There have been a couple interesting articles recently on the current and future importance of programming skills.
Clive Thompson had an article in Wired a few months ago called coding for the masses:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_thompson_wereallcoders/
Marc Prensky also wrote an article called Programming is the new literacy:
http://www.edutopia.org/programming-the-new-literacy
Thompson's take is that software affects almost everything we do, and therefore more of us need to become acquainted with the field of programming. In addition he says that understanding programming changes the way you look at things. It makes you realize that every problem is comprised of many smaller problems. This understanding of how to approach problem solving might enable people who use software to be less passive users ( accepting whatever a software company builds and delivers) and more of an educated consumer (it's not impossible to change this, and it's not even hard to do, so fix it to enable users to do X). The book Program or be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff is cited in the Wired article, I'm planning on checking it out, I'll let you know if it's good.
The Prensky article argues that so many things we do in everyday life qualify as programming something. From setting up your universal remote to changing your settings in facebook or blogger. I do not believe that the fact that I change settings in a software I use makes me a programmer. I don't even necessarily agree that everyone will *need* to be able to program, say in C++ or Java. I do, however, think that there will be more instances where the barrier to entry for programming skills are lessened, and things like scratch, alice, flash, even android's app inventor are early examples of what I think will be an ongoing trend.
What I think is at the heart of the issue in this programming literacy conversation is to achieve agility in learning - to realize and be comfortable with the fact that for the rest of your life you will continually be learning new, and sometimes hard, things. I don't think the key is whether someone can program in one language or another per se, but that they have the attitude to roll up their sleeves and get dirty learning something new, even if it's hard and/or scary at first, for the sake of being able to do more things and be more of an active empowered participant, and less a passive receiver. Maybe we should design some sort of game to promote programmatic and hacker thinking in kids!
Even if someone does become proficient in one programming language, new languages come along and other languages fall off. I think it is the mindset to continually learn and challenge yourself that will be increasingly critical in our world.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Monday, September 27, 2010
Mindtools
Originally when I heard the term "mindtools" I associated it with concept maps or schemas, like the kind you would create using webspiration. I didn't see how Excel could be considered a mindtool. Having read the Jonassen chapter on mindtools I realize that anything that forces you to reflect on and organize your thinking is a mindtool. Looking at it from that perspective, I can absolutely see how excel could be considered a mindtool in that you are forced to consider discrete pieces of information, how to categorize them, organize them, and how best to create visualizations with charts and graphs. I think a mindtool really has less to do with the tool itself and more to do with the crystallization of thinking.
Some other tools we've talked about, like flickr and delicious are really good researching tools. I have used flickr to get first person perspective on big events like Katrina and the Iranian election and subsequent protests. I have seen people use flickr's tagging capabilities, including museums and art history classes, to underscore important elements of a photo. In a photo taken during the Iranian election protests a photo taken of a woman in the protests tagged the cellphone that the woman was talking into, highlighting that the cell network had not yet been disabled at the time the photo was taken.
Besides the ability to do research by performing searches for pre-filtered results, the thing I find compelling about delicious is the folksonomy that you can see emerge. When I am researching a new area, it is helpful to me to see the tags that people have associated with the area. You can see the vocabulary that people use in association with the topic and how they've organized the hierarchy of information. That may not be an ideal means of knowledge creation, but I think it certainly is ideal in being able to quickly get an overall understanding of the landscape of a topic which enables you to conduct more pointed research.
I think what is most important about using these resources is the way they are used. I think it is most effective when these tools are used in the service of facilitating a larger initiative or project, not just tools for tools sake. When designing collaborative, knowledge constructing projects there are some things that I think are worth bearing in mind. The first is to consider what the tools afford. Some tools lend themselves to researching, others to collaboration and others as an information repository. Flickr and delicious are great for researching and sharing, but not for collaborating. In google docs and the now retired google wave, multiple people could be in the same document/environment working simultaneously and collaborating real time. Webspiration allows multiple users to work on the same piece of work, but only one at a time, which seems like asynchronous collaboration to me. One tool we haven't discussed is IM. I think there is potential for instant chat to be the thread of synchronous collaboration across even asynchronous tools.
Another consideration in using these tools has to do with account management. It becomes a bit overwhelming to have so many accounts with so many tools. I imagine that students over the course of time will have to manage not only a blog account, google account, flickr, delicious, wiki, and maybe even blackboard or ning accounts along with multiple email addresses - but also multiple accounts for most of those services for different grades, or even different subjects. We may end up needing another tool to keep track of all our accounts!
