Wandering Academic

The Power of Introverts

editor — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:16:28 +0000

Susan Cain on introversion and why we should remember how powerful it can be. I especially liked her assessment of contemporary education: desks in rows were a good thing for her, desks in pods are a bad thing for her. And people like her. And in her calls to action at the end: stop the madness about constant group work. Both intro and extroverts need to learn how to operate solo, because “that’s where deep thought comes from.” Here, here.

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Albert Einstein’s High School Report Card

editor — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:55:53 +0000

This looks like the report card of just about any bright-ish student. What made him different?

When Grades Matter

Copying = Theft?

editor — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:52:45 +0000

This short post on the Freakonomics blog got me thinking more about copying, piracy and intellectual property. If you pay attention to the tech world recently, you’ll know that the future of technology innovation is being affected by patents. There are companies whose entire business, literally, is owning intellectual property and suing other companies in an attempt to collect royalties from their patents. In many cases, these so-called “patent trolls” didn’t even invent the intellectual property in the first place, they are merely leveraging patent law to make a profit from the creative work of others.

I see nothing inherently wrong with all of this focus on intellectual property. It does create wealth, and some of that wealth will trickle down to the little people, perhaps creating a job or two.

The Freakonimics blog post points out that copying is generally not considered theft in the traditional sense. When I copy a song, I’m not taking it away from anyone. So, even though I now have something that doesn’t “belong to me” and that I didn’t have before, you still have your song, so I haven’t “stolen” anything from you. Most people, according to the linked NY Times op ed, draw a distinction between copying music or digital media and stealing. It makes a certain amount of sense.

But it seems to me that in the case of digital media, when someone copies (or, “pirates”) the media, they might not be stealing the artifact (because there is no artifact, per se). Rather, they are stealing access to the media. The currency of digital media is one of access – probably because copying is easy, and there are no more artifacts (or, artifacts are on the wane). No one buys records any more, very few people buy CDs these days, and if they do, they won’t be buying them much longer.

So, copying is not theft in the traditional sense, but copying is stealing access, which is the modern commercial equivalent to the old fashioned artifact distribution model. Copying really is stealing.

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Aside: Error Bars in Google Docs

editor — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:59:01 +0000

March 6, 2012: Google Docs can handle error bars in charts. This has always been a thorn in my side with Google Docs. You can’t do even middle school science without error bars. Now you can. Nice.

Now that I can put error bars on charts, Google, could you please fix all the other problems with your products? Like, the amount of tracking of individual activity that you do? And the crazy account system that confuses even the hardiest tech user?

Thanks.

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Standardized Test Anomalies

editor — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:21:00 +0000

School districts across the country are shown to have suspicious testing trends.

Educators and researchers have argued that the intense emphasis on student test scores, a mandate of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, put pressure on educators to show dramatic (and often unrealistic) gains in student achievement. As a result, they argue, cheating is much more likely to occur.

The LA Times had a story with a similar thesis a few months ago, in which teachers, speaking anonymously, said they would indeed cheat if their jobs were on the line.

It seems so obvious. Raise the stakes, and more people will try to beat the even odds. It’s the same on Wall Street, and it’s the same in Vegas. Basic behavioral economics. No surprises.

Does the iPad pass the milkshake test?

The Cello Is The Most Beautiful Instrument.

editor — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:46:30 +0000

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Getting Every Student Involved: Socrative.com

editor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:11:48 +0000

When I first started teaching I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Most young teachers don’t. But I will take the blame: I thought I knew how a class was supposed to run, generally, and I set it up like that. Looking back I realize what a doofus I was being.

To wit: it seemed reasonable to ask 20 kids “does anyone have any questions?” And while for some students that is a reasonable request, for the most part the question is a waste of time. I couldn’t possibly get everyone involved with that question, even though it seemed to be extended to the entire class.

Another mistake I used to make was to have lots of large group discussions. It is intuitive: you get more opinions in a large group discussion than a bunch of small groups. The weaker kids can listen to alternative opinions, broaden their exposure to different concepts. This was also largely a waste of time, because large group discussions were inevitably discussions with a small number of vocal kids and an audience of less-vocal and less-confident kids. Duh.

