More evidence of the limits of student technical knowledge

The following is just a “diary entry” recording a bit more evidence for the story that our students are neither digital natives nor digitally literate. It may or may not become useful in future research/writing. It’s not meant to be insightful, just a record of an experience.

The context is marking of assignment 1 for EDC3100. 300 odd students have created online artefacts via their choice of online tool. Youtube videos, Wix/Weebly/Wordpress websites, Sliderocket and Prezi are the most common I’ve seen so far. There have been some really good ones and some not so good ones. But there’s also been some evidence to suggest limits on the student’s technical knowledge.

Most of the problems appear to revolve around the idea of providing a URL to a post on the student’s blog that includes a URL to the online artefact. The double link caused some problems, but also has the idea of providing a URL. Some examples from tonight

1. Rather than provide a URL for the post, students are providing the URL for their blog.
2. A small number of students is providing a URL to their blog, which doesn’t have any posts with links to their online artefact.
3. Prezi URLs.

   Been a small trend with Prezi URLs not working. It appears that the students are providing a “long URL” generated from something they see. I’m assuming copying from the browser. This URL doesn’t work for anyone but them. If we cut away some extraneous material, we get to a URL that works.

4. Spectacularly wrong URLs.

   For example, we’ve seen URLs like this
   

   davidjones@edublog.org.com

   for blogs that are actually located at
   

   http://davidjones.edublogs.org

As mentioned previously

• These are 3rd year students the majority of whom have some significant online learning experience beyond their own typical use of social media.
• This perhaps says more about the technology and its design and use than the students themselves.
• It raises questions about some of the assumptions underpinning common institutional e-learning practice within universities.
• It raises questions about whether encouraging exploration, creativity and student choice can be viable in a course with 300+ students and limited time and support resources.

  i.e. the time I’ve spent diagnosing and fixing these mistakes has taken time away from engaging with student queries about the course content and assessment.

Meaningless freedom and auto-marking the learning journals

The course I’m teaching requires each student to create and user an individual blog. The blog should be created on an external blogging platform of their choice and used to reflect on their learning in whatever way they see fit. There are a couple of constraints around regularity (at least 2/3 posts a week), length (average of 100 words), links to resources (60% with links to online resources), and links to other student blogs (2 of all posts over a 3 week period). All this is meant to be automatically marked.

The following is the story of putting in place the code to check, track and mark the student blogs. Much of it has been written over the last few weeks. I’m adding the last extra touch today as the assignment has been submitted and the automated assessment needs to be completed.

As it happens, I’ve also just read Lisa M Lane’s “The illusion of the LMS/cloud-based/self-hosted solution” and am finding that it resonates strongly. If I didn’t have the technical background I have, none of the following would have been possible. I’d be constrained by the tools available in the LMS and any manual workarounds I could come up with. As it is, I could have done without the additional work required by the following.

At the moment, the message I’m taking from both Lisa’s and my own experience is that the use of technology in learning and teaching is messy. Especially when you’re trying to do something different. Being an explorer is always going to be difficult. The institutional systems and support processes are not set up for exploration, they are set up for exploitation. This is why they are constraining. If you want to be an explorer, it’s going to be hard, but it can also bring benefit. Alen Levine’s comment on Lisa’s post perhaps contains the main solution to this problem

the way to do this on the open/free/public end is to leverage the connections of others. I rely on this all the time. The “solving” is in our human networking.

No BIM

I haven’t completed BIM2 in time for the organisational processes to consider installing it into the institutional version of Moodle (this post details one step in the process). So the plan is

1. Students register their blog via a Moodle database activity.
2. That is exported, checked and stuck into a local version of Moodle (with BIM) on my laptop.
3. Marking of the blogs will be done via some additional code, either in BIM or in Perl.
   
   At this stage Perl has been used because I have a large collection of infrastructure and experience with a Perl code base that was developed as part of my PhD work. i.e. I’m a native Perl speaker, PHP and the Moodle code remains a second language to me. Eventually this work will need to be brought into BIM in some ways.

Registration, reassurance and the perils of meaningless freedom

Way back in the late 1990s experience with the design and use of online assignment submission systems led to this observation (Jones, 1999)

An important lesson from the on-going development of online assignment submission is to reduce the amount of “meaningless freedom” available to students. Early systems relied on students submitting assignments via email attachments. The freedom to choose file formats, mail programs and types of attachments significantly increased the amount of work required to mark assignments. Moving to a Web-based system where student freedom is reduced to choosing which file to upload was a significant improvement.

Having the students register their blogs with a Moodle database activity meant that the students had to correctly

• Enter their student number.
  USQ has two types of student number that it users interchangeably.
• Copy the URL of their blog.

Here’s a list of what I’ve found in the registered data tonight, out of 275 registered blogs

• 105 students used one form of number, 170 the other sort (roughly).
• 10 student numbers were incorrect.
  Some were just minor typos, but others were more major.
• 37 URLs were incorrect
  Missing the http://, typos (edublog.org not edublogs.org etc.), copying the dashboard URL not the home page.

This is not to suggest that the students are stupid. It’s to show how badly designed systems (i.e. the stuff I’ve cobbled together) allow mistakes to happen. If BIM had have been available none of these errors would have been possible and I would have saved quite a few hours of work.

