Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom

There is no by NEDHead · 2012-02-12 08:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

One best thing. Every subject taught, every student taught, every portion of each learning experience is different. To try and force one approach is to deny the variability of the participants and the subject matter. Passion is the only universal secret sauce.

Re:There is no by Darinbob · 2012-02-12 13:31 · Score: 2

If there actually was one best thing, I'd be willing to bet my entire savings that it was not social media related.

Wired magazine? by Threni · 2012-02-12 08:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

That's the yardstick of credibility these days? It's a piece of shit that just makes stuff up if the truth isn't exciting enough. Check out the Raspberry Pi site for more details.

Re:Wired magazine? by biohazard35 · 2012-02-12 10:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

For the people who don't want to find what he's talking about, here's the comment from Raspberry Pi about wired:

Ha – no, that was something else entirely. Wired asked us to give them a copy of our BOM. We told them we couldn’t do that because it’d land us in hot water with our suppliers (particularly Hynix and Broadcom); if their other customers were to use our BOM to demand similar pricing, we’d be in trouble. So instead, they *made up* a BOM (which was gratuitously wrong). They told us they were doing this, and we asked them not to; saying we’d be happier for no article to appear at all. They published it anyway. Our suppliers started getting calls from their other customers, as predicted; we had a lot of apologising to do. Slightly less serious, but still damned annoying: Wired also demanded pictures of a cased version of the final board. This was well before Christmas, at which point we didn’t *have* any beta or final boards, still less any cased ones (the cases are being finished after the board themselves are finished at the end of this month). They didn’t take no for an answer, and kept asking, and asking, and askingand then photoshopped a case onto an alpha board (wrong size, wrong proportions) for their magazine. Which is misleading, but it’s nothing like as damaging as their efforts with the BOM were. Needless to say, they’re off the list for press samples, and they’re not getting any more interviews either (they ran Rob ragged in preparation for this, then never used any of the material they’d got from him). Wired seem to believe they’re still as relevant as they were in 1998. Luckily for us, they’re not; we’ve interacted with hundreds of journalists over the last six months or so, and not a single one of them has been as hard to work with as Wired were.
Re:Wired magazine? by stephanruby · 2012-02-12 11:03 · Score: 2

Here is the comment from Liz for anyone else wondering where it was:
(by the way, BOM means Bill of Materials)

Ha – no, that was something else entirely. Wired asked us to give them a copy of our BOM. We told them we couldn’t do that because it’d land us in hot water with our suppliers (particularly Hynix and Broadcom); if their other customers were to use our BOM to demand similar pricing, we’d be in trouble. So instead, they *made up* a BOM (which was gratuitously wrong). They told us they were doing this, and we asked them not to; saying we’d be happier for no article to appear at all. They published it anyway. Our suppliers started getting calls from their other customers, as predicted; we had a lot of apologising to do.
Slightly less serious, but still damned annoying: Wired also demanded pictures of a cased version of the final board. This was well before Christmas, at which point we didn’t *have* any beta or final boards, still less any cased ones (the cases are being finished after the board themselves are finished at the end of this month). They didn’t take no for an answer, and kept asking, and asking, and askingand then photoshopped a case onto an alpha board (wrong size, wrong proportions) for their magazine. Which is misleading, but it’s nothing like as damaging as their efforts with the BOM were.
Needless to say, they’re off the list for press samples, and they’re not getting any more interviews either (they ran Rob ragged in preparation for this, then never used any of the material they’d got from him). Wired seem to believe they’re still as relevant as they were in 1998. Luckily for us, they’re not; we’ve interacted with hundreds of journalists over the last six months or so, and not a single one of them has been as hard to work with as Wired were.
Re:Wired magazine? by bigstrat2003 · 2012-02-12 11:12 · Score: 2

The summary was taken practically verbatim from the first paragraph of the article. Slashdot has nothing to do with that reference. I didn't say you commented on the wrong story, but this has absolutely nothing to do with Wired beyond your having dragged Wired into the discussion.

