The future of originality

Online learning facilitates communication, interaction, and collaboration between students in an unprecedented way. Students are not constrained by time, geography or economics from linking up with other who share a common interest. Professors and other experts are now vastly more accessible to students by email and websites, and indeed, students may casually request information and opinion from experts and expect to receive an answer more or less instantly. The very existence of the internet encourages open sharing of ideas, words and objects.

One of the potential consequences to such openness is that students are learning to use what they find on the internet without sufficient thought or background reading. Because Googling a topic will instantly throw up thousands of hits, students can - and in my experience, sometimes do - use the first 5 or 6 hits as the authority on the topic, without reading deeply or widely enough on the subject matter. They are searching, but they're not investigating.

Furthermore, the potential to use material found on the internet without attribution is enormous. Students are accustomed to copying and pasting, to downloading, and to sharing material found on the internet - this begins in elementary school. The plethora of information on the internet provides unlimited possibilities for creating a pastiche paper on any topic imaginable. Obviously, the further along in their education a student gets, with an increasing demand for specialized knowledge and language, the more difficult this copy-and-paste approach will be. But are we teaching schoolchildren and university students how to use the technology to create knowledge and, at the same time, to understand where that knowledge came from, and to cite it properly?

The New York Times recently ran a series of articles on cheating and plagiarism in education which report widespread plagiarism in higher education. Organizations like plagiarism.org cite other research confirming that plagiarism is common and accepted among many students.

Cheating and plagiarism breach  principles of academic honesty. Most institutions have policies about academic honesty, explicitly require students to learn about them, and have developed procedures for dealing with students who violate them. This Youtube video by Capilano University film students and Patrick Donahoe, Vice-President Student and Institutional Support, illustrates one strategy for informing students about plagiarism and cheating:



Institutions are now using plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin. Professors are becoming more canny in assignment and test design. At the same time, the potential for students to plagiarize and cheat using the internet continues to get bigger and bigger. It would appear that a silent arms race is underway.

The reasons for plagiarizing are cheating are numerous: poor time management, not enough time, laziness, poor writing and researching skills, and so on. The consequences of plagiarism and cheating are that students fail to learn, and more importantly, that they fail to develop the skills of investigation, analysis, evaluation and synthesis that underlie critical thinking and turn one into an educated person. The technology that now allows us to instantly connect, communicate and collaborate, also facilitates cursory and shallow thinking when the amassing of information is easier than thinking about the content. Learning has never been easy, but previous generations did at least have to read hard copy so that copying and pasting in a few key strokes were impossible. Furthermore, they had access to the same works as everyone else - typically whatever was in the library - making it harder to find more obscure sources to copy from. What took days to write a couple of generations ago can now be written in a couple of hours. Taking ownership of a piece of writing is not a prerequisite for writing a detailed and professional-looking paper.

What are some of the strategies that educators can use to encourage students in the acquisition of knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and create knowledge? How can we encourage investigative skills beyond those used to conduct internet searches? Technology has changed our capacity to create - how can we use it to foster academic honesty, creativity, and originality?

Using Twitter in and outside the classroom

How handy is Twitter in the classroom? Let’s look at the basics of what Twitter has to offer first.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows you to send out messages known as tweets containing a maximum of 140 characters. Your tweets are seen by everyone in your social network. You build a social network by “following” other Twitter accounts; similar, others will discover and follow you. Your followers see your tweets, and you see the tweets of everyone you are following. If you follow a huge number of Twitterers, you will be awash in a constant and never-ending flow of tweets – your profile page will be updated constantly as those you follow send out tweets. If you follow a smaller number of people, or if they are not prolific tweet-senders, your page updates will be fewer. You can control whose tweets you are seeing. But those new to Twitter sometimes feel overcome by this constant barrage of information – be warned - you may hate it, or you may feel comfortable ignoring tweets you don’t care about.

You can tag tweets using hashtags – putting # in front of a word in a tweet, like #blogging, tags your post – you can search for tweets containing information about blogging using #blogging as a search term. Twitter shows you all the tweets from all users that have been tagged #blogging.  You can keep track of everything you tweet about a specific topic by marking it with a hashtag – convenient for organizing tweets by topic.

