This past week I attended and presented (PPT) at the USU 15th Annual Instructional Technology Conference. Highlights for me were presentations by Sanne Dijkstra (PPT) and Wes Shumar. Dr. Merrill’s presentation (PPT) made me think as usual.
Wes’s Presentation
Wes gave a helpful overview of the main services of the MathForum. While I have visited there periodically it is so big that it is hard to get my mind wrapped around all that is there. Perhaps the most interesting things to me are the Problem of the Week (POW) online mentoring.
One of the challenges they are currently facing is sustainablity. They have mentors who respond to student responses to problems of the week. Because they recieve 300+ responses each week, they need a way to reduce the cost of doing so. Approaches to this that they are considering include: (1) Enlist University Professors and others to respond on a voluntary basis, (2) Start charging for the service. Data from a recent survey they conducted indicates that ~30% of teachers and students even care about the moderating. Another option I discussed with him is to try to automate some of the work. I proposed the following process:
- Analyze past student responses to see what the degree of clustering of response types is.
- If there is sufficient clustering, perhaps the work could be divided into two tasks, first sorting student responses, and then writing a response for each of class of responses.
Anderson and Koedinger’s research on feedback is that diagnosing errors in detail and giving detailed customized remediation based on the type of error is not nearly as important as getting learners back on the right track. Of course a lot of this research comes from studies of immediate feedback which, it doesn’t appear that PoW mentoring is. Something to consider anyway.
He presented briefly on the Math Tools DL. He gave the vision that they hoped to utilize what they have learned from the somewhat naturalistic evolution of the Math Forum to apply to the development of this new resource.
I also discussed with Wes the possibility of analyzing some of the NLVM log files to contribute to a characterization of different types of online communities. Here are some hypotheses I would like to test in regard to that:
- Sessions that last ~30-45 minutes are more likely to be from classrooms then sessions of different lengths.
- Multiple IP addresses from the same domain are likely from a given class.
- If students in a class access many different resources in the NLVM, they are likely “playing”. The teacher’s use of the NLVM is not for the purpose of supporting specific learning outcomes.
- In contrast, students all accessing the same small set of resources, is likely targeted use.
- Repeat usage can be gauged by looking at repeat visits of same domain over time.
My guess is that there is a lot of playing going on. We would like to increase the amount of purposeful use. This will likely increase when objective focused sets of activities are made available. Currently the library is what I like to call mathlet centered as opposed to objective centered. So far, using TADRIOLA I have created a few lessons that are objective centered.
One interesting hypothesis that Wes shared is that being busy is part of what it means to be a teacher. It is part of their identity. It is also a way of being comfortably secure. When a teacher is busy, life is hectic, but at least they can deal with it. When you ask them to do something new, and they respond that they cannot because they are busy, that may be a way of saying, I’m comfortable doing what I’m doing, I don’t want to try something new. That is not to denigrate the fact that teachers are in fact busy. There is lots of data to show that. Wes pointed out that despite their business, never has a teacher turned him down when he asked them if they would spend an hour with him to do an interview. My experience has been similar. In general, teachers have been very gracious to spend time with me.
I talked with Wes about analyzing the qualitative data that I gathered. He indicated that in a similar analysis he conducted a few years ago, he found teacher types that characterized teachers according to their skill and comfortability level using technology. He found that technical skill was highly correlated with pedagogical expertise. I’m guessing that my data doesn’t exactly bear that out.
I told him of my guess that while many of the teachers that I worked with indicated interest, I doubted that many would follow up. I hope that I am wrong. He responded, that with the sample size I had (~80), he expected that there would be only 1 or 2 among them who would take the initiative to lead out in innovating with the technology.
Sanne’s Presentation (PPT)
The main thing I got out of Sanne’s presentation related to problem representation. He talked about how a problem is represented, or how a person represents to themselves has a major effect on how effectively and efficiently they can solve it. This ties in heavily to what we have been doing on the NLVM. Providing visual, dyamic, and interactive representations of problems that make them easier to conceptualize and solve. Good representations obscure details that are not needed to make decisions and accentuate details that are important for solving the problem.
Dr. Merrill’s Presentation
As usual, Dr. Merrill’s presentation was passionate and thought provoking. He pushed for theory building and empirical validation. I am all for that, however, there are questions other than will students learn from this? that are important, such as will teachers use this? will students use this?
Posted on September 3rd, 2003 by joel
Filed under: conferences, instructional design
Leave a Reply