It is particularly gratifying to read a headline like this one, which appeared in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education: “Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say.”

Gotta love it! "Good teaching" finally makes it into the online tool kit!

The ‘study’ is Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: a Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies–recently released by the U.S. Department of Education. The full report is available online.

I quickly downloaded, printed out, read, and marked up my own copy!

While the report found that students taking all or part of their class online performed better than those in a face-to-face class, the study suggests that it was not the medium for delivery itself that accounted for the difference but rather "it was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages" (p. XVII).

This report could serve as a discussion prompt for faculty interested in developing or teaching an online class. And it would also be useful to instructional designers who may want to review some of the specific learning practices reviewed in the report.

As always, the IDD Blog is interested in what you find to be of interest. Read the report yourself and let us know.

Students today have access to more information than ever before.   Beyond Google-fu and Wikipedia, new technologies allow anyone to research and order practically any publication with a few keystrokes.  College students have access to expansive libraries filled with volumes on the most obscure topics, and at larger universities like DePaul, students can access full-text articles in respected academic journals with a few simple searches.  The amount of information we students have access to before we ever reach a classroom or open up Blackboard can be overwhelming. It raises the question, given the wealth of information students have access to outside the classroom, what exactly is the role of the instructor?

It cannot simply be to impart information—all the information is out there and available for students.  Rather, I think part of the instructor role has to be to act as a filter—to cut through all the information out there and identify and present only that which is most important, most up to date, and most accessible for students who are just being introduced to a field or subfield of study.  The material then needs to be arranged into a coherent, unified form.

I think a lot of professors disregard this filtering function, and either put too much into their syllabi or overwhelm students with “optional resources” for topics they can’t cover within the course.

I know from experience how frustrating it can be when a student is confronted with an overwhelming number of sources.  I enjoy being subjected to academic rigor, but I’m put off by instructors handing me articles I “might be interested in” or optional resources, even when I’m really engaged by the subject-matter of the class.  First of all, I know of no student that has the time, at least during the school year, to go that far above and beyond the course requirements.  And more importantly, I think all these secondary resources can create intellectual clutter, distracting from the central principles the course is trying to communicate.

In short, as a student, I’m interested in what I need to know to meet the course goals. All the other stuff is a distraction, more often than not.

I’m nursing a head cold and have a blog post due. Can I put something together in small tweets of 140 characters or less?

Wondering about the Web literacy of our online students. Some have to be told to scroll to see content "below the fold." Why is this?

Resisting the notion of designing for users who are Web illiterate. Does designing for the few diminish the learning experience for most?

DePaul IDD consultant Daniel Stanford has written about user tech illiteracy. I’m currently thinking he’s onto something we should consider.

I’m thinking that a basic competency in technology should be a prerequisite for students who wish to take courses online.

I’m thinking about the faculty who are similarly challenged by fundamental Web/tech literacy and teach online. Requirements for them?

Concluding that Twitter is good for musing and asking questions; maybe stimulate discussion about user-centered design & Web literacy?

OK, my Twittering ends above. While I still sense that Twittering is a largely narcissistic activity (as is, in my belief, much of social media), I am interested in its ease of use, immediacy, connectivity, and mobility. I’m also interested in how Twitter’s 140-character limit shapes writing and thought: it won’t let me ramble. In that spirit I’ll wrap up with this: I’m going to try using Twitter to document the user illiteracy I encounter day to day. If you’re interested too, follow me at http://twitter.com/dschmidgall.

No one likes to read learning objectives.  Okay, this might be too extreme a statement.  Let me rephrase to make it sound more academically correct: no one, other than instructional designers, academic creditors, faculty/syllabus-writers, or students who are bored to tears, likes to read learning objectives—unless they are short, punchy, and, hence, super retainable! 

As an instructional-design professional, I fit into the category of learning-objectives reviewers.  I have a tendency to browse through the objectives portion of various documents: course syllabi, training brochures, webinar announcements, and even activity notices from my kids’ school.  I look at them not to learn purpose of the events but rather to catch “violators” of our learning-objective rules:  “to understand”… vague word; “to improve” … but how; “to be able to” … under what condition!

