Posts from — February 2009

It has been a while since we did a simple web walk and pointed readers to some interesting material and helpful resources. Today we offer readers four interesting link options, everything from Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy to a look at why ignorance does appear, in fact, to be bliss.

Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy

Almost a year ago we featured some of the work of Andrew Churches. The teacher and self-professed ICT enthusiast has taken the time to do a modern day mash up of one of education’s long-standing models for analyzing learning.

Bloom’s Taxonomy, developed in the 1950′s, clearly holds a place of reverence within the educational community. Using a hierarchical framework to express thinking and learning, Bloom’s offers a set of concepts that begins with what we call lower order thinking skills (LOTS) and then progressively builds to higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

In education, the best teachers have made it a point to bring their students to the HOTS level of the taxonomy whenever possible. The belief has always been that acquiring knowledge and comprehending information (LOTS) pales in comparison to being able to analyze, evaluate, and apply that knowledge.

Where Churches comes in is that he began examining the traditional theory against a backdrop of the new digital age and the use of technology in the classroom. From his efforts, educators began being able to associate specific digital techniques with the traditional categories set forth in the taxonomy.

While there is clearly still much to be done to clarify these associations and properly place digital technology tasks in each category, teachers at least now have a framework from which to start and dialogue from. In keeping with the open source movement that is defining the future of education, Churches has now published his work in e-book format over at Scribd.

Those wanting to see both the rationale and the depth of assessment Churches has employed will find a free resource, Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (v212), at the site. The 44-page document is filled with information and is available for download, free, in multiple formats.

We highly recommend all teachers take the time to read this important document.

Among the Inept – Ignorance Is Bliss

An article that is now more than nine years old recently started getting tagged on Del.cio.us. As one great example of the challenge of filtering the wealth of material on the Internet, we missed the original article that takes a look at the behaviors demonstrated by people we might call incompetent.

In her article, Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss, Erica Goode cites the research of Dr. David A. Dunning. In true tongue-in-cheek mode, Goode sets the tone for the article with the following intro:

“There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them. Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

“On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.”

It seems “that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured” because ultimately “the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.”

Given that education is a people-profession, the article is a must read for everyone working in the field, especially those working in administration. With a strong push to ensure that every classroom is staffed with a competent teacher, the research of Dunning offers great insight.

Especially in the case where feedback is absent or ambiguous – in such instances incompetents generally do not realize their level of ineptness.

Open Courseware Toolset

A summary resource that offers a list of links to open courseware materials is available at the web site Best College Rankings. The Ultimate Open Courseware Toolset: 60+ Directories, Search Engines, and Web Tools offers readers an extensive set of links to a wealth of materials now available on the web.

What makes the list so worthy is that it contains some individual tools but many of the links offered are actually to other sites or web pages that then feature more links to more resources. The site lists links in alphabetical order (not weighing in on good, better or best) and breaks the material into three distinct categories.

They begin with a list of directories of various open courseware projects. The list features 22 links (some offering lists of 100s of sites) to “books, video lectures, teaching tools and more, all labeled with the open courseware tag.”

The second category features 16 links to a number of search engines and archives while the third and final category focuses on 23 web tools “that can help teachers, parents and students.”

The sheer volume of material, however, reminds us of how important our own ability to filter Internet materials has become.

A Parental ADD Resource

Finally, in recent days we stumbled across the web site of Brenda Nicholson, ADD Student. The mother of 3 children with Attention Deficit Disorder, Nicholson is a trained ADD Coach who began learning about the disorder over 20 years ago.

Surprised that many educational professionals knew little about ADD, Nicholson found she needed to educate herself. Because of her experiences, she has set up the ADD student resource portal for parents and professionals alike.

One simple aspect that spoke volumes to us was her advice regarding students on medication. Instead of pluses and minuses regarding meds, she notes that the taking of medications at school has become a major issue for everyone involved: students, parents, and educators.

Another is her focus on diet as a method for minimizing issues with ADD children and managing their symptoms. While some of the information is on a cost basis (a 12 week email coaching program for parents), there is also a wealth of general info free for site visitors including subcategory links to specific areas such as ADD and Life Skills, Organization, School and Time Management.

Flickr photo courtesy of debaird.

Our credibility being of utmost importance to us, today we return to a prior post: “Taped Lectures – Better than the Real Thing?”

