Book: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

I finally managed to finish Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen's  The Distracted Mind:  Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, MIT Press, 2016.  Not too surprisingly, reading this at work was not at all effective because of the constant disruptions that pulled me away from the focus of this book.

This book focuses on how our brains, still ancient in how they are able to set goals and how they are easily distracted to sense potential danger, are struggling with today's overload through social media, non-stop connection to information through smartphones, and the need to satisfy our "information foraging." Their hypothesis is: "We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information.  Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety" (13).

When set goals to achieve anything, the danger to lose focus and, in the long run, either take much longer to achieve our goals or not achieve them at all, is brought on by the novelty of external influences that are coming in on social media and smartphones.  Humans have always had this challenge, but with the world at their fingertips, the challenge has increased, to the point where we have great difficulties not having our phones with us.  Some mind-boggling (and maybe self-reflective) data:
Smartphone users check their smartphones

• on an average of 27 times a day, ranging from 14-150 times per day depending on the study, the population, and the number of years someone has had a smartphone,
• when they have time to kill (42%),
• while driving (55%),
• in a movie theater (35%),
• on a dinner date (33%)
• during school performances (32% of parents),
• during church (19%),
• during a shower (12%)
• during sex (9%)

Smartphone users (75%) have their phones within 5 feet of them at all times, with 75% of the younger users sleeping with their phone next to their bed, on vibrate or ring, waking up at night to check.  80% reach for their phones within 15 minutes of waking up; 62% reach for their phones as the first thing after waking up.

This leads to lots of screen time right before bed, which disrupts sleep patterns and leads to increased anxiety (108-9).

Add to this the constant mental stress of multi-tasking and task-switching, and it is no wonder that people do not accomplish as much as we are hoping for as they have the constant challenge of work interruptions (you need to reply to that email right now) or social media interruptions (so much more fun and gratifying).  FOMO (Fear of Missing out) and simple boredom also increase our social media usage.

For education, research has shown that students with lower GPAs tend to spend more time on Facebook, tend to do a lot more task-switching, spend more time on media during the day, and lack study strategies.  I learned about the game cellphone stack, that apparently is played at dinners where the person who first needs to look at their phone will pick up the tab. Maybe this can be used for teaching as well.

The authors do not leave us completely hanging with these depressing numbers but provide a couple of chapters with suggestions on how to cope with this need to forage for information.  We can change our brains or change our behaviors.

What are methods to change our brains?  Consider meditation, cognitive exercises, video games, nature walks, certain drugs and physical exercise - all these, in some ways, allow us to focus on goals more effectively.  

What are methods to change our behavior? Focus on getting a good night's sleep by limiting screen exposure in the late evening.  Here is a list of questions to reflect on that may help with changing behavior:

• "How might I increase my metacognitive view of how my own mind performs in a given situation, and in what ways are my actions not in line with how I should behave based on my goals and an understanding of my limitations?
• How might I change my physical environment to reduce accessibility of potential distractors?
• How might I assess whether I am self-interrupting because of boredom, and how might I make the task more interesting to stave off that boredom?
• How might I recognize when my actions are driven by anxiety about missing out on something in my virtual world, and what steps can I take to reduce that anxiety?" (238

Thoughts and Impressions from POD 2018

POD is the conference for the pod network community of professionals working in areas that focus on academic or educational development in higher education.  This year's conference was in Portland, Oregon, which right there was a real treat.  Add to this the opportunity to spend almost a whole week with over 1,000 folks who are passionate, enthusiastic, and creative about working with faculty to improve student learning - what is not to like?  Here are some impressions from my first time attending this conference.

One of the great opportunities of this conference is to see and talk to all the folks who are well-known in this field, with the additional bonus that they are all very interested in sharing their ideas (including tangible takeaways like handouts, web sites, online tools) and hearing what your ideas are.  The conference started with workshops and moved into 4 days of sessions, with some carefully scheduled opportunities to step away from the more formal sessions and network with colleagues by exploring different aspects of the city - you could run in the morning, do some yoga, explore the food or museum scene, and even do some karaoke.

The sessions were focused on Leading in Times of Change, which is so broad that many ideas can fall under it. I focused primarily on sessions that addressed inclusion, diversity and equity topics and of course learning spaces. I found it interesting that not many sessions had any kind of technology angle, and that, instead, were sharing strategies and techniques. 

One of the highlights for me was José Bowen's keynote, and even though I had seen and heard some of his speech before, the content had been changed enough, with other kind of data, that it was again very engaging.  He certainly knows how to use the novelty and wow effect of data to engage with his audience.  Key takeaways from his talk that higher education needs to focus more on process than content and that the curriculum should be seen as a tool box giving our students an assortment of tools to solve problems, be creative, and think and evaluate critically the world around them and their lives. He reminded us that we need to start where the students are (not where we hope they are) and that testing needs to be carefully designed so that it is not anxiety-producing but getting to the results we want - students showing to us and themselves that they have mastered a skill or knowledge set successfully.