When someone you follow tweets something, you can retweet it if you want to recirculate the information to people who follow you. You can append it, direct it specific users, or change it. You can even keep track of which of your tweets has been retweeted by someone else.

You can address a tweet to someone in particular by putting @ in front of their user name. You can also send direct messages privately to other users. You can configure your Twitter account to be public so that anyone can follow you, or you can protect it so that you decide who gets to follow you and only your followers can see your tweets.

Finally, you can send tweets from your computer by going to twitter.com, from your desktop using an app like TweetDeck, or from your mobile device.

OK, those are the basics. There are some options for using Twitter that I haven’t explored here in the interests of simplicity. An excellent video guide to using Twitter is available here.

Now for educational uses of Twitter.

First of all, you need to consider what educational goals you can accomplish with Twitter. Twitter provides a quick and easy way for students to share information with each other and the instructor. Here are some specific examples:

• sharing resources – posting websites and links of interest; you can also share music, videos, pictures,  and document
•  organizing class ideas and resources using hashtags
• asking questions – especially good for shy students who never ask questions in person
•  communicating outside of class
•  sending reminders about due dates, readings, exams
•  instructor clarification of points
•  ice-breaking – getting to know each other
• collaboration by smaller group
• as a backchannel during lectures
• to survey the class on a specific question
• in language instruction – send questions that must be answered in that language
• to create a document such as a story, one line at a time, in turn
• to archive student ideas submitted as tweets by formatting them into a pdf document

Some things to think about if you decide to incorporate Twitter into your classroom:

• Public or private? Do you want to control who is in the social network?
• If you already use Twitter professionally or socially, you will probably want another Twitter account to keep the classroom separate. You can manage those accounts using something like TweetDeck. Have all students follow your class account.
• Will you use Twitter during classtime and if so, how will you deal with Twitter as a backchannel? If using it during classtime, does everyone have access? Do you want to lay out some basic groundrules?
• Are there any potential downsides? Critics of Twitter have argued that it is a time-waster, that 140 characters are insufficient for communicating anything significant, that it is a distraction, and that it encourages poor writing and lazy thinking. I would advise an instructor to have a good grasp of Twitter as a user before considering implementing it as a communication tool in class.

Finally, as academics we are interested in evidence-based teaching practices. The use of Twitter in education has not yet been comprehensively studied. Much has been said in support of using Twitter in education. Yet only about 30% of faculty report using Twitter and the remainder are either unconvinced of its usefulness or unfamiliar with how it works. As Twitter use grows, the opportunities for studying its efficacy for learning will undoubtedly be explored.

Further reading:

Wading through the dialogue about Twitter in education, my personal favourite for best source of information for instructors has to be How to use Twitter for Social Learning by Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. This is a comprehensive guide that is well-written and easy to use. You can also consult Twitter basics at Twitter.com.

If you have tried using Twitter in your classroom, please let me know about your experience!

Adding audio comments to Moodle

I have been playing around with ways to provide students with audio feedback. There are many options for this - I was looking for something simple. I wanted a way to comment on something either to the entire class, or to students individually. Here's what I came up with, with assistance from the helpful folks in my Educational Technology Resource Centre.

I began by recording the comment using Windows Sound recorder - located in the Accessories folder when you click on "All Programs". Sound Recorder in Vista allows for recordings over 5 minutes in duration (previous Windows operating systems limited recording duration to 5 minutes). There is no editing of saved files allowed, but if your recordings are brief it's probably easier to redo them anyway if you need to change something. Save the resulting file on your hard drive. It will be a .WAV file, and you can listen to it using Windows Media Player.

To make a comment you want the whole class to be able to hear, you will need to upload your file to Moodle. Ideally, you want the file to be embedded in a resource or activity so that students can see it and click on it in one step without having to download the audio file.

