An introduction that can only be understood after reading the whole chapter is no introduction at all.
That seems obvious, right? But how many times have you read the introduction to a chapter in a technical book and found yourself completely flummoxed by it, only to come back to it later and agree it makes perfect sense? Far too often, I'd wager, even if you're not conscious of it. But now that I've said it, you'll start to notice it more and more often....
This has always been a problem, but the much-acclaimed "democratising" effects of the internet are also "amateurising", and more and more people are attempting to write articles and books on technical topics without any real grounding in the principles of technical writing. Introdutions are one of the first things to suffer, and it is becoming all too common to see an introduction that talks about something in completely opaque terms, leaving the reader more confused than if there had been no introduction at all. The writer very often acknowledges this, commenting not to worry if you don't
understand it.
My golden rule is simple:
Don't tell me something until you're ready to explain it properly. If I don't understand what you've said, you'd have been just as well saying nothing at all.
There are several factors that contribute to this problem, and some are more complex than others, so I'm going to focus on one problem alone just now: thematisation of new information confuses the reader.
What's thematisation of new information? I hear you cry. It's something I've just done to demonstrate the problem. I've been presenting a relatively coherent argument that you can follow without effort, even if you disagree with it. But then suddenly I threw in something your brain wasn't really ready to process, and you don't know what I'm talking about (unless you *do* know what I'm talking about, in which case just make believe for a while).
The "theme" of a clause or a sentence is (put simply) the first actual "thing" that the reader encounters (ie a noun phrase).
Consider the difference between:
Last week, John went to Paris.
and
John went to Paris last week.
In the first, we are talking about "last week", our theme, whereas in the second, we are talking about John. It's only a slight difference in emphasis, but it must be pretty important, otherwise we wouldn't go to the effort of maintaining the two different possible structures.
In the clause "thematisation of new information confuses the reader", the "theme" is "thematisation of new information".
I've started the clause with something most readers do not understand, and crucially I have done nothing to prepare them for it.
The conceptual gulf here is that the writer is fixated on the name of what they're trying to teach as a defining feature, rather than accepting that the name is arbitrary and effectively meaningless, and what we need to focus on is the concept and meaning.
Imagine you want to teach the idea of a biscuit tin. You've got a choice between:
"A metal container used to store biscuits is called a biscuit tin."and
"A biscuit tin is a metal container used to store biscuits."
The latter form assumes that the reader has encountered the term "biscuit tin" and is actively seeking its meaning, but the former introduces it the concept before sticking a label on it. It assumes we understand "metal container", "store" and "biscuits", but so does the other one. The first one, therefore, acts as a better introduction; the second is a dictionary entry, not copy for an instructional book.
A challenge for the reader: pick up a grammar book, any grammar book, and turn to the section on the subjunctive. How many times does the word "subjunctive" appear before the reader gets any real idea of the concept? And I'm not including "implies uncertainty or doubt", because that really isn't the meaning subjunctive in a great many languages. (EG in Spanish creo que... implies uncertainty, but it doesn't take the subjunctive.)
In my experience all the trickiest grammar points are provided with no adequate introduction in the vast majority of cases. When an introduction includes words to the effect of "don't worry if this is unclear, it will be explained later," I find myself wanting to ask the author why he didn't just leave it until he was ready to explain it properly.
Now I feel that my last sentence needs clarification: by explaining it properly I don't mean explaining it fully, because, of course, that's not what an introduction is supposed to do. An introduction can't and shouldn't give the full detail, but it should leave you with a rough notion of what the concept is, which can be refined as it goes.
Before I started properly on Scottish Gaelic, I read a great little book: Scottish Gaelic: a brief introduction (now republished as An Introduction to Scottish Gaelic). The book was an introduction. Each chapter was merely an introduction. The book didn't attempt to teach you anything in any depth, but to provide a broad overview of the concepts in the language. It's hard to say exactly how much of an effect it had on my learning, but I certainly didn't feel like I struggled with many of the concepts when I finally came round to actually learning how to use them "in anger".
I've read several internet language learners say they like to use grammar books this way -- read through without "learning" per se, just to get a feel for the overall "shape" of the language before starting to study in earnest, so it's a shame there aren't more books written in this style.
The introduction author has two great enemies.
The first is precision. No-one wants to write things that are wrong, and any simple explanation is prone to being cut down by pedantry, which ends up leading many to start with a dry technical description, which doesn't really help the reader to understand.
The second enemy is the contents page.
No, seriously.
Think about it: the textbook has never managed to supplant lectures as the main source of study, despite being cheaper than face-to-face lessons and far more readily available. And what do all textbooks have in common? Contents pages.