Some other tools we've talked about, like flickr and delicious are really good researching tools. I have used flickr to get first person perspective on big events like Katrina and the Iranian election and subsequent protests. I have seen people use flickr's tagging capabilities, including museums and art history classes, to underscore important elements of a photo. In a photo taken during the Iranian election protests a photo taken of a woman in the protests tagged the cellphone that the woman was talking into, highlighting that the cell network had not yet been disabled at the time the photo was taken.
Besides the ability to do research by performing searches for pre-filtered results, the thing I find compelling about delicious is the folksonomy that you can see emerge. When I am researching a new area, it is helpful to me to see the tags that people have associated with the area. You can see the vocabulary that people use in association with the topic and how they've organized the hierarchy of information. That may not be an ideal means of knowledge creation, but I think it certainly is ideal in being able to quickly get an overall understanding of the landscape of a topic which enables you to conduct more pointed research.
I think what is most important about using these resources is the way they are used. I think it is most effective when these tools are used in the service of facilitating a larger initiative or project, not just tools for tools sake. When designing collaborative, knowledge constructing projects there are some things that I think are worth bearing in mind. The first is to consider what the tools afford. Some tools lend themselves to researching, others to collaboration and others as an information repository. Flickr and delicious are great for researching and sharing, but not for collaborating. In google docs and the now retired google wave, multiple people could be in the same document/environment working simultaneously and collaborating real time. Webspiration allows multiple users to work on the same piece of work, but only one at a time, which seems like asynchronous collaboration to me. One tool we haven't discussed is IM. I think there is potential for instant chat to be the thread of synchronous collaboration across even asynchronous tools.
Another consideration in using these tools has to do with account management. It becomes a bit overwhelming to have so many accounts with so many tools. I imagine that students over the course of time will have to manage not only a blog account, google account, flickr, delicious, wiki, and maybe even blackboard or ning accounts along with multiple email addresses - but also multiple accounts for most of those services for different grades, or even different subjects. We may end up needing another tool to keep track of all our accounts!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Week 11 - Looking for weaknesses
Based on Professor Lowes' comments from last week, I tried to keep an eye for weaknesses in the research articles I read this week.
In the Haavind article, she looked at the relationship of low instructor contribution to high collaborative events amongst students. The study started with seven high collaboration classes, but only three classes fit the model of being low in instructor posting and high collaboration events which was sustained through the course, so only those classes were researched.
This is a small data set to start with, and then to throw out four classes and only look at the remaining three is really small. It also seems like there would be value in trying to understand where the contradictions came from. Class 7 had extremely high instructor contribution *and* sustained high collaboration. Why?
In the Zucker report, he looked at the impact of two approaches to promoting student-student interaction and collaboration. An experiment group was told to assign double point value towards grade based on student to student interaction, and was compared to a control group with the normal point assignment.
In this study, after four weeks into the fifteen week class, the teachers hadn't doubled the points for student to student interaction. At that point when they were asked to do so, they did, but, I think the pattern had already been established at that point and it ruins the study.
Zucker also administered a survey and reported a very high student response rate of 82%. It made me wonder how the survey was presented. Who did the students think the survey was coming from - the school, the teacher, a researcher? Just curious. Also, a survey pet peeve of mine is not having "other" as an option, or better yet and open text field. Without one of those options, and by making every question mandatory, he effectively forced the survey takers to agree with him, leaving no room for a response that he didn't consider.
I also noticed that the Rice article references a Cavanaugh study - I thought it was the one we read last week, but no. The one from last week covered distance ed from 1999-2004. The study Rice references covered distance ed from 1980-1998. Really?! Did they look at correspondence classes? Wow.
In the Haavind article, she looked at the relationship of low instructor contribution to high collaborative events amongst students. The study started with seven high collaboration classes, but only three classes fit the model of being low in instructor posting and high collaboration events which was sustained through the course, so only those classes were researched.
This is a small data set to start with, and then to throw out four classes and only look at the remaining three is really small. It also seems like there would be value in trying to understand where the contradictions came from. Class 7 had extremely high instructor contribution *and* sustained high collaboration. Why?
