As I tried to gather examples I could use to demonstrate that ‘we’re not born with talent and that, with effort and practice, one can excel at a chosen activity’, I realized that the majority of cases involve some form of doing. Kids don’t seem to balk at the endless playing required to become the best at Guitar Hero, the drills and practices required to make the sports team, or the time, skill, and effort required to create an animation for YouTube. There are endless opportunities for skills growth, but what about cognitive growth?

In the ‘good old days’ we were forced to remember things very early in our academic careers … times tables, proper spelling, poetry, the capitals of provinces, states and countries, verb conjugations, historical dates … the list goes on and on. We studied them over and over until they were firmly rooted in our little heads. We also had to remember phone numbers, bus schedules, and how to get from point A to point B. Every one of these activities forced us to stretch our brains just a little bit. We may not have always liked it, nor can we recall great chunks of it now, but we did learn how to learn.

Today we have digital memories. Instead of remembering things, we Google them. Documents are spell checked for us, we program numbers into our phones, and use our GPSs to get where we’re going. Technology has made our lives easier, but is this ease of access is eroding away at our ability (and desire) to really learn concepts through effort and practice?

One of my colleagues had a student tell him “I only have time to do it; I don’t have time to learn it.” It seems to sum up what many post-secondary faculty are observing … students practice a combination of strategic and surface learning; they do what they need to do in order to pass the course, and cram to pass the test. Deep learning requires one to integrate new information and experiences into our existing knowledge base, but if a student doesn’t make any effort to remember and relate fundamental facts and relationships, then how can he/she possibly learn and grow? Maybe the underlying message from that student was really “I only know how to do, I don’t know how to learn.”

Now I’m certainly not condoning the return to the rote learning of yesteryear, but it is critical that we somehow help our students build effective learning strategies. Since ‘doing’ is what today’s students seems to do best, we must help them cross the chasm from simply ‘doing’ to ‘learning-through-doing’. Offering our students level-appropriate, challenging, and authentic learning experiences will allow them to acquire content-specific knowledge and skills, while developing and strengthening executive processes such as planning, critical thinking, problem solving, risk assessment, reasoning, and self reflection.

I’ve been looking for a way to implement clickers in the classroom without needing students to buy a clicker. I came across PollEverywhere that allows students to use their cell phone, smart phone or a laptop to participate in class Q&As or surveys. I decided to try it out this afternoon.

Sample Poll

The signup process was very simple and took only a minute or two. Immediately I was able to create a poll question. Once you save the poll, it generates both a call number (circled in red) and a series of response texts (green rectangle). It was available for responses right away.

Respond with SmartPhone

First I tried the SmartPhone method of using poll4.com. A simple vote screen is displayed. The first time I tried typing in the whole response code (CAST 91731), but it did not accept it as a valid response. When I entered only the number it worked! The dynamic response screen showed the vote within seconds.

Next I tried using my cell phone to respond. I entered the call number as a new phone number and sent one of the response texts (91742) as the message. It immediately ‘called’ me back telling me I had done something wrong. I tried again … this time with the full response text (CAST 91742). It worked and immediately updated the response screen.

Web Poll

Since the poll was set to only one response per person, I had to use another computer to try out the online response … when I tried to vote again on my computer it told me that I already had. In this version you simply click on the desired response. Once again the results were updated immediately.

All in all, I was very pleased with the ease of both creating and responding to the poll. It’s certainly something that I’ll be incorporating into my classroom.

One of the case studies that I found in the education section was of students documenting the design process for a bridge building competition … not so different from some of the earlier projects that our students do. With that in mind, I decided to give it a try to see if it was something that would be easy enough for our students to use … i.e. little or no learning curve that might take time away from the main task at hand .

The sign-up process was straight forward and fast … with in a minute or two I had started making my 30 second video. The free access only allows videos to be 30 seconds, but you can apply for an educational license that allows you to create longer ones.

I chose five pictures from the ample supply of stock photo. It took me a minute to figure out how to select multiple pictures, but when I actually read the notes on the right side of the screen, the instructions were there … nothing too difficult, just hold the Ctrl key like in most Windows applications. The tool bar at the bottom of the image selection area allowed text to be added, and within a few second I had a title page in place.

The next step was to select the music to which the image transitions would be synchronized. Again there were lots available in most of the genres that you would want. Even with previewing a few of the pieces, it was only a matter of minutes until I was on to the last step, finalizing the video.

The last thing you have to do is name your video … it does all the rest. It took about 5 minutes to analyze, process, and render the video. It was immediately available to view. For a first attempt, I was pleasantly surprised with the final product!

