Mishmash of notes and quotes for building the next PBS Idea Lab article…
The story
- MOOCs Miss the Mark: MOOCs don’t work for most learning situations.
- Old Is the New New: Look to F2F classes for what does work.
- Edu Evo: “Discussion Up” courseware.
TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner
Click to access Teaching-as-a-Subversive-Activity.pdf
Prezo excerpts
From TOW Prezo: Matter, SF 2014-03-31:
Multimedia storytelling is a complex, creative craft, not easily conveyed. We designed a learning system that quickly stimulates international learners (including ESL students) to produce quality journalistic work. We did this by applying successful product/software development strategies to education, and by employing a palette of pedagogical approaches. We also discovered an entirely new online learning approach: “from the discussion up” (see lessons below)….
They did fundamental exercises: Go out, interview strangers with this question: “What are you afraid of?”
Then make a story: with a beginning, middle, and end. First week, they take a photo and three sentences from their best interview. A French learner living in Mexico made this one. A news anchor for the Voice of Nigeria made this. English was a second language for some learners, so we got to test that too. The next week, more interviews, same question, but for a radio piece. This was by a university professor in Russia…
We ran three workshops, about six weeks each. We had 60 learners from six continents in 20 timezones. What they made impressed us, and others: Some stories already aired nationally in Australia. One woman used hers to get an internship at KPCC in L.A…..
One thing that worked was Project-Based Learning. These stories the learners made were the core of the class, and became the learner’s portfolio.
And we used their best stories as assignment examples, made by their peers — we know that’s effective. How? From the surveys.
The surveys told us we had holes in our learning materials. Like beginners didn’t get video “b-roll”, and there was no good tutorial, so we commissioned one. Boom: learner videos got better. Our tutorial got picked up by filmmaker blogs; in a week, it had 10,000 views.
One class helps the next, and helps people outside the class. It’s education evolution. Right now, TOW alums are in a new discussion group. Anyone can join; they all help each become better journalists.
We have a successful prototype. It’s time for the product: an online courseware built to train people in complex, creative skills; built from the discussion up — so it all happens in one place, like in a face-to-face class; courseware that produces better stories, and better storytellers, all over the world.
Final Report excerpts
From TOW final report to Knight:
What lessons have you learned, including keys to success?
Product development strategies for education:
- Minimal viable product: In the spirit of prototyping we quickly and inexpensively assembled a learning environment that proved remarkably effective at both providing learners with a functional virtual classroom and giving us a steady stream of valuable information about how best to teach journalism online.
- Real-time data: Most classes survey students only after the class is over. We surveyed learners weekly, while the experience was still fresh. We gathered data about the effectiveness of each assignment and its associated resources. We were able to correct major issues immediately, and made many minor tweaks when it wouldn’t affect the variables we were testing. As learners observed their input affecting our adjustments, the surveys became a back-channel feedback path — a type of self-correcting system.
- Usability testing: The UX firm, Tadpull, did in-depth interviews with TOW learners before and after the workshops. Their findings expanded our understanding of what was/wasn’t working. Their recommendations became our checklists for improving each new iteration. (Tadpull later featured our project in their Client Stories.)
- Human-centric design: An evidence-based focus on user needs revealed those enhancements most easy to implement with the greatest impact. For instance, TOW learners were older, employed, and educated (many were college instructors). Simple things like making assignments due on Monday, after their weekend, greatly increased their on-time submissions.
We also quickly realized that, while our learning system was running well, certain key learning resources did not exist: so we created (or curated) them. We found no good video tutorial on “B-roll” so we commissioned one. As a direct result (we know from the surveys) learner videos improved immediately — and the video has had 10K views in just a few weeks, and appeared in several major video/DSLR sites. Learners also liked our “listicle” collections of quotes and links (e.g., “Interviewers on Interviewing”). Learning resources proved as vital to journalism education as the learning system.
Effective online educational approaches:
- Project-based learning: What mattered most were the pieces the participants produced, how well they learned to tell a story. In education theory this is called Project-Based Learning. Their work assignments were the course, would become their portfolio, and would serve as assignment examples for future TOW learners. Concentrating on the work projects meant we could eliminate some nonessential traditional tasks, such as quizzes and tests.
- Peer-instruction: Learning-to-learn — to do research, to ask your peers — is an essential skill for a journalist, as is answering your peers’ questions. So we let workshop discussions grow organically, without much instructor input. Learners often came up with innovative solutions and surprising perspectives that may not have surfaced had we interfered.
