Curious David Redux

Just Another (Extra) Ordinary First Week of Teaching

Up at 5:30 a.m. I admire a beautiful moonrise with Freud, my first morning canine companion. Then I take a glance at my iGoogle web page to monitor my RSS feeds and Google mail. IDEA: I think I'll start aggregating all email from alumni here. IDEA: Maybe I should create a course teaching Google apps. IDEA: Maybe I should apply for a Google grant. IDEA: Maybe I should make time to consummate some of these IDEAS.

I read a Profhacker post that I like. I make the time to commend the author and contribute my own thoughts. I take a quick look at Makeuseof and and learn a little about Site Specific Browsers (in particular Fluid for the Mac) to satisfy my geek needs. I surely wish the authors of this particular blog knew some other adjectives than COOL and AWESOME---but the stuff they play with is, well,  cool and awesome!!!!!!! I add another resource gem (though in need of polishing) to my teaching tool box.

My classes are going reasonably well though I still need better to master students' names and faces. I invited each to email me a brief autobiography, and I've linked these very interesting self-descriptions to digital photos of them. IDEA: It might be interesting next year to have each student make a brief video screencast in which they introduce themselves and thereby help me improve my pronunciation of names.

Some of my Introductory Psychology students are already demonstrating very good thinking in our Friday discussions of Psychological Mythunderstandings. Students in Statistics are already demonstrating increased confidence and competence in the use of SPSS. Students in Psychological Testing (all of whom I know already) by now realize that I am not kidding in my insistence that they USE things I taught them in a prior course. In another week I'll be giving my first exam in each of these three classes.

I had an interesting conversations with two fellow Carroll community members from our Advancement/ Alumni Office this week who came to my office interested in sharing, comparing, and soliciting ideas about alumni engagement. I genuinely enjoy interactions with alumni (some of whom I have never even had as students). Within the past 10 days I've been in contact with 15 different alumni via Facebook, Linked-in, Skype, this blog, email, telephone, and letters. I'm looking for additional ways to constructively connect, communicate, teach, and learn together with them. Send me your ideas.

I've had an unusually large number of students come to my office to see me already this semester. The concept of office hours has surely changed since I first began teaching. In 1977 "office hours" were the primary time expected that a professor would be present and available for visitation, assistance, and advice. Today in 2010 though I am present and available at my appointed times (and enjoy and prefer meeting with students in person) there now is more of an expectation of my 24/7 availability. I'm unconvinced that virtual office hours are a good thing though I do spend an increasing amount of my work time online.

Here's an example of how teaching and learning is never done as I experiment with screencasting software as I continue to try and leapfrog.

Exploring Diigo in the Higher Education Classroom

I am a slow learner---reluctant to innovate my teaching methods for innovation's sake. I've become convinced, however, that it is time for me to cascade into the Carroll classrooms some of the elearning tools I began investigating with my freshman seminar 18 months ago. Last semester I investigated having students respond to some of my blogs. This semester I elected to introduce "social bookmarking tools."

Which social bookmarking tool should I share with them---there are so many and they serve many different functions. Is there value in introducing such a tool to my students? I'm beginning to have some answers. As Carroll's President is fond of saying, "stay tuned."

In the first week of two of my classes, "Introductory Psychology" (which has many freshmen among the 26 students) and "Psychological Testing and Assessment" (which is primarily juniors and graduating seniors among its 18 members) I have introduced students to one of the many "social bookmarking tools" which I have personally explored in the last 18 months, Diigo.

I chose Diigo over Zotero, Icyte and Delicious in part because Diigo is aggressively seeking out users in Education---providing special accounts for students.

I continue to be blessed with bright, hard-working research assistants. Though only a freshman, my present student research assistant quickly mastered how to use the tool and encouraged my introducing it into my classes. We made sure that all computers where we we demonstrate Diigo had a Firefox Browser with the Diigo toolbar installed. I'll write about their experiences (or have them do so here in the near future).

Gotta pursue investigating psychological "mythunderstandings."

Share with me any experiences you have using Diigo or social bookmarking tools.

--CD

Sharpening Pencils, Saws, and Minds

 

School's about to start! From kindergarten on, I've always looked forward to that opening day (now another Opening Day plays a major role in my life:). Newly sharpened pencils; new clothes; new people to meet; new things to learn. I wonderful if pencils will still be used when my grandnephews start school?

The saws are sharpened; I'm reasonably rejuvenated by a 6-week hiatus from teaching. Lots of long walks in the snow---even across the lake. Lots of pleasure reading. Lots of new teaching and learning tools explored.

Tonight I'll give my three syllabi one more proof-reading (hmm interesting typo---that came out "prof reading". Will I regret the fact that I am trying to innovate in all three classes? Time will tell. Too much change too soon can undermine performance, yet failure to innovate dulls the mind.

I'll probably introduce a number of excellent didactic YouTube videos. Unless I can improve upon them, it makes no sense for me to create my own---though I've begun to experiment with their creation. Here, for example is an excellent introduction to a tool I have become convinced is useful, iGoogle.