The latest “violator” that I encountered was Dr. David Allbritton, from DePaul’s psychology department.  A few weeks ago, he gave a presentation at an online-learning seminar, where he shared the learning objectives of his online psychology course, and it looked like this:

• Think like a scientist
• Know stuff
• Figure stuff out
• Feel connected
• Find it relevant
• Don’t cheat

Maybe this was just an abbreviated list of objectives for the sake of a presentation (with the audience being psychology amateurs), but wow, talk about violations worthy of ticketing and fines! My need for a rewrite became so compelling that within a minute, new objectives showed up in my mind:

Now tell me which one you like, mine or his?  Or, to phrase it in a different way, which one is easier to comprehend and to remember?

As an audience of a presentation, I must say that I like Dr. Allbritton’s objectives, which grabbed my attention right away with his “stuff.”   And hey, isn’t “gain attention” the very first step of Gagne’s “Nine Events of Instruction”?   Okay, his second one is “inform learners of objectives”, but if your handout, syllabus, or presentation doesn’t allow you the space or time to “holler,” wouldn’t it be nice to use your objectives as an attention grabber?  If the magazines are doing it (e.g. “Lose 10 Pound in a Day,” a suspicious but nevertheless clear and straightforward objective) and the book publishers are doing it (e.g. How to Cook Everything, an ambitious objective embedded even in the title itself), why can’t an academic learning guide, such as a syllabus, be made as easy to grasp as they are?   I am not talking about an effort to commercialize or “sexy up” our academic lingo for the sake of sensationalism.  Because often, it doesn’t need that.  Being straightforward is all it takes to win the bid.  Simple expressions, such as to know, to apply, to become, to evaluate, and to change tells students exactly what to expect from the course, from the fundamental or theoretical (to know) to the practical or methodological (to apply) to the ideological or believed (to become or to think like).

Having gained my attention and that of the rest of the audience, Dr. Allbritton was able to further explain the strategies he used to ensure the achievement of each target in the same simple and direct way.  As someone who’s used to seeing and giving presentations in multislide mode, I found the following one-page handout of his demonstrated, in a clean and clear fashion, a great way of matching instructional strategies with learning objectives:   

Here at DePaul, we have the DePaul Online Teaching Series program (DOTS), where we work with faculty to help prepare them for the unique challenges of teaching online. It’s an intensive program that begins with a crash course in designing an online or hybrid course and goes all the way through working with a design consultant to get the course completed and evaluated.

In order to help the faculty effectively accomplish this, we give them the tools they will need to create their course, including a laptop computer, a webcam, a headset microphone, software, and a portable voice recorder. Doing this ensures that they have all the technology they will need to produce a robust, dynamic, and interesting course.

I received a phone call today from an instructor who went through the DOTS program asking about what resources were available to a student who wanted to produce videos to submit to the class. This got me thinking about the aforementioned technology toolkit we give to faculty. At what point will the students need a similar toolkit?

A great deal of focus in course design is often placed on creating instructional materials for the students to consume. For example, they watch a video, read an article, or view a Web site. There is not much focus on student-created content—regardless of whether it is eventually offered up for assessment. The majority of the time, students interact with the material through writing a paper, posting to a discussion board, or taking a quiz.

However, what happens when an instructor would like to send off her students to create materials for assessment similar to what the instructor can produce for the students to consume? Where does a student, especially an online student, obtain the required video camera, microphone, or editing software?

This thought process, combined with a conversation I had the other day about technical requirements for online students, made me wonder if we will see not only tech specs for computers for students in the future, but also what they will need as peripheral devices in order to succeed as a student in an increasingly visual and technical world.

I can’t wait to see where this may lead.

A professor I work with recently decided to use Ning to create an online social network for a course. Like Facebook, Ning provides a space where users can communicate and share links, images, and videos. However, Ning allows instructors to create a space that is used exclusively for course-related collaboration and is only accessible by their students. This increased level of privacy and focused purpose helps everyone involved maintain boundaries between their academic and personal lives.

Shortly after the course began, the professor noticed many of her students were having trouble with basic tasks such as uploading images, embedding YouTube video clips, and writing blog posts. The professor told me, “I have a blog and I’m almost fifty. I was shocked that my students have no experience with blogging.” I wish I could say I was as shocked as she was. Unfortunately, I know this problem all too well and I’ve been writing about it periodically for the past year. Back in February of 2008, I wrote a post about the importance of defining computer literacy. My major complaint at that time was the lack of agreement on a minimum technology literacy level for college students. The lack of computer-literacy requirements and classes to support students who don’t meet such requirements places an unfair burden on faculty. Professors who wish to use new technology in their courses wind up serving as tech support for students who lack a fundamental understanding of interactive media.

