A Deep Foundation of Disciplines
design, philosophy, teaching & learning
November 02, 2003, 01:56 PM
Last week, Dan posted about his Graduate Design Seminar class (as is his wont on peaceful a fall evening), specifically covering the nature of arts and the nature of products. I recommend reading them if you haven't already.
While reflecting on the profound ideas plainly put in Dan's point-by-point, notebook-ish style, I started to consider the role of philosophy in education. Dick Buchanan, who by all accounts is a man of amazing intellect and profundity of thought, seems to have crafted this class to give the design graduate students a solid foundation in how their discipline fits into the intellectual frameworks of society.
This got me thinking again about the role of higher education and what distinguishes a university education from a trade school education. Perhaps part of the preparation for becoming a skilled professional involves understanding the philosophical underpinnings of your discipline and how it fits in with the rest of society, both intellectually, historically and culturally; it's not enough to just learn the skills to get by. And if these underpinnings are still poorly understood, perhaps because your discipline is young, then you should at least be aware of the open issues and what the current level of understanding is. Many programs ignore this aspect of education; I was never taught the foundations of computing in this fashion, for instance. Yet perhaps learning these truths before practicing your trade is premature anyway, since you won't have the experience to connect them up with to make them meaningful to you. More thinking is necessary, obviously.
I've been half-trying to avoid reading Dan's posts about Design Seminar recently, although not because they aren't good. Every time I do, I feel like a penniless, hungry child looking in a bakery window; I can see the wondrous pastries and smell their delectable smells, but I'm helplessly tormented by the knowledge that I'll never get a taste. Kerry says I should stay here at CMU an extra semester next fall just to take Design Seminar. I'm tempted, sorely tempted...
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Active Reading
teaching & learning, writing & communication
October 17, 2003, 09:59 PM
Since I came to Carnegie Mellon, and especially since I started roBlog, I've developed a new approach to reading nonfiction books and articles, both for classes and for myself. In the past, I've found that I got very little "take away" knowledge from reading papers; usually I'd remember one or two of the main points, if I was lucky. The problem, I believe, is that I was taking a very passive approach to reading; I would just sit back, scan the text, and hope to absorb the knowledge. Sometimes this works ok, but I've found a more effective way to learn.
I call it "active reading", but its basically just a matter of reading and writing about your understanding of the reading. Sometimes I try to just summarize, but often I'll reflect on the important points behind the prose, and try to connect them to other facts I've collected in the past. This serves two purposes:
- Writing ensures I really have a complete understanding of the concepts; I won't be able to put them into words if I don't.
- The resulting text serves as a "backup" of my reading of the article; when I inevitably forget something important, I can return to my synopsis/reflection to find it again.
On the down side, this process takes longer and consumes more energy than just sitting down and reading does alone, but I find the depth of understanding I take away from it is much greater.
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The Role Of the University in Higher Education
society & sociology, teaching & learning
September 19, 2003, 06:05 PM
After attending the whole IT in the research university event as well as reflecting on my experiences in classes here at CMU and my illustrious schoolmates' comments and complaints on their own experiences, I've got to thinking about what exactly the role of a research university should be in the broader educational system. Although I'm no expert in education, I have been a student for many years now and have some experience with teaching, so I feel I have some authority to pronounce on this subject.
Here's my thoughts on what kind of learning would be appropriate at the various stages of education and who should be responsible for meeting these expectations:
- Undergraduate education should focus on giving students a broad base of knowledge to form the foundations of a productive intellectual life, as well as enough skills in a particular field to begin a career. Ideally students should all leave undergrad as T-shaped people. In my opinion, undergraduate degrees should not be conferred by research institutions; they should instead be granted by colleges that are specifically oriented towards teaching. Teaching well is a full-time job; you can't expect researchers to be able to just "fit it in" to their research schedules, especially when their incentive structure heavily favors deprioritizing it in favor of their research. These teaching colleges must also have the resources to offer courses tailored towards students with particular interests; it is not acceptable to expect a designer to learn everything they need to communicate with programmers by taking an introductory computer science course geared towards people who want to focus on programming, for instance.
