If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
They can give 0% back if they don't redistribute. If they're redistributing, then they're in the software business, so why in the world do they expect to be entitled to other people's software?
This is incorrect. There is nothing thermodynamically special about life. The second law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. When there's an input of energy (e.g., sunlight hitting a field of grass), you don't have a closed system. By your definition, a refrigerator is alive.
Since TFA is slashdotted, I'm just responding to what I could glean from the/. summary.
The two most popular ebook formats (epub and mobi/azw) are both basically just a collection of html and css files put together into a zip file. The html is extremely limited. For example, in kindle (azw) format, all images are displayed in the center of the page. So, for example, if you want to put an equation rendered as a bitmap embedded in a paragraph of text, you basically can't do it. In most cases, you cannot use javascript. Creating an ebook is also exactly like writing html for the web in that you have to make it work on any device. For instance, a Kindle 2's screen is 260x311 and a Kindle DX is 372x511. You cannot embed fonts and know that it will work on all devices. (E.g., epub 2 allows fonts to be embedded using CSS2 @font-face rule, but the spec doesn't require devices to support it, and many don't.) The CPU on these things is designed for low power consumption, not for heavy processing.
So, given these resources, there really isn't much that you can do creatively in designing an ebook. If it's a novel, it's pretty much going to look like all other novels. It's in a font that the hardware vendor optimized for legibility on that device.
It's true that the formats are becoming more sophisticated. For example, epub 3 (which is not yet supported by any devices), includes mathml, which will allow math and science textbooks to be made into ebooks for the first time. Javascripts is coming.
But be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Are we really looking forward to reading Wuthering Heights formatted beautifully by a professional designed -- for a screen that's narrower than the one on our own device? How about opening a book and finding that the title of contents is an image, forcing you to guess where to click in order to start reading? How about animations that you can't skip? How about CPU-intensive features that freeze up your device for 30 seconds? What about fonts that looked great on the designer's device, but that look absolutely horrible on ours?
And there are going to be compatibility nightmares that will make the browser wars look like a child's tea party. For example, epub 3 includes mathml, but it doesn't say that devices must support mathml, it just says that they can. So publishers will be selling one version of a calculus textbook for the Nook 17xi (which supports mathml), but a different version for the Nook 16lx (which doesn't) -- and of course an eyeball-bleeding epub 2 version for "legacy" devices, like that Nook 14 that you bought way back in 2014. Oh, you switched to an iPad? Cool, but you find out that the epub 3+mathml version of the book that you bought for your Nook doesn't work on your iPad, because Apple hasn't gotten around to implementing mathml. But you can buy an iPad version instead, only $187!
I just turned 46, and this is definitely true. I remember that we invaded Iraq, and I'm sure there must have been valid reasons for that, but I can't remember them. I clearly remember voting for Obama because he was a constitutional law professor who promised to restore civil liberties and the rule of law, but I can't remember anything he did to follow up on that. I seem to remember intentionally flying from SF to NY in 1986 without any form of ID, but obviously that can't be right, because if people had been able to do that for all those years, our country would have been immediately destroyed by terrorists.
Check out Connexions. They have a model where individuals with expertise create small modules, and then people can combine those to create larger works.
You can have digital books AND PRINT THEM OUT for those who need them.
That's what Schwarzenegger proposed when he was trying to get something similar going for K-12 in California. Turns out that this is illegal under current state law. A junior high school can pay $80 for a commercially printed textbook, but they're forbidden by state law from going to Kinko's and paying $10 to print out a free digital textbook. The regulation at the K-12 level is simply nuts. The ed code is so long that nobody has actually read the whole thing. Tons of stuff that should be in the ed code is embedded in the state constitution.
You don't, as it happens. It's a very similar business model to records, in many ways. There's vast costs that the general public not only doesn't see, they're barely aware even exist - things like proofreading, editing, marketing - over and above the basic print and distribute bits that we all know about. (Free clue: A lot of books on the market today would be borderline unreadable without massive editing and proofreading effort.)
There is some truth to this, but the reality is more complex.
One thing to realize is that the cost of textbooks has risen dramatically over the last few decades. The increases are much too large to be explained by factors like the higher cost of paper or the increased prevalence of color. College textbook prices went up 98% after inflation from 1986 to 2004. This is not because publishers are paying twice as many acquisitions editors, twice as many copy editors, twice as many illustrators, or twice as many graphic designers to produce the same number of books. It's simply because publishers are harvesting more revenue.
