The Joy of Stats - Fantastic Video just for the sake of it

The Joy of Stats - Infographics

A Teacher's Experiences of being a Distance Learning student

I'm just about half way through my final unit of a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, a course delivered through Open Universities Australia. I do have a Ph.D, but it didn't take me long after my first horrifying weeks of teaching undergraduates, back in 2005, to realise that I was not really a very good teacher. I know a lot of people would never actually admit this to themselves. I've got more years under my belt now, but I still have much to learn about designing and delivering good programs to my students.

The final assignment of the course is to redesign one of our currently taught programs as a distance education course - a task I am as yet unsure how to tackle. But first things first - What am I making of the experience of being simultaneously a University level teacher, and a student - again?

There is much chatter in the Twitterverse among educators in the United States and Canada - Australian and British teachers only pop up now and again in my timeline - about the growing potential of distance, or e-learning. At the moment, everyone is excited, or disappointed, about whether their proposals were accepted for the upcoming conference of the International Society for Technology in Education, in Philadelphia. If I wasn't tapped into this social network, I now realise, I would be terribly ignorant about what is going on and changing in my own profession. Academic journals just don't get one excited about change!!

I do feel that much of this current interest in e-learning has to do with a general embracing of technology as an enhancement for more conventional classroom activities. There is research by respected scholars to support the trend towards engaging with learners through computer technology, and through social media which is supported by mobile devices. See for example the wonderful recent edited collection by Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Dirk Schneckenberg - Changing Cultures in Higher Education, which goes way beyond the growing impact of technology in higher education contexts, and engages with questions of how education policy, organisational culture, technological development and globalised knowledge intersect to stimulate innovation, and direct change.

Not only learners are being swept up in a second, or third, wave of technology change, but educators themselves are enhancing their teaching practices by engaging with a wider network of professionals through the ease of access brought by mobile devices and social media. The world of e-learning is itself a diverse mixture of platforms, offering potential to all participants in the education landscape - not just students. This shouldn't be forgotten. Making a teacher's or an administrator's job easier, more enjoyable, streamlining administration tasks and enabling ease of communication with students and colleagues, cannot be underestimated. But there is substantial resistance among both teachers and students.

On a side note - so far I haven't printed out any course materials. I uploaded all the course modules and readings to my dropbox using my desktop computer. Then I opened the files from dropbox using the Noterize application on my iPad. I read the course notes, highlighted important sections with my stylus pen, made notes for my blog posts, and posted my blog posts to the LMS all from my iPad. I'm writing my assignment in Pages. I can do it in a coffee shop, if I want to.

Of course, more pragmatic reasons for the growing interest in e-learning is to enable wider, and more equitable access to quality education, and to expand the horizons of once place and culture bound classrooms and lecture theatres. The course I am doing is administered from Perth, Australia. It's students are located in many Australian cities, and other countries - mostly from South Asia. I really value this diversity, and the contributions made by the participants on the discussion board this term about their experiences as teachers in disciplines very different to my own, have been invaluable for me as I negotiate the readings and tackle the assessment tasks.

It wasn't always this good, however. This is the first time out of the four units I've done since 2008, where discussion posts made up a substantial component of the assessment. I can't begin to explain how much better the experience is, when participants are actually participating. You would think that as both adults, and teachers - presumably highly motivated individuals - these educators would be keen to share their thoughts and experiences on a discussion board. But no - when given the option, most would choose to lurk silently. Several people posting on the Welcome and Introductions module expressed fears and anxieties about making public their thoughts and ideas to their fellow students. I don't have the same fears now - but I did when I thought that what I might say could be seen as ignorant, or unimportant, by what I imagined were more experienced people who would judge me as a novice.

What I now know is that I could have learned from those more experienced teachers. As a more experienced teacher now myself, I am somewhat relieved to find that I am still lacking in substantial ways, and that other teachers who might see me as experienced, have much to teach me.

When I try to transfer this insight to designing a distance-education course for students, the one thing which strikes me hardest, is to be cognizant of the anxieties many people feel about being publicly exposed. I don't think this is a reason NOT to make discussion board posts, or blogs, or flip-cam movies or voice threads, compulsory. Rather, this challenging aspect of distance education - which is to expose yourself to and engage with others - could be more highly rewarded. And yet, there are inevitably students who sit silently all term in our face to face classes. This doesn't mean they aren't engaged and learning, however. One thing e-learning, or distance learning has going for it, is that there are diverse ways the shy and the anxious can engage, such as sending blog post directly to the instructor, rather than to the LMS. I don't believe students should be compelled to be exposed - but definitely encouraged.

