The aim:

1. explore some physics concepts
2. demonstrate some teaching strategies as alternatives to teacher talk, class unison responses or individual responses
3. have some fun

This was the lesson trajectory:  Icebreakers (Role Play) > Brainstorm > Pair work on Problems, Drawing diagrams, Processes > Discrepant Event fun > Collaborative small group problem > done

1. ICEBREAKER/ROLE PLAY

As an icebreaker, a role play. Get into pairs (this was a hard concept) and one person is an eight year old and you are the teacher. Talk about the concept “What is energy?”

Then, reverse roles and talk about the concept “What is a force?” Success in some ways was noise and interaction.

2. BRAINSTORM (Pairs > Whole class)

Establish some parameters for the session.
The topic: forces. “In your pairs, list all the types of forces you can think of”
I had a set of pages with Chinese translations on them. Demonstrations, a bit of fun. We compiled our list, with as many real items as possible: falling apple (after climbing up a ladder), magnet, friction (a sliding block), push, pull.

Some formal"chalk and talk" - "consolidation"

3. MINI WORKSHEETS 1-4

1. SPEED OF A TOY CAR.
Aim: diagram drawing.  I had a toy car, and we went out into the corridor to measure it’s speed. Passed out two stopwatches.

2. ENERGY GAIN OF THE TOY CAR GOING UP A SLOPE.
Aim: diagram drawing again, and more of a full process of problem solving.

3. FOUR FREE BODY DIAGRAMS.
FREE BODY DIAGRAMS. I made an assumption that they had covered the concept of Free Body Diagrams. Started with the definition of a free body diagram (in Chinese)

Aim: FBD for Apple on a plate, Apple on a spring, Falling apple, Thrown apple

4. FREE BODY DIAGRAM OF A CONICAL PENDULUM.
Putting it together.

4. DISCREPANT EVENTS

We had a little break.

“Can you balance a coke can on it’s edge?”

The answer of course is yes, when you put a little water into it.

The question then is “Why does it do this?”

5. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SHEET

“If I climb up to the fifth step of the ladder and then jump, at what speed will I hit the floor?”

Students had to work in pairs, submitting one answer with full diagram, working, units . .

Working together got much much better.

The end.  Group photo and we finished.

So what?

More on this later.

The Latest Cark Weiman study
Summary: “Science” just published (May 13, 2011) a fascinating article:  Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class, Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew, and Carl Wieman
Carl is a Physics Noble prize winner, now working in science education.  The article is on an experiment they did in physics education.
They waited until week 12 in a traditional lecture course, and then changed 1 week of class sessions. They used what they called “deliberate practice”, meaning: posing good application problems for students, letting them see if they could solve them individually, recording their answers with “clickers”, talking about their answers with 1-2 other students, and getting immediate feedback from the teacher.
With just 3 days of those changes, they had the following impact in the experimental groups:

• attendance went up 20%
• student engagement went up 100%
• student performance on tests was better (2.5X)
• when students were later asked if they liked these changes and thought they would learn more if they were used in the whole course, said in essence: “Of course!”

This has resulted in fascinating discussion in the HETL group on LinkedIn and following a Chronicle article with an appalling and inflammatory title:  “Postdocs Can Be Trained to Be More Effective Than Senior Instructors, Study Finds,”

Two other different coverages in the press:

www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/05/12/interactive-teaching-methods-double-learning-engagement-in-large-undergraduate-physics-class/

www.nzherald.co.nz/the-changing-world/news/article.cfm?c_id=1502962&objectid=10725393

The article itself is three pages, has 12 references and comes with 26 pages of supporting material and detail (only online, not in the printed journal).

I don’t think it is as clear cut as this: the group does have a significant history and has acheived some good things. They have some capacity to learn. They already have done a lot of learning – but it’s like now “How can we build for the future and improve our learning?” and in particular, the reason I was there: “What can some sort of virtual environment do for this?”

I said the electronic tools are only part of the question. It’s the habits of people that count.

So we ask: What do you do before you learn? What structures and disciplines can be put in place to build institutional habits?  Good questions.

