After spending two full days in the Creating Significant Learning Environment (CSLE) workshop with some highly motivated faculty from School of Business at BCIT I am convinced that the future is very bright for BCIT students. Our primary focus was creating significant learning environments that would take advantage of technology to enhance learning. We explored using technology to enhance the face2face, flipped, hybrid or blended and fully online settings. All the technology related activities were grounded with well defined learning outcomes and we continually looked at the balance in aligning the outcomes with effective technology enhanced activities and assessments which confirmed the learning outcomes would be achieved.
The following are all the Youtube clips and related links used in the workshop as well as several of my favourites that we unable to view due to the lack of time.
Perhaps one of the best talks on learning & education – My favourite TED Talk
This just one of many TED talks that I recommend. If you go to TED.com and filter by “Most viewed” you will see Ken Robinson’s talks as well as Simon Sinek’s talk about Why and many more amazing talks.
My blog post The Power of Media in informal learning offers the insights that I have found in using media to help my two sons in their pursuit of becoming professional downhill racers.
Finally, to easily download video clips from youtube and embed them into your Powerpoint or Keynote programs (educational acceptable copyright permitting–check with your department or library) you can use the site clipconverter.cc
On Tuesday night a fellow Instructional Development Consultant (IDC), and I met with seven Part Time BCIT instructors to take them through the instructional Skills Workshop (ISW). The ISW is a long standing tradition at BCIT and provides and opportunity for new and experienced instructors to come together and explore how to improve their teaching and learning practice. Any time you have faculty coming together to talk about teaching and learning you can be assured that there will be lots of questions and this past Tuesday night was no exception. Since we had limited time to respond to all the questions and request for additional information, I am compiling the following list of links to videos, articles, interview, related resources and a few personal summaries in response to the insightful questions from the workshop participants.
In this talk Clifford Nass of Stanford reveals that we are not only NOT able to multitask he also reveals that those who do multitask the most are poor multitaskers and also have lesser developed social skills. Nass’ research and article Cognitive control in media multitasked reveals that heavy media multitaskers are poor at multitasking. This was one of the most covered and cited papers in the social sciences in the last 12 months. Nass passed away recently at the age of 55.
The NPR interview The Myth of Multitaksing Nass explains how inefficient it is to multitask and how heavy multitasks become chronically distracted.
Research has revealed that 98% of us are not able to multitask but there are those around us who fit into the 2% who can actually multitask. In the New Yorker article Multitask Masters Marina Konnikova reports on the research of David Stayer who has looked into these supertaskers and who has also found that when people find out that there is a very small number of people who can supertask they believe that they fall into this category. Unfortunately, for most us who believe we are these special people, research has also revealed that the better someone believes that they are at multitasking the more likely they are not.
Peer Instruction & Eric Mazur
In the following youtube video, Confessions of a Converted Lecturer, Eric Mazur explains how he came to understand that lecturing alone was not helping his students to learn and how he uses peer instruction to move his students from memorization to understanding.
The blog Turn to Your Neighbour is perhaps on the best sites to learn about all aspects of peer instruction.
Note Taking Question
What helps you remember more: taking notes by typing on a laptop or tablet or writing your notes out by hand?
The general discussion in the room revealed that many people preferred taking notes by hand which corresponds to results of the Mueller/Oppenhiemer study The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. This study revealed that since students can type much faster than they can write there is a tendency for students to mindlessly transcribe large volumes of notes. In contrast, with hand written notes a student must focus more on the concepts than on the transcription. The authors pointed to additional research in their literature review suggested summarization and conceptualization resulting from handwriting notes added in retention and deeper understanding.
The authors also speculated as did many other bloggers who reposted the summary results that if one could combine the efficiency of typing with the conceptualization of handwriting that taking notes with a laptop or tablet could contribute equally to memory retention. While I have no reason to doubt the Mueller/Oppenhiemer study that is currently popular in the blogosphere I am always hesitant to trust the “most popular” opinion and I explored further to see if there were any additional studies that provided an alternative perspective.