We were taken to task to by one of the researchers, Dani McKinney, who had the following to say:

“It is difficult for an author to know how to comment when the author of the blog did not actually read the paper that he is discussing. In fact, the effect of having the podcast only appears when the students in that condition worked considerably harder than those in the live-lecture condition. The effect completely disappears when the podcasts are merely listened to. To see the advantage, the students had to take notes of the podcast AND listen to it more than once. So, far from being able to replace professors, the podcasts might give students the benefit of being able to listen to the lecture more than once, and the ability to get the notes more accurately.

Please don’t comment on specific conclusions the paper makes by reading the abstract alone. That’s similar to attending the first week of class and the last week of class and expecting to get an A….”

Our Integrity

First and foremost, in writing about the results of a new study from Dani McKinney, Jennifer L. Dycka and Elise S. Lubera, iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?, we acknowledged writing about the findings based upon the summary abstract. We chose to write about the topic based upon the fact that taped lectures were very timely given some of our prior posts. We also wrote using only the abstract because access to the full article was on a fee basis and not published using the creative commons approach that we have espoused (perhaps we have simply become spoiled).

To ensure we were not making assumptions, we did not speculate as to how it was possible for students listening to a podcast of a lecture to exceed the performance of those who attended the lecture in person. Whatever those reasons might have been, we did point out that if students listening to a podcast could even match the performances of those who attended in person, then greater consideration should be given to the less expensive, podcast option.

Replicating lectures at 100s of colleges then bringing students from far and wide to individual locations represents one of the biggest reasons for the current cost of higher education. Many online education advocates have begun speculating that a lecture repository could in fact replace the current delivery model and therefore reduce the costs of higher education significantly.

The Research

We noted that the basic experiment was quite simple. We wrote:

The researchers wanted to test the effectiveness of taped lectures and contrast that with the performance of those students who attended class and heard the same lecture in person.

One week after the different group sessions, students took an exam on lecture content. In what most would deem a startling development, “students in the podcast condition who took notes while listening to the podcast scored significantly higher than the lecture condition.”

Accordingly, based on the comments of the researcher, we need to add, “To see the advantage, the students had to take notes of the podcast AND listen to it more than once.”

In contrast to our support of others who had already postulated that professors could in fact be replaced, Ms. McKinney notes: “So, far from being able to replace professors, the podcasts might give students the benefit of being able to listen to the lecture more than once, and the ability to get the notes more accurately.”

More Appropriate Assertion

Given the feedback, a more appropriate assertion might be that it is time for all colleges to provide students access to podcasts of each professor’s lecture. That way, highly-motivated individuals would seemingly have access to the best of both worlds, the chance to hear an in-person lecture and later gain greater clarity by virtue of the opportunity to listen to the presentation a second or third time.

In fact, given the current costs of higher education, it would seem that students ought to demand such of their institutions. But at the same time, the added words of the researcher will do nothing to dissuade the current critics who insist that a podcast could in fact replace a professor provided a student has sufficient work habits.

In closing, we return to the words of Ms. McKinney:

“So, far from being able to replace professors, the podcasts might give students the benefit of being able to listen to the lecture more than once, and the ability to get the notes more accurately.”

That said, our guess is that being present to hear a lecture would still be considered exceedingly overrated by those prior critics. Because, unless a professor were in fact willing to repeat the lecture upon request by students, the opportunity to listen more than once and thus gain more accurate notes simply is not possible under the current delivery model.

Which brings us full circle, back to the original title of our article, “Taped Lectures – Better than the Real Thing?”

Flickr photos courtesy of Tama Leaver and Leaver again.

Amidst a serious economic downturn, a small group of visionaries has launched a new educational venture called Singularity University. Co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, Singularity University represents a new academic institution that has little in common with a traditional university.

From the time-frames of the designed programs to the scope of the curriculum, Singularity University will go where no other university has ever gone. Featuring three intensive programs, the founders are seeking to eliminate some of the current pre-conceived boundaries surrounding a number of the cutting-edge technology disciplines.

Looking to weave a course of study that slides across 10 varied fields, the university curriculum features such extremely disparate tracks as: future studies and forecasting, biotechnology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, AI, robotics, and cognitive computing, and finance and entrepreneurship.

