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Buzzwords Are Stifling Innovation In College Teaching
jyosim writes: Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of 'adaptive learning' and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. On the other side of it, professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says the buzzwords have thus become a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together.
Here's a buzzword with no common meaning: Online classes.
Does it mean:
The class meets in a traditional classroom, but assignments are submitted electronically?
There is no class meeting? Only assignments are posted online. There is no lecture and students work independently?
The class meets online in realtime?
Only a recording of the classroom lecture is available online?
FWIW, I am a community college prof and have seen ALL of the above describe "online" learning.
This faculty comment pretty much sums it up:
"Curiosity, imagination and critical understanding are reduced to rodent responses in an academic Skinner-box."
Sadly, this might acually be better than sitting in a 300-student lecture taught by an adjunct.
It's not something that just "capitalists" do; spinning and BS are part of every known organization. We saw it in the Soviet Union also. Humans, especially those who strive to move up in an organization or power structure, are overall aggressive and selfish, and playing games with language is part of this process.
Even if students don't want to play language games themselves, they should be exposed to spin and understand its usage and techniques in order to navigate the real world.
Table-ized A.I.
The problems occur when you use those specific terms with NON-insiders.
A doctor should simply say arm bone, or at least "ulna - a bone in your arm", when talking to a patient.
Similarly, a competent businessman will strip out the specialized terms when talking to specific people. If you are selling software to a business, do NOT say 'enterprise', say business.
The only reason insiders use insider terms with outsiders are:
To hide something - a lie, incompetence, overcharges, etc.
Because they themselves don't understand the term and are reading from a script.
They are REALLY BAD AT COMMUNICATING.
For example, When I talk to my father, I don't talk about object oriented programming, I talk about re-useable software parts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
How can you maximize the advantages of outcome-based education, without standardized linguistics targeted to areas of core competencies? Hiring managers have expressed interest in consensus oriented, business ready, net native, grey hats, who speak in code and collaborate in dynamic non-traditional employment. To breed a culture of millenial code beasts, we must reach into their social sphere, and peer coach them with best practices.
There's always a lot of buzz about tailoring learning to each individual and a lot of the literature suggests that it isn't terribly effective in that while students might enjoy the lesson more, but they won't actually learn more. What I'm more worried about is that if you don't expose students to other ways of processing information and learning that they'll become unwilling to try acquiring any knowledge that can't be presented to them exactly as they would like it.
Instead, we should be teaching students how they can more effectively process information provided to them even when it's not in their preferred style. Otherwise they'll eventually end up in the real world and be unequipped to handle things as they find themselves in an environment that doesn't really give a damn about what they prefer and isn't going to waste time coddling them.
I'm more worried about stifling the students and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at various learning environments or other projects that don't actually improve education when they money could be spent on hiring more instructors or tutors so that they can have more one-on-one time with students or provide additional instruction as necessary.
Marketing terms, not substantiated by evidence, used by corporations and entities advancing their own agenda (profits), trying to control the conversation about education (again, without evidence).
This is self serving corporations either selling a product, or trying to control the direction of education for their own ends.
This has nothing to do with "teaching" or "education" or anything which is founded in evidence.
Which means you should treat this for what it actually is: marketing puffery by people who stand to gain something.
This is about as nuanced and insightful as when HR wants a checkbox of tech terms they don't understand, and it gets used to say "anybody with this checkbox can do this job". It's to allow incompetent people to manage task-based workers with no understanding of the task.
Which is great if what you really want is cheap, outsourced labor instead of an actual educated workforce.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Not just higher education. There are a lot of complex problem domains out there and simple buzzword-answers don't model the situation well enough to be useful. That being said, there is a strong human desire for simple solutions. Hence you can always find somebody in management who will believe the sales pitch. It's always somebody in management not necessarily because they are mentally inferior but because they aren't dealing directly enough with the underlying problems and, therefore, aren't constantly reminded of the complexity in the same way as those engaging in active contribution.
I don't know anything about technology, but you sound you deserve a job here.
Looking forward to paying you a ridiculous salary,
- Silicon Valley HR Department
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
How can you maximize the advantages of outcome-based education, without standardized linguistics targeted to areas of core competencies? Hiring managers have expressed interest in consensus oriented, business ready, net native, grey hats, who speak in code and collaborate in dynamic non-traditional employment. To breed a culture of millenial code beasts, we must reach into their social sphere, and peer coach them with best practices.
Your theory is obviously complete bullshit. You don't even have any synergy.
is that "these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together". Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of ed-tech innovations are half-baked me-too schemes with no proven impact on knowledge transfer. The few systems that have serious thought and input from educators behind them can spread by word of mouth. Teaching is enjoyable but hard work and relatively expensive to provide at a high level of qualilty. Too bad.
Well, we'll just have to be pro-active and leverage our synergies.
Fine then, let's *party*
How can you *become* *happy campers* in *pleasant combinations*, without a *picnic* *together*? *silly cows* want *sauce* in *Pretty Space* from *sisters*, who *spread the wax*, are *squishy*, *surprising toys*, *take* *together* in *slippery places*. To *pull* *people energy* of *happy campers*, we must *slide* to *slow time* and *spit* *special things*.
I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
That's silly. You can download Hadoop. Scala is a programming language; it has to be precisely specified otherwise it couldn't be compiled. The wavelet transform is an equation (with lots of related proofs) that you can write down. These things are all proper nouns.
Can you direct me to the technical specification or provide the equation for "actualization of a tribe's core concepts?"
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.