Category: Computers and Education

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics

Open Book Publishers has just published Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics online. Stéfan Sinclair and I have two chapters in the collection, one on “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community” and one on “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis.”

The Acculturation chapter sets out the ways in which we try to train students by involving them in project teams rather than only through courses. This approach I learned watching Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker at the University of Virginia. My goal has always to be able to create the sort of project culture they did (and now the Scholar’s Lab continues.)

The editor Brett D. Hirsch deserves a lot of credit for gently seeing this through.

Clay Shirky: Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

Clay Shirky has a good essay on Napster, Udacity, and the Academy on his blog which considers who will be affected by MOOCs. He makes a number of interesting points:

  • A number of the changes that Internet has facilitated involved unbundling services that were bundled in other media. He gives the example of individual songs being unbundled from albums, but he could also have mentioned how classifieds have been unbundled from newspapers. Likewise MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), like the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence run by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, unbundle the course from the university and certification.
  • University lectures are inefficient, a poor way of teaching, and often not of the highest quality. Chances are there are better video lectures online for any established subject than what is offered locally. If universities fall into the trap of saving money by expanding class sizes until higher education is just a series of lectures and exams then we can hardly pretend to higher quality than MOOCs. Why would students in Alberta want to listen to me lecture when they could have someone from Harvard?
  • MOOCs are far more likely to threaten the B colleges than the elite liberal arts colleges. A MOOC is not a small seminar experience for a top student and doesn’t compete with the high end. MOOCs compete with lectures (why not have the best lecturer) and other passive learning approaches. MOOCs will threaten the University of Phoenix and other online programs that are not doing such a good job at retention anyway.
  • MOOCs are great marketing for the elite universities which is why they may thrive even if there is no financial model or evaluation.
  • The openness is important to MOOCs. Shirky gives the example of a Statistics 101 course that was improved by open criticism. By contrast most live courses aren’t open to peer evaluation. Instead they are treated like confidential instructor-patient interactions.

While I agree with much of what Shirky says and I welcome MOOCs I’m not convinced they will have the revolutionary effect some think they will. I remember seeing the empty television frames at Scarborough college from when they thought teleducation was going to be the next thing. When it comes to education we seem to forget over an over that there is a rich history of distance education experiments. Shirky writes, “In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn…” but I don’t see evidence that he has done any research into the history of education. Instead Shirky adopts a paradigm shift rhetoric comparing MOOCs to Napster in potential for disruption as if that were history. We could just as easily compare them to the explosion of radio experiments between the wars (that disappeared by 1940.) Just how would we learn from history? What history is relevant here? Shirky is unconvincing in his choice of Napster as the relevant lesson.

Another issue I have is epistemological – I just don’t think MOOCs are that different from a how-to book or learning video when it comes to the delivery of knowledge. Anyone who wants to learn something in the West has a wealth of choices and MOOCs, if well designed, are one more welcome choice, but revolutionary they are not. The difficult issues around education don’t have to do with quality resources, but with time (for people trying to learn while holding down a job), motivation (to keep at it), interaction (to learn from mistakes) and certification (to explain what you know to others).

Now its my turn to learn from history. I propose these possible lessons:

