Technology can do a lot to facilitate good learning: Some of the stuff we ask students to do doesn’t really need to happen when they’re all together in the classroom, and technology can make it possible for the students to do these things in other places (such as at home, in Hub Central, on the train, or lying in the sun on the banks of a river), and give us more time in the face-to-face sessions for interaction. Some of the ways we have of assessing students are very labour-intensive on the teacher’s side, and using technology for these things can allow the teachers to put more energy into other bits of the students’ learning experience. It’s not feasible to give every one of your six hundred students one-on-one time to explain concepts in multiple different ways, but technology can give them the opportunity to access further resources to support their learning.
Yes, technology can facilitate good learning, but the unfortunate thing is that all of these wonderful ways it facilitates learning depend on the technology actually working. When the technology fails, all of your excellent learning design goes straight out the window.
Of course, if you are a good teacher the technology will not be the only method you are using to help students learn so it won’t be the end of the world. And if you are a good teacher, you’ll be able to roll with the punches and come up with some workaround that will allow the students to learn well anyway. And if you are a good teacher, you’ll have a good working relationship with your students so they’ll be gracious when things go wrong. So it shouldn’t really be a problem that the technology fails sometimes.
Only it is a problem that the technology fails sometimes, because what if you’re not that good a teacher?
If you’re a certain kind of teacher, then when the technology fails, you’ll moan very loudly about the technology not working, and blame the technology for the fact the students are not succeeding. For a certain kind of teacher, the failure of the technology to work perfectly for all students all the time is the perfect excuse to explain everything away. It couldn’t possibly be that you don’t give any concrete examples in your lectures – no, it’s the failing technology. It couldn’t possibly be that you are never available to answer student questions – no, it’s the failing technology. It couldn’t possibly be that you don’t give your tutoring team clear direction about what you want them to do – no, it’s the failing technology.
So that is why the technology has to work perfectly all the time – so that there’s fewer weak excuses for poor teaching.
There is a particularly annoying puzzle that goes something like this:
“A rooster sits on the apex of a barn roof. The roof pitches at an angle of 43 degrees above the horizontal and is made of wood painted red. On the northern side of the roof, there is a large tree which casts a shadow over most of the roof. On the southern side, there is a duck pond. There is a very light rain shower falling, and the wind speed is 20 km/h from the Southwest. It is 10:47am on the 19th of August and the current temperature is 14 degrees celsius. The rooster lays an egg. Which way does it roll?”
The correct answer to this puzzle is usually given as: “Roosters don’t lay eggs.”
I take offense at this for several reasons:
Firstly, whenever I have seen anyone ask this puzzle, they have seemed to delight in watching the other person squirm, and they have had a superior “You’re so stupid that you haven’t figured it out” expression on their face. In my book, you are the worst sort of asshole if you choose to do things simply to make yourself feel superior to someone else.
Secondly, the puzzle didn’t ask to evaluate whether it was possible for a rooster to lay an egg in this situation! No, it asked to find which way the egg rolls if indeed the rooster did lay an egg. Sure you could discuss whether it was possible, but that doesn’t change what you’ve been asked to do.
My goodness, I know so many puzzles where the situation described is impossible or extremely unlikely, and it never stops people from figuring out the answer anyway. Just how likely IS it that a man has to take a cabbage, a goat and a wolf across a river in a small boat? Yet people have been posing and solving this problem for hundreds of years!
On a more serious note, almost none of the problems we give students are 100% realistic. In Physics courses, the students get problems about objects being dropped down holes drilled to the centre of the Earth. In Economics courses, they do problems that concern people who only consume nuts and bananas. In Architecture, they get volume and area problems with only whole-number answers. None of these situations is actually possible in real life, but that doesn’t stop us from expecting the students to do them anyway, because we know it will help them learn if they do. Are we really going to allow people to declare the imposibility of the situation and on that basis refuse to do the problem?
And finally, as a pure mathematician, I am always solving problems in situations that are so-called impossible – imaginary numbers, four dimensional space, projective space where there are no parallel lines, finite fields where 1+1 = -1 …
So in the end, I don’t think it matters that roosters don’t lay eggs!
For the past two years, I’ve been involved in the design and teaching of the statistics curriculum to the 3rd year medical students, and I have to say it’s been very rewarding. Most of my job involves helping students who have been taught by someone else somewhere else and who haven’t had the best experience of it, but with this project I’ve been able to make their actual experience of the teaching better in the first place. (Not that I would trade in helping all the other students, of course!)
But it hasn’t been without its challenges, the main one being that I only get seven lectures to teach them the stats. That’s seven periods of 50 minutes with no other contact with the students, as opposed to the 24-36 lectures, 10-12 tutorials, 10-12 computer practicals and 5-10 assignments you get in a traditional stats course.
Needless to say, I have had to make some big decisions about what I choose to tell them and what I choose not to tell them. I have had to think hard about what is the most important thing I could possibly tell them about stats and choose to say only that and do it well. They may never get another chance to hear that information, so I need to make sure they get it now.
