“We’re all students by nature”

Recently, I attended a workshop where the presenter talked about the importance of conducting course and program level assessment. “We need to better assess what students are doing and to what extent they’re doing it,” she explained. “But the students aren’t the only ones we should be assessing. As educators, we need to reflect on our instructional techniques and learn from our work. We’re all students by nature. This should be part of our DNA.”

The idea that “we’re all students by nature” really resonates with me, not only for what it says about us as a profession but also for what it says about our ability as educators to succeed in the future.  More than one report has identified some challenging years ahead for educational institutions.  For instance, Educause recently published its 2012 Horizon report which examines several emerging technologies that will play a role in our educational future.  From tablet computers to learning analytics to gesture-based computing, there are some exciting technologies on the horizon.  What effect will these technologies have on how we teach and how students learn?  It really depends on us. “The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet,” the Horizon report states “is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.”

But revisiting our roles as educators means that we have to assess what we’re doing, embrace our natural tendencies as students and learn.  I know this isn’t a foreign concept to many of my colleagues. I’m blessed to work with so many creative people who are willing to take risks and try out new pedagogical techniques.  Like the many outstanding students I’ve had the pleasure to work with, they are true inspirations.

But the Horizon report also identifies significant obstacles for educators “who are students by nature.” “Institutional barriers,” the authors write,  “present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way…. Much resistance to change is simply comfort with the status quo, but in other cases, such as in promotion and tenure reviews, experimentation with or adoptions of clearly innovative applications… is often seen as outside the role of researcher or scientist.”

While challenges exist in almost an institution, especially institutions of higher education, I see real promise in the making.  People are starting to embrace the scholarship of teaching and learning as a critical aspect of our work.  While the philosophy may be new to some, it’s really just about cultivating a culture where educators and “students by nature” can thrive.

Innovation involves risk taking

Innovation is another buzz word you’ll hear around the water cooler these days.  Everyone is promoting innovative teaching practices or trying to promote innovative solutions to the big problems facing schools, education and society.  Lost in the discussion of innovation, however, is the fact that being innovative requires a great deal of risk taking and possibly some failure.  As a culture, we struggle with the idea of failure which limits our desire to take risks and innovate.  But perspective is everything.  Take Thomas Edison.  Arguably one of the greatest American innovators of the 19th Century, Edison tried almost a thousand times to build the incandescent light bulb before eventually getting it right.  When asked about failing so many times, Edison reportedly replied “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”  It’s all about perspective.

Or look at Michael Wesch.  Wesch is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and has been an advocate for using technology instructionally to engage students actively in classroom content.  Wesch has given TED talks and created several technology-based videos that have gone viral.  For instance, Wesch’s Vision of Students Today which describes the digital lives of collegiate students has been watched over 4 million times.  He’s a world renowned technology leader and educator.

Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured Wesch in an article titled “A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working.”  While Wesch has been advising colleagues to use Twitter and blogs in their teaching, his colleagues have not reported the same level of success as Wesch has had.  “It was chaos,” one of Wesch’s colleagues said after implementing Wesch’s strategies.”It just didn’t work.”

But it’s all about perspective.  Innovation requires risk taking and involves educators learning from their efforts.  Rather than focusing on his colleagues’ failures and dismissing technology outright, Wesch chose to re-examine its use and learn from their mistakes.  Educators need to have a purpose for integrating technology and focus on establishing relationships with students, Wesch now recommends.

Wesch’s story teaches us a lot about teaching, learning and instructional technology.  But it also offers us so much more.  Innovation is about trying new things and promoting positive change. But we don’t always hit the mark.  We learn from our mistakes.

Cultivating Collaboration

Regular readers of the 8 Blog know that I talk about collaboration a lot.  Over the last few years, I’ve written about wikis, Google Docs, Crocodocs, and Stixy (and many other applications) and discussed how different tools can be used to foster collaboration in classroom environments.  But why is collaboration so important?  In their book on 21st Century Skills, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel identify collaboration as a critical skill for individuals to “survive and thrive in a complex and connected world.”  In a recent New York Times article, Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, writes that collaboration is the “inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion.”   The world is becoming a more open place, Summers writes, and businesses are placing a greater value on the ability to work together.