Not only would BIM have provided immediate feedback on registration, it would have allowed the students to be reassured what what was known about their blog. With BIM the just visit the activity and its there. In this semester, I’ve had to send bulk emails out letting students know what the system knows about their blog.

Statistics

Time now to finish off the script that will generate statistics about the students’ blogs and generate their mark. As shown in this prior post I’m also using this facility to generate some visualisations of the interconnections, but that’s another post.

The statistics being used for marking include

1. Number of blog posts per week.

   Currently being calculated by dividing the number of existing posts on the student blog by the number of weeks.

2. Average length of blog posts.
3. % of posts that contain links to external resources.
4. number of posts that link to other student blogs.
5. % of the learning path activities completed.

   This isn’t a blog statistic. It’s from the activity completion report on Moodle. Each week has a collection of activities/resources (the learning path) and students are expected to complete them.

Each of these is currently being generated. But I need to

1. Double check the links to other student blogs, not sure it’s counting blog posts.
2. Exclude links to their own blog.

This is all done. So some statistics. With 330 students mostly still enrolled in the course

• Average word count per post – 184.9
• Average posts per student – 11.5
• Average posts with links – 7.7
• Average posts with links to another student blog – 1.7
• Average completion of Moodle activities – 89.8%

The last one is a bit disappointing. Need to explore it more.

Missing students

I have a script that automatically “marks” the students blogs and also their completion of activities on the Moodle study desk. Trouble is it appears that at least one student is missing from that list. Why?

Some possibilities

• The student has dropped the course? – NO, still there
• The student didn’t register their blog? – YES, that’s the problem

If there’s one, I wonder how many others there are? Even after we did a dry run a couple of weeks ago to identify folks in this situation there appear to be a few. In theory, there are 327 students still enrolled in the course. Of those, 20 students haven’t successfully registered their blog.

Question is whether this is a problem with my kludges, or the students haven’t registered their blog. I’ll let them figure that out.

A visualisation

The following is the latest Gephi visualisation of the links between student blogs. A bit more complex than the last one, but obviously connections aren’t a priority.

Visualising the blog network of #edc3100 students

The following describes the process and results of using Gephi to generate some visualisations of the inter-connections between the blogs of students in the course I’m teaching. The process is heavily informed by the work of Tony Hirst.

The result

The following represents the student blogs that have connected with each other. Size of the node is weighted towards the number of connections coming in. You can see a couple in the bottom right hand corner who have linked to themselves. The figure also suggests that there are 6 or 7 communities within these.

There are actually 300+ blogs in the data set. However, a significant number of those are not yet connected to another blog. Hence the small number in the above image. Two possible explanations for this

1. Many of the students haven’t yet taken seriously the need to connect with each other.
2. There’s a bug in the code producing the file.

Will need to follow up on this. Will also need to spend a bit more time exploring what Gephi is able to do. Not to mention exploring why 0.8.2 of Gephi wouldn’t run for me.

The process

The process essentially seems to be

1. Generate a data file summarising the network you want to visualise.
2. Manipulate that data file in Gephi.

The rest contains a bit of a working diary of implementing the above two steps.

Generating the file

The format of the “GDF” file used in Tony’s post appears to be

• A text file.
• Two main sections
  1. Define some user/node information.

     The format is shown below. The key seems to be the “name” which is a unique identified used in the next section.

     nodedef> name VARCHAR,label VARCHAR, totFriends INT,totFollowers INT, location VARCHAR, description VARCHAR
     67332054,jimhillwrites,105,282,"Herne Hill, London","WIRED UK Product Editor."
     

  2. Define the connections

     Essentially a long list of id pairs representing a user and their friends. I’m assuming this means the use connects to the friend.

     edgedef> user VARCHAR,friend VARCHAR
     67332054,137703483
     

More on the GDF format available here. It mentions a minimal GDF file and also mentions that the edge thickness can be specified. This seems useful for this experiment i.e. edge thickness == number of links from one student blog to another.

So the file format I’ll use will come straight from the minimal spec, i.e.

nodedef>name VARCHAR,label VARCHAR
s1,Site number 1
s2,Site number 2
s3,Site number 3
edgedef>node1 VARCHAR,node2 VARCHAR, weight DOUBLE
s1,s2,1.2341
s2,s3,0.453
s3,s2, 2.34
s3,s1, 0.871

Thinking I’ll use the “hostname” for the student’s blog as the “site number”. Maybe just the first four letters of it. Just to keep student anonymity.

Questions for later

1. Can I modify the file format to include with each “friend” connection a date?

   The idea is that the date will represent when the post was made. Using this I might be able to generate a visualisation of the connections over time.

2. Is there value in also mapping the connections to the other links within the students’ posts?

   Could provide some idea of what they are linking to and help identify any interesting clusters.

The data

The database I’m maintaining contains

• All the URLs for the students’ blogs.
• All the posts to the students’ blogs.

I already have a script that is extracting links from each of the student blogs, I just need to modify this to count the number of connections between student blogs…..a bit easier than I thought it might be.

Now a quick script to generate the GDF file. Done.

Using Gephi

This is where I’m helping Tony Hirst’s instructions work with a minimum of hassle.

That’s a bugger. Empty menus on Gephi. It’s not working. Is it wrong of me to suspect Java issues?