- Near transfer: The more similar two tasks appear to a learner, the greater the knowledge about one transfers to accomplishing the other. We benefited from this “near transfer” concept in picking media examples for assignments. When we used only pieces by media masters, learners were inspired, but overwhelmed and unclear about the connection to the assignment. So we added, as examples, the best pieces from previous workshops. Learners better understood the assignment, and had more of an “I can do that” attitude.
- Education evolution: We believe every class should try to grow the available knowledge on a subject, contributing work, resources, and educational insight that reach beyond the four walls of a classroom (or firewall of a virtual one.) We engineered our workshop so each helps the next, with the best-of work assignments described above, and with exit survey questions like “What would you tell the next TOW learners?” We not only compiled good resource lists, but also created new resources that others are already using. When possible, a course shouldn’t just exist; it should evolve.
- Co-teaching: An online, discussion-based course made it easy to expand the idea of the “guest lecture.” We invited a few journalists/educators to add their comments, whenever they had time, and about whatever they chose. This informal arrangement proved easy on the guest professional and helpful to the learners, who received advice from a Radiolab producer on maternity leave in New York, a communications professor from Arizona, the head of NPR’s Next Generation Radio, and a Transom Story Workshop instructor.
- From the discussion up: Our major educational insight for teaching multimedia, and maybe a host of other subjects, is that the virtual classroom should extend from the discussion up. The discussion shouldn’t be merely another element of a course, another link in the sidebar. It should be where the class happens. Everything else, videos, audio, photos, links, can be embedded in the discussion, the central location where everyone meets — similar to a face-to-face class. Having observed how learning happens, and the systemic needs for allowing learning to happen, we can now take this knowledge and build the first-ever discussion-up courseware.
…Have you collaborated with other organizations?
Global Voices sent us international learners from six continents for the workshops, and blogged about the experience. Community Media Training Organisation sent us Australian learners for the workshops…
Reference: Project Activities (per Grant Agreement)
- Plot Learning Paths: Identify routes people can take from being media consumers to becoming media producers.
- Create Learning Experiences: Experiment with learning transfer processes.
- Break Down Workshops: Break current Story Workshops into elements; construct web analogues; add online enhancements; curate, create, and edit learning materials.
- Optimize Online Elements: Architect a learning curricula (self-guided and instructor-led); assess costs for free sections; find sustainable-but-affordable price-point for instructed courses; establish course graduation criteria; add feedback systems so teachers learn and learners teach.
- <Craft Training Guides: Design and refine How-Tos, augmented with real-world illustrations and inspirations. Assemble a resource library.
- Deploy and Test: Put prototype in real-life learning environment.
- Evaluate Learning Systems: Ask the experts; adhere to web standards; adopt open-source education solutions; incorporate innovative educational testing/design approaches.
- Deploy Transom Online Workshops: Publish two free self-guided learning path topics (i.e., Interviewing and Editing). Conduct two reduced-fee instructor-led online courses with periodic student evaluations. Gather user feedback; collect user metrics.
- Encourage Discussion: Implement tools for students to interact online, upload works-in-progress, chat with each other, or share their work with the entire Transom community.
- Test Early, Test Often: Contract with UserTesting.com; enlist Transom Workshop students as testers; conduct UI/UX focus groups at public media conferences; work with Transom’s many partner organizations, especially youth media groups, to fine-tune course effectiveness.
Misc. Quotes & Snippets
“PBL students take advantage of digital tools to produce high quality, collaborative products. PBL refocuses education on the student, not the curriculum–a shift mandated by the global world, which rewards intangible assets such as drive, passion, creativity, empathy, and resiliency. These cannot be taught out of a textbook, but must be activated through experience.”
–Thom Markham, “Project Based Learning: A Bridge Just Far Enough” (Teacher Librarian, December 2011)
There is no formula, no recipe, no textbook that teaches you to tell a great story. You learn from your mistakes. You figure out how to use the tools, then how to edit and arrange the elements into a polished piece. The TOW gets learners into the habit of asking and answering each other’s questions.
The world-wide-web is our textbook and tutorial. We construct more than instruct, inspire more than inform. And we are very much influenced by Sugata Mitra’s open, unstructured Self-Organized Learning Environments:
By installing Internet-equipped computers in poor Indian villages and then watching how children interacted with them, unmediated, I first glimpsed the power of the cloud. Groups of street children learned to use computers and the Internet by themselves, with little or no knowledge of English and never having seen a computer before. Then they started instinctually teaching one another. In the next five years, through many experiments, I learned just how powerful adults can be when they give small groups of children the tools and the agency to guide their own learning and then get out of the way.
—Sugata Mitra, “We Need Schools… Not Factories”, Huffington Post/TED
It might make you nervous. It might feel awkward. It might be very counter-intuitive — the last thing you’re inclined to do, But if you talk to strangers, it’s a guaranteed way to improve your day and theirs.