There are also many books for which the publisher's contribution is virtually nil. This is the case for many graduate-level texts in math and science, for example. The author writes the book in LaTeX, produces a PDF file, and it basically goes straight to production with little more than a quick copyedit from a freelancer.
Another recent change is that print on demand production is getting more and more competitive with traditional printing. It used to be that when a publisher printed 10,000 copies of a book and sold only 7,000, a manager would get in trouble for coming so close to underestimating demand. The cost of production was virtually all setup cost; very little was the incremental cost of printing one more book. Nowadays it's totally different. If your initial run ends up not being enough copies to satisfy demand, you fill in the gap with POD. What this does is to take a huge amount of the risk out of the proposition for the publisher. By all rights, this improvement in efficiency and reduction in risk should have led to lower textbook prices, not higher ones.
Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.)
I teach physics, not math, but here are some existing math books that I consider to be of pretty high quality:
The lack of color in the printed versions of free books is never going to change. The cost of producing a book in color is high enough that no significant number of students will ever choose it voluntarily over a free digital book. This may become less relevant as more and more students start carrying a tablet or a laptop in their backpacks.
Proofreading, error checking, and increasing the number of exercises are all things that could definitely benefit from a wider collaborative effort, and I don't think they require government funding as proposed by Steinberg. E.g., my own physics texts are free, and I've benefited a lot over the years from having people send me emails pointing out errors. I do have a few exercises from other people's physics books that are under compatible licenses, but not very many.
High quality art would definitely be a huge plus for free textbooks. My wife paid a couple of people to do art for her free French textbook, but in general, illustrations are an area where government funding really might make a huge difference.
My proposal is more like if the engineers had to be responsible for 30, 35, 40 projects (students) at once, and the materials they have to work with are enough steel & rivets & cable for 25 bridges, plus some 2x4s, twine, and some... bananas (being the troubled students).
You make a good point. Some points to consider:
(1) The lower grades are very different from the higher grades. An 18-year-old high school student who can't read, or who slaps his teacher, is indeed like the banana in your analogy. But in kindergarten, there basically are no "bananas." Kids are mentally plastic at that age, they're too little to be juvenile delinquents, and although some may have had more exposure to books than others, they are more or less blank slates educationally.
(2) An engineer who is presented with steel that isn't up to spec can reject the steel. Educators do have something similar they can do: they can fail a student. Whether they really will have the backbone to do so, and how society will treat them if they do, gets back to the same issue, which is that we need to treat K-12 teachers more like professionals who are expected to make high-stakes decisions.
(3) The quality of the students coming in at the beginning of the school year is a variable that you can control for. Newspapers in my area have started tabulating "value added" data on teachers, where they look at how much students *gained* over the course of the school year in a particular teacher's class. They've found that some teachers have much higher gains than others. It's been suggested that teachers ought to be evaluated based on this, maybe given merit pay, etc. Guess how teachers' unions feel about that?
I'm a dues-paying, card-carrying member of a teachers' union (at a community college), but I can't help feeling that this is the kind of thing that teachers' unions in the US have brought upon themselves.
What should happen is that K-12 teachers should be professionals, and they should be treated just like other professionals, such as doctors and engineers. When is the last time you heard an engineer claiming that although his bridge fell down, he shouldn't be held accountable? When's the last time you heard a premed saying that it was unreasonable to expect him to do well on the MCAT, because African-Americans do worse on it, on the average, than whites and Asians, thereby proving that the test is racist? Or a doctor whining that it was unreasonable to expect him to use MRI scanners, because he hasn't had the training?
What left the K-12 teaching profession vulnerable to political interference was its history of failing to hold itself to high professional standards. That opened the door to NCLB and a general tendency of politicians to try to tinker with things that ought to lie within teachers' own sphere of professional competence and discretion.
What the politicians in Idaho are doing is stupid, but that kind of incompetent tinkering is the natural result of K-12 teachers' unwillingness to act like professionals.
Hmmm...sounds like you're simply finding that you have to do your teaching within a system that's poorly designed. Why not fix the bad design?
I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowledge of a student in physics, by the way.
Are you talking about false positives, or false negatives?
In other words, suppose that class A has a very low average on the FCI, while B has a very high one.
I would maintain that the teacher of class A is incompetent, and is in denial if he won't admit that fact and try to change; the FCI is ridiculously basic, and any student who's at all competent should score very highly on it.