  • Unbundling will have an effect on the university, especially as costs escalate faster than inflation. We cannot expect society to pay at this escalating rate especially with the cost of health care eating into budgets. Right now what seems to be being unbundled is the professoriate from teaching as more and more teaching is done by sessionals. Do we really want to leave experiments in unbundling exclusively to others or are we willing to take responsibility for experimenting ourselves?
  • One form of unbundling that we should experiment with more is unbundling the course from the class. Universities are stuck in the course = 12/3 weeks of classes on campus. These are the easiest way for us to run courses as we have a massive investment in infrastructure, but they aren’t necessarily the most convenient for students or subject matter. For graduate programs especially we should be experimenting with hybrid delivery models.
  • Universities may very well end up not being the primary way people get their post-secondary education. Universities may continue as elite institutions leaving it to professional organizations, colleges and distance education institutions to handle the majority of students.
  • Someone is going to come up with a reputable certification process for students who want to learn using a mix of books, study groups, MOOCs, college courses and so on. Imagine if a professional organization like the Chartered Accountants of Canada started offering a robust certification process that was independent of any university degree. For a fee you could take a series of tests and practicums that, if passed, would get you provincial certification to practice.
  • The audience for MOOCs is global, not local. MOOCs may be a gift we in wealthier countires can give to the educationally limited around the world. Openly assessed MOOCs could supplement local learning and become a standard against which people could compare their own courses. On the other hand we could end up with an Amazon of education where one global entity drives out all but the elite educational institutions (which use it to stay elite.) Will we find ourselves talking about educational security (a national needing their own educational system) and learning local (not taking courses from people that live more than 100K away)?
  • We should strive for a wiki model for OOCs where they are not the marketing tools of elite institutions but maintained by the community.

In sum, we should welcome any new idea for learning, including MOOCs. We should welcome OOCs as another way of learning that may suit many. We should try developing OOCs (the M part we can leave to Stanford) and assess them. We should be open to different configurations of learning and not assume that how we do things now has any special privilege.

Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale

The other day while browsing around looking for books to read on my iPad I noticed what looked like a dissertation for sale. I’ve been wondering how dissertations could get into e-book stores when I remembered the license that graduate students are being asked to sign these days by Theses Canada. The system here encourages students to give a license to Library and Archives Canada that includes the right,

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

I now just came across this cautionary story in the Chronicle for Higher Education about Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale. It seems it is also allowed in the US.

The X Factor – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education

From Humanist, a link to an article on online education, The X Factor (in the Brainstorm blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The post talks about how Harvard University has joined with MIT to create edX, an online education consortium. Harvard is now joining the MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) bandwagon pioneered by some Stanford profs who opened their courses to thousands. The author, Kevin Carey, points out that edX won’t compete with MIT or Harvard, but with other online providers and with less prestigious institutions.

I worry we are going to see a lessening of educational diversity. I worry that the star quality of MIT, Harvard and Stanford will drive out less prestigious players leaving us with a small number of online courses. Fewer instructors for more people will mean more standardization of education and less diversity.

The New York Times has a Room for Debate on this, Got a Computer? Get a Degree with different reactions to the news. Most seem positive, but few feel that certificates for taking MOOCs are comparable to real course credit.

A walk through The Waste Land

Daniel sent the link to this YouTube video, A walk through The Waste Land, that shows an iPad edition of The Waste Land developed by Touch Press. The version has the text, audio readings by various people, a video of a performance, the manuscripts, notes and photos. I was struck by how this extends to the iPad the experiments of the late 1980s and 1990s that exploded with the availability of HyperCard, Macromedia Director and CD-ROM. The most active publisher was Voyager that remediated books and documentaries to create interactive works like Poetry in Motion (Vimeo demo of CD) or the expanded book series, but all sorts of educational materials were also being created that never got published. As a parent I was especially aware of the availability of titles as I was buying them for my kids (who, frankly, ignored them.) Dr. Seuss ABC was one of the more effective remediations. Kids (and parents) could click on anything on the screen and entertaining animations would reinforce the alphabet.