Enormous Talent Assembled
Kurzweil believes the school, named after the theories he expressed in his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, will have the unique ability to bring together leaders from these various fields. Once together, these individuals then would have the chance to collectively approach some of the world’s greatest challenges (global hunger, pandemics, and climate change, etc.).

Singularity University will kick off their work this summer with about 30 students. Utilizing the NASA Ames Center, the program will co-exist with another cutting edge entity, the International Space University which is expected to host 120 students at the same complex.

The faculty list is extremely impressive. Among those committed to teach are Will Wright, The Sims and Spore creator; Cal Berkeley professor and 2006 Nobel Prize winner George Smoot; fellow Berkeley staff member Dan Kammen; Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames’ chief scientist; and the legendary Vint Cerf.

Interview with Salim Ismail

For a more in-depth look at the new school we turn to one of the founders and current Executive Director of Singularity University. The successful consultant founded such companies as PubSub and Confabb and recently spent a year at Yahoo as a Vice President and Head of Brickhouse where he worked on Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Live and Fire Eagle.

Can you give our readers some brief background information on you and how it is that you became involved with the concept of Singularity University?

I’ve been fascinated by innovation ever since learning about quantum mechanics during my university degree. I then got into computers and in the last 10 years I’ve been involved in eight early stage companies. In 2007, I joined Yahoo to build out and run their incubator called Brickhouse. While running Brickhouse I set up a relationship between Yahoo and NASA, and that led to them (SU) inviting me to the founding meeting of SU on September 20, 2008. From the beginning, I was inspired by the vision and the team. When they asked me to head it up, I didn’t blink.

Starting a new university from scratch can never be considered a small task but starting a new university that is the antithesis of the traditional university structure would seem to be even more challenging, especially in these economic times. Can you talk a little bit about the “Founders Circle” and the process of raising start-up capital for such a ground breaking concept?

A key to getting SU up and running is that we’ve licensed the IP and pedagogy of the International Space University, which has very successfully run a graduate program for 20 years. Many of our Founders are at the leading edge of these technologies and saw the need for such an institution to better understand and manage where these disciplines are headed. I believe we’ve had excellent success in these tough times for the following reasons:

1. we’re using and copying a proven model (from ISU);
2. we’re trying to help understand a crucial set of rapidly advancing areas;
3. we’re trying to create leaders who can use this knowledge to address some of the grand challenges facing humanity (e.g climate change, energy, information management etc);
4. the challenges we’re facing today only highlight the need for an institution like ours, and many of our backers have the vision to see that.

The talent you have assembled is extraordinary, from the management team to the board of trustees to the teaching faculty. Can you give our readers a sense of how it is that you have been able to bring together so much talent in such a short time?

Like the donors, many of the leading academic thinkers around the world see the need for such an institution which complements the deep academic teaching of existing universities. We’ve had an extraordinarily positive reaction from them, and very gracious commitments of their time to help with the curriculum and in attracting other leaders.

In selecting faculty, have you set forth specific guidelines regarding those who would be from the business/tech working sector versus those who would be classified as academics (university professors, teachers, etc.)?

We don’t have formal specific guidelines, but we are definitely aiming for a diverse mix of lecturers from both business and academia. We have faculty coming from Stanford, MIT and other leading academic institutions as well as leading companies like Google, Microsoft and others, both locally and from around the world.

Your site speaks to a “First-of-Its-Kind Curriculum” that features ten different academic tracks. Can you explain how you folks came to agree upon these ten specific tracks of study including the process used and the rationale for those tracks?

About a month ago, we held a curriculum planning meeting with about sixty people, including many of the faculty that you see listed on the site. At that meeting we collectively agreed on the ten tracks and currently have a draft version of what will be taught per track – this will of course evolve considerably before the summer program starts. The tracks were determined by examining which technologies and disciplines are considered to be advancing at an exponential pace. Track 1 is about how best to manage, predict and measure these domains, tracks 2-6 are considered the core set, tracks 7 and 8 are areas of application for these core technologies, and tracks 9 and 10 are supporting tracks that we considered crucial to give a framework for how best to take it out into the world.

Likewise, the academic objectives are broken into six specific categories (assemble, teach, focus on humanity, network, spin out, and communicate). Can you talk a little bit about the formulation process for these objectives?