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"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard

Is the lecture best after all? by owlnation · 2012-02-12 08:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.

Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.

How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.

Leave face time for labs and tutorials, forget lectures -- they are a relic of the middle-ages, along with the need to have term and vacation times that match the harvests.

I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)

Re: Is the lecture best after all? by icebike · 2012-02-12 09:02 · Score: 3, Funny

How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.
Probably at least the male students are in fact more concerned with twat questions, and have very little time in which they are fully ready to concentrate.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Re: Is the lecture best after all? by Sir_Sri · 2012-02-12 09:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

The short answer is that while it's true students may be half asleep, left to do the work entirely on their own, most of them don't. Or at least not until it's too late. Even if the students only half pay attention, they are adding their own notes to the lectures, augmenting their copy of the powerpoint with what you say (fill in the blank power points work remarkably well, where the student fills in the answers during the lecture), but when it comes time to study the notes they're relearning the material, not learning from scratch.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that in a profession that is ~40% about your ability to lecture, you'd have a bunch of people who are good at giving lectures that students understand and find engaging. And those same people trying to completely change what they do doesn't always work. This guy, who is essentially researching experiments in teaching may be good at it because first, he's tried a few beginning steps and knows how to use that to control the classroom, even if he didn't realize it was important. Students might also like it because of the novelty of 'lets try this' or because what he did maps particularly well to the problem he's trying to solve. But trying to use twitter in a classroom needs to map to a particular problem you're trying to solve, trying to do ODE's where everyone starts tweeting about which DE they are isn't going to actually teach you anything about solving DE's. Tutorial exist to reinforce what is in lectures, not to replace them. Sometimes (especially in first year) there isn't much difference, because a lot of the lectures are just an effort to make sure everyone has the same background, since every province, state, country etc. are different.
The era of 'chalk' is mostly gone, but where it served a purpose it still does. If you're doing math, explaining what you're writing, why you're writing it, in a slow deliberate fashion is conveying that information.
Keep in mind that a large part of what universities are is accreditation bodies and places of research. The people who teach need to actually do this stuff on a day to day basis, and take time out from that to teach it. You need to make sure that everyone with a degree in CS, or who has taken 3rd year programming languages has gotten a particular experience. Sure, you can spend 36 hours watching lectures from some other universities, but how do you know what from that is important (no assignments after all), how do you demonstrate that you learned it? On your own trying to solve real problems you need to know what you're trying to use to solve a problem. It's been a while since I took programming languages, but I know what a logic language is enough to know if I have a problem to solve that might use it. A physicist may have vaguely heard something about what logic languages are, but has no actual sense of how to use a logic language to solve a problem (this sort of thing happens a lot to physicists because they're expected to be programmers, but then they get almost no formal training in CS, and so they don't know languages or algorithms or automated software testing well, all of which would be super handy). Yes, you *can* learn all of these things on your own, from wikipedia or from some videos, but you need to know what you're looking for. The great strength of wikipedia is that it immediately connects you to connected information, which also lets you get easily distracted. I'm not sure about the US, but at least in canada, our graduation rates and times are carefully monitored. If you aren't getting kids out the door in whatever average, I think it's about 4.5 years for 4 year programme, they start doing extra reviews of what you're up to and so on, and, eventually, if you can't reasonably get people completed on time, you can't take on students and your programme disappears. That's rare, because there are a lot of things you can do to fix it, and there's some fairly complicated analysis that goes into determining how a programme is doing.
Being able to pause a
Re: Is the lecture best after all? by pz · 2012-02-12 09:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.
So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.
Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session ... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.