Before you embed the file, you may have to reformat it. Our version of Moodle does not support WAV files, and I was required to convert the file to MP3 format. This was very easy - just download Switch Audio File Converter by NCH Software, and you can convert the file in one step.

Now upload the audio file to Moodle. You can place it in any resource or activity that has an html editor. All you have to do is select the text where you want the file to appear and insert the file, as I've done here in  Label. Find the insert link icon in the editor:

Because you are inserting a file from your computer rather than a URL, you have to browse to find the file:

Click the Browse button to locate your file, then click Upload ,

and wait for the message that Moodle has successfully uploaded your file. Then click on the file, and the link will be embedded wherever you selected it to appear in the first place.

At my institution, there is an embedded audio player in Moodle that automatically plays the file when the student clicks on the link:

If you want your comments to go to students individually, you have several options. You could create a Group for each student in the class using auto-create - each student would be the only person in his/her group. Then create a Forum called Feedback or Comments, with Separate Groups - this way no student can see any other Groups. Then upload your audio comment file for each student to his/her Discussion forum as a new topic. This gives the two of you a way to have a private conversation about the comments if necessary. You can subscribe students to the Forum so that they each receive an email whenever you leave them a comment.

You could use the wiki or assignment modules in much the same way to provide students with individual feedback.

You may get feedback from your listeners about the quality of your sound recordings - if you have static, hissing noises, or the volume needs to be turned right up, you might want to adjust your input recording levels. I created my first comment without any sound adjustment - just opened Sound Recorder, put my headset on and started talking. It wasn't bad - certainly good enough - and when you are used to the procedure, you can play with the levels if necessary.

This was a very easy and straightforward way to add audio comments to Moodle. There are numerous other ways to insert audio comments in your online teaching - what are some of the other methods that have worked for you?

Increasing student motivation and achievement using email

As an online instructor, how often should you communicate with your students? This is an important issue. I try to repeat information multiple times in my online course. For example, when I post instructions for online work on Moodle, I will also email students telling them that the instructions are on Moodle. I will also send follow-up emails to students who I haven’t seen online after a reasonable period of time.

The timing, content, and frequency of such emails are important issues to consider. As well, the time required to email individual students has to be managed by the instructor.

One piece of research that relates to these questions was conducted in 2008 by ChanMin Kim and John M. Keller. Kim and Keller were interested in using instructor email to increase personal contact between the instructor and students in large f2f classes. They argued that students’ vulnerability to distractions, lack of motivation, or poor academic skills could be ameliorated by increased contact with the instructor. They questioned whether or not general email messages could be effective, or whether personalized emails would be required. Clearly, the latter require increased instructor time and effort.

Kim and Keller studied 101 undergraduate students in a regular archaeology course. The students completed a questionnaire about their satisfaction with their achievement in the course following their first exam. Those students who indicated low satisfaction were placed in a Personal Message group slated to receive an email from the instructor addressed to them by name and containing specific information about strategies to help them do well in the course based on their questionnaire responses.

The students who indicated after the first exam that they were satisfied with their achievement in the course so far were placed in a Non-personal Message group. Their email from the instructor would not address them by name and would contain more general information about studying and so on.

Both groups then received a pre-test to measure their motivation for the course, the number of hours a week they were studying for it, and an exam on the course material. Later, they received their Personal or Non-personal email message from the instructor, and a month after the pre-test, motivation, hours spent studying and exam grade were assessed again.

The results were interesting. Let’s hold off for a minute considering how they relate to online learning.

The measures of motivation showed no difference in interest in the course between the two groups. Both groups reported an increase in their rating of course relevance – it appeared to rise dramatically for the Personal Message group although Kim and Keller unfortunately did not report a significance test on this difference. Confidence in their ability to meet their course goals dropped for both groups, but interestingly, it dropped less for the Personal Message group, and their confidence AFTER the instructor email was higher than for the Non-personal Message group.

There were no significant differences between the groups in the number of hours they reported studying per week, or in the change before and after the instructor email.

