Digital Wisdom

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As you may remember, we discussed the term "digital native" coined by Marc Prensky back in July. I think we should reflect on how old this digital immigrants/ digital natives talk actually is. Prensky noted a sea change in K-12 students… two years before I graduated from high school (2001). An entire generation has been through the education system since this term was coined. If anything, the trends he noted 17 years ago have accelerated.

Prensky has since written other articles that are well worth mentioning. The first is about what technology ISN'T good at. With so much of the education world moving rapidly toward digitization, what role do physical teachers play? As teachers, we must be aware of the weaknesses inherent in whatever delivery medium we're working in at the moment. Prensky says we must come to grips with three questions:

1. How do we use the technology wisely? 
2. How do we find best symbiosis of brain and machine? 
3. What should we outsource to machines, and what should be reserved for humans and human minds?

He says, "I would propose empathy as the most important element a good teacher offers that technology cannot replace." Empathy goes far beyond content delivery (which machines are often better at) to understand each learner as a unique human individual with strengths, weaknesses, passions, and propensities. At its core, Presky says, empathy means that teachers like students... and want to help them. Would you agree?

In a second post he also identifies "passion" (basically enthusiasm) as something that is irreplaceable by technology.  He says, 

"While teachers think, quite rightly, that their own passion for their subject is important, and hope to inspire their students by showing that passion, a teacher’s goal now must additionally be to bring each student to the material they are teaching through each student’s own passion, whatever it may be."

Prensky argues that a resource like Khan Academy - which has one good lesson for just about every subject out there - should have 100 good lessons for each subject, each approaching the subject from a unique angle or passion. He gives the example of teaching math using music examples and music theory for students passionate about music.

This conversation dovetails quite nicely into Prenky's writing about digital wisdom and knowing how to use technology to its fullest extent. When we use digital technology we're faced with ethical and moral dilemmas as well as more pragmatic problems and questions:

1. What should we memorize vs allow a machine to remember for us? 
2. Should we allow machines like smartphones and wearables to enhance and extend our minds? 
3. When should we allow digital calendars and to-do lists to plan and prioritize our lives? 

Easy answers don't exist. In your lifetime computers moved from room-sized monstrosities to pocketable, wearable supercomptuers. They will continue to take over more and more of our lives and even move into our physical bodies. The answer is not to avoid technology or to demonize it. The only workable solution is to teach and model digital wisdom and digital literacy so that our students will know how to interact wisely with technology for the rest of their lives. 

Works Cited: 

1. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf  
2. http://www.wisdompage.com/Prensky01.html
3. http://marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-What_Isn't_Technology_Good_At-(Part%202)-EDTECH-Nov-Dec-1012.pdf
4. http://marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-What_Isn't_Technology_Good_At-EDTECH-Sept-Oct-1012.pdf
5. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/worlds-first-cyborg-human-evolution-science/ 

7 Things You Should Know About...

This week on the education blog we'll look at a resource that may fill an existing gap for you: EDUCAUSE's library of "Seven things you should know about..." 

These short meta-analyses provide a synthesized, at-a-glance summary of many pressing issues in education today. Each entry also features case studies and examples that provide down-to-earth help for everyday practitioners such as ourselves. I believe you'll find these resources informative but also accessible and easy to read. Enjoy!


For example:

Seven things you should know about:

1. Research on Active Learning Classrooms
2. Developments in Learning Analytics
3. The 2017 Key Issues in Teaching and Learning
4. Personalized Learning
5. Institutional Self-Assessment 
6. Cross-Institutional Collaboration
7. Developments in Instructional Design 
8. Gamification of Education

And many more. The archive goes back to 2005 and contains about 150 discrete articles. 

Thoughtful and Timely Feedback

Providing clear, timely, substantial feedback to learners is a foundational principle of modern educational learning theory. Why does feedback matter so much?

When I was in ninth grade my algebra teacher labeled me as one of the dumb kids. In fact, I was struggling with a course design problem related to feedback. Many times, she would provide feedback on my algebra assignments weeks or even months after I turned in the work. At that point, it was too late to implement her suggestions to improve my performance on the next assignment.

