markmorton's blog

A few years ago, I established a "Loving to Learn Day" at my university, an event that I would be glad to see taken up at other institutions. Essentially, Loving to Learn Day is an opportunity for members of university communities, as well as the public at large, to reflect on their love of learning. To help motivate people to undertake this reflection, I devise a different contest each year (with prizes being provided by my university's bookstore). This year, for example, I've invited people to submit a paragraph describing the one thing that they are most glad to have learned over the past year. Please take a look at the webpage that I've created for the event:

http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/L2L

I recently gave a workshop on how a "best-practice" approach to using clickers can help remedy a number of instructional challenges. However, rather than use PowerPoint, which I find constraining in that assumes a linear pathway through the presentation material, I created a concept map using Cmaps. The nodes of the concept map are hyperlinked to webpages that correspond to "slides." Once the workshop got going, I was able to jump to whatever node was relevant to that aspect of the discussion. All in all, it worked quite well, and helped make the workshop more dynamic and interactive. The concept map is available here: http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/clickers.html . Feel free to make use of it, or to give me feedback.

-- Mark

I recently came across a couple of great passages from Boswell's Life of Johnson. (Samuel Johnson, as you probably know,  was one of the greatest English authors of the eighteenth century, and had a gift for cranky wit; James Boswell was a friend who followed him around in order to record his pronouncements). In the first passage below, Johnson shows himself to be an early advocate of active learning. In the second passage, he reveals his impatience with "theory!"   :)

"People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures -- you might teach the making of shoes by lectures!"

We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. Johnson: "Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare.  Sir, while you are considering which of the two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both."

One of the faculty members at my university teaches large classes of students (in Accounting and Management), and he's eager to implement Active Learning into these courses. An obvious challenge, however, is that the students themselves tend to be skeptical of Active Learning; they are familiar with the Sage on the Stage approach, and thus they are often reluctant to embrace a teaching strategy that is not a straight lecture. To help address this challenge, I've offered to attend the instructor's course (at the beginning of the term) with a view to making a presentation (and facilitating a discussion or debate) about Active Learning. Essentially, I want to persuade the students that Active Learning can improve their performance, and therefore they should welcome their instructor's Active Learning teaching strategies. In preparation for this, I reviewed a number of studies of the efficacy of Active Learning, extracted the most salient passages, and pulled them together into a single document. That document is attached.

RateMyHeuristic.Com

Mark Morton, Instructional Program Manager, Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology

Everyone loves a heuristic: a handy, tidy, bulleted, get-down-to-brass-tacks distillation of the best practices for navigating your way through a complex system or situation. In higher education, one of the best known heuristics must surely be the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” devised in 1987 by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson. As you probably know, Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles encourage things like “student/faculty contact,” “prompt feedback,” and so on. Other heuristics have also been proposed as alternatives to that of Chickering and Gamson. For example, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) advocates “Five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice,” such as “level of academic challenge” and “active and collaborative learning.” Likewise, Patrick Terenzini, the author of the award-winning How College Affects Students, identifies “Six Characteristics of Learning and Development,” including “real world activities” and “unbounded by time or place.”

In October of 2005, I emailed about forty individuals who have expertise in faculty development as it pertains to instructional technologies. In my email, I asked them this question: in a workshop or training program that's designed to help instructors learn to use online technologies in ways that promote active, student-centered learning, at what point should those instructors actually be introduced to the technology? That is, should one discuss the technology before discussing the pedagogy, or should one discuss the technology after discussing the pedagogy, or should one blend together the discussions of technology and pedagogy in an iterative manner? As it turned out, there was a clear consensus among the 37 individuals who responded to my query; I discuss that consensus in the attached PDF, which comprises a synthesis of the responses as well as an appendix that includes all of the responses in their entirety. -- Mark
PS I've replaced the original PDF, which wasn't opening in all versions of Acrobat. It now should open in any version. -m

I recently came across three news items from the early 1930s in the London Times. All three pertain to an exhibition that showcased new "mechanical aids to learning," such as "talking film machines," gramophones, and epidiascopes. It's interesting to see that some of the concerns raised then about new learning technologies echo those that concern us now. Consider this passage: "One of the difficulties of bringing together the teacher and the machine is that the former is not usually mechanically-minded. He is accustomed to working with his mind, and is shy of having to manipulate knobs and wheels and switches which may go wrong." For those interested in how "the more things change, the more they stay the same," I've attached the three news items, in PDF form, to this posting. -- Mark

I've received a few emails from people in the Educause community requesting more information about the faculty development program that I offer at the University of Waterloo, called The E-Merging Learning Workshop. Accordingly, I'll provide (below) three links to resources that give more detail about our approach to faculty development vis-a-vis learning technologies.