“Wow, David,” you must be thinking, “that must be tough. I’m so glad I do have 60 hours of time with my students.”
But do you really have 60 hours of time with your students? What if they work full time and can’t come to any of the tutes or pracs? What if they had an accident and suddenly couldn’t come to the rest of the course? What if you got sick and couldn’t teach them any more? What if there was an earthquake and your university was closed for the rest of the year? What if they simply decided they weren’t going to come any more? (The med students are famous for this last one.)
We really don’t know how long we’ve got with them, so it seems to me that we should all seize the day and tell them the most important bits now, before it’s too late. If you get longer with them, then be grateful you can go into more detail, but even if you don’t, you’ll know they’ve come away with something good.
This comment was left on the original blog post:
Joleen Hall 12 July 2013: I think one of the benefits those students get is you as their teacher. You explain concepts and techniques in a way that opens students up to learning. As an aspiring teacher I will aim to be half as good as you at teaching my students and making maths fun, as there is nothing like the real thing. I hope the uni values you as an educator as much as the students do.
There is an episode of the TV show “Friends” where Phoebe makes a doll’s house out of boxes. The other friends are most impressed with this doll’s house, especially with the candy room, aroma room and bubble-blowing chimney (except Monica of course, who still wants to play with her historically accurate mansion). Unfortunately, the cardboard doll’s house burns down, the fire seeming to originate in the aroma room.
It was a cool episode, but it was made all the cooler after I watched a “making of Friends” show in the special features on the DVD. This featurette chronicled the making of a single episode of Friends, and the work of hundreds of people who made it happen. There were writers, set-builders, camera operators, editors, costume designers, sound editors, music composers, foley artists, live audience herders, actors, and props managers, all working sixteen-hour days just to make half an hour of television.
The ones that most opened my eyes were the props managers. They make sure that everything the actors hold or touch works and looks the way it should. In particular, they made Phoebe’s doll’s house. In fact, they made SEVEN of Phoebe’s doll’s house: that’s SEVEN candy rooms, seven aroma rooms and seven bubble-blowing chimneys, all exactly alike. They had to make so many in order to get the scene right where the house burns down.
Yet to us the viewers, there was only one house and it was only in the episode for a total of three minutes. You wouldn’t dream that there would be SEVEN doll’s houses to produce these three minutes of television.
And it got me thinking about one of the major difficulties of my job: it seems easy. The students turn up to the MLC or our seminars or art events and we talk to them; they go to our website and find resources to use. It all seems so easy. But what people DON’T see the hours of other work: the data entry, the meetings with casual staff, the workplace safety training, the fiddling with web links, the data entry, the editing of videos, the painting, the design of posters, the printing, the laminating, the dishwashing and the data entry.
Well finally someone recognised all that work. Yesterday we got a Commendation for Excellence in Support of the Student Experience from the Vice Chancellor. While we would never stop doing all this behind-the-scenes work (because we really do love working with students), it is nice to know at least a few other people appreciate how much goes into making it look easy.
Recently I asked the boss for some money for some new stuff for the MLC: laminating for the new signs, batteries for the clocks, an HDMI cable for the electronic sign, new trays for the tea and coffee, and also new play dough. In her email to approve this expense, she said, “Play dough eh? Have fun.” You could almost see the smile as she thought of all the unusual things we have asked for in the past.
I don’t judge her. Firstly because our good Pro-Vice Chancellor for Student Experience is a most excellent advocate for good teaching across the uni, secondly because not many people realise just how awesome playdough is for teaching maths, and finally because we do ask for some pretty unusual stuff.
Not that I needed justification for making my unusual request, but all the same I got my justification yesterday when the playdough came in handy in a way I had never used before.
A student was studying for her Statics test (“Statics” is a physics course that the Engineering students do). She was trying to understand why a particular force would produce an anticlockwise rotation around an axis in 3D. We looked up the right-hand rule in the book, and we drew pictures and waved our hands, but she just could not see it.
I was just saying, “You have to think of the object the force is pushing on as a solid box…” when it suddenly occurred to me that I could actually make a solid box! So I jumped up and ran to get the playdough out of the cupboard. She watched nonplussed as I moulded it into a box, drew some coordinate axes on paper and plonked the box down on the paper.
“Here is your force,” I said as I pushed with my finger on the corner of the box. And lo and behold, it rotated anticlockwise around the axis! The look on her face as all the confusion melted away was priceless. Seeing this look on people’s faces one of the reasons I love my job, but it also totally justified spending the University’s money on some nice new playdough!
There is a little trick someone played on me once as a child and I have been playing on the students in the Drop-In room this week. It goes like this:
Answer the following questions:
What would you find in a haunted house?
What do you call a meal of meat cooked in an oven?
What is the part of the country that is next to the sea?
When you have more than everyone else, what would you have?
What do you put in a toaster?