Or are you talking about class B? The evidence I've seen is that there basically aren't students who do well on the FCI but are bad at problem-solving. Is there some other area where you think class B might be weak?
As a professor, allow me to say "Ha ha ha!" Or, "Yes, that sounds great, but...." [...] Sadly, we're not allowed to treat students as responsible adults who will "get all the passive shit done at home." I wish we could.
As a professor, allow me to say, "Ha ha ha! I treat my students as responsible adults who will 'get all the passive shit done at home.'" Works for me. What's stopping you? Cynicism? You don't have tenure yet?
Interesting. What about students who don't own a cell phone, or who only have voice on their cell phone, not data? (Actually, I don't own a cell phone myself.)
Thanks for your post! I teach at a community college in California where the maximum class size is 25 anyway. (Lecture and lab are in the same room, with the same students and teacher.) I use mostly interactive engagement techniques, mixed with snippets of straight lectures, demos, etc. We don't use any techniques that require expensive AV stuff; what techniques that you use require that?
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago.
Does this mean that you've completely eliminated traditional labs? (IMO that would be a shame.)
Do you have any data on how students did on a test such as the FCI before and after the switch to the workshop method?
You descrive not being able to do certain things (e.g., "it's difficult to move away from the median student"). Are there constraints that force you to teach a certain way on a certain day? If you want to do something totally different on a given day, is there some reason why you can't?
You seem to be thinking that the method they're talking about involves replacing live lectures with canned videos of lectures. I can see how you might get that impression from the slashdot summary, but the actual article does a significantly better job of explaining what it's about. It's about replacing traditional lectures, where students sit passively and take notes, with classes where the students interact with each other and/or with the professor.
YOU WILL FEEL THEIR FAILURE
The teaching method described in the article isn't new (it dates back to 1996), and the empirical evidence is that it succeeds, whereas traditional lecturing fails.
The slashot summary isn't terribly accurate, and even if you violate the social norms of/. and click through to read the article, the article is pretty sketchy as well. We're already getting comments from people who think this is about substituting video lectures for live lectures, and that's totally inaccurate.
This method is not new. I teach physics at a community college (not at Hahvahd like Mazur, alas), and I've been using methods similar to his for about 15 years. I learned about them from Mazur's book, which was published in 1996.
It's also not just some guy's opinion about how to teach. It's solidly backed up by research.
Let's start from the evidence. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is a terrible way to teach physics. The classic studies work like this. You give students a multiple-choice test at the beginning of the semester on very simple, basic concepts of physics. What hits the ground first, a larger rock or a smaller rock? What forces act on a book that's lying on a table? They do badly, but you expect that, because most of them haven't had high school physics. Then you teach a semester's worth of physics to them and give them the test again to measure how much they've improved. The usual statistic used to measure their improvement is the gain, G, defined as G=(final score-initial score)/(100%-initial score). In other words, if they haven't improved at all, G=0, and if they've improved as much as it was possible for them to improve, G=1. With classes that use traditional lecturing -- even by experienced, award-winning teachers who get glowing reviews from their students, are enthusiastic, and put a great deal of effort into their lectures -- you get about G=0.25. In other words, the students have developed very little conceptual understanding beyond what they came in with. On the other hand, if you use interactive teaching techniques that force students to participate actively and talk about concepts, you can usually get much higher G's.
The evidence is that it doesn't really matter very much what specific interactive technique you use, as long as it's interactive and deals with concepts. Mazur pioneered a technique called peer instruction. Just to be concrete, I'll describe his specific technique. You require the students to read the book *before* they come to class. You enforce this with reading quizzes given when they walk into lecture. The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D. If you see that almost everyone got it right, you briefly confirm that, and then move on. If they didn't, you have them break up into small groups and discuss the question. You walk around and listen a lot without saying much. Then you have them vote again again. The theory is that the right answer is supposed to win out over the wrong answers in the discussion. When it's time to give a test, you make sure that the test includes some purely conceptual questions, because otherwise students will tend to resist dropping the "plug and chug" approach they're used to and switching to focusing on concepts.
Mazur's book shows data where he got G~0.5 with this method. Nobody has ever gotten a G that high with traditional lecturing. Over the years since 1996, many of us who use interactive techniques have refined what we do, and it's not uncommon to significantly higher G's. The average for three of us who teach freshman calc-based physics at my school last semester was 0.7.
