Source: learninginhand.com/blog/mobilize-for-productivity-infographic.html
Archives For Learning
If you pay attention to any type of media that has a focus on education, teaching and learning you will have inevitably seen the argument that all children/students should learn to code. The argument runs along this line… computers are everywhere today which means coding is the new literacy or skill of the future; therefore everyone should learn how to code. While this argument makes some sense I have always been hesitant to fully endorse it because I see so many other fundamental skills that our children need. I am not alone in this hesitation.
Jeff Atwood a career programmer who founded two successful software startups is deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code. Atwood believes that basic exposure to computer science is fine but it should not come at the expense of other fundamental skills like reading, writing and math. He also wants:
children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically. Where did that Wikipedia page come from? Who wrote it? What is their background? What are their sources?
Atwood reminds us that many programmers would be much more successful if they could read and write better, think critically and communicate effectively–essentially be better learners.
The longer I spend in the education the more I am convinced it’s about the learning, it’s about making meaningful connections and sharing those connections with others.
70:20:10 is a very simple and pragmatic framework that describes how learning naturally happens in the workplace–we learn by doing–and then offers a strategy to support that learning:
Charles Jennings offers one of the best explanations of the 70:20:10 model in the following YouTube video:
For those who want more details on the 70:20:10 model refer to Jennings 70:20:10 Primer on his blog or review the 70:20:10 Framework Slideshare.
Jane Hart has released the 9th Annual Survey of Learning Tools. Hart surveyed over 2,000 learning professionals from around the world in both education and enterprises settings to compile the following results.
Top 10
1. Twitter
2. You Tube
3. Google Search
4. Google Docs/Drive
5. PowerPoint
6. Dropbox
7. Facebook
8. Word Press
9. Skype
10. Evernote
Researchers Philip J. Guo from University of Rochester, Juho Kim from MIT and Rob Rubin from edX collaborated on quantitative research project to study how video production decisions affect student engagement in online educational videos. They used data from 6.9 million video watching sessions across four courses on the edX MOOC platform to measure how long students watched each video and whether they attempted to answer post-video assessment problems.
They found that shorter videos, informal talking-head videos, and Khan-style tablet drawings are much more engaging. They also found that highly produced pre-recorded classroom lectures did not engage students.
The following table provides a summary of the researchers findings and their recommendations:
We really shouldn’t be surprised by the results. When we are looking to learn something or solve a problem an authentic simply produced and presented message wins out over the highly polished and drawn out information dump. The marketing and social media world has recognized that there is an ideal length for everything online and that every piece of content should be as long as it takes to convey the message and no longer (See Internet is a Zoo Infographic).
Now that we have the hard data to support this notion academia too can start moving in the right direction when it comes to effectively using media to engage the learner.
References:
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of mooc videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.
