Group items tagged

Little p-value What are you trying to say Of significance? — Stephen Ziliak, Roosevelt University economics professor How many statisticians does it take to ensure at least a 50 percent chanc…

"Yet on the level of thinking of our Silicon Valley overlords, aspects of my cognitive abilities that are absolutely central to my educational success are taken to have literally no value at all. In educational research, perhaps the greatest danger lies in thinking "that which I cannot measure is not real." The disruption fetishists have amplified this danger, now evincing the attitude "teaching that cannot be said to lead to the immediate acquisition of rote, mechanical skills has no value." But absolutely every aspect of my educational journey - as a student, as a teacher, and as a researcher - demonstrates the folly of this approach to learning." True I think but echoed to greater and lesser extend by the educational system which helped create those who run Silicon Valley. h/t Dan Meyer

"If we've let the fickleness of history and public policy describe the bizarre set of standards (looking at you, Math) and therefore the metrics that we'll measure all students against, you'll end up with a system designed for those metrics. Instead, if you define your own measures, and actually study longitudinally their validity, we'll end up in a place where perhaps we'll value the emotional-intelligence development of a teenager above their ability to comply with outdated curricula. Maybe we'll come to value the nuance of entrepreneurial thought opposed to attempting to cram a line of reasoning they stole wholesale from Reddit into five paragraphs 20 minutes before the paper is due. "

"If you've heard me speak in the last several months, you've probably heard me rail against "disposable assignments." These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They're assignments that add no value to the world - after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!"

"Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice." Tie in with ECAR findings writeup

"Of course, I am little disappointed that the students aren't all actually reading Plato. But I'm also impressed with their ability to find and use the content they need, just when they need it. It is still pretty early in the semester so they haven't yet realized that spewing facts does nothing to improve their overall grade. Soon, they will be confused to discover that I don't assess according to one's ability to retain information. It will take them a while to adjust, most have over a decade of schooling that has systematically conditioned them to believe in the value of isolated proofs."

"By being up-front with my students about what I'm asking them to do outside of class, and-most essentially-why I have ordered things in that manner, I'm asking them to be co-owners of their learning experience. By making it clear that I'm doing my level best to value their time, they see my investment in their success."

I wonder how often this opportunity is there but the person isn't . . . seems like the very definition of computational thinking. "In the end, the tool was very crude but accomplished something very useful: It had a flow that ensured all the reports required by people on the ground, and above, were sent in a timely and orderly manner. Each step of that flow was almost entirely automated. Each button filled a template and put the text in the clipboard for copy-pasting in the chat. Events were timed automatically. Distances and time of travel were computed automatically. A dropdown menu facilitated entering common values. Big warning signs were visible when a time critical step was ongoing, or some important data was missing."

"OK, so how do we fix this problem? How do I help these students understand that there is value in being confused? I think the only solution is to keep confusing students. Sorry students, there is no shortcut to real understanding."

""We do not face a choice between tradition and change, between the familiar and the new. We face an opportunity and an imperative both to embrace thoughtful change and to affirm our core values in ways that fulfill this extraordinary university's enduring promise to its students and to the world.""

"Students appreciated the MOOC's ability to support structured, self-paced learning. Students often watched the short (10-to-15-minute) lecture videos at double speed with the captions turned on, at times that fit the students' schedules. Students described Andrew Ng as a highly effective lecturer, which added to the value of the lecture videos. Students did not actively participate in the discussion forums provided by the MOOC, choosing instead to use each other and Professor Fisher as resources when they needed help with the material. Occasionally, a student with a specific question would check to see if that question had already been asked and answered in the forums. It often was, and so the forums were a study resource for the students even if they didn't post to the forums themselves. Doug's students appreciated the in-class active learning facilitated by the "flipped" approach. By shifting explanatory lectures outside of class, class time was made available for more discussion, interaction, and application of that material. The students described Doug's role as "facilitator," guiding class discussions and making sure that every student understood the material. The biggest challenge identified by the students was a misalignment between the MOOC material and the additional readings Doug provided. These readings took the students beyond the introductory ideas presented in the MOOC, focusing on recent and seminar research in the field. The readings weren't designed for novices in the field, as Andrew Ng's lecture videos were, and they required "a different kind of learning," as one student put it. Nor did the readings always build on the week's MOOC content in clear ways."

"This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. "

The Kress Foundation funded research to help clarify perceptions on digital scholarship and art history! I can only imagine the creative community being equally aghast and confused about earth art, conceptual art and performance art (among others). Wild to think about. We keep marching forward. "The findings reveal disagreements in the art history community about the value of digital research, teaching, and scholarship. Those who believe in the potential of digital art history feel it will open up new avenues of inquiry and scholarship, allow greater access to art historical information, provide broader dissemination of scholarly research, and enhance undergraduate and graduate teaching. Those who are skeptical doubt that new forms of art historical scholarship will emerge from the digital environment. They remain unconvinced that digital art history will offer new research opportunities or that it will allow them to conduct their research in new and different ways."

Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.

Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).

"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"

"Once you present OER to faculty, there's a real affinity and alignment of OER with faculty values. Jeff was surprised more about the potential of OER than he had thought going in. Unlike other technology-based subjects of BSRG studies, there is almost no suspicion of OER. Everything else BSRG has measured has had strong minority views from faculty against the topic (online learning in particular), with incredible resentment detected. This resistance or resentment is just not there with OER. It is interesting for OER, with no organized marketing plan per se, to have no natural barriers from faculty perceptions"

"A major affordance of video is the ability to produce multimedia elements and create dynamic learning artifacts. This may be self-evident, yet often instructional videos are produced without much design devoted to sound or imagery. Students repeatedly described the audio/visual elements of video as useful aspects of online course videos. Throughout the interviews, all participants evaluated charts, graphs, photographs, and other visuals relevant to the content area in positive terms. Conversely, a couple of students voiced their dissatisfaction with videos that they did not perceive as a value-add over text (they said videos they viewed did not include useful audio/visuals and that they could have just as easily read a transcript for the same information)."

Assessment: What are students really learning?