Back in April I started a project that I decided to conclude today. The project was an effort to experiment with solar energy and energy consumption. I promoted this project as an example of what educators might find a way to explore both electricity and clean energy.
Here is a brief overview. I have a gazebo outside my house and I like to read and write in this structure when the temperature in Minnesota permits. Some years ago I purchased a solar panel and the equipment necessary to save the power generated from this panel to a battery and convert the DC to AC for use. I did very little with the equipment, but in April I purchased a device allowing the recording of the amount of energy flowing through an outlet. I decided to make use of my solar equipment to power my laptop and Amazon Echo when spending time reading and writing in this gazebo. The details of the equipment are described in the initial post.
Today, I took the final readings to conclude the project. During the 187 hours I spent in the gazebo, I used 3.43 kilowatts of energy. The value of this electricity is about $.35. Laptops and the Echo are inexpensive to operate.
Cindy and I have been writing textbooks since 1996. Our main book “Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning” was our first effort and we have been updated it since then. When the Internet became a potentially useful opportunity for K12 classrooms we wrote “Integrating the Internet for Meaningful Learning”. This second book was integrated with our first book in the third edition. In between, we wrote a version of the original book as a scaled down Primer that was shrink-wrapped with other educational textbooks for a small increase in price.
We wrote 5 editions of our textbook with traditional publishing companies – first, Houghton-Mifflin, then RiverDeep, and finally Cengage. The college textbook market has been consolidating for years with collections being sold to other companies and companies specializing in fewer areas. College textbooks are very expensive to develop with editors, market analysis, marketing, etc. and very expensive to sell as a consequence. Our fifth edition was sold for $140. Our books were always successful, but the “technology for teachers” courses are small. Fewer competing books, but a much smaller market compared to large introductory courses (Intro, Developmental, Educational Psychology in my general area of instruction).
As we were in our fourth edition, we began to imagine a different approach better suited to the niche for our books, insights into the process of writing textbooks in an area that changed very quickly, and what was beginning to build as a backlash to the cost of textbooks. We began pushing a model that consisted of a Primer, online resources matched to the Primer, and something I described as an “interactive syllabus” to tie a course together. I called it the $29 textbook project and argued educational technology would be a great course for a company knowing the future was going to move them away from the traditional book and the traditional development model to learn from a project targeting a market already interested in technology in education. At $29, we would share any risk as the authors’ cut of $29 is very different from $140.
Our proposal was based on logic aside from just the cost. Because the field of educational technology was moving so fast, the traditional three-year revision cycle was a very real problem. Authors don’t know if another edition will be allowed until maybe the end of the second year of each cycle. The author must then revise the book in approximately 6 months so that the book can go through the revision and review process and be printed to be advertised toward the end of the 3rd year. There are multiple frustrations in such a schedule. The time from the end of the author’s work until the release of a new book is probably nine months and the major periods of adoption are the second semester of the first year and the second year of sales for a cycle. Any advances in the field during this period of time are not part of a book put into the hands of students. We had multiple experiences describing a technology product that was discontinued or renamed and sold by a different company by the time the book was released.
The wait, wait, rush model does not work for authors and in my opinion results in shallow modifications. The most creativity and deep background research tends to be involved in the preparation of the initial product. I believed authors could continue to work toward additional editions continuously, but our expertise and daily work tend to take on a far narrower focus than is ideal in writing a book for a course covering a broad area. The idea in the $29 model was to pay authors a small amount (similar to the advance for first editions) to write continuously and make this content available immediately online possibly to be integrated in the next edition. This would offer learners an improved and less dated experience and offer authors the opportunity to remain active and keep exploring.
The idea of an interactive syllabus might make the most sense if you imagine it as a web site created with a product such as Google Sites. Google Sites simplifies the development process allowing development with limited learning time. The instructor controlled syllabus created in this fashion would allow the instructor to structure the student experience taking advantage of resources the instructor could piece together and provide access to these resources through links. I tend to see this resource based on the structure of the textbook, but this would not be necessary. If an instructor did use the chapter of a textbook as the base structure, the instructor would then link to any of the online resources provided by the textbook company the instructor felt suited her class and would link to other sources as well. Picking and choosing among web resources allows flexibility and keeps the size and price of the Primer down. There is an efficiency and flexibility here not possible with a large and expensive textbook.
