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..."