Author: grabe

I read a recent post from The Blue Skunk Blog that is evidently a repost. I actually think I remember the original post and belief I responded to that post as well.

Johnson states – I would find standards in the following areas extremely helpful as I try to evaluate our district’s technology infrastructure and plan for improvement :

• 1. Connectivity (LAN, WAN, and Internet I & II capacities)
• 2. Security (firewalls, filters, policies)
• 3. Tech support (technicians per computer, tech support response time, reliability rates, policies about technology replacement,)
• 4. Administrative applications (student information systems, transportation, personnel systems, payroll systems, data mining systems, home-school communication systems, online testing)
• 5. Information resources (e-mail, mailing lists, blogging software, online learning software, commercial databases, library automation systems)
• etc.

As I understand this portion of Doug Johnson’s post on standards, he would like to know just what resources schools should have available in order to provide effective educational experiences for students.

I develop resources to prepare future teachers and part of what I attempt to do is to offer descriptions of the situations they may face in the schools they will eventually enter. My interest is in the variability in such situations. Perhaps this is also what Doug Johnson is looking for – what are the standards that educators should be able to expect and what are the typical means and standard deviations for some of these indicators. In other words – how does my school compare, what should be expect to be able to provide?

I think locating good data on technology in schools – what is there and how it is used – has become increasing difficult. I know that good data on what technology exists is there, but these data are collected by businesses that intend to sell the information to vendors. I can’t afford access and evidently neither can the libraries I use. I used to use the National surveys conducted by Henry Becker and the Technology Counts annual publications to locate such data. Technology Counts abandoned the state to state comparisons. Perhaps some states were embarrassed and resisted offering up information. The vast differences among the states was pretty clear evidence that students had very different experiences.

I am thinking researchers found it difficult to secure funds to actually conduct quality surveys and this has cut off on-going, independently collected descriptions of what is typical in this area. The best resource I can find is offered by the National Center for Education Statistics (Teachers’ Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009 ). Still, even on the descriptive level, I do not think the data are complete enough. Wouldn’t you like answers to some of the descriptors Johnson identifies?

Which end of the pool? This is a question that occurred to me because of Carr’s book “The Shallows“. This book seems another example of a new genre which seems to imply that most of us have a tendency to turn potentially useful opportunities into experiences focused on immediate gratification and in the long term diminish our cognitive potential. Other examples – The dumbest generation; Infotopia; iBrain. If these books do not interest you, try Carr’s original article in the Atlantic. Carr and the others are proposing that our use of the Internet has changed the way we prefer to take in information perhaps at the biological level. Even though the potential might be there for deep contemplation, the experiences we select tend toward brief encounters. We have lost the ability for prolonged focus as might be the case when reading a traditional book.

I have been trying to write today and in preparing I have been reviewing data on how adolescents use the Internet. For years I have followed what some have called the participatory culture. The generative potential of media creation seemed to have great educational potential. However, recent data appears to indicate that the style of participation is drifting toward the shallows. For example, the most recent PEW data on social media and young adults indicates that the proportion of young adults who blog has been halved between 2006 and 2009. Use of Twitter started slow, but has begun to increase in this same age group.

If we are models for the use of technology are many of us being sucked into the same pattern? Perhaps it is too easy to get into Twitter and stop blogging. Perhaps many folks just pass resources around with few actually reading the resources. Hard to fake it when you attempt to author in long form. Pretty easy to assume you have accomplished something when the system limits you to 140 characters. Here – you read it. I don’t have time.

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I pay attention when the general public is told something about higher ed. I am an educational psychologist so the topics are sometimes relevant to my teaching or research. I also am interested in how the area in which I work is presented to the public.

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty- four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week.

In mid-summer, the results of a research study by Babcock & Marks (prepublication PDF) received general attention. This does not happen often. The lead sentence from the abstract appears above. The amount of time college students spend studying has declined dramatically. (BTW – the authors use the word “curmudgeon” in the first paragraph of their article. How often does that happen?). The authors examine and reject some possible explanations. For example, technology does not appear to have made students more efficient learners. Only a fraction of the decline can be attributed to a higher proportion of college students who work.