Contrast that experience with my experience taking algebra in college. By the time I took college Algebra, an online learning tool called MyMathLab had revolutionized homework and feedback for Algebra students. Rather than face the harsh criticism and personal judgment of my teacher months after I had done my assignments, MyMathLab provided impersonal, instant feedback for me, allowing me the freedom to fail without feeling singled out as a person of below average intelligence. I aced the course and all subsequent Algebra and math courses I took in college.

The primary difference between my algebra teacher in high school and the automatic, algorithmic learning program was that I received instant feedback on each step of the process. My feedback was always 100% accurate. The feedback the computer gave me was always accompanied with videos that showed me how to do the problem correctly, passages from the textbook that explained the learning concepts, and the computer would even solve the problem for me if I chose and give me a new, similar problem to solve.

In developing a professional teaching practice, providing timely and complete feedback to learners shows our respect for their work. Student work is the heart of a course. Our goal as teachers should be to to empower students to become scholars, subject matter experts, and skilled practitioners of their Biblical craft. My goal in Apologetics is not to cover all the content or subject matter, although those are one important element of the course. My goal is to train Biblical apologists who are capable, confident, and yet humble. My goal is to instill an attitude of gentleness and respect but to develop the skill of making a defense for the classic doctrines of the Christian faith.

No teacher that I know loves grading. I would challenge you, however, that we ignore the centrality of feedback at our own peril. Easy assignments that give the illusion of learning will not leave students satisfied for the long term with the learning they experienced at Bible School. 

Populi gives us new and exciting ways to gather data and provide feedback for our students. For example, the lessons feature of Populi allows us to have an intelligent conversation with our students about the amount of time they spent engaging with the material, the number of words that they generated in discussion forums, and the frequency and depth of their engagement with the material.  

I hope that the following verses will spur us on to appreciate and value the opportunity and privilege we each get to hone and sharpen student’s skills as they faithfully demonstrate their learning for us:

Proverbs 15: 31 If you listen to constructive criticism, you will be at home among the wise (NLT)

Proverbs 3:12 “For whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth. ” (KJV)

Proverbs 11:14  “Where no wise guidance is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (AMP)

Online Discipleship and Relationships: Being Relational Online

Today on the education blog let’s explore a topic that is crucial in the online learning and teaching discussion: how do we recreate a personal touch in the digital environment? Researchers that study distance education define an online teaching and learning persona as your, “social presence.” You may be saying to yourself… “But Ric, I don’t do online teaching.“ Ah, but remember what we said on the blog last week. We are all doing online teaching just by using a learning management system such as Populi.

As we know, discipleship is key to any biblical student – teacher relationship. Can natural and frustration-free discipleship take place online? Can mediated communication such as Populi really take the place of face-to-face classroom interaction? Perhaps not perfectly, no, but social interaction online does have strengths that the face-to-face classroom lacks. For example, it is easy in an online discussion to require a main post and follow-up comments from each student and to track whether or not each student is participating. In the physical classroom, it is much more difficult to track this individually.

It gets better. Lowenthal and Dunlap (2009) looked at whether or not storytelling can enhance online learning. They concluded that digital storytelling such as explaining a photo, narrating a video, giving a PowerPoint presentation, or disclosing personal information and relating it to what is being learned helped students retain more information, feel more involved in their learning, and humanize the teacher. Bottom line: we can be relational online.

What does it really mean to be relational in an online context? Bentley (2011) defines social presence as “an individual’s ability to demonstrate his or her state of being in a virtual space”. This would include the level of connectivity and communication taking place on a personal level between a teacher and his or her students. It would also include the individual’s “level of availability” for interpersonal interactions.

Bentley says, “social presence may represent the degree to which experiences seem unmediated.” Oddly enough, an experience that seems unmediated will almost always occur when teachers and students are comfortable and familiar with interactions in the online environment. This kind of natural social interaction takes place best when people forget that they are using a learning management system or a tool to communicate at all.