In a different session, I was introduced to a new idea for practicing critical thinking which is authentic, geared primarily towards graduate students.  The retraction watch,

https://retractionwatch.com, is a site that lists any research that is being retracted for small or more serious reasons.  Having students analyze such an item to see what the problem is with reflection on how they can improve their own research can be helpful.  Another resource are various preprint servers for different disciplines, where one can access manuscripts not officially published yet, to provide a kind critical review to the authors:

http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers is one such preprint server.

Oh, and did I mention food trucks

and Powell's and Voodoo Doughnuts?

Ideas from Edspaces 2018

Here are my takeaways from the various sessions I attended at Edspaces.

This is a very different audience - not only are the professionals primarily architects, interior designers, and of course the sales people of the various furnishing companies, but almost all of the folks representing educational institutions are from the K-12 environment, and most of them are not necessarily faculty but people involved on the state or local level with designing schools.  As a result, the presentations appear to be focusing on ideas that folks in the instructional design and instructional technology communities have been talking about for a number of years - for example, having folks talking about what a flipped classroom is seems somewhat strange to me, having folks talk about how online learning is a new trend that should be seen as disruptive innovation is also interesting - just reminding me how slowly ideas work through different segments of the work force.

On the other hand, seeing some of the examples of what K-12 schools look like and, more importantly, what they are doing, is just amazing.  For example, one of the sessions on maker spaces gave the examples of multiple schools where the school culture has been profoundly impacted by introducing a maker space into an area that is publicly available.  (Reminder - a maker space is not just a space with tools, either physical or digital, but a space with these tools that gives students space to explore ideas with the specific purpose of solving a problem that they perceive by building/creating a solution and testing it).  One school where a maker space has allowed for a change in school culture, improving student attendance, retention, and graduation rates is Tilden High School in Chicago. Of course it is the people who make this happen, but the space makes it much easier.

Maker spaces are also described a space where you can learn to take risks - and risk taking was claimed as a core skill just like communication, leadership, and collaboration.

Showing another example of schools can be different, Chris Lehmann, founder of the Science Leadership Academy, a high school focused on letting students learn, challenged us to change our language so that we no longer say that we are teaching a subject but that we are teaching students a subject.  Adding the word students shifts the focus away from the content to the people - as it should be.  As the content can change rather quickly anyway, focusing on students is the only way to go (one person stated that every 73 days, medical education changes).
Part of this teaching the students is that we need to give students the space to learn - and that means the space to make mistakes and truly learn from them.  We take it for granted that athletes and musicians take years of practice before being good, if not even great at their skills.  For some reason, we set a different standard when it comes to other subject matters.

We also need to make sure that the environment allows for empathy and caring - change is scary, and it becomes even scarier when you do not have a safe space at home.  Caring is essential, but caring does not mean that I do things for and to you (that is control and management); caring means that I do things with you and by you.

And so our schools need to reflect the caring and the focus on student learning - and this means that we need to move away from learning spaces that are designed as prisons and as crowd control, and need to move across the board towards spaces that encourage curiosity, exploration, social justice, civic engagement, and innovation - for all, not for the school districts with a high socio-economic background

And finally a little fun - we did a rapid prototyping process in one of the sessions to come up with a learning spaces design, using, among other things, playdough.

Discoveries at Edspaces

This week, I am discovering new furnishings and other ideas at Edspaces in Tampa - while this conference very much focuses on K-12, there are some sessions covering higher education, and of course it is always great to see what K-12 is doing, to see what we in higher education need to expect from our students when they come to our campuses.  It is quite clear that the discrepancies continue to grow, and that the schools that are able to renovate/build new and change the way they are teaching are sending students to university who have a very different idea on how learning should happen.

While the sessions of the conference are interesting, I will focus more on ideas and products I am encountering.  Here are some ideas for starters.

 How about a storage cabinet where the sides can be used for writing?   Smith System, now part of the Steelcase empire, has some interesting solutions, and other companies, like Gratnells, are also quite fun.  I also found a couple of other erasable writing surfaces that may be worth exploring, for example Polyvision's ceramic steel, which can look and behave like a chalk board, comes in different colors and claims to be easier on the eyes than glass and more durable.

Or a rocking chair that is very low to the ground? Quite comfortable, though it took me a moment to get out of it. This one is built by Virco.

 And here is an example of games that can be played with your feet, by RichTech Display.

 Think about what kind of collaborative spaces you can build out of these shapes - and apparently they are virtually indestructible.  One version of this is the one shown by Fomcore.

this kind of chair can be taken anywhere and will potentially improve your posture.  HowdaDesignz won an award for this concept.  Yes, I tried this one as well.  

 And yes, this is a grassy knoll for creating green spaces inside, by NorvaNivel.

 This lab table has magnets so that the stools can be attached for storage.  Notice the additional storage behind the stools.

a maker space on wheels,

 height adjustable learning stations,  and what would be cool if this could be combined with something like the FootFidget for folks to stand during lecture and be able to move just a little

 wobbly stools to keep you moving,

and storage desks with velcro sides to add flexible sides - this is part of their STEM Starter cart - NorvaNivel also has velcro blocks to create privacy barriers for testing

Race Equity Workshops - what I am learning

Our Office of Inclusion and Diversity has provided us the great opportunity to participate in a series of workshops focusing on awareness around race equity (and lack thereof) and strategies for ourselves, our courses, and our academic culture to become (more) equitable.  Part of this series is that we are going to implement projects in our disciplines or programs to improve equity across campus.