So even though we lack the data to observe directly whether college has been “dumbed down,” we are able to draw from the data a solid conclusion about university practices: standards for effort have plummeted—in practice, if not in word.

I think their conclusion translates as – whatever has changed on the instructional side, college profs have lowered standards resulting in less student effort.

Now, this could have been the end of this story (and my post) – BUT NO!

UND, my institution, topped one of the lists generated by the Princeton Review. We are #1. We are #1. We study the least. Wait, this may not be a good thing. Just so those in the area do not scoff. We are also the only ND school Princeton Review considers for any ranking.

So, studying is declining. This decline may indicate a lowering of standards. UND students study the least. I am not sure I like where this logic exercise is going.

This topic (the general finding, not the UND data point) has generated a good deal of discussion and analysis.
Boston Globe
Atlantic Wire
Mother Jones

I do think this should be treated as a serious topic (generally and locally). I am not a big fan of survey data – participants can exaggerate or give answers to create an impression. Is indicating you don’t study much at your school fall within the same category as bragging that you school is a great party school?

Here is my take (no data here) as a prof. I think profs are pressured from two directions. First, there is the “I don’t want to buy and then read that expensive and large book” complaint. This is student pressure. Then there is the colleague pressure (with support from some students) that condemns lecturing as boring and passive. We should expect students to read and then discuss and explore in class. The combination may be deadly. If there is a resistance to reading and there is a resistance to presenting what you have left is discussion of personal opinions. We used to call this shooting the bull (not sure why – I did attend a land grant college) and it was what you did after studying when you walked to the campus town bar for a nightcap. I tend to think of a heavy emphasis on class discussion as “studying with your students”. This is not necessarily a bad thing if students come to class with something to study. Perhaps out of class and in class studying should be combined as a single variable. But, just what would be the focus of such effort?

I really hope this topic receives more attention. … enough of this writing stuff, back to reading the student’s book for the semester. …bah

[Cross posted from Curmudgeon Speaks]

My start in combining educational technology and research was many years ago – the mid-1980s. I was interested in the development of reading skills (upper elementary) and was attempting to develop games that would both develop skill and generate data on performance. At the time (Apple II and II+), the technology experience for the user was predominately text-based. For someone interested in reading, this seemed perfectly acceptable. What the computer offered was  interactivity and it was this combination of words and actions that was appealing to me. Early on exploring the new world of personal technology and learning to program in the process, I encountered text-based adventure games. For me, a basic concept began to emerge. The moves one makes in adventure games depends on your comprehension of the text. Existing games involved more than basic comprehension, but this was mostly a function of purposeful vagueness used to make the games challenging for older players. To emphasize reading skill, we decided to create games in which understanding the “story” made certain moves more productive. Success (leveling up, solving problems) should be associated with comprehending the text of the game. So, our earliest games were a combination of the text-based adventure games of the time and “choose your own” adventure books. I found an early entry in my vita related to this research.

Grabe, M. (1988).  The instructional potential of microcomputer adventure games. Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, 15, 72-77.

I don’t think the journal is still alive. It was the research outlet for an organization I remember as ADCIS. I know this organization was absorbed by another. At some point, technology became main stream and we started publishing in more traditional research journals.

I still like the idea of connection understanding to action; i.e., because I understand what I have read I can do something more successfully. The connection is immediate and embedded when understanding can be applied to making a better choice.

This is a long and possibly unnecessary connection to something I discovered just yesterday. I was scanning the links that “magically” appear on my personal desktop home page and noticed a reference to adventure games on the iPod (actually the reference was to the iPhone but those of us living in North Dakota do not purchase iPhones). The link was to an NPR story on U-Venture repurposing classic “Choose your own adventures” for the iPhone and iPad. It is an interesting interview (read or listen). I immediately spent $3.99 to give it a try (there are other text adventures available, but I was interested in the U-Venture approach).

This is an interesting example for anyone who wants to explore the experience on an iPod or iPad (or iPhone if not in ND). The notion of
reading with a purpose (and a consequence) still makes sense to me. To me, there is something unique in the “choose your own adventure” genre
(what qualifies as a genre anyway). So, if you are looking for content to address the development of comprehension skills and maybe ESL skills,
I think there are some interesting possibilities here.