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Theory in educational technology

I have become increasingly frustrated with the literature on educational technology and online learning, in part because so often the connection between theory and practice in applied / action research seems to be entirely absent. I am not quite satisfied with research which claims to be situated within a “framework” rather than to be testing any specific hypothesis deriving from a theory or theoretical perspective. In research on how we use technology to enhance learning, I believe we need to have a plausible model of learning, a plausible model of teaching, and a clear articulation of the desired outcomes from our teaching practice. I would actually go further, and question whether we should be focussing more on teaching than learning, since it is the teaching side of the equation that we engage in, and over which we have some level of control. It does not seem appropriate especially in a university, to answer basic questions about the nature of teaching and learning with motherhood statements about “student-centered learning” and terminology which seems to derive more from political correctness than scholarly investigation.

The choice of whether we focus on teaching or learning alone seems to me to have theoretical implications which should follow through into our practice. For example, with a focus on (social constructivist / student-centred) learning, we are implicitly favouring inductive models through which students build on what they already know and follow their interests and strengths. With a focus on teaching, we are externalising domains of knowledge, setting learning objectives, and defining the things to be learned at the end of a course of study irrespective of the student’s individual knowledge base or interests. We need to be clear about our purpose and intent, because there are strong implications for practice, depending on which position we adopt.

So here are some questions that I believe deserve due consideration. When we engage in educational / instructional design, is it appropriate to consider teaching and learning without having a position on the nature of knowledge representation and epistemology? Is it appropriate to consider the effect of “learning styles” or interface design on learning without a good understanding of cognitive processing, perceptual processing, memory and attention? In taking account of learning styles, are we aiming to build all modes of learning for each individual (work on areas of weakness as well as, or in preference to areas of strength) or are we focussed on relative fairness in terms of assessment (allowing everyone to focus on their areas of strength and hide their weaknesses)?

In designing simulations or replacing practical classes with virtual projects, can you really consider or measure learning outcomes without a fairly comprehensive understanding of the whole process of learning? Which learning outcomes are relevant indicators of good teaching? Which learning outcomes are indicators of inherent student ability / skill? Are short-term learning outcomes or long-term learning outcomes the ones to focus on? Do our educational theories speak to which outcomes are relevant? Does our rhetoric on desired graduate attributes speak to what indicators should be important?

Convenience measures do not make for good science if they do not measure things relevant to a theoretical position. The fact that something has been measured does not substitute for a theory. Quantitative analyses and statistical differences between groups do not by themselves constitute good research if they are not theoretically grounded and do not form critical tests of specific hypotheses. The fact that a data set is compatible with a theoretical position is no great contribution to science if the same data set is compatible with a range of other theoretical positions, and a different data set from the same study would not have allowed rejection of any competing theories.

In thinking about theory in this area, I am repeatedly drawn to the position that educational technology research is not a discipline area by itself, but provides a potential context for data which speak to theoretical questions from core discipline areas such as cognitive science, social psychology and computer science. It is important for us to ensure that any research questions relate back to core discipline areas rather than building an entirely self-referential data set around a single piece of technology or learning design.

Leadership crisis

I don’t know of any research off the top of my head that would relate the changing age profile in our society to failure of leadership and I haven’t really looked very hard, but
here’s my line of thought:

– population demographics are such that we have an ageing population
– political / social leaders are now reaching leadership positions when they are older (cf age of famous political / military leaders in history …)
– because people are living longer (and because of the loss of a reasonable percentage the world war 2 generation of males ?), baby boomers reached leadership positions sooner, with less basis, and occupied them for longer

There is now a mismatch between peak of intellectual / motivational / creative force so that potential energy for leadership is lost and people develop wisdom and / or cynicism before they get an opportunity to practice energetic leadership.

In the emerging model in my head, the peak of focussed, driven intellectual energy maybe around the age of 30 to 35 … when potentially great people know enough to lead, but don’t know enough to have doubts.

Internet users quick to judge. 16/01/2006. ABC News Online

Internet users quick to judge. 16/01/2006. ABC News Online
“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Given that users continue to view the large number of visually unappealing sites out there, maybe this research suggests that visual appeal can be assessed, but is not actually all that important to people accessing a site for information.

