Educause 2017, Day 4

The final day of the conference started off with the University of Kentucky discussing its findings for their first year of having 17 active learning classrooms across campus. Interestingly enough, it appears that they did not worry about faculty development ahead of time but simply assigned faculty to the new and redesigned classrooms.  Sometimes faculty did not know they were teaching in this new space until just a couple of weeks before classes started. They do have an impressive number of 42% of their students having had a class in a TEAL space during this first year. Their discussion of stakeholders did not include faculty and students, which I also found surprising. They used surveys and classroom observation with the Minnesota observation tool and some interviews to gather data, also focusing on final grades.

One takeaway for me was the following up with individual faculty who participated in surveys to ensure that the lines of communication stay open by acknoledging their concerns. Their data included all sections of all courses, with historical data, to ensure for the final grades that a good comparison could be established.  This analysis did show that even though not all faculty used the spaces well, students nevertheless improved grades, and, possibly more important, some underserviced student groups saw an improvement in retention in the second year.

Indiana University showed off its concept of Reality Studios - up to 25 implementations of virtual reality stations that are available to students outside of class, making it easier for them to take the time and fully immerse themselves into the VR.  In conjunction with their MOSAIC initiative of learning spaces, they are now taking advantage of the relatively inexpensive hand held VR devices after 20 years of more expensive VR development and display.  They reminded us that a lot of VR is run through the STEAM platform, leading to possible problems purchasing licenses for the university. Some of the VR examples were Anatomy:  The Body VR Journey inside a cell; Apollo 11, Geography, Music:  Soundstage; Astronomy:  Titans of Space; and finally a simple Media playback tool:  Simple VRVideo Player.  The future will bring mobile VR as right now you need to still stay tethered to the computer that is processing the VR.

Temple Grandin

The conference closed with Temple Grandin discussing Developing Students who have Different Minds.

Key takeaways there are to remember that Algebra should not be used to deny students who are visual thinkers access to the sciences, and that our insistence on providing students on the spectrum special accommodations without giving them truly different ways to learn, through, for example, hands-on internships, is depriving all of us amazing opportunities as it means that potential innovation does not get the stimulus it needs to thrive. In addition, she pointed out that overspecialization leads to a loss in creativity.

Educause 2017, Day 3 - Part 2

Safiya Noble

As promised, a different post on the Algorithms of Oppression and Safiya Umoia Noble's discussion on how search engines reinforce racism.  For a short video on what she is talking about, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVZozEEWlE
Dr. Noble is faculty at the University of Southern California, focusing on racism, sexism and other oppression as they occur on the internet. Her talk was a clear call to action to improve our efforts in educating everyone to be digitally literate in order to be able to tell opinion and advertisement from facts that are more objectively presented. Focusing on the Google search engine, as it holds practically a monopoly on the market of search engines, Dr. Noble pulled together two points that we need to remember:

1. People trust Google to give them the truth - a trust that comes primarily out of positive experiences with such things as getting good directions through Google Maps, helpful suggestions what to do, reliable information on common facts in Physics, Chemistry, History.  (and of course it starts to get a little iffy when it comes to history).
2. People forget that Google's search engine is an advertising machine and that the search results can thus be manipulated in favoring certain sites over others because a company pays Google or tweaks its metadata to play the engine itself.

If you take these two points in combination, it becomes clear quickly that we cannot trust our searches quite as easily as we have been thinking.  Her examples show that the algorithm, designed by primarily white men (this is a guess on my part), perpetuates stereotypes about women and minority populations in this country.  And while Google publicly has stated that the algorithm cannot be tweaked as it is the truth, evidence suggests otherwise. 

Gillespie on algorithms

The recent UN ad campaign shows that Google's search suggestions are rather troubling.

When a couple of years ago a tweet went viral about what happens when you search for three black teenagers and then three white teenagers, the search results changed miraculously over night to appease the troubled customers.  However (and this is my side note), we should not underestimate that one of the driving forces for these searches is previous search histories, which suggests that this country may be in even more trouble than we thought.  Another example of such claim to an authentic search was the search for unprofessional and professional hair styles -- all examples of unprofessional hairstyles were images of black women wearing their hair naturally, while all professional hair styles were white women wearing carefully braided buns and other constricting hair constructions.

So, what to do about this obvious but nevertheless practically invisible racism and sexism? Not using search engines may no longer be an option, but remembering that Google is an information broker is essential, and remembering the sources for more reliable information (eg, government databases, library databases) is essential.  Her example of the South Carolina murderer Dylan Storm Roof is quite telling. In his online diary, he described how he could not believe that mainstream media had not been reporting on certain types of crime -- that moment of not believing should have made him aware that his line of online inquiry had let him down a rabbit hole of fake fascist news. Unfortunately, because he already agreed with such views, he continued and ended up murdering black Americans in their church.

