[ED 257A] Week 2: Learning Theories

The Art of Presentation is...

Source: 99% Invisible Podcast

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This week's reading is based off of:

Chris Dede. "Theoretical Perspective Influencing the Use of Information Technology in Teaching and Learning" International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education, 43–62. Springer Science.

Atkinson & Mayer (2004) "Five ways to reduce the PowerPoint overload"

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Design and storyboarding is a fascinating topic (especially hidden design of everyday objects; see 99% Invisible podcast). Good design is undetectable and is intuitive for the user but is painstakingly difficult to achieve. What makes a good presentation is all the decisions and thinking the audience doesn't see, but will appreciate. I would like to share a few things I've learned in my side-quests to find the ultimate presentation techniques in hopes that they may help someone. And please, feel free to add your own tips! A quick disclaimer though- I come from the STEM side of things, but I would be curious to know if similar concepts could be applied in the HFA and SS fields.

I'm sure we've all seen the pitfalls of PowerPoint: cluttered slides, tiny fonts, blurry images, outrageous animations, terrible animations, content that is skipped over without explanation. However, these can all be avoided through two things- planning and practice. Planning is perhaps the biggest factor for what makes a good presentation. One of the most helpful things I learned was from a seminar from Jean-luc Doumont, an engineering PhD turned instructor and invited speaker on all-things related to designing clean and clear presentations. (Side note: He occasionally comes to the UCSB campus to give such seminars.) Basically, plan the story of the presentation outside the medium of the presentation. This could be on a piece of paper, using sticky-notes, or using a storyboard but the point is to move away from the implicit constrains of thinking slide-by-slide and to think more big picture. Having a big picture makes sure every slide, every image, every word has a purpose (does it build the big picture?). The hope is that the speaker does not fall into being an accessory to the presentation, but rather the presentation is a tool for the speaker. From personal experience, this has changed the way I approach presentations and I feel it has really helped me hone in what is relevant and what is not relevant in a presentation. But I'd like to know your thoughts as well! Would this be a useful technique for you to build presentations?

The second tip is practice, practice, practice. The first run is never that great, the second run is better, and by the third run, you have a rhythm. I attended a workshop offered by Grad Div that aimed to teach theatre techniques to graduate students in STEM. At first, I'll admit I was a bit skeptical, but towards the end it was really fun. We re-enacted an excerpt from (I think) Henry V and added interpretive movements. I think the exercise really connected what you're thinking of next to say with your body and voice, and connecting these three are what truly makes an engaging speaker. This naturally requires forethought and, most importantly, practice. While I won't be doing dramatic pauses or fake-sword-fighting gestures in my own presentations, I think the lessons of unifying all types of visual and audio media (including yourself) are important. What are your thoughts?

And unrelated but highly enjoyable to watch, to help prep for speaking:
From whence the "Wonder Woman" pose for confidence came. 

Your body language shapes who you are

  

[ED 257A] Week 1: ICT Literacies

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This week's reading is based off of:

Kennedy & Judd, 2011 "Beyond Google and the 'satisficing' searching of digital natives"

Lai & Hong, 2015 "Technology use and learning characteristics of students in higher education: Do generational differences exist?"

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We started our first week with a brainstorming session on desired characteristics of instruction and instructional materials followed by a discussion of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and course management sites.

Kennedy & Judd highlight a growing trend in the current generation of students (dubbed "Digital natives" or the "Google generation") of "satisficing" their studies through cursory online searches are just sufficient to complete the task. This I thought was an apt observation of how students today approach their studies, regardless of field, in light of the emergence of the Internet and ubiquity of information. Indeed, we saw this trend in our own class demographic when polling for digital learning characteristics of ourselves and the undergraduate population we teach. The poll is taken on a scale of from 1= Strongly Agree to 5 = Strongly Disagree. For example, many of us are comfortable with a several forms of technology.

Perhaps because of our digital literacy, we are also guilty of "satisficing" in expecting to find an answer to our question quickly. Often times this is through a Google search, or nowadays, Wikipedia.

 In being digital literate in so many technologies, we have adopted the mindset that multitasking is the way to accomplish and learn. However, research has suggested we don't truly multitask, just switch between tasks quickly and that switching process could be cognitively costly. Certainly food for thought.