Going back to older version. That’s worked, but I haven’t installed it yet into Applications. 0.8.2 seemed to have worked previously as well. Get this done and figure it out later.

File opened. We have a network.

Tony Hirst then removes the unconnected nodes. I’d like to leave them in as it will illustrate the point that the students need to connect with others.

The Modularity algorithm doesn’t seem to be working as I’d expect (on my very quick read). It’s finding 200+ communities. Perhaps that is to be expected given that most blogs are connected by one or two links and that I haven’t removed the unconnected nodes. Yes works much better if you do that.

A bit more playing produces the final result above.

Many of our students are neither digital natives nor digitally literate

Yesterday I attended a session with three different presentations focused around “student voices and their current use of technologies at USQ”. There was some very interesting information presented. However, I have a few reservations with aspects of the research and especially with some of the conclusions that have been drawn. I’m hoping to reflect upon and post more about this when I have some time. But an experience just now reinforced one of my reservations and is worth a short sidetrack.

A largish survey of students found that all of the students had some form of access to the Internet. Given that it was an online survey, this is perhaps not surprising. But that’s not the problem I particularly want to address here.

The big reservation I have is that one of the conclusions drawn from this work was that our students are “Digitally literate and agile”. My experience suggests that this is not the case.

My experience

The course I’m currently teaching has 300+ students, mostly 3rd year Bachelor of Education students, spread throughout Australia and the world. 200+ of these students are online students. i.e. they generally don’t set foot on a campus. The course itself is titled “ICTs and Pedagogy” and as you might expect we’re pushing some boundaries with the use of ICTs. Attempting to model what we espouse. Some examples of that include, amongst others

• Students are required to set up their own blog and use it as a reflective journal.
• They are required/asked to sign up for Diigo and join a course Diigo group
• We’re using Diigo’s annotation facility to mark up online readings and the assignment pages.
• They are encouraged (but not required) to join Twitter.
• We use Google docs for shared content creation.
• The course Moodle site is heavily used including the discussion forums leading to a lot of email traffic (this is picked up below).
• We use a range of ad hoc activities to demonstrate different ICTs.
  e.g. a version of the “weather Flickr” activity of @courosa

Many of the students, especially the online students, have been studying online for 3+ years. Some of the earlier courses these students have completed encourage them to engage with different ICTs e.g. developing a webquest or creating digital stories.

So, obviously these students are “digitally literate and agile”?

Some gaps in digital literacy

Here’s a quick list of some of the questions/problems students have asked/had in the first three weeks of semester

• Not knowing what their university provided email address is.
• Not knowing to look in the junk folder for a confirmation email.
• Not knowing how to add a link using one of the WYSIWYG editors provided on web-based services such as Moodle, WordPress etc.
• Not knowing that you have to “right/ctrl” click on a link to download a file rather than display it in the web browser.
• Not knowing about email filters.

The last point is a big one. It’s fairly common for students taking four online courses to get a lot of email from the discussion forums for those courses. This flood of email messages take over the Inbox and lead to confusion and missed information. Many of these students have been experiencing this for 3+ years. Yet, almost none of them knew about email filters.

Perhaps one of the most successful learning activities in the course was a Google doc that was created for the students to list the problems they were having with the course and any suggestions they might have for tools or practices that might help solve those problems. The following image is a screen shot of a section of that document about email filters. Click on it to see it bigger.

This particular activity was combined with reading about Toolbelt theory and encouraging the students to start building their toolbelt. To have them start taking control of their problems and identifying how they can solve them.

Not digital natives

Perhaps the major mistake (one of many) I made in the design of the first few weeks of this course was that I assumed that the students were far more digitally literate than they appear to be. Not only that, as someone who is fairly “digitally literate”, I assumed that they would have the experience/knowledge to be able to implement the “Tech support cheat sheet” without much prompting.

Lessons

When we are designing our learning experiences we (i.e. I) cannot assume that they are “digitally literate and agile”. I need to give more thought to scaffolding these experiences and perhaps exploring ways to better help them develop what @irasocol describes as an essential survival skill

knowing how to pick the right tool for the job and moment, how to use that tool well, and how to find new tools

I also think there’s a lesson here about research methodologies. Research methodologies – e.g. surveys and focus groups – that capture insights from people divorced from the actual activity (e.g. the “current use of technologies at USQ”) – are going to overlook important insights. That limitation has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions and recommendations for action.

The absence of a search function – my current big problem with a Moodle installation

Consider this a plea for suggestions. In particular, consider it a plea for workarounds that I can implement quickly (and painlessly).

The problem

I have a Moodle course site. It has a range of activities, many with a page or two of text that sets the context and explains the task. The image below shows what the activities for one week look like.

Now this works fine if a student works sequentially through the activities. It tracks what they’ve completed etc.

It fails miserably when they want to revisit the page about “X”. They have to remember in which week “X” was talked about, under which activity “X” was addressed.

I have problems doing this and I wrote the stuff.

The “web way” solution

If this was any other website, we’d follow the advice of Jakob Nielsen

Search is one of the most important user interface elements in any large website. As a rule of thumb, sites with more than about 200 pages should offer search.

The “web way” solution would be to have a search engine. But the Moodle installation of the University I teach the course for doesn’t appear to provide this functionality. I believe the only way this can occur is to allow Google to have access to all courses on the site. While there may be reasons for this, it’s not a solution I’m pushing just to solve my problem.