- Professional graduate education, such as the programs I and most of my friends are in here at CMU, can be taught by research institutions, but must not be seen as "more undergraduate work". If you want to learn a new skill, you need to go back to a teaching college. Professional graduate education, on the other hand, should mostly involve courses run in a seminar style that focus on collaboration between the professors and students (most of whom are returning to school after spending some time practicing their trade) to distill the abstract research done by academics into a form that can be used by the industry practitioners. Essentially, professional graduate education should be viewed more as a form of technology transfer (numerous studies have found that transferring people is much more effective than merely transferring technology) and less as a form of instruction.
- Academic education, or PhD programs, should be run more or less as they are now. Essentially PhD programs are (or should be) a form of apprenticeship where the student learns by working with the master. Hopefully freeing researchers from some of their teaching burdens will give them more time to spend working with their PhD students, who are the type of people they are actually qualified to teach.
So that's my modest proposal.
Posted by Dan on September 20, 2003 at 09:41 AM
Spot on. Having gone to reseach schools for both undergrad and grad, your observations are corect. However, I bet you might feel differently about PhD programs after you've gone through one....
Posted by Rob on September 20, 2003 at 10:12 AM
Yeah, I'll bet the reality of PhD-level education isn't as good as the theory. Not having ever been in a PhD program, I didn't have much to say about that.
Theoretically, however, I'm guessing an apprenticeship model is the best way to go for teaching advanced researchers. In fact it works pretty well in a lot of trades. I don't know why our society doesn't use it much anymore.
Posted by Dan on September 20, 2003 at 02:18 PM
Because it isn't profitable. Why have one apprentice that you have to pay, when, at a university as a professor, you can have five, paying $28k a year?
Posted by Rob on September 20, 2003 at 06:36 PM
In Ye Olde Days, apprentices worked for low pay in exchange for instruction, so the benefit to the master was cheap (albeit less skilled) labor (and the practice persists today in some fields; my dad, who is a woodworker, took on an apprentice for awhile about a year ago). This is essentially what the HCII here at CMU does; PhD students are fully funded by the department so they don't have to pay tuition and receive a modest stipend in exchange for their work. So it does cost profs money to support PhD students, but in exchange they get expanded capacity to research and publish papers.
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Advanced Software Design Seminar
software development, teaching & learning
September 07, 2003, 01:22 PM
Abby and I had what I believe is a really great idea for a course to run here at CMU (or elsewhere, for that matter). I'm afraid it won't have a chance to see the light of day, but I'm posting about it here anyway.
The course would be called "Advanced Software Design Seminar" or something similar, and, as the name suggests, it would be run in a seminar-style. Each student would have a fairly large (perhaps on the order of 4 to 6,000 lines) software system that they'd be responsible for working on over the course of the semester (whether they finished it or not might not actually be as important as it sounds). This system could either be something they're doing for work or another class, or it could be something they made up. What's most important is that each student is excited about his or her own project.
The class would consist of weekly meetings where everyone would review the artifacts of everyone else's work: the architecture and detailed designs, the source code, the user interface, the documentation, etc. Essentially, we'd be aiming for something similar to doing a design critique for software development. Whether this would mean using more formal procedures like ATAMs or code walkthroughs or just putting up stuff and letting people comment, I'm not sure.
If there's time and interest, the course could also involve having individual students research particular user interface software technologies and development processes and methodologies, present their findings to the class, and lead a discussion on the possible applicability of the technique to real-world projects. This is secondary to the main goal, however, of helping students get experience in building a large software system in an environment where they can receive peer reviews and feedback, as well as have a chance to revise their system to correct their mistakes. To facilitate this kind of learning, the course would have to stay small; definitely below small group sizes (less than 12) and probably practically no more than 5 or 6 students.
I think it would be a fun course, and if there's significant interest from other students I'd even be willing to hunt down a prof to facilitate it. Drop me a line if this interests you.
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Teaching, IT, and Making Research Matter
internet, teaching & learning
September 05, 2003, 07:22 PM
Last Wednesday, I attended a discussion forum on "Information Technology and the Research University", which I mentioned I was invited to earlier. There were a bunch of bigwigs from the National Academies present; they were apparently interested in how CMU faculty and students were using IT currently, what IT research was going on to try to improve education, and what the future trends appeared to be. Ken Koedinger, the cognitive tutors and educational technology expert from the HCII, was there to talk about his research. So was Jared Cohen, the president of CMU, so this must have been a reasonably big deal to the university.