Building in flexible options for participation is easier in an on-line program. This is one of the strengths of more general kinds of e-learning, and a good argument for why higher-education needs to embrace change, innovation, and recognise that not all learners (or all lecturers / professors) have the same needs, or the same levels of comfort, within this second or third-wave of change.

Involving Faculty in Pedagogy - Modeling Constructivism

As part of my constructivist agenda, I have been aiming high and trying to get the staff at my college to participate in, and generate our own professional development. See my post from where I spoke at the Staff Conference about Trends in International Pedagogy, in September.

One of the things I am doing with the generous assistance of an energetic and enthusiastic colleague, and a fabulous Educational IT person, is building a Wiki for staff from all departments across the college to participate in. I'm hoping at least some of the nearly one hundred academic staff will want to help construct the Wiki. Here's what it looks like.

It was important for the Wiki to be both aesthetically attractive, and easy to use. The name, Volta, was a brain wave of my colleague - a way to bring together the arts and sciences disciplines. It tells participants that

"This Wiki is a resource for sharing ideas, resources, research, classroom practice and pedagogy. Our broad aim is to foster interdisciplinary appreciation and collaboration, and to cultivate an intellectual community of scholars."

We announced it's "Activation" at the last All Staff Meeting, and showed staff through some of the most enticing pages, including: Book Reviews, Useful Teaching Resources, Our Research Interests, Worth Reading, Informative education Blogs, Wiki's and Twitter feeds / groups (including #mathchat and #edchat), Ideas Forum, Philosophy and Literature. Also, importantly, there is much there to look at and laugh about. Hopefully this will entice the more reluctant ones to at least look

All academic staff in the program have been invited to take part, and I will let you know how it goes. The wiki is, however, restricted to academics in our college. If there is no interest, I will try and find out why. I've had a few emails to say, "Well Done" - and "about time someone did this" but no participants yet. I wish I could set up a counter (will have to see if the IT person has an idea how to do this). Must give them time to finish marking exams, I guess... I'm impatient!!

My hope is that, being "grass roots" rather than administered from above, there will be some people who want to take part. It certainly has support on many levels, but will people make the effort? Do teachers really want to take part in evolving a resource which enhances our own professional development, and improves the learning experiences of our students at the same time?

Time will tell. It's the end of the semester, and it's winding down time. I have hopes, though.

Culturally Responsive Story Choices - Evaluation with students' voices

Well, I've had some time to read the short essays from my class, and reflect on the success, or otherwise, of the task. I have some very positive reflections about the value of the exercise overall - and in particular, the positive effects of including of a slideshow of visual images; the constructive elements of my earlier 'looking behind / below a word" exercise, and finally, the value of the exercise in terms of discovering my students prior knowledge (or lack of it) as the case may be.

Ironically, I'm really excited by my own failure to choose a story they would all understand.

The essays themselves were a mixed bag. The students who came to the last tutorial before the holidays, to engage in discussion, and receive the handout where I gave a suggested outline of things to discuss, generally produced clearer writing, and communicated more effectively. The handout justifies the suggested structure with reference to the elements of longer essay writing in Literature with which the students will soon need to become familiar. I reduced this structure to three or four very short paragraphs.

Introduce your theme / topic / (in this case 'image'.)
Indicate some places in the text where this image occurs (quotes and evidence).
Give your impressions of what purpose the image has in conveying the "deeper" meaning (from looking behind a word).
Close with a sentence suggesting an overall meaning for the role of the image in the story.


The students who didn't come to the last tutorial, struggled to structure their work effectively, and generally had a hard time linking back to the earlier exercise of looking behind an image, to this new story context. Those who did, and who referred carefully to the examples I gave using another key image from the story, wrote much more usefully about their chosen image.

No surprises there. The written work tells me a lot. However, I wasn't satisfied with only evaluating the written work. I wanted to hear from the students how they had approached their task, and some of the positive and negatives they could identify. This feedback, when combined with assessment of the writing, was infinitely more useful for my evaluation purposes than writing alone.

Employing the Ipad app Audionote for Evaluating student work

As the owner of a new Apple iPad, I am particularly keen to explore ways I can use it in my work - both to enhance my students' learning experiences, and to make my own teaching, administration, and professional development activities more effective, and enjoyable. In our first class back this term, I invited each of my ten students to consider some questions about their writing task - how they approached it, what they struggled with, what they learned - and jot down some notes. Then I sat with each student, and recorded their responses using the Audionote application.

