Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Stacie Nevadomski Berdan: No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools

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In “No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools” from the Huffington Post, Stacie Nevadomski Berdan makes a remarkable concise and compelling argument for the importance of foreign language teaching in elementary schools.  She really drives the point home in the following paragraphs.

In the global financial crisis, Americans learned that — for the first time — the so-called developing world surged past the developed world in its share of global productivity; Americans are learning that we can no longer afford to ignore China, Russia, India or Brazil. When today’s kids grow up, they are as likely to be competing for jobs in and with people from Beijing or Brasilia or Bangalore as from Boston or Baton Rouge. In our ever-shrinking world, global experience will continue to move from “nice” to “must-have” for career success.

At stake is nothing less than our ability to compete successfully in the raw global arena, and one of the deciding factors will be American professionals’ ability to speak strategic foreign languages.

However, because studies show that language learning comes more easily to those whose brains are still in the development phase — up until roughly 12 or 13 years of age — when we cut language programs from elementary schools, we are inhibiting bilingualism in future adults. We comfort ourselves with the unrealistic expectation that students will learn in high school or college. But that is unlikely to happen due to the increased difficulty in language learning as we get older. Arguably, bold and innovative new methods of teaching foreign language are needed now more than ever – and instituted in schools as early as kindergarten.

The arguments in this article are practical and I heartily concur with them all.  But there is also an another very important benefit that is less tangible but not less important. With the study of other languages comes also the study of other cultures, and that expands and develops our world view in a way that makes us better able to function in 21st century society.
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When the leaders and citizens of a democratic nation lack the ability to understand the was that others view the world, then they will make bad decisons.  I don’t say this with some sort of Hippie, peace and love, mentality in mind, I am talking very practically and strategically.  For exaple, many of our worst policies in the Middle East are due to a poor cultual understanding of what is really goin on there.

As the world becomes more and more interconnected, it becomes all the more imperative that Americans be ready to encounter the other on their terms.  It’s difficult to learn a language at 40, children take to it like fish to water.  Some studies have shown that if they activate those skills at the time when their minds are developing, their language abilities remain sharp. Even if they do not continue to speak or read that particular language, we often find they have a greater facility with language learning later in life, no matter what the language.

Interesting, no?  I can’t find the studies now and it is late, so I’m not going to look more.  But if anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

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An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.

Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:

“War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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“Curricular Uses of Visual Material: A Research-Driven Process for Improving Institutional Sources of Curricular Support” by Andrea Lisa Nixon, Heather Tompkins, and Paula Lackie. When students work with visual materials in all parts of the curriculum, how do you make sure they get the technical support they need? An extensive research study of faculty and students led to a new coordinated support model. Nixon, Tompkins, and Lackie explain how they got it done.

“The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.

“The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.

At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Quick Takes: The Cost of Journals — and Their Future

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A new report from the National Humanities Alliance finds that the average cost per page of a sample of eight humanities and social sciences journals is $526, almost twice the costs for science and technology journals. The analysis of the eight journals was conducted to help disciplinary associations get a better understanding of the economics of their publishing ventures, at a time of increasing pressure to embrace the open access movement, in which research is available online and free. The humanities alliances report finds that open access would not be a “sustainable option” for the journals studied. At the same time, the report suggests that a more complete study — going well beyond the eight journals — is needed. Such a study might better examine differences among journals in the humanities and social sciences disciplines, the current report says. The new report may be found here. Analysis of it from the American Historical Association may be found here.

via Quick Takes: The Cost of Journals — and Their Future – Inside Higher Ed.

So how’s that for a shocking little piece of information?  What’s even more tragic is that the readership of those journals is often quite small.  Being published is the ultimate goal in academia and when it happens it can represent many months, sometimes even years of work beginning with research, defining and argument, writing, editing, submitting and to journals, bringing it into line with their editorial expectations, and then simply waiting.  And yet once the article comes out, it is met with little reaction or even deafening silence.  Few people read academic journals until they themselves have to write articles.

But there’s the rub.  The system is not suited to the times and it hasn’t been for some time.  For the most part traditional academia and the processes through which it grants diplomas to students and tenure and promotion to faculty is geared toward print and different time when the book and the printed word were the be all and end all.  Not only did you have to understand an idea or an argument and the processes by which one arrived at a conclusion, but you had to have memorized all the supporting evidence.  Knowledge wasn’t a few mouse clicks away, so we had to store massive amounts of it in our heads.

Most importantly, the printed word was immutable.  It was not easy to publish a book and it was not cheap either.  So if something went into print and was made public, it had to be worth it.  The book and writing have been sacred in almost every culture at some point and to some degree.

And so our system has us write papers.  I wrote my first research paper in 8th grade.  We took field trips to the city library to do the research, turned in note cards at steps along the way, then a draft, and then finally a 8-10 page paper.