The workshop series is conducted out of the University of South California's Center for Equity, and it has been a great experience so far.  I am not going to retrace all of the steps and discussions we are having; instead, I will highlight some of the points that took me by surprise.

Maybe you saw this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a while back and thought to yourself, this is not happening in my classes or, this is happening in my classes but I don't know how to improve the situation.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Traditional-Teaching-May/243339?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=d9bc9e4ee59f4eea9168c9f5d77010ed&elq=e3b3c595e6bb4e5793fcf596213a6ee8&elqaid=18996&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8587

So here are some very simple ideas to get you on this track of thinking more inclusively with more equity in mind:
1. When you use examples, case studies, and other assignments for your class, use non-Anglophone names. It helps if you use names of people you have met so that you can say to your students you indeed know someone with that name (because you may get push-back using names not familiar to your students.  This strategy broadens what kinds of names are possible to use in a classroom.
2. When you put together readings for your course, choose texts from non-canonical authors that introduce the idea that not all scientists, philosophers, engineers are white men - I am exaggerating, though I suspect you recognize the problem. Including these voices shows all of your students that anyone can be successful in your particular field.
3. You may say that you are only using a text book and thus do not have this option of bringing diverse voices into your course.  Think about how you can connect your area of teaching then to issues of equity.  It may be worth it to give a brief history of your subject that includes references of scientists who are not often discussed.  Keep an eye out for news items connected to your subject that can highlight inequity or equitable use of your subject.
4.  Give your students a voice.  In an active learning space, you have already done this - take it a step further and consider creating spaces where students can briefly reflect on what is happening in their world, whether that is announcing a campus event (building community) or discussing a news topic that impacts them.
5. Include a statement in your syllabus about equity.

Because this should be our goal:

More to come!

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, is an interesting book connecting psychology, human behavior, everyday life, economics, learning situations, and research.  This book outlines a multitude of experiments he and his colleagues have conducted over the last few decades to show how human behavior impacts and often counteracts rational decision making.

Starting the with concept of System 1and System 2 thinking, something we all do, he shows how humans most of the time make decisions quickly, based on our emotion-connected System 1 thinking.  Most of the time, these decisions are accurate as they are grounded in our experiences, but many times, we need to take a moment to switch into our System 2 thinking, which takes more time, is more difficult, but tends to provide us with a more nuanced view and thus a less biased decision.

Add to this his findings on loss aversion - we do not like to lose or perceive that we lose, so we rather stay where we are than take a gamble, on avoidance of change - System 1 thinking makes it difficult to see change as valuable, on single evaluation -- based in System 1 thinking and plaguing justice systems, on hindsight bias, the illusion of understanding -- the list goes on and on.

What does this mean for teaching and learning?
1. We should be concerned about fast answers to complex issues. We need to give our students more time to come up with more nuanced answers, no matter how uncomfortable this may be.
2. We need to remember that experts when asked for their expertise tend to overthink and move into outlier situations while statistical data is more reliable, and we need to remember that we as teachers are seen as experts and may fall into the same trap.
3. Unlearning something is very difficult because it is part of our System 1 thinking that helps us create a vision of the world that makes a coherent sense - even if it is not founded in facts.  We can be blind to the obvious and to our blindness.
4. We can see the illusion of understanding in our classrooms all the time. How do we deal with this illusion?
5. We do not like to take risks -- so how can we construct our learning assignments so that students do not see them as major risk taking?
6. Opting out and opting in:  when you ask people to opt in, you get a lower response rate of participation as when the default is already set as in, and you ask people to opt out.  Not only are people lazy but opting out suggests that they are missing out on something - which humans do not like.  What can we do in our classes so that students are by default part of it and they can opt out?

Book: The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

I read Judson Brewer's The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits to see what it can bring to the improvement of teaching and learning - although this is not its focal point.
Brewer clearly connects addiction and its perceived rewards to the human condition and our way of (non)thinking, charts his life's course as an example of how meditation can move a person away from addictive behavior to mindfulness and joyful immersion into meaningful activities such as learning and working. He shows addiction with its cycle of trigger, behavior, reward in situations that we would easily recognize - smoking, drinking, eating, drug use, but then maps the same cycle onto the use of social media, emotions, and other human behaviors. His solution is meditation, reflection, mindfulness to move towards a different kind of good feeling, based in Buddhist teachings. 

How can we use this in teaching and learning?  One of the key points he made is that full immersion into a topic comes from curiosity.  We need to find ways in our teaching to enable students to recognize the trigger of curiosity, use the appropriate behavior or immersion into the content to get the reward of feeling good about the learning.  We also need to make them more fully aware that the other triggers of social media lead to a lesser reward and addiction.
Using our mobile devices in class to feed our curiosity is one way of dealing with it; however, it may be useful to suggest to students to turn off notifications for that time period.  Changing that function may be enough to allow students to focus on course content without the distraction of getting sounds and buzzes from their various communication tools.
Giving students data about the downside of distraction, the myth of effective multitasking may make it also easier for students to put the mobile device distractions aside.
Some faculty decide that no devices are permissible in class, but that puts some students at a learning disadvantage. It may be more effective to have device-free thinking and discussion periods where no one needs to have a device for note taking.
What we have seen in our workshops is that marking clearly a time for break when it is ok to check email, social media and other communication channels helps faculty to stay focused during the remainder of the workshop - I am wondering if a similar strategy would work for students as well.

