Mid-year update: Top posts from 2012

As we enter the halfway point of 2012, I thought I’d use this opportunity to identify the 10 most visited posts from the last six months.  Enjoy!

1.  Publish your own eTextbook with iBooks Author

2.  Innovation involves risk taking

3.  BYOD Concerns: Education vs. Prohibition

4.  See the future with Google Glasses

5.  Google Play heralds the tablet era on campus

6.  Working with these students today

7.  Course Management Tools through iTunesU?

8.  Examining “what the pedagogy requires”

9.  Openly Educating and Learning with iTunesU

10. Google’s Education on Air breaks the conference mold

Visualizing Technology Integration

In a post last fall, I discussed the SAMR model, which identifies different levels of classroom technology integration.  In the model, technology integration is viewed along a hierarchy.   For instance, some educational tasks involve simple substitution with instructors integrating technology to replicate something they may have typically done in low-tech ways.  Maybe they replace their traditional chalkboard lectures with Powerpoint slides or stop using their typewriter and move to a word processor.  Higher forms of technology integrations would involve a redefinition of classroom activity, with students collaborating with experts, authoring new content and publishing their work to the world.  In a redefined integrated task, the student’s role evolves from being a consumer of information to being a producer.  Maybe students are blogging about their research or sharing their findings in a wiki.  In a redefined classroom, the student isn’t just a passive receiver of information but an active participant in a worldwide forum.

While the SAMR Model offers a basic framework for discussing technology integration, when I shared the post last fall, I wrote that I had some reservations about using it.  I felt that the model focused too much on tasks and tools and too little on the most important component of what we do:  student learning.  In my online travels recently, I came across the Technology Integration Matrix, which really alleviates some of my reservations with the SAMR model.  Developed by some folks at the University of South Florida, the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) offers a more comprehensive view of technology use.   Rather than four levels of technology use, the TIM identifies five different levels of technology integration.  Rather than just looking at the technology, the TIM also connects these levels to the roles of the teacher and the student in the learning process.  These levels include:

Entry: At the Entry level, the instructor uses technology primarily for content delivery. At the Entry level, instructional activities may include listening to or watching content delivered through technology or working on activities designed to build fluency with basic facts or skills, such as drill-and-practice exercises. In a lesson that includes technology use at the Entry level, the students may not have direct access to the technology. At the Entry, the instructor makes all decisions about how and when to use technology tools as well as which tools will be used.

Adoption:  At the Adoption level, technology tools are used in more conventional ways. Similar to the Entry level, the instructor makes decisions about which technology tool to use and when and how to use it.  Students’ exposure to individual technology tools may be limited to single types of tasks that involve a procedural understanding.

Adaptation:  At the Adaptation level, the instructor incorporates technology tools as an integral part of the lesson. While the instructor makes most of the decisions about technology use, the instructor acts more as a facilitator, helping to guide the students in their independent use of technology tools. Students have a greater familiarity with the use of technology tools and have a more conceptual understanding of the tools than students at the Adoption level. Students are able to work without direct procedural instruction from the teacher and begin to explore different ways of using the technology tools.

Infusion:  At the Infusion level, instructors integrate a range of different technology tools seamlessly into the teaching and learning process. Technology is available in sufficient quantities to meet the needs of all students. Students are able to make informed decisions about when and how to use different tools. The instructional focus is on student learning and not on the technology tools themselves. For this reason, Infusion level work typically occurs after teachers and students have experience with a particular technology tool. The teacher guides students to make decisions about when and how to use technology.

Transformation:  At the Transformation level, students use technology tools flexibly to achieve specific learning outcomes. The students have a conceptual understanding of the tools coupled with extensive practical knowledge about their use. Students apply that understanding and knowledge, and students may extend the use of technology tools. They are encouraged to use technology tools in unconventional ways and are self-directed in combining the use of various tools. The teacher serves as a guide, mentor, and model in the use of technology. At this level, technology tools are often used to facilitate higher order learning activities that would not otherwise have been possible, or would have been difficult to accomplish without the use of technology.

Additionally, the TIM associates these levels of technology integration to different learning environments.  In their book entitled Learning to solve problems with technology: A constructivist perspective, Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra (2003) identify five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed, authentic, and collaborative. The TIM connects the five levels of technology integration with each of these characteristics to form a more complete picture of how instructional technologies are used and how different learning environments foster different levels of student ownership, responsibility, decision making and activity.  Besides discussing technology integration conceptually, the TIM website also offers video examples of what technology integration looks like in K-12 classrooms for different content areas which can help instructors visualize what authentic technology integration looks like in practice.

An educational “clean sweep?”

Two weeks ago, I started cleaning my basement.  For most people, cleaning a basement would involve simply running a vacuum cleaner or maybe a mop.  In my house, the task of cleaning the basement will ultimately conclude with a huge dumpster being removed from my driveway.  I’m actually not someone who typically saves things.  The basement just got away from me.  When my wife and I moved into the house fifteen years ago, we set out to remodel each room of the house.  As we ripped out cabinets, removed walls and disconnected light fixtures, we worried whether we might need the stuff in the future.  Maybe we would need that ceiling fan.  Or the old cabinet drawer.  Or the chunks of paneling.  Rather than throwing all of it away, we decided we would store the remnants in the basement “just in case.”