There were more in high school and college.  I generally got very good grades on them, but no one read them but me and my teachers, or sometimes peers in the more humanities oriented classes where we did peer correction.  Technology now offers lots of strategies to break out of this pattern, but that’s for another day.   Then, of course, there is the Master’s Thesis and the Ph.D. Dissertation.

My job has shielded me for the pressure of “Publish or Perish” academia, but I do have a number of articles floating around out there.  I’m proud of them and they represent a lot of work.  I’ve received responses on them from people I don’t know who found them useful and interesting, but no one has every disagreed with me.

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Depending on how content is made available (free or to subscribers, password protected or open access, etc), the internet make every single connected computer a potential reader for your work.  A journal, only those readers who are subscribed to the journal, who access it at their library, or who have access to a journal database that contains it.  Of course academic journals are not found in your average public library.

The real dirty little little secret is that many academic journals serve little other purpose and to provide scholars with publication vehicles.  Because if they didn’t, there would be no way for scholars to advance.  The really important “journals of record” simply do not have space for all the research at the produced, especially in the digital age.  That is not to say the research published in these other journals is necessarily second rate.  It may well be, third rate even.  But it could also be better.

And that brings me to my final point, which is the utility of the research.  Let’s suppose for a moment that I am a Shakespeare scholar and I have a particularly interesting and provocative way to looking at his work, a startlingly original way that elucidates the text and from which we can extrapolate a whole new school of literary criticism.

Which is really the more desirable approach.  That I go on leave next year and sit in the library writing up my argument in meticulous detail so that by the end of my leave year I have an article submitted to a handful of journals that I will hear back from several months later, or that I harness my excitement and take it public immediately in my blog.  Maybe I begin teaching my students the text using this approach and they engage the texts using lesson plans I share.  Others share theirs too, and we set up a wiki, diigo group, etc.

This is scholarship in action, scholarship the contributes, and scholarship that allows the academic to play the role of public intellectual, so desperately needed in todays bleak media landscape.

But now you will ask me about assessment and evaluation. How do we judge performance in such a system?  How do we evaluate an online resource?  I didn’t say I had answers.  Besides, it’s late in the day and this is is my random thoughts and ideas.  So what do you think?

The Wired Campus Asks, “Can Twitter Turn Students Into Better Writers?”

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As educators interested in how online tools can make students better writers, we are finally getting some systematic studies to back up anecdotal evidence about how the more widely used tools, blogs and Twitter, are impacting writing skills and the evidence so far is positively inconclusive.  That is the gist of an interesting post from Wired Campus today, which takes note of the contradictory conclusions drawn from two studies.

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, turned in a Brainstorm blog post on Saturday, August 29, 2009 arguing that while it is true that young people today write far more than any previous generation in the form of online postings, text messages and the like,

we don’t see any gains in reading comprehension for 17-year-olds on NAEP exams, the SAT, or the ACT.  The last NAEP writing exam showed some improvement at the very lowest end, but no improvement in “proficient” or “advanced.”  Remedial reading and writing course enrollments are heavy, and the Chronicle’s survey of college teachers found only six percent of them claiming that students are “very well prepared” in writing.  And businesses keep spending billions of dollars each year on remedial writing training for employees.

On the other hand, early results of five-year study from Stanford draw an opposite conclusion.  The study examined close to 14,000 pieces of student writing done for courses and beyond.
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Though final data analysis has not been done, early results indicated that in their Internet writings, students took pains to cultivate tone and voice, and to address a particular audience. “The out-of-class writing actually made them more conscious of the things writing teachers want them to think about,” said Paul M. Rogers, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University who is involved in the study.

So there you have it.  These are only two studies.  More have been done and more are being undertaken.  I am sure it will be a while before the debate is settled.

To my mind, however, a correlating, and perhaps even more important question, might be whether or not we are teaching students the right kind of writing.  In other words, is the nature of written discourse being so radically altered that we need to supplant or at least supplement teaching the forms and styles we teach now with newer forms and styles for the digital age?

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity

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Electronics and Multitasking I was listening to NPR on my way to the beach on Friday and I found myself wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly, “La, la, la, la…,” so disturbing was what I was hearing.

It was a segment on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday August 28 that dealt with a study of multitasking.  Apparently people who think they are great at multitasking are not.  Apparently they are not only not good at multitasking, but their cognitive abilities are impaired in other areas as well.  At least that is what Clifford Nass from Stanford University found in the research he described on NPR’s Science Friday.

So the three abilities we looked at were – the first is filtering: the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information. And I had thought, more than my other two colleagues, that that was a particular gift that high multitaskers had. But in fact, multitaskers are suckers for distraction and suckers for the irrelevant, and so the more irrelevant information they see, the more they’re attracted to it.