I spoke a little about the types of communication mediums that students commonly use nowadays, including weblogs, instant messaging, and email. Some of the committee members seemed very interested in multiplayer gaming, which I didn't know too much about although some of the other students did.
They were also concerned about how many of the CSCW technologies introduced into classrooms to foster community tended to get dropped after a few weeks of use. I pointed out that part of the reason for this (I believe) is that these technologies tend to get imposed in a top-down fashion without much regard for whether they will fit into the students' (and teachers') styles of working and learning. Most of the technologies that have been successful (email, IM, file sharing services, and now, perhaps, weblogs) were not imposed from above but instead were picked up by students and pulled into the classroom. The committee didn't seem to have much to say about this; one of the members responded by claiming (essentially) that attempts to impose technologies in a top-down fashion has worked successfully in the Army, so why not in the university? I don't think I have to elaborate on the problems with that reasoning. My hypothesis is that educational technologies (community-oriented or not) have to take into account their users (teachers and students) and their users' goals if they wish to be successful. And this means properly integrating themselves with the lesson plans and the student and teacher work flows. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this as CSCW wears on.
As we were wrapping up, Joel asked the committee if they had recommendations on what future research should be done in the area of IT and the university. Their reaction was surprising and encouraging. Pretty much all the committee members responded that we already know quite enough; the problem isn't that we need more research, the problem is that we need to figure out a way to take the research we do have and actually put it into practice. All of them seemed to be aware that very little of the work that gets done in the modern university actually influences the work of industry and government. (Interesting factoid: I was talking to a woman who works for the Office of Technology Transfer. She said the government gets a return of two cents for every dollar they spend on university research. That's a net loss of 98%. Think about that for a minute.)
Several of the faculty who were present pointed out that there currently exists no incentive structure for them to work towards getting their research adopted in practice. There is also little incentive structure in a research institution (like CMU) for the faculty to spend time improving their lesson plans and teaching skills. President Cohen and the Vice Provost of Education resisted this claim on the grounds that CMU had many wonderful teachers, but the committee responded that they didn't doubt that; they were just asking if there were better ways of doing business at the organizational level. And of course the committee is right. Sure there will be those who take initiative on their own, but if there is no organizational support and award structures to support good teaching, this will be the exception and not the rule. Matt made this point quite nicely in a discussion of one of my old posts. Essentially this is the same argument that the CMM makes about the importance of software development processes; relying on virtuosos may produce great results sometimes, but these results won't be repeatable. If you want your organization to grow, you need a good process.
At any rate, it's good to know the decision makers seem to be thinking about the right issues. Whether they do anything effective about them remains to be seen.
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Novice Teachers
teaching & learning
September 02, 2003, 11:53 AM
I'm reading an article called "Information Ecologies" for Jodi Forlizzi's Visual Interface and Interaction Design class. As a side point, the authors mention a company, Farallon, that has developed an interesting hiring practice for technical support persons. Instead of hiring highly technical people, they hire people with little or no computer experience like former cocktail waitresses and social workers. Instead, they focus on hiring people who are "natural teachers" because they found that the technical people, while they understood the computer, didn't understand how to teach others about it. In the words of their technical support manager, "You can teach people to use a computer but it's real hard to teach patience. I look for natural born teachers because that's what they're doing all day".
Although I'm not sure if I agree with the phrase "natural born teacher" (a term that would irritate Matt, if I'm not mistaken), I do believe Farallon has a great idea here. It's well-known that the people who tend to be the best at teaching concepts are those who just learned them, not the long-time experts. This is because the newly minted expert is much more familiar with the novice's way of thinking; he understands what it is like to not understand. The long-time expert has forgotten this experience; to her, the novice's mindset has become alien and thus she has great difficulty communicating concepts in terms the novice will understand. I can relate; I find it very hard to teach introductory programming concepts to new programmers because these concepts are so second-nature to me. It almost seems odd that anyone could not understand them. And I'm a relatively patient teacher; many technical support people are easily frustrated by "inane" customer questions, as their culture makes quite clear.
