data to identify multiple “drivers” of achievement outcomes. I was particularly interested in their conclusions regarding relationhips between science achievement and whether student classroom experiences had emphasized teacher-directed or inquiry-based experiences. Because the focus of the work was on science achievement and I imagined science to be a subject matter often supported by laboratory experiences, I thought the results relating these learning experiences to achievement would be particularly interesting.

Without getting too far into the methodological or statistical weeds, the conclusions were explained in the following chart. The various survey questions allowed the categorization of the classroom experiences students had experienced into levels of teacher-directed or inquiry-based experiences (few, some, many) with direct instruction showing a more positive relationship to achievement overall. The researchers concluded there was a sweet spot with some inquiry-based experiences combined with mostly teacher-directed experiences when it came to the best outcomes.

These findings likely frustrated the many constructivists who constantly berate the textbook and presentation-based approaches that limit student-centered activities, but the findings are consistent with the major reviews I have read. The researchers used individual items (e.g., students design their own experiments, students are asked to argue about investigations) to suggest that when inquiry activities are used structured tasks are likely to be most effective. One hypothesis proposed by the researchers was that students don’t have sufficient background in many cases to benefit from inquiry activities.

The specifics of the survey questions used by PISA interested me because I always find the methods section of research students to be helpful and I could not find the specifics I was looking for in the McKinsey study. I also tend to value research studies in journals over “think tank” analyses so I did some searches for PISA 2015 research. I came across a study (Cairns, 2019) more to my liking.

Cairns focused specifically on the inquiry tasks and what differentiated effective from ineffective experiences. If you looked at the individual items making up the multiple survey items what could you discover? The author noted that the term “inquiry task” is not clearly conceptualized in the literature making this approach of potential value. Cairns also noted that more experimental investigations of inquiry tasks have been more successful in supporting inquiry methods than correlational methods (the PISA study would be considered correlational as it evaluated existing instructional conditions and the relationship to achievement rather than controlling the research setting). The results resembled the findings of the McKinsey study and emphasized the importance of scaffolded experimentation (not student-designed experiments) with instructors explaining the implications of the core principles demonstrated by the experiments.

I was able to find examples from the survey questions elsewhere.

Teacher-directed items.

Inquiry items

Bryant, J., Dorn, E., Krawitz, M., Kihn, P., Mourshed, M., & Sarakatsannis, J. (2017). Drivers of student performance: Insights from North America. New York: McKinsey & Company.

Cairns, D (2019) Investigating the relationship between instructional practices and science achievement in an inquiry-based learning environment, International Journal of Science Education, 41:15, 2113-2135

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Question stems

Question stems offer guidance educators and learners can use to guide thinking about content. Becoming aware of prepared question stems can diversify the types of questions teachers ask of students and guide students in asking questions of themselves. Questions offer an external mechanism to encourage productive thinking.

Here are several links related to this video.

Learn more about the online service Insert Learning

Online lists of question stems – Question stems for critical thinking; Question stems organized according to the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy

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Comment spam

This blog offers the opportunity for comments. This allows readers to respond to what I say – agree, disagree, or extend. Until a week or so ago, such responses have been very uncommon. I wish this was not the case, but few people react to my posts. Please feel free.

Like I was saying, a week or so ago I began receiving comments to various posts every few hours. Somehow, I have become the target of comment spam. The messages vary from promoting products that have nothing to do with the posts to which these promotions are attached to strange stuff in other languages. This blog must have somehow been added to a list.

I have been trying to figure out the motivation for these comments. I moderate the comments to this blog. This translates as nothing appears to the general public until I approve the comment. I would approve most comments should they have any level of relevance, but the comment spam that has been appearing lately is just irrelevant stuff. Unless I am missing something or there is a motive here I don’t understand, I can’t figure out why these comments keep coming.

BTW – if there is a goal here I am missing, please feel free to comment.

I have discovered the source of the spam. I was using an extension from Akismet to block spam. Akismet decided this blog was commercial in nature because it contains ads and deleted my account. The challenge is that the least expensive service for a commercial site from Akismet costs more than the ad revenue I make in a year so my only solution is to discontinue comments. Sorry to anyone wanting to add a comment.

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Annotation and Layering

I have generated multiple posts explaining and offering examples of the online services I describe as allowing educators to design educational resources by layering elements on top of existing online web pages and online videos. This interest also generated a short book on the same topic. A book (Annotation) by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia has recently been made available and offers a related, but more general perspective and may be of interest to those who have read my content on layering. Both make useful contributions (my opinion) for anyone interested in this topic with my book better suited to K12 educators and Annotations for researchers and anyone wanted a more comprehensive view of the history and potential application of annotation.