Anyway, this is getting pretty long but identifies the major components of the commercial model that interested me. We explored the possibility of some version of this model with Cengage during the sales of our 5th edition and for a couple of additional years beyond the normal run of this edition. We never did reach the point at which anything we discussed was actually implemented. We were interested enough in our vision (this was latecareer so I had different motives than might have been the case in a junior faculty member). We finally decided we could not get to a way to implement some version of the $29 plan and Cengage gave us back the copyright for our book (both the company and the authors share copyright for textbooks).
I began implementing a version of the proposed model based on a Kindle ebook (for the Primer). This was not my first experiment in offering a book-type online resource for the undergrad education student. When wikis kind of caught the fancy of the education community, I developed a wiki I called “Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web”. I was not using the wiki as a collaborative writing space, but I wanted the experience of developing and hosting a wiki (I operated my own server). I made use of MediaWiki the same software used for Wikipedia and used this wiki in a grad course I taught and offered it to other instructors. A more traditional web-based of this project still exists.
We have a functional model of the $29 dollar textbook, but the Primer costs $9 as a Kindle book. The web resources are available from the same server that provides this blog. The Google sites interactive syllabus exists when I teach a course for which the book is appropriate. I have always known that selling a book without the door to door salespeople and the free examination copies textbook companies provide is tough to compete with. College instructors don’t go looking for resources. They wait for someone to come to them or explore the book vendors when attempting academic conferences.
There is a lot of inertia when you have an existing book. The “wiki book” experiment received attention because of our traditional textbook. Web content we developed originally received attention because of our traditional textbook. I had hoped that this same and expanded collection of web content would work in the opposite direction with the Kindle book. It doesn’t seem to have worked in this way. A few instructors seem to have adopted the Kindle book, but are not assigning much of the web content. We also seem to sell singles of the ebook and I had assumed we would get adoptions for more classes. I have never added a traditional paper book to the ebook which Amazon makes fairly easy. We had assumed that a “teaching with technology” resource would make the most sense requiring learners to learn from a digital resource. So, there are a few things I understand about this experience and some things I still don’t.
I intend to continue my little experiment and receive enough attention to keep going. College instruction is difficult to change and I still think the course type I have worked on for so long is likely to play a role in this change. I continue to promote the model I am trying to develop and I do see some movement in the model of traditional publishing companies. Books are still too large and too slow to change, but ebooks options are fairly common. There is some increase in web-based content such as book-related videos and maybe study guides, but the traditional approach still lacks the flexibility I think is quite practical, Textbooks still costs far too much. I don’t intend to work for a textbook company again, but I understand the financial problems that plague the textbook market and I appreciate the level of support you receive (editor, photographer, paid reviewers, marketing) as an author. Part of the impetus for change is going to have to come from educators who in this case are the decision-makers when it comes to making decisions for their courses. There seems more interest in open educational resources (OER) which I just don’t see ever getting very far (have already written free learning resources) than in exploring and pushing for more options from textbook companies. I guess we will see.
Data literacy is an educational opportunity I see as commonly overlooked. The collection and analysis of data generalize to many academic areas and the critical thinking involved in evaluating the data collection methodology in combination with the data is key to understanding so many controversial topics.
Here is a unique example which might be useful in some classroom situations. Cornell University has created a feeder watch program that encourages user participation. Cornell provides round the clock access to some of the feeders they have set up and runs a winter citizen scientist feeder watch data collection program.
With plenty of time and limited opportunity for travel, I have been running my own feeder watch program. I feed birds at both my home in a suburb of Minneapolis and a cabin in Northern Wisconsin. Some years ago Cindy gave me a bird cam – a motion-activated camera similar to the type of cameras hunters use to look for the presence of game animals in a given area. The bird cam is a different lens system designed for taking images at a short distance.