I think this is largely self-explanatory. We want to get together leading thinkers, get them up to speed on the state of the art of these rapidly accelerating fields and arm them with a set of tools and the right contacts to address the big challenges facing humanity today. We feel these objectives are appropriate to help deliver the mission of SU. Larry Page, at our founding meeting, gave an inspiring talk and suggested that the students graduating from SU had a unique perspective and should focus on the grand challenges facing humanity. That formed some of the foundation for the objectives.

You will be offering three separate programs at the outset, a 10-week summer Graduate Studies Program, a 10-day Executive Program and a 3-day Executive Program. Can you give our readers a brief overview of the coursework and the respective objectives that will form the basis of each of these separate programs? Can we assume the price of $25,000 quoted at CNet is accurate for the 10-week? Have prices been set for the others?

The $25k is indeed for the Graduate Studies Program, but it’s actually nine weeks. The 3 and 10-day courses will distill content from the 9-week program and is intended for executives and government officials. We haven’t established the fee for those yet. For example, the CEO of a semiconductor company might come to the 3-day program to better understand the latest state of networks and computing, and get an ‘over-the-horizon’ radar view of what will affect his or her industry.

The agenda for the 10-week program was described by the folks at CNet as “not for the faint of heart.” In addition, in that article, Mr. Diamandis is quoted as saying, “If we do our job correctly” students “will meet, (discover their) common visions, and start companies together.” One of the most impressive aspects of this venture is the lofty goals that have been set forth but is it really possible that in just ten weeks time such relationships could be formed?

A very important question… it is relevant here to again note that we have licensed the model of this curriculum from the International Space University which has very successfully run such an interdisciplinary program for 21 years – today, many of the heads of the world’s space agencies are graduates of ISU. We will adapt their model to our curriculum, but it gives us a proven structure from which to start, and will indeed be a very intensive program. For example, ISU has found that in 9 weeks, a 120-person student body can form quite deep relationships and everyone gets to know everyone else. We will start with 30 students in year one and expand to 120 in the second year.

David Brooks, the well-known op-ed columnist for the New York Times, recently gave us pause with a piece called “What Life Asks of Us.” Brooks begins by citing a Harvard faculty committee report from a few years back that offered the following purpose of education:

“The aim of a liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

Brooks goes on to summarize the report’s implications:

“The report implied an entire way of living,” noted Brooks. “Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.”

Brooks offers that this approach is “deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness.”

Institutional Thinking

Brooks contrasts this current notion with “another, older way of living” that was discussed in a book by the political scientist Hugh Heclo called “On Thinking Institutionally.” In citing such a focus, Brooks almost hearkens back to Kennedy’s call in the early sixties.

“We are not defined by what we ask of life,” writes Brooks. “We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.”

And those institutions are crucial to Brooks. They provide “certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do.

“New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of.”

Brooks then goes to Heclo directly to offer:

“In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

Reverence for Institutionalists

Brooks is no fan of our modern culture, the one described in that Harvard faculty report.

“The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations,” writes Brooks. “There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

And this notion is so important to the writer:

“I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most,” Brooks adds. “Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.”

He closes with the following support for institutional thinking:

“Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

“But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.”

Different View

Over at Brian Barrington’s Blog, little reverence is expressed for Brooks’ thoughts. Barrington sees Brooks as offering nothing more than the traditional conservative line.

He goes on to note some of our prior institutional practices that were rightly questioned: slavery, the right of women to vote, and a time when child labor was an effective way to reduce factory costs.

Institutionalists would be “telling us that women should get back in their kitchens where they can be happy,” writes Barrington, “or else it will be the end of civilization as we know it. They would have been telling us that the women they most admire are the ones who stay in their kitchens where they do the work that gives meaning to their lives.”

Barrington makes some great points. Clearly, many of our most positive societal changes have come from times when individuals have in fact examined life from the outside and subsequently called into question some existing institutional behaviors, if not those institutions themselves.

Personal vs Societal

And yet we are reminded of the fundamental notion of institutions: “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals …. identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.”

That definition, along with the premises that Brooks set forth, is precisely why his op-ed piece gave us such pause. It reminds us of Bill Bradley’s notion that the biggest challenge we face is that neither of our political parties offers a philosophy that fits our current world.

We cannot so easily dismiss what Brooks notes. It is important to ask, do we see ourselves “as debtors who owe something” or as “creditors to whom something is owed.”

There is also great merit in our young people learning that “there will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

At the same time, we have great concern that the emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness is in fact undermining our fundamental need for cooperative human behavior.