While the ubiquity of information is certainly powerful, it can hinder good habits. I observe this in my own field. A current trend in materials science is high-throughput computing (for example, the Materials Genome Initiative). The idea is because we now have powerful supercomputers, we can now do massive number of calculations on arbitrarily complex systems to identify new materials. We have all this data now, but the question is, can we reasonably screen our data without error? Are we losing information by throwing it away based on some pre-determined criteria? Before the advent of big data, much of research in condensed matter physics was driven by physical intuition and the ability understand general physical concepts. While high-throughput computing affords us a great tool, I believe it is important to understand the limitations of a tool. The same applies to using the Internet for educational purposes. It is important to be critical of what lies in front you.

We also covered the tools in course management sites, such as our own Gauchospace. In starting to teach my own course MAT 188, Gauchospace has been an extremely important tool to communicate the course and provide supporting material. It was enlightening to learn about all the effort that goes into Gauchospace. From my own experience in graduate classes in the engineering and sciences, Gauchospace is underutilized. It was not until I took courses in the Education department and had to build MAT 188 that I was made aware of all the features that Gauchospace has. Perhaps this is a manifestation of what Lai and Hong alluded to in their study of whether generational differences exist in the usage of technology in higher education. That is, the technology divide occurs not so much across generations but rather across fields of study (and gender). What are your thoughts on why this occurs? Offering courses that graduate students from all disciplines can participate and exchange perspectives is a great avenue to lessen this divide, and I'm excited to partake such a course this quarter.

Welcome again!

Welcome again to my technology in education blog. This Fall 2015 quarter, we'll continue the discussion of the usage of technology in the classroom with ED 257A: Teaching and Learning with Digital Media, here at UCSB.

This quarter I'm particularly excited since I will be simultaneously helping to teaching an undergraduate course MAT 188: Materials in Energy Technology. The objective of MAT 188 is to give participants an overview of how materials science impacts energy technologies, such as batteries and solar cells. It is a course that is organized by enthusiastic graduate students, and I am happy to be a part of the effort. Stay tuned!

[ED 256: Final Project] Science(or)Fiction

After a quarter that has flown by, below is a link to download the culmination of the final project that Marta and I have worked on. Enjoy!

Final Presentation *.pptx

[ED 256 Week 8] Technology in higher education

The following is a reflection on week 8 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on technology in higher education.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

L. Breslow. "Lessons Learned: Findings from MIT Initiatives in Educational Technology (2000-2005)." J. of Science Education and Tech. Vol. 16, No. 4, August 2007

S. Hooper and L.P. Rieber. "Teaching with Technology." Teaching: Theory into practice. pp. 154-170. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
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This week's reading focuses on various technology-based tools used in higher education institutions. Hooper and Rieber outline the process and paths in which technology is integrated into the education system. These are familiarization, utilization, integration, reorientation, and evolution. They propose that traditional education is limited to the first three phases and that only when reaching reorientation and evolution does a change in teaching philosophy occur. Reorientation is when the "learner becomes subject rather than object of education" and evolution is when an actual change in the classroom occurs. Interestingly, Hooper and Rieber define that such an evolution occurs under the philosophy of constructionism, in which the learner is active and is the focus. They propose that

1) effective learning consists of selection, organization, and integration,
2) effective learners actively process lesson content,
3) presenting information from multiple perspectives increases durability of instruction, and
4) effective instruction builds on students knowledge and experiences.

This is indeed the case, given recent research on the process of learning, so they are valid points. Several examples of possible implementations are given by Breslow, who describes initiatives at MIT. Their major findings are that

1) successful technology must meet the unmet or poorly met needs compared to traditional methods,
2) too much technology or bad technology is detrimental, and
3) there is an important relationship between technology and the learning environment.

I appreciated the balance of perspectives offered in this paper of several technology-based tools in several of the engineering classes offered at MIT, such as an online posting forum and online lectures. In many cases, the success of the technology depended on the audience. For instance, whereas alumni valued the online forums, undergraduates found them cumbersome. It is idea that "media are not neutral conveyances-" they are biased, limited, and application dependent.