Book: Teaching and Learning STEM

I just finished reading Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, by Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in learning how to teach, learning more about how to learn, especially if this is going to happen in a traditional STEM field -- but the tips will also be applicable to other sciences in higher education even if the examples and illustrations may not be that easy to transfer.
The clear organization of the text makes it easy to envision starting with small changes in one's class and leading up, over time, to more complex changes that include project or problem based learning.  Some of the things I learned are

• in learning objectives do not use the verbs know, learn, understand, or appreciate as you cannot truly measure what your students are accomplishing
• if you need your students to know material that is primarily memory-based (vocabulary, terminology, definitions, facts, periodic table), give them handouts and set the expectation
• when addressing cheating in class, remind students that this may say something about their future life, their future work ethics
• distinction between active and reflective learner - though the example given does not convince me (active learner = just tries without thinking, reflective learner = will work carefully through exercises)
• the strategy of TAPPS - thinking aloud pair problem solving with the two roles of explainer and questioner
• the strategy of Pair Programming with the two roles of navigator and pilot
• flipped flipping
• learning approaches of deep, surface, and strategic
• designing an exam with 10-20% of high level objectives - no more, no less
• giving students strategies to become experts through problem classification, metacognition, automacity of certain tasks, self-efficacy
• the McMaster problem solving structure of define, explore, plan, implement, reflect
• the Perry model of intellectual development: dualism, multiplicity, relativism
• in-class clinics for group work

The reminders throughout the book were just as useful.

UBTech 2018

Back in Las Vegas! I was here two years ago and swore I would not come back -- and here I am again.
First day of UBTech 2018 brought a very good Women in IT Leadership Summit with some outstanding speakers and the opportunity to meet other women in IT. Highlights from the Summit:
1. Jenny Evans from PowerHouse Performance talked to us about crushing the confidence gap through an animated and personal discussion of how we need to take care of ourselves through reflection, sleep, and exercise, with exercise allowing us a (relatively) easy way to push ourselves into and through our zones of discomfort for increased challenges that allow us to see other challenges, like phone calls, as doable if not trivial. She also reminded us to go on an intellectual diet, purging our RSS feeds, catalogue subscriptions and other consumer-focused media inputs to limit what we see, read, and thus get tempted to deal with.
2. Marcia Dorita Baker from U of Nebraska provided strategies for inclusion that focused on different skill sets and practicing them so that everyone in a team gets the opportunity to grow in different skill sets.
3. Nicole Aboltin from Lone Star College discussed 3 models of mentoring which gave me some ideas on how to structure the Women in IT mentoring program I have been thinking about for Auburn.
4. Finally, Rebecca Gill from U of Nevada gave us crushing statistics on why women choose not to stay in IT -- with the top reasons the lack of female role models, female mentors, and female networking in an otherwise (white) male dominated profession.  Time to get to work.

Radical Equations

Radical Equations

I just finished Robert Moses' Radical Equations, a fascinating read that connects the civil rights movement, in particular in Mississippi, with the need for better Math education.

In both cases, it is young people who recognized that a certain set of knowledge leads to better opportunities, whether these are political (voter registration, voting rights, voting access) or economic (Algebra as the gatekeeper course in high school for access to education geared towards computing), and through their organization they were able to force the established power structure to change culture (albeit very slowly and hesitantly).

As Math is too often seen as a skill that you either have or you don't, connecting Math learning with relevant cultural and historical experiences has been a successful strategy to get poor, mostly minority students interested in Algebra.  While I think you should read the book yourselves, here are the five steps for the Algebra Project curriculum:
1. Physical Events -- the trip has at least two purposes. It gives students a real experience with a cultural or historical moment, and it gives the physical experience of traveling along a certain set of paths, covering certain distances.
2.  Pictorial Representation/Modeling -- students need to find an individual way of translating the trip experience into something abstract, so after the travel comes the reflection that is based on an image or model
3.  Intuitive Language/"People Talk" -- students continue reflecting on the trip by using their own language.
4.  Structured Language/"Feature Talk" -- the reflection of step 3 is analyzed for mathematical features such as start, finish, direction, distance
5. Symbolic Representation - the final step is turning the findings into symbols that can be understood by the whole group.

Tradeline 2018

With a couple of colleagues, I attended this year's Tradeline conference with its focus on STEM and lab buildings to see if we can gather ideas for our next classroom building that will incorporate teaching lab spaces for a couple of different disciplines.