As someone who writes about this relatively novel topic, I find it interesting how different individuals came to explore and write about this topic. One immediate commonality is obvious – we both explored the same tool for annotating and sharing comments on online text – Hypothes.is. My own perspective stems from a career long interest in highlighting, notetaking, and adjunct (inserted) questions in assisting students of all ages in learning from text. A second, but indirect, perspective emerged from my reaction to how research on learning from text read from the screen and a traditional book was being presented to educators. I have relied almost exclusively on digital content for many years now and was troubled by the argument that comprehension was superior from traditional books. As I considered the research, I decided both sides may have a valid perspective. I would describe my interest as studying rather than reading (any extended use of text content after the initial reading) and reading on a device offered obvious advantages (storage, search, efficient review, etc.) for anything beyond the initial exposure to content.

I have been thinking about annotation and my perspective of layering and how best to explain these differences. While it seems possible to reach the same end from either perspective, here are some thoughts on efficiency.

  1. The authors of Annotation do mention the potential uses of what they describe as “multimodality”, but seem strongly influenced by hypothes.is and the focus of this tool on text. What can be done with a text-first tool limits perspective – text first heavily focused on the annotation of text with text. Tools that allow layering on video or audio may end up being more important with increasing interest in presenting in this fashion saving class time for other activities.
  2. Layering emphasizes the clarity of a physical separation between content creator and secondary contributors and also the control of visibility of multiple sources. The opportunity of an end user to turn on and off the added elements can be important in satisfying individual differences and in allowing strategic roles that may differ over time.
  3. A focus on hypothes.is limits the clarity in understanding that multiple tools that can be applied by the one adding elements and the intended person targeted for these additions. Depending on service, multiple tools may be available – e.g., text, highlighting, questions, discussion, audio/video. My own writing is focused on the use of such elements to encourage productive processing of the information (text or video) to which the elements have attached. A perspective I like is that existing online content has not necessarily been created as what an educator might describe as a learning resource.

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Book update

I have generated few posts lately because I have been updating our textbook to make it available for the Fall semester. I have written about our involvement in writing textbooks several times before (use the book tag at the end of this post if you are interested in reading earlier posts). We have had a book used in the preparation of inservice teachers and the continued development of practicing teachers since 1996. We worked with a commercial publisher (Houghton-Mifflin and then Cengage) through 5 editions and when we wanted to offer a different approach (a Primer selling for $29 augmented with online resources) we could not reach an agreement and then decided to continue with our experiment by selling our Primer through Amazon ($9). Much of this adventure and our rationale is explained in previous posts.

One of our core ideas was that proven authors should write continuously rather than rush every three years to produce the next edition. The combination of a Primer and online resources allows this approach. We reasoned that in a field that moves as fast as the application of technology this makes a lot of sense. What I have been working on for the past few months was the update to the Primer.

I found that my update was more challenging than past updates. It was time to do the update, but the pandemic and how K12 education was forced to change as a consequence left me uncertain how best to position our view of technology integration for the future. Online experiences will undoubtedly play a larger role despite the negative reaction of many educators to their experiences during the past year. The core principles of how learning happens and how educators must provide external experiences to optimize the internal cognitive work of students have not changed. Our best guess is that we better appreciate how to use technology to better individualize learner experiences and part of how this will happen will require educators to function more often as instructional designers rather than rely on commercial instructional content.

I guess we will see as we try to get educators to take a look at our update and make decisions about how best to develop the skills of future and practicing teachers.

I learned a couple of things that may be of value to others who like to work in Google docs. I write almost exclusively in docs and this has been the case for a while. I like working online because I work using many different devices in many locations. I also like the way I can organize the many resources I use in one place. Anyway, here are the issues.

First, I learned that large documents (i.e., a book) cannot be saved as a pdf from docs. I was totally confused by this at the end of work as I needed a pdf to load into Kindle Create. I could download in other formats, but not pdf and I could swear I have never had this difficulty before. Anyway, there is evidently some issue with file size. The solution was simple – print to pdf. This is an old hack, but evidently it works on your own computer and does not stress Google.

Second, I needed to create a Table of Contents that links to the beginning of individual chapters. I have encountered this challenge before and I know I solved the problem in a different way before. Unfortunately, when I am working under a deadline, I frequently solve a problem and then don’t keep an account of how I did it. A few years later and I can’t remember. This time I used the capacity to add internal links in Docs. You add a bookmark at the beginning of each chapter (see bookmark under the Insert dropdown menu), list chapter titles on a TOC page, and then link from each item on the list to the appropriate bookmark. You should see the bookmarks you have created when you select text and then the same link icon you use for external links.

Finally, the last challenge I am trying to resolve is to get Amazon to identify the newer version of our book as an update. This is supposed to work when you upload a new version in place of an older version, but I have not been successful in accomplishing this change. When you update an existing work, the folks who purchased your original work are supposed to be given the opportunity to update their copy at no cost. I know this works because I see the “update” option from time to time in my own Kindle library. This also means any link you have used to reference your book in the Amazon store still works. The downside is that Amazon will continue to list your book by the original publication date which is misleading to new potential buyers. I am waiting a few days to see if the “update” link appears for the old version I have in my Kindle library and then I will have to decide what to do.

Access through Amazon

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