Accidental Pedagogy

When bar charts go bad

Presentation Zen has a nice post about a really awful chart that deserves entry into the Bar Chart Hall of Shame. The comments point out all the ways the chart is bad. But see for yourself.

 

The posting alerted me to the presence of a cool blog I hadnt known about, Junk Charts.

Critique of Marc Prensky and digital nativism

My friend Alan Wolf sent me a link to an article by Jaime McKenzie in From Now On that makes a pretty searing critique of Marc Prensky and the way that his concept of digital nativism has been picked up by many of those writing about the differences between young and old in how they respond to and use technology.

Critiques of Prensky are way overdue. At a conference I attended Marc Prensky was introduced to a friend of mine who is a wonderfully insightful, productive (and I might add technologically hip) professor of instructional design. On being introduced the first comment out of his mouth was that she was "one of the fun suckers." Arguably his comment was teasing and intended as a joke but it always struck me that a lot of what he writes about is produced in the same sort of way. A shoot from the hip stereotyping based on a very superficial understanding.

Jaime McKenzie's article starts to demonstrate exactly how that is the case. His critique focuses on the thinly supported claims made by Prensky (that what we're seeing is a radical discontinuity) and the poor quality of the citations that Prensky does use to support his assertions. Mckenzie also shows how actual empirical evidence out there contradicts much of what Prensky is arguing.

But go read the article.

My one criticism of the piece is that it starts off strong and ends weakly and Mckenzie allows himself to engage in a little bit of techno-bashing that starts to sound a little like the somewhat hysterical critiques of technology use by the young that we read in convention media eg "Those who substitute FaceBook for face-to-face communities suffer many of the consequences....

We should not substitute one form of stereotyping for another.

On a side note Prensky's misuse of cites is clearly not that uncommon also among real academics.  In today's Inside Higher Education there is an article about some research done that shows that roughly 30% of citations are incorrectly cited or misrepresent the findings.

Journals, scholarship, sponsorship and product placement

Like Graham Attwell I was given pause by the contents of an email in my inbox today. The online journal Innovate has a new sponsor, Microsoft. As part of this they will be doing the following sorts of activities.

The email made the following announcement, emphases mine.

The sponsorship program affords technology providers the opportunity to partner with Innovate to help 
spread the word about creative new uses of technology that will enhance educational effectiveness. In 
concert with this effort, we are offering sponsors a voice on our Web site via a new section, "From Our 
Sponsors." As described in the "About this Journal" link, we will publish articles in this section that focus 
on (1) how educators use our sponsors’ products to enhance teaching, learning, and administration, (2)
the services our sponsors have provided or intend to provide to enhance educational effectiveness, and 
(3) how our sponsors view the future of education and the role information technology tools will play in 
addressing educational problems and issues. These articles will meet Innovate’s high editorial standards
they will be rigorously reviewed and edited to enhance their value to the global community.

As part of the sponsorship arrangement with Microsoft, we invite you to submit manuscripts describing 
uses of Microsoft technology (e.g., Office, SharePoint, WL@EDU) that enhance, extend, or in some cases 
replace traditional pedagogical or research methods. 

I am always uncomfortable about scholarly or applied research articles or reports that use brand names or focus on specific, proprietary products. In academic technology we frequently cant help but write about specific technologies but the siren call of the vendor is one that I think we must resist. I think it's hard enough to really question technology and ask tough questions about its impact and how its used in our research without there being a sponsor like relationship there, operating even in a subtle and unobtrusive way.

But maybe I am guilty of double standards here. I believe that Apple has something of a history of doing some similar sorts of things and they have given me way less pause (and I am not a Mac user). And one could argue that so long as they have rigorous peer review standards and procedures things should be ok. Plus we need to find ways to fund these sorts of journals.

I guess part of my concern stems from the fact that I am just not that interested in reading articles about how to use Word, or SharePoint. I fear that apart from any pandering or distortion of the integrity of the process if you're trying specifically to write about a specific product from a particular vendor the questions that you're going to ask are going to be dull. I guess we will have to wait and see how it turns out.

Nice Connotea collection on teaching and learning

My friend Alan Wolf sent me this link to a great collection in the academically focussed social bookmarking site Connotea on threshold concepts. It is a pretty handy source for anyone interested in pedagogy, teaching and learning.

How to Write Consistently Boring Academic Technology Articles

I got a link from Alan Wolf to an article giving advice about how to write consistently boring scientific literature. The author advises that you follow ten simple steps to guarantee a vibrant publication record and career success. At the very least you will likely avoid reviewers making statements such as "I was alarmed that the authors believed this to be a final draft" or "although purporting to be about Subject X, I feel like this article is a subtle and indirect criticism of my pet Project Y, which is Beyond Reproach and against which I can brook no criticism so I will grind this article into the dust and make it disappear into the void." Not that I have ever received comments like that, but maybe the uninformed members of the hoi polloi amongst you have.