What... you expected a more in-depth argument than that? Correlation isn't good enough for you? Well then, try this on for causation:
What do you get on a contents page? Quite often a single noun phrase. "The nominal group." "The subjunctive mood." "Hydrostatic load." "Currying functions." Before you even turn to the first page of the chapter you're bombarded with arbitrary, undefined terms. All new information, all theme; nothing that actually means anything.
I believe that this predisposes people to write bad introductions, because it makes them act as if the reader is looking for a definition of a given term, when often nothing could be further from the truth: the term given is merely a label of convenience to summarise a body of knowledge that the writer hopes to impart to the reader.
But now the word's up there in bold type and there's no getting away from it. It could be ignored, but wouldn't you feel a little silly actively avoiding the word used in the title of the chapter for the first page or two? The title has poisoned the chapter.
OK, I'm exaggerating grossly here. Not all books have bad introductions. Some books have meaningful chapter titles rather than simply throwing the jargon in there. But there's something about the format that encourages thinking this way, and it's something that bears conscious consideration....
09 February 2013
08 February 2013
The misunderstandings in MOOCs
I had another article lined up and ready to go, and then I started reading about MOOCs on-line, and in particular a lot of the reaction to the total collapse of Coursera's MOOC Fundamentals of on-line education (#foemooc), one of the biggest and most revealing ironies in history.
One article quoted a law professor as follows:
We are currently experiencing a similar bubble in Web 2.0. So-called investors* have ploughed money into companies like Facebook and Instagram, only to see stock prices suffer when the market suddenly realises that they have no business plan.
[* The modern stockmarket makes a mockery of the term "investor". "Investing" is supposed to mean putting money in so that a company can grow, but most high-profile IPOs, including Facebook and the like, are simply a change of ownership. The money is for the previous owner, not the business.]
Why do we want to replicate that model at a cost to our valued educational institutions?
I've commented on that side of things before, noting Udacity's move toward corporate sponsorship: MOOCs as adverts for a given vendor.
This MOOC-as-sponsorship model might even work to some extent for the universities too -- the University of Edinburgh's Coursera MOOC E-Learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc) is based on a module taken from one of their masters programmes, and it's possible that the increased exposure it gives the course among potential students will get back the cost of putting the MOOC version together and on-line. The risk, though, is that if too much material is available for free, the adverts will basically kill the market for the product.
One article in particular caught my attention. Over at the blog online learning insights, blogger and instructional designer Debbie Morrison wrote a post about three takeaways from the collapse of the Coursera Fundamentals of Online Education course.
Her first "takeaway" is, in my ever so humble opinion, completely and utterly wrong. Totally. Completely. Utterly. Let's take a look:
1) The instructional model is shifting to be student-centric, away from an institution or instructor-focused model.In a massive, open and online course with thousands of students, the instructor must relinquish control of the student learning process. The instructor-focused model is counter intuitive to the idea of a MOOC; in the MOOC model the student directs and drives his or her learning. The pedagogy used for traditional courses is not applicable to a course on a massive scale. With the Web as the classroom platform, students learn by making connections with various ‘nodes’ of content [not all provided by the instructor] on the Web, they aggregate content, and create knowledge that is assessed not by the instructor, but by peers or self. This pedagogy builds upon the constructivist theory, and more recently a theory developed by Downes and Siemens, the connectivist learning model.
Wrong... how so?
Debbie Morrison clearly knows a thing or two about building online courses; unlike me, she's actually written them. But when she claims that the a tight teacher-led course is "counter intuitive to the idea of a MOOC", she's projecting her views into a reality that is distinctly different. The origin of the MOOC is in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The original MOOCs were very much instructor-led, with very specific, well defined tasks for the student to follow.
Because the tasks were very tightly controlled, marking could be automated, and hundreds of thousands of students could be individually assessed by machine.
Morrison is mistakenly applying the standards for her own niche, the small-to-medium online course, to a very different animal.
Morrison's courses are comparable to a seminar-based course in more traditional education. Every generation has accepted that seminar-based courses are better than lecture-based ones, but that they're more work for the teacher because the uncontrolled variables lead to a massive space of potential outcomes and directions for the class.
Online education for small classes is a good realisation of the seminar-based course, because the online medium removes some of the time pressures on the instructor in terms of organisation, logistics and delivery; time which can be devoted instead to tailored group and individual feedback.
But when you've got one instructor and one teaching assistant for a class of 41,000 students (foe) or 1 instructor for a class of 150,000 (claimed by Ed Tech Magazine for a Udacity course), then that's out the window. A teacher cannot be a "guide" or a "facilitator" to a group that big. A teacher cannot even have a concept of the individual students as human beings (we're well beyond Dunbar's Number here).