Indeed, I can speak to one particular example known as TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning), which was implemented in all introductory physics classes when I was a freshman. TEAL is based on the usage of clickers, in which students submit answers electronically to some questions (most often on a powerpoint slide). The paper lists several successes of TEAL in 8.02T (a course on electromagnetism. MIT associates numbers with classes, so 8.02 means it is a course in the physics department, i.e., course 8). While I can see the intention of the TEAL program to encourage interactive and engaged learning, my memories of it were more aligned with the criticisms of TEAL. Often times students forgot the clickers, didn't bother to click, or tried to game the system. In the particular class I took, the presence of clicker questions fell off after the first few lectures of class, after I had to spend a good $40 on the clicker itself. In many cases, the questions that were asked were not actually helpful for learning; they were simple, by nature of being multiple-choice. What was actually more useful was going through problems in groups and practicing problems from different textbooks to get different perspectives on the same concept.

I think Breslow makes several good points about bot the limits and potential of technology in higher education. Namely, there are limits and that one must carefully consider if technology is the appropriate medium. One example of this are the online lectures from past classes. In several cases, I have used online lectures from past semesters of professors that I heard were exceptionally compelling at lecturing but were now retired or no longer teaching that particular class. From the technologies that have been successful, it seems the common theme are the tools that  encourage the flow of information among students and instructors spatially and temporally. This is where I believe technology has a great potential in higher education.

Science Communication: Merchants of Doubt

"lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities- yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats"

This past Thursday was the Sustainable Science Communication Conference held at UCSB. The conference started off with a showing of the film Merchants of Doubt, based off of the book of the same title by Erik M. Conway, a historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech, and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science now at Harvard University. In short, this was a fascinating film about a very different kind of science communication.

The film begins with the magician Jamy Ian Swiss, who talks about how audiences willfully and knowingly participate in being deceived by the magician and the stark contrast of the deception purported by these merchants of doubt. Indeed, although this film is meant to be satirical of the brutish yet manipulative tactics of these pundits-for-hire, it is also horrifying. The film makers interview several of these pundits who see nothing wrong with spreading doubt in order to stymy legislation that could cut profits for the company. What is even more astonishing is it is often the same people who are posing as these "third party experts" that are hired across several industries to surreptitiously advance their objectives. The film shows that this has happened with the health risks of tobacco and  fire retardants, and more recently pharmaceuticals, the food industry, and (most relevant to this conference) climate change. In fact the campaigns run for Big Tobacco were so successful, that the same strategies are being used in issues we face today.

That is, the main goal of these pundits-for-hire is to turn the focus away from the science and on the politics of regulation by casting doubt, by personally attacking the scientists, and by manipulating the perception the public. I found this movie to be entertaining but also elucidating on the nature of manipulation in communication. I hope you will consider watching the film, and also think twice about what you see on media.

[ED 256: Week 7 Reading] Playful Learning

The following is a reflection on week 7 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on playful learning.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

M. Resnik. "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten." Creativity & Cognition conference. June 2007.

M. Resnik, J. Maloney, A Monroy-Hernandez, et al.  "Scratch: Programming for All." Communications of the ACM. Vol. 52, No. 11. November 2009.

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This week we have feature articles from the MIT media lab. The main concept is to highlight the kindergarten way of learning, in which the learner is constantly "designing, creating, experimenting, and exploring." Resnik outlines several keys feedback processes for an effective learning process in which the user sets the pace of the learning environment. These are imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. This philosophy is implemented in the online community surrounding Scratch, an interactive platform that uses the idea of Legos to teach concepts of programming. Since starting in 2003, the Scratch community has expanded to thousands of users who create stories, games, animations, and simulations.

Scratch user interface

Scratch website frontpage

The idea of representing code as pieces that fit together in an intuitive way is appealing, including myself who has had some training in programming. I think the idea of using modularity that can be configured in any which way but adhere to certain rules is the perfect balance for which something can be learned and still flexible enough to be personalized. Indeed, MIT is a key locus for experimenting with the vanguard of education. In addition to what has come out of the Media Lab, there is OpenCourseWare that provides access to past lectures and class materials and newly started MITx offers free classes with certifications of many engineering courses. 

Even within individual departments (and individuals who graduated from MIT; see Khan Academy), there are several initiatives to make knowledge more accessible to anyone with the desire to learn. For example, in my undergrad Materials Science and Engineering department, I took a course in which the classroom was flipped. That is, we watched lectures outside of class and had more interactive discussions in-class. This class was particularly well-suited for this endeavor since it was a higher-level course on electronic devices, so much of the basic physics was covered in earlier semesters. Having such a format affords much flexibility and control of learning on the part of the student while still preserving face-to-face communication with the instructor. I feel lucky to have experienced something that people are talking about in papers!