Many variables determine the type and frequency of birds you view. At our home in the city we feed safflower seed to reduce the attention our many squirrels pay to our feeder. Evidently squirrels do not like safflower seeds and it seems to work. We have many squirrels because of a large black walnut tree in our yard and squirrels love black sunflower which would normally be the seed I feed most heavily. Varying the type of food is one of the variables you can manipulate to study the quantity and diversity of birds you attract.
The bird cam I use would be great for doing bird counts. It has the advantage of recording the visitors and does not require watching in real time.
Those of us with programming experience are familiar with the concept of data types. When declaring a variable it might be necessary to declare the type of data that variable could hold, e.g., integer, string, floating point number, which in part determined how that variable could be used. This notion that data can take different forms allowing different types of manipulation might be useful to the notion of “methods for learning with data”. To me, this way of differentiating types of data suited to different purposes might be compared to the distinction some researchers make between quantitative and qualitative research. Some data questions cannot be addressed by the collection and analysis of data that can be expressed as a numerical value and exposure to the methods and analytical techniques associated with other data types offers insights into how certain types of questions can be addressed.
A good example of a nonquantitative approach can be found in the work of historians. What is it historians must do to collect and analyze data to offer descriptions of historical events and trends? What can historians do to be precise and accurate in their summarizations? How can historians offer a description of the process they have applied so that other historians can “check their work”? The techniques historians learn to accomplish these goals are often described as the historian’s craft. This collection of values and techniques has meaning for historians in much the same way that I as an experimental psychologist might point to courses in statistics and research methods as the basis for teaching and learning how questions are answered in my field.
There are ways in which students can have opportunities to explore components of the historian’s craft and be exposed to analytical methods of this type. For example, photographs represent a type of data historians might use to gain insight into historical events. Certainly, we all have viewed family photographs that offered a perspective on what life was like at a different point in time. How could many images be used to put together the “big picture” associated with some issue? Here are some useful resources offering suggestions for the use of photographs in this way.
You never know when you could be in a position to apply the historian’s craft or engage your students in such methods of learning with data. We all have historical sources in our attics and other family storage sites. My brother recently began creating digital records of letters my father had sent home to his sister when heading off to fight in World War II. You wouldn’t know it from the sample I provide here, but he ended up in South Pacific as a radar operator. Making sense of letters and diaries
I started this series on the “methods of learning from data” (the phrase I have finally decided to use) because I thought K12 schools were missing an obvious opportunity. Partly, my motivation was prompted by the impact the coding advocates have achieved in gaining the support of the public and the interest of educators. The experiences of many students have changed as a consequence. While I value my own coding skills and the role the projects I have coded have played in my professional career, I still feel the broad role for coding some imagine lacks the evidence we should expect to make a drastic change beyond providing coding courses in high school. Put another way – computational thinking lacks credibility as a unique form of higher order thinking and I just don’t see the evidence that would warrant a drastic alteration of the curriculum. I think other tactics (e.g., writing across the curriculum) have demonstrated greater benefits in multiple content areas and other areas of emphasis (e.g., methods of learning from data) provide largely unexplored authentic activities for developing higher order thinking skills in multiple content areas.
As I have searched for similar positions, I found the data literacy emphasis that as far as I can tell was operationalized by library professionals. It seems to me that the big thinkers in the library community see the role of their profession more broadly than purchasing, recommending, and lending books and magazines. Librarians when describing the big picture suggest that they help others solve information problems. In developing the skills to accomplish this goal they might argue they help others become information problem solvers.
From this perspective, data literacy would represent an example of the development of the skills involved in solving problems based on the collection and analysis of data. What the methods of collection are will vary depending on the type of problem. What the data are will vary in the same way. The skills of analysis will be more consistent across both methods and data types.
I don’t think it is necessary for me to summarize the content from the Data Literacy Project. They have put considerable effort into both the background and the classroom suggestions. Here are several links you may want to explore.