The backwards thing is that our society assumes that its ideal to have subject-matter experts teach such introductory material. This is the idea behind the teaching university, where top researchers in the field teach undergraduates who are just beginning to grasp the core concepts. And my 5+ years as a student in academia has bourne out this theory; I've found that these researchers tend to be excellent teachers when they are directly teaching their research. At teaching the more introductory material (which is most of an undergrad's education), they tend to suck.
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Information Technology and the University
internet, teaching & learning
August 15, 2003, 12:40 AM
Last week I randomly got an email from Joel Smith, the CIO and director of educational technology here at CMU, asking if I'd be willing to meet with him to discuss "IT and the research university". Apparently Ryan pointed him in my direction; why he thought of me I'm not sure.
I met with him today; he's part of a group from the National Academies that is looking into how information technology (IT) is used in universities for education and research, what new trends are appearing that may indicate how it will change in the future, and what direction students and researchers feel it ought to be going in. He is putting together a panel of students and faculty for the National Academies people to talk to about these issues and wanted to know if I was interested in participating. I remarked that it sounded like an interesting problem since it was similar to what we do in HCI, where we study how people use technology and then try to design new technologies that will work better for them. I spouted some of the truisms in HCI ("users can tell you what they do but not how they can do it better", "users know what the problems are but may not know the right solutions"); Joel seemed interested.
I thought as we were talking how it was sometimes surprisingly hard to articulate what exactly it is that we do over in HCI, why there's a need for us, and what our methods and techniques involve. It may be a good exercise to get several good usability people together in one room to come up with "elevator speeches" (assume you have to give a pitch for or an explanation of a given topic in the time it takes for an elevator to get from the starting floor to its destination) for some of these HCI-related issues. For instance, can we give a quick explanation of what a Contextual Inquiry is and why you'd want to do one? I think this could be very useful if we ever find ourselves in the position of advocating usability to the grand poobahs of our companies (which we will, I don't doubt).
Joel was also interested in weblogs, especially when I mentioned I kept one. He asked why I decided to start one and whether they were a major form of communication among students. I gave some of my thoughts on the different uses of weblogs, but I felt like it should really be someone like Micah, who's practically a certified expert on the topic, sitting in that chair instead of me. But Micah, alas, has left for good. And I suppose I ought to start considering myself a serious weblogger, especially considering that I'm writing my own news aggregator.
At any rate, it sounds like an interesting investigation, although I'm not sure what will come out of it. I plan to try to get involved.
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The Design Process
design, processes & methodologies, teaching & learning
June 30, 2003, 04:11 PM
Today was my first day of Communication Design Fundamentals (CDF), the prerequisite studio-based design course for the HCI program here at CMU. We started off the course with an exercise in the design process where the teacher, Karen, gave us a pile of semirandom household implements and asked us to arrange them into an ordering so that someone who walked in the door could understand just by looking at them how they all related to each other. Apparently this is a common exercise for introducing students to the design process.
The design process Karen described goes like this:
- Familiarization, where you work on understanding the domain and what the general relationships between objects in that domain are. For us, this involved figuring out what each implement does (difficult, since there were some weird items. No one got the Fijian cannibal's fork...) and grouping them into some general functional categories.
- Development, where you start to define the general structures and groupings. We divided the "kitchen items" and "art items" into separate areas, organized the kitchen items into a circle and the art items into a grid, and divided into two teams to manage the arrangement of each.
- Refinement, where you start to focus on the nitty-gritty details of the design. This is where we separated out the various piles of items we made into groups separated by whitespace and aggregated by function or appearance.
It struck me as we were going through all this how similiar it was to other design processes I'm familiar with, like the HCI user interface design process and the software system design process. In HCI, you start by studying your users and trying to understand their needs, their desires, their tasks, and their gripes, which is part of familiarizing yourself with the domain. My persona development process for open source software is an example of a technique used at this stage. Next you design the high-level information architecture and rough screen designs for the application, which is equivalent to the development stage. Finally you build higher-fidelity mockups that you can actually run user tests and analytical checks on, the HCI version of the refinement stage. In software development, you frequently familiarize yourself with the technologies (although this stage is often skipped, to the detriment of many projects), develop a high-level architectural design, and then refine this design into detailed class hierarchies and object interactions and finally down to actual source code. And as Karen pointed out for the design process, at each step you frequently must move to the next step to see if your design ideas will work or not. A strict "waterfall" approach to the design problem rarely works.