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Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Re: Is the lecture best after all? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-12 10:15 · Score: 2, Insightful

Let's put it in engineer terms. Lectures have a feedback loop. I'm goign through a professional class rihgt now,with a bunch of New Guys. I was transfered laterally into the job, have blown through the online courses and not learned a damn thing about it. That was a waste of 80 syllabus hours, and about 15 clickthing through and grep'ing the test answers.
However, without me verbalizing anything in class, I'm learning the same material. Probably, some of it is prior exposure. However, motivation it ain't. I already bitched aobut hte online classes and mya ss is going to get fired if I figure that shit out. The big difference, though, is the feedback loop. With 25 in the class, the lecturer can see the "what the fuck" look on people's faces. Not so much with a video camera. Yes, they do that. Good lecturers do it in a hall of 100. Shitty ones fail when lecturing one on one. But, youtube will fail every single fucking time.
Re: Is the lecture best after all? by ceoyoyo · 2012-02-12 10:24 · Score: 2

Do you actually teach? Most lectures are at least somewhat interactive. The lecturer takes cues from the audience and the audience can usually ask questions. You lose all that watching a video.
If the lecturer is poor, a video of that lecture is also going to be poor. But very few lecturers are actually so poor that they completely miss all cues from their audience.
A lot of the gimmicks people have thought up to replace or liven up lectures really do need to be thought out. Things like clickers - I've found all they do is give the lecturer and the audience an excuse not to actually participate out loud. Twitter in the classroom sounds like it has even less rational thought behind it.
Re: Is the lecture best after all? by Half-pint+HAL · 2012-02-12 10:27 · Score: 2

I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.
Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.
How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.
The real problem here is that teaching manuals are inadequate, and teacher training courses are in adequate. I've done a 4-week course in teaching English to foreigners, and what I noticed was that everything taught to me was superficial. I was told about various types of teaching techniques, methods, and tasks. I was told how to deliver and present them, but never was it explained to me why I should use a technique -- how to choose one. Never was I taught how to build a task from the ground up so that it was focused and coherent. All I was taught to do was commit arbitrary tasks to paper and get on with it.
But this wasn't just this course. I went through loads of books trying to find the information that was missing from my course. I went through all the standard textbooks for teachers, and it wasn't there. My father was a teacher, and in all his CPD it was missing too.
So this guys advice will be lacking in the same way. It won't tell you how to build the material meaningfully; it won't tell you when to do what -- all it will give you is a rough description of the shape of the tasks he does.
Now I believe face-to-face lectures still have one advantage that nothing else can replace: spontaneous and semi-spontaneous talk is messy, and as soon as you try to commit something to video, to paper, or to an on-line description, you eliminate that mess. But often that messiness serves a genuine pedagogical purpose. On the simplest level, it slows the language down, and gives the listener more time to process the content (which is new to the listener, remember). More subtely, it also helps the lecturer create a better structure in the students' minds to understand what's going on.
Here's a completely made-up example using false anatomy.
The book version
As can be seen in fig. 12, the whombombic nerve splits into the tremblific nerve and the gronoral nerve at the whombobic plexus. A trapped tremblific nerve can cause discomfort after periods of inactivity.
The lecture version
Have a look at this slide. You see here...? [waves pointer in a circle] Just there, above the... the area here, called the whombombic plexus, there's a nerve bundle, and it branches. The right branch goes down to the gronorus, so it calls.. erm we call we call it the gronoral nerve. The left branch heads off along the tremblus, and it's called the tremblific nerve. You might not know anything about the tremblific nerve, but have you ever had shooting pains down your left side when you've been lying in place too long? There's a good chance that's your tremblific.

I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)
If this were true, then the lecture would only now be in use in the USA, because in much of the rest of the world, universities make their money from research grants and tuition is cappe

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Re: Is the lecture best after all? by tophermeyer · 2012-02-12 10:54 · Score: 2

I know exactly what you are talking about, and I've seen it a lot. Teachers in academia (especially research universities) often don't receive a great deal of training in adult education. The stereotype is that they are specialists in their field first, and educators second. Some decent educators do emerge, but not often. Teaching universities are better at this, but
Compare this to the training that most youth educators receive and it seems silly. Especially when you consider that transition that young adults go through from High School to college. Even trainers in corporate environment typically have a stronger adult education background than professors.

They need to flip their paradigm 180... by hsthompson69 · 2012-02-12 08:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

...have kids watch taped lectures at home, and come to the classroom to do problems and ask questions of the professor in person. Make "homework" "classwork", and make lectures "homework".