I did manage to find a recent undergraduate research project by Ian Schoen of Pitzer College that directly compared typing notes and handwriting notes in both the lecture and textbook study. In his senior thesis Effects of Method and Context of Note-taking on Memory: Handwriting versus Typing in Lecture and Textbook-Reading Contexts Schoen found that although the survey participants preferred taking notes by hand, his research revealed that typing notes in a lecture produced slightly higher retention scores.
Article Abstract:
Both electronic note-taking (typing) and traditional note-taking (handwriting) are being utilized by college students to retain information. The effects of the method of note-taking and note-taking context were examined to determine if handwriting or typing notes and whether a lecture context or a textbook-reading context influenced retention. Pitzer College and Scripps College students were assigned to either handwrite or type notes on a piece of academic material presented in either a lecture or textbook context and were given a test to assess their retention. The results demonstrated that there was a significant main effect for typing notes such that typing notes produced higher retention scores than handwriting notes. The results also indicated that there was an interaction between method of note-taking and context such that the lowest scores were achieved in the condition in which participants hand0-wrote notes during a lecture. In total, these findings suggest that typing as a method of note-taking may by an influential factor in memory retention, particularly in a lecture context.
Taking notes is better than not taking notes is the one fact consistent in all the research on this topic. It is also clear that much more research will need to be conducted to provide a more definitive answer on this issue. Until the research is in, one’s personal preference should also play a significant role in deciding just how to take notes.
This past Wednesday, I had the honour and privilege of working with the dedicated faculty from the BSN program in the BCIT School of Health Sciences. We spent the morning exploring and discussing the following topics as we worked to prepare for the upcoming curriculum redesign that the BSN program is undertaking this fall:
Start with Why – Download PDF of slide deck SoHS Why
Videos used in the session:
John Kotter – Heart of change
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
Creating Significant Learning Environment – Download PDF of slidedeck CSLE-SoHS
Without a doubt, the ability to connect the dots is rare, prized and valuable. Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn’t been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than ever before.
Godin also asks why then do we spend so much time collecting dots. We overwhelm our learners with so much data, ask them to regurgitate this content in tests, and simply focus on the delivery of content instead of helping our learners make meaningful connections. While Godin has coined the notion of connecting the dots rather than collecting the dots, the idea of developing connections within a conceptual framework was first intro ducted to me by my colleague Robert McKelvain, Ph.D. at Abilene Christian University in 2010. McKelvain suggested that the difference between an expert and a novice is that an expert has a fully developed conceptional framework.
In the diagram, the main concepts are represented by the larger blue dots and the dotted lines between the concepts represent the connections that the expert has developed as they have expanded their conceptual framework. The expert not only relies upon their full conceptual framework, they are able to enter into this framework from many different perspectives. They can see all the pieces and understand all the connections and when dealing with new information they have a much broader base in which to understand and encode that new information—which makes them a more adaptable, efficient, and effective learner and problem solver in their areas of expertise.
In contrast to the expert, the novice may not only have a minimally developed conceptional framework, they may even have some of the concepts wrong, miss the connections, and not fully understand all the connections that they do see. If we understand that learning is the making of meaningful connections then the role of the expert teacher is to:
Provide the context for learning which includes introducing the fundamental conceptual framework components.
Create the environment where the learner can start to make meaningful connections between those concepts.
Model the learning process needed to: make those connections, add new concepts, and see the patterns that lead to solving problems.
Mentor the novice in building and expanding their conceptual framework.
In a nutshell, the expert models what it takes to become an expert learner and take ownership in the development of one’s own expertise.
One of the biggest challenges in this process is the expert’s bias, which is the inability for an expert to see the challenges that a novice or beginner faces. This can have significant ramifications in areas where subject matter experts with limited teaching knowledge and experience are tasked with teaching. Subject matter experts have often forgotten more than a novice even knows and unless they are also expert teachers and have developed the conceptual framework of an expert teacher, they can have difficulty understanding the challenges that the novice is experiencing. Therefore, teacher training and professional development will be crucial if we hope to move from the notion of collecting dots to connecting dots.