Individual knowledge locked up in individuals is not enough. Some sort of shared disciplines are needed to benefit from this.  And how to manage the inward (personal learningO) focus, the outward service and keep the personal and corporate goals in balance.  I’ve tried to put a few of these thoughts in a simple diagram.  Not quite there yet, but here it is:

As well, in the current climate: knowing we can do it is also not enough.  Certification and meeting of standards is also an issue: this learning also needs to be formalised.  Somehow.

The Learning Organisation

From a search: About 473,000 results in Google – another 173,000 spelled with a z.

Senge (www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm) has his definition of a learning organisation:

…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

Characteristics of a Learning organisation: (Senge)

• Systems thinking
• Personal mastery
• Mental models
• Building shared vision
• Team learning

He sees people as agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of they are a part of. These characteristics are ‘concerned with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future’ (Senge 1990, p69)

OK, so we note people AND systems

Another definition:

“an organization that facilitates the learning of all its members and consciously transforms itself and its context”

Referenced in gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/learning-organization-2

REF:  Senge, P.M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline. London: Century Business.  One of the many internet summaries of this work: gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/review-of-the-fifth-discipline/

OK, what does all this practically mean?

After the Systems and the people, pay attention to Tools + Habits

Possibly some sort of online environment in the organisation with around collaboration, communities. Access to the formal qualifications needed. Gentle shepherding, facilitation of the learning communities.  Unfortunately, organisations have an appalling track record with choosing the right tools.

A little quote from blog post from How to start a small business

It seems that whenever there’s a new technology platform, learning organizations get so excited they end up forgetting the basics.    <snip>   As with any other training, you still must identify the purpose of the learning before developing a program so that purpose and design align.

“Our experience shows that when people complain about learning curve, [it's] not a complaint about learning curve, but a complaint about instructional design,” said Alex Heiphetz, CEO of AHG Inc., which specializes in developing tools and simulations for training and education.”  (Emphasis added)

Making the change is hard. Not all of us have seen the tools really working, and then buy into something quickly.  And I agree with the quote from Alex.  Design has a lot to answer for in some products.

Where to now?

I guess my questions after the meeting are: How to clarify the return on investment? Demonstrate the advantages, and clarify a value proposition . . not simple, but definitely doable.

In some respects (from the point of view of management) it’s all about ‘Improving performance’. A need of management, central funding provider pressures and all that.

How then to then help management support the staff and let them, the staff, manage the learning they need to do the job.

I stumbled upon this post from Gardner Campbells blog Gardner Writes: Kathy Sierra Lives.

A little quote:

Can we find a way to work with our legacy brain to get cognition and affect to work together to get us to our goals?

I can’t help pointing out the John Donne connection here. T. S. Eliot wrote this about Donne: “To Donne, a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.” And I think the process will work in reverse.

Kathy notes that we must choose our cognitive/affect triggers carefully so we encourage relevant practice and not irrelevant personal tangents. I agree, though there’s real artistry needed here, as that legacy brain spam filter will skew “relevance” toward very narrow channels if we’re not careful.

Great point here: adopting a more conversational voice triggers the hold-up-my-end-of-the-conversation reflex in our minds. We feel we’re in a real give-and-take, not simply a one-way broadcast.

We are still in a time delimited workshop training session mentality in many respects.  In the dreadful staff development 90 minute sessions, can we find better ways to engage and focus without imposing a pathway, a straitjacket, a lack of mystery and magic and taking the minds in the room off creativity and originality?

A post worth reading.  I’m sure there are more seeds of Kathy’s recent thoughts floating around on the net.  The top of the Google search produced this from just 11 days ago, a nice 6 minutes that obviously includes some of the ideas in the presentation Gardner comments on:

She didn’t call her blog “Creating passionate Users” for nothing.

This list from the ROTP project, used in teaching/teacher evaluation:
“The Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) was developed as an observation instrument to provide a standardized means for detecting the degree to which K-20 classroom instruction in mathematics or science is reformed per the national science and mathematics standards.”