When we got to organizing the structure of our designs, one group had put items into a basic circular structure, the other had used a grid. Karen pointed out how design decisions such as these can determine the structure of your later decisions. Her off-the-cuff analogy described this as similar to cutting a pie; the first cut you make determines the positioning of all the future cuts. So when you make those early decisions, you need to make sure are careful and have your audience's needs in mind. This is quite similiar to the classic software architecture problem; the architecture of a software system encompasses those decisions made early on that determine what is easy to change and what is difficult. Its interesting to reflect on how much these apparently different design processes have in common.
As we were progressing through this exercise, Matt remarked that this was an example of experiential learning; Karen gave us a specific problem to work on first, then helped us generalize our experience to all of design. She didn't lecture per se, instead she interjected comments and suggestions as they we needed them to help solve the example problem. It was a neat approach; I'm excited about teaching in this style with Matt for our TCinC summer course, which starts tomorrow.
This session is shaping up to be a lot of work, but it looks like it will be interesting work and thus bearable. It's also great to hang with my fellow part-time HCI students who are all in CDF with me (sans Mathilde). I even get to see Neema again regularly, which is a rare treat. Good times all around.
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Journals for Lesson Plans
teaching & learning, writing & communication
May 21, 2003, 12:20 AM
My friend Matt is interested in teaching and education, specifically lesson study and experiential learning. One of his life's goals is to improve education in academia, which is generally done particularly badly (most professors' ideas of "teaching" is equivalent to "lecturing", which most modern psychological theories of learning tell us is a particularly ineffective way to transfer skills). Currently, however, there is little incentive for professors at most colleges to improve since (1) their performance is mostly evaluated by the quality of their research rather than their teaching and (2) current students are unaware that there are better alternatives available and thus don't complain.
What we need is an incentive structure that will help bring lesson plan improvement forward as a major goal of academics. I have a proposal that I think is both tractable and will constitute a major step in accomplishing this: piggyback on the research and form academic journals that focus only on publishing lesson plans.
This has two benefits. First off, professors take journal articles seriously and would probably be more likely to consider lesson plans in a peer-reviewed academic journal for use in their own classes. Second, professors would have a direct incentive to develop high-quality lesson plans for publication since they would get credit for doing so (since an academic's performance is generally assessed in terms of how many journal publications they can claim). Hopefully this will help get some professors interested in improving their teaching using modern learning theory. This should help students realize that there are more effective ways to learn available, which will hopefully lead them to demand similar quality from their other professors.
Ideally, teaching journals of this sort should spring up for every field of study that appears in the modern universities. Professors tend to get credit for publishing in journals that are relevant to their research interests, which implies that teaching journals should be divided up similiarly to how the research journals are. It may even be worthwhile for university tenure committees to require that a certain quantity of publications appear in teaching journals if the tenure position is for a teaching faculty member.
Developing a venue for publication of lesson plans is the most immediate way available to ensure academics have incentives for improving their teaching. If journals of the sort I'm proposing become a common part of academic practice, we may see the boring hour-and-a-half lecture class become a thing of the past.
Posted by Matt Easterday on May 21, 2003 at 03:41 PM
This is exactly the right idea--it is so good in fact, that not only did American teachers hit on this decades ago, but they covered it up and left if for Japanese educators to pick-up and innovate on leading to the absolute supremacy of K-12 Japanese students in math and science.
The trend in the U.S. (I think in the 20's?) was move all educational research activities into the hands of "experts" i.e. academia, and view instructors as mere implementors. In some cases, teachers actually doing research on improving how they taught were forced to stop. This is unfortunate as actual teachers are in the best position to observe and form a research agenda.
Meanwhile, for the last 50 years, k-12 Japanese instructors in all disciplines have been collaboratively studying how they teach and improving their teaching based on their observations. Each semester or so, a given department will meet at least once a week for the duration of the semester to discuss how to teach a single lesson. At the end of the semester, they teach the redesigned lesson, make their final conclusions then publish the results in a scholarly journal.