The second ability is the ability to manage your working memory, keep it neatly organized, be able to – the way I usually think about it is, imagine having very neat filing cabinets where you carefully and quickly place things in the right cabinet, and when you need the information, you immediately know which filing cabinet to go to. They’re actually much worse at that.
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And finally, the biggest surprise to the two other authors of the study, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, the biggest surprise was that they’re even slower and worse at switching from one task to another. You would’ve thought that, at the very least, would be the key gift of multitaskers, but they’re actually worse.

As if that weren’t bad enough there seems to be some evidence that multitasking impairs other types of thought more generally.

I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.

I don’t think of myself as particularly good at multitasking, but I do it a lot.  It seems like a necessity in today’s world.  So are we dumbing ourselves down?

NITLE – Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences

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This is the description for a program I have organized to take place in our multipoint interactive videoconferencing system (Elluminate) on September 10.  I’m quite looking forward to it.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record, a global education is more important than ever, and technology provides is invaluable tools to help provide it, right across the curriculum.  Places were still available when last I checked, so if you are interested, more details and registration information is here.

While an understanding of ones place within a global community is increasingly considered a core value of a liberal arts education, students in the sciences are less likely to participate in study abroad programs and take fewer electives outside their major or related disciplines. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but the problem must be addressed. In this presentation Mark Stewart, chair of the department of psychology, Willamette University, and Stas Stavrianeas, professor of exercise science, Willamette University, will present their strategies for helping students better understand other cultures and increasing the number of students opting to pursue study abroad, strategies that rely heavily on increased ease of access to global media, interactivity of new technology and innovative pedagogical strategies.

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via NITLE – Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences .

Programming peace. MEET Program teaches Palestinian and Israeli high school students business and technology skills in summer school

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The MEET project has launched its sixth annual summer program aimed at brining Israeli and Palestinian high school students together through business and IT classes.

Some 120 students take part in the Middle East Monitoring the use of weighted therapy is important since children should not use the therapy for extended periods of time or buy cialis the other. The way company’s accounts are currently structured means there is a tremendous emphasis on current year earnings. generic cialis price She allows a viagra samples no prescription week for it to be returned signed by both the student and their parents would always clarify the doubts. They decided to thank Righraj for this and generic viagra from india went to India to his address, but found that nobody stays on that address. Education Through Technology program held in Jerusalem. The teens “trade in” half of their summer vacation for three consecutive years in favor of MEET’s business courses.

via Programming peace – Israel Activism, Ynetnews.

Why Online Schools Are Booming

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Here is a provocative paragraph from a Newsweek article on the growth of online education.

Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus–like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a “virtual child.” They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. “The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn,” says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. “I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring.”

Technology and the distance learning it enables opens up so many possibilities for extending the university, and that is incredibly exciting.  The new methodologies and pedagogies it allows, like those listed above, are also reason for educators to rejoice.  I certainly have no doubt that online offerings these days can surpass the classroom experience.

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It isn’t always an either or proposition, either.  The hybrid course is often the site of the most exciting and innovative teaching.  More on that another day.

Students May Not Be as Software-Savvy as They Think

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Here’s an interesting item from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog a couple of days ago.  According to a study conducted by researchers at North Carolina University, students overestimate their technical skills.

Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.

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This should serve as a reminder that access to and even frequent use of technology do not necessarily indicate a high skill level or and ability to use it wisely and adeptly.

When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

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There is something of a backlash against the use of technology in the classroom, and this article,  “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” from The  Chronicle of Higher Education is one example of it.

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Bowen makes good points.  It is an interesting article with a fair amount of food for thought.  For example, it is interesting, though not surprising, that in a study published in the April Issue of British Educational Research, students gave low marks to computer-assisted classroom learning activities.  Nor does it surprise me that,

“The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

I am an advocate of teaching with technology, one might even say an evangelist.  But it is not used effectively and it is for this reason that students find it boring.  A great deal of the technology that is developed for pedagogical purposes is developed for individual learning and is not meant to be brought into the classroom to begin with.  That is not to say it is not appropriate for a course, but it should be integrated for the purposes for which it was intended.
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The second thing to remember is that technology for technology’s sake is never the end, so  technology should never be used for its own sake.  Unless technology is the subject of the course such as it might be in a course on new media or something of that nature, then it is a tool and should attract no more attention than the chalk board.   It should serve an end.

The one thing to always keep in mind is to put pedagogy first.  Before making use of any technology or tool from a DVD player to a complex video simulation, ask yourself what it will teach students and if the technology is the most effective way to do it..  You use a specific tool for a specific purpose, so that is the rule to love by.  One should never teach with blogs just to be teaching with them or with any technology simply for purposes of teaching with that technology, but rather for purposes of teaching, full stop.

Anyway, the expderiment at SMU is an interesting one.  Read the full article to check it out.