Author: grabe

Games?

If you follow my  work, you can probably guess that I spend little time promoting the educational value of digital games. But, I realize that games are an important learning option promoted by many in the ed tech community. Because I make a serious effort to influence other practicing and future educators, I try to be analytical when I find my own priorities in disagreement with what others propose.

I think I see games as adding unnecessary layers to the learning process. It is not that games are not productive, it is that this productivity comes at a cost. Games provide an experience to interpret, but my analysis suggests that it takes several layers of activity to generate this experience. Game play itself represents one layer. Playing a game requires engagement with the scenario of the game, following the rules of the game, generating the actions required by the game, etc. Expending the mental effort to engage in the scenario according to the rules of the environment provides experiences. The second layer involves an interpretation of these experiences. One must process this experience to identify facts, principles, rules, etc. Finally, one must integrate these nuggets with existing internal knowledge.

Contrast this series of activities with direct instruction. One interpretation of direct instruction might be that an author or a presenter attempts to identify facts, principles, rules for you and you then must engage in only the final stage of the learning process. There is some amount of interpretation of the external experience, but there is also some “preprocessing” by the individual serving as the source. There is no “game play” layer at all.

I am more a fan of simulations (or life) as a way to provide experiences. There is some effort involved in engaging a simulation or living, but I would describe this effort as authentic with some future transfer value. When we see value in providing learners experiences in processing primary sources as a component of learning, it makes more sense to me to engage with experiences that are as close as possible to the future experiences we expect learners to have to process.

I am also a fan of direct instruction. Why not skip the outer layers and provide learners in as succinct a fashion as is possible the facts, rules, principles we want them to understand and retain. Learning, when you get right down to it, is about the processing of an input by each learner. Each individual must do the work to modify his or her existing models of the world or find links between new experiences and what they already know. These are not easy tasks and overburdening learners with other simultaneous requirements may be damaging to the success of this final and most important stage.

Surprisingly, I have developed and evaluated learning games. My interest was in the development of reading skills. I still see this as a little different. The external “layer” of learner experience in such games is reading. Applying (or attempting to apply) the skill of interest served the goal of the game. There were no layers to get through to get to the priority process.

It also seems possible I am just not a game person. I do believe our own experiences play a role even in how we understand professional pursuits. I seldom play games that involve mental skill as a form of entertainment. If people want to socialize, I would rather talk rather than play cards and talk. I recognize that games provide a certain motivational component for some people. There than may be the trade-off to be considered – motivation vs. added cognitive demands.

Having said all this, I do recognize the serious approach some take to developing and evaluating games. I tend to promote learners be exposed to a variety of learning experiences with consideration given to the proportion of each activity. This has more to do with learning to learn rather than the acquisition of content knowledge/skills.

One of my colleagues, Richard van Eck, has been a noted supporter of serious games for some time. In a recent Educause Review column, he contemplates the past ten years of his experience with educational games. I certainly encourage any ed technologist to review his comments as they provide a solid overview of the topic.

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Deep processing together

I encountered a recent article on “Annotating the scholarly web” in Nature and the author was promoting an activity that has long interested me (click on the highlight tag attached to this post to see earlier posts with a similar theme). The article describes Hypothes.is which is open source software for pdf and web annotation and highlighting. This article would not be published by Nature because it describes this software. It was included because the idea is to use the sharing of highlights and annotations as a way for scholars to interact in the discussion of published work.

As I suggest above, social bookmarking/highlighting is not a new idea. What this venture has going for it that is unique is the effort to go beyond developing the tool and attempting to establish partnerships with publishers.

I investigated Hypothes.is a bit more and have a better understanding of how they see the “big picture”. In addition to attempting to gain the cooperation of partners, the group is also working toward the development of annotation standards. One of the problems at present is that the various methods for web highlighting operate in different ways and likely struggle to develop a sufficient following to continue. Working toward standards would allow those adopting the standards to use different tools to share.

Hypothes.is is also thinking beyond the development of tools for advanced scholars and presently offers suggestions for how students might use their resource.  

