Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Instructional

  • Perfection-oriented v. Performance-oriented

    Robert Strandh writes a piece about two different kinds of learners: perfection-oriented learners and performance-oriented learners.

    He writes:

    The people in the category perfection-oriented have a natural intellectual curiosity. They are constantly searching for better ways of doing things, new methods, new tools. They search for perfection, but they take pleasure in the search itself, knowing perfectly well that perfection can not be accomplished. To the people in this category, failure is a normal part of the strive for perfection. In fact, failure gives a deeper understanding of why a particular path was unsuccessful, making it possible to avoid similar paths in the future.

    The people in the category performance-oriented on the contrary, do not at all strive for perfection. Instead they have a need to achieve performance immediately. Such performance leaves no time for intellectual curiosity. Instead, techniques already known to them must be applied to solve problems. To these people, failure is a disaster whose sole feature is to harm instant performance. Similarly, learning represents the possibility of failure and must thus be avoided if possible. To the people in this category, knowledge in other people also represents a threat. As long as everybody around them use tools, techniques, and methods that they themselves know, they can count on outperforming these other people. But when the people around them start learning different, perhaps better, ways, they must defend themselves. Other people having other knowledge might require learning to keep up with performance, and learning, as we pointed out, increases the risk of failure. One possibility for these people is to discredit other people’s knowledge. If done well, it would eliminate the need for the extra effort to learn, which would fit very well with their objectives.

    Looking at these two categories, I would put myself in the perfection-learning category even though I don’t necessarily think this is the better category. He later describes how initial impressions often cause an individual to reject a programming language or toolset for bogus reasons. He says:

    It is hard to overestimate the strength of this phenomenon. I myself recently discovered a marvelous feature in a programming language that I had purposely avoided for the past 10 years, simply because 10 years ago, a colleague (who did not know the feature) explained to me that it was no good. We were both victims of our own minds. My colleague because he obviously needed to defend that he had made a different choice, and myself because I subconsciously found it very appealing to be able to brush off the feature as useless and thus not having to learn it. It is hard to overestimate the wasted time I have put in during the past 10 years due to considerably lower productivity than I could have had, had I realized at the time what I now know about human psychology.

    Obviously Strandh is trying to warn against this tendency. But I would argue that this tendency toward premature judgment is in fact a natural learning response. The brain absorbs what it can. It’s quite possible that this feature wouldn’t have made any sense to him at the time the feature was presented to him, and it was only later that he could appreciate its usefulness. The learner creates his own path, rejecting some avenues and accepting others. We can hope that some teacher can guide him along and point out when the learner is going nowhere, but there is a lot to be said for the learner discovering things on his own. The mistakes in exploratory forms of learning can be just as instructive as the correct paths.

    That is why keeping abreast of a field is particularly important (by for instance reading weblogs). While reading newsgroups and weblogs, the mere recurrence of certain discussions will gradually familiarize the learner to a tool or concept and help him to “rediscover” it later on. To use the example presented above, the reason for the programmer’s stupidity may very well have his failure to keep abreast in ideas and commentaries by peers who did find the tool to be useful.

  • Blogging in Education?

    It’s popular to tout blogging as the magic panacea for everything. What about using it for education? Stephen Downes writes about the impact of blogging on education:

    But perhaps the most telling motivation for blogging was offered by Mark Pilgrim in his response to and elaboration on ?The Weblog Manifesto?: ?Writers will write because they can?t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you get it. Do you know someone like that? Someone who does what they do, not for money or glory or love or God or country, but simply because it?s who they are and you can?t imagine them being any other way??32

    Pilgrim?s moving declaration should be read as a cautionary note. The warning is not about bosses who don?t want employees to write weblogs (though that danger exists), but this: writing weblogs is not for everybody. In particular, if you feel no empathy, no twinge of recognition, on reading Pilgrim?s words, then writing a weblog is probably not for you. This does not mean that you are not a part of the weblog world. It merely means that you participate in a different way.

    And herein lies the dilemma for educators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don?t say the wrong things?

    I’ve addressed this question before in my post on linking to friends. Despite the lack of obstacles, only a small segment of the population has any desire to blog. My friends (even those who know I have a weblog) rarely follow this weblog, much less write one for themselves.

  • Open-Source Course Development

    I used to read elearningpost every day and have grown out of the habit. I’m trying to catch up. Judith Boettcher writes an interesting article about online course development where she links to two useful resources to online course software: a review of of weblearning software and Sakai, which is basically a java-based content framework for educational tools and services. She writes:

    If program planners use a working estimate of $10,000 per credit hour for a master?s degree program, then a 30-credit master?s degree program can require an investment of $300,000. The available examples in the literature often provide examples of investments ranging higher, in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $20,000 per credit hour. Institutions have been very creative in finding ways to reduce these up-front investment costs. Some strategies that appear to be successful are collaborating with other institutions and finding corporate sponsors for whom programs are specifically designed and delivered.

    On another note, eduplone serves as a platform for educational services. Here’s an article about eduplone with more details about implementation and use and the fle3 home page (which is zope-based).

  • SCORM Best Practices

    I had looked at the draft, but here’s the final version. Carnegie Mellon’s SCORM Best Practices for Content Developers. Now if only LMS’s can incorporate them!

    Speaking of nifty PDF’s, I was astonished by the Citizen’s Guide to the Airwaves (PDF). I went ahead and bought this poster.