This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Another issue here is that although the article is specifically about learning physics, you seem to be talking about learning in general. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is simply an ineffective way to teach physics in particular.
Advertising is the main source of revenue for most publications.
Well, yeah, but "main" isn't the same as only, and "most" isn't the same as all.
Newspapers typically depend on both ads and subscriptions, with neither being negligible.
I subscribe to Asimov's Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Both contain very little advertising.
I subscribe to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Both are full of ads, and yet neither one is available for free, so apparently both need payments from readers to survive.
Learning does NOT include sitting there like a stooge taking notes. That's the first sign of a terrible teacher and students who are not learning. That it's "expected" so much is a sign of a broken system.
Sure, you can replace THOSE teachers with a powerpoint presentation
You've wandered off the point. You made an extremely broad assertion about "e-learning." I gave a counterexample. You then claimed that my counterexample didn't fall within your definition of "e-learning." I then asked you to define your terms. You still haven't defined your terms.
Sorry but tech mags are going to be the first to drop paper distribution. I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane . Like "buy a private island with a year's printing and mailing costs" insane. Each postage increase adds a nice 3-4 bedroom house to the year's overhead.
Yes, but the replacement has its own problems.
AFAICT, Linux Magazine is currently pretty much free online, although it looks like you may have to pay to get material older than 6 months...? The trouble with this approach is that it kills the publisher's revenue stream. It's great to cut costs by eliminating printing and postage, but cutting costs doesn't help you if you lose your revenue. This is the same sort of thing that newspapers are currently struggling with. Some are paywalled, most aren't. I'm not aware of any high-quality daily newspapers in the US that have eliminated print. Does Linux Magazine now get its only revenue from ads? If that works for them, more power to them, but I don't think it's viable for most magazines to be supported only by ads -- not if they pay professional writers and editors.
What many magazines are probably going to end up doing is switching to distribution via proprietary systems like the Kindle and iPad, with DRM. That sucks. The good thing about print is that although you can photocopy it, that would be a pain to do. As a result, people like me are willing to pay for a subscription to the New Yorker or Asimov's Science Fiction.
Checking your homework answers is NOT eLearning. Sheesh, are you THAT desperate to prove a failed idea?
OK, so what's your definition of e-learning? The OP seems to think of it as including note-taking. So you're saying it includes note-taking but not checking your answers to homework problems? Do you claim that yours is a widely accepted definition?
Another example that I've heard about recently, although on a purely anecdotal basis, is that handheld devices are turning out to be extremely helpful for working with autistic kids. I know someone who works with severely autistic children, many of whom have no language. They have ipads in the classroom, and she says it really helps a lot. For instance, if the kid wants fish sticks for lunch, they have an app where the kid can pop up a picture of fish sticks and show it to the person serving the food. This is way better than having the kid screaming or biting because he wants fish sticks but can't express that desire. I don't know if there is any peer-reviewed research yet on the effectiveness of the technique -- it sounds like it's fairly recent. However, if you google "ipad autism" you'll turn up a ton of material.
So maybe what you meant was that you didn't know of any studies that showed a benefit, or that there is probably no benefit from throwing a bunch of hardware at the kids without doing all the hard work of finding the right software and making sure it's used in an effective way.
There are obvious analogies to be made with cheating in school, doping in sports, government bureaucracies where bribery is universal,... and obvious caveats about whether those analogies are really valid (online games aren't real, so cheating doesn't hurt people in the tangible way that a bribe-taking Russian cop does).
I teach physics at a community college. It certainly makes sense that students are more likely to cheat if they see their friends getting away with it, or if they see that cheating is so rampant that they start to believe that they have to cheat or else they'll be at an unfair disadvantage. The obvious fix for that would be to take it very seriously if students cheat. Suspend them, expel them, give them an F in the course with a note on their transcript saying why. But it seems to be a nearly universal thing at schools in the US these days that none of that happens. My school's lawyers have advised the administration that they can't allow faculty to give anything beyond an F on the assignment -- which is typically not a penalty at all, since usually the reason students cheat is that they're already failing, so they have nothing to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
They can give 0% back if they don't redistribute. If they're redistributing, then they're in the software business, so why in the world do they expect to be entitled to other people's software?
This is incorrect. There is nothing thermodynamically special about life. The second law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. When there's an input of energy (e.g., sunlight hitting a field of grass), you don't have a closed system. By your definition, a refrigerator is alive.