In the last decade, the US has rediscovered lesson study when researchers working on the Third-International Mathematics and Science Study tried to characterize the differnces between Japanese, German, and US mathematics instruction. It's not only important that mathematics is taught very differently in Japan (with more collaboration and focus on problem-solving to name a few attributes) but that there is a _system_ (lesson study) by which these improvements can be discovered an implemented. While it may seem slow to just improve 1 or 2 lessons a year, over time, this research effort implemented entirely by teachers has produced the best educational system in the world.
US K-12 teachers have already began to collaborate and learn from their Japanese counterparts and have started (often with no finacial support or resources) their own lesson study groups here in America. Other initiatives include creating on-line lesson study resources and video-clips of teaching. While a movement like this will take time to develop, its future looks promising.
As for academia, perhaps publishing journals would provide the necessary incentive, however, I think that until "teaching" is valued in our society (and given the needed resources) as much as "research", then I think the quality of higher-education will continue to suffer.
Posted by Matt Easterday on May 21, 2003 at 04:06 PM
Just to provide you with controversy Rob :-) ...
I completely disagree with the views expressed in the experiential learning learning included in the post. While I don't have a _great_ link, a quick google search yielded this link on experiential learning which at least explains the basic idea and the most often cited names (with the exception American philosopher/psychologist/teacher John Dewey): http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/learning/experien.htm
Posted by Rob on May 22, 2003 at 02:45 PM
Hi Matt,
Just to clarify since I'm not sure I made it clear in the post, but the idea behind these journals would be for academics to publish the lesson plans for the classes they teach, not to have "education" academics make lesson plans for everyone else. Plus, these journals, at least at first, are only intended to form incentives for academics to care about their teaching effectiveness and provide the same level of rigor in lesson plan development that they apply to their research. (Ok, just a little bit of sarcasm there... :). So the intent of this idea is to turn academics into real practicing educators, not to have them sit in their ivory tower and develop the lesson plans real educators use.
So once that's accomplished, there is the question of how elementary, middle, and high school instructors, adult and continuing education instructors, etc. should fit into this picture. Ideally, I think they should be publishing in the same journals as academics, peer reviewing the same articles as academics, etc. Personally I think the gap between practitioners and academics in more fields that just education is a problem, and maybe forcing checks and balances through journal publications would be a good way to do this. But one thing at a time.
I wholeheartedly agree that what's ultimately important is to ensure that teaching is valued higher in our society. The question in my mind is how to go about ensuring that this happens. This proposal is a suggestion of how the system could be changed through the actions of a few people (the ones who set up these journals) in a way that would give one part of the population (academics) the incentive to care about teaching and value it as an activity. I agree it is only one part of a larger goal, but hey, every little bit helps, and we have to do something if we want to see the problem solved in our lifetimes.
Thanks for the excellent reference for experiential learning. I frequently post links to other sites just because I need to reference a source that explains a concept, not because I know them to be reliable. I always appreciate corrections and sources of supplementary information and opposing viewpoints.
Posted by Matthew Easterday on May 22, 2003 at 03:09 PM
Just for the sake of more controversy...
I didn't mean to suggest that academics should publish lesson plans for K-12 teachers. Perhaps the confusion is due to the fact that I wan't really agreeing with the idea that "journals for academics" will improve University education, (although I do agree with that "reasearching curriculum" should be placed at the same level as other kinds of research). I see K-12 teachers as understanding this need doing precisely this kind of research in their community.
As for academics, I think "lack of lesson plan journals" is just a symptom of the root cause that teaching is undervalued. Here's the causal chain I'm assuming:
IF teaching is valued -> funders will provide resources -> people will research teaching -> paper and journals will be created.
If this assumption is correct, then I _don't_ agree that simply creating a journal will change things.
What I'm guessing you're saying is that:
the university values education -> the University will by some unknown mechanism create journals -> academics will want to publish in journals -> education will be researched and improved.
If (CMU in this case) really valued education however, they would just hire good teachers (instead of hiring researchers and making them teach). I think trying to change researchers into teachers probably is not the right strategy. I think the right thing to do is get teachers, and treat them like professionals by giving them the tools they need to imrove their craft.