Clearly, lots of places are building lots of very interesting buildings right now, though sometimes the small tweaks may be the most interesting.  On the first day, we toured Tufts University's new teaching and research lab building, where a couple of features struck me as interesting.

cloth wall

1. walls made out of cloth outside of faculty offices so that notes can easily be pinned to them. 2. integration of art that connects to the science in the building

art in science

translucent office windows

 3. lots of natural light but translucent glass to provide privacy

Power cords from ceiling

4.  Retractable power cords from the ceiling

passthrough window

ladders for storage

5. a pass-through window between a prep and a teaching lab that can be covered up by a white board
6.  Ladders to extend storage up to the ceiling.

Other ideas I gathered over these two days included the reminder that Art programs really could do some amazing things with augmented and virtual reality as the current exhibit of Art in the Age of Internet showed.

Use unusual spaces for unusual projects - Lehigh University was able to take over an old factory and started turning its spaces into creation and experimental spaces

Ask the right kinds of questions - broad, open for innovation, specific and targeted for keeping with the status quo.

Dynamic Lecturing: Tips to Enhance Student Learning, April 6, 2018

Todd Zakrajsek

A couple of weeks ago I made the trip up to Samford University to listen to Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. You may have seen him on TedTalks where he discusses "Improve learning by thinking about learning."

This time, his talk focused on Dynamic Lecturing, based on the book he just published, Dynamic Lecturing:  Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness (The Excellent Teacher Series)

His discussion was part lecture, part interaction, and while it took him a while to be more obvious about this distinction, the bottom line of his talk was that the dichotomy between lecture and active learning is a false dichotomy, and that most faculty do a mix of both, and have done so for many years --but we can always improve how we are doing this.  The following is highlighting his ideas and then also listing the different strategies he used throughout his presentation.

His argument is that the human brain is always looking for at least minimal (perceived) value. If a lecture, or a book, or a movie, or any other form of content delivery does not yield this minimal value, then the brain will turn to something that will provide this value -- and people turn to their phones.  (Side note -- a monotonous voice is perceived by the brain as a sound that can be ignored, just like other background noise, so after a while we literally can no longer hear a monotonous lecture)
So, for learning to happen we need
1.  Attention:  Because of the way our brain functions, it is best to lecture in small chunks -- up to 7 minutes is optimal; at that point our brain hits cognitive load saturation.  Change it up with a short group activity that focuses on the lectured content to practice and deepen the content.
2. Understanding:  note taking means we make choices on what to exert energy so we interact with the content and thus learn it.  Typing on laptops allows us to go too fast, so we do not make choices -- so the solution is not to take the laptops away but to give strategies to the typists on how to choose what to type.
3. Value:  Explain to your students how we learn and how something that is difficult for us becomes even more difficult, if not impossible, when we surround ourselves with external stimuli:

Intrinsic load - inherent difficulty of the content

Extraneous load - additional external stimuli -- a good side story can diminish the intrinsic cognitive load, but it can also just be confusing 

Germane load - processing of information, construction and automation of schema, the more you practice the easier it becomes

The myth of multitasking is not entirely a myth -- we can do more than one task at the same time if at least one of the tasks is automatic -- like breathing and walking.  But the second the task becomes more of a cognitive load, like speaking or writing, we can no longer multitask but instead move to task shifting, which takes a lot of energy.

For memory to happen, we just need repetition (btw, tip for passwords:  log in and out 5 times and you will remember your new password)

When a student asks if this is going to be on the test, maybe what the student is really asking is whether this information is worth spending cognitive load on.




Strategy 1:  Let audience know how many responses you are looking for from them before you will move on - and count them while you are collecting them.
Strategy 2:  when asking, how many of you have read, make sure to follow up with how many of you have not read and possibly a third option -- this raises engagement
Strategy 3:  use humor
Strategy 4:  do the unexpected, for example interpret a well-known image differently
Strategy 5:  when you ask your students to watch videos, embed questions -- lots of tools to make this possible.
Strategy 6:  "mute" your projected screen to focus on the discussion at hand or something else that is not on the screen -- CTRL B for black screen, CTRL W for white screen on Windows/Command B and Command W for Mac.
Strategy 7:  at beginning of project  have each person map out when they would be doing the major chunks of work, then have a group discussion at that point for better planning; individual components get written, so individual grades and not everyone gets lumped in.
Strategy 8:  explain to your students why you are doing in class what you are doing

Next Generation Learning Spaces 2018, remainder of conference

I am rather behind on reflecting on the remainder of this conference, so this will be a little less detailed than I like to be, and a rather random collection of thoughts.

Oral Roberts University is doing some amazing things with augmented and virtual reality -- they had multiple representatives there that showcased how their institutional culture and values allowed them to move faster forward on such initiatives. However, they also changed some labels so that instructional designers are now learning producers and other staff members are innovation engineers.

As our spaces reflect our values, we should also be aware of the immediately adjacent spaces to an amazing renovation.

Generations X, Y, Z

Generation Z and what it is (or is not) was one of the big topics, and it does get confusing and contradicting.  Apparently,  Gen X is aiming for work life balance, Gen Y for freedom and stability, and Gen Z for security and stability.  What has not been addressed is if these aims are because of when these people were born in the absolute chronology or because these people are now of a certain age - maybe Gen X can finally aim for work life balance because they are at a point in their career where this is important -- and not because they are born between 1965-1980 (or whatever the magic numbers are )

However, here are some other numbers and info that may be useful:
Gen Z folks get multiple inputs on financial decision making
They will be 40% of the consumer base by 2020, 85% get new product ideas through social media, and many of them want to be entrepreneurs (33% of older students already have their own business, 77% of total want to turn hobby into business)

Immersion into content is also important, especially when it can be done with others, so what the University of Central Florida is doing with virtual reality is quite interesting - they use Embodied Labs to have their social work students experience different visual abilities so that they can learn empathy for certain parts of the population that otherwise may "just" be seen as poor.