Since TFA is slashdotted, I'm just responding to what I could glean from the /. summary.
The two most popular ebook formats (epub and mobi/azw) are both basically just a collection of html and css files put together into a zip file. The html is extremely limited. For example, in kindle (azw) format, all images are displayed in the center of the page. So, for example, if you want to put an equation rendered as a bitmap embedded in a paragraph of text, you basically can't do it. In most cases, you cannot use javascript. Creating an ebook is also exactly like writing html for the web in that you have to make it work on any device. For instance, a Kindle 2's screen is 260x311 and a Kindle DX is 372x511. You cannot embed fonts and know that it will work on all devices. (E.g., epub 2 allows fonts to be embedded using CSS2 @font-face rule, but the spec doesn't require devices to support it, and many don't.) The CPU on these things is designed for low power consumption, not for heavy processing.
So, given these resources, there really isn't much that you can do creatively in designing an ebook. If it's a novel, it's pretty much going to look like all other novels. It's in a font that the hardware vendor optimized for legibility on that device.
It's true that the formats are becoming more sophisticated. For example, epub 3 (which is not yet supported by any devices), includes mathml, which will allow math and science textbooks to be made into ebooks for the first time. Javascripts is coming.
But be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Are we really looking forward to reading Wuthering Heights formatted beautifully by a professional designed -- for a screen that's narrower than the one on our own device? How about opening a book and finding that the title of contents is an image, forcing you to guess where to click in order to start reading? How about animations that you can't skip? How about CPU-intensive features that freeze up your device for 30 seconds? What about fonts that looked great on the designer's device, but that look absolutely horrible on ours?
And there are going to be compatibility nightmares that will make the browser wars look like a child's tea party. For example, epub 3 includes mathml, but it doesn't say that devices must support mathml, it just says that they can. So publishers will be selling one version of a calculus textbook for the Nook 17xi (which supports mathml), but a different version for the Nook 16lx (which doesn't) -- and of course an eyeball-bleeding epub 2 version for "legacy" devices, like that Nook 14 that you bought way back in 2014. Oh, you switched to an iPad? Cool, but you find out that the epub 3+mathml version of the book that you bought for your Nook doesn't work on your iPad, because Apple hasn't gotten around to implementing mathml. But you can buy an iPad version instead, only $187!
I just turned 46, and this is definitely true. I remember that we invaded Iraq, and I'm sure there must have been valid reasons for that, but I can't remember them. I clearly remember voting for Obama because he was a constitutional law professor who promised to restore civil liberties and the rule of law, but I can't remember anything he did to follow up on that. I seem to remember intentionally flying from SF to NY in 1986 without any form of ID, but obviously that can't be right, because if people had been able to do that for all those years, our country would have been immediately destroyed by terrorists.
Check out Connexions. They have a model where individuals with expertise create small modules, and then people can combine those to create larger works.
You can have digital books AND PRINT THEM OUT for those who need them.
That's what Schwarzenegger proposed when he was trying to get something similar going for K-12 in California. Turns out that this is illegal under current state law. A junior high school can pay $80 for a commercially printed textbook, but they're forbidden by state law from going to Kinko's and paying $10 to print out a free digital textbook. The regulation at the K-12 level is simply nuts. The ed code is so long that nobody has actually read the whole thing. Tons of stuff that should be in the ed code is embedded in the state constitution.
You don't, as it happens. It's a very similar business model to records, in many ways. There's vast costs that the general public not only doesn't see, they're barely aware even exist - things like proofreading, editing, marketing - over and above the basic print and distribute bits that we all know about. (Free clue: A lot of books on the market today would be borderline unreadable without massive editing and proofreading effort.)
There is some truth to this, but the reality is more complex.
One thing to realize is that the cost of textbooks has risen dramatically over the last few decades. The increases are much too large to be explained by factors like the higher cost of paper or the increased prevalence of color. College textbook prices went up 98% after inflation from 1986 to 2004. This is not because publishers are paying twice as many acquisitions editors, twice as many copy editors, twice as many illustrators, or twice as many graphic designers to produce the same number of books. It's simply because publishers are harvesting more revenue.
There are also many books for which the publisher's contribution is virtually nil. This is the case for many graduate-level texts in math and science, for example. The author writes the book in LaTeX, produces a PDF file, and it basically goes straight to production with little more than a quick copyedit from a freelancer.
