Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb?

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How technology will affect humanity is a topic discussed often in education circles, as well as the supermarket, the subway, at PTA, and almost anywhere people gather. Intelligence Squared U.S. recently sponsored a debate on the statement: Smart Technology Is Making Us Dumb

The debaters who agreed with the statement were Nicholas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: Automation and Us and Andrew Keen, executive director of FutureCast. Debating against were David Weinberger, senior researcher at Harvard  and Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and VP at Intel Corp. All of the debaters are well-known figures in the technology or “anti-technology world.”

Both sides argued so persuasively that according to a poll of the audience afterwards the debate was declared a tie. The team supporting the statement cited studies showing that people who use technology consistently, experience cognitive overload, and the inability to process real learning. They may stop trying to learn and become dependent on technology. In one study, researchers recommended removing technology from airplane cockpits because it prevented pilots from learning how to fly on their own in crisis situations.

The other side cited that technology has eliminated “the gatekeepers,” largely elite white men who limited access to knowledge. They talked about global access in developing countries and how it has helped in the recent earthquake in Nepal and the Ebola outbreak in Africa.  Weinberger said to the opposing team:

…even if you’re right about everything you said, I think it’s undeniable that this is the greatest time in human history to be wanting to know…access to information has never been this free…you don’t have to be at a major university to get access to a wide range. The ability to engage — not just read…not even just to explore, to follow your interests where they go, by following links, and finding people who know things that you don’t…

In many ways, the debaters were talking apples and oranges. Those who argued that tech didn’t make us dumber were talking about it as a tool, something that gives us access to greater communication and information. The side saying it made us dumb were arguing that it doesn’t matter, because after we use it for a while we won’t know what to do with that access.

The reality is we need both lines of thinking because technology is here to stay. The train has left the station, so to speak.  If you don’t get on, you’ll be left behind. But we need to be more than passive passengers. We need to figure out how to control it, how to make it go where we want it to go, and how to stop it if need be.

We can’t let technology’s speed, openness, and potential seduce us into thinking that everything to do with it is good for us. It is our responsibility to continue the debate, to examine technology’s pros and cons, and make sure that our humanity prevails so that generations of the 21st century have a better chance of learning to use rather than be used by technology.

Think Outside the Box

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“Think outside the box” has become a way of asking people to be creative. The idiom is based on a psychological concept, functional fixedness:  Very simply, when we learn about something, the meaning and its first associations get stuck in our memories and prevent us from thinking about it differently. The experiment that proved this included observing whether participants would use an actual box in a new way.

Recently, Nicholas Kristof described great examples of thinking outside the box in his NY Times column on HeroRats: Three-foot long rats are being taught to sniff out mines in minefields resulting in detection that is twenty times faster and safer than humans. And, the same type of rats are being used to diagnose tuberculosis about one hundred times faster than humans.

While I’m amazed at what the rats can do, I’m more amazed that someone actually thought of doing this. Bart Weetjens, founder of Apopo, the non-profit that trains and disperses the rats, got the idea by connecting his experience with rats as pets to what he learned about gerbils used for detecting smells. Incredible, right?

For most of us, functional fixedness would have gotten in the way of creating HeroRats. If you learned that rats are harmful rodents, you probably wouldn’t think that they could be used to do good. Similarly, if you learned that detecting disease is done through lab tests, you wouldn’t think that using a non-technological solution is a better way to recognize it.

While functional fixedness can get in the way of new ideas, fear of risk-taking or just inexperience can keep us from acting on them. So if we want to encourage better ways of doing things, we need strategies to teach students that it’s okay to present something unconventional, to be creative.

In Finding a Place for Creative Assignments, Maryellen Weiner gives examples of three strategies in higher education courses: learner-centering the course; requiring a poem describing what students want to get out of a course; and having students present their reflections on the process of learning in the class.

I would like to add another strategy: freestyling. Freestyling is associated with rappers who build rhymes off of random words from the audience or in competition with each other. This is all done in real time; it’s instant free association and creativity. And it’s fun!

