From DSC:
My dad sent me this in an email — I’ll include it here as a graphic to insure that I get the layout correct:
Another excerpt from the email:
If you can raed this, you have a sgtrane mnid, too.
Can you raed this? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
From DSC:
What amazed me about this was in the meta cognitive processes of my mind I sensed my mind struggling to make sense of the first couple words…but then, as I moved forward, my mind went back and filled in the gaps and moved forward with understanding what the words were saying. Then it occurred to me how amazing the human mind is — glory to God! Humans can pick up patterns much quicker than computers and algorithms. Not that algorithms can’t be tweaked over time, but humans are key in getting them headed in the right direction in the first place!
P.S. I also saw this type of thing at Jimmy Johns; but that’s even one step further outside the academic realm than even an email from someone’s dad! But thanks Dad if you are reading this! I found it to be an amazing exercise. 🙂
Mayer & Clark – 10 brilliant design rules for e-learning — from Donald Clark
Excerpt:
Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark are among the foremost researchers in the empirical testing of media and media mix hypotheses in online learning. Their e-Learning and the Science of Instruction (2003) covers seven design principles; multimedia, contiguity, modality, redundancy, coherence, personalisation, and practice opportunities. Clear explanations are given about the risks of ignoring these principles – with support from worked examples and case study challenges. It should be a compulsory text for online learning designers.
From DSC:
The other day, I mentioned how important it will be for institutions of higher education to increase the priority of experimentation. But, for a variety of reasons, I believe this is true for the K-12 world as well. Especially with the kindergarten/early elementary classroom in mind, I created the graphic below. Clicking on it will give you another example of the kind of experimentation that I’m talking about — whether that be in K-12 or in higher ed.
From DSC:
I’m trying to address the students that are more easily distracted and, due to how their minds process information, have a harder time focusing on the task at hand. In fact, at times, all of the external stimuli can be overwhelming. How can we provide a learning environment that’s more under the students’ control? i.e. How can we provide “volume knobs” on their auditory and visual channels?
Along these lines, I’m told that some theaters have sensory-friendly film showings — i.e. with different settings for the lights and sound than is typically offered.
Also see — with thanks going out to Ori Inbar (@comogard) for these:
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A relevant addendum on 1/10/12:
Driven to distraction: How to help wired students learn to focus — from eschoolnews.com by Larry Rosen
Excerpt:
A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report surveyed 2,462 middle and high school Advanced Placement and national writing project teachers and concluded that: “Overwhelming majorities agree with the assertions that today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans, and today’s students are too ‘plugged in’ and need more time away from their digital technologies.”
Two-thirds of the respondents agree with the notion that today’s digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically.
Mind you, we are talking about teachers who typically teach the best and brightest students and not those who we would generally think of as highly distractible.
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From DSC:
If I’m an educator or a trainer and I can’t get through the gate (i.e. get someone’s attention), I have zero chance of getting a piece of information into someone’s short-term memory/working memory — and then ultimately into their long-term memory.
Also, from my own experience…
Especially in regards to information in a textual format, I know that I’ve grown increasingly impatient when someone doesn’t get to the point. When drinking (information) from the firehose, I seem to be almost forced into this type of situation/perspective.
“Mom! Check out what I did at school today!”
If you’re a parent, don’t you love to hear the excitement in your son’s or daughter’s voice when they bring home something from school that really peaked their interest? Their passions?
I woke up last night with several ideas and thoughts on how technology could help students become — and stay — engaged, while passing over more control and choice to the students in order for them to pursue their own interests and passions. The idea would enable students to efficiently gain some exposure to a variety of things to see if those things were interesting to them — perhaps opening a way for a future internship or, eventually, a career.
The device I pictured in my mind was the sort of device that I saw a while back out at Double Robotics and/or at Suitable Technologies:
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The thoughts centered on implementing a growing network of such remote-controlled, mobile, videoconferencing-based sorts of devices, that were hooked up to voice translation engines. Students could control such devices to pursue things that they wanted to know more about, such as:
For accountability — as well as for setting aside intentional time to process the information — students would update their own blogs about what they experienced, heard, and saw. They would need to include at least one image, along with the text they write about their experience. Or perhaps a brief/edited piece of digital video or audio of some of the statements that they heard that really resonated with them, or that they had further questions on. The default setting on such postings would be to be kept private, but if the teacher and the student felt that a posting could/should be made public, a quick setting could be checked to publish it out there for others to see/experience.
