Learning Is Earning!

Introducing Edublocks and The Ledger:

Welcome to the year 2026, where learning is earning. Your ledger account tracks everything you’ve ever learned in units called Edublocks. Each Edublock represents one hour of learning in a particular subject. But you can also earn them from individuals or informal groups, like a community center or an app. Anyone can grant Edublocks to anyone else. You can earn Edublocks from a formal institution, like a school or your workplace. The Ledger makes it possible for you to get credit for learning that happens anywhere, even when you’re just doing the things you love. Your profile displays all the Edublocks you’ve earned. Employers can use this information to offer you a job or a gig that matches your skills. We’ll keep track of all of the income your skills generate, and use that data to provide feedback on your courses. When choosing a subject to study in the future, you may wish to choose the subject whose students are earning the most income. You can also use the Ledger to find investors in your education. Since the ledger is already tracking income earned from each Edublock, you can offer investors a percentage of your future income in exchange for free learning hours. Our smart contracts make these agreements easy to manage and administer. The Ledger is built on blockchain, the same technology that powers bitcoin and other digital currencies. That means every Edublock that has ever been earned is a permanent part of the growing public record of our collective learning and working. (source)

If the excerpt above is not nauseating/scary or interesting/exciting enough for you - here's the full video:



Other similar efforts include OTLW and BadgeChain, especially when combined with something like Knewton.

Does Technology Reduce the Cost of Teaching?

Corinne Ruff has a nice article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Does Technology Ever Reduce the Costs of Teaching? and the answer is, as expected, whatever you want it to be to support your agenda.

One thing seems clear, however: using open-source content, open textbooks, and open-source platforms does save real money, especially for the student.

For more on the business side of ed-tech consider The Business of Ed-Tech (2015), Bundling Textbook Costs with Tuition, or this interview with Audrey Watters.

http://www.socialhacks.com/education/the-skinny-on-buying-cheap-textbooks

The Quantified Student

Adam Markowitz and Ryan Craig have proclaimed 2016 as the Year Of The Quantified Student. For context, Markowitz is the Founder and CEO of Portfolium and Craig a Managing Director at University Ventures. Here are two quotes:

Quantified Students will be able to map current skillsets against the requirements of target careers, evaluate the gap, and then select the educational program or path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost effectively.

As Quantified Students declare majors and continue to accrue skills, four years of academic work will find a permanent home in the cloud rather than in the trash. All of the underlying data will be indexed and eventually cashed in by students to prove competencies to skills-hungry employers.

Not surprisingly, Markowitz and Craig propose/promote e-portfolios for that 'permanent' home in the cloud - in some ways a logical extension of Claim Your Domain! and adaptive-learning tools like Knewton.

Of course, why would a Quantified Student spend 4-year on the campus of a small public college as opposed to filling the skill gaps identified by Big Data on the vast international private market of higher education? For a more nuanced discussion, consider From the Quantified Student to the Quantified Self by Audrey Watters.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-05-11

What Do You Think About Online Education?

And - how does that compare to what the/your administration thinks?

For answers, consider the 2014 Survey of Online Learning Grade Level: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2014 or 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education on Wired Campus (the 71 comments are quite interesting!).

Here's the summary - academic leaders (tend to) think that:

1. online education is critical for the success of the institution.
2. hybrid courses are at least as good as f-2-f courses.
3. the majority of their faculty don't think online courses are 'legit'.

Personally I always wondered how you can conduct 'classroom' observations needed for the tenure/promotion process in an online course.

It will be interesting to read the 2015 survey.

Claim Your Domain!

And control your digital identity and digital citizenship!

• Problem: students and faculty lose control of their digital work once they upload it to the commercial LMS or E-Portfolio systems.
• Solution: claim your domain and put yourself in-control of your own digital academic or professional portfolio.
• Example: carstenbraun.us

And the institution can (and should) facilitate that by creating a Domains of One's Own initiative for students, faculty, and staff.