Another recent change is that print on demand production is getting more and more competitive with traditional printing. It used to be that when a publisher printed 10,000 copies of a book and sold only 7,000, a manager would get in trouble for coming so close to underestimating demand. The cost of production was virtually all setup cost; very little was the incremental cost of printing one more book. Nowadays it's totally different. If your initial run ends up not being enough copies to satisfy demand, you fill in the gap with POD. What this does is to take a huge amount of the risk out of the proposition for the publisher. By all rights, this improvement in efficiency and reduction in risk should have led to lower textbook prices, not higher ones.
Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.)
I teach physics, not math, but here are some existing math books that I consider to be of pretty high quality:
The lack of color in the printed versions of free books is never going to change. The cost of producing a book in color is high enough that no significant number of students will ever choose it voluntarily over a free digital book. This may become less relevant as more and more students start carrying a tablet or a laptop in their backpacks.
Proofreading, error checking, and increasing the number of exercises are all things that could definitely benefit from a wider collaborative effort, and I don't think they require government funding as proposed by Steinberg. E.g., my own physics texts are free, and I've benefited a lot over the years from having people send me emails pointing out errors. I do have a few exercises from other people's physics books that are under compatible licenses, but not very many.
High quality art would definitely be a huge plus for free textbooks. My wife paid a couple of people to do art for her free French textbook, but in general, illustrations are an area where government funding really might make a huge difference.
My proposal is more like if the engineers had to be responsible for 30, 35, 40 projects (students) at once, and the materials they have to work with are enough steel & rivets & cable for 25 bridges, plus some 2x4s, twine, and some ... bananas (being the troubled students).
You make a good point. Some points to consider:
(1) The lower grades are very different from the higher grades. An 18-year-old high school student who can't read, or who slaps his teacher, is indeed like the banana in your analogy. But in kindergarten, there basically are no "bananas." Kids are mentally plastic at that age, they're too little to be juvenile delinquents, and although some may have had more exposure to books than others, they are more or less blank slates educationally.
(2) An engineer who is presented with steel that isn't up to spec can reject the steel. Educators do have something similar they can do: they can fail a student. Whether they really will have the backbone to do so, and how society will treat them if they do, gets back to the same issue, which is that we need to treat K-12 teachers more like professionals who are expected to make high-stakes decisions.
(3) The quality of the students coming in at the beginning of the school year is a variable that you can control for. Newspapers in my area have started tabulating "value added" data on teachers, where they look at how much students *gained* over the course of the school year in a particular teacher's class. They've found that some teachers have much higher gains than others. It's been suggested that teachers ought to be evaluated based on this, maybe given merit pay, etc. Guess how teachers' unions feel about that?
I'm a dues-paying, card-carrying member of a teachers' union (at a community college), but I can't help feeling that this is the kind of thing that teachers' unions in the US have brought upon themselves.
What should happen is that K-12 teachers should be professionals, and they should be treated just like other professionals, such as doctors and engineers. When is the last time you heard an engineer claiming that although his bridge fell down, he shouldn't be held accountable? When's the last time you heard a premed saying that it was unreasonable to expect him to do well on the MCAT, because African-Americans do worse on it, on the average, than whites and Asians, thereby proving that the test is racist? Or a doctor whining that it was unreasonable to expect him to use MRI scanners, because he hasn't had the training?
What left the K-12 teaching profession vulnerable to political interference was its history of failing to hold itself to high professional standards. That opened the door to NCLB and a general tendency of politicians to try to tinker with things that ought to lie within teachers' own sphere of professional competence and discretion.
What the politicians in Idaho are doing is stupid, but that kind of incompetent tinkering is the natural result of K-12 teachers' unwillingness to act like professionals.
Hmmm...sounds like you're simply finding that you have to do your teaching within a system that's poorly designed. Why not fix the bad design?
I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowledge of a student in physics, by the way.
Are you talking about false positives, or false negatives?
In other words, suppose that class A has a very low average on the FCI, while B has a very high one.
I would maintain that the teacher of class A is incompetent, and is in denial if he won't admit that fact and try to change; the FCI is ridiculously basic, and any student who's at all competent should score very highly on it.
Or are you talking about class B? The evidence I've seen is that there basically aren't students who do well on the FCI but are bad at problem-solving. Is there some other area where you think class B might be weak?
As a professor, allow me to say "Ha ha ha!" Or, "Yes, that sounds great, but...." [...] Sadly, we're not allowed to treat students as responsible adults who will "get all the passive shit done at home." I wish we could.