Educause 2017, Day 3 - Part 1

Cardboard Stools

Today's sessions covered learning spaces, learning science, choice architecture, and algorithmic oppression, so quite the variety. Because of this, I am going to break this into two parts as I want to make sure the algorithms of oppression get my full attention.  Brown University discussed human-centered design for learning spaces, with the idea that humans should not really need to make the room work but that the room will know what the human wants -- they are playing with Alexa to enable the room to be speech controlled, but are not quite there yet. We have to remember that anything we like to label as user error is really a design error, so we need to keep track of user errors to see how we can address them.  

Katherine Milkman

The second keynote of the conference was given by Katherine Milkman and focused on choice architecture, giving us principles to follow.  She reminded us very effectively that our brains when focused ignore key elements that are not directly related, and that we tend to be overconfident in what we think we know. Overconfidence can lead to epic failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QlPdP9rM50) 

She also reminded us that our political decisions are based on economic models that are completely based in rationality and thus are ignoring human propensity to be not rational.  Therefore, it is important to recognize how we can guide and help our fellow humans to make better decisions.  For example, Choice Architects in Stockholm turned a staircase that was very little used because everyone used the escalator, into a fun piano, and immediately the use of the escalator dropped dramatically (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SByymar3bds). Here are the principles she discussed with us:

1. Principle 1. Set helpful defaults because we will stick with the defaults because we are lazy or believe that the default is a good practice anyway (somebody thought it was good).  This includes opting out rather than opting in
2. Principle 2. Prompt people to plan through basic questions like what are you going to do when where and how?  The is creates accountability, embeds the plan into memory and thus makes it easier to follow up on it.
3. Principle 3. Leverage power of social norms -- if we think or see evidence that everyone else is doing it, we are more likely to follow along. We are also more likely to repeat something (eg, give to a charity) if we see evidence that we ourselves have done this before.]
4. Principle 4. Create accountability - make your commitment public in some way, challenge people to do their civic duty and vote.
5. Principle 5:  Fresh start -- use any milestone, eg, new year, new week, new month, holiday, birthday as markers for the fresh start as people are more likely to follow through.
6. Principle 6 create opportunity for pre-commitment that gets rewarded
7. Principle 7:  Power of what we stand to loose - if we frame carefully what we personally may loose if something is not successful, we are more likely to act on it.

New Steelcase table end

Periodic table glass board

The session on how learning science can influence innovations in teaching and learning was unfortunately not that useful to me. However, their argument that we need to move away from quasi experimental or random control trial designs was compelling.  They also reminded us that we need to push the industry to ask for research for their claims that their products improve learning.

One piece of software that I found in the exhibit hall that looked quite promising:  Flipgrid

This software allows us to have true discussion boards with videos, and the claim is that this creates a more profound discussion of topics as people actually talk to each other (it is asynchronous). The tool is pretty new, so they offer a solid free trial for people to play with.

I will leave you with some baked goods from the nearby bakery:

baked goods

Educause 2017, Day 2

The conference was off to an interesting start with keynote speaker Michio Kaku, who is one of the thinkers behind String Theory and is focused on making Physics interesting and appealing to a broad audience.

Michio Kaku

His focus was on what life in general and education in particular could look like in 20 years. The key idea is that computers as we know them (as boxes under or on our tables) will no longer exist but that the processors will be built into our clothes, into our watches, maybe glasses, but most likely into our contact lenses, so that with the blink of an eye we would have any and all information not at our finger tips but on our retinas.
This kind of instant access to information would mean less need to memorize anything - and it would mean that assessing people on memorized information becomes completely meaningless. He also reminded us that memorization crushes curiosity and the desire to become a scientist.
Because of these changes, people will need to improve their intellectual properties as jobs that are bound in repetition or just simply a middle position will all be moved towards robotics and other kind of automation. The skills needed will be analysis, creativity, experience, innovation, leadership, talent, imagination.  Faculty will need to mentor their students to improve and practice these kinds of skills rather than focusing entirely on content.

My next session was the Learning Spaces Constituent Group where I learned about Happy Light, a light designed to help with seasonal affliction. Adding these light sources to classrooms without windows may be a relatively easy way to improve the student energy in the room.  Georgia State just opened a new MakerSpace that looks quite interesting. I am not sure if they did this, but I think if we were to build a MakerSpace, I want to try to build it to follow Design Thinking so that each area of the room provides resources for one particular stage - eg, loungy chairs for discussions in the empathy space; erasable wall space for the definition and ideation space, lots of tools for the Protoype space, and open space for the testing. One point raised was that students need explicit permission to use certain spaces, write in certain places -- for example on designated walls and windows -- one trick there is to use the same color of paint for all those spaces you can write on, to set it apart from regular walls.