Somehow, we must find a proper balance between the two notions.

Which leads back to the fundamental question, what should be the aim of education, liberal or otherwise?

Flickr photo courtesy of DoubleSpeakShow.

Teacher designable versions of Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire now available online.

Every week night, roughly 10 million folks tune in to Jeopardy to test their knowledge base as well as watch three contestants display their intellectual prowess. And in the early 2000s, a like number tuned in to the immensely popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

The popularity of these games has certainly spawned a number of educational knock offs, including simple low tech blackboard versions, that seek to bring the fun aspects of the game to the educational setting but focus the questions and answers on specific learning topics covered in the classroom. But as technology grows, one has been expecting that there would come a time where a free web version of these popular games would become available for teachers.

SuperTeacherTools.com

Such is the case as both game formats are available for teachers at SuperTeacherTools.com. Each was designed to eliminate the word “kill” from the “drill and kill” phrase that is generally used to describe education that focuses on knowledge retention.

Each is created for teacher use in the classroom as a SmartBoard review game. What makes the games so appealing is that they are available for download as well as online use and are PC and MAC compatible. They are also free.

Each will demand some teacher time upfront but as with all computer-based developments, once created, the games can be saved as well as modified and edited at a later time. Most importantly, the web-based nature means that the games may be shared with other teachers easily and can be assigned to students for homework.

With the Jeopardy version, teachers can create their own categories, 25 individualized answers, and even assign varying point levels to each category and/or answer. There is no need for playing with PowerPoint templates, the typical method by which such games have been created and shared in the past.

The site archives games created online into the Jeopardy Game Library, specifying the name of the game and the creator (if provided), the number of questions in the game, and when the game was created. That means that teachers can either play the game online or download it to play offline at a later time. It also means you can modify any existing game and then save it – the site will create a brand new game file for everyone’s future use.

All of the same aspects hold true for the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game except it is designed to match the popular television format featuring 15 questions and 4 choices for answers. The site also features a library of available games, availability to work online or off with either a PC or MAC, and again is completely free.

Great Fun

The key of course is that both games can create outstanding review opportunities and reinforcement of the specific learning tasks teachers deem most important while bringing some enjoyment to what can be a tedious process.

In other words, a great chance to do that all important drilling at the same time that one finds ways to build a student’s zest for learning.

Editors note: The site also offers “Our Speed Match Review Game,” “FlashBoard Review Game Generator,” and some basic classroom management tools.

Flickr photos courtesy of howieluvzus and jacorbett70.

Last week, Kathy Kristof, writing for Forbes Magazine, offered one of the more honest looks at the cost of college today and the subsequent impact of those costs on our young people. In The Great College Hoax, Kristof notes that “higher education can be a financial disaster” for students “especially with the return on degrees down and student loan sharks on the prowl.”

As but one sampling of the current situation:

“The proportion of students who graduate with more than $40,000 in debt jumped sixfold during that period, to 7.7% of the 1 million grads in 2004, or 77,500 people. Most will struggle for more than a decade to work it off, assuming relatively low 6.8% interest rates, the Project on Student Debt says.”

In such an environment, it is critical that those seeking the dream of higher education have their eyes open. Unfortunately, the current lending practices and predatory marketing have benefited from students who lack the basic financial literacy skills to understand that the system is essentially taking them for a ride.

Under such prevailing market conditions, we call our readers attention to our sister site, GoCollege.com, where college students have access to a wealth of information related to the entire college finance process. GoCollege, helping students succeed in college since 1997, recently created a free primer, The Student’s Guide to Personal Finance, designed to provide students some of the financial literacy basics.

As our sister site notes, everywhere one turns these days we are exposed to yet another appalling story of college student debt. Because of those tales, it is imperative that our young people, already facing an uphill battle to establish their working future, not saddle themselves with debt-levels that essentially mortgage their entire future away.

And for a specific lesson as to how students can in fact manage their debt level while in school, The Digital Student Blog at GoCollege offers a Q & A with Kai Davis, a University of Oregon senior about to graduate this spring with zero debt.

Kirstoff notes that “Higher education can be a financial disaster” for students. But it need not be. Educated with the proper information, our young people can avoid mortgaging their entire financial future as they pursue their dream of a college education.