A massive course cannot be student-centred because there are simply too many students.
And let's go back to the seminar-style class for a minute. Seminar-based classes are far more common in taught postgrad courses than in undergrad courses, and while you might encounter them in undergrad courses, you'll only see them in degree-year modules, or in very specialised, low intake degree schemes. As I said before, seminar based courses are more work, but more specifically, they take a lot more time to grade. An open-ended course leads to an open-ended assessment. If you have a class of 400 students, marking essays is an endless task, and it is very difficult to mark them all fairly and equally, but if you give them a structured exam, marking is quick, easy and completely objective.
But more than that, the standard system provides a gradual shift in abstraction. Perhaps this is a happy accident rather than by design, but as we progress through our degree scheme, we should be building up a toolkit of useful skills and concepts that can later be applied elsewhere. As that toolkit expands, we are slowly given greater freedom to apply and think.
My opinion is, and always had been, that the MOOC must be seen as a vehicle for "basic skills" courses. Many within the educational establishment reject basic skills teaching in favour of "whole topic" teaching, but I personally believe that they've done so on the wrong grounds.
If you were to tell me that basic skills teaching is categorically bad, I would disagree with you. Basic skills are prerequisite to advanced skills.
But if instead you were to tell me that teaching basic skills properly and exhaustively is good in theory, but unfortunately not practical given class sizes and constraints on classroom time, I think I would be able to accept your point.
And this is where online can really flourish: we can take the basic skills load out of the classroom. Have the students work on the basic skills individually, using constrained tasks that a computer can assess. These types of tasks can be completed much quicker without all the usual classroom faff of handing out sheets, explaining the task, checking up on students, going over the answers, addressing individual errors with the whole group etc. The volume of work that is assessed or otherwise receives feedback can be increased, as the teacher's time is no longer a limiting factor.
Then the students can go into the class with the basic skills they need to address larger, more abstract, more challenging tasks. Lessons can be more rewarding for both the student and the teacher.
Debbie Morrison proposes turning a course with a 5-figure class roll into a student-centred, open-ended seminar course, but that is precisely what the FOE Mooc attempted to do, and it was a total train wreck. Debbie's "takeaway" from the incident isn't asking us to learn from their mistakes, but to repeat them.
One article quoted a law professor as follows:
“Part of what Coursera’s gotten right is that it makes more sense to build your user base first and then figure out later how to monetize it, than to worry too much at the beginning about how to monetize it,” said Edward Rock, a law professor serving as the University of Pennsylvania’s senior adviser on open course initiatives.Is he mad, or just plain ignorant? It's this sort of thinking that leads people to compare the MOOC boom to the internet bubble at the turn of the century. After all, that bubble was based on companies building massive user bases with no idea of how to monetarise them.
We are currently experiencing a similar bubble in Web 2.0. So-called investors* have ploughed money into companies like Facebook and Instagram, only to see stock prices suffer when the market suddenly realises that they have no business plan.
[* The modern stockmarket makes a mockery of the term "investor". "Investing" is supposed to mean putting money in so that a company can grow, but most high-profile IPOs, including Facebook and the like, are simply a change of ownership. The money is for the previous owner, not the business.]
Why do we want to replicate that model at a cost to our valued educational institutions?
I've commented on that side of things before, noting Udacity's move toward corporate sponsorship: MOOCs as adverts for a given vendor.
This MOOC-as-sponsorship model might even work to some extent for the universities too -- the University of Edinburgh's Coursera MOOC E-Learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc) is based on a module taken from one of their masters programmes, and it's possible that the increased exposure it gives the course among potential students will get back the cost of putting the MOOC version together and on-line. The risk, though, is that if too much material is available for free, the adverts will basically kill the market for the product.
One article in particular caught my attention. Over at the blog online learning insights, blogger and instructional designer Debbie Morrison wrote a post about three takeaways from the collapse of the Coursera Fundamentals of Online Education course.
Her first "takeaway" is, in my ever so humble opinion, completely and utterly wrong. Totally. Completely. Utterly. Let's take a look:
1) The instructional model is shifting to be student-centric, away from an institution or instructor-focused model.In a massive, open and online course with thousands of students, the instructor must relinquish control of the student learning process. The instructor-focused model is counter intuitive to the idea of a MOOC; in the MOOC model the student directs and drives his or her learning. The pedagogy used for traditional courses is not applicable to a course on a massive scale. With the Web as the classroom platform, students learn by making connections with various ‘nodes’ of content [not all provided by the instructor] on the Web, they aggregate content, and create knowledge that is assessed not by the instructor, but by peers or self. This pedagogy builds upon the constructivist theory, and more recently a theory developed by Downes and Siemens, the connectivist learning model.
