Through a glass darkly metrics and modalities

Metrics for blogging.

Any form of measurement for which there is a preferred outcome creates distortions, whether its school completions, or listings of the best performing schools in terms of students proceeding to college or any other thing. For the two school based metrics mentioned above: in one case we retain students when their time might be better spent elsewhere, in the other case we teach to the interview or teach to the test depending on the college entry requirements in the country concerned. This distorts the system and moves us away from a well rounded education appropriate for the entire educational cohort concerned.

It’s the same in the blog-o-sphere. The search for traffic whether the numbers are important for cash or self esteem reasons distorts the medium.

Distortion is not all bad, the classic Haiku or the sonnet are literary forms where a very constricted format leads to great art.

Stephen Downes in this post http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=54933 describes  describes many of the tricks Bloggers use to drive traffic to their sites. He is deeply critical. giving out that the result is neither deep, well aruged or authentic. These are all good points, but may misrepresent how many of us use blogs.

Often we are not looking for a long and deeply intellectual discourse which will leave us pondering for the rest of the day, we are looking for the short “edu bite”, fast food for thinkers on the run trying to clear the in-stack on their Google reader page.

A standard VLE for Ireland?

We are at an interesting point in Irish education, where many secondary schools are moving their school systems towards VLE’s or content management systems.

Why do I use both terms, when these are clearly very different pieces of computer kit?

It’s how they are used. I’m listening to discussions in various teaching fora on the web, looking on as a parent, and for my sins trying to teach. And through all these channels I see many very different views of what computers have to do in the classroom.

At one end we have the apple tribe, with students making Imovies, engaging with apps and hitting each other over the head with ipads when they’re not texting on their iphones.

Its creative, anarchic and probably reflects a true vision of the future with these students lounging around as adults listening to their ipods and sending updates to their e-friends on facebook 2.3.

At the other end I see SCORM compliant transpositions of our traditional teaching modes “Listen to it, learn it, pass the exam and forget it”, where the computer turns into a vertically mounted examination paper with a slightly stricter method of enforcing the “Times up! Stop writing now" imperative moment.

The problem with making a national VLE recommendation as I see it is this.

We need a VLE where a class can have a discussion, where they can write a newspaper. Where they can collaborate on a movie. Where they can write a class blog, sit an exam or play serious games. We need somewhere where teachers can do everything from just putting up the homework for the class, to running a virtual classroom for housebound students whom they have never met in person.

Many teachers will be in the just put up the homework camp.  They have been teaching their course for many years, are good at it and it works. These are the easy people to satisfy.  The problem is with the rest. Moodler’s and Sakai’s BB’rs Frogs and angels. Together with the vast array of teachers who have found tools like Voki and Voice thread, Youtube an Vimeo. Trailmeme or eTwinning. 

For these there may be only one real VLE, and its called the world wide web.

Refs

This piece was written after reading a truly excellent post on the history of the VLE which is linked from this blog page by Ray Tolley:

http://t.co/c2gr0OL,

 http://efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/2011/02/evolution-of-vle.html

From the Irish Times:Free online course materials will revolutionise third-level education

This is a reaction to the above article by Brian Mooney writing in the Irish times today, the First of February 2011. In the article he extolled the virtues of MIT opencourseware.
MIT is great, and I love the open course ware initiative, but its only one small shelf in a very big open-source learning bookstore! Have you looked at whats available through ItunesU? This has all of the MIT stuff + Berkley +Harvard, +....hundreds of universities, and Museums and other such.  Its a great resource for the learner.
Here is another source of such materials, this came up on the CESI list in response to the Irish times article:
 http://cnx.org/ 
 
The second interesting trend is the emergence of degree replacements such as "Microsoft Certified", where it doesn't matter where you get the learning, once you sit the exams and pass, you get the piece of paper.  In this way we see the learning and the certification being de-coupled with the later being given the imprimatur of an internationally accepted (albeit commercial) standard.
City and Guilds in London used to do something like this, and The university of London also had a very early distance education program with a good reputation.  This is a field where we will see more players entering in the near future.

Are we Scholars or Teachers?