First, the home page of the E-Merging Learning Workshop, which briefly explains its goals and approach: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/programs/ELW/

Second, a seven-minute screencast that explains what the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW1.wmv (6 megs)

Third, a ten-minute screencast that explains how the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is achieved:
http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW2.wmv (5 megs)

These screencasts are in Windows Media format. I intend to also render them in Quicktime format, but haven't done so yet.

I've taken the ideas and information that were originally in this blog entry, and have turned it into a better structured, better formatted, and more thorough Microsoft Word document, which I've attached to this entry. I've called that document "Five Ways That Technology Can Save Instructors Time While Enhancing Student Learning." Feel free to use it. 

One part of my job as Instructional Program Manager is to help faculty members develop pedagogical strategies that work effectively in an online environment. There are a number of challenges to this, and the primary one is probably the looming presence of the technology itself: that is, the complex and powerful online course management system is there in front of the instructors -- they can almost stub their toe on it -- and so when they start to think about incorporating an online component into one of their face-to-face courses, the first thing that comes into their mind is "how do I use the technology" rather than "what do I do with the technology." In other words, they are well aware that they need guidance and probably even training with regard to the nuts and bolts aspects of logging on, making online quizzes, using the online gradebook, and so on. But this focus on the technology AS technology causes them to overlook less tangible things, such as the need to develop new pedagogical approaches, and the need (and opportunity) to make online learning as active and student-centred as possible. On a day to day basis, this problem is manifested in the fact that many of our faculty mistakenly think that our unit -- The Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3)-- is a kind of "technology help desk," the place that they phone when they are having a problem with a computer or with software. In short, it's lamentable that LT3 sometimes gets confused with IST (Information and Systems Technology); and sometimes we are also confused with other quite distinct units, such as Distance Education.

At a recent Educause workshop in Toronto, I was introduced by Cyprien Lomas to "vlogs" which are the offspring of blogs. (The evolution of that word is interesting: some years ago, the phrase "web log" was clipped to just "blog," and now that word has undergone another generation of clipping and fusing (with the word "video") to result in "vlog.") The vlog that Cyprien used as an example was the daily one at http://www.rocketboom.com. He also referred to the "Numa numa" video that is, if I understood him correctly, the sort of original and accidental inspiration for the subsequent proliferation of vlogs. That "Numa numa" video is available for viewing here: www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/numa.php. I've also just learned that there's a fairly new word to describe a phenomenon that suddenly achieves "cult" status on the web (like "Numa numa" or like the clip of William Hung singing "She Bangs" that circulated the web a year or so ago) -- those sudden "spreadings" of something on the web are called "memes" or "neta." It reminds me, in a way, of a pandemic like the 1916 influenza outbreak: it comes out of nowhere, spreads like wildfire, and then vanishes just as suddenly. Think Kato Kaelin.

I've established this blog as a way of centralizing and disseminating information and ideas that I come across in my role as Instructional Program Manager at the Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology at the University of Waterloo. However, I've sat here with my fingers on the keyboard for some time, wondering who the audience of this blog is. At one extreme, it could just be for me. At the other extreme, it could be for anyone at the University of Waterloo or (I suppose) beyond. I do know, though, that it's crucial to establish, at least in my own mind, a target audience. Otherwise, the scope of the blog will be in flux; and as I know from working on some book projects, it's easier to write cogently when you have a sense of your audience's frame of reference and assumptions. So, until I indicate otherwise, I'm going to envision that my audience is made up of the seven Faculty Liaisons at the University of Waterloo: Pia Marks, Katherine Lithgow, Antonia Palmer, Scott Anderson, Paul Kates, Jane Holbrook, and Laura Briggs -- they are the conduits between the LT3 Centre (which aims to foster learning through technology) and their respective faculties.