Now, after fifteen years of remodeling the rest of the house, I’ve decided it was time for a change.  While the stuff in my basement had value at one point, it was now a nuisance and an eyesore.  While I initially wanted to just throw everything away, I decided to employ “Clean Sweep” tactics.  For those unfamiliar with the reality show on TLC, Clean Sweep tackles some of the hardest house cleaning projects and films the process.  In each episode, the hosts help the homeowners clean out their house by making three piles of their belongings.  One pile is for the items the homeowners want to keep, another pile is for the items they want to donate and the last pile is for the items they plan to throw away.  As I made my piles, I realized that I really didn’t want to keep the majority of the things I had once saved.  Faced with the decision of keeping, donating or discarding, most of the items are being thrown away or donated to charity.

As I tackled my basement project, I thought about change in education.  I hear many educational experts talking about how schools need to change, evolve, transform or innovate, but who is recommending any wholesale “clean sweep” akin to my basement project?  While the term “change” implies the adaptation and modification of structures already in place, a “clean sweep” would involve thoughtfully examining all aspects of what we do and deciding what needs to be kept and what needs to be discarded.  Individual instructors, departments or whole institutions could employ this “clean sweep” approach.  For instance, I’m planning to “clean sweep” my syllabi before the fall semester.  Usually before the start of a semester, I’ll tweak an assignment or two, change calendar dates or make subtle variations to readings or projects.  Before the fall semester, however, I plan to do a more comprehensive “clean sweep” and completely redesign my courses.  A few years ago, a colleague took an even more radical approach by throwing away all of his lecture notes, exams and syllabi and starting completely fresh.  That’s a total clean sweep!

Looking broader, a “clean sweep” could also be employed institutionally.  This process would involve examining all of an institution’s structures, organizations and procedures and identifying which need to be discarded, repurposed or retained.  I realize this would be a challenging endeavor but I think most people involved in education would agree that it is needed to some degree at their institution.  By undergoing a “clean sweep,” institutions can begin to identify those elements that still have value in the current educational environment and those that have outlived their usefulness.  To be clear, I’m not advocating reducing positions or discarding low-enrolled majors.  Instead, we need to identify the boxes of structural debris that have accumulated over the years and to begin cleaning out our institutional basements.

Exploring Tradition and Change

Last week, Nigel Thrift, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick in England, wrote a compelling article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  In the article, Thrift presents a radical change in how undergraduate teaching will be done in the future.  Thrift writes:  “most teaching in the early years of an undergraduate degree will gradually cease to be via lectures and will instead take the form of online presentations produced by professionally trained presenters backed up by teams of academics.“   To support these online presentations, students would participate in “peer questioning” activities that would help them build understanding of the material.  Thrift’s vision of the future also includes instructors engaging with students in peer-to-peer social networks and physical learning spaces evolving to include more adaptable, fluid structures that can be easily changed depending on need.

Since Thrift presents a radical departure from today’s undergraduate experience, his article garnered quite a few comments from Chronicle readers.  Some comments commended Thrift’s vision and his willingness to present a possible model for discussion.  Others, however, examined the online presentations that Thrift proposes which began a thread on traditional lecturing and their perceived effectiveness.  As one commenter wrote in defense of traditional lectures, “Odd that lectures have promoted ‘deep learning’ for hundreds of years–have they suddenly stopped working?“  Another commenter posted that s/he “grieves” the change in education and that “we are so busy changing that we rarely pause to acknowledge our feelings about what we have lost.“

These comments brought to mind a video I watched recently.  Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, gave the keynote at the Education Innovation Summit held in Scottsdale in April 2012.  In his keynote, Crow presents the need for “massive change” in education but also outlines some of the potential hurdles to change.  Education, Crow argues, suffers from filiopietism, which is the “excessive veneration for tradition.”  It’s why instructors “grieve” the coming changes in Education or hold onto lessons that they say have worked “for hundreds of years.“

Crow’s position calls to mind a story I heard a few years ago.  A mother was teaching her daughter how to roast a turkey.  In the lesson, the mother removed the drumsticks and wings and repositioned them in the pan.  The daughter asked why she needed to do this.  Did it help the turkey cook faster?  Did it make the turkey tenderer?  “I never really thought about that,” the mother explained “It’s just the way I was taught by your grandmother.  We should ask her.”  The mother calls the grandmother and asks why she dismembered the bird prior to roasting.  The grandmother laughs and explains “The turkey wouldn’t fit in the pan we owned so I had to cut it up to make it fit.”  And so, the family tradition began.

By sharing this story, I don’t mean to suggest that instructors blindly make educational decisions without thought or reason.  The challenge, however, is that many of us who work in higher education are the successful products of the tradition of higher education.  We’ve navigated coursework, lectures, and thesis defenses and been successful.  Yet, we’re the ones that need to bring about the change that is needed for higher education to survive.  To do this, we have to fight the urge to hold onto century old methods and overcome “our veneration of tradition.”  But we need not change just for the sake of change.  We need to strongly examine everything we’re doing and analyze how it supports our larger mission of student learning.