How can I provide my students with a search function? How can I make my course site “of the web” and not “on the web”?

I have heard mention made of being saved by repositories. i.e. Moodle is not a content hosting platform and doesn’t try to be. If you want searchable content, place it in a repository. The trouble is we’re not talking here about large documentation. Just a lot of small pages that are closely wrapped around specific learning activities in Moodle. I’m yet to see an information repository integration that works as seamlessly as I’d expect.

My interim solution

In the absence of any brilliant ideas, it appears that the only way to do this is to create a duplicate website that is actually “of the web”. i.e. one that is indexed by Google. I’m thinking probably a blog with pages set up to match the weeks and other components.

Some have suggested providing the pages as a PDF document (or three). The problem with this is that there is web content (videos, animations etc) embedded throughout. Producing a print document would allow folk to search, but then they wouldn’t have access to the web content (unless they clicked on a link etc).

Producing a second website is by no means a perfect solution, some of its limitations include

• Extra workload for me.
• Large potential to create confusion amongst the students
  e.g. which website do I visit? Which website has the correct content? Do I need to check both websites?
• Loss of some Moodle functionality.
  The course currently uses the Moodle activity completion functionality to allow students to track their completion, but also as part of the assessment. If students start working through the blog version of the website it will lead to “But I already did that activity!” problems.

Surely there has to be a better solution?

How much of a cage should I build?

Just how much of a cage should I make my course into? How far should I take the constraints? The following sets the scene and asks the questions. Would love to hear alternate views.

  by  geezaweezer 

The course

The course I teach has 300+ students spread throughout much of Australian, parts of Asia and perhaps other parts of the world. Studying both on-campus and online. It has folk who will be teaching everything from Early Childhood through to TAFE/VET, and everything in-between.

The course website is a Moodle site. Each week the students have a list (perhaps too long a list) of activities to complete (see the image). To help them keep track of what they have and haven’t done the Moodle activity completion functionality was used. That’s what produces the nice ticked boxes indicating activity completion.

Building on this, part of the assessment of the course is tied to how many of these activities they complete. Activity completion is actually linked to keeping a learning journal and contributes 15% of the total course mark (5% for each of the 3 assignments).

Task corruption

Given the pragmatic nature of students today and especially given the perceived large amount of work in the first week. It was not surprising that a bit of task corruption” is creeping in. I assumed that some students would figure out that for the activities that are “web pages” with exercises, simply visiting the page would tick the box.

But there are other activities that require students to post to a discussion forum with some form of artefact. For example, a description of a resource found on Scootle and a description of how it links to their curriculum. These are posts that I see and try to keep a track of. So a bit of a deterrent?

Turns out perhaps no. I’m starting to see the odd post that either purposely (or not) does address the task, but is sufficient to be recorded as an activity completion.

The question is whether or not I should be actively policing this?

The trade-off

I don’t want to set myself the task of being a policeman. But perhaps I need to implement some penalties here, some options might include:

• A gentle warning, at least initially.
• Warn the student and delete their activity completion for the given activity (i.e. do it again).
• Deduct marks for task corruption.

  Of course, there will always be the “but I misunderstood the task sir” excuse.

.

A purely pragmatic reason against doing this is that it will take a lot of work to police this. For another, I’ve already expressed some reservations about what it means to impose new learning strategies on a group of learners. That’s certainly something the course is currently doing.

We’re also talking about 3rd year University students, shouldn’t they live with their choices? If the don’t engage in these activities I do believe they will learn less and perform worse on the other assessment.

Then there’s the question of the students who are engaging with the activities and may potentially be receiving the same marks as those who have engaged in task corruption. I’m sure there would be a view amongst both sets of students.

Perhaps I should just mention this to the students to discourage (though not prevent) this practice?

Thoughts? Suggestions?

How are they going?

The lack of interaction/feedback between student and teacher in large, contemporary, Australian university courses has always frustrated me. With 350+ students currently enrolled in the course I’m teaching, I’m keen to address this problem. Enter the weekly “course barometer”, a simple practice I’m hoping we can keep up for the current semester. The following is a quick summary of the results for the first week and a description of how it works.

How it works

In summary,

• I ask the students to complete a Google form at the end of their learning for a week.
• Their responses get put into a Google spreadsheet.
• The responses are examined, analysed and inform what we’re doing in the course over coming weeks.

The questions/tasks in the Google form are (all except #4 are free response)

1. Write down the two most important things you have learnt in EDC3100 this week.
2. What would you most like more help with?
3. How do you feel about EDC3100 at the moment? (Select all the words that apply to you)
4. What is the biggest worry affecting your work in EDC3100 at the moment?
5. How could we improve EDC3100?

A process similar to this has been widely used. This particular set of questions arise from the following

The IMPACT procedure (Clarke, 1987 cited in Goos et al., 2007, p. 411) is one method for discovering the concerns and opinions of students. It involves the regular completion of the following simple questionnaire during class (for this unit during the Friday “Reality and Reflection” lessons) and the retention of responses over the period of the class. Goos et al (2007, p. 411) suggest that the success of this process “depends on respecting the confidentiality of student responses and acting on these responses where appropriate to improve students’ experiences of learning mathematics.”

taken from here

Due to the point about “confidentiality” and the novelty of this approach, I’ve decided (for now) not to open up access to the Google spreadsheet with the data to anyone except the teaching staff in the course.