Here is my take on how this works. I think of it as similar to tools I use to highlight pdfs I read (e.g., Skim ). It is like the software adds a layer over a page and allows a user to mark on this layer. The original is not actually altered. The software/online service saves the marked up layer separately. When shared (or just retrieved by the individual adding the highlights), the original and the extra layer are combined for viewing.

Highlighting and annotating (with the opportunity for replying to comments) goes beyond the addition of comments at the end of a document or post. It is much easier to understand the context of an embedded message.

Hypothes.is allows public, private, or defined group highlighting. I have added some highlights to a personal page so you can see what a marked-up page looks like. 

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PaperPile

I have spent a considerable amount of time during the past 40 years reading and highlighting documents. The methods have changed. Early on, I would highlight articles in journals or books I owned and create index cards referencing these articles with summary information and a citation. As technology came on the scene, I switched my card file over to various database applications. Most recently, I have stored pdfs of articles (highlighted and annotated using various tools) and referenced these articles using various bibliographic systems (I pay for Endnote, but also use other systems – ReadCube, Mendeley).

I have encountered a new “system” I find very impressive. It is not free, but $3 a month is far less expensive than what I pay for Endnote).

PaperPile is a cloud-based system that works through a chrome browser (including a Chromebook). As I said, it will cost academics $3 a month, but you can give it a try at no cost. Paperpile saves bibliographic information in its own servers and sends pdfs uploaded in association with bibliographic entries to a folder it establishes in Google drive. Converting an existing system is fairly easy (I pretty much just pointed PaperPile at my Mendeley site and everything happened automatically).

Paperpile

PaperPile recommends metapdf  (same company) for highlighting and annotation of the pdfs stored in Google drive.

metapdf

 

It is too early for me to decide if these tools will be my focus. Working with tools in implementing long-term writing projects is really the only way to make such a choice, but the service looks very promising.

My first impression is that this service or something similar will be a significant challenge to expensive products such as EndNote. I see this as similar to the Google challenge to Microsoft Office. The issue has nothing to do with the quality of MS Office or EndNote. The issue is really the cost for quality products with many capabilities that are not necessary for most users.

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Pavlovian response to mention of Skinner

Diane Ravitch appears to be on a campaign to devalue “competency based education”. Evidently, competency based education represents a flawed “reform” model. I think this translates as “may replace teachers”, but you will have to read the Ravitch blog to reach your own conclusion. The Ravitch link I provide here summarizes a post from Emily Talmage connecting recent “competency based” effortswith BF Skinner. I am guessing this association (note my title) is intended to elicit a feeling of revulsion among teachers.

Quick – provide a definition for competency-based education. Does the phrase have a negative or positive valence? What is your answer if the name Skinner is included in the same sentence.

When I began working at the institution from which I retired, the Education College was dominated by humanists. The dean at the time was a prominent humanist and attempted to build a college with this orientation (actually there was the college of education and the “new school” which eventually merged). I was not a member of either program. However, because my focus in psychology was on educational practice, I was interested in who they hired. After a while, I began to understand how things worked and I would wince should a candidate in his or her job talk make a positive reference to objectives or any term that might be associated with behaviorism. Such candidates had little chance of being employed. To me, a teacher education program with a narrow orientation was not the way to prepare future professionals. A good debate is a great learning experience and a debate among people is prefered to a debate between a person and a concept (i.e., straw man).

I think I rejected academic tribalism early on because of what I taught and the way I thought about things. I assumed the explanations for human behavior were rooted in biology, but the state of the biology of thought and learning was incapable of offering much in the way of useful guidance to educators. Still is. I tend to think of schools of thought as models rather than reality and the most useful model depends on how the model fits the data and offer applications that generate data. Using “data” is the theme here.

I tried to teach “learning theories” when I taught Introduction to Psychology by offering examples of phenomena suited to being understodd from a given perspective. I emphasized cognitive explanations of learning in my own work, but cognitive models seemed suited to studying reading comprehension, study behavior, and self-regulation in learning – the topics I prioritized.

