Been thinking lately about the nature of learning at higher ed institutions – and how it effects content development for online courses.
In an “old” episode of a TWiT, This Week in Tech podcast (from May 31, 2009), they were discussing the shift to new media especially among young people, and how universities haven’t really caught on yet. The whole episode is interesting, but at about 50 minutes in, a comment from Don Trapscott really resonated for me:
…if somebody was frozen a hundred years ago and they miraculously came alive today and they looked around at the professions, a doctor in an operating theatre or a pilot in a jet, they’d think “Wow has the world has ever changed”. And technology has been at the heart of it. While if they walked into a lecture theatre at a typical university or in a classroom, they’d breathe a sigh of relief, they’d say this something I recognize… transcript
The model has remained basically the same: lecturer up front (or behind the learning management system) pours out knowledge to brains that will hold onto it until they’re tested on it. Information dump. Students are tested on knowledge and how well they retain it, so they develop strategies accordingly.
Then just today I came across a comment from Cathy Moore, author of the blog Making Change – ideas for lively elearning. (It’s also from months ago – what can I say, it’s impossible to really stay up to date.) What Cathy says ties in well with the quote above, I think:
I agree that a lot of instructional design as it’s currently practiced has been influenced by thinkers in higher education. Since in higher ed the goal really is to get knowledge into people’s brains and not necessarily to have them use that knowledge, it makes sense that a lot of the models and theory put knowledge first.
Her comment was on a post about focussing on actions rather than “learning objectives”. After the first time I read that post I tried to pay more attention to the learning objectives written for content I was developing. Many of the objectives started with the words “know”, or “recognize”, or other similar terms for “get this in the head and hold on to it”. Cathy’s blog emphasizes the action that your learners need to perform (maybe with the help of some missing knowledge) and developing activities that support that active goal.
The question that seems to be lacking in a lot of higher ed offerings: “What do you want to do with that knowledge?”… (besides pass the exam ).
Just came upon a nice little note taking plug-in for moodle. Mediabird allows students to take notes and share them if they want to, as well as publish questions about their notes to others in their study group. They get to form their own group(s), and so don’t depend on instructors, nor are they limited by rigid rules about group activity. The youtube intro is worth a look:
The plug-in needs to be installed at the site level by a moodle administrator, of course. Wonder if system administrators would have any hesitations about security, data protection or other concerns that sys admins are supposed to have (for good reason).
It’s not new, but hopefully it’s starting to gather momentum: unitasking. I’ve never been a big fan of multitasking, but somehow I got through the last decade or so of its popularity, one task at a time (ok, mostly one at a time). The article’s title, The Death of Multitasking and Rebirth of Unitasking gives me a bit of hope that continuously interrupted attention will soon be regarded widely for what our brains have long known it to be: a waste of time.
This comic from The Usable Learning Blog provides the perfect, visual, I’d say even visceral, explanation of why information dumps do not work. You can really feel the learner’s reaction.
I especially love how the author/artist Julie Dirksen concludes (emphasis added by me):
You can make them sit through it, but you can’t make them pick it up and carry it around…
Do you sometimes have trouble understanding your own notes? Miss a point or two in a crucial meeting? I know I do. And I know that I definitely want to check out Pear Note: “A note taking utility” (how unsexy sounding for something so tempting)…
Pear Note records audio and/or video while you take your notes, so later you can find what was being said when you typed something. You can play back an entire recording, or jump straight to the point you need. Watch this short video to get the full picture.
From a learning theory point of view, having to take notes in class is a serious dump o’ cognitive load (yo’ po’ brain is doing double duty trying to understand and trying to record it all for later). So being able to take down the very minimum and know that you can go back and hear critical parts without hunting could be a real relief for students sitting in a lecture hall. Or for anyone sitting in any meeting room.
You can listen better, so you can understand better and participate more effectively.
Pear Notes is only for Macs running Leopard (10.5) with an update for Snow Leopard (10.6) in the works. This might finally get me to update from Tiger. Finally…
P.S. Assuming he’s been correctly quoted I can’t help passing on this quip about face-to-face teaching from Open University’s James Fleck:
“[...] It’s a process whereby the notes of the lecturer are transferred to the notes of the student without passing through the brain of either [...]“
Some years back I was lucky enough to experience the making of Head First books from behind the scenes. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates’ idea behind Head First – learning books that grab your brain’s attention and let you learn effectively and enjoyably – was relatively new at the time. At the time, the process to create a Head First book was, of course, still rough around the edges.
Today the process has been refined considerably, and O’Reilly generously lets us all peek in on what Head First books are built on: the learner’s journey. Take a look at Head First editor Brian Sawyer’s video on the learner’s journey. If you’re creating learning material – for any media – you’ll appreciate the insight. Thank you Head First.
And then…
Being easily distracted as I am (not scattered, curious!), I was intrigued by the title of another of Brian’s videos: Introducing The Back of the Napkin. It makes perfect sense that someone involved with Head First books would have great tips about visual information. I’ve just ordered Dan Roan’s The Back of the Napkin and can’t wait to see it! A recent, text-heavy e-learning project could benefit from a little visual help, and this might just be the right inspiration for it.
Are you trying to move beyond taking “snapshots” into making decent photos? How do you know when you’ve gone beyond taking snapshots? Don’t get me wrong, I love snapshots, all the gazillions of them stuffed in shoeboxes or hiding out on my hard disk.
Recently I’ve been learning a lot about photography through podcasts and experimenting with a used Canon 350D that I bought for the purpose. Nicole Young, a successfull iStockPhoto contributor, was recently interviewed by Frederick Van Johnson of This Week in Photography fame. She mentioned how submitting photos to iStockPhoto is a learning experience. So of course I had to check it out…
And they have this cool article where you get to see the difference between a snapshot and a photo that iStock would accept as sellable material: Are you taking snapshots? A *lot* of the difference, not surprisingly, is about composition, your photographic eye as it were. A great resource for anyone who’s got the bug to create nice pictures, with or without intentions to sell on iStockPhoto.
Here’s a sample, can you say what it is that make this a snapshot?
A bit late to the game, just discovered YouTube’s Edu offering of videos from university partners. They describe it as “videos and channels from our university and college partners”. Without taking the time to dig deeper, I wonder what it means to be a partner and how a college or university gets to be one.
A quick browse through the videos shows big names like MIT, U Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Hofstra, Tulane, and others. I took a peek at an MIT lecture from 2002, apparently a prof’s review lecture before exams. Ever wondered what an MIT lecture on Electricity and Magnetism might look like? Go on, be brave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js9SLJ2TU2c
Fortunately there are videos with content other than straight recordings of college lectures, interviews with Noam Chomsky for example.
I’m looking forward to browsing a bit more. First quick impressions: interesting, worth exploring, curious about the value.
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photo from 
Here’s one to look into: videos of university lectures from the big names at 