First weeks responses

The following images (click on them to see a bigger version) are word clouds generated by sending the raw responses for each question through Tagxedo. I still need to look more closely at the feedback, but some initial thoughts.

How are you feeling?

Was happy and a little surprised to see some of the more positive feelings be visible. Had worried it was all negative. Week 1 was very challenging and time consuming.

Given students are given a fixed set of words and are able to add a few words of their own, this is perhaps the best question to analyse using a Word cloud. A word cloud is not so useful for the free text questions.

Two most important things

Help

Need to look at these responses in more detail. Interesting at some level that “assignment” is not the biggest. Arguably having “learning” and “understanding” being more of a focus is potentially a good thing. But closer examination is needed.

There is the “how to use the tool” presence (blog, twitter and diigo)

Biggest worry

Time and workload have been the big worry, at least via other communication mechanisms, and that appears to have come through in this.

Improve

Time and workload would appear to be a major area for improvement. Future weeks will see this improve and we’ll need to revisit the design of the course a bit. As it stands, week 1 is probably too much of an ask.

However, I’m going to be interested to see how this evolves over coming weeks. Much of the work in week 1 was setting up new tools and developing some foundational insights that should really help in subsequent weeks.

And it starts again, edc3100 in 2013

It’s that time of year again – week 1, semester 1 – and after almost three-quarters of a year there are face-to-face students to tutor and lecture. Have to love the pedagogical assumptions built into the fabric of the technology that is a University education (a good example of technology becoming mythic). The following captures a few thoughts from the first lecture/tutorial.

The need to define ICTs by example?

The first is the need to define what ICTs actually are. The tutorial reinforced that this was a good idea and that perhaps there needs to be a bit more of it.

Apparently, the Google doc into which we’ve been asked to contribute the ICTs we’ve seen and used includes a laminator. At least that’s the report from some of the students. I think this is perhaps one of the flaws of a few of the activities this week. The students are being asked to contribute, but they aren’t necessarily getting feedback (good or otherwise) on those suggestions.

Wondering if there’s an online tool we could use to have different folk sort a list of technologies into ICTs and not-ICTs? Do it collaboratively so you can what others have said, see what the expert said and perhaps raise a challenge. i.e. give the argument why you think X does/doesn’t belong to a certain category. A crowd-source answer perhaps, save having the expert give an answer?

  by  jimmiehomeschoolmom 

This also suggests the potential need for more work around the students discussing their understanding of pedagogy and the combination/integration of ICTs and pedagogy.

Time, repetition and something unique

The lecture went longer than I thought, a standard worry. More importantly it has me wondering about how to distinguish between the online and the on-campus cohorts. The course site has the collection of activities and resources that I want the students to engage with. I don’t want to create something brand new for the on-campus students (workload and the online students miss out) but there’s the need to make appropriate use of the f-t-f medium.

Blended learning as a concept doesn’t seem to fit too well. The activities for the solely online students are designed for them. “Blending” those activities into the on-campus lectures/tutes is difficult because of variability amongst the online students. Some have worked through all or most of the online activities leading to repetition and boredom. Other students haven’t looked at it yet. Blending appears to require a more fixed specification of what is done online and offline. This static, fixed approach doesn’t cater well to student variability.

Will need to think more about how to better “blend” the online and the offline when the online is designed to be stand alone.

There’s more to a PLN than technologies

So far the students are starting to use blogs, Diigo and even Twitter, but I’m not sure most of them are really building a

• personal – one that is unique to them and is designed to respond to their needs.
• learning – with a focus on learning about ICTs in teaching.
• network – with an appropriate size and variety in the network connections.

Next week will need to build on these.

Exploring using the Wii/Augmented Reality to teach proportion

One of the tasks for the course I teach is to explore in a bit more detail one of the 150 ICT innovations identified as “good” in the Decoding Learning report. The list can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. Preferably, the idea is we should be exploring ICT innovations that we might like to apply in our teaching.

The Wii, proportion and embodied mathematical cognition

The Decoding Learning folk describe this innovation this way

This project uses a gesture control device (Wii remote) and an onscreen representation to help learners explore and discuss their mathematical understanding, for example, of ratio. The underlying idea is that the design encourages learners to make gestures to represent mathematical concepts and then to reflect upon and discuss how their gestures related to the concepts. The innovation requires the gesture console, the prototype device and peers to be available so that learners can discuss their ideas.

The reference they give is Abrahamson (2012) but it appears that Trninic and Abrahamson (2012) may give a better, broader introduction.

Of course, rather than wade through an academic treatise you may just want to watch the video.

The Mathematical Imagery Trainer

Trninic and Abrahamson (2012, p. 286) describe their rationale as being

that some mathematical concepts are difficult to learn because mundane life does not occasion opportunities to embody and rehearse their spatial–dynamical foundations

To test this they implemented the Mathematical Imagery Trainer shown in the video above. They tested this with students (22 students from a K-8 school). It’s use went something like this

• A student was sat in front of the screen and tasked with moving their hands until the screen was green.
• Once achieved they were asked to move their hands and keep the screen green.
  i.e. they need to develop a rule for why the screen was green.
• As needed additional scaffolding could be provided to the students, including
  • A cartesian grid, without numbers.
  • Adding numbers to the cartesian grid.
  • And it appears some level of tutorial support encouraging the student to elaborate and reflect on their thinking.