Anyway, I used to do all that, and I realize now why it is generally less effective than engaging students on an individual basis. Tech makes this task easier.

Google Forms, Documents and Sites are my go-to tech tool for engaging every student simultaneously. They can work together on a document or a site, or they can input responses into a form and I can share the results with them. However it happens, working in a shared space lets me target individuals who need help, it lets students share knowledge and experience, and it mediates the anxiety of a large group discussion.

I took a look at socrative.com a while ago, but I’m going to experiment with it for the first time soon. It is a fancy version of an “e-clicker” tool – the teacher asks some questions or provides some prompt, and the students respond with their own “clickers”. The original clickers were little boxes with a few buttons with which students could vote. Socrative.com takes this to a new place using web apps and the possibility of using any device – laptop, phone, iPad, anything with web access.

I used to think e-clickers were really bad… I mean, in what sense is a multiple choice question an interesting or effective assessment tool? First, I went and took the GRE. It reminded me that multiple choice tests can be mind-bending in the best possible way. Second, I realized that when I stand up and ask a group of kids: “Which characters in Macbeth are blamed for murder of Duncan?” I am asking a kind of low-level factual question, but an important question for reviewing basic information and helping to imprint that material in the students’ working memories. This is a key component of learning, so I might as get good at it. I have the creative project thing down, no problem. It’s the delivery of material that is generally being ignored in education these days, to students’ detriment.

Socrative.com activities could be run for only a few minutes each class, and it can become a kind of ritual, a way of constantly reviewing, and a way for the teacher identify weaknesses and gaps. The questions and prompts can be created easily in an Excel template, or collaboratively using Google Spreadsheets and then imported. Socrative even has a kind of game template for speedy reviews, and a template for end-of-class learning reflection. It is fast formative assessment at its best. It has the added benefit of putting mobile phones to good use, rather than poor use. And suddenly the entire class is engaged at the same time, no exceptions.

Socrative.com is in public beta, so it’s free to use. Jump on it. Teachers visit: t.socrative.com

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iPad Academic Unveiling

editor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:42:24 +0000

I’ve been spending this academic year doing two things: preparing for PhD programs in Literature, and working with iPads in the classroom. The two are not entirely unrelated – I’m becoming a kind of expert on iPads and how to leverage them effectively in a number of different educational environments, and I suspect that there will be heavy iPad influence in higher education, like there is in secondary ed.

Because on the one hand I read and am interested in lots of literary, philosophical and neuroscientific stories related to education, and on the other hand I’m generating a lot of content specifically about iPads, I’ve decided to spin-off the iPad work to a new site: iPad Academic. It’s like Wandering Academic, but with a very specific focus: original iPad content. I’m not going to be copying and pasting stuff from other blogs and other news sites. iPad Academic is all original, all iPad, mostly geared toward teachers and students, but with some attention going to being productive and creative with this device. Anyway, feel free to bookmark it, sign up for the RSS feed, whatever. Send it to the tech people in your lives that might gain a little insight or who might find it useful.

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Will iBooks Author Create A Wave of Self-Published Teachers?

editor — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:59:42 +0000

As with anything Apple, the recent education-themed announcement has everyone dreaming of a better future for the children, and all that. The question you keep reading is “will e-textbooks change the face of education?”, just like people asked about the iPad when it first came out. And while I’m very impressed by the design of the new textbooks available on iBooks 2, and I love the fact that they include touchable animations and videos to supplement text, the books themselves don’t seem revolutionary. They are evolutionary, certainly – they are digitized, enhanced versions of learning materials we’ve been using for decades. They are very engaging, at least some of them are. I get it. They are cheap, too. Great. Up-to-date, portable, and I’m able to take notes and quiz myself. Perfect. Thank you, Apple. Really, thank you.

But a better textbook doesn’t herald a new form of education. The sample chapters from McGraw-Hill and Pearson were just textbooks, with some fancy-looking animations. E.O. Wilson’s “Life on Earth” is really good, but it is sort of a self-promotion packaged as a book: the end of chapter 2, titled “Project Based Learning”, is just a short description of what will appear in the book as projects, rather than an actual project for students to complete. Whatever, there is a timeline for all of this, I understand.