1. The instructional strategies and activities respected students’ prior knowledge and the preconceptions inherent therein.
2. The lesson was designed to engage students as members of a learning community.
3. In this lesson, student exploration receded formal resentation.
4. This lesson encouraged students to seek and value alternative modes of nvestigation or of problem solving.
5. The focus and direction of the lesson was often determined by ideas originating with students.
6. The lesson involved fundamental concepts of the subject.
7. The lesson promoted strongly coherent conceptual understanding.
8. The teacher had a solid grasp of the subject matter content inherent in the lesson.
9. Elements of abstraction (i.e., symbolic representations, theory building) were encouraged when it was important to do so.
10. Connections with other content disciplines and/or real world phenomena were explored and valued.
11. Students used a variety of means (models, drawings, graphs, concrete materials, manipulatives, etc.) to represent phenomena.
12. Students made predictions, estimations and/or hypotheses and devised means for testing them.
13. Students were actively engaged in thought-provoking activity that often involved the critical assessment of procedures.
14. Students were reflective about their learning.
15. Intellectual rigor, constructive criticism, and the challenging of ideas were valued.
16. Students were involved in the communication of their ideas to others using a variety of means and media.
17. The teacher’s questions triggered divergent modes of thinking.
18. There was a high proportion of student talk and a significant amount of it occurred between and among students.
19. Student questions and comments often determined the focus and direction of classroom discourse.
20. There was a climate of respect for what others had to say.
21. Active participation of students was encouraged and valued.
22. Students were encouraged to generate conjectures, alternative solution strategies, and ways of interpreting evidence.
23. In general the teacher was patient with students.
24. The teacher acted as a resource person, working to support and enhance student investigations.
25. The metaphor “teacher as listener” was very characteristic of this classroom.

From Anton Lawson’s site.

The Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) was created by the Evaluation Facilitation Group (EFG) of the Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (ACEPT). It is an observational instrument designed to measure “reformed” teaching.

The initial development of the RTOP is now complete, and the instrument is being widely circulated.  Consequently, there is a need for a manual that contains the more technical information about the RTOP that might be used by scholars and researchers. This document is designed to fill that need. The theoretical constructs that guided the design of the instrument are presented here, as are reliability and validity information. In addition, the results of an exploratory factor analysis of the RTOP are presented.

I am reading this in the light of John Hattie’s work, and the wondering: what is evidence based research when it comes to teaching and learning?

However it has been an interesting process.

The workshops involve developing some skills in using media wiki and going on to produce an OER resource which will be available under a Creative Commons license.  I was only asked to do the workshop at the last moment.

OER: Open educational resources. In brief: Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. From Wikipedia.

Question One: In considering the workshop the first question I had to ask myself was do I know enough about media wiki? “I think so: was the answer.

Question Two: The second question was my attitude and qualification to be involved in anything with open educational resources (OER). For a number of years I have been involved on the periphery and the question was: How genuinely committed am I? until today I didn;t even have an OER tag here,

At the time there was an intense debate going on in the wiki educator Google group. This had to do was issues around collaboration, ownership, central control in terms of standards versus uses determining their own standards etc. It seems that any decision to quote “open things up” always has unintended consequences to close something else down. Example if you require all materials to be created and free and open source tools such as Openoffice, but then means some people who are forced to use Microsoft office have to then learn and become familiar with a new platform. For some this will be a big enough barrier.

I spent a little time reflecting on this question, and decided “Yes, I am committeed”.

Revisiting a few of the key events

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration: www.capetowndeclaration.org/  The first bit says:

Unlocking the promise of open educational resources

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

A few links:

http://www.repository.ac.nz/ A link to a few Moodle sites.  They say: Project Goals and the Challenges of Modular Course Design – The first objective of the NZ OER project is to develop some ‘proof of concept’ courseware that is freely available to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand. Underpinning this objective were our goals to increase the quality of eLearning materials, increase flexibility in their re-use and significantly reduce the duplication of investment in their design, development and production. The license used was the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 therefore the content is actually free to all. Note that this project is planning to develop a New Zealand version of the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This illustrates some of the joys and perils of OER.  Spin offs. local inititives, re-inventing the wheel.  Both a strength and a potential weakness.

http://www.oercommons.org/about: About OER Commons: OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.

The emergence of OER signals the growing trend toward openness for teaching and learning materials.
Our Mission

The mission of OER Commons is to expand educational opportunities by increasing access to high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER), and facilitating the creation, use, and re-use of OER, for instructors, students, and self-learners.