I like this idea because it uses ICTs to achieve something that would be otherwise difficult. Engaging the body in understanding maths also appeals. It also moves examples of ICT use beyond social media, which tends to dominate my practice.

It also helps that the source code for this has been made available. Though without some further testing I’m not sure about the quality and ease of use of the code. It might be beyond a typical teacher to get this up and going. There is then the question of students doing this individually.

Reimplementation ideas

A re-implementation using something like AR SPOT wouldn’t be that difficult and would potentially lower the entry barrier for classroom use. A PC with a web cam and an IWB or big screen could potentially be useful.

Kinect2Scratch might offer some similar possibilities.

Of course, it even opens up the possibility of a the students either help implement it in Scratch or perhaps analyse it after they’ve used it. The ability to look at the code providing some mental/algorithmic reinforcement of the embodied introduction.

References

Abrahamson, D. (2012) You’re it! Body, action, and object in STEM learning. In J. van Aalst, K. Thompson, M. J. Jacobson, & P. Reimann (Eds) ‘Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences: Future of Learning’ (ICLS 2012) Vol. 2: Symposia, pp. 99-109. Sydney: University of Sydney / ISLS.

Trninic, D., & Abrahamson, D. (2012). Embodied artifacts and conceptual performances. International Conference of the learning sciences: Future of learning (ICLS 2012) (Vol. 1, pp. 283–290). Sydney.

Taking a look at the “Decoding Learning” report

Late last year Nesta – a UK-based charity – released the report Decoding learning: The proof promise and potential of digital education. Nesta commissioned the London Knowledge Lab and the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham to “analyse how technology has been used in the UK education systems and lessons from around the world. Uniquely, we wanted this to be set within a clear framework for better understanding the impact on learning experiences”.

The following is a summary and some reflections on my reading of the report. I’m thinking of using it as a resource for the course I’ll be teaching soon.

If you’re after a shorter summary, the Nesta press release might provide what you’re looking for.

Reflections

While there appears some value in the themes of learning, I thought there were some definite grey areas in terms of innovations being allocated to particular themes.

That said, the collection of examples of technology use divided into these themes provides what I see as a very useful resource for pre-service teachers. It gives them a taste of what is possible and what good uses of technology look like. This is something I think might be valuable in the early days of the course. Start with concrete examples, before getting into the theories and the planning.

The idea of using this list and the themes as the foundation for the co-construction of some sort of database or site of examples. A list students could add to through their explorations. Perhaps later expanding on each of the examples by suggesting what learning theories, curriculum elements, year levels, etc might be relevant to each example.

There are also a few other points apparently useful for a pre-service teacher thinking about ICTs (i.e. reflect some of the limitations of thinking about ICTs that I saw last year)

• Starting with the learning theme, rather than the technology.
• The point about linking learning activities across themes and experiences to reinforce learning and other plusses.
• The importance placed on context. The ecology of resources model may be useful in scaffolding some thinking.

Chapter 1 – Introduction and scene setting

Key questions for education

• Has the range of technologies helped improve learners’ experiences and the standards they achieve?
• Is this investment just languishing as kit in the cupboard?
• What more can decision makers, schools, teachers, parents and the technology industry do to ensure the full potential of innovative technology is exploited?

Digital technologies have a profound impact on management of learning but “evidence of
digital technologies producing real transformation in learning and teaching remains elusive” (p. 8)

“Our starting point is that digital technologies do offer opportunities for innovation that can transform teaching and learning, and that our challenge is to identify the shape that these innovations take.” (p. 8)

Has been much research. “synthesising reviews do find some evidence of positive impact” but there are 2 complicating factors that limit these findings

1. the evidence is drawn from “a huge variety of learning contexts” (p. 9).
2. “findings are invariably drawn from evidence about how technology supports existing teaching and learning practices, rather than transforming those practices” (p. 9)

Learning themes

Based on the learner’s actions and the way they are resourced and structured, the report is organised around 8 effective themes

1. Learning from experts.
2. Learning through inquiry.
3. Learning with others.
4. Learning through practising.
5. Learning through making.
6. Learning from assessment.
7. Learning through exploring.
8. Learning in and across settings.

Research process

Used both research and “grey” (blogs etc) literature

• Review of last 3 years of academic source – 1000 publications – from which 124 research-led example innovations chose. Relevant reviews and meta-reviews included.
• Informal literature identified 86 teacher-led innovations from a pool of 300.
• The combined 210 cases form the basis for the report.
• Use a comparative judgement method/tool (described in an appendix) to have 150 innovations ranked/compared by a group of experts.

There is an Excel spreadsheet with the top 150 innovations, including URLs.

Chapter summary

• Chapter 2 – discusses evidence of innovation in each of the learning themes.
• Chapter 3 – how are the 8 themes related and how they can be linked by technology to produce a rich learning experience.
• Chapter 4 – looks at how learning context shaped the impact of new technologies on learning.
• Chapter 5 – identify what needs to be done if innovative and effective uses of technology in education are to happen.