Wrong... how so?
Debbie Morrison clearly knows a thing or two about building online courses; unlike me, she's actually written them. But when she claims that the a tight teacher-led course is "counter intuitive to the idea of a MOOC", she's projecting her views into a reality that is distinctly different. The origin of the MOOC is in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The original MOOCs were very much instructor-led, with very specific, well defined tasks for the student to follow.
Because the tasks were very tightly controlled, marking could be automated, and hundreds of thousands of students could be individually assessed by machine.
Morrison is mistakenly applying the standards for her own niche, the small-to-medium online course, to a very different animal.
Morrison's courses are comparable to a seminar-based course in more traditional education. Every generation has accepted that seminar-based courses are better than lecture-based ones, but that they're more work for the teacher because the uncontrolled variables lead to a massive space of potential outcomes and directions for the class.
Online education for small classes is a good realisation of the seminar-based course, because the online medium removes some of the time pressures on the instructor in terms of organisation, logistics and delivery; time which can be devoted instead to tailored group and individual feedback.
But when you've got one instructor and one teaching assistant for a class of 41,000 students (foe) or 1 instructor for a class of 150,000 (claimed by Ed Tech Magazine for a Udacity course), then that's out the window. A teacher cannot be a "guide" or a "facilitator" to a group that big. A teacher cannot even have a concept of the individual students as human beings (we're well beyond Dunbar's Number here).
A massive course cannot be student-centred because there are simply too many students.
And let's go back to the seminar-style class for a minute. Seminar-based classes are far more common in taught postgrad courses than in undergrad courses, and while you might encounter them in undergrad courses, you'll only see them in degree-year modules, or in very specialised, low intake degree schemes. As I said before, seminar based courses are more work, but more specifically, they take a lot more time to grade. An open-ended course leads to an open-ended assessment. If you have a class of 400 students, marking essays is an endless task, and it is very difficult to mark them all fairly and equally, but if you give them a structured exam, marking is quick, easy and completely objective.
But more than that, the standard system provides a gradual shift in abstraction. Perhaps this is a happy accident rather than by design, but as we progress through our degree scheme, we should be building up a toolkit of useful skills and concepts that can later be applied elsewhere. As that toolkit expands, we are slowly given greater freedom to apply and think.
My opinion is, and always had been, that the MOOC must be seen as a vehicle for "basic skills" courses. Many within the educational establishment reject basic skills teaching in favour of "whole topic" teaching, but I personally believe that they've done so on the wrong grounds.
If you were to tell me that basic skills teaching is categorically bad, I would disagree with you. Basic skills are prerequisite to advanced skills.
But if instead you were to tell me that teaching basic skills properly and exhaustively is good in theory, but unfortunately not practical given class sizes and constraints on classroom time, I think I would be able to accept your point.
And this is where online can really flourish: we can take the basic skills load out of the classroom. Have the students work on the basic skills individually, using constrained tasks that a computer can assess. These types of tasks can be completed much quicker without all the usual classroom faff of handing out sheets, explaining the task, checking up on students, going over the answers, addressing individual errors with the whole group etc. The volume of work that is assessed or otherwise receives feedback can be increased, as the teacher's time is no longer a limiting factor.
Then the students can go into the class with the basic skills they need to address larger, more abstract, more challenging tasks. Lessons can be more rewarding for both the student and the teacher.
Debbie Morrison proposes turning a course with a 5-figure class roll into a student-centred, open-ended seminar course, but that is precisely what the FOE Mooc attempted to do, and it was a total train wreck. Debbie's "takeaway" from the incident isn't asking us to learn from their mistakes, but to repeat them.
06 February 2013
A corpus in the class...
This week I got my first opportunity to try out corpus linguistics in the classroom. It was a class of technically-oriented students (computers and media), and it was a small enough group that I could get them all in front of a computer for a bit, so I thought I'd give it a go.
(See below for a brief summary of what corpus linguistics actually is if you don't already know.)
I didn't think to check beforehand whether they understood the concept of regular expressions (a computing term, not a linguistic one). Not a major mistake. It turned out that they haven't been taught that in their courses, so I ended up teaching a little bit about regular expressions. There's nothing wrong with teaching a bit of computing in an English class, as long as you are teaching it through English, after all!
I didn't prepare enough good examples to pull out anything interesting from, as I wanted to work with whatever the students suggested. Why? Well, the whole point of corpus linguistics is that it's full of things you don't expect, and wouldn't be able to guess. With the first class, this resulted in findings so dull that I can't even remember what words we used. But in the second, someone said "amazing" (which may well have been a sarcastic reaction to my geeky enthusiasm for corpus linguistics!) and I searched for it in the British National Corpus. As I was looking at the computer screen and reading out a few of the words appearing around "amazing", I spotted a pattern: beach... bar... hotel... wait! The word "amazing" appears very frequently in adverts for package holidays. You learn something new every day.