Back in November, I also wrote about the misleading stereotype of the tech-savvy millennial learner that I hear about so often at conferences. As much as people love to refer to today’s twenty-something college students as “digital natives,” many of these students are more like “digital resident aliens.” They’ve learned just enough to get by, but ask them something that’s not in their phrasebook and you’ll quickly see how superficial their knowledge really is.

Sadly, the lack of a well-rounded technology education isn’t just failing students in the arts and humanities. Students pursuing technology-focused degrees are also suffering. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted that many Web-design instructors are not preparing students for the demands of employers in the field. In “Colleges Get Poor Grades on Teaching Web Fundamentals,” the author cites a survey developed by Leslie Jensen-Inman, an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jensen-Inman interviewed thirty-two professional Web designers and discovered that universities are either encouraging students to overspecialize in a particular piece of software or programming language or teaching outdated tools and techniques that are no longer relevant in the working world.

As a part-time Web-design professor, I found this article vindicating, because it supports my belief that students need a broad range of up-to-date knowledge to become successful designers themselves. In addition, I think the basic skills and knowledge that aspiring Web designers need are becoming increasingly essential for all college students. Knowing how to manage digital files, maintain a blog, participate in an online discussion, embed media in a Web page—these are all skills that will prove valuable no matter what a student’s career aspirations might be. Now we simply need to recognize that this knowledge won’t reach critical mass by osmosis. Hundreds of hours of Wii Tennis or text messaging or Twittering might do a lot to reduce technophobia in a new generation of students, but it doesn’t necessarily increase their understanding of how interactive media works and enable them to transfer knowledge from one tool to another.

Many instructional designers might disapprove of the idea that we should relegate new-media education to a single “Technology 101” course. Instead, they often support an integrative approach in which technology is used across the curriculum as a means to an end for a variety of disciplines. I agree that it’s wonderful to see faculty using technology to improve learning in a variety of subject areas, from philosophy to chemistry to mathematics to the fine arts. However, I think attacking the problem from both sides could help ensure the push for technology integration doesn’t always come from the top down.

A Technology 101 course could help ensure today’s students can live up to the tech-savvy stereotype we’ve already forced upon them. With a little support from the bottom, we might finally see more students pushing faculty to use new tools and helping instructors improve their technology literacy. Until then, I’m afraid we might be stuck in an inefficient, reactive model that attempts to support students once assignment deadlines are looming and panic has set in. This approach is a bit like asking students to drive cross-country after giving them the keys to an eighteen wheeler and an 800 number to call if they have questions as they’re barreling down the highway. Will some of them make it? Sure. But a little driver’s ed up front could prevent a lot of disasters down the road.

Conventional wisdom views language as a device through which thought is actualized into spoken or written word, as a tool that simply assists in the representation of something that precedes it. To paraphrase a science mentor and dear friend of mine, “We do not create the world through language. Language and explicit knowledge are the poor symbolic systems we use to try and communicate about the real creator of the world: implicit rules and knowledge that are metasymbolic.”

I disagree with this assessment and see an important, fundamental feedback between metasymbolic, implicit rules and knowledge on one hand and language on the other. Understanding language formally as a symbolic, self-contained system that is governed simply by syntactical and grammatical rules is narrow and fails to recognize that language does not only express thought but also guides it. Such a failure underestimates language’s potential to both enrich and stifle thought. With this in mind, the belabored arguments below are meant to support a single simple statement:
The task of developing rich (and ideally multi-) language skills should be undertaken not only by language or creative writing majors but by all, since one’s level of linguistic skill provides the basis for critical and creative-thinking development, which is fundamental to all human endeavors.

By the time in our lives that critical thinking and reflection have become prominent aspects of our being, both the use and understanding of language have themselves become implicit, creating the illusion of a given language’s “naturalness.” Those who speak and write fluently in more than one language often discover aspects of thought and feeling that are much more accessible in one linguistic scheme or another, destroying this illusion. I, for one, think and feel differently, express myself differently, and focus on different aspects of my experiences depending on whether I "function" in Greek, English, or German. I can think of several words that exist in one language and not in another (especially words with subtle shades of meaning) that not only suggest differences in how thoughts are expressed but also support the formation of different future thoughts. For example, there is no Greek noun that can capture the meaning of the English "privacy," while the English "hospitality" and the equivalent Greek "filoxenia" (literally and clumsily translated as “friendship towards strangers”) clearly put emphasis on different aspects of the concept they describe. In both cases, the linguistic differences reflect and support attitudes towards privacy and guests that are fundamentally different between the two traditions.