Chapter 2 – Learning with technology

Using the learning themes. Explains the type of learning and then present examples of the 210 innovations with the greatest potential.

1. Learning from experts.
   Highlights are
   • The increasing wealth of online resources offers great potential for both teachers and learners; but places great demands on both to evaluate and filter the information on offer.
     So YouTube videos, e-books etc fit here.
   • Innovations in Learning from Experts have tended to focus on the exposition of information rather than fostering dialogue between teachers and learners.
   • Digital technologies offer new ways of presenting information and ideas in a dynamic and interactive way. However learners may need the support of teachers to interpret those ideas and to convert that information into knowledge.
   • New forms of representation (e.g. augmented objects) offer the potential to enrich the dialogue about information between teachers and learners.

   The Mathematics Image Trainer (described in this paper, the paper offers some theoretical/pedagogical rationale for why this type of approach is important for learning mathematics) is an example. Luckin et al describe how it allows the teacher to focus on asking the student to explain what they think is happening. Hence the innovation is framed as “a powerful too to enhance discussion between the teacher and the learner”

   Aside: I wonder how hard this would be to implement using ARSpot. Might make it more widely available since it would only require a Windows computer with a camera and the AR spot print outs. Rather than a Wii or similar

   Tutorial and Exposition are the two kinds of interaction between learner and teacher. Mentions Bloom’s suggestion that one-to-one teaching is the most effective way to learn. Methods that represent traditional approaches to teaching and that many examples of technology build upon (e.g. Khan Academy)>

   Mentions lots of different examples.

2. Learning with others.
   Considerable enthusiasm. But academic research not filtering into the classroom. Teachers’ awareness of tools needs to be raised. “Priority should be given to developing tools that allow teachers to organise and manage episodes of joint learning.

   Identify four social dimensions

   1. collaborative – help learners develop mutual understanding.
   2. networked – help learners interact.
   3. participative – help learners develop a strong community of knowledge.
   4. performative – allow the outcomes of collaborative learning to be shared.

   Three promising areas for development:

   1. representational tools that enable activities taking place to be presented to other learners;
      e.g. technology-enhanced spaces for acting; tools for capturing and sharing on-going achievements…
   2. scaffolding tools that provide a structure for learning with others.
   3. communication tools that support learners working at a distance to collaborate.
3. Learning through making.
   Making and sharing is “one of the best ways people can learn”. One example is the construction of an environmental sensor and linkage with a mobile phone app.

   Highlights of the section are:

   • Success rests on two principles: learners must construct their own understanding; and create something they can share with others.
   • Digital technology can bring it alive by making it possible to construct just about anything and share, discuss, reflect and learn.
   • The motivational aspect and benefits of producing real world outcomes of learning through making frequently cited in teacher-led innovaitons.
   • Depend son the appropriate use of digital tools in suitable environments.

   Mentions Papert and constructionism. Links to to Logo and computer programming. Mentions Maker Faires etc.

   Most of the innovations are teacher-led, apparently little research.

   • Examples help learners construct notes and other material to improve their learning, electronic outlining tools, learners developing presentations based on the information they collected during visits.
   • Scatch mentioned, also blogging and storytelling through Web 2.0 applications. ZooBurst create 3D pop up books with augmented reality features a bit like ARSpot. But also a bit more than that.
   • 3D printing gets a mention.
   • The need for teacher support, they help students to learn how to use technology critically link multiple representations and make the connections between individual learner’s constructions and whole class understanding.
4. Learning through exploring.
   Learners have always browsed, but information is abundant. Need to new skills/strategies. Technology can help. 3D simulations, visualisations, technology-augmented spaces. Found few examples of innovations in this theme Gives electronic blocks as one example.

   Includes work where learners search or browse information or engage in playful, game-like interactions. It can be opportunistic or more structured.

   • two principles: learners are given the freedom to act; they need to regulate their own actions (which is itself an important skill for learning).
   • Digital tools provide new ways to explore information and structure the environment to explore.
   • Limited research studies suggest it is underused and undervalued.
   • The few examples were of high quality suggesting potential.
5. Learning through inquiry.
   Exploring the natural or material world by asking questions, making discoveries, and rigorously testing them. Technology may help organise inquiry or connect learners’ inquiries to real world scenarios.

   Enables learners to think critically and participate in evidence-based debates. More structured towards an end than learning through exploring. Seen to include: simulation, case-based learning, problem-focussed learning and scripted inquiry. The degree of structure varies.

6. Learning through practising.
   Perhaps the most contentious application in some areas, but probably the most used. Helping learners practice skills. Most effective when a variety of representation and interactions are used and doesn “simply sugar-coat uninspiring or unchallenging activities”.

   Practice builds foundational knowledge to be used in other context. use of tech in this sphere is rarely seen as innovative, but plusses include rich multimodal environments used to create challenging problems and appropriate feedback.

   Zombie Division is given as an example. Which leads me to the “Serious Game Classification” site. Another example has kindergarten students using a digital dance mat to practice/compare number magnitude. Light-bot is nice, appeals to the inner-programmer in me.

   Hello programmed instruction.

