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