As a professor, allow me to say, "Ha ha ha! I treat my students as responsible adults who will 'get all the passive shit done at home.'" Works for me. What's stopping you? Cynicism? You don't have tenure yet?
Interesting. What about students who don't own a cell phone, or who only have voice on their cell phone, not data? (Actually, I don't own a cell phone myself.)
Thanks for your post! I teach at a community college in California where the maximum class size is 25 anyway. (Lecture and lab are in the same room, with the same students and teacher.) I use mostly interactive engagement techniques, mixed with snippets of straight lectures, demos, etc. We don't use any techniques that require expensive AV stuff; what techniques that you use require that?
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago.
Does this mean that you've completely eliminated traditional labs? (IMO that would be a shame.)
Do you have any data on how students did on a test such as the FCI before and after the switch to the workshop method?
You descrive not being able to do certain things (e.g., "it's difficult to move away from the median student"). Are there constraints that force you to teach a certain way on a certain day? If you want to do something totally different on a given day, is there some reason why you can't?
You seem to be thinking that the method they're talking about involves replacing live lectures with canned videos of lectures. I can see how you might get that impression from the slashdot summary, but the actual article does a significantly better job of explaining what it's about. It's about replacing traditional lectures, where students sit passively and take notes, with classes where the students interact with each other and/or with the professor.
YOU WILL FEEL THEIR FAILURE
The teaching method described in the article isn't new (it dates back to 1996), and the empirical evidence is that it succeeds, whereas traditional lecturing fails.
The slashot summary isn't terribly accurate, and even if you violate the social norms of /. and click through to read the article, the article is pretty sketchy as well. We're already getting comments from people who think this is about substituting video lectures for live lectures, and that's totally inaccurate.
This method is not new. I teach physics at a community college (not at Hahvahd like Mazur, alas), and I've been using methods similar to his for about 15 years. I learned about them from Mazur's book, which was published in 1996.
It's also not just some guy's opinion about how to teach. It's solidly backed up by research.
Let's start from the evidence. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is a terrible way to teach physics. The classic studies work like this. You give students a multiple-choice test at the beginning of the semester on very simple, basic concepts of physics. What hits the ground first, a larger rock or a smaller rock? What forces act on a book that's lying on a table? They do badly, but you expect that, because most of them haven't had high school physics. Then you teach a semester's worth of physics to them and give them the test again to measure how much they've improved. The usual statistic used to measure their improvement is the gain, G, defined as G=(final score-initial score)/(100%-initial score). In other words, if they haven't improved at all, G=0, and if they've improved as much as it was possible for them to improve, G=1. With classes that use traditional lecturing -- even by experienced, award-winning teachers who get glowing reviews from their students, are enthusiastic, and put a great deal of effort into their lectures -- you get about G=0.25. In other words, the students have developed very little conceptual understanding beyond what they came in with. On the other hand, if you use interactive teaching techniques that force students to participate actively and talk about concepts, you can usually get much higher G's.
The evidence is that it doesn't really matter very much what specific interactive technique you use, as long as it's interactive and deals with concepts. Mazur pioneered a technique called peer instruction. Just to be concrete, I'll describe his specific technique. You require the students to read the book *before* they come to class. You enforce this with reading quizzes given when they walk into lecture. The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D. If you see that almost everyone got it right, you briefly confirm that, and then move on. If they didn't, you have them break up into small groups and discuss the question. You walk around and listen a lot without saying much. Then you have them vote again again. The theory is that the right answer is supposed to win out over the wrong answers in the discussion. When it's time to give a test, you make sure that the test includes some purely conceptual questions, because otherwise students will tend to resist dropping the "plug and chug" approach they're used to and switching to focusing on concepts.
Mazur's book shows data where he got G~0.5 with this method. Nobody has ever gotten a G that high with traditional lecturing. Over the years since 1996, many of us who use interactive techniques have refined what we do, and it's not uncommon to significantly higher G's. The average for three of us who teach freshman calc-based physics at my school last semester was 0.7.
A common concern is that if the teacher d
I, for one, am an Aural learning type.
This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Another issue here is that although the article is specifically about learning physics, you seem to be talking about learning in general. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is simply an ineffective way to teach physics in particular.
How in the world did this get modded up? This is complete nonsense. Here is some correct information.
Advertising is the main source of revenue for most publications.