Again supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Wikipeaida: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

But if you visit Merlot, you will find a labyrinthe of ideas and resources, very difficult to find, all sorts of odd useage arrangements and the issues of quality, metadata emerge,

We can mistake a clear view of an objective for “easy to reach”.  Here is a libnk to the wikieducator Google groups thread, which shows the good, the bad and the ugly all in one place, and illustrates that we can work togewther even if we disagree, and that there is (at least ibn my opinion) real hope in the range of OER futures.

Probably won’t ever be. From Leigh:

As I teach and facilitate various online courses this year, a lot of the theories and concepts I subscribe to are getting some hard testing. The biggest challenge I am finding is the expectation for a teacher or instructor while everyone talks about a facilitator. I don’t think someone can be both, primarily because a teacher inherits a significant amount of power and traditional roles that counter act the more neutral and passive presence of a facilitator. This post will be a series of thoughts about this tension, and some ideas on how I can better manage my attempts at online learning community facilitation.

There’s a teacher at the party

I find it is all too easy to assume the role of a teacher if you are an expert in your field, but very difficult to adopt and maintain the role of facilitator to a group studying your field.

There is this fascinating thread in the list supporting the Facilitate Online Communities course

Two extracts:

Bron: this is our test of the group email. can you please tell the group about
your idea of a good time. This is a warm up so everyone can see how this
group email works.

Leigh: can you tell me/us how me telling everyone what I think makes up
a good time is going to help me/us understand how to facilitate online
learning communities better and quickly?

And from Bron’s Blog: [facilitatingonlinecommunities.blogspot.com]

Some questions: Why is this course called facilitate online learning communities and not teach online learning communities? Is teaching and facilitation really interchangeable? Is facilitation simply one of many techniques that a teacher employs in their work? Or is teaching just one of many 3rd party services that a facilitator might call on in their work? Is it possible to be both a teacher and a facilitator within the same group of people? What are the differences in the roles and what are the social dynamics in play when they function?

Follow on thoughts . . .

Sometimes I think it’s nearly impossible for me to think three thoughts in a linear function.  I often wonder if my degree of ‘success’ such as it was in the classroom was largely due to the ability of my students to sort out the stuff they needed from the rambling and shambolic sessions.  But I also gave every class a book.  And I re-wrote the book every year, set up to print from a pile of masters through the night before the first class.

Day one: “Here is the target: test samples, glossaries, quirky and whimiscal readings and problems, data sets, cartoons, advice (Like do some study), poetry and philosophy”  If I droned on or died they could still pick up enough to ‘pass’ (and notice I did not say ‘learn’ – this only happened sometime)

Rogers and facilitation

I have been fascinated by Carl Rogers. Facilitator extrordinaire.  Here is a quote from the wonderful infed site: (Probably better than wikipedia and citizendium in it’s field.)

Freedom to Learn brought together a number of existing papers along with new material – including a fascinating account of ‘My way of facilitating a class’. Significantly, this exploration brings out the significant degree of preparation that Rogers involved himself in (including setting out aims, reading, workshop structure etc.) (Barrett-Lennard 1998: 186).
Carl Rogers was a gifted teacher.

His approach grew from his orientation in one-to-one professional encounters. He saw himself as a facilitator – one who created the environment for engagement. This he might do through making a short (often provocative, input). However, what he was also to emphasize was the attitude of the facilitator. There were ‘ways of being’ with others that foster exploration and encounter – and these are more significant than the methods employed. His paper ‘The interpersonal relationship in the facilitation of learning’ is an important statement of this orientation (included in Hirschenbaum and Henderson’s [1990] collection and in Freedom to Learn).

The danger in this is, of course, of underestimating the contribution of ‘teaching’. There is a role for information transmission. Here Carl Rogers could be charged with misrepresenting, or overlooking, his own considerable abilities as a teacher. His apparent emphasis on facilitation and non-directiveness has to put alongside the guru-like status that he was accorded in teaching encounters. What appears on the page as a question or an invitation to explore something can be experienced as the giving of insight by participants in his classes.

Having someone in your class of guru like status changes things.  In light of the teaching/facilitation dialogue, this is important.  Sometimes reputation, your first sentence or your first post establishes something – a place to dialogue or not.  Etienne Wenger is superb at this: creating a space to move into.  But he is not just a facilitator.  More sometime.

I hear Leigh tomorrow. And Etienne in two weeks.  Cool

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)

On the TALO list from Kylie:

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.