First, my stance on openness. Generally, I am a huge fan. I strive to be quite open about my teaching and research practices and processes, and certainly open up my thinking to my students whenever possible. I also am a huge fan of many open source software tools / solutions (WordPress and related plugins are powering a dozen sites for me right now). The software that I developed as part of my dissertation is sitting on my website for anyone who wants to to use in their classrooms.

However, I also have a background as a professional software developer who, at times, struggled with all of the hidden costs that free and open source software introduced into the development environment. Finally, it may surprise people / my students to know that I am a relatively private person. I never update my status in Facebook. Not because I’m worried about who will see it (though that would occur to me) but simply because I feel no need to share unless I am actually having a conversation with someone. In my professional identity, though, I’ve worked hard to do the opposite. I set up two twitter accounts, even when I still thought the whole thing was somewhat silly, and experimented. Now I tweet semi-regularly about my work, teaching, etc. I find it interesting, and I’m pretty sure it is doing some interesting things for my professional relationships. So far, so good.

Shifting perspective

What I’d really like to see us do is shift the conversation away from whether openness is good or bad, or has hidden costs, and recognize the fact that in many cases an “open” approach fundamentally changes the game. Period. That means re-thinking the entire perspective. Thinking about Don Norman’s famous descriptions of the user v/ system perspective, this speaks to me of fundamentally changing the system. When I choose to make something open, it’s not just that more people can see it, it is often that we are now engaged in very different kinds of work.

Take the issue of open courseware as an example. In principal, this is a really great idea. Sure, the idea of having whatever I say off-the-cuff living on the internet forever frightens me a little. But more importantly is the simple fact that I just don’t lecture! The learning theories that I use and develop often suggest that lecture is the worst possible way to present information. Many of my students are actually quite shocked to see me talk for more than 10 minutes straight. Rather, I present a little, ask questions, organize students into groups, throw my opinion in the mix or ask an annoying question, let them run with it, etc. What would it mean to make that open? Let’s say all my students agree and we publish it and avoid the image that is coming to my mind of a very (fortunately) unsuccessful reality show. Does anyone watching it get the same out of it as the students living it? I doubt it. I’m about to transition one of my classes online. To do it “right”, I believe requires fundamentally re-thinking my approach, not just recording the lectures. So, all questions of cost and tenure aside, I think there are far bigger questions about how it changes the entire dynamic both in and out of the classroom.

Or, let’s look at the question of software ownership since I often find myself in the role of software designer. I’ve got some ideas that I think might make money. So I’ve considered what that would mean. Here’s the most important sticking point for me: if I am making a profit off of these ideas, I don’t think I can ethically continue to research them in the same way (or at all). Ouch. Big change there, and much bigger cost to me than the profit. Let’s be honest: if it was all about the $$, I’d still be a software engineer.

Or, let’s take an example that I think is particularly interesting. What about editing a public wiki such as wikipedia? Well, here’s the thing: once a class has edited it, it should become that much harder to re-edit it in a future year. Tweaking last year’s edits anew and trying to expand them may be an incredibly valuable exercise. But it is a very different exercise than writing a fresh new wiki post. Engaging really thoughtfully in how openness impacts one’s teaching, I think, necessitates exploring these implications. We have seen some really great examples of all the feedback that folks can get from the cloud. I agree. But that’s also a lot of information to filter, and some of it may be crap or spam or both. This doesn’t mean we should avoid asking the cloud, and I certainly do on occasion. But it’s not just a cost-benefit analysis. It is, I would argue, a shift in what the activity is. (Incidentally, I hope all of the students in my theorizing class are now nodding their heads at how these ideas link to our course concepts).

On that note

I feel like this is running long, and I want to save some of my ideas for responding to everyone else. But I want to make one last point. I am pre-tenure, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t often thinking about tenure. But here is the other bit: I love what I do. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy sharing my ideas. I want to empower teachers and other professionals to do new and exciting things. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Also, I think there are all sorts of indirect benefits just as there are indirect costs. For example, spending the time to share all of these ideas does take time away from other things I might do. However, it also helps me connect with more scholars, scholars who might take up my work or might influence my work. That has all sorts of benefits for me both professionally and personally. I guess the point being that I think there are some really important and fantastic other issues balancing the scales that I’d hate for us to lose sight of in a cost-benefit analysis.

A number of students have asked me for suggestions about how to go about reading more effectively (faster, with more understanding). I prepared the above presentation as a way to illustrate a number of key ideas while also linking them to the theoretical frameworks that we have been covering in p544: Applied Cognition and Learning Strategies. There are certainly different ways this could be analyzed, and we will cover a number of them throughout the semester. As with the majority of my presentations, this was the backdrop and spark for intense and productive discussion and debate. Therefore, read it individually at your own peril.