So the spontaneous examples from the class are definitely a good thing, but next time I'll have a list of other examples that show interesting results.
Overall, though, I felt the lesson went really well for a first attempt. I focused on two tasks, the first of which was shamelessly ripped off of the first assessed task I carried out with a corpus back at uni: checking the frequency of occurence of must, have to, and 've got to in English, then drilling down to see differences in register. The second task was far more freeform and exploratory, asking them to look for common phrasal verbs. It was far more of an open-ended task than I would usually set, and I was quite unsure of myself setting it. It worked well with the first group and not so well with the second. Basically, there wasn't enough support to kick off the phrasal verb task. I should have given them a more gradual introduction by starting with a specific phrasal verb, then asking them to find phrasal verbs with a specific verb, and then verbs that go with a particular particle, then leave them to explore openly for the last 20 minutes or so.
But, yeah... if I ever find myself in front of a class who that sort of thing would appeal to, and where the facilities are available, I'll give it another go.
What is corpus linguistics?
"Corpus linguistics" is the analysis of a large body (corpus) of texts using computers. It allows us to search for patterns in language statistically, rather than relying on our intuition or simply trusting the grammar book. You use a piece of software called a concordancer to extract the information, and there's a great concordancer free on Brigham Young University's website, with access to several different English-language corpora, as well as Spanish and Portuguese.
(See below for a brief summary of what corpus linguistics actually is if you don't already know.)
I didn't think to check beforehand whether they understood the concept of regular expressions (a computing term, not a linguistic one). Not a major mistake. It turned out that they haven't been taught that in their courses, so I ended up teaching a little bit about regular expressions. There's nothing wrong with teaching a bit of computing in an English class, as long as you are teaching it through English, after all!
I didn't prepare enough good examples to pull out anything interesting from, as I wanted to work with whatever the students suggested. Why? Well, the whole point of corpus linguistics is that it's full of things you don't expect, and wouldn't be able to guess. With the first class, this resulted in findings so dull that I can't even remember what words we used. But in the second, someone said "amazing" (which may well have been a sarcastic reaction to my geeky enthusiasm for corpus linguistics!) and I searched for it in the British National Corpus. As I was looking at the computer screen and reading out a few of the words appearing around "amazing", I spotted a pattern: beach... bar... hotel... wait! The word "amazing" appears very frequently in adverts for package holidays. You learn something new every day.
So the spontaneous examples from the class are definitely a good thing, but next time I'll have a list of other examples that show interesting results.
Overall, though, I felt the lesson went really well for a first attempt. I focused on two tasks, the first of which was shamelessly ripped off of the first assessed task I carried out with a corpus back at uni: checking the frequency of occurence of must, have to, and 've got to in English, then drilling down to see differences in register. The second task was far more freeform and exploratory, asking them to look for common phrasal verbs. It was far more of an open-ended task than I would usually set, and I was quite unsure of myself setting it. It worked well with the first group and not so well with the second. Basically, there wasn't enough support to kick off the phrasal verb task. I should have given them a more gradual introduction by starting with a specific phrasal verb, then asking them to find phrasal verbs with a specific verb, and then verbs that go with a particular particle, then leave them to explore openly for the last 20 minutes or so.
But, yeah... if I ever find myself in front of a class who that sort of thing would appeal to, and where the facilities are available, I'll give it another go.
What is corpus linguistics?
"Corpus linguistics" is the analysis of a large body (corpus) of texts using computers. It allows us to search for patterns in language statistically, rather than relying on our intuition or simply trusting the grammar book. You use a piece of software called a concordancer to extract the information, and there's a great concordancer free on Brigham Young University's website, with access to several different English-language corpora, as well as Spanish and Portuguese.
05 February 2013
Groupwork in action...?
So a couple of days ago I commented on the idea of peer instruction, and noted how it said that peer explanation worked because a student who had just learned something recently was often able to explain it to a peer. I compared this with my rant against groupwork from a year or so ago.
I found myself feeling more open to groupwork, now that I had a context, and when I found myself in a room with fewer computers than I expected and an internet-based lesson plan, I needed to test my confidence in it.
And yes, the first group seemed to get something out of it. One of the students with the best English was sitting with one of the guys with a pretty basic level, and he was bringing him up. Most of the pairs were working cooperatively and discovering stuff. Success!... I thought.
The second group weren't as good. Every pair seemed to have one person working and the other doing nothing. Or one person checking their email, or playing a game, or browsing the net.