That's the short version of Audrey Watters new book Claim Your Domain - And Own Your Online Presence. This is a good and quick read, but you can also skim the Clif Notes version on her blog at The Web We Need to Give Students.

The End of Public Education?

Forget PLATO (no, not our PLATO), MOOCs, Sal Khan, iTunes U, or SNHU - this may be the end of public education: Knewton (if it works).

"We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile." (Jose Ferreira, CEO Knewton, 13 October 2015/NPR)

Read more about Knewton and the history of automated 'adaptive' learning here: The Algorithmic Future of Education (Audrey Watters, 22 October 2015).

http://hackeducation.com/2015/10/22/robot-tutors/

Better Online Pedagogy

Here are two options to become a better online educator:

1. You could yourself take an online class, perhaps on The Flipped Classroom, Teaching with Twitter, or Learning Online - all you need is a few hundred spare $$$, perhaps using an IPI or SoTL Grant?
2. Or, you could just read a book, for example the new Teaching Online A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice by Erin Dolan. Before you buy, consider this review or swing-by and take a look at my copy.

For a more critical view of online education and education technology in-general consider the essays The Golden Lasso of Education Technology or Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools? by Audrey Watters. Or, read her book The Monsters of Education Technology.

http://paleofuture.com/blog/2011/8/24/the-push-button-school-of-tomorrow-1958.html

Pr. Erica Morin on Cell phones

In-Class Research Activities with Cell Phones

Cell phone use during class time is infuriating. Our students struggle to disconnect from their phones for even 50-75 minutes. (I am guilty, too. I check my iPhone at least 500 times a day.) But cell phones are absolutely forbidden in my class. I have an incredibly strict NO PHONE ZONE policy. My syllabus reads, verbatim, “If I see, hear, or sense a cell phone during class time, the entire class gets a pop quiz immediately.” This policy has proven incredibly effective. Students are terrified of having a pop quiz and loath to incite the ire of all their classmates. Over the entire semester, I maybe give 1-2 quizzes across all my course sections, and I have never given more than one pop quiz to the same class. The lesson is learned the first time.

But I am not immune to arguments on the other side of the spectrum. Rather than enforcing “no phone zones,” some educational experts suggest embracing cell phones as valuable learning tools that put the entire Internet at students’ fingertips.[1] Smart phones have become so pervasive and ubiquitous, it might be easier and more beneficial to integrate such devices into the classroom, instead of fighting the “inevitable.”[2]  Additionally, our students are growing more and more accustomed to (read: dependent upon) using technology, so they are comfortable with that learning platform.[3] Especially at larger institutions, like Texas Tech and Purdue, where I previously taught, mobile devices can be integrated into classroom participation and virtual discussions with programs like Socrative, Polls Everywhere, and HotSpot.[4] For larger classrooms where participation can be challenging, these apps allow students to ask and answer questions, offer feedback, and, generally, get involved, from the palm their hand. These apps are less necessary at Westfield State, perhaps, given our smaller class sizes, but they offer a glimpse at the educational possibilities of mobile devices.

I am not completely sold on the idea of cell phone use in the classroom for a number of reasons, however. First, I think they pose an enormous potential for distraction, even when very closely monitored. It only takes one text message or Tweet or Yak or Facebook notification to completely derail a student’s focus. The temptation to do other things often outweighs the ability of the instructor to maintain productive engagement within the specified activity. Second, I do not like the idea of our students further retreating into their cell phones and virtual worlds. Mobile devices and technology in the classroom should not be a substitute for them making eye contact, opening up their mouths, and speaking to each other. 

I feel like I am already noticing a decline in conversational confidence and interpersonal skills among millennial students.[5] I am inclined to blame this trend, at least in part, on the never-ending ability of our students to interact virtually and anonymously via the Internet and Social Media. I want my students to talk, out loud, to one another, on a daily basis, so technology will never replace verbal discussion for me. Lastly, although smart phones are incredibly common, they are not universal. I do not want to marginalize lower-income and non-traditional students because they do not have or want the latest mobile device. As a result, I am wary of creating an assignment that “requires” a smart phone. In the past, I have brought my own smart phone, tablet, and laptop to the class, and encouraged students with multiple devices to share with their classmates and it has never been an issue. Or, as you will see below, you can ask the groups to designate one “researcher” in order to limit them to one phone per group. (Also, the other implicit hesitation underlying all this is the fact that the Wifi rarely works in my classroom, so actually connecting to the Internet may be a concern.)