Probes provide a way to collect information from the environment and summarize it numerically. You use a probe when you check someone’s temperature with a medical thermometer or a thermometer that reports the temperature outside of your window. Our textbook devotes considerable space to the classroom use of probes as allowing student participation in authentic activities. Probes were a category of digital tool we emphasized in our expansion of the core ideas we first found in Jonassen’s description of mindtools. We describe an authentic task as mimicking the behavior of practitioners. There is a theoretical explanation for the benefits of contextualizing learning through the use of authentic tasks, but this is type of thing I explain in our textbook and not here.
Probes play an essential role in most sciences and engineering and the data generated are important inputs to mathematical and statistical calculations. Probes have long been promoted for classroom use. I used to see multiple booths at education conferences displaying the probes companies had available and demonstrating some of the types of information these probes could collect. Student use of probes to conduct authentic investigations just seems such a logical fit with STEM initiatives and yet I don’t see the frequent use I expected when these devices first became available for classroom use. Again, probes represent another of the mysteries of why some ideas catch on in education and others do not.
My recent example of the multi-function power consumption monitor would be the last example of a probe I have used. Here is another example of a probe (heart rate monitor) that you may have used personally applied to a novel investigation. The links at the end of this example offer access to some of the companies providing probes for classroom use.
Probes = another opportunity for student data collection.
As I have explored the topic for which I have yet to find a suitable descriptive phrase, I have encountered similar existing initiatives. Claiming originality should always be done with great care. One source I intend to use for several posts seems to have been the focus of school libraries who describe this topic as data literacy and see an important role for librarians relevant to this topic in guiding and supporting student activities in developing this literacy. Without a formal claim of responsibility, I am left to speculate regarding how the connection with the role of librarians explains their interest. My guess is that librarians see data literacy as involving answering certain questions based on a type of information resource (data sources) and librarians exist to help connect users with information resources. I will explore this position and provide some references as my series of learning to generate and use data continues.
One category of public data your librarian might acquaint you with would consist of datasets and databases such as what might be available from the CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/datastatistics/ – selected as an example because of our present situation) or data.gov (https://www.data.gov/). Various activities might be based on the analyses of the data provided. Before I retired, I was aware of academic colleagues who were applying advanced statistical procedures to public data to look for relationships among variables in data that had not been considered.
My example here is far less sophisticated. It is also not original as it is proposed by one agency providing such data. The data provided by the U.S. Department of Education (https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/landing.jhtml) even proposes the use of a graphing tool students can apply to data – Kids’ Zone – Create a Graph (https://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/).
I thought I would use graphing to explore data that interests me. The data that caught my attention was taken from a table summarizing 8th graders daily use of a computer broken down by various categories (Table 218.50). I think you can expand this image to read the two rows of data I am focusing on here. These data concern whether a given student qualifies for free/reduced lunch (a proxy for SES) and amount of use.
The data table can be downloaded as a xls file (the type of file for use in an Excel Spreadsheet or other spreadsheet program) or just read from the chart.
With a spreadsheet, I can select the cells that interest me and turn the values into a graphic representation.
With the Create a Graph program, the data would be entered directly from the keyboard to generate a similar representation.
Now we have bar graphs representing data summarizing 8th graders daily use of a computer. What can be observed? Perhaps you find the percentage of 8th graders who report no use interesting. What does this mean? What would you need to know about the methodology that would help you understand? For example, would an iPad be counted as a computer? What about the difference in family resources? The largest gaps are in the groups claiming no use and the group claiming a small amount of use? Here low income seems to matter. It does not seem to matter among the groups using a computer quite a bit. Do you wonder if this was because computers were provided by the schools and this is where most computer use occurred? Research always leads to more questions when the data are limited and the methodology does not allow an answer to questions asked after the process of data collection is complete.
I intend to write a couple more posts focused on the recommendations from the library association. I would describe my goals as very much overlapping with the way this association describes data literacy. If there is a distinction, I would describe it as my interest in data and data collection methods that are not numerical. If data literacy is limited to quantitative data, I must still find another terminology to describe this broader perspective.
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