I am not certain how critics are using the phrase “competency-based education”. If I understand the concerns about recent “reforms” correctly, I would prefer the descriptor – mastery learning. I have been following research on mastery learning since the late ‘60s. It is true that mastery learning, at least the form promoted by Fred Keller, came from a behavioral tradition. Many early publications appeared in JABA – Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis. However, I would identify the other major figure in promoting mastery learning as Benjamin Bloom. I do not label Bloom as a behaviorist, but others might.

There seems to be a little more in the present criticism – some connection of competency based education (or mastery learning) with computers (teaching machines). I am guessing the underlying motive is the assumed intent to replace teachers with machines. I agree that present technology may allow an implementation of mastery ideas. Sometimes the big new idea is not about the idea, it is about a way to make the idea practical.  Technology provides a way to make the individualization proposed in certain variants of mastery learning (Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction) practical.

I think I can take the campaign against whatever “competency based education” is about one step further. It does seem that there is greater use of such innovations in charter schools. Skinner, behaviorism, competency-based education, technology, charter schools = bad!

Rather than replacing teachers, I think that blended model is a more accurate representation of what is being explored in some charter schools (see Blended – Horn & Staker). I prefer to understand such situations using what Bloom described as the two sigma problem. Bloom proposed that the best learning environment would be a student working with a human tutor and other approaches to teaching could be judged by how close these methods could come to the producting of a student and tutor. I see technology within the competency based approach as a weak version of tutoring. The core question is how much time can a good classroom teacher offer each student that would qualify as tutoring. If the answer is “not much”, then some use of technology offers an option worth evaluating.

If the concern is that charter schools are using technology as a substitute for teachers, say so. Salivating over the mention of Skinner is too obtuse for me.

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Open is OK if available

My reaction to #GoOpen was one of my more popular posts of the modern era (I have been a blogger for many years). I am not backing away from the sentiments I expressed, but I think I should clarify. My position is that depending on free is a bad long-term strategy. I ask only that readers examine their own behavior and evaluate their personal willingness to generate resources requiring considerable effort at no cost to the consumer. I am not claiming individuals with such altruistic tendencies do not exist (I offer my own effort as an example), I am claiming the assumption that this component of formal instruction should not be assumed to be free. Note that open resources could be paid for by a third party (states could sponsor textbooks). Much like endowed chairs as a way to bolster the human resources of state universities, I question whether such resources will be common.

I am not questioning whether quality open resources exist. For this interested in this topic, I refer readers to this research study ironically made available at no cost to the consumer by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

 

 

http://edr.sagepub.com/content/43/7/341.full

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Adrift (or not) …

In addition to the journal articles and textbook I assign in my graduate educational psychology course, I ask that students read one book from a list I provide. The book I included for the higher ed types was Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (My public Kindle notes).

The book was based on some research that seemed to suggest college students make little or no advances in critical thinking and writing skills as a consequence of college attendance. At a time when “higher order thinking skills” is the buzzword of the decade, this conclusion received a lot of attention.

A recent meta-analysis soon to be published in the Review of Educational Research disputes the dismal conclusions of the Academically Adrift authors. The review did not reach the same pessimistic conclusion:

Our study suggests that students make substantial gains in critical thinking during college. We estimate the overall effect of college on critical thinking skill at 0.59 SDs.

The review offers some other interesting points:

  • It appears that over time, the gains in critical thinking skills have declined in recent years (this would be a tamer version of the Academically Adrift conclusion). The authors of the meta-analysis speculate that either a) students are entering college having acquired a reasonable level of proficiency and hence have less room for improvement or b) more students are entering college unable to benefit from the instruction provided and hence the average improvement is lower. The data did not allow these hypotheses to be tested.
  • Research does not seem to suggest that direct efforts to teach critical thinking have been no more successful than courses focused on traditional content and methods. This is not inconsequential. The authors go further to speculate that efforts to directly teach critical thinking may reduce what is learned in other areas.

Huber, C. R., & Kuncel, N. R. (2015). Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research.  Retrieved from http://rer.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/16/0034654315605917.abstractN2

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#GoOpen – I’m not impressed

The Department of Education has just announced a new initiative – #GoOpen . The initiative is intended to encourage school districts and educators to make greater use of open resources.