What really interests me is iBooks Author. Fiddling around with it, it feels like a version of Pages built for the iPad screen, with organizational tools that fit the paradigm of “Book”: chapters, sub-chapters, title pages, etc. There are built-in ways to include multimedia components, like little comprehension self-quizzes and image galleries. If you are handy with a tool such as Hype, you can easily put your HTML5 animations into a book. It’s a great package of components for the budding book publisher.

But it struck me – why not create course materials with this? As a teacher, why shouldn’t I just craft my course documents and all the rest, package it up, and distribute it to my students? Well, there are several reasons iBooks Author isn’t ready for this.

No copy-paste. Actually, there is a version of copy-paste. Select some text, un-highlight it, “Search” for the text, then copy it from the search bar. But this is not true copy-paste, and so iBooks will be useless for students who want to paste notes into other apps like Noteshelf or Evernote. That is a true short-coming. I understand the need to protect the content of reference materials, but there should a small fair-use maximum word count that can be copied.

Note-taking is not robust enough. I mean, this is a touch-screen device. Made by Apple, the company that created iBooks. Why oh why haven’t they included the ability to mark the page itself, like with a stylus? Is it because Steve Jobs hated styluses? Well, he was wrong about that. He really was. I’m running two iPad pilot programs with high school students, and they need the stylus for effective creative and scholarly tasks. You just need it. Sorry, Steve. And iBooks, if it had an awesome handwriting engine like Noteshelf, would be the killer education app. It’s not the case.

No print, or open in… If I wrote a book and wanted to include a worksheet for a teacher to use with her class, she would be unable to print the worksheet, copy the text, or open the file in some other app that would accommodate her desire to save one page. In that sense it’s no good for collecting lesson plans or anything people might use - it will only be useful for materials people might read. I guess you could include the worksheet as an image in the book, have the reader open the image in full screen view, and then screenshot the worksheet, and paste it into Pages or Noteshelf or something like that. Pretty cumbersome.

I hate to hate on Apple products, because this is an exciting development for schools who want to cut down on textbook costs, who want to increase engagement with their students, and all that. We want the same thing where I work, which is why we’re running 1:1 iPad pilots in the first place. I guess I kind of expected more from iBooks Author.

But lo, there is a tool for the Mac that makes iPad-friendly books, allows you to print and share individual pages of a book, and allows for handwritten notes. It doesn’t, like iBooks, allow the author to update all the readers with a newly edited copy, but copy-paste will work just fine. It’s called Pages. For the teacher who self-publishes, Pages is the better, more flexible tool for now.

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PA Teachers will keep working for free when funds run out

editor — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:15:02 +0000

via Philly.com by Dan Hardy

I was disgusted when I read this. The Chester Upland School District has implemented huge cuts on personnel and budgets for its schools, teachers, and staff. Class sizes are around 40 in some areas. And on January 11, the district will run out of funds to pay its teachers. The teachers’ reaction is to keep coming to work for free, because, as one teacher puts it, “We are adults, we will find a way. The students don’t have a contingency plan. They need to be educated…”

In what other professional field would this be allowed to occur? In what other professional field would that be the reaction of the professionals? Imagine workers for the Department of Transportation – you know, the guys that stand on the highway slowing traffic, while their colleagues do essential public work like fix roads and clear debris and other difficult, largely invisible but hugely important tasks. Imagine the state running out of money for roads (that never seems to happen, it is always schools that get cut, isn’t it?). And so, they say, hey guys, after January 11th, we won’t be able to pay you. Sorry.

What would the reaction be? I guarantee that not a single PENNDOT worker, for all their dedication and hard work, would put up with it and say “Well, the roads need to be repaired if people are going to get around, you know, to get to work. People don’t have a contingency for the roads being undrivable. We are adults, so we will find a way. We’ll be there on Monday, paycheck or not.”

I’m not sure if teachers in this situation are heroes or suckers.

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