With all that said, I am trying. I have created a few activities for my upper-level history courses that include the use of cell phones. Each activity is highly-structured and closely monitored, in order to keep students on track. I have experienced wonderful success with these activities, and I intend to repeat them, with a bit of tinkering, of course. I follow a simple formula. I have a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for my upper-level courses in which I generally give a lecture introducing and explain the content on Tuesday, and then we have a discussion and/or activity on Thursday. For these cell phone activities, students engage in a group discussion based on preassigned readings and then break out into small groups to research a specific topic related to the readings. Students use their smart phones or tablets as personal research tools. I will provide a few examples of how I use this format with several topics and an assessment of the results.

Course: U.S. Environmental History

Topic: National Park creation

This discussion falls chronologically near the Progressive Era and the growth of conservation and preservation ideas with Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. Students read an article[6] explaining the early rationale for national park creation, i.e. American desire to distinguish ourselves from Europe by highlighting our rich natural history and minimizing our short cultural history, as well as promoting natural beauty as a unifying source of national pride in the post-Civil War years. The article focuses on how the parks’ founders and greatest supporters highlighted the beauty and uniqueness of places like Yellowstone and Yosemite when they advocated for protection. We discuss the early national parks and how they correspond to cultural values and perceptions of beauty, including wild open spaces and spectacular natural features.  Then I explain how preservation priorities changed in the 20th century. As scientific knowledge of ecosystems grew, some natural areas were set aside for biological diversity and unique species or features, rather than conventional ideas of natural beauty. Then I break the class (25-40) into groups of 2-4 students. I distribute the name of a national park to each group.  I instruct them to look up the national park on their devices. On an accompanying worksheet, they need to identify the park location, describe the appearance, important natural features, and determine, to the best of their abilities, why it was protected. Some of the National Park examples given to the student groups are the Everglades, Petrified Forest, Guadalupe Mountains, Redwoods, Arches, Theodore Roosevelt, Kenai Fjords, Dry Tortugas, Death Valley, Saguaro, Joshua Tree, Congaree, and several more. While a few of these parks correspond to the original aesthetic, but most were preserved for aspects that were/are not considered traditionally beautiful, but offer unique biological, geological, archaeological, or ecological benefits. After students have researched each of their national parks and reached a conclusion about their reason for protection, we go around the room and share our findings.

Course: U.S. Constitutional History

Topic: The Bill of Rights in Modern Cases

This course covers the formation and evolution of the United States Constitution. This particular activity occurs late in the semester after students have thoroughly covered the historical background of the Bill of Rights and are prepared to discuss current Supreme Court cases related to these rights. Students are divided into partners or groups of three and given a piece of paper with a constitutionally-protected right written on it. (These rights are more specific than simply “freedom of speech.” They are better classified as “elaborated rights.”  For example, it is difficult to say freedom of speech without specifically listing or explaining what that means in terms of more specific rights. Some of the “elaborated rights” protected under freedom of speech are protest speech in opposition to the government,  obscenity and pornography, symbolic speech like flag burning,  and recently,  political speech in the form of campaign donations, to name just a few examples.) So each student group receives an “elaborated right,” then they are assigned to find an example of a recent Supreme Court decision that interpreted this right. The small groups use their phones or other devices to look up cases and complete a worksheet which lists the case name, case events, case decision, and contribution to our understanding of the right. Each pair shares the cases with the class and I create a cumulative list of current cases.