With that in mind, here are a few questions to get a conversation started today:

How comfortable are you communicating with students online? How comfortable do you think students are communicating with each other (or with anyone else for that matter) online? Is your interaction with students on Populi important to you? Is it important to our students? Do you seek opportunities for online interaction or avoid it? Do you view Populi as a way to serve our students or as a simple grading and correcting tool? Is an online class or course shell that is devoid of all personal information and human interaction ideal? Can we do better?

Thanks for thinking with me. As usual, leave any comments below. You can click the drop-down box and select “anonymous” to make a comment anonymously.

Works cited

Bentley, Kia J. (2011). The centrality of social presence in online teaching and learning 

Lowenthal, Patrick R. And Joanna C. Dunlap. (2009). From pixel on a screen to real person in your students lives: establishing social presence using digital storytelling

Distance Education Best Practices

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First of all, I want to congratulate and thank everyone who has been doing online education at EBI for the past three semesters. Moore and Kearsley propose a working definition of distance education as, “teaching and planned learning in which teaching normally occurs in a different place from learning, requiring communication through technologies as well as special institutional organization (2012).” Two years ago, online learning didn’t happen at EBI. Today, we each interact regularly with students asynchronously via Populi, which technically counts as distance education according to Moore and Kearsley’s definition. Crazy!

Still, we have a long way to go in order to catch up with current educational trends. Allen and Seaman (2013) Point out that as of 2012, 62.4% of higher education institutions provided complete online programs to students. They claim that only 13.5% of higher education institutions offered no purely online classes at all... that was five years ago. You may have heard we’re moving in the direction of offering purely online classes ourselves.

Considering that, let’s examine some online learning best practices in this blog post. Moore and Kearsley (2012) propose that distance education is best delivered and designed in the broader framework of a supporting system. In their words, “adopting a systems approach [to distance ed] is the secret of successful practice.”  They identify the main subsystems of a distance education system as: technology, learning, teaching, program/course design, management, policy, and organization. 

They go on to say, “Content, or subject matter, does not make a course. In a course, the content is organized into a carefully designed structure that is intended to make it as easy as possible for the student to learn... Therefore, preparing a distance education course requires not only the content expert but also instructional designers who can organize the content according to what is known about the theory and practice of knowledge management and the theory of learning.” The point here is that online education (just like all education) is best envisioned as a collaborative effort between multiple experts: design experts, technologists, chief education officers (think dean of ed), and content experts to name a few examples.

Everyone agrees that the key to an online class is communication. This communication should not just exist in the form of content delivery (one way communication). Moore and Kearsley say, “it is the communication that goes on between the individual learner and an instructor that transforms common information into personally relevant knowledge (2012)”. They go on to explain that the form this personal communication takes and the extent of the communication will vary based on the subject matter being taught, the educational philosophy of the designers, and even the maturity level of the students. But they make a point to emphasize the imperative nature of this type of communication. Similarly, most instructional designers emphasize the importance of peer interactions via discussion boards, wikis, or blogs, etc.

Finally, a key component of all education including distance education is quality control. In distance education, the key components of quality control are the products that students complete at regular intervals throughout the course. These are generally thought of as “assignments”, though quality control can be insured another ways as well. These assignments should be based on the knowledge content of the course and deserve careful review, evaluation, correction, and comment from the instructor himself. Anecdotally, speaking from my own experience, I have found that online assignments tend to be more challenging and time consuming than assignments in face-to-face courses. There is a very real sense in which online learning requires discipline, time, and commitment.

What has your experience been so far in delivering assignments and some content knowledge online to students at EBI using Populi? What components of the systems approach outlined above do you include in your regular teaching even for face-to-face courses? Which course has been the best online course that you’ve ever taken? What made it so good? What are the essential characteristics and qualities of a good online teacher? Are they the same as those for a good face-to-face teacher?

Feedback is always welcome.

Sources:

Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (2012). Distance education: a systems view of online learning. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

I. Elaine Allen, & Jeff Seaman. (2013). Changing course: ten years of tracking online education in the United States. Pearson Education.