Prototyping spaces is important so that you can socialize a concept without spending a lot of money -- and make adjustments based on stakeholder input. I would hope we could use the SPRINT concept, developed by Jake Knapp, even though it may take us a little longer than 5 days.

Data analysis - what kind of data can we get out of our spaces and space usage that would allow us to make smarter decisions building the next set?

Blockchain could be used to make academic credentials truly portable and thus no longer tethered to the university but connected to the individual who earned the credentials.

Start your sentences that may challenge the status quo with "I wonder..."

Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference, Day 1

Pat Boone exhibit

This is my first time at the annual Next Generation Learning Spaces conference, happening this year in Los Angeles.  The first day consisted of three workshops focusing on new ways to think about innovation and entrepreneurship on campus, active learning and faculty development, and change management. In the late afternoon, I was able to visit Pepperdine University's library that just opened after a full-scale renovation of its 1970s space, including a Pat Boone exhibit.

Work with Emerging Technology to Accelerate your Campus Culture

Teggin Sumners, San Francisco State University

The presentation focused on pushing the concept of Makerspaces into its next iteration. Right now, many makerspaces are informal spaces for students to innovate, often not connected to a particular course or curriculum, and thus potentially not giving all students structure to succeed in such spaces.

Focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, many universities are now taking the next steps to create not only spaces for innovation but processes and structures for students to innovate and then turn that innovation into a successful enterprise, turning the students into entrepreneurs.

Such a shift is happening now out of the realization that our work force needs across the globe will be radically changing in the next 20 years or so, making it necessary for us now to rethink the way we are teaching our students.  Some universities create innovation hubs, connected to particular degrees, others are opting for innovation learning communities.  The key components to consider are 

Strategy

Financial and human resources

Support infrastructure

Entrepreneur education

Start-up support

Evaluation approach

Universally designed

Sustainable

before you can think about what that kind of space needs to look like

Meta-Active Learning Can Help Faculty Engagement and Success

Beverly Bondad-Brown, California State University, Los Angeles

This workshop focused on giving faculty opportunities to think about active learning while experiencing it, so the workshop itself was giving us the same opportunities through multiple activities.

As we are already doing a lot of this at Auburn, the most valuable piece was the set of cards they graciously shared that we will be able to use in our future faculty sessions.

Change Management:  Interdisciplinary collaboration amongst faculty, technology providers and site planners

 Maggie Beers, San Franciso State University

In front of yet another scary statistics highlighting how California will be short 3 million workers by 2025 because not enough students are graduating college even though the number that enters has doubled, we learned about the six academic cultures, how they think and what they value, and how we can use this knowledge to create communication plans to talk to these different audiences to push for innovation.

The discussion is based Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy by William Bergquist.

In addition, Maggie also shared a card set with different questions for future planning of learning spaces based on the Learning Spaces Rating System created by Educause. These cards allow for better sorting of where one still needs to do work, especially in a group setting.

She also reminded us of the principles of diffusion of innovation: Compatibility, triability, complexity, advantage, observability, and how we need to consider these for large-scale active learning implementations.

ELI 2018, Day 3

The final day of ELI covered Universal Design in Learning (UDL) and what Artificial Intelligence and Robotics may mean for higher education, our profession and the future.

Embracing challenges in UDL

Oakland University brought some excellent points to the discussion on creating an environment for Universal Design in Learning and where it creates some conflict with following recommendations for accessibility.

In particular, you want to remove barriers to learning and increase access, which means phrasing your approach as a social justice issue for all rather than a legal requirement for a few may be more convincing for many faculty.

They have seen evidence of increased student success and retention because of increased access opportunity and have created online videos both to make it easier for faculty to get started and student-created videos to show faculty the barriers students encounter when their course is not UDL structured.

Where the conflict with ADA compliance becomes visible is in the need to close-caption all video content made available to all students - if we want to give out students choices to access the material then we need to make sure this is all captioned, but that takes additional time that we often do not have.

We also need to remember to give our students some guidance -- they do not always know that there are different ways to access and thus learn materials and may not know the best way for them to learn.

CAST is another good resource for all things UDL.

What AI and robotics may mean to our professions and education - Diane Oblinger

The final keynote reminded us how technology, in particular AI and robotics, is changing the job world at amazing speed, and we need to take this into consideration at all levels of education.  Many of the current existing jobs will no longer exist in a few years, including such professions as stock brokers (you can already trade online, so why need people who are proven not to be as expert as they claim).

Elliq

Robots and AI will not be able to replace the critical thinking connected to ethics, but they will be able to provide social comfort for, for example, the single elderly -- see as an example Elliq, an Israeli product that interacts with older people, encouraging them to engage in activities, reminding them of tasks to keep their lives structured.