With the world becoming increasingly connected and people working and learning from a distance, collaboration needs to be a curricular focus in our courses and cultivated in our classrooms, schools and institutions. We just can’t expect students to know how to collaborate.  It’s a skill that needs to be developed.  But cultivating collaboration isn’t easy, especially in educational settings.  Like so many concepts, collaboration skills are best learned socially.  Students learn to collaborate by directly communicating and working with their classmates, either physically, face-to-face or virtually through technology.  We as educators must support their collaboration and help them learn from their collaborative experiences.  But is this happening in our schools?  Summers doesn’t seem to think so.  Examining the current state of America’s institutions of learning, Summers writes, “the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system… For most people, school is the last time (students) will be evaluated on individual effort.”

But cultivating collaboration isn’t just a curricular challenge. We as educators must be models of collaboration ourselves.  We can’t just talk the talk.  We must walk the walk.  We must break free of our respective silos and learn to collaborate with one another.  In his book called Collaboration, Morten Hansen identified four barriers to collaboration that institutions may face.  These barrier include:

• The not invented-here barrier:  people are unwilling to reach out to others and reject the ideas from the outisde
• The hoarding barrier:  people are unwilling to provide help or keep information close at hand because they are competing with one another
• The search barrier:  people are not able to find what they are looking for because information is spread across the institution
• The transfer barrier:  people are not able to work with people, especially ones they don’t know well.

I’m sure Hansen’s barriers will resonate with many readers but they can be overcome.  And they need to be overcome.  Not only to be better educational models for our students, but also so we can be more productive, more creative and more innovative.  Collaboration is more than a bridge between two ideas.  It is the catalyst that spawns a multitude of new ideas.  And that needs to be valued, cultivated and celebrated.

Update: Apple changes iBooks Author EULA

A few weeks ago, I discussed the new iBooks Author app and also outlined some of my concerns with the End User Licensing Agreement for the application.  If you recall, some people were interpreting the EULA as Apple claiming some ownership of any content that is authored using the iBooks Author app, whether it is uploaded onto the iBookstore or not.  They compared it to Microsoft claiming some ownership of every document written with MS Word or any presentation created with PowerPoint.

Enough people expressed their concerns that Apple recently modified its EULA to clarify their intentions.  Looking at the revised EULA, authors will retain all of their rights for the content of their work but are not able to sell the specific iBooks files anywhere but through the iBookstore.  To check out the EULA for yourself, visit the App Store Preview.  For an in-depth analysis of the EULA language, check out this post from AppAdvice.

Course Management Tools through iTunesU?

After featuring Apple-related topics in the last two posts on the 8 Blog, many readers may be ready for something different.  Before moving on, however, there is one more important feature of the Apple Education event that I feel needs to be discussed.   Besides the release of the iBooks Author app and the dedicated iTunesU portal, Apple also showcased the course management tools that are now available through iTunesU.  While I’m really excited that iTunesU is giving educators the ability to build online courses for free, I’m a little concerned about the message Apple is sending with their online tools.

Recent studies show that online learning is becoming a prevalent option for collegiate and K-12 students.  For instance, in its recent study on technology use by American collegiate students, Educause reported that over 30% of students have enrolled in at least one online course during the collegiate career.   The National Council of Education Statistics released a report last fall which examined online education in public secondary schools.  With over 2300 school districts across the country participating, the NCES reported that 55% of schools offered some distance learning options for students and over 1.8 million students were enrolled in some sort of online course.  As the tools become easier to use, these numbers will continue to grow.  And that’s where Apple steps in.

With the iTunesU course management tools, an educator has the ability to create entire courses by wrapping posts, assignments and materials around recorded lectures.  While these options are intended to help educators provide “content and context” to their course, the message that Apple is clearly sending is that online learning is an endeavor that students should undergo independently.  None of the course management tools allow students to communicate with one another or directly to educators.  There is also no way for educators to provide feedback to their students or to assess their students’ learning.  Since Apple is not a degree granting institution (at least not yet…), I understand why it may have avoided including these features.  But then again, maybe Apple didn’t feel communication and assessment tools were necessary.  Looking at Apple’s Course Creation Guidelines, they offer several “Best Practices” for course construction.  The list includes displaying content with “short titles for posts and assignments so students see the most important information at a glance.”   The focus is clearly on the presentation and organization of content.  While this is important stuff, online education should be more than this.  As an online educator, I take great pride in interacting with my students and creating online learning communities for students to engage with and learn from their peers.  Learning is social process.  As a company that has tried so hard to build social opportunities into their tools, Apple should know better.