Course: Gender and the Environment

Topic: Hyper-masculinity in Advertisements Displaying Nature

This interdisciplinary course explores male and female interactions and representations related to the natural environment in U.S. history and incorporating global examples. Over the course of the semester, students examine the many, many ways in which nature is infused with gender connotations and/or connected to gendered values and attributes. Very frequently, the environment is feminized, especially in relation to “mother nature,” the language of conquest, and who cares about protecting nature. Conversely, representations of men in/and nature are often hyper-masculinized. Advertising is an especially rich source for examining this dichotomy. Many advertisements featuring men and nature are comically, stereotypically, shamelessly masculine. In this activity, students are split into pairs. They are instructed to find the best example of an advertisement (print or video) that combines nature and a representation of masculinity. Students share links to their findings on a previously-used online forum, like Blackboard Discussion or Google Docs. The results are informative, hilarious, and appalling. (My favorites are Dr. Pepper Ten,[7] Old Spice,[8] and various reality TV shows, like Ax Men, Mudcats, or Man vs. Wild.)

Assessment

I believe this simple formula can be incorporated into a wide range of courses. Basically, the instructor just needs to develop a specific topic of inquiry that is relevant for their curriculum. If students are provided with context, clear instructions, and a final deliverable to ensure accountability, they will be able to use their mobile devices for a productive classroom assignment. At the same time, the instructor must be vigilant. I have no patience for tomfoolery.  The students have a task to complete and I monitor their progress closely.  At the end, each group must share their findings with the class. If I catch any non-assignment activity, the quiz rule still stands (which students are informed of in advance).

In part, I think the success of these activities is because I am so strict with phones for 99% of the class. My students are accustomed to absolutely no cell phones. Ever. For any reason. End of story.

Therefore, when they are allowed to use their phones, it is a fun and exciting activity. They know that I trust them and most want to have this same opportunity or activity again in the future. As a result, engagement is high, noncompliance is almost nonexistent, and outcomes are awesome.

For me, though, the distraction and temptation of cell phones far outweighs the daily classroom value. I will not be adopting a “run what you brung” approach anytime soon.[9] But I do think that mobile devices can be valuable for limited classroom activities in highly structured settings with pre-existing rules.

Assistant Professor Erica Morin, History Department

---

[1] http://www.nea.org/tools/56274.htm

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/do-cell-phones-belong-in-the-classroom/257325/

[3] http://www.emergingedtech.com/2012/05/embracing-the-cell-phone-in-the-classroom-with-text-messaging-assignments/

[4] http://www.teachhub.com/how-use-cell-phones-learning-tools

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-losing-social-skills-2012-3

[6] www.historical-geography.net/volume_35_2007/figueiredo.pdf

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zza3GqEL5B0

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-XRzDt_bvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLTIowBF0kE

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jGzvusnRU8

Using R in the classroom

Thanks to special guest blogger this week, Diane Genereux of the Biology Department, for providing an introduction to the use of R (open source stats computing language) in conjunction with Westfield's new Bioinformatics class! If you'd like to contribute in the future, simply email Nicholas Aieta at naieta@westfield.ma.edu.


Sequences of DNA molecules recovered from various subway stations in New York City reflect intrusion of marine microbes during Hurricane Sandy, and mirror the distribution of various ethnic groups across the City' s boroughs (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405471215000022; Afshinnekoo et al. 2015). Temporal and geographic patterns in the occurrence of Tweets containing words like "flu" and "muscle aches" are at least as successful as survey-based data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in predicting local flu outbreaks (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0019467" Signorini et al.2014). Population-level data on alertness in people of various ages reveal that nighttime use of light-emitting e-readers has severely reduced the duration and quality of sleep for the average American (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1232.long Chang et al. 2014), with possible consequences for the epidemiology of cancer, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. 

What is common among these diverse findings? For one thing, all reflect the capacity of data sets that are new, enormous, and often publicly available to reveal population-level patterns that would have gone undetected just a few years ago. In many cases, these new-found patterns provide unique and actionable insights into factors that can improve or impair health on population scale. Best of all, the sheer volume of the data available ensures that individuals with strong data-analysis skills have the opportunity to uncover such patterns --- even in without funding for data collection.