But I can't say that this was due to the "groupwork" thing, because there was a rather major difference between the two groups: most of the second group bring a laptop with them, and so they weren't working on the uni desktop machines. Was it the seating arrangements, the screen size or maybe the lack of mice (everyone was using the touchpad) that made the whole thing seem more "solo" to them? Or was it simply that "my laptop" is "my territory"?
This is the group I'm most likely to experiment with in terms of teamwork, though, as they seem to be a fairly tight group and work on lots of activities together in other classes. It will be interesting to challenge my own preconceptions.
I found myself feeling more open to groupwork, now that I had a context, and when I found myself in a room with fewer computers than I expected and an internet-based lesson plan, I needed to test my confidence in it.
And yes, the first group seemed to get something out of it. One of the students with the best English was sitting with one of the guys with a pretty basic level, and he was bringing him up. Most of the pairs were working cooperatively and discovering stuff. Success!... I thought.
The second group weren't as good. Every pair seemed to have one person working and the other doing nothing. Or one person checking their email, or playing a game, or browsing the net.
But I can't say that this was due to the "groupwork" thing, because there was a rather major difference between the two groups: most of the second group bring a laptop with them, and so they weren't working on the uni desktop machines. Was it the seating arrangements, the screen size or maybe the lack of mice (everyone was using the touchpad) that made the whole thing seem more "solo" to them? Or was it simply that "my laptop" is "my territory"?
This is the group I'm most likely to experiment with in terms of teamwork, though, as they seem to be a fairly tight group and work on lots of activities together in other classes. It will be interesting to challenge my own preconceptions.
03 February 2013
MOOCs? Bah humbug!
Yesterday I got an email from the Georgia Tech online education Coursera MOOC explaining why it was important that people signed up for groups. I felt it was slightly patronising to start off with, but made particularly so because I received it a while after I'd clicked "Assign Me A Group". The reason I hadn't signed up for any groups was simple: the course opened on Monday and the group signup had crashed before I had a chance to look at it, and I didn't have the time to look at it again until Saturday, because I had a very hectic working week (28 and a half student contact hours, plus planning, marking and reporting). So I'd been quite annoyed to log in on Saturday morning hoping to do my week's MOOC work and find that I couldn't do my week's homework because I wasn't in a group.
The course has now been postponed indefinitely, presumably because there were too many people in certain groups and too many people without groups. Overall, their approach seems massively shortsighted -- the original problem with group signups was that they'd done it with a Google Docs spreadsheet with wide open permissions, meaning it could all too easily get mucked up. A spreadsheet can't handle that sort of concurrency anyway.
Then there was the links to the videos that had been uploaded at way too high a resolution and took too long to download.
Overall, for a course specifically teaching online education, the organisers appear to have had a spectacularly poor grasp of the technological side of things.
I signed up for another MOOC on online education, again with Coursera, but from the University of Edinburgh: Elearning and Digital Cultures. This also opened on Monday, and I didn't get a chance to look at it until Saturday, when I saw that the instructions for the week included watching a bunch of short films before tuning into a live webcast with the tutor on Friday. They didn't give enough notice, and it really misses the point of global online education if you have to watch at a certain time, even though the segment is not interactive.
So I'm getting pretty cynical about MOOCs and the woolly thinking and poor planning surrounding them. So thank heavens for Edinburgh University's Introduction to Philosophy, featuring a scruffy looking bloke in a poor-fitting jumper talking to a camera. It's finally something I feel I can relate to. (And to think I only signed up because I saw the Edinburgh logo, and there was no other Edinburgh courses at the time!)
The course has now been postponed indefinitely, presumably because there were too many people in certain groups and too many people without groups. Overall, their approach seems massively shortsighted -- the original problem with group signups was that they'd done it with a Google Docs spreadsheet with wide open permissions, meaning it could all too easily get mucked up. A spreadsheet can't handle that sort of concurrency anyway.
Then there was the links to the videos that had been uploaded at way too high a resolution and took too long to download.
Overall, for a course specifically teaching online education, the organisers appear to have had a spectacularly poor grasp of the technological side of things.
I signed up for another MOOC on online education, again with Coursera, but from the University of Edinburgh: Elearning and Digital Cultures. This also opened on Monday, and I didn't get a chance to look at it until Saturday, when I saw that the instructions for the week included watching a bunch of short films before tuning into a live webcast with the tutor on Friday. They didn't give enough notice, and it really misses the point of global online education if you have to watch at a certain time, even though the segment is not interactive.
So I'm getting pretty cynical about MOOCs and the woolly thinking and poor planning surrounding them. So thank heavens for Edinburgh University's Introduction to Philosophy, featuring a scruffy looking bloke in a poor-fitting jumper talking to a camera. It's finally something I feel I can relate to. (And to think I only signed up because I saw the Edinburgh logo, and there was no other Edinburgh courses at the time!)