Other areas where AI is making major impact is: 

• knowledge curation
• online mediation
• online legal advice
• online medical advice and connecting within medical community
• job placement that is more fair

By 2030, many of our current professions will have gone through radical relearning because the technology will have introduced new dimensions that we cannot quite see yet. How nimble is higher education to adjust curricula, degrees, or certifications to account for such changes?  As Oblinger reminded us, what used to be called soft skills will become even more important, the core skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and life long learning.

ELI 2018, Day 2

Day Two of this year's Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) brought interesting discussions on navigation privacy in a data driven world, non-cognitive factors, overcoming obstacles in academic technology leadership, the future of learning spaces as growing experiences, and making makers.  In the middle of all of this, my colleague and I had a productive poster presentation.

Navigating privacy in a data driven world (Jules Polonetsky) reminded us that the Council of Europe is soon (May 2018) coming  out with new regulations on data privacy that will affect also many non-European countries as new technologies. Key changes:

1. A company dealing with EU citizen private data, regardless where the company is located, has to comply with these new GDPR rules
2. Penalties can be up to 4% of annual global turnover or $20,000, whichever is greater
3. Consent language must be clear and precise, with clear indication what happens to protected data
4. Breach notifications need to be issued within 72 hours
5. Users have the right to access their data
6. Users have the right to have their data erased
7. Users have the right to take their data with them
8. Institutions are responsible for having data protection officers rather than negotiating with all the different countries their users hail from

This impacts any higher education institution enrolling students from EU countries.
Add to this innovative new technology that allows for multiple data access points for one person, and you can see how this can get quite interesting for everyone involved. For example, when you talk to your smart devices at home (Alexa, Siri, and all the other strangely named women around your house), do you know what happens to your requests? Are they forgotten or are the stored for some future use (AI development)? How often do we take the time to review the privacy settings of our social media tools, even when they try to force us to review them?
One interesting point about the ethical implications of any of this was to have a philosopher at the table when such discussions become important.


Incorporating Noncognitive Strategies to improve Learning Success discussed McGraw Hill's research on procrastination and learner profiles. While the findings are not surprising, it is good to have numbers associated with our common sense reactions.
Combining different disciplines, like Learning Science, Neuroscience, Behavioral Economics and Econometrics, new models can be developed, like the econometric model of skill formation, eg Eckman and Cunha's Technology of Skill Formation, 

Here some points out of this model:

1. Multiple skills are required for success
2. Cognitive skills only one part
3. Skills evolve over time
4. Skills are complementary build on each other
5. Different skills are malleable over time to different degrees
6. Different skills have different critical and sensitive periods
7. Skill gap emerges very early and persists
8. Non cognitive skills can be more malleable at larger stages

Other factors such as health and economic status also affect our skill formation
In their procrastination research of over 2 million data points from 100,000 students using the McGraw Hill learning platform, the presenters found that up to 50% of students procrastinate to some degree, and that the longer they procrastinate the more likely it is that they will fail their assignment completely. This of course makes sense, but to have the number of 37 times more likely to fail if you always procrastinate could be a good number for faculty to use when working with their students on noncognitive skills.  How to work against this - build in early low-stakes assignment to identify procrastinators and then give them the support to change such habits.
The learner profiles they developed (out of almost 700 students) include average student, gritty, struggler, coaster, plugger.  The gritty students tend to be the most successful ones as they keep sticking with it.Only 12-15% of our students fall into the gritty or coaster (students who just get it) categories, so the question is how we can move more students to the gritty stage (and this is where growth mindset would come in)

Kyle Bowen, Penn State, discussed The future of learning spaces is growing experiences, with such entertaining and useful terms as Cone of Distraction (the cone of viewers forming behind a person using a laptop) increased by the Probability of PowerPoint (use of a boring PPT in class). He reminded us that amazon ships everything in way too large boxes to ensure that one box fits all -- we have the same attitude with our classrooms. He reminded us that lecture has 10 sf per student, in comparison to 3.5 sf on a plane, 10.5 sf on a subway and 22 sf at Starbucks.
The takeaway is that our classrooms need to be designed to grow experiences - which may mean that we take the class out of the room completely.  Let's build spaces for creation; and let's move away from limiting ourselves to writing as creation.

Finally, Making makers   Students at the center of education, technology, and innovation, highlighted Brandeis and Wellesley's maker spaces and what it allows their students to do. The maker mindset includes prototyping and startup, design thinking in practice, a moment when I say I need this thing and it does not exist yet so I make it myself. Makers find gaps, find something that can be used differently, figure out how things work, collaborate and, most importantly, do all of this without any instructions or roadmaps.  Intrinsic motivation is 

Fail faster and fail smarter. Encourage breaking things and then fixing them.

And in the middle of this, Jerisha and I had our fabulous poster session....

Poster session at ELI

ELI Day One, Part Two

Here some notes on the sessions for the first day of this year's ELI (Educause Learning Initiative).