In class, the students are the audience. Suppose each student is asked to write a random word or phrase that seems to have nothing to do with the subject of the class on a piece of paper. The suggestions are put into a receptacle. Then groups or individuals each pick one out. They are given a specific amount of time to prepare a brief presentation (not in rhyme) connecting the chosen words to a general class study topic such as the Depression in US History or depression in Psychology or the Renaissance in Art History.

My hypothesis: This type of exchange will grease students’ inner wheels of creativity and lead to a lively, productive discussion. If you try it, let me know how it works out.

TSL℠: Do You Speak It?

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I’ve specialized in applying learning principles to print content in higher education for over twenty-five years. Of late, the major part of my focus has been working with technical people to transition from print texts to digital.

I’ve participated in conventions, webinars, courses, meetups, and anything that will get me quickly up to speed in the digital world. I couldn’t have started this blog without a class I took from Molly Ford at General Assembly. (Thank you, Molly.)  All of this re-education has contributed to my continuing success.

My most recent learning adventure involved signing up for the edX MOOC, Design and Development of Games taught by Eric Klopfer, MIT. I got through the first two weeks, overcoming significant challenges including learning Gameblox so I could create a simple game in which a sprite knocked out coins. I felt empowered.

Then I hit Week 3. After five hours of watching videos, reading assigned materials, and getting a review of narrative video games from Jordan, my daughter’s fiancé, my head was exploding. Still, I felt confident that in the morning I would be able to do the assignment: analyze a video game.

Only I couldn’t. Even after reviewing, Mitgutsch and Alvarado’s Serious Games Design Assessment Framework, a very much needed construct. When I tried to apply it to a game, my mind went blank. Why? Very simply, I was too new to the genre. I needed to spend a lot more time playing and experiencing games before I could analyze them.

Somehow this realization started me thinking about my parents who came to America after surviving the Holocaust.  I remembered their accented speech and that sometimes I had to translate official letters and documents for them. No matter how much they assimilated they would always be immigrants, non-native speakers.

Then it hit me, now I am an immigrant, an immigrant in technology land and like any immigrant, I have to learn and keep learning a new language, TSL℠(Technology As A Second Language℠). Does that make me a second-class citizen or in this case, a second-class digital educator? I remember a story Anna Frajlich, a Polish immigrant and poet, told me about an early ESL course she took:

Anna’s assignment was to write about a story she had read. She chose to discuss Franz Kafka’s The Trial in which the main character is referred to as Joseph K. or K. When she got her essay back, her ESL teacher had commented that her English was improving, but “in America, we write out last names.”

The ESL teacher’s ignorance is a reminder that even if something does not immediately make sense in the digital world, it can still make sense and add value. If we accept that learning from each other across cultures is positive, then learning across education generations is a no-brainer. Native speakers and non-native speakers dialoguing and collaborating can only strengthen the digital education landscape.

What Color is Math?

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For a long time, the battle cry among students was Relevance! to me, to my future. I taught algebra and geometry in a hospital setting to a group of emotionally disturbed high school students whose diagnoses were very serious: schizophrenia, severe depression, acute anorexia. Math was the last thing they wanted to study. How could I make it relevant?

First, I cleared a bulletin board and put a heading on it: Math in the News. My students laughed. I offered extra credit every time they brought in an article. After a few weeks, the board was filled and we had to start taking articles down to make room for more. The articles were mostly about mathematicians, theories, and curriculum. No rock star statisticians then. Eventually the students stopped laughing and started seriously discussing the articles.

Secondly, I appealed to them emotionally by explaining that unlike literature and history which are subject to interpretation, math is a discipline of certainty.  Figuring out the correct and only mathematical solution can give you psychological relief from other anxieties (the mental anguish that brought them to the psychiatric unit in the first place). According to psychologists, even small positive emotions associated with “I got it” situations can help de-stress.

Now we don’t need to defend math. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) has become an education war cry, an area that receives millions of dollars for creative learning and assessment. Now we talk about teaching 21st century skills so students can get jobs. Relevance is a priority. Students don’t even have to raise the issue; educators, business leaders, and politicians are doing it for them.  Liberal arts is being pushed out of the curriculum.