Posted by Rob on May 24, 2003 at 11:09 AM
Ah, I think I see our point of disagreement now. I'm not convinced that the root cause of the problem is that teaching is not valued in our society. I do believe that other things are frequently valued more, which, given limited resources, means that teaching gets bumped off the bottom of the queue. I think there are many who want to teach well but don't have the time or the expertise. I guess I can't prove this assertion; it's based purely on what I've observed from working with academics.
The point here is that researchers are _already_ teaching. So they are "teachers" by definition (frequently bad teachers, but teachers nonetheless), regardless of whether this is a good idea or not. The other solutions you propose sound like good ones, but they're outside the scope of this recommendation and so I'd like to defer those discussions for another weblog post. I'm not proposing that education journals will solve all the education problems in the world; just that they might help professors get better at what they are supposed to be doing.
So the question then becomes "Given that researchers are teaching, how can we provide incentives for them to improve their teaching?" That's the sole problem this suggestion was trying to address. In case I was unclear, remember this is most certainly NOT a proposal for improving all education, everywhere, nor is it trying to solve the entire education problem in one simple maneuver. It is a point solution to one important problem in the domain of higher education: give academics incentives to do their work well. Right now there are no incentives, so any lesson improvement academics engage in is done ad hoc through a sense of responsibility. Is it any wonder it rarely gets done?
Posted by Jackie on July 26, 2006 at 06:42 AM
Hello,
I am working on a white paper on experiential learning. My goal is to find research that shows whether students K-12 learn better through experiential learning than other styles. If you know of any reserach, please email me. Thank you.
Jackie
Email Rob:
Drawing Work Over Time
processes & methodologies, teaching & learning, writing & communication
May 11, 2003, 09:02 AM
For our TCinC work, Matt and I are interviewing the students who just completed the course to get a picture of how they worked, what they learned, etc. We plan on performing this exercise again after Joe incorporates our redesigned lesson plans into his curriculum to hopefully show that our changes brought about real improvement.
I'm currently trying to develop a notation for mapping out what the students did through the course of the semester, what information or materials they used to do it, and what they learned at each phase. For our initial contextual inquiries, we built the "five faces of work" diagrams from Contextual Design. But for our problem, we found the diagrams contained a lot of repeated information and split important aspects of the students' experience across diagrams, for example, we would like the interaction of people and documents from the Work Flow diagram to be mixed with the sense of linear work-over-time from the Sequence diagram.
What we basically want to know is whether the concepts Joe teaches in class were used by the consultants at site, and how the overall process could be streamlined and improved both to facilitate the students learning and improve their work with their community partners. Thus, our diagramming notation needs to express the following concepts:
- What students did at each stage of the process (class periods, meetings with their community partners, etc.).
- What knowledge they internalized at each stage of the process and how this knowledge changed over time.
- What artifacts they created and how these artifacts changed over time.
- What opinions and thoughts they had at each stage and how these changed over time.
To try to address these issues, I've developed the following notation:
Since real user data is confidential, this is, of course, a mockup of a real diagram.
I'm hoping this diagram will address these issues at a glance. (1) should be addressed by the student activities which are mapped onto a timeline (you can even make the activities wider to indicate the relative lengths) which comes from the Sequence models. (2) and (4) should be addressed by the "thought bubbles" which come out of activities and can influence future activities, as well as morph into other thought bubbles as the student's understanding changes. (3) should be addressed by the document boxes that can be produced and used in activities. People and outcomes are important to include to see who was influencing the students and what they actually accomplished at each meeting.
I am concerned that cramming all this information onto a single diagram will make it appear cramped and difficult to use to get an overall picture as intended. But if I split some of this across multiple diagrams, I worry we'll have the same problem we did with the CI/CD models where a lack of a consistent process view made it hard to get a handle on the whole system being studied. I'm also concerned that comparing the "before and after" diagrams at the end of our studies will be less effective with something this complex; the improvements may not jump out at you as much as they would with a simpler notation.
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The Community Technology Forum
charity, teaching & learning
May 05, 2003, 03:49 PM
"Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you will feed him for a lifetime."
The old saw has never held more true for me than it has today.