I have just finished reading this interesting piece
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/01/28/martin_gillen_time_to_create_a_market_for_excellent_college_teaching
written by Robert Martn and Andrew Gillen in "Inside higher Ed"
They raise the point that there is no efficient market for excellent teachers, rather there is an efficient market for scholars of higher education. Thus rather than training people to teach effectively, we train them to be effective scholars in the field of education.
This is not unique to education, and comes from the inbuilt reflexive bias in higher ed, whereby course givers are by and large working for academic institutions.
The article also identifies another source of this bias which is that in the hiring process employers have the external publishing record of the lecturer/researcher to go on, and that the reference mechanism is in many markets broke. (An excellent reference may indicate an employer’s unwillingness to be sued, or their enthusiasm for getting rid of the individual in question, rather than a deep-seated conviction that this is an individual of truly above average ability!)
When I think of the coursework in the course I am now pursuing, I find that much of it is aimed fairly and squarely at scholarly research, which is very valid considering that that is going to be a significant hiring criteria. It does however beg the question has this emphasis on scholarship led to less time being spent on delivering material pertinent to the development and delivery of content to students, which may be what teaching is about.

The semantic Web

This is in response to a discussion in #LAK11
The semantic web is an umbrella term for an initiative to make the web richer by attempting to tag large data collections with tags conveying their meanings and knowledge content.  In some sense I see it as being an outgrowth of the AI community's effort to encode knowledge into semantic maps.
I think its a wonderful project, but perhaps a little too ambitious, and I'll tell you why. Humans love to re-purpose things in unexpected ways, and I cant see a set of tags which would be broad enough to encompass all possible uses, yet retain enough specificity to be useful. As an example:
Once upon a time there was an astronomer who was looking at galaxies, and after two years of looking at galaxies everyday they asked for help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Zoo
and currently
http://www.zooniverse.org/projects
Whats interesting in all of this is that:
1) These are collections of big data which still need many thousands of people to generate knowledge, and
2) A specific tool for a specific task, (deciding whether galaxies were spirals or not) is now looking for space junk on the moon, examining solar storms, and reading old ships logs to find out about global warming.
This is a very human thing to do, other examples, a website set up for selling Pez dispensers turned into Ebay, and a piece of software set up to help an academic keep track of references, turned into Google.
This is human.
At our best we look above and beyond.
 The second problem is the one alluded to in the old joke about the British and the Americans being two nations divided by a common language.
As a chemist I once studied a set of small molecules each containing 4 atoms.
I was talking to another computational chemist and they recommended a particular piece of software as being good for small molecules.
I tried it, and it failed.
When I met them again, I asked about it. It turned out that they were doing computational biochemistry, and small for them was around 10,000 or so atoms big. 
Even in very closely related fields terms can have very different meanings.
My 2c.
Laurence Cuffe

Meta Analysis

Great claims have been made for Meta analysis. The principle seems sound, that by combining the results of numerous smaller studies you can generate results which are both more authoritative and more general than any of the individual papers which go to make up the study. 

Professor John Hattie is a practitioner (http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/staff/j.hattie)

I remain to be convinced by Hattie's Meta analysis. For me its a purely numeric argument. I assume that for a study to make a valid contribution to a meta analysis, the author of the Meta analysis must have read the paper. 

Hattie's meta analysis is claimed to be  a synthesis of 50,000 previous studies (This number varies in some papers on his website its as high as 180,000). If the original papers were used that would be reading 50 papers a week for about twenty years.

However Hattie does not claim to have read these studies, but to have read a much smaller number of studies summarizing previous work.  At this point one has to ask how it was possible to ensure that the literature used as input in those studies was distinct, i.e. that each of those studies did not include many of the same papers.

If you cant do this then determining just how many studies contributed to the eventual conclusion becomes problematic.

Just to make this reservation clear, I would like to state that this comment is based on over 100,000 research studies, because it is based on at least two reviews of Hattie's work, each of which were based on his work, which included the results of over 50,000....

Much of what Hattie  says is very sensible, in particular his argument that as educationalist we must move away from "it works for me"(Hattie, 1999) and take a more objective approach to educational research and model building. Statistics can be one approach to such a project. However showing that two factors are correlated is a very long way from showing that there is a causal relationship between them, and its hard to see how Hatties approach of combining Meta analysis can drill down deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of what goes on  in a classroom environment to provide us with reliable information as to what will work for us.

my 2c.

Hattie 1999 http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/education/shared/hattie/docs/influences-on-student-learning.pdf

Game Based learning

http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2011/01/03/game-based-learning-isnt-always-electronic/

This very brief article on game based learning highlights a game called the healing blade, where the lord of pestilence is pitted against the apothecary. This is a card based game for teaching medical students what does and what does not work in fighting infectious disease.  The take home of this is that Game based learning does not necessarily involve computers, and the second take home is that profits from the game are used to support a pediatric charity.

This takes me back to “life and death 2” which was a video game in the eighties based on learning how to do brain surgery. I’ve played the game, but I’m not sure that I’m equipped with the skills needed for the task.  However in this case its not me but thee subject matter which is likely to query my competence once I detail the source of my online training.

Now: Anyone for a game of Hangman?