7. Learning from assessment.
   Being aware of what a learner understands is fundamental to increasing their understanding and knowledge. Technology can help: compile learning activities and enable both teachers and learners to reflect upon them; track progress of learning and present that information in rich and interactive ways. There is little innovation in technology-supported assessment. Research innovation is modest. Most innovative focusses on self-assessment through reflection, not teacher-led. Most innovation is based on summative assessment of traditional subject. More work on formative assessment and assessment of other skills is required. Suggests learning analytics holds promise. Also e-assessment using social networks and other technologies that facilitate peer, collaborative and self-guided learning.

   The subtle stone is used as a way to gain insight into students’ emotion.

8. Learning in and across settings.
   Context of learning plays an important role in the quality of learning. Knowledge is deepened when applied across different locations, representations and activities. Technology provides a variety of devices to capture, store, compare and integrate material from a variety of settings.

   Key success factors

   • Understanding what parents really need in order to get them involved;
   • Recognising that activities designed for school are not necesarily transferable to the home (and vice versa)
   • providing on-going support and ensuring use of technology at home is purposeful.

   Purple mash is used as an example of transferring learning between home and school. Augmented reality for field trips gets a mention and uses of mobile devices to support field trips etc.

Chapter 3 – Bringing learning together

“To achieve a more rich, cohesive, and productive learning experience, we must consider the
links that exist between different learning activities within and between themes.” Providers learners with a coherent episode. Reinforces learning and strengthen future learning.

Suggests the following

• Learning themes are mad up of
  • Learning activities (e.g. creating an animation) which are connected/embedded across different themes into
  • Learning episodes (e.g. lessons, projects units) that are linked/sequenced to create..
  • broader Learning Experience at class, school etc levels.

Linking learning activities

57% of examples encompassed two or more forms of learning. Some with different learning activities within the one theme, others had learning activities across multiple themes. Often there would be a primary theme and another used as supports.

Through making, with others and through exploring most often used in a supporting role.

Chapter 4 – Context is important

Context is crucial for success with technology. Realising the potential of digital tools is contingent on how we use them and the context of learning.

Uses one of the author’s models – Luckin’s Ecology of Resource which essentially

• Has the learner surrounded by
  • Environment;
    Most examples from formal schooling – primary and secondary. The classroom may have specialist equipment/expertise that makes it easier. Digital tools tend to be usable in many environments.

    All learning environments have formal/informal rules for behaviour of teacher and student. This can limit technology use. Existing infrastructure may also limit it.

  • Knowledge and Skills;
    The way knowledge is organised shapes learning. e.g. separation in disciplines. Certain learning activities better suit some subjects. The whole question of what is knowledge is also a factor.
  • People;
    Teachers’ have a role to play in having innovations succeed. PD is an issue. Peer learners also impact on learners. Technology can help. Not to mention other people within school – technical staff, teaching assistants, leadership etc. Not to mention the broader community.
  • Tools.
    Breaks digital tools into hardware, applications, networks and platforms. Mentions infrastructure. Cloud computing. Thin clients (dead already). BYOD not mentioned. Lists three factors that can constrain wider adoption: cost, complexity, safety.
• Between those and the learner are a set of filters.
• Understanding these helps predict likely impact of technology and help roll them out.

Chapter 5 – Bringing research into reality

Understanding how technology can be used to improve learning is only part of the answer. Systemic challenges need to be addressed.

Learning from the evidence

Repeats the adage that technology alone won’t improve education, “we need to make better and more creative use of them” (p. 59)

The most compelling opportunities to improve learning through technology are

• Improve assessment.
  “too little innovative technology-supported practice in the critical area of Learning from assessment“. Don’t restrict it to the end of a learning episode and don’t make it “dull or dispiriting”. Learning analytics, adaptive assessment and the potential for instant statistics, knowledge maps, class data and badges. Also, how to assessment knowledge and skills such as collaboration and leadership.
• Learn by making.
  Lots of digital tools being used in making. Coding, robotics kits etc. But “careful consideration needs to be given to how the process of making leads to the desired learning outcome”.
• Upgrade practising.
  The longest and most popular aspect of technology. “But not all types of practice are equally beneficial”. It is most effective when it involves rich, challenging problems with appropriate feedback, rather than on easy activities. Challenge here is in determining which ones are most effective, for whom and in what context.
• Turn the world into a learning place
  Most learning is in school and escaping the constraint of location is not simple. But digital tools enable this. It can “link learners with other learners, experiences and settings”. We need to stop thinking of learning taking place in isolation, in schools.
• Make learning more social.
  Promote better teacher/student discussion and learner/learner discussion. Use technologies to create audiences for participatory or performance activities.

Key priorities for technology in learning

• Link industry, research and practice.
  The gap between these groups is problematic. Advantages to all 3 if connected. Role of government and other stakeholders. Informal connections help, but formal connections required.

  The role of context in research also needs to be mentioned to enable comparisons.

• Make better use of what we’ve got.
  WHile access to technology is important, an emphasis on hardware limits examination of other opportunities.

  Teachers need to move to a “think and link” approach where tools are used in conjunction with other resources and a variety of learning activities. Teachers need to be able to digitally “stick and glue”. Teachers need ways to share ways of using new technologies.

• Connect learning technologies and activities.
  “Linking learning activities and using a variety of technologies and approaches” can lead to a richer experience. “Focusing on individual learning activities with single use technologies will not achieve the maximum impact”

  But the tools aren’t there yet.