Today was the Community Technology Forum, Joe's end-of-the-semester meeting where all the community partners and student technology consultants to present the work they did throughout the semester. It was quite an encouraging event, due both to the benefits the community partners are getting out of the consultancies and to reaffirm that Joe's vision of the course is moving it in the right direction.
Joe, unusual for a CS professor, emphasizes introducing appropriate technologies through developing an understanding of the organization and ensuring those technologies are sustainable. The spirit of the class at least is less about the technology and more about improving the technological capacity of nonprofits. And sure enough, the most enthusiastic community partners repeatedly emphasized that the biggest benefit for them was the increased understanding of technology they received as a result of working with their consultant. They appreciated when the consultants paid attention to their work and taught them technological fixes that helped them do that work, even when they were as simple as helping them sort emails in Outlook.
Many service learning classes hope to teach students new skills while also helping charitable organizations, but often don't succeed because they have "ulterior motives". For example, if the class is about database system design, then the students are going to develop a database system regardless of whether that's what their community partners need. Joe's class is unique because they focus on these needs rather than predetermined solutions.
This focus on the needs of organizations also relates to my earlier point about the need for usability in open source software. There's been a lot of talk in the open source community about the potential for open source software in nonprofit organizations. The reasoning is that since open source software is free, it is ideal for nonprofits with small budgets. Additionally, since open source projects aren't tied to a particular company, they're more sustainable since nonprofits won't have to worry about the company who provides the software going broke, upping the price, etc.
Although these are both valid points, I am skeptical about this potential for open source software as it currently exists. For example, one organization had a student group (for another class) develop a system for them the previous semester that was intended to speed up their reporting process. The students developed a MySQL / PHP web system that was delivered as promised, but wound up not doing everything the organization needed (a common situation, if you know anything about software development). Unfortunately, no one in the organization was technically sophisticated enough to fix the problems with the system, and the original team was long gone. After getting over a month behind on their reports, they wound up scrapping the system and reverting to their old paper system. One of the student consultants this semester worked with the organization's technical lead to develop an Access-based system that they could maintain.
I'll agree that this problem was due in large part to the failings of the previous student group to adequately understand the needs of the organization, but even so, it's hard to imagine how one could build a database system that was usable and modifiable by nonprofit workers who, while very smart, are not willing to spend months learning SQL, Linux, PHP, etc. We need to start creating systems that are usable by these types of people before open source can make inroads in the nonprofit arena.
In short, my impression is that Joe's class is doing good work and is taking the right approach to the problem. Merely putting the student consultants and the community partners in the same room with each other seems to accomplish a lot, and Joe helps them along by focusing their attention on the organization's short and long term needs. Hopefully the work Matt and I are doing will help improve the student's and community partner's understandings of their organization so that their work can have an even bigger impact in future classes. I guess we'll find out in December at the next Forum.
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Posted by Dan on November 02, 2003 at 07:29 PM
Interestingly, in that same day when he talked about the nature of arts and products, Dick also talked about what distinguishes a trade school from a university, and it was just as you said: a trade school teaches by having you imitate a master craftsman, while a university teaches you principles (and procedures). When you are good enough at those principles (as demonstrated in your thesis paper and project), you are called a "Master" (as in Master of Science).
Another thing, according to Dick, that is different is the mastery of themes: being able to connect one idea in one area to another idea in another area. This is what Seminar is really all about, both as a subject and as a form. He takes disparate disciplines: library science, semiotics, education theory, philosophy, etc. and use them to map out world views that pertain to design.
And yes, I know my blog style is plain. But it's the only way I know how to accurately capture the material I'm learning. Since I post usually on the day or day after I'm actually in class, there's not a lot of time for style or reflection. if I spent more time crafting my entries, I'd probably never do them. Or do much fewer.
Posted by Rob on November 04, 2003 at 11:16 PM
This is one of the reasons I'm so envious of your seminar experience; Dick's approach to learning and philosophy is very much in line with my own beliefs. I would agree that mastery (dare I say "wisdom"?) involves connecting together ideas from several disciplines and seeing the patterns that arise in quite disparate areas of inquiry.
I didn't mean the "plain" comment as a criticism and apologise if it came across as such. It was just meant as an observation; I actually enjoy your style of writing quite a bit, as well as the content itself.