Re:They need to flip their paradigm 180... by hsthompson69 · 2012-02-12 12:09 · Score: 2

So pretend for a moment 90% of the kids don't watch the lectures at all. The show up to the first "classwork" session, have obviously not seen the lecture, and the professor kindly informs them that they've just failed the class, please come back next semester.
If you want *everything* done in the classroom, I think you're arguing for military boarding schools where students are given no choice but to actually perform under the strict supervision of superiors.
I'll argue the other way, and assert that what is necessary is both freedom, but also personal responsibility. If 90% of the kids don't watch the lectures, then they get to fail the class. Period. Done.
Re:They need to flip their paradigm 180... by hsthompson69 · 2012-02-12 12:13 · Score: 2

I watched a few of them before signing up for the class, and I couldn't stand it -- I couldn't focus my attention on them, and sometimes even started nodding off.
Did you ever nod off in class?

the lectures really were irreplaceable and at least half the material was new every year.

What kind of class was it that required new material every year? iOS programming?

God, even just writing that reminds me of the intense boredom of watching educational videos (and yes, I've seen Khan Academy).
I'm not sure if I understand the difference between intense boredom in a lecture hall filled with 500 kids, or intense boredom watching the same lecture in my pajamas at 2am.
Perhaps what we need is only the best of the best to create captivating lectures that will overcome your intense boredom, and then have your average joe educator in person help you through actually doing problems and exercises.

Re:Wow a TED presenter by NEDHead · 2012-02-12 09:14 · Score: 2

Simple. He engaged the audience and convinced them that a fun group project would be to create additional slides to fill in the blanks.

More like... by blahplusplus · 2012-02-12 09:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

... rethinking student selection. My god, there are too many people going to school who are not scholastically inclined nor have the work ethic. We instead of created a culture of stupidity and status seeking based on false promises of what can be expected out of an 'education'.

Call Me Old School... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-12 09:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

...but I have found lectures to work out better than anything else. I'm a former tech professional now teaching in the humanities, so my lack of interest in social media classrooms has nothing to do with either closed-minded-ness or lack of aptitude with technology. Lectures just tend to work better for me and for every other professor I know. It's not always clear what's going to be grasped quickly, what's going to need more explanation, or even what side issue will grab the attention of the class. Every class is different; only a competent lecturer can adapt to the individual needs of the class. A video can't decide to skip over the point that everyone seems to have grasped more quickly than anticipated but spend more time on the issue that - unexpectedly - proved quite difficult. A video can't engage members of the class directly.

It's important not to confuse the attributes of a badly delivered lecture (and there are many) with the attributes of lecturing as such.

Teacher quality NOT technology by khb · 2012-02-12 10:11 · Score: 2

Why is anyone surprised that the quality of the teacher and not the technique is really the high order bit? A great teacher inspires. A good teacher facilitates. Mediocre or worse teachers bore.

Bored students do poorly.

Re:lack of a a sense of purpose cover other parts by VortexCortex · 2012-02-12 13:08 · Score: 2

lack of a a sense
between professor and student." They
They also have professor who are / have done more real would work
they have more then just book skills to teach off of.
Also stuff like loads filler classes
and a over load
Now days what is the purpose of not having lot's night / class times that fit in to people who work full time / day jobs. [?]
4 years + plans why can't college
so you can say take 1-2 years in the class room maybe
with on going ongoing education
Why forced high cost meal plans? I have head of people buying
Forced room and board now that does data back to the past but now days you can rent own you own for less (for better / newer rooms) and find room mates and save even more.

I was going to rate you "funny" for all the irony.
Looks like we should re-examine our elementary & high schools as well... This is truly a 'cry for help' if I've ever seen one.

Rethinking the classroom by loufoque · 2012-02-12 13:24 · Score: 2

Stop rethinking the classroom every other day.
All "classroom rethinkers" ever propose is distracting kids with useless technology.

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Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom

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