02 February 2013
Peer Instruction
Well that was serendipitous. Just yesterday I linked to an old post of mine called The Myth Of Groupwork. My argument against groupwork was that students don't know how to teach each other, and that even if they did, the nature of the task doesn't present teaching as the goal, so instead of working together to learn, the students work together to fill in the gaps on the sheet. A "task-focused" approach or, as I compared it to in that post, a "pub-quiz" approach to a question sheet.
But today I sat down to watch some videos from a Coursera MOOC on online education, provided by Georgia Tech (Georgia the US state, not Georgia the country). Now I'm not too impressed with the course in a lot of respects so far, but it is full of very good information that I will definitely learn from. (A fuller review may come later, when I've made a bigger dent in my workload here.)
I've just paused a video midflow to write this because the course instructor has just started talking about an idea called Peer Instruction. Apparently it was "discovered" in 1990 by a guy who "discovered" that lecturers "didn't work". Peer-led learning is nothing new really, and everybody knows that lectures alone don't work. But leaving that aside...
Eric Mazur, the man credited in the video with this "discovery" did make a useful observation, even if others probably did before him. Students who had learned a new concept in class successfully were often better able to explain it to a peer (that had been in the same lesson but hadn't understood) than the teacher, because the student has just gone through the process of reasoning out the problem.
There is one intrinsic flaw in this reasoning: a good teacher should be capable of giving a better explanation than a non-expert peer; Mazur's discovery was in effect nothing more than discovering he wasn't a particularly good teacher. Which is a pretty good explanation, for why this teaching idea was "discovered" by one of the leading lights in optical physics (>groan<... sorry) rather than a pedagogy or education professional.
This is OK... that's how universities work, and that's why learner independence is so important in a traditional university: lecturers are subject experts, not education experts.
But it's when I compare this idea of Peer Instruction to my observations of groupwork that things start to get interesting, because the incident refered to in my previous post wasn't something that we'd just learned. It was a grammar class with a mixture of natives, long-term learners and recent learners, so re-evaluating it from the perspective of Peer Instruction, an essential element was missing: the people who understood the concepts we were being tested on had already known them a long time before the class started, so they didn't have the recent experience of having recently worked out the answer that successful peer instruction is based on.
One of my philosophies (and a frequent undercurrent in my posts here) is that it's safer to assume a teaching technique is bad than good until you understand how it works and when, where and why it's appropriate. Most groupwork is justified by the overly simplistic notion of "learning from your peers", but the idea of "learning from peers who have recently learned the concept" is massively more useful.
Now that I better understand the why and when of groupwork, I'm far less negative about it, but that doesn't mean I'll suddenly take it up wholeheartedly. In my situation, this is entirely academic: my classes are at such a mixed level that I the central idea of peer instruction fails: the students who understand the concept generally understood the concept (at least in part) before the lesson -- they do not have the recent experience of working out how the language point works....
But today I sat down to watch some videos from a Coursera MOOC on online education, provided by Georgia Tech (Georgia the US state, not Georgia the country). Now I'm not too impressed with the course in a lot of respects so far, but it is full of very good information that I will definitely learn from. (A fuller review may come later, when I've made a bigger dent in my workload here.)
I've just paused a video midflow to write this because the course instructor has just started talking about an idea called Peer Instruction. Apparently it was "discovered" in 1990 by a guy who "discovered" that lecturers "didn't work". Peer-led learning is nothing new really, and everybody knows that lectures alone don't work. But leaving that aside...
Eric Mazur, the man credited in the video with this "discovery" did make a useful observation, even if others probably did before him. Students who had learned a new concept in class successfully were often better able to explain it to a peer (that had been in the same lesson but hadn't understood) than the teacher, because the student has just gone through the process of reasoning out the problem.
There is one intrinsic flaw in this reasoning: a good teacher should be capable of giving a better explanation than a non-expert peer; Mazur's discovery was in effect nothing more than discovering he wasn't a particularly good teacher. Which is a pretty good explanation, for why this teaching idea was "discovered" by one of the leading lights in optical physics (>groan<... sorry) rather than a pedagogy or education professional.
This is OK... that's how universities work, and that's why learner independence is so important in a traditional university: lecturers are subject experts, not education experts.
But it's when I compare this idea of Peer Instruction to my observations of groupwork that things start to get interesting, because the incident refered to in my previous post wasn't something that we'd just learned. It was a grammar class with a mixture of natives, long-term learners and recent learners, so re-evaluating it from the perspective of Peer Instruction, an essential element was missing: the people who understood the concepts we were being tested on had already known them a long time before the class started, so they didn't have the recent experience of having recently worked out the answer that successful peer instruction is based on.