The session on Making Virtual Reality a Reality focused on work Arcadia University is doing -- as in giving students a space to explore and design virtual and augmented reality. One additional reality there is the 360 degree videos that students can create with relatively inexpensive cameras right now. Google Tilt Brush is one such tool that could make art and other designs very interesting in the future.  Apollo Launch 11 recreates the launch of this exploration.  Focus on places you cannot go because it is too expensive, too dangerous, or just plain impossible.  The Smithsonian is doing interesting things as well:  https://americanart.si.edu/wonder360

The final session of the day discussed the Generation Z and what their attitude towards smart devices may mean for universities.  University of Central Florida and Harvard University discussed their two different approaches. We heard numbers about how many hours GenZ spends on smartphones - 12 per day, with essentially 100% of students having a smartphone and using it for pretty much everything. While we still see an increase in use of computers and tablets, the phone has overtaken all other devices in ubiquity.  UCF decided to build a comprehensive map, based on student needs.  These needs were determined by students with parking as number 1, so their app shows students where parking is available. Other key pieces are maps and student affairs, dining and special events with integrated voting features. Push notifications are something students like, so we need to take advantage of this. Harvard decided to go with student inspired and created apps through an annual competition - this means multiple apps, but it does also mean that student need is directly addressed in a very diverse and inclusive way.

And then I prowled the Exhibit Hall but did not find anything that completely blew me away.

Educause 2017, Day 1

This year's Educause is happening in Philadelphia, which, simply from a cultural and things-to-do perspective is very cool as the Convention Center is downtown in walking distance to many great places to visit.
I started off the conference with a full-day workshop, the Diana G. Oblinger Innovation Forum:  Leading Academic Transformation in Support of Student Success.

Diana G. Oblinger challenged us to think about new jobs that need to be done to ensure student success in the coming years: What if you redefined:

1. Timeline for student success -- right now we are looking only at  recruitment to degree completion-- expand to career success, to feed forward to next educational experience
2. Degree of integration - eg with labor market information, with k-12
3. Degree of transparency - to employers to make it more obvious what a credit means
4. Outcomes so that students can future-proof themselves for the jobs that have not been invented, jobs created by ourselves-- problem solving, design thinking, critical thinking
5. Artificial intelligence and robotics -- how does student success change due to change from data processing to knowledge processing -- new division of labor that may be ahead of us between people and machines (and of course between people who know and people who don't)

Modeling the design thinking process through active learning strategies, the workshop consisted of very little but pertinent information so that we can think about this goal:

Breakdown of Current Student Success

The modeling helped us practice and better understand what we can do back at our own institutions when we introduce innovative change. 

In a nutshell:  With innovation you start on Desirability, and much later deal with Feasibility and Viability. In a perfect world, you get a sweet spot between the three that allows you to fill a genuine need for everyone in your target population (eg, all students) in innovative ways that are feasible and sustainable.

Design Thinking covers the following stages:

Design Thinking Process

We had collected student surveys (empathize), then moved to defining our problem in 10 words or less, did a true brainstorm, with a time limit, written collection, quick firing of wild ideas, that led to a prototype sketch that received feedback, ending on formulating metrics to test the prototype, ideally on the population in the first step.

In the afternoon, we discussed strategies and questions to ask of ourselves and others to turn the prototype into a feasible and sustainable innovation on campus. Key here to remember is that graduating more students makes more money, so if the innovation can show, for a small and very specific first target audience, that it is successful, then the small success can be increased. 

How bad are the numbers for graduation? Check out this current graph:

Graduation Rates over the last ten years

So, how can we present our innovation to have a better chance of getting resources allocated towards it? Delloite Development came up with the following factors:

10 Types of Innovation for the Social Sector

while asking the question about 

the market:  what do our students need?

the mission:  what are we good at that meets the student needs?

the margin: how do we create student value and a sustainable financial model?

Be aware that culture can be stifling to innovation - be aware of higher education orthodoxies that need to be addressed and, carefully, debunked.

Why We Do What We Do, Edward Deci

I am going to add another dimension to the blog -- reflections on some of the books I am reading that are connected to learning, teaching, and higher education.  These reflections will be a little longer than my Goodreads reviews, and somewhat focusing on a different audience.

Why We Do What We Do

I expect many of you are already rather familiar with Edward Deci's work on motivation - after all, he and his colleague Ryan started working on this in the 1960s.  Why We Do What We Do appears to culminate, in some ways, the decades of work Deci and Ryan have done, research they have conducted about autonomy and its possibilities for us, in a non-academic focused style that makes the book very accessible to a large audience. Starting with motivation, and moving towards wellbeing both on the physical and psychological levels, the book ends on reminding us that we can practice autonomy, and that is indeed our responsibility to do so and to give other autonomy to make choices so that they can develop more fully and live fulfilled lives.