The advent of Big Data inspired this semester's new Bioinformatics course here in Biology Department.  Each week, we read and discuss a Big Data paper, and then analyze some data of work on a specific set of computational and  graphing skills useful for analyzing such data. 

In developing this semester's course, I was not at all worried about how I'd find relevant, primary-source readings that could be engaging for students. Today, one need only open the newspaper to learn about the latest findings made possible by Big Data. I was, however, very worried about how I'd help students of diverse background in math/statistics/computational biology to develop a common set of skills in data analysis. In the past, I've tried to develop mathematical-biology courses around http://www.r-project.org R -- an open-source, statistical-computing language that is very popular among computational biologists --- with limited success. Learning statistical programming is admittedly challenging, and all the more so for beginning biology students who have not  yet developed a strong background in statistical concepts. 

Once again, Big Data papers suggested a solution. Nearly all of the papers we would be reading in our course report statistical analyses and include graphics made in R. Would it work, I wondered, if I were to write some code to approximate the published analyses, and then ask students to modify the existing code to address a question of their choice? 

To my great surprise (and, admittedly, relief!) the answer often seems to be "yes!". So far this semester, students have modified and amended existing R code to perform linear regression, make box plots, and infer confidence intervals to analyze publicly available data sets on batting averages, rainfall, and recovery time following knee-replacement surgery in males as compared to females. We've discussed false positives and false negatives --- statistical concepts that are often elusive for beginning students -- in the context of the annual football combine, in which NFL recruiters seek to assess players' potential for success as as professional athletes using information on their sprinting speeds and bench-press abilities. Before the end of the semester, we'll spend a class session working on analyses using geography-encoded Tweets.  

One of the nice things about asking students to adapt earlier analyses to address data sets of their own choosing, I think, is that students approach the project with some existing ideas about what could go wrong in the analysis. For example, during our discussion of the football combine, many students mentioned specific football players who had been terrific sprinters in the combine, but were later had only limited success in the NFL. In this sense, the results of the football combine were useful in motivating the statistical concept of false positives, which we then went on to discuss in a more rigorous way. How nice to be able to engage students' existing knowledge and intuition in clarifying what is often a challenging concept. 

I've also been impressed to see that students retain a substantial skepticism in interpreting their results. For example, in their subway-microbes paper, the authors report that the  abundance of Pseudomonas, a bacterial genus, changes markedly from morning to night. The authors interpret this to reflect shifts in the mean ages of subway users across the morning, noon, rush hour, and late-night sampling intervals. Several of the students pointed out that it was not reasonable to interpret the data in this way without knowing a bit more about whether, when, and how subway turnstiles were cleaned over the data-collection interval. In noting this problem, the students identified a critical caveat for nearly all Big Data analyses: unless one has collected a given data set oneself, one simply cannot have complete information about potential pitfalls in analyzing it. I was very happy to see that the students were at once enthusiastic in their analyses, and cautious in their interpretation!

In addition to challenges arising from the potential for over-hasty interpretation of results from Big Data,  some challenges remain in the integration of R as a key tool in our classroom. R, like most programming languages, is exquisitely sensitive to coding syntax, meaning it's easy for a beginning student to become deeply frustrated when a stray or missing comma prevents a graph from being rendered from otherwise perfect code. Many times this semester, though, a student's intuition about a sports-data sets and encouragement from classmates has proven sufficient for him or her to push through such intermittent frustrations. The schedule for  our class --- three hours, once per week--- is also helpful in provide adequate time for students to become immersed in identifying and resolving such programming issues.

Our class meets in the Natural History Museum (Wilson 223) each Thursday from 12:45 to 3:30p. Next week, we'll be discussing data from a population-level survey that revealed major differences in the diversity of gut microbes in Americans as compared to individuals from elsewhere in the world. We'll also be exploring strategies for presenting data using heat maps. Please do join us for an enjoyable -- but cautious --- foray into the world of Big Data!