Serendipity35

Anyone who has moved a course from face-to-face to an online environment knows that some things that worked fine in the classroom don't work as well online.

You hear about the learning theory that is labeled "constructivist" a lot these days, particularly with online learning. One popular finding from that area of learning research is that assignments that work need to focus more on process, rather than the task. But that is more challenging to design.

Identifying tasks is not only easier at the outset, but is probably going to be easier to analyze and assess. Tasks can be quantifiable and gradable. Process-based learning is much harder to evaluate because there are more variables.

I found this to be especially true in the five-year Writing Initiative at PCCC that I finished directing last fall. Although we used existing tasks such as an exit essay exam that existed before the Initiative as a quantifiable assessment tool, it was clear that this was not the best way to demonstrate the changes in the writing of the students in the wider sense.

The difficulty for us was partially that to shift the focus to process, we needed changes in what faculty valued in their grading. We introduced rubrics for writing but also for information literacy and critical thinking. We also introduced the use of ePortfolios to the college.  Because we included technology into the learning environment and students used it in their writing process, the assignments evaluation and grade should also include those elements. That represents a big change for many faculty.

Designing digital assignments is often seen as something for online learning, but students are learning digitally in any classroom on or offline. Students are using computers to work on projects, do research, collaborate with their peers, and interact with resources, but are then graded on the final product. The process is not included.

To evaluate the process of research and the organization and application of found information is obviously a large part of the learning process and is certainly important to a teacher's overall objectives in giving the assignment. But if the evaluation is based solely on the final product, students realize that the process is not valued in the same way.

Some instructors successfully used multiple smaller writing tasks rather than the dreaded semester-long research paper and then segmented their writing assignments. In this way, you might grade the topic design or proposal as the first element. This can be as a simple as a title and first paragraph to establishing goals, timelines, resources, technology and other elements if appropriate.

And the final learning objects don't always have to be "the paper." Again, this is new ground for many teachers and a final product that is a website, wiki, blog, video or combination rather than a paper is really radical. But digital assignments by their very name suggest images, links to Internet sites and a much wider scope for what an assignment means for the student and the teacher.

I was reading an article called "The Problem of 'Pedagogy' in a Web 2.0 Era"  and it got me thinking about how often we throw around that term in higher education even though very few educators at that level have any formal training in it.

Higher education faculty don't get any courses on pedagogy or learning theory in their degree programs. Faculty members in four-year universities are often researchers and their focus is on their research and not on how learning occurs and perhaps not even as much on their own disciplinary knowledge as those at other colleges.

Of course, there should be faculty development efforts at all colleges and those should include workshops and presentations to increase awareness of the basic research in learning theory of the past few decades as well as what is being found currently.

All teachers learn by teaching. That in itself is a learning theory that has several names attached to it. But that learning process is made more efficient by exposing faculty to what we know about pedagogy. That doesn't mean just learning the language of constructivism or Bloom's taxonomy. It means trying out lessons and being exposed to new approaches to what is often very old content.

And if you are teaching older, non-traditional students, then you really should be aware of what has been found to work in the field of andragogy. Pedagogy literally means "leading children" and came first from studies of students in grades K-6 and then later included those in secondary school. Andragogy was a later area of study. Malcolm Knowles and others theorized that methods used to teach children are often not the most effective ways of teaching adults. I think many college professors would say that their students are often somewhere between those two -gogies. The 18 year old freshman, the 21 year old senior, and the 23 year old graduate student are very likely to sit in a classroom with a 28 year old freshman, 35 year old senior and a 50 year old graduate student.

I would love to be in a discussion with a group of interested educators about some learning theory like "situated cognition." If the topic is new to the participants, all the better. Situated cognition is the name given to the theory that knowing is inseparable from doing. It proposes that all knowledge is situated in activity which is bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.

To take this theory on means nothing less than making an epistemological shift from empiricism. To put it into action in a classroom would mean encouraging thinking on the fly rather than the typical back-and-forth of knowledge storage and retrieval. Cognition cannot be separated from the context.

If it sounds radical, it's because it is radical. And yet, students and teachers have been doing it throughout their lives - though probably not very often in a classroom setting.

Do I think this should be the new way to teach? No. But I would love to hear educators talking about it and about learning theories, pedagogy and andragogy with some of the same passion that they discuss their research, promotion and tenure, and contracts.

UPDATED from 11/20/07

As a follow-up to my post on using wikis, I came across a short post from gearfire.net with 4 suggestions on how students should use Wikipedia in research.

The preface is something students have already figured out for most classes: Never cite Wikipedia in an academic paper. But that's just for the benefit of your teacher (and your grade) because you should use Wikipedia.