From an educational perspective, for teachers and parents, some of his statements grounded in research seem counterintuitive on first sight:  competition ruins performance, grades ruin learning, setting controlling rules ruins autonomy, praise and rewards can be perceived as controlling and thus also counteract intrinsic motivation. How can we possibly teach, parent, supervise without competition and grades to motivate? Unfortunately, the system of judgmental evaluation and competition, very much at the foundation of the US way of life, the American Dream, is counterproductive to wellbeing because these external motivators motivate through control rather than through choice and intrinsic autonomy.

How, then, can we change our classrooms to give students more choices, especially when we want them to be more responsible for their learning through active learning? Set expectations clearly without being controlling. Practice language that encourages without judging, that praises without controlling.  Acknowledge student perspectives and student expertise genuinely to align yourself with your students.  

Deci’s research has shown that students who are in a controlling rather than autonomy-supporting learning environment will learn things by heart rather than ask critical questions. They will stop the second the control is gone while the other students are more likely to stay engaged, and they will forget their learned facts because their lack of intrinsic motivation gives them no reason to apply the new knowledge and connect it to their previous expertise.  This includes situations where we reward through presents, praise, or payment.

These same lessons do not just apply to school and parenting. They also apply to the work place, to our interactions with medical professionals and other professionals that we have been trained to perceive as figures of authority.

How can we turn this ship around?  

Teaching with Technology 2017, Day Three

The final day of this year's conference ended with more great presentations, primarily developed by faculty.

In Flipping the Classroom Successfully with Technology, Jonathan Velazquez, American University of Puerto Rico, reminded us that aviation combines multiple disciplines. We should look more carefully at the interdisciplinarity of our majors to see where we can connect thoughts across curricula.

He pointed out the importance of letting students know why the are preparing content for a class, and that pre-class preparation would probably be focused on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy.   The preparation is essentially the ticket to the class, no matter what the evidence of the preparation looks like - answer a question, bring your own question, take a side in a controversial issue.  Students without tickets can be in class, catching up on the preparation without able to participate in the class activities.

Toni Weiss from Tulane discussed Interactive Strategies for Engaging Large and Small Classes Alike.  She showed off doceri, illustrated clicker question without clickers (close your eyes and raise your hand when your choice is called), but to me most interesting was the One Question One Response activity she uses after a test where a question proved too difficult.  The class gets the question again and they can work together to resolve it, without additional resources. The more students agree on the proposed answer the better the final grade, but it means that people can disagree with a better answer and lobby for it.

However, one of her points troubled me - the statement that a day of activity would allow her to then lecture full-steam ahead, as if the activity was really just a way for students to accept the lecture. This thought appears opposite of Bowen's statement that we no longer need to or should be content-focused but learning focused.

The final session for me covered Moblab:  Experiential Learning Using Decision-Making Experimental Games. Christy Spivey from University of Texas Arlington introduced us to this web-based software that allows Economics and Business courses to work through simulations, something we tried as well.  What I found fascinating was my emotional and physical response to this kind of investment gaming.

Teaching with Technology 2017, Day Two

The second day of this year's Teaching with Technology was chockful with great ideas and meeting new folks.

Julie Smith

Starting us off in the morning, Julie Smith, School of Communication at Webster University, discussed The Importance of Critical Thinking in this Post-Truth World.

She reminded us how important media literacy is and the necessity for us to teach our students a critical eye on published content because everyone can publish, and everyone makes bad assumptions.
We need to remember that when we want something to be true because we agree with it, we tend to share it with others without a second of thought (Stage 1), so we need to remember to slow down and think in our Stage 2 (Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow), especially when we are sitting in our echo chambers of social media.  We have to teach unconscious bias!
Fake news, as she reminded us, has been around forever, but now anyone can create them.

Here are tools she mentioned in her talk:

Snopes http://www.snopes.com/ 

Hoax Slayer http://www.hoax-slayer.com/ 

Emergent http://www.emergent.info/ 

Trends Map https://www.trendsmap.com/ 

Who Is http://whois.domaintools.com/ 

First Draft News https://firstdraftnews.com/ 

Page Rank Checker http://checkpagerank.net/ 

Four Match http://www.fourandsix.com/fourmatch/ 

Meedan Checkdesk https://meedan.com/en/check/ 

Full Fact https://fullfact.org/ 

Fact Check http://www.factcheck.org/ 

Verification Junkie http://verificationjunkie.com/http://verificationjunkie.com/ 

Google Reverse Image https://images.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl 

Facebook Live Map https://www.facebook.com/live/map/ 

Picodash https://www.picodash.com/ 

Foto Forensics http://fotoforensics.com/ 

Pipl Finder https://pipl.com/https://pipl.com/ 

WebMii http://webmii.com/ 

Truth or Fiction https://www.truthorfiction.com/ 

Politifact http://www.politifact.com/ 

So, how would you use these tools? For example, if you see an image that looks too good to be true, use Google Reverse Image to see if the same or a very similar image has been published previously.  If a news story is breaking and you want to see if it is indeed happening, go to Trends Map and see if anyone else at that location is tweeting about this story - if all the tweets are generated far away, chances are very high this is a hoax. Foto Forensics shows if an image has been photoshopped, and other sites simply cross check that a story is true.
Teaching tip:  Break your own News is a web site that allows students to post "news" and watch what happens so that they get personal experience how things can go viral.
The Stanford Civic Online Reasoning research shows that middle school students cannot distinguish an ad from news content -- partly because the ads are so convincing but also because our news publication is so glittery.
She also reminded us that a big part of the problem is that we want to be amused, not educated.

