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.