Learning Aloud

I drove from Minneapolis to Grand Forks last evening. I typically listen to podcasts or audiobooks when I drive and I enjoy the time to think. The audiobook for the trip was Jeff Jarvis’ “What would Google do?” I have commented on this book previously, but I was listening again to the chapter on the “future of higher education / what is wrong with higher education” (my version of the title). I find myself reacting to many different issues. To keep this post within practical limits, I will comment on one topic.

General complaint about college in the Google age – memorizing stuff you can look up on Google is a waste of time.

Reaction – I have heard this before. However, I know few college profs who see their courses as an exercise in memorization. Perhaps this is one of those issues we see as a problem in the courses taught by others, but not in of our own. We want to get to things we see as interesting and relevant, but I am guessing we first feel the need to develop background so our students can understand what we see as interesting and relevant. I can understand how students in survey courses (I sometimes teach Introduction to Psychology) may come to believe their performance relies on memorization. It does, but memorization is not the point. Without a shared vocabulary and the ability to represent basic principles of the field, communication and knowledge development are pretty difficult.

Consider the following example as a possible explanation of how students may incorrectly believe that memorization is the goal. If I ask a student which of a list of simple descriptions of daily behavior seem best explained by operant conditioning, the student who is unable to offer a reasonable definition of operant conditioning is obviously in trouble. To me, the phrase I used was simply a way to communicate the conditions of the task and my intent is to evaluate something at a deeper level. Would student performance be improved with access to Google in this situation? Perhaps, but I still believe we need to have core knowledge more immediately available. We work within certain working memory limits – it is far better to know basic information when attempting to perform tasks that assume understanding of prerequisite knowledge than to divert from the more applied tasks while attempting to recognize basic vocabulary and understand basic principles. It may be acceptable to deal with an occasional failure of background through search, but frequent failures disrupt our own cognitive performance and become increasingly annoying to those who depend on us in applied settings.

The idea of Googling what you don’t know reminds me of the concept of just in time learning. I am arguing that pushing just in time learning too far reaches a point of absurdity that is inconsistent with the way human cognition works. We constuct understanding, but we must have some internal representations to work with.

Thinking about a survey course such as Introduction to Psychology it may work something like this. Memorization differentiates the C from the B student. I am hoping the difference between the B and the A student depends on something more.

“Why we’re behind: What top nations teach their students but we don’t” is a report offered to the public and policy makers by Common Core. Multiple players with varying motives (business leaders, politicians, academics) are weighing in on the state of education, assessments of what is wrong, and what needs to be done. This is one more contribution. It is starting to remind me of the story of the blind men and the elephant except that everyone here has their eyes open and still tend to see only part of the picture. I have comment on other policy statements/recommendations/concerns in other posts. My goal here is only to summarize the most current report.

The report is based on a simple logic – identify those countries scoring above the US on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and attempt to identify factors the differentiate these countries from the US. Nine countries fall into this category. So, the selection of countries is based on quantitative data assumed to reflect a fair comparison of student performance and the explanation for the difference in performance is based on a logical/qualitative assessment of policies, expectations, materials, etc.

The arguments made appear to focus on examples of standards and examples of assessment materials (see the report for a large number of examples).

The general conclusion appears to be:

Several contributors offer individual insights as part of the general report that provide perspective and somewhat different takes on the findings.

It seems there is agreement that the successful countries focus on content knowledge and not just skills. The U.S. has moved to a curriculum that is narrower and more basic. Narrowness might by exemplified by the focus on math and reading. NCLB is described as encouraging this focus.

More successful countries encourage a broader focus in terms of content areas and accept the importance of knowledge (what some might describe as factual knowledge) in addition to skills. The performance advantage in the skill areas is used to argue that broad knowledge may be necessary for the meaningful development of skills.

The report appears to contest counter-claims I have accepted in the past. The U.S. spends more money per student. The focus of the U.S. on all students does not result in a relative weakening of the correlation between SES and performance.

There did appear to be some disagreement among the experts offering comments. For example, the impact of the significance of movement of time away from other subjects to focus on areas emphasized by NCLB exams was not explained in the same way and how assessment fits in was evaluated differently. Existing testing practices were regarded has having some negative influence, but one expert proposes that some countries also assess specific knowledge, but have specific expectations for what will be learned in a greater diversity of areas. Hence, the focus here was not on less testing. In other words there are standards that are more specific in contrast to the vague standards in the U.S. and assessment matches these specific expectations more accurately. All agree on the diversity of knowledge issue.

One expert pushing the position that testing reduces time spent on other areas offers data indicating time spent on science in grades 1-6 decreased by 20% 1994-2004 while time spent on language arts increased 9% and math increased 5%.

Some may be disappointed because the position paper:
a) downplays emphasis on what some describe as 21st Century skills – disputes high stakes, narrow focus testing but does not then propose what have been described as 21st century skills should be the alternative focus
b) clearly advocates content knowledge (information) – basis for understanding, effective skill acquisition

One writer acknowledges an obvious limitation of the methodology. The method assumes that differences noted between the U.S. and “more successful nations” are caused by the differences argued to reliably differentiate instruction and policy. An obvious test of the conclusions reached could be accomplished by testing the findings against other examples. If other countries at the same performance level of the U.S. or lower do not show the same pattern, the explanation would be less credible. In other words if nations scoring below the U.S. offer a broader curriculum and focus on knowledge, the argument that such factors explain the poorer performance of the U.S. relative to the “more successful” countries above would be far less credible.

Google offers the opportunity to create a custom search service and I knew this, but I had never considered potential educational applications until I heard Alan November present some ideas at NECC.

You can set up a search engine and control the web sites it will access (you can probably get the idea from the screen capture I have inserted above. You need a Google account to gain access and then locate the option under the list of Google Products (I can’t offer a link here because the link would not work unless you have a Google account). So, this was not new to me.

What I did not consider was that you can also control who can add sites to search and who can view and how setting these preferences might be of some educational value. Assume a tech coordinator sets up a search engine focused on useful web sites for elementary science and offers elementary teachers within the district the opportunity to contribute URLs. Perhaps the goal is to explore the wildlife of the state. Access to this collection could be made public or shared more privately. What might be made available to students as a consequence of this process might be a Google search engine that would then only return search results appropriate to the topic (level, focus, quality, etc..).

What follows is a custom search engine that will return hits from my two blogs. You can test it be first locating something in this blog and then conducting a search to see if you locate the post you expect (and perhaps others).

Cindy somehow learned about something called DLP technology (she can’t remember how). She knew that it had been applied as an alternative to whiteboard technology and searched for information through YouTube. She located the following demonstration.

So, today she heads off to the Texas Instruments booth in the exhibits hall to see if they had a working demonstration and finds not only the technology, but the kid (to us) who created the demonstration video. This made quite a hit in the Texas Instruments booth because no one else had made the connection between the youtube post and the person working the booth. Finally, he had a fan.

So, here is a picture of Cindy and Marshall.

BTW – watch his YouTube demonstration. This is going to be a very interesting classroom option when the cost comes down a bit.