Finally, the analysis of exam grades showed that the Non-personal Message Group performed better on all exams compared to the Personal Message Group (not surprising, given that this group was more satisfied initially with how they were doing). However, while the Non-personal Message group achieved better grades both before and after the instructor's email, there was greater improvement in the group who had received the personal message - in fact the exam grade average in the Non-personal Message group went down at the post-test.

Kim and Keller concluded that personal contact between student and instructor for relatively poorly-performing students is important in terms of achievement and motivation. The results for better-performing students are not so clear.

What does this all mean for online students and instructors?

Balancing the time it takes to gather information from students about their needs, the additional time it takes to generate personalized responses, and the potential effects on student achievement will be challenging. Kim and Keller’s study raises a raft of questions about instructor presence in online learning such as:

·         Should online students receive additional obligatory institutional support in the form of academic skills training specifically targeted to online learning outside of the specific course-focused content from their instructor? This relates to underlying issues around understanding who takes online courses, student level of ease with online instruction, reasons for taking online courses and attrition in online courses.

·         Do instructors have enough time to respond to needs of individual online students? When the primary mode of communication is written, instructor feedback needs to be clear, precise, informative, carefully-constructed, and with understanding of the potential impact of communicating without the non-verbal cues present in f2f interactions.

·         What level of email support is ideal for the majority of online students? How much personal contact is effective for increasing student motivation, achievement, understanding, etc?

·         What other modes of communication in online courses are most effective? Instructors have a variety of communication means available such as phone, Skype, audio messaging, synchronous chats, etc.

·         What level of institutional support do instructors require for online teaching, especially new online instructors?

I’ll look at some of this research in a future post.

References

Kim, C., & Keller, J. M. (2008). Effects of motivational and volitional email messages (MVEM) with personal messages on undergraduate students’ motivation, study habits and achievement. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(1), 36–51. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00701.x

Increasing Student Collaboration

One of my educational goals is to create ways for students to collaborate with and learn from each other as well as the instructor. One of the neatest tools for accomplishing this that I have come across is Voicethread. Voicethread allows you to post something online - an image, a video, a document, etc., and then you and others can comment on it. The commenting featuring is very flexible - you can create a video comment, phone your comment in, leave an audio comment, or just type it. A voicethread can be public or private, and the creator can play with various settings to customize who can see or comment on the voicethread. You can also review the comments before they appear.

This voicethread by Michelle Pacansky-Brock shows some educational applications of this technology very effectively. I love how the use of real voices, as opposed to text, brings the conversation alive. In fully online classes, this is a great way to bring the instructor's and the students' voices into the classroom.



Love to hear how others are using voicethread!

Evaluating blog posts

I like to incorporate student blogging in my courses. It allows students to survey a topic, reflect on what they have been reading about and link to those sources, practice their writing, and ideally, make some connections to other people with similar interests. Students can blog in groups, pairs or individually. I devote 10 to 15% of the course grade to this element.

What is the best way to grade a blog? Should it be graded at all? Assuming you buy into the usefulness of student blogging at all, then I think you have to attach some marks to it - students do not have time to work on them otherwise. If you're wondering about arguments for and against the value and desirability of requiring students to blog, check out this article by Stephen Downes.

I have seen numerous grading rubrics, and have come up with the following format. I will use this next semester in an intro course and see how it goes. The grade will be determined by which box gets ticked most frequently; "meeting expectations" in all would receive a grade between 60-73%.

Criterion	Fails to Meet Expectations	Meets Expectation	Exceeds Expectations
A minimum of 8 blog posts, 3 comments on other blogs, and replies to any comments on student’s own blog.
Writing is clear, well-structured, error-free, and effectively communicates ideas. Blog posts are labeled or tagged appropriately, including author’s name. Links are embedded.
Content – Blog posts are informative, provide sufficient detail, survey the topic, connect to appropriate links (i.e. scholarly, credible), and provide accurate information.
Creativity – Blogs are well-laid out; may include embedded images, video; include blogroll or other widgets/gadgets.

