That’s a video from Penn State professor Christopher Long (via Cole Camplese). Nothing new, but it efficiently sums up everything there is to know about the use of blogging as a teaching tool.
I’ve read multitudes of blogs for years, but the motivation for doing one myself came out of a Distance Learning course I took several years ago. If nothing else, I’m grateful to have learned that the web is a powerful medium for not only consumption, but also creation.
When I heard a story on NPR last week about the use of “clickers” to engage students in college classrooms, my opinion of the technology swung wildly: when they teased the story, I thought it was idiotic. “Clickers?” Isn’t that what they use to train pets?
When I heard how they were used in the class, I thought it was brilliant. Students, instead of just passively absorbing content, are forced to interact – primarily through answering multiple choice questions. Answers are then graphed out so the instructor can see what percentage of students is understanding the material. At the end of the story, they go into some detail about the more “advanced” clicker that allows for open-ended responses.
Wha? I’m sorry, that last sentence seems kind of odd to me, seeing as I was able to type it on a laptop, which if you enter a college classroom, everyone seems to have. Which makes me wonder why on earth these developers are trying to reinvent the wheel. Cole Camplese had a post on his blog recently about using Twitter in the classroom. Wouldn’t that be so much simpler (and cheaper) to implement? And wouldn’t it allow you to do more than just pick from a predefined set of answers?
Ah yes, I forgot. The point of higher education is to get students to think, but not too hard. They are, after all, preparing us to enter a challenging world where how far we go in life is determined by how well we answer multiple choice questions.
I’ve always been a Pepsi guy, but for some reason, I was compelled this past weekend to really give Coke a chance (it’s actually not quite as harsh if you pour it out of the can). All my brand loyalty waffle reminded me of one of the great stories in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. When Pepsi started their advertising campaign promoting their superiority in blind taste tests, the fizzy wonks at Coke decided they needed to change their product in order to compete, resulting in the gargantuan disaster that was New Coke. This is why it’s currently called Coca-Cola Classic – they had to revert back to the old formula due to public outrage.
What Coke didn’t realize is that nobody drinks their soda under the same conditions as the taste tests were conducted – comparisons of sips from unmarked cups. The problem is nobody drinks sips of two different types of soda in the normal world. Additionally, all the associated emotions that come with your choice of soda are not taken into account. There’s a certain comfort that comes with certain brands – particularly ones as old as Coke.
Cole Camplese had a post a couple of weeks ago that reminded me of this issue of comfort. Students in his class had a negative reaction to the level of organization in the class, possibly because the course materials were placed on a blog instead of an LMS, or the class structure was more open and grounded in constructivism.
For all the talk by edu-theorists and edu-bloggers about open learning and constructivism/connectivism/whateverism, I wonder if the issue of discomfort will slow both learners and educators from moving in these directions. After all, it has taken nearly a decade for the LMS-based system for learning to gain widespread acceptance. God knows why, as I have found the Blackboard interface at USF to be terribly outdated and confusing. About two-thirds of the links lead to nothing, and categories are vague and frequently overlap. Yet when I look back at my graduate education, I’ll think fond thoughts about that useless dark green navigation bar on left hand side.
I’ve always been a Pepsi guy, but for some reason, I was compelled this past weekend to really give Coke a chance (it’s actually not quite as harsh if you pour it out of the can). All my brand loyalty waffle reminded me of one of the great stories in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. When Pepsi started their advertising campaign promoting their superiority in blind taste tests, the fizzy wonks at Coke decided they needed to change their product in order to compete, resulting in the gargantuan disaster that was New Coke. This is why it’s currently called Coca-Cola Classic – they had to revert back to the old formula due to public outrage.