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.