—Aaron Henkin (WYPR-Balimore), “Talking to Strangers”
You’ve got to be brave and strong and desperately want to say something, create something. You will make mistakes and embarrass yourself on a continual basis, but this is part of the process and it helps a lot to see mistakes as opportunities to improve.
—Scott Carrier, TOW Mentor Statement
On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.
—“Review of Online Learning Studies”, U.S. Department of Education
You don’t have to be able to code yourself, but you have to know what coding is. You should be able to work in Final Cut Pro. WordPress should be second-nature. I think, in generational terms, being able to produce and consume content at the same time.
—David Carr, “TPM Interview: New York Times Media Columnist David Carr”, Talking Points Memo
If you visualize the process of doing something, the task becomes easier to do. If you close your eyes and think about what you need to do, then, you brain is tricked into thinking that you’ve done it before, and it becomes so much easier to get things done…
- Plan Goals
- Plan Time
- Plan Resources
- Plan Process
- Plan for Distractions
- Plan for Failure
—Vik Nithy, “Why we procrastinate” (video)
“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” –Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)
“It’s the middle of a class period and two hundred students aren’t listening to the instructor. Instead, they’re engaged in over fifty simultaneous conversations with their neighbors. This probably sounds like a disaster to many teachers. But it’s actually a rousing success: the students are discussing a question which challenges them to think about the material and justify their reasoning to their classmates.
Nothing clarifies ideas better than explaining them to others. Peer Instruction actively engages the students in their own learning. Carefully chosen questions (ConcepTests give students the opportunity to discover and correct their misunderstandings of the material, and, in the process, learn the key ideas of physics from one another.”
Eric Mmazur, “Peer Instruction”
“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”
—Gold Hat: Stinking badges – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“They’re guinea pigs and we’re guinea pigs….
Not only were students in the online section performing the equivalent of half a letter grade better than those physically in attendance, but taking the class online also slashed the achievement gap between upper, middle and lower-middle class students in half, from about one letter grade to less than half of a letter grade…
The class will be split into smaller pods monitored by former students, who essentially work as online TAs…
The professors’ research has shown their students benefit from computer-based learning to the point where they don’t even need to be physically present in the classroom.”
–Carl Straumsheim, “Don’t Call It a MOOC” Inside Higher Ed
Learning Strategies: Developing Skills for Independent Learning (1 of 2)
Completing this course efficiently and effectively
When starting an online course, most people neglect planning, opting instead to jump in and begin working. While this might seem efficient (after all, who wants to spend time planning when they could be doing?), it can ultimately be inefficient. In fact, one of the characteristics that distinguishes experts from novices is that experts spend far more time planning their approach to a task and less time actually completing it; while novices do the reverse: rushing through the planning stage and spending far more time overall.In this course, we want to help you work as efficiently and effectively as possible, given what you already know. Some of you have already taken a statistics course, and are already familiar with many of the concepts. You may not need to work through all of the activities in the course; just enough to make sure that you’ve “got it.” For others, this is your first exposure to statistics, and you will want to do more of the activities, since you are learning these concepts for the first time.
Improving your planning skills as you work through the material in the course will help you to become a more strategic and thoughtful learner and will enable you to more effectively plan your approach to assignments, exams and projects in other courses.
Metacognition
This idea of planning your approach to the course before you start is called Metacognition.
- metacognition | metəˌkägˈniSHən |
- noun Psychology awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.
Metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” refers to your awareness of yourself as a learner and your ability to regulate your own learning. It involves five distinct skills:
- Assess the task. Get a handle on what is involved in completing a task (the steps or components required for success) and any constraints (time, resources).
- Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. Evaluate your own skills and knowledge in relation to a task.
- Plan an approach. Take into account your assessment of the task and your evaluation of your own strengths and weaknesses in order to devise an appropriate plan.
- Apply strategies and monitor your performance. Continually monitor your progress as you are working on a task, comparing where you are to the goal you want to achieve.
- Reflect and adjust if needed. Look back on what worked and what didn’t work so that you can adjust your approach next time and, if needed, start the cycle again.
These five skills are applied over and over again in a cycle — within the same course as well as from one course to another.
–Open Learning Initiative (Canrgie Mellon University), Open Learning Initiative: Register for a Course
lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient
–Eric mazur, Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds | Science/AAAS | News
Harvard also educates only about a tenth of a percent of the 18 million or so students enrolled in higher education in any given year. Any sentence that begins”Let”s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”
–Clay Shirky, “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy:
In normal college teaching, a truly dedicated instructor will go through a never-ending process of constant refinement and improvement for their courses, based on two-way interaction and feedback from live students.