You may say, no, no, it’s now STEAM with the “A” standing for the arts. But subject areas such as history, sociology, psychology, and entrepreneurship are not the arts. Fareed Zakariah’s recent article, “Why America’s Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous,” in the Washington Post, makes a great argument for the value of a liberal arts education featuring quotes from leaders in the tech world.

So what would I say now to my students if I were teaching a liberal arts subject? First, I would ask them to find articles about liberal arts, to post on a class Tumblr, track reblogs and invite comments from fellow students.

Secondly, what about the interpretive aspects of the humanities and social sciences? Certainty can be confining at times. Living is not about absolutes. It’s messy and we need to be able to understand and communicate all issues. What would life be like without the ability to dream and explore beyond science, beyond reason? What color is math?

The difference between the sciences and liberal arts is not an either/or situation. It’s an age-old tug-of-war that resonates in all of us. It’s what attracts millions to Star Trek’s very human(ities) Captain Kirk and the logical Mr. Spock. The success of their adventures confirms for us that together they are stronger than each alone. As technology draws us into global complexities, we also need the liberal arts to understand and solve the problems that arise. We need Kirk-Spock solutions.

Learning Objectives in Higher Education

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Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.     Albert Einstein

Learning is a cognitive activity. According to the Psychology Dictionary, cognition encompasses “the mental processes in gaining knowledge and comprehension.”

In the 1950’s, the University of Chicago’s Benjamin Bloom invented a cognitive taxonomy which was embraced by American educators. Revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, the taxonomy became more dynamic, reflecting the interactivity of contemporary education contexts. The list has six categories. It moves from the simplest form of cognition, knowledge/remembering, to the most complex, synthesis/evaluation/creating.*

For educators, Bloom provided a scientific way to categorize learning. If educators could connect Bloom’s taxonomy to teaching and learning, they would have a much more sophisticated way of measuring instructional and student accomplishment.

At the same time that Bloom was creating his taxonomy, the idea of writing formal learning objectives in education was gaining traction. Bernard Bull does a great job blogging on the history of learning objectives   Learning objectives are statements that describe an act that can be measured. A learning objective always includes a verb and a specific goal to be achieved, showing learning through performance. Typical objectives assume “the student will be able to”:

  • Solve one-variable equations.
  • Describe the importance of audience in public speaking.
  • Compare the strategies of Lee and Grant during the Civil War.

K-12 uses cognitive categories and learning objectives to frame teaching, student content, and test questions. The core of the Common Core involves cognitive taxonomy and learning outcomes.

Learning objectives and their measurement are very concrete. They focus on cognitive growth in the present. So there is a contradiction when calls for accountability and job training require higher education institutions to develop learning objectives.

Colleges have traditionally provided students with a broad education meant to resonate in the future. And, they have set as their goals helping students become better people, responsible citizens in one way or another. The recent news about university responsibility in judging behaviors such as rapes on campus is rooted in this type of higher education mission.

We expect college graduates to be prepared for dealing with life outside their majors.We need to preserve the cultivation of this type of learning in higher education. Learning objectives may be reasonable and helpful in some curricula, but they are not the answer to creating a higher education environment that helps students succeed in life as well as work. We cannot allow learning objectives advocates to make learning all about what you can assess, what you can “see” now.

We need to resist the push in higher education to make the learning that can easily be measured the heart of 21st century education. We need to find ways to emphasize and reward learning that “can’t be counted” as much as that which “can be counted.”

*

Bloom’s Original/Revised Description
Knowledge/Remembering Recall facts and basic concepts.
Comprehension/Understanding Connect concepts through interpretation and organization.
Application/Applying Solve problems using acquired knowledge.
Analysis/Analyzing Use evidence, knowledge and data to draw conclusions, infer, and conclude.
Synthesis/Evaluating Create a plan or product based on elaborated ideas/Present opinions based on criteria.
Evaluation/Creating Assess based on criteria/Present new ideas or solutions by innovative organization of evidence