Continue reading A walk through The Waste Land

Google Art Project

An article in the New York Times led me to the Google Art Project. This project doesn’t feel like a Google project, perhaps because it uses an off-black background and the interface is complex. The project brings together art work and virtual tours of many of the worlds important museums (but not all.0 You can browse by collection, artist (by first name), artworks, and user galleries. You can change the language of the interface (and it seems to change even when you don’t want it to in certain circumstances.) When viewing a gallery you can get a wall of paintings or a street view virtual tour of the gallery. Above you see the “Museum View” of a room in the Uffizi with a barrier around a Filippino Lippi that is being treated for a woodworm infestation! In the Museum View you can pan around and move up to paintings much as you would in Google Maps in Street View. On the left is a floor plan that you can also use.
This site reminds me of what was one of the best multimedia CD-ROMs ever, the Musee d’Orsay: Virtual Visit. This used QuickTime VR to provide a virtual tour. It had the sliding walls of art. It also had special guides and some nice comparison tools that let you get a sense of the size of a work of art. The Google Art Project feels loosely copied from this right down to the colour scheme. It will be interesting to see if the Google Art Project subsumes individual museum sites or consortia like the Art Museum Image Consortium (Amico.)

I find it interesting how Google is developing specialized interfaces for more and more domains. The other day I was Googling for movies in Edmonton and found myself on a movies – Google Search page that arranges information conveniently. The standard search interface is adapting.

HUMlab Space – a set on Flickr

The HUMlab at Umeå University is one of the best designed computing labs I have seen. The director Patrik Svensson has created a multi-purpose space out of a library basement. When there in February I took some photos to document the space – see a Flickr set on the HUMlab Space.

Computer labs used to rows of desktop computers all facing a shared projection space. Now that most students have laptops we don’t need those sorts of labs. The HUMlab instead features all sorts of shared spaces with different screens and projectors. The idea is that a lab should support different arrangements of people around shared social screens. You have private spaces, couches, small seminar tables, exhibit screens, and larger presentation spaces.

Is College Worth It? Pew Social & Demographic Trends

I came across this chapter from a report from the Pew Research Centre on
Is College Worth It?. The report looks at the value of education over a lifetime of work and concludes that “The typical college graduate earns an estimated $650,000 more than the typical high school graduate over the course of a 40-year work life…”

This chapter is part of a larger report on The Value of College. The authors make a number of points:

  • “A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend, and about four-in-ten college presidents say the system is headed in the wrong direction”
  • “just 19% of the 1,055 college presidents surveyed say they believe that the U.S. system of higher education is the best in the world. And just 7% say they think it will be the best in the world 10 years from now.”
  • “most college presidents (52%) say college students today study less than their predecessors did a decade ago, while just 7% say they study more. And 58% say that public high schools are doing a worse job of preparing students for college now than they did a decade ago, while just 6% say they are doing a better job.”
  • “the Pew Research survey finds that college graduates, on average, are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, their financial situation and their education than are those who did not attend college.”
  • “When asked what it takes for a young person to succeed in the world, more people point to traits such as a good work ethic (61% say this is extremely important) and knowing how to get along with people (57%) than say the same about a college education (42%).”
  • “the cost of a college education—at both public and private institutions—has roughly tripled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars”
  • “By a small but statistically significant margin, the public says that the main purpose of a college education should be to teach work-related skills and knowledge (47%) rather than to help an individual grow personally and intellectually (39%). … College graduates tend to place more emphasis on personal and intellectual growth (52%) over career preparation (35%), while those who are not college graduates lean the other way, emphasizing career preparation (51%) over personal growth (34%).”

All of these quotes are from the Overview of the full report.

People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande

I heard a keynote at the GRAND 2011 conference who mentioned a “learning pyramid” which purports to show that lecturing is the worst way to teach.

I went looking for the research behind this and it seems that the pyramid is a hoax. People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande is a short study that tried to figure out what were really the percentages. Van de Sande’s study came up with different numbers: Hearing: 36%, Reading: 51%, Seeing: 35%, Hearing and Seeing: 54%, Discussing: 50%, Experiencing: 70%, and Explaining: 58%.

Other blogs and essays on the subject include: Will Thalheimer‘s blog debunking the pyramid. There is an article in Education titled, The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction? (that I haven’t read) that looks at the source for the numbers. Finally there is a long blog post on the subject by David Jones. He says that the “research is generally referenced back to the National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine.” The NTL has apparently lost the original data.

This then raises the question of whether lecturing is really so bad.