Generally the first teaching improvement / learning activity I engage in every day is to visit my iGoogle page. I try to keep it relatively uncluttered but I have there RSS feeds for sources I find particularly useful to me:

Mingled feeds from Jane Hart

A Widget for Psychology Headlines Around the World

Makeuse of.com

Readwriteweb

NewYorkTimes.com

Profhacker

I also use this location to monitor my g-mail account. I'm finding that more and more alumni are using it---and for the moment it is free, whatever that means.The time is fast approaching when I'll have to seriously reconsider my investment in paper versions of my journals and other subscriptions. 

Which of Jane Hart's (e)Learning Tools Best Address My Present Teaching Needs?

I've spent quite a bit of time the past few days thinking through how best and how quickly to proceed in bringing into my classroom the right balance of elearning tools. Just now I have finished examining Jane Hart's recent overhauling, updating, and reorganizing of her 2010 Learning Tools Directory. More specifically, I have gone through Jane's category of "instructional tools" identifying which showed promise of immediate use to me. My admittedly idiosyncratic "screening criteria" included the following:

1. Do I already have the software? Alas in my frenzied attempt to know about such tools I have too often acquired a tool and then never deeply explored its utility.
2. Does it have a quizzing/testing component? I want to be able better to give students prompt, reasonably personalized and reasonably detailed feedback.
3. Is the tool free (or, if not, does the cost offset the costs of free software)? I don't have time to spend with buggy or poorly documented software. 
4. Will, in my professional judgment, the tool truly allow me to teach better or in new ways or will it only provide students with a fun experience? Though there is a place for fun in learning, I am interested in more than entertainment.
5. Is the tool hosted? Since I move back and forth between a Windows and a Mac environment (and because my personal machines are often more advanced than those available to employees at work) it is important that something I develop be easily portable and accessible for student use.
6. Will I (and my students) be able to master the tool quickly and use it immediately? I want to avoid frustrating my students with a steep tool-learning curve unless I judge that frustration is a necessary or inevitable component to mastery.

Here then are fifteen "instructional tools" I plan to explore over the next fifteen weeks. No doubt I'll discover that some of them deserve more of my time than others. I'd welcome hearing from any of you who have first-hand experiences with these tools---or if you'd like to join me in trying them out.

1. ClassMarker
2. EasyTestMaker
3. Ecto
4. Equizzer
5. ExamProfessor
6. Funnelbrain
7. IgniteCAST
8. Jeopardy
9. Kubbu
10. Myicourse
11. MyStudiyo
12. Socialmediaclassroom
13. Udutu
14. Yacapaca
15. Zoho Challenge

Puzzled

I'm puzzled. I just opened up today's mail and read with interest a special issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. This issue's special topic deals with  "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence."

The relatively short but lucidly written article by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork thoughtfully and fairly examines the empirical evidence addressing the proposal that instructional methods should be aligned with students' learning style in order to maximize student learning. The authors provide an overview of learning styles doctrines and industies, address the question of how learning styles approaches became embedded in education, propose the kinds of evidence needed to validate interventions based on learning styles, and evaluate the learning styles literature. They conclude that there is a paucity and poverty of strong evidence adequate for applying learning style assessments in school settings.

For visual learners, here is a report with similar conclusions.

And here the same psychological scientist's views on "brain-based" education.

What puzzles me are two things:

1) Why did I receive today January 7, 2010, the Volume 9 Number 3 December 2008 of Psychological Science in the Public Interest?!

2) Why is there such a disconnect between what is taught to teachers and what empirical evidence shows?

Curious. I welcome your thoughts.

Thinking Critically

One of the reasons that I enjoy teaching is that I am encouraged to think. I would argue that one of the missions of higher education is to develop thinking capabilities---and the joy of thinking --- in students. This can be done in a number of ways and it can be overdone. Similarly emphasizing "learning objectives" can be overdone---ironically resulting in the diminishing of the joy of teaching and of learning.

I find the term "critical thinking" over-used with users of the term very often having very different private definitions. I want my students (and me!) to be able to think deeply and to be perspicacious, to understand nuances and to recognize the quality of arguments, to know when it is appropriate to take something at face value or to trust one's intuition and when it is prudent to challenge what seems commonsensical or nonsensical.  And then there is the conundrum of how to measure this quality of thinking!

A book I recently read shows promise for how I might better develop clearer thinking of my students---at least about popularized "findings" in psychology.  In 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, authors Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio and Barry L. Beyerstein suggest that there are 10 major ways in which we are fooled by plausible sounding but specious claims:

• Repetition of the (false) claim across a wide variety of sources
• Our desire for easy, quick answers
• Our selective perception and memory
• Our predisposition to infer causation from correlation
• Our tendency to think that if one event follows another, it has been caused by it
• Exposure to biased samples
• Misuse of mental shortcuts
• Misleading media portrayals
• Exaggerations of kernels of truth
• Terminological confusion

The authors do an admirable example of thoughtful, careful examination of of fifty widely held "myths" in psychology  (e.g. most people use only 10% of their brain power). They spell out where possible the myth's origins, how the idea has been or can be tested, why the myth persists, and how one can better develop ways of reducing one's susceptibility to such faulty thinking. I'm impressed enough by the book that I intend to incorporate it into my Introductory Psychology class---though, as the authors suggest, the book should be required reading for all educators or journalists who attempt to popularize ideas and findings of psychology. The book provides much to think about.