Real world. Engaging. Passing over more choice and control to the students so that they can pursue what they are passionate about.
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Also see:
From DSC:
I’m also reminded of what I’d like to see in a digital textbook — a series of “layers” that people — with various roles and perspectives on the content — could use to comment on and annotate an article:
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Students think they can multitask. Here’s proof they can’t. — from Faculty Focus by Maryellen Weimer
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Excerpt:
With easy access to all sorts of technology, students multitask. So do lots of us for that matter. But students are way too convinced that multitasking is a great way to work. They think they can do two or three tasks simultaneously and not compromise the quality of what they produce. Research says that about 5% of us multitask effectively. Proof of the negative effects of multitasking in learning environments is now coming from a variety of studies.
The question is, how do we get students to stop? We can tell them they shouldn’t. We can include policies that aim to prevent it and devote time and energy trying to implement them. I wonder if it isn’t smarter to confront students with the facts. Not admonitions, but concrete evidence that multitasking compromises their efforts to learn. The specifics are persuasive and here are some examples to share with students.
From DSC:
If you can’t beat ’em, join em! 🙂 I vote for having students use such devices in achieving the same learning outcomes/objectives that you normally would like the students to cover. That is, to integrate the technologies that they are so engaged with — if possible. But I like Maryellen’s thought about just confronting them with the facts — that if they choose to “multitask,” they will significantly reduce their ROI that they’re making in their education.
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Example article:
Principles of Instruction — from American Educator by Barak Rosenshine
Research-based strategies that all teachers should know
Excerpt:
The following is a list of some of the instructional principles that have come from these three sources. These ideas will be described and discussed in this article:
Excerpt:
How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such gut knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on? Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.
Cognition & the intrinsic user experience — from UX Magazine by Jordan Julien
Excerpt:
Over the past few years there’s been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone’s just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.
Cognition is about knowledge and understanding, so there’s a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. I’ll focus on two principles that, once understood, will elevate a UX practitioner’s designs to a whole new level.
Excerpt
From DSC:
As Brian Crosby points out in the title of his blog — “Learning is Messy.”
There is no silver bullet in the world of education that can be used to effectively teach everyone. In fact, if you were to get 100 instructional designers/teachers/professors/instructors/trainers in the same room, you will not be able to find anything close to a strong agreement on what constitutes the best and most effective learning theory as well as the practical implementations of applying that learning theory (even if we were to be talking about the same age range of students). In my Master’s work, I was looking for that silver bullet…but I never found one.
It is very difficult for a professor or a teacher to deliver truly personalized/customized learning to each student in their classroom:
In my estimation, the way we have things setup throughout most K-16 education, this is an impossible task. When there’s typically only 1-2 teachers trying to teach to 20-30 students at a time, how can this type of personalized instruction occur?
However, I believe digital learning and its surrounding tools/ecosystems hold enormous promise for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities. Such technologies will be able to learn where a student is at, how to motivate them, how fast to push them, and how they best progress through a type of content. Such tools will provide real-time, learning-related, diagnostic dashboards for professors or teachers to leverage in order to guide and optimize a student’s education.
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So I believe that the promise is there for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities available 24x7x365 — even though we aren’t completely there yet. But think of the power a teacher would have if he or she had IBM’s Watson AI-based analysis on each student at their disposal! A “guide on the side” using such diagnostic tools could be a ***potent*** ally for a student.*
As such, I see innovative approaches continuing to come to fruition that will harness the power of serious games, analytics, web-based learner profiles, and multimedia-based/interactive learning content. Eventually, a piece of this type of personalized education will enter in via the Smart/Connected TVs of our living rooms…but that’s a post I’m building out for another day in the near future.
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*Another hope I have here is that such technologies will
enable students to identify and pursue their passions.