This semester marks the beginning of my 2nd full year teaching as a member of the Faculty at Indiana University (I started in January 2009).

The twitter version of this post

A few days ago, I began to prepare for class by reviewing my notes from the same session in the previous year. As I read them, I was struck by how differently I approach my teaching now. I didn’t give it that much thought other than to tweet about it (that’s one of the points of twitter after all, isn’t it?). Apparently someone is reading those darn things. @joshbaron replied almost immediately asking the obvious question: how?

I tapped off a few quick replies (see the img to the right) and then promised a lengthier response in the form of a blog post. The more I thought about it, though, the more I think it is not so much that my teaching has changed, as that I have. The voice I saw in the notes from the prior year was the voice of a vaguely different, slightly greener, less confident academic who was just beginning to figure out the balancing act this job demands; a process that is still very much in progress.

The stage, as it were

First, a little background. I truly love teaching. Also, while there is always room for improvement and I’m no exception, I consider my teaching so far to have been reasonably successful. Why? First, I see the students changing over the course of the semester, becoming more confident, knowledgeable, and articulate in their ideas and arguments both verbally and in their final papers (this is great for me, and presumably for the students as well). Second, my teaching reviews have been pretty decent (good for tenure, though not as important as other things). Finally, I had the good fortune to receive honorable mention in the Sakai Foundation’s Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (exciting for me, bragging rights for my parents).

However, as Lee Schulman once said at a graduate training event that I attended, funded by the Spencer Foundation, it behooves us to study and reflect upon our teaching with the same kind of intent and rigor as we think about our research lest we do a mediocre job or persist under the incorrect assumption that we are teaching effectively when we might not be. I agree. My teaching isn’t just interesting and important to me, but also to the University as a whole, to the students who are in my classes, and I would argue to the communities who will be served by the future educators and educational researchers that I am helping to train.

OK. So, I take it seriously. I’m also a Learning Scientist and an Activity Theorist which means that I am deeply interested in how people learn, how activity systems learn, and how the two are related. The majority of my research also happens to focus on the role of external representations (drawings, diagrams, charts, etc.) in supporting learning, the role of technology in supporting learning, and the way that interaction unfolds in and helps to shape learning contexts (more here). Admittedly, I mostly study 7-year-olds, but many of the same principles apply. Which is all to say that I’ve got some theoretical epistemological, and practical commitments that shape my reflective process as I think about my teaching.

Enough already, what’s changed?

As I see it, teaching is about juggling between tensions. So, what has changed for me is that I have become more aware of what some of those tensions are, have made some very real, personal choices about how to balance them, and have become more confident in my ability to do so. Before I list some of the tensions that I find most interesting, important, and rewarding, let me make one key note: teaching is also about finding your voice. It’s easy to try and emulate the professor who seems to “win” with students by being their friend, by being a comedian, by being so stern and intimidating that students are afraid not to excel. But if that’s not you, I am pretty sure the students can see the facade from a mile away. So here are some of the tensions that I think are important. I hope you find them interesting, useful, sometimes familiar, and perhaps thought provoking. And that you will share some of your own in the comments below.

So, some tensions:

1. Teaching well v. selling your students on the fact that you are teaching well: I figured I would start with this one because in some ways it frames many of the others. There are two inter-related issues here. The first is that I think students are more motivated, engaged, and generally positive (e.g., forgiving of your goofs among other things) if they feel you are doing something generally good for them. The other is the simple fact that if they feel that way, they say it on the recommendations which ultimately reflect on your performance review. The first reason is the more important one for me, but I’d be lying if I said the second didn’t matter. In either case, sometimes we need to do something students won’t like, like give them a bad grade on a paper that they thought was pretty darn good. I don’t have a golden rule for how to balance this, but I try and handle it with the following three methods:
   1. I always try to reflect back on whether or not I am doing the students a disservice in my choices. If I feel I am helping them to learn and become better scholars, then I’ll go for it and worry about the reviews later.
   2. I strive for transparency (see below). I find this goes a long way.
   3. Finally, I’ve re-worked my grading schema / assignment structures to promote revision and reflection. Whenever possible I give students feedback early and often and then let them re-write if they need, giving them a higher grade if they adjust and adapt effectively. This is a bit more work for me, but it’s also more work for the students who care. If they take advantage of the opportunities to push their understanding, I’m happy to meet them 1/2 way on the effort. If not, well then, I don’t feel as bad giving them a lower grade. They chose their priorities and they have their reasons.
2. The unsuccessful but sometimes desired transmission model.