The advice is the following:
1. Avoid focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Write l  o  n  g   contributions
4. Remove most implications and every speculation
5. Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use many abbreviations and technical terms
8. Suppress humor and flowery language
9. Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
10. Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements

Many of these obviously transfer directly to writing about academic technology so we can immediately put them into practice and go forth writing more unfocused, non-original and logic-leaping screeds. But in the spirit of the exercise, I feel obliged to write my own Top 10 list (why be original, repeat!). And besides there are some ways in which we in academic technology are peculiar unto ourselves. Here goes

Top 10 Ways to Write Boring Academic Technology Articles

1. Write only about the hot topics of the moment. Right now you have to write about MMOGs or gaming. Even if you don't know and have nothing new to say about either.
2. Write only in a breathless sort of style.
3. Use the word neo-millenial as often as you possibly can.
4. Write from the first-person perspective of an undergraduate student at an R1 university in the US. then extrapolate madly from that in the final section to cover all students at all universities, everywhere.
5. Bury the fact that your study was based on a small n of interviews and a survey with 4 faculty members deep in a footnote late in the article. Certainly don't mention that in the title, the introduction or your discussion of the limitations of your study.
6. Wherever possible write about studies you did where you compared learning in one class with learning in another class. The classes were taught by the same professor who loved using a particular technology in the one class and hated not using it in another.
7. Frequently make statements about how faculty are bad at using technology which enrages students who are all neo-millenial tech savvy neo-millenials.
8. Use brand names when talking about technologies. That is not a course management system that you're analyzing, its Blackboard!
9. If you must insist on writing a solid, engaging article, preferably try to publish it in a venue where they will print your 15 pages of text over 75 advertisement interspersed pages such that any reasonable reader needs to take Ritalin in order to get through it.
10. The more obscure and irrelevant the little aphorism at the top of each section the better.
11. Write excruciatingly detailed reports for example about how faculty use course management systems.

Be sure to read Scott Leslie today

He has some interesting posts up.

1. On the new New Media Center's Horizon Report. I haven't had a thorough read yet myself and I maybe will post more when I have. But I agree with Scott that maybe the more staid approach taken this year is more closely reflective of the reality of most colleges and universities. It did take us a long time to catch on to those overhead projector thingies.

2. On a new paper by Margaret Lohman on course management systems. She looked at the effect that information distribution strategies had on student performance and satisfaction. She looked at the impact that distributing course materials in different ways had on how students performed on a test, their overall grade and ratings of satisfaction with the distribution method. Some students got the info in class, others via a CMS. While there were no sig differences in grades and satisfaction, the students who got the info in class did better on the tests. She argues that this may be because more conventional models of info distribution allow for the info to be presented in a more logical flowing manner. She found curious the fact that students did not seem to especially value the convenience of the CMS despite research that would have predicted otherwise.

I agree with Scott that it is a pity that this was such a small n experiment (52 students) and was done only with grad students. It would be interesting to try this out with larger numbers and with undergrads. One other small observation. It is possible that the fact that materials for one group were distributed in class meant that they came to class and benefited consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally from that resulting in higher test scores.

If the Lohman article is a taste of the quality of articles we can expect from the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning then I am impressed. And I look forward to more.

OCLC report on student perceptions of libraries

I just read the OCLC report on student perceptions of libraries that came out in December of last year. They used survey results from a poll done by the Harris organization of 3,348 youths  in the US, India, Canada, the UK, Singapore and Australia. Most respondents were in the US.

Some interesting bits.

• The report contains one of the less attractive lines I have seen in a long while. "Throughout the report the phrase "information consumer" is used, as it was in the 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan to refer to people who seek, ingest and sometimes purchase information" (p.xii). Yuk
• Their sample is maybe not as reflective of college students as we may like. Of the US sample, 621 were age 14-17,  403 were 18-24, 449 were age 25-64 and 381 were 65 and older. Seems like a much older sample than we might really want to see in such a study. Samples from the other countries were apparently too small to be broken down by age.
• The college students in the sample were much more likely to have visited a library and were more likely to say that their use of libraries was likely to increase. 89% said that their searches started with a search engine. This is likely to give some librarians heartburn but it seems like a realistic number and reflects faculty information seeking behavior. There's a quite amazing graph reflecting this on pg 1-7 of the report.
• But there is an interesting trade off. Students start with search engines which they see as easier and more convenient but they see the library as a better source of trusted information. And when they go to the library they prefer to interact with librarians rather than electronic sources of help.
• In general the report paints a somewhat different picture of college students use of libraries and information than some of the "millennial student" literature would suggest. They value libraries and are really concerned about information reliability etc.

On a final methodological note, it would have been really interesting to see the survey tool. I also wonder what they would have discovered if they had used a mix of methods eg observation and focus groups.

Does the Internet flatten academic hierarchies?

An interesting paper just out from three economics and finance researchers looks at the way that electronic communications technologies erode the advantages of top 25 departments in terms of research productivity. I havent read the whole paper yet (but it's available for $5 so I have ordered it) but they looked at research productivity (measured in journal publications) at the top 25 economics and finance departments in the US. Prior to the Internet there was a distinct advantage ito productivity to being at one of the top 25 departments. Now not so much.

They speculate that it is because communication among scholars is easier and more widespread and because things like databases etc can be shared and accessed remotely. It would be interesting to see if they considered whether the research expectations of some of the lower ranked departments had increased over that time and whether that explains some of the leveling out.

It's the conduit, stupid

An interesting post by George Siemens at elearnspace about knowledge behaviors and information literacy. The interesting point he makes about the way that a lot of discussions about information and knowledge management and learning management  make the concept of knowledge too corporeal. We cannot "trap" knowledge or learning into software systems though the way they frequently are spoken about almost implies that we can. Knowledge and learning exist only in transmission and practice.

What is important in these systems is facilitating exchange  and transmission.

Federal research Public Access Act introduced in Congress

Senators cornyn and Lieberman have introduced a bill, called the Federal Research Public Access Act. It in essence would require all federally funded research that gets published by peer reviewed journals to be made freely available in digital repositories within 6 months of publication.

The bill is being supported by the American Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association for Research Libraries (via SPARC) and others. It has the potential to make a big change in how journals operate and how libraries might increase access to scholarly communication in the face of continued budget crises.

Poeple would still submit articles to journals, a. because the RTP processes depend on it, b. to get the information sooner and c. to get the official pagination etc. But it will be interesting to see how those $20,000 a pop journals stand up to the pressure.