To encourage the development and dissemination of resources, two specific “opportunities” were identified.

  • First, resources generated as a consequence of federal grant funding should be made available as open resources.
  • Second, multiple commercial entities (Amazon, Microsoft, Edmodo, ASCD) will put their resources behind curating, serving and training initiatives associated with open resources.

Grant byproducts

The one thing here that I see as a mild opportunity is the requirement related to grant projects. However, unless new grant initiatives are offered specifically to create content in a form appropriate to distribution what is generated already is either not ready for prime time OR is already available. I make these statements based on personal experience.

Some examples follow:

I worked with my wife’s million dollar Teaching American History grant. The whole purpose of this grant was to organize lessons allowing K-12 students to use primary sources in learning about history. Part of the grant funded a server that made these resources available. This server was maintained for multiple years after the end of the funding cycle and eventually shut down. Potentially, this content could have been transitioned to servers provided by the GoOpen partners, but there would have been costs in doing so. During the years the resources were freely available, any cost in placing the resources on additional servers would have been redundant. In addition, the professional development associated with the transition from textbook-based history instruction to the use of primary source resources was likely the main contribution for those classrooms using the resounces.

My work in developing and evaluating tools to improve introductory college student study of textbook intensive content was partially grant based. Some my earliest software developed for this program was specific to a particular operating system. My later efforts were Internet-based and cross platform. All efforts were customized for individual textbooks. This software would have very limited value for others because a) considerable effort would be required to prepare the backend database for a particular textbook and b) the software was not designed for instructors with limited technology skills. Without a knowledge of PHP, MySQL, etc., a novice user would require either considerable support or an additional development effort to make the software more user friendly. The software may have been of some value to a book compnay looking to improve the supplemental resources accompanying a textbook and willing to invest in futher development.

My point – much grant-supported activity does not involve the allocation of time and resources to make what has been accomplished transportable. I know that “continuation” is an issue to be addressed in many grants, but this often seems to be interpreted as “how will the grantee” continue the work once funding ends.

What about the promises from the commercial providers?

I am trying to find a way both to think through and explain what I think of various companies (e.g., Edmodo, Amazon, Google) making commitments to the #OpenEd initiative.

Imagine a hypothetical situation in which Hardees somehow convinces McDonalds to give away McDonalds french fries at all Hardees locations. Which business would you interpret as being most altruistic? Which business would you interpret as being most foolish? Would it matter whether the french fries were provided in Hardees or McDonalds’ packaging?

I have little appreciation for what  companies offering to host and serve the resources provided by others are providing. Even if no ads or other sources of revenue are involved, getting customers “in the door” when other services that do generate revenue exist is alway part of the business plan. I guess this is where my Hardees and McDonalds scenario breaks down. Hardees is likely to sell a burger and a soda to supplement the free french fries so I guess they might actually promote McDonald fries.

Educators are always looking for “free stuff”. I get that. Educators often have inadequate budgets to provide learning experiences to their students and either do without or subsidize their instruction out of pocket. I am just not a fan of free. I understand the process of creating educational resources and offering them for a price. I know for certain what labor was required to generate that content. To me, content generation is just another way to teach and like any teacher I assume the work invested should be appreciated and compensated.

There are important questions here. What about education is over-priced and who gets to decide? Are educational materials too expensive? Are teachers, administrators and other school personnel paid too much? How can those “in the middle” (administrators, school board members) make ethical decisions when compensating “in the flesh” people you see and invisible workers you do not face?

I am guessing the #GoOpen will surface some resources.  I just do not see the resources to be made available as solving a meaningful or expensive problem.

If the Department of Education wants to offer lower cost resources, then it would seem most productive to offer grants for the development of what commercial entities already provide. This approach would likely encounter considerable opposition from those who believe that the private sector can do everything more efficiently than the government, but it might encourage a little more innovation (if that is what was emphasized in the grant process) and it change how the generation of educational resources are funded. The location of the competition would be shifted from what now occurs between different companies to the grant award process.

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