The keynote by Bernard Bull, Concordia University in Wisconsin focused on Experiments, Entrepreneurs, and Innovations that are Shaping the Future of Higher Education. As academic transformation remains the leading issue at higher education institutions across the spectrum, his talk reminded us that we are again seeing education in unconventional ways and places. He watches trends and is interested when, for example, a trend jumps out of its domain (eg, health care) and into a different one (eg, education) as it shows that more than one small group of the population value the idea, and he is also very much interested in the concept of self-organized learning, which you may have seen in the amazing Hole in the Wall example.  

He stressed that one piece of the teaching and learning is the choice of educational institution, and if there were better ways for students to choose which institution is a good fit for them, then they could be more successful (he did not address how these students would then go about and pay tuition if they were to be selected for one of the very expensive institutions). This kind of alignment may also lead to more holistic measuring, and he reminded us that measures and algorithms, while more reliable, can either amplify or muzzle values and beliefs.

One of the examples of innovative education was Promazo, a group that connects students with companies for paid internships to solve problems that would be outsourced anyway.  The Wayfinding Academy helps students become clearer in their passions and interests making a traditional higher ed degree more meaningful as it cuts out multiple changes of majors that can extend time students put into a degree.

Finally, he considered that methodological and philosophical pathways can be a useful addition to curricula and programs, giving students additional choices for the path of study, but also giving institutions the chance to rethink their curricula away from simple compliance and accreditation.

 Second session of the day focused on Student Success with two short presentations, one focusing on the importance of stressing growth mindset, the other showcasing the development of a portal to pull together disparate online platforms to create a learning community. The first discussion is grounded in Carol Dweck's research on growth and fixed mindsets, and how clear communication about the two mindsets can already change attitudes and thus improve chances for success.  Students who are exposed to these two mindsets will make better choices in non-cognitive skills. Key takeaway from this session is also how you articulate your praise.  As growth mindset assumes that anyone can improve any skill through practice, feedback needs to focus on the practice and effort part, not create an environment that focuses on innate qualities.

Secret Decoder Ring

Third session of the day focused on the Secret Decoder Ring:  Why Faculty Choose to Pass on Faculty Development.  Three universities presented their approaches to faculty development, Northwestern, Wisconsin-Madison and Purdue, and their findings focused on empathy but also on focusing on culture and influencing change through this awareness.

ELI, Day One, Part One

Sticky note table top

The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) is meeting this week in New Orleans, and we have two teams from Auburn University presenting about various aspects of learning at the conference.

I am here to see what I can learn about virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and just reality in general.  My Monday morning workshop focused on . VR and AR: Driving Pedagogical Innovation through Vision and Strategy, giving us plenty of food for thought with examples of existing various realities, suggestions on gear, and worksheets to tackle strategic and implementation challenges.
The two presenters, Maya Georgieva and Emory Craig, have been working for years in this field and written a number of Educause pieces discussing various aspects of virtual and augmented reality.

Here some pointers on these different aspects if you have not thought too much about this yet:
1. 360 degree video is probably the easiest to accomplish, filming an existing location in a full 360 degree circle to create a somewhat immersive experience. All you need is a 360 degree camera, a sense of what kind of space makes sense to be captured this way, and some experience in post-production, eg editing, stitching the video together. Panopto now allows for 360 degree video uploads.
Yosemite video is one example of a 360 degree video - note the instructions under the video for best user experience and that you can drag the video inside its window to see different perspectives.

2.  Augmented reality allows for an overlay or embedding of virtual or graphic elements into a real video environment.  Think Pokemon Go as the most obvious popular example. Both Apple and Google have been developing engines that allow for the design of such augmented realities.  Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore allow all of us to create our own realities to some extent.
ARKit Examples
ARCore Examples

3.  Virtual Reality is the full immersion into a completely design virtual environment.  This tends to be the most complex environment to design, especially as we have been already exposed to very expensive versions of virtual reality, making it potentially difficult to compete with our previous experiences in the gaming world.


Why would this be of interest to us in education? Consider that each of these can do one of the following:
 - Take your students to places they would otherwise not be able to go to because it is too expensive, to time intensive, or too dangerous.
 - Allow your students to interact with an environment that in the real world would be too expensive or dangerous to work in, like a lab, power plant or other workplace experience.
-- Allow your students to learn from their mistakes in this environment before they encounter stressful situations in the real world.
 -- allow your students to be agents in making decisions in this kind of environment
 --  Allow your students an active part in creating such environments, with all the situational factors that need to be considered when creating aa compelling learning situation.

The technology may still be in its toddlerdom (I think we are past infancy), and with the emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, we will be able to give more choices to the users of such situations.

Here some examples of what is already out there, many of the cross-university collaborations with a lot of student input:
Virtually Ulysses - James Joyce's Dublin to bring a complex piece of literature to life and make it potentially easier to understand
1772 Gaspee Affair -- historical event reinvisioned
Visualizing the impossible - architecture students create physically impossible constructions
L.A. Children's Hospital Trauma Training - medical students are immersed into chaotic ER situations to deal with the entire situation not just the immediate medical crisis
Berlin Wall - students play different roles in a very emotional historical situation, allowing for the creation of empathy for different participants
Oregon 3d virtual microscope - moving into the molecular level

and yes, the furniture was also cool with a table top consisting of sticky notes.