I decided to see how easy it was to edit it. I went in and very quickly deleted an image, moved a few around, added a video clip (again lots of stock provided), and inserted a second text element. Here’s the final product that took about 20 minutes to produce, including all the time I spent viewing images, videos, and listening to snippets of music.

My First Video.

It’s nothing fancy, but I can see the potential for quick visual documentation of project process.

As I read through the chapter on myside processing this morning, I couldn’t help but stop and reflect on the section about the myside bias that engineers often have when designing and upgrading products. Myside bias is the “tendency for people to see and respond to a situation from their own perspective”. As engineers we design things the way we would like them to work, often forgetting that we are not the typical user. We also get so familiar with our products that we feel the need to “improve” them by constantly changing or adding  features. As experts, we sometimes wrongly assume that everyone will really appreciate all these enhancements, when all the consumer really wants is a reliable, straight-forward, easy-to-use product.

The same can be said about teachers. How many times have we jokingly said “I’ve taught this class five times before, haven’t you got it yet?” The first time we teach a particular course, we spend much of our time filtering through resources to extract and organize the curriculum in a way that will make it easy for our students to learn and understand the key concepts. The next time we’re assigned that course, we reflect on what went well, and focus on improving what needs to be changed. Usually by the third time, we’ve got it … the bugs have been worked out, the content is well organized, examples, assignments and labs have been honed, and all is well. Beyond that is when “feature creep” and “feature fatigue” set in! We get tired of doing things the same way (feature fatigue) so, to keep our own interest up, we feel the need to add a bit more content, make things more challenging, or introduce new tools and techniques (feature creep). We forget that the core concepts are new and often difficult for our students to master (as they probably were for most of us the first time we encountered them!). Change is good, as long as it improves and enhances student learning … as the experts, we have to make sure that feature creep and fatigue aren’t finding their way into our classrooms!

Many of my students claim that they do so much multitasking that it doesn’t really affect their work. They insist that they can listen to music, text their friends, and watch a YouTube video, all while trying to successfully complete an assignment. My gut instinct and day-to-day observations in the classroom say otherwise. Common sense tells me that students who focus on a given task are more likely to complete it sooner and with less difficulty. Fewer distractions correspond to better performance. It turns out that the study actually proved my assumptions and observations. HMMs are more easily distracted, have a harder time filtering out irrelevant information, and are more likely to start unrelated tasks. Surprisingly the study also showed that HMMs take longer to switch between tasks than LMMs.

It also surprised me to learn that HMMs tend to pay attention to all the information and/or tasks presented to them instead of choosing (or being able) to focus in on just one. They also seem to treat all the information and/or tasks with the same level of importance.

What surprised me most about the results of this study was that these effects of heavy media multitasking present themselves even when the student is not multitasking. It seems that the brain of an HMM may actually process things differently than that of an LMM.

This has serious implications for teaching and learning. As educators these days we don’t have much control over how much media multitasking our students do. We will have these students in our classrooms and we share the responsibility for their success. Somehow we have to find ways to help the HMMs filter, prioritize, focus, and find meaning.

“project work forms the central and dominant component of their curriculum and conventional didactic teaching is only provided to supplement the requirements of the project topics. The subject material studied is determined by the demands of the project topics, in terms of understanding both theoretical and methodological issues necessary to complete the project.” (my italics)

While I can’t say that we’ve stuck to this definition 100%, it has been our guiding philosophy.

These days most of the feeds on PBL are all about technology in the classroom. Projects seem to be research-oriented where students (usually somewhere in the K-12 demographic) are assigned a topic to work on either independently or in small groups. The internet is their source of information and some form of technology (computer, camera, video, etc.) is available to produce some form of digital presentation or report. Technically these are considered projects, but to me a project means producing a real-world, authentic, and realizable product.

Today though, those feeds included a description of a new engineering program in Minnesota that is all about authentic, project-based learning. Each week students live engineering … spending a few days working in industry on real engineering projects. They will not only acquire the required engineering knowledge, but more importantly they will gain the practical and professional skills necessary to be successful engineers. This, to me, is what true project-based learning is all about.

Now it is important to note that the students that I’m talking about are your everyday, run-of-the-mill students. They are not at-risk because of any significant academic, social, physical or psychological event … they’ve had pretty normal high school careers and graduated with average marks. My thinking is that they are at-risk because they have either not learned or had insufficient practice applying the cognitive and process skills necessary to survive and succeed in our post-secondary programs as they currently exist.