Rotating snake

Rotating Snake
This is one of a whole raft of pretty cool visual illusions delivered via flash – seems like it’s time to update my own (very old) illusion applets !!

Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy

NOTES & IDEAS: Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy | Academic Commons
via Stephen Downes

Students taking their first philosophy course often express surprise when encouraged to use “I” in their papers. Unlike academic writing in most other disciplines, philosophical writing frequently and strongly states the “I” because philosophers have to develop and defend their own positions. They cannot weasel out of taking responsibility for their views, and thus the assertion of the “I” means that they are willing to stand or fall with their expressed position.

This is an interesting perspective – I always understood that the third person / passive voice of scientific writing was to indicate that the concept being expressed could stand alone by itself without the need for a personal appeal by me as its proponent. But the mood has drifted such that it has become more like parliamentary privilege – I am sufficiently removed from the concept that I don’t need to identify with it or suffer any discomfort or guilt-by-association if it is flawed.

Sinewave and coordination

Wow – I think I’m finally beginning to understand a bit about sine wave. Sure, I’ve got the basic bit about down-up-down and I’ve understood that sinewave is part of coordinated action so that within a technique, everything ends at the same time, but I hadn’t really considered the role of sinewave in coordinating with other people or coordinating sequences of movement.

When we spar, we are always encouraged to keep moving, to keep bouncing on the balls of our feet, and all good fighters in all forms of fighting keep moving even when they aren’t actually punching or kicking. Maybe it is obvious to everyone else, but I have only just realised that the bouncing is part of sinewave, and the rhythm provides an internal beat for planning and coordinating sequences of movements. More importantly, you can speed up or slow down the beat and still execute the same sequence of movements. When you are watching your opponent, you’re not only watching them with your eyes, but you are entraining the rhythm of your bouncing to the rhythm of their movements (ie you are mirroring their timing so that you know when they will be able to execute a technique). You can then set an appropriate phase lag between your sinewave and theirs so as to time your own techniques for when your opponent is unable to respond.

So when are they unable to respond? If you know by understanding your opponent’s rhythm when they are capable of executing a technique, whether or not they do, you can adjust your sinewave (bouncing) so that your techniques will only show themselves when your opponent is already committed to whatever they were going to execute (they have already selected a ballistic movement to a specific target) or they are not yet ready to attack (they have missed that wave of their own sinewave). You will have so much more time in “planning” because you have already encoded the relative timing information between their actions and yours into your own sinewave or bouncing rhythm.

Adjusting the frequency of your bouncing (your sinewave) to encode your opponent’s movement, and adjusting your own movements to fit into that rhythm also cuts down on planning. A jumping kick is no longer different in its premotor planning to the same technique on the ground – the jump is part of the sinewave, but the wave just goes a bit higher 🙂

So – the bit that started to fall into place was that bouncing (keeping moving) in sparring is not just random moving, and not just keeping a rhythm for yourself, but it is a part of a “conversation” with your opponent to keep the appropriate timing and phase relationship between your movements and theirs, so that you always have the advantage. If you are sparring with someone who understands this conversation, the trick is to be able to change the tempo to keep the advantage.

The reason that skipping is the preferred endurance training for fighters is also an obvious correlate of sinewave. The circular motion (sine wave is a circular function in mathematical terms) of the rope powered by your arms ensures that you have to entrain your arm movements to you leg movements and you have to jump. The cyclical visual cues of the rope are also being entrained so that you can start to associate visual information with motor information. The “conversational” aspect of skipping – the entrainment to the visual cue – can be seen when someone else turns the rope. If you watch kids run in to skip in an already turning skipping rope, they move their arms or bodies up and down for a few cycles to get the rhythm of the motion. There is an easy side and a hard side to run into because on one side, there is room for error (the rope is coming down so you can duck) whereas on the other side, the rope is going up so there is no room for error.

Continuous Partial Attention

We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to ever more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.”

cited in Meanwhile: A tale of snail mail – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune

“Linda Stone, a former Microsoft techie, characterizes ours as an era of “continuous partial attention.” At the extreme end are teenagers instant-messaging while they talk on the cellphone, download music and do homework. But adults too live with all systems go, interrupted and distracted, scanning everything, multi-technological-tasking everywhere.
We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to ever more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.”