Marking assignments electronically

Continuing with the theme of assessment and evaluation,  I thought I'd go off on a small tangent and explore two options for marking assignments that are submitted electronically. These could be useful in f2f as well as online courses. I will be trying electronic submission with all of my students this fall, instead of just in my online courses. I like the idea of paperless assignments!

You can use a Tablet to grade papers - this allows you to "hand-write" your comments on the screen. This is more like the experience of grading papers that anyone over a certain age is used to - it retains that "natural" feel that some instructors don't want to give up. However, the tablet is one more thing to carry around (although you could trade your PC for a tablet PC). You might also suffer from very bad handwriting - and your handwriting might even be slower than typing. So the tablet has pro's and con's.

Another option for marking assignments that are emailed as documents created in Word, is to use Word's Review feature to make comments, like this:

If you click on the Track Changes icon, commenting is even easier - just double-click where you want to change something and type:

One potential problem with Tracking Changes is that if you email the Word document back to your student with your changes, they can then "Accept" all of the changes without physically having to make the changes themselves - not a teachable moment. A better option is to save your graded file as a PDF, and email that back to the student, who can then make the changes in their Word file. PDF also means that the student should not have any compatibility issues if you use a different version of Word for example.

I recently learned about a new tool that looks like a great time-saver for grading in Word: Phrase Express. PhraseExpress allows you to create shortcuts for common phrases that you use frequently, thereby automating the grading somewhat. For example, if you often use the phrase "singular-plural confusion", you could create a shortcut, like, #sp, and whenever you type the shortcut, the entire phrase appears. You can also use PhraseExpress to automate the opening of files, folders, websites, and programs. And it's free. This is something I will definitely take an hour or two to explore further as it looks like a practical and useful program.

Effective online interaction - one piece of research.

Students in online learning engage in a variety of collaborative practices such as threaded discussions, wikis, chats, blog comments, etc. I have the most experience with asynchronous threaded discussions. They are easy to use, and if the number of threads is small, organizationally transparent. As a learner though, I've also seen that when there are multiple discussions occurring simultaneously, they all seem to get watered down a bit. Given that I tend to rely on discussion forums as a way to engage students, introduce content, and provide opportunities for analysis and reflection AND assess participation, it seemed a good time to delve into this topic a little deeper.

I went to PsycINFO to see what research has been reported on this topic. PsycINFO indexes everything that is published in the scholarly literature on psychology - it is beyond enormous. I limited my search to articles available through my institution's library-based access as full-text, downloadable PDFs so that I could read the actual articles, not just the abstracts.

Antonio Calvani, Antonio Fini, Marcello Molino and Maria Ranieri published a 2010 article called, Visualizing and monitoring effective interactions in online collaborative groups, in the British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 41 Number 2  Pages 213–226. Their goal was to model the effectiveness of group collaboration. They wanted to use the model in a real course to give the online tutor the means to monitor and evaluate online collaboration. They also wanted to improve Moodle's standard Forum module.

The authors address the complexities inherent in trying to describe and evaluate "group effectiveness". One of the problems is that a group can be effective - they work together well, respond in a timely manner, etc - yet mundane, nonanalytical and unreflective in their thinking. Calvani et al addressed two basic dimensions of online collaboration: participation and cohesion.

Participation was composed of several factors:

• the frequency with which individual members posted to the group
• the tendency of individuals to propose discussion material by presenting cues, ideas and hypotheses
• equal participation in all group members
• rotation of roles with the group, i.e. sometimes analytical, sometimes questioning, sometimes summarizing
• regular and constant rhythm of participation

Cohesion was expressed by:

• individuals reading each other's posts
• the depth of the discussions as measured by the number of connected responses to posts
• group discussion and analysis of the arguments and proposal made in discussion
• summarizing contributions that synthesize contributions and provide closure

Calvani et al. measured these factors in the online discussions in a course taken my master's level students. Some of the features of the enhanced Moodle discussion forum that they developed were used to collect data. More on their enhanced Moodle modle and a PDF of the original article are available here.