Some items that reinforced this notion for me include:
The key link from Bloom (1913-1999) one e-learning paper you must read plus his taxonomy of learning — an excellent item from Donald Clark Plan B (also see Donald’s archives for postings re: 50 top learning theorists)
The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring
Benjamin Bloom
University of Chicago | Northwestern University
Excerpt:
Most striking were the differences in final achievement measures under the three conditions. Using the standard deviation (sigma) or the control (conventional) class, it was typically found that the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average of the control class (the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class). The average student under mastery learning was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class(the average mastery learning student was above 84% of the students in the control class).
Two key items from EdNet Insight’s Anne Wujcik:
Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey – K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning — from Project Tomorrow
Personalizing Learning in 2012 — The Student & Parent Point of View [infographic] — from Project Tomorrow
Excerpt from Anne’s posting:
This first report focuses on how today’s students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. That personalization centers around three student desires: including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The report share the unfiltered views of K-12 students and parents on these key trends and documents their aspirations for fully leveraging the technologies supporting these trends to transform their learning lives.
A list of Allen Partridge’s on-demand/online-based seminars (free, requires free ID at Adobe):
1: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules
… a foundation in multimedia design concepts for eLearning, and help you understand the reasons / rationale behind many of the eLearning strategies you see implemented today.
2: Balancing cognitive load in eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5
…session focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as Personalization, which suggests that people learn more effectively when conversational styles and or learning agents are used to enhance the social aspects of the experience.
3: Applying Personalization to eLearning with Adobe Captivate 5
…session focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as Personalization, which suggests that people learn more effectively when conversational styles and or learning agents are used to enhance the social aspects of the experience.
4: Creating effective eLearning Multimedia with Adobe Captivate 5
…session will center on the Multimedia Principle (the importance of combining images & text) of eLearning Design.
5: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 5: Contiguity
…the Contiguity Principle, which indicates that the spatial relationship (proximity) of symbols (like text) to analogous images (things that look like the subject of the learning) is significant, and plays a key role in how effectively we learn.
6: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 6: Redundancy
…focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as Redundancy, which suggests that presenting symbols via both text and aural channels is less effective than presenting via only one.
7: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 7 : Coherence
…focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as Coherence, which suggests that off topic ancillary material can distract from learning. This theory stands in opposition to arousal theory, providing research based evidence that when stimulating animation or any form of non-relevant information is provided, it can actually decrease the efficacy of the instruction.
8: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 8: Segmenting
...the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as the Segmenting Principle, which suggests that authors of eLearning content should break content up into small pieces or chunks in order to help avoid cognitive overload for the learners.
9: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 9: Pre-Training
The session focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as pre-training, which suggests that elearning content authors should first build up basic information about essential elements which are pre-requisites to understanding the larger concepts.
10: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 10: Individual Differences
…the Individual Differences Principle, which suggests that design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high knowledge learners, and for high-spatial learners rather than for low-spatial learners.
More resources re: Adobe Captivate
Using Twitter? @AdobeElearning OR HASHTAG: #AdobeCaptivate
Using YouTube? http://www.youtube.com/adobeElearning/
On Adobe TV: http://tv.adobe.com/channel/e-learning/
Captivate Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/
Also see:
Excerpt from Digital Dilemmas: The Data Deluge, Attention Deficits and The Future of Books
Given people are creating and receiving an exponentially growing amount of information per day and time is not expanding, author Adrian Ott on Fast Company suggests we are in an “attention arms race.” (emphasis DSC) Despite the massive information processing power of the human brain, the senior executives we work with confirm this challenge. Even with faster computers and an ever-expanding array of mobile devices to receive and process information anytime, anywhere, people struggle to keep up. Often we try to multitask, but according to McKinsey on information overload, multitasking is not productive or creative.
From DSC:
This is why I think it is getting — and will continue to get — harder to get someone’s attention (i.e. getting through what I call “the gate”); and if I can’t get through the gate, I can’t make it into someone’s short-term or working memory. If that’s the case, I have zero chance of getting into their long-term memory (i.e. zero return on investment.)
This is not only true for students, but I believe that it’s true for everyone. For example, how many human billboards (waiving some type of signage or wearing some type of clothing/costume) have you seen recently? I see 1-2 a day. I created the graphic last summer to illustrate this potential issue:
Some of my proposed solutions to this issue include:
