Friday, September 26, 2014

More Mobile Means More Learning Opportunities

Photo courtesy of phonerebel.com
With Apple’s release of the iPhone, selling more than 9 million in the first three days, it’s hard not to think about the mobile lives of teenagers. After all, this is just further fuel for a mobile fire that already has 74% of teens (ages 12-17) accessing the Internet using mobile phones.

The good news, at least for teachers, is that the growing percentage of teens with smartphones and tablets creates all kinds of opportunities for learning. Here are three ways that mobile devices can broaden the learning potential at your school.

  • Create more distributed learning opportunities -- Before the Digital Age, distributed learning meant the occasional organized field trip or sending kids home with assignments from their textbook. Today, most every young learner has the entire Internet in his or her pocket. They can access information, record their experiences, and communicate in a variety of ways -- all while they are going about their daily activities outside the traditional classroom. This means that learning can be truly centrigugal and persistent -- it can go with students wherever they go. We can extend the learning environment to include the whole world of information and experience! Of course, it doesn't happen automatically. We have to prompt or help students in their use of mobile devices for learning. One easy way to do this, for any subject, is to create an optional/alternative mobile (distributed learning) activity for every lesson or learning unit.
  • Design more opportunities for creation -- Mobile devices also open up an incredible world of creation for our students. Photos, audio, and video are all easy to create and edit. Mobile devices afford our learners new tools for creating new learning stories. If you want to be inspired on this front, just look at this post from Wes Fryer about teaching iPad videography to kids in Alaska via videoconference.
Videoconference to Alaskahttp://audio.speedofcreativity.org/wp-content/uploads/quick-edit-videoconference-sept2014.mp3



  • Introduce new forms of content -- Mobile devices are made for audio, video and photos. They are designed for interactivity and touch. This opens up exciting new content opportunities for our classes. And the great news is that there are so many fantastic learning resources that are already perfect for mobile learning. Now is the time to make sure that you are providing mobile-ready content to go along with every lesson.


Creating Learning Communities with Individuals

I've been sampling a number of xMOOC courses lately, with a particular interest in their approach(es) to community-based activities. Most feature a fairly common template, one which is also popular in traditional online courses.

In this approach the instructor/course treats the class community as a homogeneous element -- trying to move it in lock step from Point A to Point B. Community-based assignments, then tend to be discussion prompts in which homogeneous community members provide an answer to a homogeneous question set based on a collection of homogeneous information. After each member of the homogeneous class community has posted their fairly homogeneous response to this homogeneous question based on a homogeneous set of information, individual students are then asked to reply to the homogeneous responses. It is at this point, I believe, that the community connections are supposed to occur. In reality, by this time, all posts are pretty much the same so students just pick a couple and write their homogeneous replies without needing to give much thought given to the original posts. Occasionally, some student who either doesn't understand the instructions or doesn't understand that they are supposed to be acting homogeneously, will fly off the rails and disrupt the whole enterprise. The homogeneous structure of the course is generally so strong, however, that this type of insensitive behavior is quashed rather effectively.

I contrast this with the Storybook Project that my friend Laura Gibbs employs in her Mythology and Folklore online course. In this course design models, students are treated as heterogeneous community members who are allowed to select and write heterogeneous stories/posts based on heterogeneous information sets tied together by a common set of ideas. As a result of the individualization of the information and the topics, students write creatively and passionately. Other students, when asked to comment on the storybooks created by other students, often do so with equal interest and passion, which leads to legitimate connections and a vibrant community.

In case I haven't made the contrast clear, ere is a simple visual of the two models.



Homogeneous_Community
Heterogeneous_Community


Monday, September 22, 2014

Teaching Matters More than Ever in a Digital Age

Thirty years ago, I traveled to Argentina to study at the National University of La Plata for a year. It was a transformative experience, one full of café con leche and facturas in local confiterías, haunting book shops in Buenos Aires and La PLata, and incredible learning experiences in a country experiencing democracy for the first time in almost a decade.

Naturally, as my teaching career evolved, my experiences in Argentina (from that and future trips), played a significant role in the courses I taught on language and literature. The allowed me to give detail and weave narratives. They enabled me to provide a meaningful, added dimension to the information my students were processing.

I was reminded again of the importance of that added dimension as I read about the latest virtual reality (VR) headset from from Oculus Rift, the company purchased by Facebook this past summer. The company's latest prototype allows users to "explore the virtual environment as you would in real life." The reviewer comments that he found himself "regularly crouching down and moving around to examine the digital objects surrounding me me from all angles." All of which translates into a more immersive experience, and one that moves closer to capturing "the feeling presence."
I did come close to the feeling of presence, I think, during one portion of the demo that had me moving slowly forward through a giant disintegrating orb. I was stationary, of course, but my brain definitely thought I should be moving, and I found myself actively trying to balance myself as a result. It is the first time that I truly felt like the digital world had begun to take over more than just my visual perception. That sensation was fleeting, but Oculus' latest dose of virtual reality gave me a glimpse of presence.
 I have experimented with VR headsets in the past, and have long believed that, at some point in the future, VR will allow our students to experience the presence of relevant locations as part of their learning.They will be able to don headsets (or glasses) that will allow them to tour the landscape of the literature they are reading, or to walk through the streets of Buenos Aires as they learn Spanish, all without ever having to leave their actual time and space.

Of course, immediate questions arise when I talk about such technology trends with educators. "What will my role be?" "Will this kind of technology replace me?"

My answer to such questions is the same one I've been giving since I presented a series of lectures on technology in education to high school teachers around Oklahoma in 1998. "If your only purpose is to oversee the processing of information then, yes, technology will replace you (and be an improvement). If, however, your role is more than that, if it is about connections, understanding, and to facilitate the accrual of wisdom, you are providing a unique service that will always be in demand."

In fact, I would argue that teachers and teaching matter more in the the 21st century and the digital age than they ever have. In this era, every day in a course is much like the study abroad experiences I have enjoyed with my students. As we traveled along with me, they were seeing the same objects and had access to the same information I did. I didn't need to describe the Amazon ecosystem to them because they are experiencing it for themselves in real time and incredible technicolor. In spite of that, however, they still lacked the necessary context to really "see" it completely, to experience it meaningfully.

In the digital age, teachers and teaching matter more than ever because information/learning context is more important than ever. Today, students have access to incredible information resources, virtual experiences, and easy "answers," but what they need most is context and understanding.

This is what teachers do. They are the meaningful ligaments that make possible a true learning motion.