Second session of the day covered Using Geospatial Technologies to Overcome Geographic Illiteracies. Davie Perault, Lynchburg College, discussed 4 types of geospatial technologies: maps, remote sensing, GIS, and GPS.
Students have limited knowledge not just about geographical knowledge, but they simply do not know how to read geographical information, such as maps, so giving them practice on reading maps, reading different kinds of maps and GIS, GPS data, will allow them to function better in the world.  Practically any industry today uses this kind of rich data to make decisions, so adding this skill set into different kinds of classes could be very helpful. In addition, GIS data in particular is available for free online for pretty much any major city, making it relatively easy to show the geographic relations for various concepts such as food deserts, flood plains, traffic bottle necks, or historical landmarks.

Third session of the day focused on a Quest for the Ideal Formative Assessment for First Year Stem.  Charley Fleischmann from U of Canterbury, NZ, discussed how he had changed the practices for his first-year engineering students away from the traditional homework discussed in a tutorial to online quizzes that allowed students to practice multiple times, with friends as needed, improving time on task, while the tutorials could be used more effectively by those students who needed the additional help. Online resources guided students through the process without giving them the final answer, and students see more clearly the connections between Physics, Math, and the real world.

Fourth session of the day discussed How to Enhance Online Communication Using Multiple Levels of Rich Media and Synchronous Technologies. Evie Oregon from West Kentucky U walked us through her 100% online graduate program communication system that is grounded in Media Richness Theory, giving us ways to decide in what kind of a situation a student needs high level communication contact, and when it is ok to send a low-level email.  The bottom line is that we need to be available to our students, and I expect that we need to start doing this more intentionally for our f2f classes as well, which does mean having a better social media strategy.  We have to remember that our students are not comfortable coming to office hours -- they are more comfortable texting than talking on the phone! Show you are connected with them, and they will be more willing to reach out, and the richer the media is that you use, the clearer your message is going to be, because a rich video message will not only give the content but also voice and visual cues, while an email stays flat.

The fifth session of the day discussed some augmented reality (AR) tools to help students immerse themselves more fully into content. Melissa Murfin from Elon U pointed out that especially in courses with a very intense cognitive load in majors that tend to work in cohorts for the entire day, having other ways to bring the content to life is very helpful.
Examples of AR:  https://www.houzz.com/ allows you to "try out" a piece of furniture in your home before you purchase it, using your phone's camera to overlay the furniture image onto the view of your room. In education, https://alivestudiosco.com/ creates reading and math exercises for K-5.  http://www.arloon.com/en/ has math and anatomy content and other STEM content.
https://daqri.com/  works on professional training AR.
Aurasma allows you to create your own overlay for AR, but it needs to become more user friendly to become useful.

José Bowen

The final keynote was presented by José Bowen of Teaching Naked fame.  He reminded us with carefully selected personal stories and learning examples that
1.  Our students start in a very different place from where we are.  They use tools like Healthvana to check out a potential date whom they may have seen getting a high rating on Lulu (ok, that does no longer rate), because that person's presence popped up on tinder, and based on this completely indirect "interaction" decide to meet someone.  Students do not want to interact in person, certainly not be the first to talk to you.
2.  Students do not hang out with friends in a physical space, they have less sex, they date less, they don't want to drive, they are more prone to feel lonely, and they do not get enough sleep because they are constantly checking their devices, going to bed with both their phones and laptops.
2.  We grew up learning through books, we love reading books - our students don't - they will find ways and content online that will get them out of reading because it looks like it is the same content.
3.  Our students need the following to learn:  S.W.E.E.T:  Sleep, Water, Exercise, Eating, Time -- they do not need us to learn, though we can give them a lot of help.

So, let's acknowledge these situational factors and work with them:  Let's reach out to our students through social media, and let's google our content so that we know what pops up and we can build assignments around this content to stimulate critical thinking. Some possible options that may pop up are Crashcourse, content on String Theory or Charlesmagne.  How can we use this in our teaching?  Can we create that kind of content?  Can we have our students create this kind of content?
We need to remember that learning happens when we are pleasantly frustrated, we need to focus on digital literacy and work on our new thre Rs:  Relationships, Resilience, Reflection
We can guide students to better online content, but they will not take our advice.
Finally, we need to model thinking to our students -- so not just give the answer but make our thinking processes more transparent, admit that we need time to do research and think things through, and state that our minds can be changed.