One of my philosophies (and a frequent undercurrent in my posts here) is that it's safer to assume a teaching technique is bad than good until you understand how it works and when, where and why it's appropriate. Most groupwork is justified by the overly simplistic notion of "learning from your peers", but the idea of "learning from peers who have recently learned the concept" is massively more useful.
Now that I better understand the why and when of groupwork, I'm far less negative about it, but that doesn't mean I'll suddenly take it up wholeheartedly. In my situation, this is entirely academic: my classes are at such a mixed level that I the central idea of peer instruction fails: the students who understand the concept generally understood the concept (at least in part) before the lesson -- they do not have the recent experience of working out how the language point works....
01 February 2013
Physician, heal thyself!
I have many criticisms about teaching and/or teachers, and this sometimes leads me to wind up other teachers. Not here, though, because I've been far too focused on my own teaching!
My criticisms aren't intended to be taken too personally, though. They're not personal failings, they're just mistakes that are pretty much endemic in teaching, so it's not really that surprising that I fall into the trap of making a lot of these mistakes myself.
So this post is a reflection on one of the errors I constantly find myself slipping into, and that I need to be on constant guard against.
A year ago I wrote about a personal experience as a learner, in a post entitled The Myth of Groupwork. My criticism of the groupwork was that it was too "task-focused", in that the students and the teacher were looking to fill in all the answers on the sheet, not to "learn" per se. The results of groupwork tasks give the teacher no insight into the level of knowledge of any individual student, and there's not normally any way of verifying that any of the lower-achieving students have actually learnt anything from the experience.
My error isn't in assigning groupwork, but it's that problem of being "task-focused". Sometimes I make the mistake of looking at the result of "the class", rather than verifying that every individual has learned from the experience.
Which is not to say that a classroom teacher can check every student's work for every task, every time. No, that's a logistical impossibility.
What I'm asking of myself is to stay mindful of any compromises I have to make between pedagogy and logistics. I'm asking myself to remember at the end of the class that I do not and cannot know whether that lesson has been a success... or at least not until exam marking day.
There's a very human tendency to start to accept the things you do as being intrinsically and unquestionably correct, even while retaining a superficial recognition that it is in fact a compromise. Once you do this, you stop trying to improve, and that's something that I never want to do. Realism forces me to accept the compromise, but optimism tells me that if I keep my eyes open, I'll find ways to slowly improve and compromise less.
What I've always aimed to do when criticising pedagogy and methodology is raise the questions and increase the readers' mindfulness of their own actions and motivations, but sometimes I've fallen into the trap of criticising more bluntly. That can be taken far too personally, and doesn't help anyone.
So I suppose that I have to be more mindful not only in the class, but when discussing classes too....
My criticisms aren't intended to be taken too personally, though. They're not personal failings, they're just mistakes that are pretty much endemic in teaching, so it's not really that surprising that I fall into the trap of making a lot of these mistakes myself.
So this post is a reflection on one of the errors I constantly find myself slipping into, and that I need to be on constant guard against.
A year ago I wrote about a personal experience as a learner, in a post entitled The Myth of Groupwork. My criticism of the groupwork was that it was too "task-focused", in that the students and the teacher were looking to fill in all the answers on the sheet, not to "learn" per se. The results of groupwork tasks give the teacher no insight into the level of knowledge of any individual student, and there's not normally any way of verifying that any of the lower-achieving students have actually learnt anything from the experience.
My error isn't in assigning groupwork, but it's that problem of being "task-focused". Sometimes I make the mistake of looking at the result of "the class", rather than verifying that every individual has learned from the experience.
Which is not to say that a classroom teacher can check every student's work for every task, every time. No, that's a logistical impossibility.
What I'm asking of myself is to stay mindful of any compromises I have to make between pedagogy and logistics. I'm asking myself to remember at the end of the class that I do not and cannot know whether that lesson has been a success... or at least not until exam marking day.
There's a very human tendency to start to accept the things you do as being intrinsically and unquestionably correct, even while retaining a superficial recognition that it is in fact a compromise. Once you do this, you stop trying to improve, and that's something that I never want to do. Realism forces me to accept the compromise, but optimism tells me that if I keep my eyes open, I'll find ways to slowly improve and compromise less.
What I've always aimed to do when criticising pedagogy and methodology is raise the questions and increase the readers' mindfulness of their own actions and motivations, but sometimes I've fallen into the trap of criticising more bluntly. That can be taken far too personally, and doesn't help anyone.
So I suppose that I have to be more mindful not only in the class, but when discussing classes too....
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