In the Zucker report, he looked at the impact of two approaches to promoting student-student interaction and collaboration. An experiment group was told to assign double point value towards grade based on student to student interaction, and was compared to a control group with the normal point assignment.
In this study, after four weeks into the fifteen week class, the teachers hadn't doubled the points for student to student interaction. At that point when they were asked to do so, they did, but, I think the pattern had already been established at that point and it ruins the study.
Zucker also administered a survey and reported a very high student response rate of 82%. It made me wonder how the survey was presented. Who did the students think the survey was coming from - the school, the teacher, a researcher? Just curious. Also, a survey pet peeve of mine is not having "other" as an option, or better yet and open text field. Without one of those options, and by making every question mandatory, he effectively forced the survey takers to agree with him, leaving no room for a response that he didn't consider.
I also noticed that the Rice article references a Cavanaugh study - I thought it was the one we read last week, but no. The one from last week covered distance ed from 1999-2004. The study Rice references covered distance ed from 1980-1998. Really?! Did they look at correspondence classes? Wow.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Define success
My job is to take web usage data for our site and help business owners understand if their section of the site is "successful" and how to make it better. I see some similar patterns in the meta analysis we read this week.
At the end of the day success looks different from situation to situation depending on your objective, and if a group or a company or an industry can't agree on the same metrics and what they mean, then no one really knows what is being reported.
So, in education, what is our objective? We want kids to learn. But how do you measure how well a kid has learned?
I propose that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to move forward with meaningful, actionable research until we think about this question. What does learning look like? Is it the ability to recall facts, can it be demonstrated in the ability to write an essay? And, to Alejandro's point, what about cheating? Once we identify what success looks like, then students efforts turn to striving to mimic that standard, not learning.
What if we were to accept that in this day and age, anything can be searched for and found, so what is the benefit of memorization. My kids are being taught cursive, and for the life of me I cannot imagine why.
It seems to me like the challenge is to be able to take existing information, sort out the good from the bad, synthesize it, and figure out how to use it appropriately. What if learning was measured by what was created and the process of creating it?
We would look at a student or students ability to pick a project, search for the resources they need to understand it at an appropriate level and take that information and apply it. We'd evaluate their success in collecting and gathering the requisite depth and breadth of information; the level to which they've understood and used the information appropriately; and how well they took the information to create something of their own.
It is unrealistic to think that anyone can learn all that they need for the rest of their life from their time in school. The benefit to this approach is that students learn how to find their answers and be critical thinkers, so whatever the question that arises in the future, they'll know the process to take to build their understanding.
At the end of the day success looks different from situation to situation depending on your objective, and if a group or a company or an industry can't agree on the same metrics and what they mean, then no one really knows what is being reported.
So, in education, what is our objective? We want kids to learn. But how do you measure how well a kid has learned?
I propose that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to move forward with meaningful, actionable research until we think about this question. What does learning look like? Is it the ability to recall facts, can it be demonstrated in the ability to write an essay? And, to Alejandro's point, what about cheating? Once we identify what success looks like, then students efforts turn to striving to mimic that standard, not learning.
What if we were to accept that in this day and age, anything can be searched for and found, so what is the benefit of memorization. My kids are being taught cursive, and for the life of me I cannot imagine why.
It seems to me like the challenge is to be able to take existing information, sort out the good from the bad, synthesize it, and figure out how to use it appropriately. What if learning was measured by what was created and the process of creating it?
We would look at a student or students ability to pick a project, search for the resources they need to understand it at an appropriate level and take that information and apply it. We'd evaluate their success in collecting and gathering the requisite depth and breadth of information; the level to which they've understood and used the information appropriately; and how well they took the information to create something of their own.
It is unrealistic to think that anyone can learn all that they need for the rest of their life from their time in school. The benefit to this approach is that students learn how to find their answers and be critical thinkers, so whatever the question that arises in the future, they'll know the process to take to build their understanding.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Collaboration, All Star style
Nardy and Sean have already done a good job of talking about the logistics of our project and our workings, so I'll just give you some personal observations about the experience.
I think the hardest part of the process was at the beginning when we were trying to settle on the platform we were going to use to collaborate. We all did a lot of double posting and emailing to make sure the message got through to each other. It was a bit time consuming with the over communication and checking into multiple platforms. I don't remember how it is we finally went with the wave, I guess it just naturally evolved that way.