They created an assessment model that evaluated the group on each factor. A similar scale would look like this, with higher grades closer to 5 and lower grades closer to 1:

A chart like this would provide the instructor with a graphic picture of where a group needs help. It also highlights the need for an instructor to invest time and effort into understanding group dynamics, different levels of thinking, AND assessment. 

This is just one look at the issues around the structure and evaluation of group work in online learning, but this was a useful activity for me because it reminded me that we do not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel - there is a rich empirical literature on online learning. My goal is to read more of it, and to incorporate evidence-based teaching practices into areas like evaluation.

Learning to pogo

In this post I'd like to address the notion of learning theory. I liked the clarity of M. K. Smith's infed article in which he outlines the qualitatively different layers of knowledge acquisition and understanding that characterize what adult learners experience when learning something new. Acquiring facts about something is not the same thing as changing the way you understand the world. A good analogy might be understanding how to use the remote control for your television versus understanding the costs and benefits of television programming to contemporary life, the role of TV in the development and expression of culture, or how personal and collective relationships with technology shape our society.

How we learn is an interesting question because it involves both the learner and the teacher. We could investigate a variety of learner factors: personal strategies like time management; memory strategies such as active versus passive processing; the social relationships with others in the learning community; personal motivation, self-discipline and independence; existing knowledge to connect the new learning to; even timing - sometimes we are just ready to learn something. Then there are the teacher factors: the dynamism and charisma of a teacher; the degree of support and scaffolding the teacher gives the learner; the perspective of the teaching - behavioural, humanist, cognitive, etc; the structure, pace, timing, complexity, etc of the information being taught. For a list of these and related factors see Zemke and Zemke's 30 Things We Know For Sure about Adult Learning.

The factors involved in learning are embedded not just in the individual, but also within their immediate environments (e.g., family, school, neighbourhood) and the culture at large. Technology plays an obvious role here - it can create opportunities or limitations in any of these areas. Technology in some cases IS the teacher.

Learning experiences that work really well for me don't necessarily hit all of the above factors. It may be that a really interesting or charismatic teacher has made something come alive for me, or it could be that my natural curiosity has sent me off on an information-seeking quest. If it's something I HAVE to learn but don't have an implicit interest in, then the more things that come together - both from me as the learner and from the teacher - the better. When I've been learning online, the best resources are those that are coherently designed and complete - either it points me to a set of resources or it at least summarizes a basic point. I'm most frustrated by resources that are insufficient, or poorly structured.


But I know I've learned something when I'm aware of an "aha moment". It's the same feeling I get when I've read a great book, where the author has expressed or described something - an idea, a situation, a thought - so perfectly I can't imagine that it could be done any better.


Aha moments that come to mind:

• Learning how evolution works by reading Stephen Jay Gould's books as an undergrad.
• Troubleshooting, and then fixing, some technical computer glitch (like why Vista won't put my screen to sleep or wake it up).
• Figuring out how to do more than 3 jumps in a row on a pogo stick.

Photo by Ralph Carter. Used with permission.

I used these examples because they reflect different types of learning as described by Smith. All were things I wanted to learn. For me that's key, but it reminds me that students might be learning about something that they don't find so compelling!

What is pecha kucha?

Last week I did a professional development presentation at work in pecha kucha format. What, you're asking, is pecha kucha? It's a challenge - 20 PowerPoint slides, 20 seconds each, no bullet points. The point of pecha kucha (Japanese for chit chat) is to present a big idea, in a highly visual format, and to do it efficiently. The parlour game version of PK is hitting cities everywhere - the last one in Vancouver sold out, to an audience of 1150 at the Vogue Theatre.  The next one in Vancouver - the 11th PK Night - will be held May 26 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Pecha kucha started in Tokyo in 2003 - it was created by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architects. While it was developed for people working in architecture and design, PK is a format that has endless potential. Here's an example from youtube showing you how PK works in a presentation on signs:


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My PK was on online learning - specifically, on the intro post in Moodle. I used some of the great ideas presented in an online seminar called Pimp Your Post - Jazzing up Introductory Posts in Online Courses moderated by our own Tracy Roberts - thanks Tracy! I showed 20 images that symbolized WHY the instructor's intro post is important and some options for HOW to make the intro post personal, informative and visual. The images are paired with narrative - the story behind the images is as important as the visual punch. There's no stopping for questions until the end - and the slides are set to move every 20 seconds so you have to be well-prepared and rehearsed. My favourite image from my PK is this one:

Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license to stringberd

Now a challenge for you - what point was I making about WHY the instructor should make his or her online intro first, before inviting the students to dive in? What does this image represent to you?