  • Stephen Downes and Kevin Cox

    Stephen Downes’ Weblog/Writing site is one of the best sources for ideas about education, technology and web standards. In Meaning, Use and Metadata, Downes speculates about how the Semantic Web debate echoes previous Wittgensteinian debates. He writes:

    In my view, the massive efforts underway to tag, to carefully sort, classify and describe, learning object metadata is misplaced. It is misplaced not because t is wrong or misleading (though that possibility is certainly built in by assumption). It is misplaced because such metadata descriptions can, at best, represent only one point of view of the description and the application of a learning object. We will not be able to approach the usefulness contained in the promise of learning objects – and of the semantic web more generally – until we get past this idea that we can define it (and in passing, all of human knowledge), a priori. We can’t. The very best we can do is establish (through, say, RDF) relations between intended meaning of terms. But at some point, we need to step back and observe how these entities are being used, and to capture that as our definitive metadata.

    Downes has an Ouevre page and apparently writes one erudite article each week. Definitely on my blogroll.

    Kevin Cox writes a web tools newsletter which addresses other instructional technology subjects. His articles emphasize cool relevant hyperlinks than on musing.

  • Students, the Slow Moving Target

    Jack Wilson, CEO of UMass Online, has written several important essays about elearning. In his essay, ?Elearning?Is it Over?? he writes, ?The paradox of technology enhanced education is that technology changes very rapidly and human beings change very slowly. It would seem to make sense for proponents of e-learning to begin with the students. At least that is a relatively slow moving target.? He has also written 10 Ways to Fail with Technology in the Classroom and 10 commandments for elearning .

    In another amazing article, More than Digital Content: Long Live Your Course, Wilson asks the logical question of ?who owns the course?? In this age of online learning, a great deal of the course is tied to the webpages and bulletin boards and web applications on the university?s server. So then, does the university hold the rights to this content? Should a university insist on owning the content as a way to partially recoup the massive expenses related to infrastructure? Or should it let professors do what they want with the web content, letting professors make money off content paid for by the university and made possible by the university?s instructional infrastructure?

    The question is a faulty one, Wilson argues. ?Any faculty member that could be replaced by a videotape, CD, or Web site should be replaced?as soon as possible.? In other words, a class?s value resides not only in the online material, but also in the interactions and activities with the professor. But that position paints us into a logical corner. Why can?t a teacher?s involvement with students be totally web-based? What if a teacher is lousy in class but designs a great online course? The problem with online learning is that it forces teachers to create learning content. Professors are uncomfortable with this. Yes, they can write articles for academic publications, but these articles don?t need to be pedagogical in nature or to address the general community. On the other hand, with an online course, they practically need to write a textbook by themselves, a rather insurmountable task. And it needs to be updated regularly. As any webmaster will tell you, the tools to automate this are not here yet.

    Professors have a hard time understanding the learning needs of students in a web-based class. Yes, there are homework assignments and discussion, but it?s easier to talk to a student in an environment unmediated by technology. Here are two problems with web interactions: Whose turn is it to speak? How do I control the number of students I can talk with at one time? Web interactions still lack the spontaneity of tapping one?s neighbor on the shoulder or doodling on a piece of paper. Probably hybrid classes are the solution: classes with both a live in-class component and a web component. That might be preferable for adult learners. But in a hybrid class, learners will still prefer the sessions in the classroom and probably do the most interesting interactions and discussions there, causing the web component to be used with varying levels of enthusiasm. Just as foreign language classes work better when everybody agrees to stop speaking the primary language, the only way to gain a commitment from students to use the web component is to leave them no other choice. Also, there are economic matters to discuss. The initial costs involved in developing a web course are so high that it makes little sense to just make one or two modules. Making 8 or 9 allows a teacher to realize an economy of scale.

    Unfortunately, most of the problems with elearning are economic. Students are unwilling to pay thousands of dollars for a class where they never see their teacher. Universities are unwilling to spend money on technology that might become outdated in two years. Professor, already overworked, are unwilling to assume the role of content creator unless they are paid more and given more time and assistance to develop courses. But just wait. As technology becomes cheaper, webcams become more popular, web maintenance technologies become cheaper and bandwidth becomes more plentiful, web courses will be cheaper, easier and possibly more fun. Possibly.

  • Reusable Learning Objects

    Here is an article about obesity.

    Here?s a White Paper about Reusable Learning Objects

    It seems like a useful methodology, and one especially geared toward storage via databases, but it makes implicit assumptions about the subject matter. It seems to assume that all learning goals can be ?chunked? into 5-9 learning objects, and that learning goals by themselves are small and discrete. It also assumes that the instructional designer knows the typical usage patterns for a piece of software. That may very well be the case for learning software applications and other procedural tasks. But in programming, for example, each learner may be performing an action on a different computer (and in a different context). Therefore, the specific steps in RLO/RIO may not correspond exactly to the learner?s experience. In other domains (the arts, for example), it just doesn?t work to have learners go through specific learning objectives. A behaviorist approach like RLO/RIO controls the learning process for users and doesn?t allow for discovery or distributed learning. The problem with this learning methodology is that it treats learning as a ?content creation? problem. But learning is often a cognitive problem. A learner can follow the steps in a book about TCP/IP setup without understanding underlying concepts (such as netmasks and gateways). Similarly, a person may understand the basics of networking but be unable to troubleshoot TCP/IP problems in real life. And since the instructional designer may map out only one or two typical uses or installation scenarios, the learner is left trying to figure out what part of the RIO actually apply to him. This methodology places an insuperable burden on instructional creators to explain everything, when in fact the most effective learning strategy may be trial-and-error or consultation with other learners.

    I?m not saying that a good instructional designer couldn?t fit alternate methods into the RLO/RIO approach, but RLO/RIO emphasizes small attainable objectives rather than constructivist or cognitive methods. It might work in situations where a group of instructors are collaborating on the creation of learning modules (such as with a Fortune 500 company), but on a smaller scale its effectiveness seems questionable.