The drawbacks of formal approaches to language come to the forefront especially when trying to address prosody and metaphor, linguistic devises that account for a large portion of communicated meaning and of language use and creation in general. All the  formal “substitution” theories of metaphor accomplish is to create a model that is “Ptolemaic” in its complexity and uselessness, trying too hard to stick to existing ideas, simply because embracing different ones would require thinkers to enlist the help of unfamiliar intellectual traditions. But I will reserve this topic for a future post.

Winograd and Flores (1986) observe that even sophisticated linguists are puzzled by the suggestion that the basis for the meaning of words and sentences cannot ultimately be defined in terms of an objective external world. Words correspond to our intuition about “reality” simply because our purposes in using them are closely aligned with our physical existence in a world and with our actions within it. But this coincidence is the result of our use of language within a tradition (or as some biologists may say, of our “structural coupling” within a “consensual domain”).  As such, this reality is based on language as much as it reflects it.

Ultimately, language, like cognition, is fundamentally social and may be better understood if approached as a “speech act” rather than a formal symbolic system, a move that introduces the importance of “commitment,” as described in speech-act theories of Austin and others. Both language and cognition are relational and historical, in the larger sense of the word. As Winograd and Flores note, the apparent simplicity of physically interpreted terms such as "chair" is misleading and obscures the fact that communication through words such as "crisis" or "friendship" cannot exist outside the domain of human interaction and commitment, both of which are intricately linked to language (as speech act) itself. This apparently paradoxical view that nothing (beyond simple descriptions of physical activity and some sensory experience) exists except through language describes the fundamentally linguistic nature of all experience and motivates me to approach moments of understanding (i.e. “understanding” experiences) as the achievements of explanatory (i.e. linguistic) acts.

The power of language to create, rather than simply express, thought and meaning may actually be more easily recognized through an examination of the relationship between explanation and understanding. The writings of Gadamer (1960), Ricoeur (1991), and others, have expanded our conception of explanation, illustrating that it cannot be approached as simply the result of and subsequent to understanding. 

Explanation and understanding are both products of thought, “moments” of knowing that constantly interact in a productive feedback. This feedback is manifested as communication, reflection, etc. and has explanation, rather than understanding, at its center. In this scheme, explanation is linguistic in nature (whether as discourse—with someone or within—or text) and understanding is cognitive/phenomenological (whether as thinking or thought). Explanation (interpretation) is not seen as a post-facto supplement to understanding but as belonging to understanding’s inner structure, an integral part of the content of what is understood. I see Gadamer’s efforts to recover the importance of application (“understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation’”) as evidence that application is the ultimate explanatory act. As an "explanatory achievement," understanding is the fruit of explanation, "being realized not just for the one for whom one is interpreting but for the interpreter himself." This essentially argues that understanding is “explaining to self.”

If, along with Gadamer, we conceive every statement as an answer to a question, what we understand as a statement’s meaning is an answer, an explanation. And even though the moment of understanding often seems to occur without explicit interpretation/explanation, it is always preceded by an explanation to self, motivated by the hermeneutic question that has to be asked and be answered in any event of understanding.

The understanding/explanation dialectic parallels the one between thought (understanding) and language (explanation). A thought that cannot be “explained” linguistically (to self or others) is better approached as intuition, not as understanding. The revelatory moment of experiencing a work (linguistic or otherwise) that manages to say to us what we could only intuit is what transforms our intuition into thought, helping us escape the prison of our previous language (and thoughts), and being verbally reconstituted through our new language, enriched through our encounter with the work. Our interaction with the work gives us the tools to explain our intuition to ourselves and turn it into a thought, with our newly found understanding being the culmination of an explanatory moment, however “implicit” or “concealed” this moment may seem.

This is just a blog post rather than a piece of academic writing, so I will allow myself the luxury of closing with strong words: Language must be recognized as our means of formulating thought, with all understanding viewed as the result of explanatory moments whose ontology is linguistic. Explanation and understanding, in turn, must be recognized as being tied into a continuous and dynamic feedback loop that develops through the initiation of acts of explanation. With Winograd and Flores, I reject cognition as the manipulation of knowledge of an “objective world,” recognize the primacy of action and its central role in language, and conclude that it is through language that we create our world.

References

Gadamer, H. G. (1960). Truth and Method. 2nd edition (1989). New York: Continuum.

Ricoeur, P. (1991). A Ricoeur Reader. M. J. Valdes (ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley, Pearson Foundation.