Needless to say, the general consensus regarding cell phones and schools is that the two simply do not mix. However, a new study from across the pond gives strong indication that schools should give greater consideration to putting these handheld mobile devices to work.

The Current View
When it comes to cell phones and schools, the current position is that these mobile devices have no place in the school setting. At FabZone.net, we found the following rather emphatic assessment:

Distractions such as cell phones don’t belong in school…. Cell phones in school are an unnecessary distraction that takes time away from teachers and can be a source in cheating…. I’m sorry to tell you this, but if you think students will not be texting each other while a teacher is teaching, you’re dead wrong…. Cell phones have become a huge problem.

And as yet another indication of how professors view these wondrous little devices, we turn to a story that appeared in the NY Times.

Halfway through the semester in his market research course at Roanoke College last fall, only moments after announcing a policy of zero tolerance for cellphone use in the classroom, Prof. Ali Nazemi heard a telltale ring. Then he spotted a young man named Neil Noland fumbling with his phone, trying to turn it off before being caught.

“Neil, can I see that phone?” Professor Nazemi said, more in a command than a question. The student surrendered it. Professor Nazemi opened his briefcase, produced a hammer and proceeded to smash the offending device. Throughout the classroom, student faces went ashen.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Ali Nazemi is a hero. Ali Nazemi deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mobile Phones and Learning in Secondary Schools
However, Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and Nadja Heym of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham recently released a research report that would seem to contradict that current viewpoint. While How mobile phones help learning in secondary schools may not be a ringing endorsement of cell phone use for educational purposes, it certainly offers an interesting take on the potential use of these mobile devices to enhance the educational setting.

The study followed teachers in three schools who began exploring ways to use students’ personal phones as well as additional borrowed smart phones. Though in each case there were existing school policies banning mobile phones in class, students were given permission to use cell phones for a wide array of activities.

The study focused on the basic question: Is there a positive side to mobile phones in schools and if so, how might they be used to support learning? The researchers came away with a yes verdict and offered some specific ways in which cell phone technology could support learning.

A partial list of the ways that teachers used the devices included:

• Timing experiments with stopwatch
• Photographing apparatus and results of experiments for reports
• Photographing development of design models for eportfolios
• Photographing texts/whiteboards for future review
• Bluetoothing project material between group members
• Receiving SMS & email reminders from teachers
• Synchronizing calendar/timetable and setting reminders
• Connecting remotely to school learning platform
• Recording a teacher reading a poem for revision
• Accessing revision sites on the Internet
• Creating short narrative movies
• Downloading and listening to foreign language podcasts
• Logging into the school email system
• Using GPS to identify locations
• Transferring files between school and home

Attitudinal Shifts

As one might expect, students were at first quite surprised by the notion that mobile phones could actually be used for learning. Because of their prior use pattern, the phones were deemed items associated with socializing.

In addition, the use of the cell phone technology in the classroom served as a great motivator for students. Almost all students reported greater enjoyment in projects and felt more motivated. In one school, the results indicated that the phone use in the classroom helped students both in their social and learning environments, thereby increasing student confidence and their work ethic.

One key element supporting the use of mobile phones over other handheld learning devices is that most students already own mobile phones. Therefore, the allowance of cell phones was a step towards student ownership and greater personalization of learning. The fact that students used the devices outside of school and in social settings meant they also tended to bring a set of skills to the classroom by virtue of their own experimentation with their phone. In addition, the phones allowed for a reduction in the number of devices to carry – many students reported using them in place of their calculator.

Noting the current concerns, the researchers assert that the eventual aim should be to replace policies that involve blanket bans on the devices. That said, they noted the supervision-related challenges associated with cell phones and therefore noted that whole-school changes should not occur at the outset. Instead, the researchers note a gradual shift would be more appropriate, one that could coincide with behavioral changes when the alignment of mobile devices with purposeful learning occurred. Ultimately, the researchers suggest that mobile phones could in fact come to be perceived as natural in the school setting as any other technology.

Summation

As for mobile technology having the potential to positively impact education, the researchers offered an assessment that contrasts significantly with the view of FabZone or Prof. Ali Nazemi.

In every case, other teachers became interested and involved, and the project teachers decided to continue using mobile phones. These champions of change have shown that, with good planning and anticipating class management and technical issues, using mobile phones can be a very productive way to augment access to tools for computing, communication and photography. As one student said ‘It is good to use new technologies. It prepares us for the future as we will be using mobile phones more and more.’