   Teaching v. Guiding: Simply put, my theoretical and epistemological commitments suggest that the best way to teach is not to stand up in the front of the room and lecture. Don’t get me wrong, it is sometimes helpful, worthwhile, and downright efficient to spend some time in the front of the room giving students some key information. Usually for me this is the background information, connecting ideas, and framing to help them think about the big ideas in the readings I’ve selected. Then, I think it is much more valuable, more often than not, to engage students in doing their own thinking about the ideas through a collection of activities where they are challenged to revisit the ideas in the readings, define them, clarify their own commitments, debate and answer each other’s questions, and create other representations (back to my research roots here) that help them to express and clarify their ideas. The trick is that doing this badly can sometimes seem like a gimmick. The students are, after all, paying quite a bit of money to be in the classroom with me. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? They’re paying, whether they realize it or not, to be in the classroom not only with me, but with a bunch of other smart, interested and interesting people.

   Nonetheless, I want the students to feel good about what they are getting from me and from the experience. My solution? I lecture when I need to, and when students seem to really want it. I design activities that make sense to me theoretically. And I challenge not only myself to have good reasons for my teaching choices, but I encourage my students to do the same. If I don’t have a good reason for the way I am tackling a subject, I tell them, then I shouldn’t be doing it. The rest, for me, is about being both flexible and transparent. I plan for about 30% more class time than I actually have. Then, I roll with the punches. I have ideas up my sleeve for all of the eventualities that might arise, and I’m ready to throw those ideas out the window if students are confused, frustrated, or on the flip-side, getting to and through the big ideas faster than I expected. It’s tiring, but immensely satisfying to strike the right balance and flow with the students. I don’t always hit it, but it sure feels right when I do. Either way, I reflect and take notes after. The next class or year won’t be identical, but I can still learn something from my experiences.

3. Challenging students v. Helping students: Motivation researchers have pretty consistently pointed out that there is a balance somewhere between a task being too easy (boring) and too hard (not worth the effort). Not everyone knows where their spot is, so it’s certainly hard to know from the front of the room when it is worth pushing and when to ease up. I struggle with this, especially when pushing someone raises one of the other tensions here. So I go back to whether I truly believe it will help the student, and then I just keep my eyes open and adapt to what I see happening. If students take the challenge and want more, I throw it at them. If not, I ease up and wait until later. This is a dimension I struggle with constantly because it is too easy sometimes to fall into the trap of thinking “it’s my fault, I should push less hard or teach better” (for others the opposite trap of “they are too lazy” is the easy one to fall into). To be perfectly honest, I’m not that great at this one, so I’ve had to rely on friends and family to push back on me and tell me that they know I doing the best I can, and to trust in the students to do the same. See, I told you I listen?! Sometimes anyhow…
4. Transparency v. Mystique:
   It doesn’t matter what you say so long as you look brilliant saying it.
   One piece of advice I received second-hand before I started teaching went something like this: “It doesn’t matter what you say so long as you look brilliant saying it. Maintain that air of Professorial Brilliance at all costs and let the rest work itself out.” I’m not sure if this works for others, but I can’t do it even if I want to. I like to be honest with my students and tell them when I don’t know something and when I struggle(d) with something. I believe they respect the honesty. The trick is maintaining my own genuine confidence and making sure that shines through too. Nobody wants to be taught by someone who isn’t sure that what they are doing is a good idea. So, I opt for transparency. I also tell students the reasons behind my instructional choices. It helps a bit, I am sure, that I am in a School of Education and talking to students interested in teaching. But I would do it anyway. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach, so why not share it with the students and help them to share my confidence in why it will work?

5. Open-ness v. the Other way: Increasingly, classrooms are being opened to the world. Even if you don’t put your course online, and keep your syllabus behind closed doors, your students can and do share what they like, learn, and hate. And they will tweet about it. And blog about it. Anyone who isn’t aware of how memes can flow across the internet or one’s own social network probably isn’t reading this blog post, so I won’t bother repeating it. Where do I come down? In principle I love it. I’m in this game for the developing and spreading of ideas, so why not let them run rampant? In practice, though, I am a relatively private individual who not only doesn’t want every half-baked idea out in the world, but is well aware that his students may not as well, and sometimes worries about how to separate the wheat from the chaff in consuming all the information that is out there.

   So, I categorize my exploration with social media and open-ness as an experiment in progress, especially because I have and will continue to have students and colleagues who want to push me out there and have pretty compelling arguments for why I should dive in head first. I dabble my toes. It started with some tweets (see my professional, @jdanish, and teaching, @drdanish, twitter accounts) and a revamped website and is now branching into other areas (more on this someday soon). And I explore. I have, so far, mostly found it incredibly rewarding. More people are joining in the conversation. My students are talking about the big ideas of class in-between sessions. And I am privy to it which can and does influence my teaching in good ways (though a tension here is not to over-respond to student ideas, gripes, or preferences given that the tweeting voices aren’t the only voices). And I also get to share and reflect further on my teaching. So far so good. I’m also a technology researcher, so its important to and for me to be exploring these technologies and thinking about what they mean first-hand. Even better.

