Well today was an interesting day, attending one of the few non ed, education conferences; seeing how the non ed world is using and “discovering” what many of us with an education background have known and used many times over. So with that in mind, my refections on the day are not to explore the ideas that I want to explore as it is in other conference posts, but rather looking at ways that non ed people use ed language to get ed ideas across. With this in mind, the first part of the day was the keynote by Carl Wieman (Nobel, Wikipedia).
Wieman delivered an entertaining presentation on what basically could be understood as constructivism. While I was listening to it, I kept thinking to myself how technology and teaching are not really separate, they are one in the same and if you think one is being added to the other, it’s not really going to get you very far. But back to the presentation, which I’m reflecting on out of sequence.
The talk started out exploring how to really teach, one must change the way that students think. This is something that many grad and IIP advisers have had to face as they receive students who have amazing marks, but no knowledge of the field that their new environment is working in. Frustrated by this, Wieman decided to explore it using the scientific process and discovered that there is a different type of knowledge between the “booksmart” (my term) new student and the experienced “expert in field” (again, mine). When everything is boiled down, if you want to change how people think, you have to provide an environment for that change to occur. This is pretty easy in the lab as the expert and the novice share ideas and true problem solving can occur as there is little in the definition of what the problem truly is and what the answer is as well. In the classroom however, this is not as easy. Students get to be experts in “process matching” rather than problem solving where they learn quickly to match their answers to what the instructors want (of course this isn’t saying that every student is like this) . In the classroom, there is no risk, context, transfer or language of the expert environment of the lab so the results obviously can not be the same.
That was essentially the crux of the issue when it comes to science (or any other) education process – experts are trying to cross between the expert and novice worlds, but they fail to notice the details of the environment that make them essentially different. But it’s not practical to transform a 300 student lecture to a 4 person lab, so instructors have to think about ways that they can communicate with their students, provide context and some element of risk or uncertainty and all at a rate that won’t “melt brains”.
At the end of the presentation, Wieman mentioned clickers as a ways to facilitate communication between the student body in the classroom and the instructor and attempt to “virtually” reduce the class size so that it might match more to what the lab environment is like (my brain is melting as I write this… ah!)
The rest of the day for me was about Web2 and tech integration. The Web2.0 presentation explored the way that the ‘net that was once the “great library” is now the great conversation. Tools like the student created Otavo and WikiYork are only a couple of the examples to add to Flickr and the rest.
The last session was from Memorial and their Instructional Design “people”. For me, this was a great session as it verified the process that I use in the Faculty of Science based on Chickering:
- identify instructional challenges
- determine instructional team’s technology comfort level
- define learning outcomes
- consider student access
- assess critical mass/tipping point
- support through gradual roll out
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