Here's my take on those suggestions in a classroom scenario of my own where I'm teaching To Kill A Mockingbird.

---

Okay class, now I know some teachers here have you told you that you can't use Wikipedia for your research, but I know that you are using it. So, I actually will require you to use it for this paper we're going to be doing on the novel. I've got some suggestions for right now while we are formulating topics. Look up at the Wikipedia page I have on the projector and let's use Wikipedia to get background information.

For example, I would be happy to see one of you decide to learn something about Harper Lee's hometown which served as a model for the book's setting. Not a bad topic, though I caution you that it might be tough to find out very much. Then again, these papers are short, so do you really want to find five whole books on your topic?

What else do we see here?

Yes, one of you future lawyers might want to write something on the impact of the fictional Atticus Finch on the real legal profession.

We won't have time in class to talk much about the Great Depression, but I assume that the class has studied it at least once in some history class. Just in case, before we get into a discussion tomorrow, I put two questions on the side board for homework. Take a look at this on Wikipedia in order to answer them and if you can add something from your study of history or find any errors, let us know tomorrow.

Melissa, as our lovable class radical, perhaps you'd like to look at the controversial nature of this book for your paper? Think about it.

Did everyone notice the LINKS at the bottom of the article? These are EXTERNAL links (unlike the ones we just looked at that are internal and go to other Wikipedia entries). TIP: the sources cited in these links are more likely to be accepted on a final paper by the other teachers in this school.

I thought that someone might want to read some or all of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, a book about the author.  Drew, you seemed intrigued that Harper Lee never wrote another novel, and remembered her as a character in the movie Capote. Want to take this book as your topic?

If you are going to the library or a search engine to find interesting topics for your TKAM paper for me, consider the KEYWORDS hyperlinked in the articles.

Linda, a legal eagle in my other class, read this section online this morning:

When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of raping her. The story and the trial were covered by her father's newspaper. Lett was convicted and sentenced to death, but a series of letters claiming Lett had been falsely accused caused his sentence to be commuted to life in prison where he died of tuberculosis in 1937.^[9]Scottsboro Boys incident occurred when she was six years old and would also be covered by her father's paper, Lee has stated that she had in mind something less sensational than that, although the case served the same purpose in displaying Southern attitudes about prejudice.^[1] -

Linda decided to do her paper on the actual cases of that time to see how realistic the legal portrayal is in the novel. She decided to focus on the Scottsboro Boys incident to start even though it's not the incident that really inspired Lee. She'll see if she can come up with more on the case in Monroeville. I look forward to that paper.

Oh, Drew - if you come across anything in that biography you're reading on Lee about this, please share it with Linda. No, that's not cheating. It's collaboration. It's good, and, No, I didn't say it was for extra credit - but maybe I'll make collaboration a requirement of the grade. OK, stop groaning.

I would like to point out to the class those little superscript numbers in that passage. Look familiar? Yes, that's right, much of what is on Wikipedia has footnotes. Those REFERENCES at the bottom are to books and articles that were used to put this article together. I'm hoping that this year I can get you guys to read some of those original sources. Yes Jason, you can cite those if you actually use them.

So what we're trying to do here is have you use Wikipedia to get started.

You need to really focus your research, get some background and context for the topic, so that you won't waste time looking up stuff and reading things you don't need.

Yes, this will save you time. You don't want to write a long paper for this, and I don't really want to read a pile of them for the next week. I want 2 or 3 pages of brilliance on something neither one of us ever thought about before this assignment.

No one will be able to do their paper by just using Wikipedia, but all of us can get started there.

And don't cite Wikpedia as a source - cite the source that was used to create the Wikipedia entry. Got it?

So, have a nice Thanksgiving weekend, give this some thought and we'll hit the road with it on Monday.

Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives from 1956 created by a committee of educators chaired by Bloom. He edited the first volume of the 3 volume handbook - Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: the classification of educational goals.

This classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives) is an education classic. The taxonomy divides educational objectives into three "domains": Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively). One of the important goals of Bloom's Taxonomy was to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education.

In 2001, a revised version of the taxonomy was created. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, edited by Lorin W. Anderson and David R. Krathwohl, was published.

The blog at you-can-teach-writing.com has a good list of lesser-known facts about the revision. I particularly like #10:

The authors don’t push standardized testing. Because national and state testing programs and performance scoring guides have high stakes consequences, they can have a negative impact on classrooms, the authors say. They refer to such testing programs as external assessments “because people who typically do not teach in classrooms mandate them (p. 248) [italics added]. Since such high stakes tests won’t disappear any time soon, the authors of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy say, “Teachers need to find ways of incorporating these external assessments into classroom instruction that are positive and constructive” (p. 233).