These concepts of “continuous partial attention” and of expanding personal bandwidth are good ones to explore in the learning domain – but it might also be instructive to look back at parallels in earlier times – surely the multi-tasking capabilities of a traditional housewife (simultaeously cooking, washing, child-minding, talking to the neighbours etc) is at least at the same level of attentional complexity, as is the cognitive load of driving a carload of passengers, or of playing / coaching many team sports. I wonder whether the initially compelling idea of a problem with increased attentional load from new communications technology is an artefact of the shift in attentional focus required by adults using such technology. Adults are so used to applying continuous partial attention in other domains that they only become aware of attentional load when they have to retrain their attentional habits to different cues.

The notion of “expand(ing) personal bandwidth” is also one that is initially compelling but in the end as Stone asserts, probably illusory. I suspect that personal bandwidth is a limited capacity and that while communications technology may expand the pool of connections available to us in both temporal and spatial domains, it does not expand the communications bandwidth for sustaining meaningful communication. Our communications horizons may be expanded, but our attentional capacity is still limited in focus.

Writing regularly

Yet again, I’m finding it difficult to maintain a regular writing habit because I’m struggling with releasing ideas before they are entirely formed. I suppose this is the obvious tension for traditional academics for whom the publication process has been a rigorous and long-winded affair in which ideas are gradually honed down to being the next step in a logical progression, or if they are too divergent, become embedded in a cocoon of qualifiers to ensure the mainstream has time to accommodate a shift in direction. Traditional published ideas already have a stamp of approval from a subset of academic peers.

Writing regular opinion pieces in a blog is really a bit more like a seminar series of the sort that I remember from 15 – 20 years ago, where discussion was robust and every concept was open to examination by a passing parade of academic colleagues, many of whom were outside of the specific area of research, and some of whom were expert in the areas immediately adjacent to the topic under discussion. Although for the most part, the atmosphere was collegial before and after presentations, during the actual seminar itself, it would be rare to hold back on contesting the contestable.

The difference I see between a seminar and a blog piece is probably timeframe and longevity – a seminar is restricted in time and location, and participants need to be able to react and interact in real time. In contrast, a blog piece might be stream-of-consciousness, but reaction to it might be prepared in meticulous detail giving an unfair balance to the argument. The lack of contextual information on the type or timeframe of a blog article / commentary leaves me feeling more vulnerable and exposed by a blog article than I would in a F2F situation with similarly constructed material.

Then again, the attraction of blogging is the fact that high quality generalist F2F academic interaction seems to be becoming rarer, especially in the cross-disciplinary domain, but I want to ensure that my ideas are still available for peer review in some form. To be honest, I’m not quite sure who my appropriate peer group is in the mix of cross-disciplinary genres that is emerging as my current “voice”.

My other ongoing problem is deciding where to write things. It is increasingly a problem for me that I work as an academic in a faculty academic support area. Although I am employed as an academic and am therefore expected to have expert academic opinions, my academic views are often at odds with the service policies of my faculty / university. I am less and less confident that dissenting views are well-tolerated in corporatised academia and if my academic expert opinion is at odds with current policy, it is more likely that expression of my opinion will be construed as subversive rather than as my academic obligation to share my expertise.

As a result, I have four blog sites – my work blog, my edublogs-hosted blog, my personal blog and my taekwon-do blog, and increasingly I am tempted to write things on my personal blog to ensure that I am not offending anyone (or more accurately, if I am offending anyone, I’m not doing it in their workplace). Interestingly, the content of my taekwon-do blog (now replicated on my personal blog) is probably the most relevant and informative with respect to my expertise in pedagogy, cognitive science and principles of teaching and learning, and most of the stimulating ideas have come from watching a committed, passionate martial artist teach the mental, physical and ethical components of his discipline to students from 5 – 50+ in a way that is accessible to all of them. This is true cross-disciplinary cross fertilisation of ideas.

Almagest

This looks like the sort of tool I’ve been looking for – a content management system with the appropriate granularity for teaching, such that text, images and other multimedia elements are stored in a database, and there is a presentation / editing tool to allow use of elements in the database in a given teaching situation.

It’s been developed at Princeton, there is a Building Blocks integration to Blackboard, and it is Open Source – sounds ideal, although I’ve not examined any of the details yet, and the devil is always in the detail …