Teaching with Technology 2017, Day One

For the next couple of days, I am in Baltimore at the Teaching with Technology conference to see how our colleagues use technology effectively and innovatively in their classes.

Dr. Peter Doolittle

The opening session by Dr. Peter Doolittle was already quite remarkable (this TedTalk is not quite what he talked about, but may be of interest:  https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_doolittle_how_your_working_memory_makes_sense_of_the_world).

While the content of the session, I believe, was quite familiar to a large part of the audience as it focused on Teaching, Learning, Technology, Memory and Research, the construction of the presentation kept us very engaged, with some pretty amazing aha and wow moments when he asked us to participate to illustrate different types of memory.

He carefully chunked his content, marking each transition with a humorous related video.  One of them was this video about Math:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2_kQ1Bf1js.  I wish I could find a better version of it, but do take the time to watch it and be puzzled. He carefully repeated content to deepen our memory, and he made the connections between our activities and why they related to the content very obvious.

The talk's message was essentially that because of the way our brain works, we need to construct our learning activities carefully to allow all learners to be successful, and the tools to do this are backward design, careful choice of tools, and constant remembering why we are doing what we are doing so that students can process new knowledge and skills repeatedly.

Sounds simple enough, and we think we are all doing this already, but his examples drove a couple of points home that I think we tend to neglect when we teach.
1.  We construct knowledge out of materials provided -- but that construction is not the same for everyone.
2.  Because of this construction, meaning is remembered but specifics get lost - so we need to be obvious with our students what specifics we want them to know
3. To test learning, ask students to say what they know (not write what they know)
4. Learning happens when we practice retrieval in varied ways with different purposes (so no memorization), at the principle level, with us having the sense that we have some control and autonomy, supported by developmental feedback and connected to our prior knowledge and experiences.

That brings a lot of challenges to our classrooms - connect to this the fact that our Working Memory can really only hold 3-4 concepts (and by concepts I mean words) for a couple of minutes, we can see how our students are struggling when we ask them to work with lots of new content in a short amount of time.  One suggestion was to hand out complex content ahead of time so that students do not need to take notes and thus not pay attention.  Segment the information and take short breaks every 5 minutes for 30 seconds for students to catch their brain breath.
Studies have shown that when you scaffold content, the students with a lower cognitive load ability will be able to perform as well as the students with high cognitive load ability -- this, I think, is huge, as it means that we can give all students an even better equitable opportunity at success.

He reminded us that motivation can be fostered through:  Choice, Caring, Challenge, Collaboration, Competence and Curiosity (I am missing on C) -- consider how you are doing this with your classes.

How does technology fit into all of this -- well, as part of the design of the class, the different tools can help students achieve success, and he reminded us that we need to be way more intentional and collaborative about researching emerging technologies so that we can start later in the Hype Cycle (Gartner)

Hype Cycle

His repeated challenge to us was that we need to consider each presentation for this conference under the light of Where is the processing?  Where is the design?  Where is the research?
I thought giving us this kind of focus for the entire conference was very useful and is something to do for our own sessions and conferences.

This is Research -- Auburn University Symposium

Last week, Auburn University held its annual This is Research Symposium, highlighting different research and projects across the departments of the university.  Some presentations showed the connection between research and learning more clearly than others, but what I found very impressive was how almost all short presentations focused on how their research benefits the State of Alabama, in particular through addressing issues of poverty, broader economics, and broader education needs throughout the state and region.

The topics ranged from tiny specks of bronchitis viruses that infect chicken and thus need to be dealt with (as chicken products are worldwide still the number one source of protein) to 3d printing of plane engines and other machines that no longer need to be assembled out of hundreds of parts.  Or they ranged from how trees and other plants can create more durable and sustainable materials to designing and building houses that cost only $20,000, making it possible for poor people (of which we have a lot in Alabama) to get an affordable house. Or how difficult it is to discern between different synthetic drugs; or how AI development may make it easier to help us make informed decisions rather than letting us drown in all the choices we have to make daily.

The variety of research was amazing, the focus on Alabama and its people was refreshing -- now we need to find ways to bring our students better into the discussion.  One point that was not truly addressed is that almost all of the new developments in the various areas lead to a shrinking population in rural areas and small towns, widening the gap between urban haves and rural have nots. How can the university help sustain smaller communities while improving the rural standard of living? Online technologies and partnerships with local community colleges seem the obvious solution, although I expect that this is easier said than done.

Mell Classroom Building @ RBD Library is Open

Well, we did, are doing it -- week 3 into the semester, and the Mell Classroom Building @ RBD Library is in full swing.

Full EASL

Mell Lecture Hall

Study Space

EASL Lite

Indeed, the moment the doors opened on August 20th, students were in the building, and it feels like they have not left.  Classes are humming along, study rooms are booked and busy, and all the different nooks and crannies the building and the spaces in the connecting library are being used for studying, collaborating, socializing, resting, and again studying.