As each student spoke, I typed their name on the note 'paper,' so that I could easily find each students' response on my recording. I could then listen back to the responses when I was reading their essays. Short notes can be added in afterwards, to jog my memory about certain issues. It is a great way to add supplementary detail about students' responses, areas of difficulty, and strengths.

I fully realise that this strategy might be great for this small class, but my regular teaching timetable brings over one hundred students into my classes each week, and the challenges might be more substantial. However, the potential is exciting. What I was able to gain from it was interesting and useful feedback from students about the challenges they faced.

Listening to the students responses before I read their work was illuminating. I learned that several students in the class had little or no knowledge,let alone understanding, of religion, and that this factor severely limited their appreciation of one of the story's major themes. Even with the three tutorials of discussion and analysis, this concept hindered a deeper understanding.

I learned that the slideshow of images I made was highly effective at helping several students to "see" the connections made in the story between the main character, the underlying theme of lost traditions in an ancient culture, and between the repeating images which all intersected and built up a powerful aesthetic. It allowed them to see in to a foreign world, using images to which they could relate, simply because the work of imagination was done for them.

Putting the images, words, and meaning together in a piece of written work, however, is something they need to learn to do on their own, with support. I feel rather pleased that the challenge was high enough that many difficulties were able to come to light. It is easy to be complacent about what we think our students know, or should know, but if we bothered to find out, we can help them to help themselves fill in the blanks. They are such vulnerable things, I've come to appreciate.

Culturally responsive story choices

My Anxiety.

It's the end of first term for my experimental Literature class, and I'm taking a moment to reflect on how I think it went. The students have been assigned a writing task over their holidays (they voted for this option themselves) and I literally have no idea what things will come back to me in two weeks time.

I must confess I'm not feeling positive. For all my ambitions to make the classes accessible, relaxed, and open in many respects for students to engage and learn in creative ways, only half the class turned up on the last day to get their assignment, and to engage with the preparatory writing activities I had worked hard to develop for them.

Sometimes I reflect that my approach might well be counter-productive. Am I going too slowly? Are the texts too difficult despite my efforts to find ones which I felt would enable these particular students to feel their way in to the ideas more easily? I'm trying to locate the "average" zone of proximal development for these students. After seeing their presentations, I got a much better sense of what they might be able to understand. The challenge is for them to translate that understanding into a written piece, in an unfamiliar discipline, in a second language. I really don't know what that's like.

The Students' Anxieties

The assignment isn't the usual argumentative essay assigned to the general cohort. I'm building on the basis I've tried to establish. Here is a word - an idea lies behind it - and an image may also be conjured (out of imagination or cyberspace) to fill in the ambiguities.

I think this is easy enough in everyday discourse: the complication comes when the word is located in a context where meaning is not immediately evident - such as in a story. To ease the strangeness which my other students have reported feeling when confronted with a literary text in English, I chose one which was, in my view, both accessible and meaningful. The story I chose has a contemporary Indonesian setting, and tells a story which goes from the present to the past, and back to the present. The visual, auditory, and sensual images which supported the story were vivid, and had clear connotations - at least, I thought so (I might well be wrong, and will be pleased to understand the difficulty). The subject matter is contemporary, relevant to a growing proportion of the world's young people, and had multiple levels of possible engagement for the students' varied abilities.

The task is to write 400-500 words on the role of one of the repeating images in the story. What is the image? How is it described? What is the role the image plays? How does the image contribute to the overall meaning of the story? Many in the group have expressed anxiety and concern that they won't be able to write well enough - mainly based on their lack of experience, or past efforts in literature in their home countries. "But this is just a preparatory, non-assessed course," I remind them. "Don't worry so much." Strained, fearful faces peer back at me - half terrified, half amused.

If you are interested to read the rather wonderful 1500 word story being studied, "The Pilgrimage" by Tim Hannigan, you can see it here at Indonesiamatters.com.

http://www.indonesiamatters.com/6576/short-stories/#pilgrimage

A slide show of images accompanied my presentation of the story to the class. You can look at it on Slideshare. I aimed to find location credits for the pictures, and have author/publisher permissions. The excerpts are from "The Pilgrimage," by Tim Hannigan (Timdog).

http://www.slideshare.net/jennmelb/pale-ghosts

When I get the assignments back, I'll have a grounds more relative than this reflection to base evaluation upon. Stay tuned.

Noel Entwistle - Teaching for Understanding at University.
Deep Approaches and Distinctive Ways of Thinking

Publication Details

This book has had a profound impact on my recent reflections about my teaching approaches. Entwistle's focus is higher education, and there is much here to interest educators from diverse disciplines. Beginning from an understanding that the twenty-first century is ushering in unprecedented change in terms of global interconnectivity, Entwistle writes, "Increasingly, knowledge acquired at University can be no more than a springboard for coping with change and complexity in everyday life and the workplace." p1.