Time . . . monkeys . . . distraction . . . the web

I liked what Julia had to say about the affordances of online learning for deep reflection - having the time to ponder what we're learning about and then responding creates the potential for deep processing. One of the ironies, of course, is that the technology that allows us the luxury of this slow, measured responding (in contrast to the immediate demands of f2f classroom learning) is also a technology that can encourage monkey brain - a term for the cognitive restlessness that results in your thoughts jumping from place to place like a monkey scrambling around in the forest without staying in one spot for more than a few seconds. One of the goals of meditation is to still the monkey mind. 


How does that relate to being online? We are connected to a multitude of places, people, and things simultaneously - how do you stem the flow of all that information that can lead you to monkey mind? Damon Young in today's BBC News Magazine calls ours the distraction society - but he argues that this is not caused by the technology, rather, our digital world aids and abets a natural tendency to seek novelty and reward. He claims that "at distraction's heart aren't silicon chips, but an unwillingness to confront very human issues: pain, boredom, anxiety. Distraction certainly has neurophysiological underpinnings - physical bottlenecks of sense, response and cognition. But these often work because we allow ourselves to be managed by machines' rhythms and logic." 


Damon argues that recognizing and then finding strategies like time management to deal with the affordances of the online world is the key to reducing distraction and confusion.


Today's young learners are natives of the distraction society. How does this affect how they learn? How might this change how we teach?

Using rubrics in online discussion

My online teaching practices have evolved over the past few years as I have learned, mostly by trial and error, what was more or less successful. One area that has changed quite a lot has been online discussions - how they're structured, what kind of feedback I give, and what I hope students will learn. I've realized that a fair amount of structure helps everyone - it clarifies for me what the learning objectives are and how they should be met and graded, and it gives the students a concrete starting place that they can divert from once they understand what the topic is (and I've learned that understanding the topic is huge!).

I have my students engage in several online discussions in their intro psych class. Students work in groups of 5 to 7 students, and they stay in the same groups for several discussions in order to foster a feeling of community. This past semester, I created a rubric for online discussion to help students understand "how" to have an online discussion, and I match the rubric to the grading criteria. The rubric breaks down 5 components of online discussion into four levels: Exceeding Expectations, Meeting Expectations, Approaching Expectations and Not Yet Meeting Expectations. The 5 components are:

• Understanding - e.g., show understanding of the multiple sides of an issue
• Analysis - e.g., critical analysis using logic and evidence that increases the group's understanding
• Questions - e.g., posing questions that provoke group discussion
• Clarity - e.g., clear writing with few typos or grammatical errors
• Posts - e.g., 3 posts delivered on 3 separate occasions before the deadline

The rubric and associated grading criteria are available here - comments or suggestions are welcome.

I've returned to the rubric at different times over the semester and pointed students back towards it often. This is different to my initial foray into online teaching, when online discussions were largely unstructured and I failed to make my expectations explicit or concrete enough. Now the discussions show more critical and analytical thinking, and the writing has improved (far fewer typos for a start!). We also have more of a real discussion, rather than what I like to call "post and run" :-). Still, while increasing the quality overall, the discussions have showed enormous range - from perfunctory and mundane to amazingly insightful and analytical.

I want to learn more about structuring the discussion to elicit those thoughtful and analytical posts that provoke reflection and discussion. And I need to work on drawing in the more reluctant participants. Some of them lose a lot of marks because they don't engage in all (or indeed, most!) of the discussions. I'm not sure what's going on for them, but it's something I need to work on. And when and where should the instructor chime in?

Lots to keep working on . . .