6. Teaching content v. Professional development: Last but by no means least is the simple fact that I am generally trying to teach two things simultaneously: the content of the course (e.g., learning theory, learning technologies, etc.) and how to be a professional academic; how to be a teacher, researcher, and colleague. But how much time does one devote to each? My answer is to aim first for synthesis with the teaching of the content. Second, to be perfectly honest, I go with my pet peeves or my own recent experiences. Read a few too many manuscripts that don’t do a good job of citing theory? I build in a reflective exercise to help my students think about citations. Attend an NSF review panel and learn quite a bit about the grant-writing process? I use grant writing as a way to push students to think about design in a way that will jive with the demands they will face when their applications are in front of a similar panel. And I do my best to treat the students like colleagues now. That’s how my mentors worked and I appreciated it. I also know it paid off for me. So I’m returning the favor.

I am sure there are more, and I can already think of a few, but I’ll leave those for next year. I will, however, wrap up by saying that I found it interesting, challenging, and helpful as ever to not only reflect on this past year, but to attempt to articulate it. I strongly encourage you to do the same regardless of whether or not you make your reflection a public artifact.

P.S. I was also asked how technology played a role in these shifts. The quick answer is that I see technology as just one aspect of the activity system, and always aim to think about the system as a whole so that I am integrating the technology thoughtfully. The longer answer will be a follow-up post.

I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

For this representation to make any sense, you will definitely want to click on the image and see it enlarged.

This week we read about digital storytelling (Hull and Katz, 2006), fanfiction (Black, 2006), and some of the tensions with applying Web 2.0 practices in education (Dohn, 2009). While there are a number of incredibly important issues being raised by each of these authors, there were three big ideas that struck me that I wanted to include in this response: 1) the role of these various tools in helping individuals to express and shape their identity; 2) the relative absence of discussion of specific tools; and 3) the different relationships with other individuals that were suggested by each of these. In looking at these, I have intentionally simplified the 3 models in ways that some viewers may take issue with (if so, I hope you will comment!). I have also made some potentially contentious choices about when to give individuals complex identities or not. Those choices reflect what I perceived as the relative importance of discussing those identities in the various papers, not a belief on anyone’s part that individuals in certain contexts lose or flatten their identities.

More than ever, given this week’s theme, I hope you will all post comments, suggestions, and critiques below.

• Black, R. W. (2006). Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction. E-Learning, 3(2), 170-170.
• Dohn, N. B. (2009). Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(3), 343–363.
• Hull, G. A., & Katz, M.-L. (2006). Creating an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1), 43-81.

This week we talked about Virtual Worlds. The content of this image is related primarily to a paper about the spread of the WhyPox outbreak in Whyville (you can see a host of Whyville-related research at http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com). However, I think that all of the papers that we read this and in the previous unit on games discuss both the power of virtual experiences to situate learning, and also raise a question about how and when that learning moves out of the virtual world.

I’m struggling this week with how to make the full range and scope of a literacy visible to students in the context of computational literacy as inspired by diSessa’s (2000) book, Changing Minds. It seems that most people either “get it” and therefore don’t need a description, or would need quite a bit of exposure to truly grasp the implications. It feels similar to trying to explain to a 5 year-old why literacy is so much more powerful than their understanding the storybook in front of them, long before they have even begun to appreciate all of the powerful ways that the ability to read and write can transform their daily life. This drawing, therefore, attempts to sidestep the issue by focusing on some of the underlying assumptions of what it might mean to reach a point where computational literacy is accessible to all, as Wing (2008) and diSessa (2000) would encourage us to strive for.

This post is in response to the chapter on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theories of learning. There were many directions this could have gone, but a lot of the forum discussions this year seem to be about memory with a focus on encoding and recall. That inspired the library theme. The references to radiation and General are a nod to the famous Glick and Holyoak transfer study. For some reason, they came to mind when I was trying to think about a topic to search for in memory. If you are wondering why… ask the librarian!

This dtg is a response to:
Colella, V. (2000). Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 471-500.

This was inspired by several of this week’s readings that all focused on how various kinds of computational software can make complex science concepts more accessible to students of all ages. Notably:

White, B., & Frederiksen, J. R. (2000). Technological tools and instructional approaches for making scientific inquiry accessible to all. In M. J. Jacobson & R. B. Kozma (Eds.), Innovations in science and mathematics education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

Wilensky, U., & Reisman, K. (2006). Thinking Like a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Firefly: Learning Biology Through Constructing and Testing Computational Theories—An Embodied Modeling Approach. Cognition and Instruction, 24(2), 171-209.

Sandoval, W. A., & Reiser, B. J. (2004). Explanation-Driven Inquiry: Integrating Conceptual and Epistemic Scaffolds for Scientific Inquiry. Science Education, 88(3).

Note: the formula on the whiteboard came from the Wikipedia page for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.