I liked using the wave. In the past I don't think you were able to get email notifications when changes were made to the wave, but they apparently changed that feature and that made life a lot easier. After a while when the wave got so long that it became clunky, Nardy and I discovered that you could delete pieces. Once we were all on the same page, we did a bit of pruning and that made it more manageable.
Nardy and I also communicated with Google chat a lot, which I found to be a huge plus. Whether I was at work in front of my laptop, or around town with my mobile, I got pinged and we could collaborate on resources or answer each others questions.
I found doing the researching for the content and picking the tools to be the most fun. I found trying to put the framework up around it all to be the most daunting, but Sean had a clear vision and he pulled it all together.
I love the benefits that come from working in a team, seeing things in a new light and how collectively you can do something better than you could have individually. We had a really good team, and I'm so happy with how it all turned out!
I think the hardest part of the process was at the beginning when we were trying to settle on the platform we were going to use to collaborate. We all did a lot of double posting and emailing to make sure the message got through to each other. It was a bit time consuming with the over communication and checking into multiple platforms. I don't remember how it is we finally went with the wave, I guess it just naturally evolved that way.
I liked using the wave. In the past I don't think you were able to get email notifications when changes were made to the wave, but they apparently changed that feature and that made life a lot easier. After a while when the wave got so long that it became clunky, Nardy and I discovered that you could delete pieces. Once we were all on the same page, we did a bit of pruning and that made it more manageable.
Nardy and I also communicated with Google chat a lot, which I found to be a huge plus. Whether I was at work in front of my laptop, or around town with my mobile, I got pinged and we could collaborate on resources or answer each others questions.
I found doing the researching for the content and picking the tools to be the most fun. I found trying to put the framework up around it all to be the most daunting, but Sean had a clear vision and he pulled it all together.
I love the benefits that come from working in a team, seeing things in a new light and how collectively you can do something better than you could have individually. We had a really good team, and I'm so happy with how it all turned out!
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Taking a leap...
I don't know about everyone else, but I have found that when there is something that I am dreading, or have a lot of apprehension about, the best thing I can do is stop avoiding it and just jump in.
That's pretty much where I am at right now. I have never taught and have never put a lesson plan together. We've read so much about standards, curriculum, assessment, teaching styles, learning styles - the idea of building something that covers all of those areas seems totally overwhelming. But - I think that once I dive in and get into it, it won't be as overwhelming as I think. I also think this exercise will help me a lot, both in getting over the fear and in giving me a new perspective to consider when reading about online learning.
And, I'm really glad to be doing this with a team!
That's pretty much where I am at right now. I have never taught and have never put a lesson plan together. We've read so much about standards, curriculum, assessment, teaching styles, learning styles - the idea of building something that covers all of those areas seems totally overwhelming. But - I think that once I dive in and get into it, it won't be as overwhelming as I think. I also think this exercise will help me a lot, both in getting over the fear and in giving me a new perspective to consider when reading about online learning.
And, I'm really glad to be doing this with a team!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Week 6 - reassessing
Looking back at the schools I chose, I don't have different views of them now, but that is only because I was able to find so little information in the first place and haven't gotten any more. Perhaps I wish I had chosen different schools where I could have gotten more information, but it seems to be a general challenge, so maybe there wasn't must I could've done differently anyway.
Other views of mine have changed, however. While I believe wholeheartedly in online learning, I think that a blended model that includes both online and face to face holds a lot of potential. I think the ideal model of learning is that which is project based, and a blended style class would lend itself to working in a collaborative research project.
I had also imagined myself building an educational software platform, and while I still want to do that, I realize there are so many more options and I don't want to close myself off to just one. I think if my career were long enough and I had the opportunity, I would also want to spend time researching, and I'd also like to work as a coordinator or consultant to help teachers and school develop innovative ways to redesign their curriculum. And who knows - maybe I'll try teaching after all!
Other views of mine have changed, however. While I believe wholeheartedly in online learning, I think that a blended model that includes both online and face to face holds a lot of potential. I think the ideal model of learning is that which is project based, and a blended style class would lend itself to working in a collaborative research project.
I had also imagined myself building an educational software platform, and while I still want to do that, I realize there are so many more options and I don't want to close myself off to just one. I think if my career were long enough and I had the opportunity, I would also want to spend time researching, and I'd also like to work as a coordinator or consultant to help teachers and school develop innovative ways to redesign their curriculum. And who knows - maybe I'll try teaching after all!
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