Full copies of the report are available in word format and in PDF.

Flickr photos courtesy of Justin Baeder, Mark Warner, themarina, and compujeramey

First during his campaign, then later with his push to make this year’s Martin Luther King holiday a national day of service, President Barack Obama has sought to rekindle one of our fundamental American values, helping thy neighbor. That highly-publicized call for service led to a record number of Americans to honor Dr. King by volunteering for more than 13,000 service projects across the country (more than double the number from the year before).

Significant Action, Less Fanfare

Dave Eggers, the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, established his desire to make a difference in the lives of others when in 2002 he launched 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based writing and tutoring lab for young people. Under his direction, the nonprofit has branched out with other centers now located in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston and Ann Arbor.

In 2008, he received the TED Prize, given yearly to someone with the desire to change the world. He was awarded a $100,000 donation and a pledge of support from the TED Community. Upon receipt of his prize, he made the following wish:

While accepting his prize, Dave Eggers asked the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools.

“I wish that you – you personally
and every creative individual
and organization you know -
will find a way to directly engage with a public school
in your area and that you’ll then tell the story of how
you got involved, so that within a year
we have 1,000 examples of transformative partnerships.”

To gather those stories in one location, he has created the web site, Once Upon a School. From a family of educators, Eggers understands the current demands facing teachers in inner city schools. And with his site he offers a hope that we might:

“Usher in a new era
of participation in our public schools. ”

A Hope to Inspire Others

Watching the nervous presentation of Eggers leaves a viewer with a strong sense of the man’s sincerity. He, like Obama, is calling on us all for service, but with a direct call to helping our public schools.

Indeed, his site was not created for chest thumping – instead, in documenting the many stories of common folks volunteering, he hopes that the sharing of those stories will inspire others to serve in similar capacities.

While receiving less fanfare, his extraordinary commitment to helping kids and public schools has not gone unnoticed. His work led Time Magazine to state:

“Many writers, having written a first best-seller, might see it as a nice way to start a career. He started a movement instead.”

OK, this online learning concept may now have another feather in its cap. We recently discussed the notion of video lecture series being available online, a step that could ultimately render the traditional face-to-face lecture option obsolete.

In a rather interesting development, Dani McKinney, Jennifer L. Dycka and Elise S. Lubera have released the results of a new study. In iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?, the researchers take a look at student test results depending on whether the student attended a specific classroom lecture or listened to the lecture as a podcast.

The Research

The experiment was quite simple. The researchers wanted to test the effectiveness of taped lectures and contrast that with the performance of those students who attended class and heard the same lecture in person.

To determine the effectiveness, the researchers created two distinct groups. One group of undergraduate general psychology students listened to a 25-min lecture given in person by a professor using PowerPoint slides. Students were provided handouts in the form of copies of the slides to enhance note-taking. A second group of undergraduate psychology students listened to the same lecture in a podcast. They too were provided the same PowerPoint handouts.

One week after the different group sessions, students took an exam on lecture content. In what most would deem a startling development, “students in the podcast condition who took notes while listening to the podcast scored significantly higher than the lecture condition.”

Another Blow to High Cost Education?

We noted previously the potential outcome of high-caliber lecture repositories becoming available online. We quoted John Robb, who offered this simple caveat in regards to online lectures, especially if the taped version were delivered by the best in the field.

“There is no need to recreate the lecture with tens of thousands of less qualified/exceptional teachers” if there is at least one exceptional version available online.

Critics have long held onto the fact that being there and hearing the lecture in person, face-to-face, trumps any taped offering. The work of McKinney, et al, certainly undercuts that assertion.

Unfortunately, in an ironic twist for us, the folks at ScienceDirect have not caught on to the opensource education movement. To be able to read the full article regarding the study one must shell out $31.50.

So we have not been able to discern what McKinney postulates as rationale for the students listening to a podcast to perform better than those students hearing the lecture in person.

But the abstract alone confirms that as education gives careful consideration as to how best to implement technology, things change when the focus is on steps to make education more affordable. Because, if lectures and the accompanying power point slides available on iTunes produce even similar academic outcomes as traditional face-to-face lecture formats, then the enormous potential cost savings from taped online versions would in fact render the current educational model obsolete.

Flickr photos courtesy of Tama Leaver and Eli Hodapp.