The ribbon cutting was a big success as well. https://www.facebook.com/mellrbd/



So, what is next?  We are ironing out a few technical bugs, for the most part, because of the amazing work of Auburn University's Office of Information Technology, in particular the networking and classroom design folks, the technology in the building is working very well.  We are tracking the study room reservation system, and it appears that students not only have found the online system but are using it a lot.
The Learning Consultants who support the building are checking the rooms regularly so that we know about technology problems before faculty have to deal with them -- which makes it, I believe, easier for faculty to be daring and try out new things in their courses.
If I can just find someone now to get my office in the basement assembled....

InstructureCon Day 3

Scott Barry Kaufman

Thursday's keynote was Scott Barry Kaufman, a positive psychologist, discussing leveraging human potential.

He reminded us that creativity is connected with messiness, that humans are always a mix of things, never just genius or just insane, and to have a positive outlook on life to foster creativity.

One of his terms is harmonious passion -- people who have it, who are harmonious passionate, tend to be secure in themselves, willing to take risks, autonomous and have/had a strong mentor.  He reminded us that mindfulness is about reducing suffering of others, and that 10,000 hours of practice is not a straight line to accomplishment but a wobbly line of trial and error.

University of North Florida has created five Canvas templates that they are essentially giving away for free.  Two are designed with Design Studio, the others are straight Canvas.  The templates are guided by Quality Matters rubrics, and table explains how each template implements a particular QM criterion:  http://www.unf.edu/cirt/services/id/resource_online-course-template.aspx

From their experience, these templates kickstart faculty use of Canvas while ensuring that a lot of information about university resources, tech help and other support is already part of the content.

Jeff Faust reminded me of a number of tools in Canvas that can be used to individualize student learning:  careful set up of modules so that students can pick and choose how they want to accomplish a particular learning outcome; selective release of assignments to give different options to different students, turn on anonymous grading for less bias towards students, choice of format for assignments, and so much more.

He briefly mentioned a new Ted tool -- TedTalks teamed with Watson to create a powerful search engine inside their site that allows you to ask a question and it creates a play list of TedTalks and parts of them answering the question:  http://watson.ted.com/welcome

He reminded us of Carol Tomlinson's statement that "It's our job to see them all as successful and then create the learning environment that does that."

Jared Stein's keynote on how Canvas helps with engagement and accessibility for all talked about behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagement.  His examples from the University of Auckland, and a South Carolina School of the Blind and Deaf were very powerful, showing how Canvas helps connect students who fell isolated in a higher education setting and how the Canvas tools allow students who are physically isolated to connect with others and to learn.

And then he showed us how he can talk to Canvas through amazon's Alexa -- very cool!  At this point, the intents are still limited to just a few (students  -- what do I have to do, what are my grades; instructors - what do I need to grade; parents -- how can I support my child) -- but this is going to grow.

Another new release is the new app (iOS and Android) Canvas for Teachers.  While this does not give teachers everything in Canvas yet, it does now allow you to grade online, annotating (works esp well with Apple Pencil), grading, announcing and communicating with students.  Find the yellow Canvas icon and start using it -- folks in the audience were already and were quite happy with it.

Penn State has an LTI that allows for peer evaluations in group work -- this looks very promising! And finally the Business School at Stanford came up with an interesting use of Qualtrics by creating one-question surveys and then embed these surveys into Canvas pages to get feedback from students on content comprehension.  Unfortunately, this is not a sustainable model as it does take a lot of work to set up all these surveys and allows for little flexibility.

InstructureCon Day 2

Canvas

The conference was officially kicked off with Sheena Iyengar, giving us a version of her TED Talk, The Art of Choosing, giving us some interesting insight into the complexity of choosing while dispelling some myths.
For example, male and female brains, according to her, are not differently wired from birth but instead may move into different directions because of how society deals with men and women.  We are better off making choices when we are not overwhelmed with them:  we are more likely to buy a product when there is a limited number (say, 6 types of jams) rather than a large variety (say, 24 types of jams).
Her key point is that our attitude towards choice also reflects whether we have a growth mindset or not, and she gave some strategies on how to foster a growth mindset.
1.  set goals
2.  write down these goals (what do I want to have accomplished in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years) and repeat the process every 6 months
3.  share these goals with someone you trust
4.  keep a progress journal

Back to the point of too many choices: we make more mistakes, we procrastinate more, and we have a less satisfactory life experience (my potentially trivial example is that I limit myself to "only" Netflix for watching movies and shows).
Research showed that engineers considered those supervisors dictators who gave no choice, but incompetent those who gave too many choices - so a couple of options is all you need to give.
Finally, when you want feedback that is meaningful, get with your dormant relationships, not just the folks you are already working with -- get out of your echo chamber.
Choice is Invention.