What really appealed to me about the book is an argument emphasising the need to identify and work with your subject's "inner logic" as well as the particular pedagogy to support it. "Effective university teaching thus depends on establishing a relationship between the specific subject content and the ways in which students are helped to engage with the ideas, so as to develop their own understanding" p3.

Short "bridges" connect chapters, linking the various discussions neatly. There are sections on 'How Students Learn', exploring educational psychology, learning styles, motivation and personality; 'The Nature of Academic Understanding', examining the conceptual basis of various disciplines (engineering, biological sciences, history, media); two chapters on 'How Academics Teach', and 'Research'; and also planning and designing curriculum and assessment to support student deep learning and understanding.

Student voices are included throughout - the author having sought out students' responses and evaluations of various pedagogical approaches. These sections are illuminating, reminding the educator-readers that there are end users whose opinions of our work matter. What educators think students need to know is only part of the new higher education landscape. Expository practices - the lecturer holding court with students as passive receivers - are out of style. Inspiring educators to create 'powerful learning environments' is the ambition of Entwistle's book. How to do this?

• Provide authentic, open problems with learning materials in a variety of formats designed to make connections with students' previous knowledge and interests.
• Use teaching methods which arouse interest, activate prior knowledge, clarify meanings and model appropriate thinking strategies and reflective processes.
• Specify learning strategies in detail to provide scaffolding, with the guidance then gradually removed to encourage subsequent self-regulation of studying.
• Encourage students to monitor their own strategies and discuss these with other students, to provide a classroom culture that encourages reflection on process. (p 105)

Well worth investigating.

Presentations in Lit class

In my second last post, I described the visit to the computer lab I made with my small student group. Their task: to look behind / below / around a word, idea or phrase. The groups had to then "teach" the rest of the class what they had found, and the groups watching and listening were invited to comment, question, evaluate the information imparted for its communication value.

The words / ideas / phrases chosen by the students themselves were:
1. Studying overseas 2. Cloning 3. Shake

To say I was impressed by the variety and quality of what these students presented is an understatement. Maybe it was because I have never done anything like this in my usual teaching, (where I have eight classes of fifteen students once a week) that the novelty and creativity of the activity made such an impression. I'm struggling to think of how I can do similar things with over a hundred students. Next year, there might well be WiFi enabled iPads in the hands of each student, if the pilot program our college has under way is a success.

The group looking at studying overseas produced a fantastic slideshow, with a story at the heart of it - a Chinese girl coming to Australia to study, and finding dilemmas and challenges in her way, to be overcome. This group showed in their presentation familiarity with the narrative arc of story telling, introduction, complication, climax, dénouement. I learned something important about my students' knowledge which I would perhaps not have uncovered so effectively, if I had just asked the group what they knew about story telling. Enabling them to "show" me, teach others, and share their ideas, brought this important piece of information the whole group in a powerful way.

The second presentation on "cloning" was deeply impressive. For a start, the group researching the word / idea were interested in the science, the potential, the ethical dimensions of this developing technology. OK, so, what has cloning to do with Literature? Well, the students were researching, asking questions, finding answers, and in their presentation they covered history, important moments, explored the positives and negatives, asked one another and the audience questions about possible futures - "Where would you want to keep a clone of yourself - in a deep freeze? In a specialised hibernation chamber? Would you want to spend time talking with your clone?" What fabulous stories such questions would inspire, and what complex and lateral thinking these students showed me and their colleagues! I can now draw on the ideas, problems, and ethical dimensions of this presentation to build parallel understandings with the literary and language ideas we will shortly come to.

The third presentation on "shake" was a fitting conclusion. Each student in the group found a story to match one of the several possible connotations or variations on the term. Physical movement, emotion, surprise, horrible realisations. They worked hard to find expressive visualisations to complement their presentation of the word, and the possible interpretations and uses to which it could be put in language, storytelling, experience. They DID the work required, and went beyond it.

While this isn't perhaps a revolutionary exercise, I hope that it will lay a foundation of ideas, concepts and reference points which might not otherwise have been available for these students, as they progress in the course. They were all explorers, researchers, storytellers, creators of knowledge, sharers of ideas. My aim is for them to continue to be so, but the next stage will be a development on this foundation.

In the next post, I'll briefly outline the next step towards the reading, analysis and writing task to be assigned.