–AngryMath “Udacity Statistics 101”
“I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race…
I believe that the child should be stimulated and controlled in his work through the life of the community.
I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life.
I believe that the teacher’s place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.”
–John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed” School Journal vol. 54 (January 1897), pp. 77-80
“Students are now actors in their learning, not observers, and teachers at times become the observer as well as the actor.”
–Debbie Morrison, Online Learning Insights> “Role Reversal of Teacher & Students, A Revealing MOOC Scorecard & New Take on Robo Grading |“Students generally stop watching videos longer than 6 to 9 minutes”
—An early report card on MOOCs – WSJ.com
(Chart: http://online.wsj.com/news/interactive/MOOCchrtPRINT?ref=SB10001424052702303759604579093400834738972 )Humans are bad at predicting the performance of complex systems. Our ability to create large & complex systems fools us into believing that we’re also entitled to understand them. —The Mature Optimization Handbook
Carlos Bueno
http://videos.writethedocs.org/video/64/instrumentation-as-living-documentation-teaching
http://www.slideshare.net/BrianTroutwine1/instrumentation-as-a-living-documentation-teaching-humans-about-complex-systemsIt’s misleading to suppose there’s any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
Marshall McLuhan “Classroom Without Walls”, Explorations Vol. 7, (1957) from “Classroom Without Walls”, Explorations Vol. 7, 1957; reprinted in Explorations in Communication ed. E. Carpenter & M. McLuhan, (Boston: Beacon, 1960); and again in McLuhan: Hot and Cool ed. G. E. Stearn (NY: Dial, 1967). Explorations in communication, an anthology : Carpenter, Edmund Snow : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
“Synchronous learning is biased”
–Maha Bali and Bard Meier, An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning – Hybrid Pedagogy
Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.
–Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller | http://designsciencelab.com/resources/OperatingManual_BF.pdf
What’s Wrong With the Scientific Method? | Science Blogs | WIRED
New forms often augment rather than replace the old: the Internet didn’t replace television, which didn’t replace movie theaters, which didn’t replace theater. In all likelihood, MOOCs will not shutter college classrooms but rather become part of college classes.
Learning journalism is a creative, communication-based, and complex pursuit. So is teaching journalism, particularly multimedia storytelling. To manage Managing complexity requires real-time data, feedback paths…
Learners included a story editor for National Geographic Magazine, a news anchor at the Voice of Nigeria, and journalism professor at the American University in Cairo…
“a few ideas …” (Visions of Students Today), Michael Wesch – Anthropology Program at Kansas State University
Var URLs
1st article: The Shape of Learning: How Media Consumers Become Media Producers | Idea Lab | PBS
Building Online Learning Communities – Tadpull
MOOC Student Survey: Who Enrolls in Online Education? | New Republic
Community-college “now enrolls 45 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, many of them part-time students”
How to Escape the Community-College Trap – Ann Hulbert – The Atlantic (Nearly 7.5 million students will attend public 2-year institutions (source), and 0.5 million will attend private 2-year colleges (source). Some 8.2 million students are expected to attend public 4-year institutions (source), and about 5.6 million will attend private 4-year institutions (source).: nces.ed.gov Fast Facts
Major Players in the MOOC Universe – The Digital Campus 2014 – The Chronicle of Higher Education
scottberkun.com Stop saying innovation: here’s why
Transom: Online Workshop post archives
Don’t Think Outside the Box — Find the Box
–Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer
The box in this case is easy to find, and even box-shaped: It’s the classroom. Before we fly off to planet MOOC, let’s find out what to bring from our face-to-face journalism and communication classes: What works, what doesn’t, and what’s most easily transported online?
Embed possibilities
Mindmap: “The Dao of TOW” (early draft): http://www.mindmeister.com/392061902/the-dao-of-tow
PBS Idea Lab
Brown bg: #E6E3DB
Grey bg: #D2D3CF
Transom » How To Shoot B-Roll
“For all these companies, the key selling point is ‘disruption,’ one of the tech industry’s worst buzzwords…” –Uber Isn’t Worth $17 Billion
The author explains more in his blog: “most disruptors fail to change the status quo, and that the few that succeed often have setbacks along the way”
http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/03/if-it-is-strategic-growth-investment-in.html
StoryMap:
http://goo.gl/8Imfza
Editing for Rhythm and Pacing lecture on Vimeo
Later in Russia, Lev Vygotsky was thinking hard about how people learn:
“Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people… and then inside the child…
Hence, we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function.”
—Lev Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky (1932/1997)
“History of Distance Education”, from StraighterLine
Or smaller…
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