Gave two talks yesterday.
The new ITAG (IT advisory group) meets once a month for lunch and an informal catch up on various matters at 0ur institution. They invited me in to speak about web 2.0 and benefits (And a guy from the web team to talk for 10 minutes about the other side)
It looks like a bit too much to cover in ten mins (8 topics, 1minute and a bit for each??).
One of the issues with presenting stuff about flexible/online learning, is newbies get overwhelmed, and their heads spin. that can turn some folks off. <snip>
Also, provide a list of links covered in your talk. Almost every time I present these intro style sessions for staff, they want all your links.
Better still, just link them to a delicious page with all your links – leading by best practice.
Kylie was right of course. There was a question “Could I provide links”. I will of course. I thought I had headed off this query with a brief description of Delicious.
It was a good session, (9.45 min), and yes, Kylie was right about ‘too much’ – but that’s life. I know what I’d like to do with Blogs (WP MU or roll your own) plus nice simple aggregators. But I still don’t know what to do about wikis.
I feel like the geeks have let me down a bit. Here’s a story:
In 1998 I was conducting some research on lectures. Videoing lectures, principally in Physics (but also maths) doing their thing explaining stuff. Often they would miss out on a vital step – or gloss over it so quickly we would miss it.
Previous research has demonstrated that physics experts categorize physics problems by the principles used to solve them; whereas, many physics novices tend to categorize physics problems by surface-feature similarity. This current study sought to find differences between physics experts and novices on a memory test of physics pictures. research.physics.uiuc.edu/PER/
There were a lot of articles published in the last few years of last century. For example:
“Understanding and teaching problem solving in physics,†J. H. Larkin and F. Reif, Eur. J. Sci. Educ. 1:2,191-203 (1979). From a case study comparing the problem-solving approaches of an expert and a (good) novice problem solver, the authors identify critical elements needed for expert problem solving. An instructional strategy is described for teaching novices to take a more qualitative, global approach.
“Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices,†M. T. H. Chi, P. J. Feltovich and R. Glaser, Cognitive Science 5, 121-152 (1981).
This study identified differences in the ways that experts and novices solve physics problems. It was found that experts categorized problems according to “deep structure,â€while novices tended to categorize according to surface features.
“How novice physics students deal with explanations,†J. S. Touger, R. J. Dufresne, W. J Gerace, P. T. Hardiman, and J. P. Mestre, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 17:2, 255-269 (1995). Introductory physics students were asked to explain open-ended problem situations and to select which of a variety of types of explanations they preferred. Their recognition of appropriate concepts was highly situation dependent. They were frequently unable to interpret explanations given in everyday terms.
ASIDE: Sorry for the lack of links. I will need to see if I can remedy this. Work I was familiar with 10 years ago and resides in my pile of papers has yet to appear on the net in an easily Googled format. I must see if I can track it down.
Suffice to say: novices and experts are different. I videoed people giving nearly adequate descriptions. NEARLY. Vital pieces, thinking tools, attitudes, shortcuts were just not there in the final explanation. Had a lot of fun. I went to Dunedin for some PD at some stage, virgin territory – and even then, going over some of the research – we all still did it. Explain with mental leaps. What is so obvious to an expert is NOT to a novice. Teaching with some of these expert strategies in mind has proved to improved results. (But not a lot of physics lecturers read education research sadly)
Wiki experts gloss over a lot also. 