Well, yeah, but "main" isn't the same as only, and "most" isn't the same as all.
Newspapers typically depend on both ads and subscriptions, with neither being negligible.
I subscribe to Asimov's Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Both contain very little advertising.
I subscribe to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Both are full of ads, and yet neither one is available for free, so apparently both need payments from readers to survive.
Learning does NOT include sitting there like a stooge taking notes. That's the first sign of a terrible teacher and students who are not learning. That it's "expected" so much is a sign of a broken system.
Sure, you can replace THOSE teachers with a powerpoint presentation
You've wandered off the point. You made an extremely broad assertion about "e-learning." I gave a counterexample. You then claimed that my counterexample didn't fall within your definition of "e-learning." I then asked you to define your terms. You still haven't defined your terms.
Sorry but tech mags are going to be the first to drop paper distribution. I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane . Like "buy a private island with a year's printing and mailing costs" insane. Each postage increase adds a nice 3-4 bedroom house to the year's overhead.
Yes, but the replacement has its own problems.
AFAICT, Linux Magazine is currently pretty much free online, although it looks like you may have to pay to get material older than 6 months...? The trouble with this approach is that it kills the publisher's revenue stream. It's great to cut costs by eliminating printing and postage, but cutting costs doesn't help you if you lose your revenue. This is the same sort of thing that newspapers are currently struggling with. Some are paywalled, most aren't. I'm not aware of any high-quality daily newspapers in the US that have eliminated print. Does Linux Magazine now get its only revenue from ads? If that works for them, more power to them, but I don't think it's viable for most magazines to be supported only by ads -- not if they pay professional writers and editors.
What many magazines are probably going to end up doing is switching to distribution via proprietary systems like the Kindle and iPad, with DRM. That sucks. The good thing about print is that although you can photocopy it, that would be a pain to do. As a result, people like me are willing to pay for a subscription to the New Yorker or Asimov's Science Fiction.
Checking your homework answers is NOT eLearning. Sheesh, are you THAT desperate to prove a failed idea?
OK, so what's your definition of e-learning? The OP seems to think of it as including note-taking. So you're saying it includes note-taking but not checking your answers to homework problems? Do you claim that yours is a widely accepted definition?
NO study has shown that students benefit
A good counterexample is software developed at MSU called LON-CAPA, which is used to help math and science students check their answers to homework problems. Here is a list of publications about the system. For an example of a study that shows there is a benefit, try D. A. Kashy, G. Albertelli, E. Kashy and M. Thoennessen, Teaching with ALN Technology: Benefits and Costs, Journal of Engineering Education, 89, 499 (2001).
Another example that I've heard about recently, although on a purely anecdotal basis, is that handheld devices are turning out to be extremely helpful for working with autistic kids. I know someone who works with severely autistic children, many of whom have no language. They have ipads in the classroom, and she says it really helps a lot. For instance, if the kid wants fish sticks for lunch, they have an app where the kid can pop up a picture of fish sticks and show it to the person serving the food. This is way better than having the kid screaming or biting because he wants fish sticks but can't express that desire. I don't know if there is any peer-reviewed research yet on the effectiveness of the technique -- it sounds like it's fairly recent. However, if you google "ipad autism" you'll turn up a ton of material.
So maybe what you meant was that you didn't know of any studies that showed a benefit, or that there is probably no benefit from throwing a bunch of hardware at the kids without doing all the hard work of finding the right software and making sure it's used in an effective way.
That would be a completely different statement.
You are comparing a community college to a university. They are VERY different animals.
Or the legal situation may differ from state to state. I'm in California.
There are obvious analogies to be made with cheating in school, doping in sports, government bureaucracies where bribery is universal, ... and obvious caveats about whether those analogies are really valid (online games aren't real, so cheating doesn't hurt people in the tangible way that a bribe-taking Russian cop does).
I teach physics at a community college. It certainly makes sense that students are more likely to cheat if they see their friends getting away with it, or if they see that cheating is so rampant that they start to believe that they have to cheat or else they'll be at an unfair disadvantage. The obvious fix for that would be to take it very seriously if students cheat. Suspend them, expel them, give them an F in the course with a note on their transcript saying why. But it seems to be a nearly universal thing at schools in the US these days that none of that happens. My school's lawyers have advised the administration that they can't allow faculty to give anything beyond an F on the assignment -- which is typically not a penalty at all, since usually the reason students cheat is that they're already failing, so they have nothing to lose.