My next session was, alas, another session focusing on left joint tables, but the takeaway for me was that we should pull the report from Canvas as to which courses have not been published and identify those faculty as they are most likely the ones who have not used Canvas -- and that way we can offer a more targeted training for these folks who may not be comfortable getting into technology.

The following keynote unveiled the Canvas Roadmap -- there are a lot of new changes coming, so I think I will do a separate blog post on this.

I learned that I need to get more involved in the Canvas Community as there are such folks out there as James and Kona Jones who develop hacks on a regular basis to make our lives easier.  Their code word is Canvancement -- they have developed quite a few of these, like importing a rubric, reducing the number of clicks when you are in SpeedGrader (Quizwiz), roster sorter, and other nuggets of innovation.  I think we will be testing some of these in the Biggio Center and spread the word.

Canvas of the Future discussed an new LTI, Nudge, that nudges students who have not completed an assignment -- the first test showed that very few students opted out and that the assignment completion rate improved rather dramatically. The concept of Nudge comes out of behavioral economics, in particular the book Nudge:  Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness.

Finally I discovered another tool that may be useful in particular for Math and Chemistry courses -- wiris.  Wiris gets added to the editing tools in Canvas, allowing faculty and students to select formula and chemical elements to work through a problem.  In addition to the elements, the tool also has a handwriting tool that translates my writing of the formula into chunks that are added to Canvas.

InstructureCon Day 1

InstructureCon and its Spy theme

This week, I am hanging out at Keystone Resort with a few hundred other people learning about new features in Canvas, their corporate version Bridge that looks like a nice fit for what we are trying to accomplish at Auburn University, and lots of third-party products that can make life easier or more interesting when working with Canvas.

The workshop I attended yesterday, Making Canvas Data Approachable, had a hard time getting off the ground (I am wondering if Canvas needs to do some serious training on how to run workshops for its staff members), and was, I have to admit, way over my head.

Bottomline: We can pull data out of Canvas in tables that we can then run for different reports connecting functionality of Canvas with how faculty and students are using it.  That has been around for a while, but now they have developed a tool, Canvas Data Loader, that will make it easier to connect the various tables with each other.  One current downside -- it runs best with Tableau right now for the database backend, with MySQL and Microsoft SQL coming in the future, and Oracle in the distant mythical future.

Why is this exciting?  Well, it could mean that with some learning, we can figure out how to answer such questions as

how many courses are unpublished?

how much are courses using discussions, quizzes, assignments?

when are students the most active in the course, including times to submit assignments?

how long does it take faculty to provide feedback to students or get grades turned around?

what quiz question types are used most frequently?

Some of this may look a bit on the big-brother side, but if we can set it up so that faculty could retrieve that kind of data about their own course to see how they are doing, it may be quite useful.

And here a couple of interesting looking tools that I saw:

Blackboard Ally is a tool that allows faculty to see in Canvas how ADA compliant their documents are, with instructions on how to fix issues.  It looked quite userfriendly and may help create the needed culture of universal design on campus.

Tealpass is an attendance tool -- that is all that it does, so if folks really are not interested in engaging their students through a student response system, this may be what is needed.  However, we have also had some requests for attendance taking at events, and I am wondering if this may work for such an occasion.

ReadSpeaker looks interesting as well, though I believe it may be limited to html code right now, not to any document.  This software allows for turning any highlighted text in any browser to be spoken rather than read, with the additional bonus of translating it into a number of languages (55, I believe).  I tried the translation to German for a somewhat technical chunk, and I was quite impressed with the Germanic nature and accuracy of the translation and the spoken word.

Jewel singing off smartphone

The social part of the conference turned out to be a bit on the wet side, but the evening's concert of Jewel singing a couple of her new songs, a lot of her early hits and then a couple of songs that she could not remember and so someone was on stage with an iphone so that she could read the lyrics was pretty amazing.  Her story and her story telling are also quite impressive.

wild flowers

Finally, nature around here is so nice and different from Alabama in July:  temperatures are pleasant and downright chilly at night, lots of wild flowers, and I was surprised at the number of humming birds.

humming birds

North Snake River

3 Day Course Redesign

Visual Syllabus

We just finished a 3 day workshop on course redesign, based on Dee Fink's Self-Directed Guide to Significant Learning, and our #fab group thought through their courses very carefully aligning dream learning goals with realistic (more short term) learning goals, with assessments, with activities that provide students with the practice to be successful in the assessments, with the resources we need to provide students to be successful in the activities.

Highlights included the formation of a great new community of teachers, creative versions of a visual syllabus, lots of intense discussions on teaching and learning, with teachers learning about themselves as learners by being thrust into the student position, and videos on microteaching that included stuffed animals and Hello Kitty figures.

We will get back together end of July to see how the visual syllabi and other sketched out activities are taking shape for the Fall term, and we will provide specific, actionable and kind feedback to each other.

Visual Syllabus

Visual Syllabus

Visual Syllabus