The answers to these questions are of course, a ghost, a roast, the coast, the most and… bread. You weren’t thinking toast were you? 😉
You may ask why I’m playing such a mean trick on my students, when normally I am adamant that we shouldn’t make our students feel stupid. Fair point, but I think it will help them feel less stupid in the end.
You see it all started when one of the students was doing “volume of revolution” problems. Every problem so far had required him to take a 2D shape and rotate it around the x-axis, thus creating a solid 3D shape. The next problem, however, required him to rotate around a different line outside the 2D shape, thus creating a 3D shape with a hole in it. It said on the page it had to be rotated around a different line, and yet he still rotated around the x-axis anyway. “Why did I do that?” he asked. And in response I played the above trick.
The point is that humans are good at following patterns, so good that we don’t even know we’re doing it. In general this is actually a good thing – it means you can set a table, sing music, do jigsaw puzzles, count, learn languages and and even learn maths. But sometimes it fails us, because things don’t always fit into a pattern. Just because the first four answers rhyme with GHOST, it doesn’t mean they all will; just because all questions so far require rotating around the x-axis, it doesn’t mean they all will.
So for students, the message is to keep your mind open. Don’t just follow the pattern, but think carefully about what the problem at hand requires you to do. For teachers, we should be careful to put in more than one type of example, so that students aren’t encouraged to form a pattern that isn’t there. In short, for all of us: Beware of the toast.
MyUni (known as “blackboard” to people not at Uni of Adelaide), is a powerful tool for supporting your students’ learning. There are a whole lot of awesome things you can use it to do: use discussion boards, have virtual classrooms, set up group assessment, student wikis, and the list goes on. The bread-and-butter of MyUni is of course to put up the lecture notes, assignments and prac instructions.
And this brings me to the most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students’ lives better: label everything properly. And not just any labels – descriptive labels.
Let me illustrate with some examples:
Example 1
Imagine yourself as a student doing your assignment and needing to remember how to, say, produce a QQ plot in SPSS. You remember that you had a computer prac at some point in the past where you learned to do that, and that the prac instructions told you how. So you go to the part of MyUni where all the prac instructions are. And you are faced with the following picture to the left.
And now you have to go through every prac one at a time, dowloading one pdf after another, to find where the instructions are. You have an intense feeling that perhaps it’s just not worth it.
If only the lecturer had labelled them with a description of what was in them! something like this:
Prac 1: Entering and importing data, saving data
Prac 2: Descriptive stats, graphs, importing into Word
Prac 3: Labelling categories, making tables, drawing scatterplots, calculating regression
and so on…
Then you as a student would be able to find the instructions yourself and not have to ask for help, or worse, just give up.
Example 2
Imagine yourself as a student studying for your exam. You have been going through your assignments and you find that you really need to go over the topic “integration by parts”. So you decide to go and watch the appropriate lecture recording.
You go to the part of MyUni where the lecture recordings are and you see the picture to the left. There is a list of the lectures at the bottom, but they are organised by date. You don’t have dates in your own personal lecture notes because you organise them by topic, since that fits with your learning style. How on earth are you supposed to know which one is the one about integration by parts? You’re not about to watch the first ten minutes of ALL of them to figure it out!
If only the lecturer had put each individual lecture as its own item with a little description of what it was about, you’d have a much easier time as a student. Indeed, you’d get a really good picture of what was going on in the course if for some reason you were forced to miss some lectures. (It would be even better if the MyMedia setup allowed lecturers to choose descriptive titles for each lecture at the time they recorded it, which was automatically included in the info here…)
Example 3
Imagine yourself as a student trying to do an assignment. You remember that you lent your lecture notes to a friend earlier in the day, so you go into MyUni to download the slides. You know you are particularly looking for the bit on Indifference Curves, but when you go to the bit with the slides you see this:
You know it’s one of Module E, F or G, but which one? If only there was a description of what was in each lecture, you might actually be able to choose which one. And in fact you might possibly get an appreciation of what the whole course looks like since the topic list would be right there. As it is, you waste precious time, and vow never to lend your notes to your friends ever again.
Conclusion
Do you see how important this one thing is? Do you see just how annoying it can be for a student to have to deal with a lack of labelling, and how it can actually seriously impede their learning? Do you see how proper labelling might actually smooth the way for the students to become more independent?
This is why I think it is the one most important thing you can do to label everything properly. Lecture notes, lecture recordings, practical notes, assignments, tutorials – everything. It really will help your students learn more than you will ever know.
So please, label everything clearly in MyUni!
This comment was left on the original blog post:
Ryan Hattam 18 January 2013:
Hi
Great advice! As a former student and now a MyUni Admin I’ve been in to many courses, and agree completely with the 3 examples!
A couple of points on example 2: In MyMedia a lecturer can include notes when they record. There is a notes field on the MyMedia Capture Application in lecture theatres, and on the file upload screen of the website. You can enter as much or as little text as you like. This text is then viewable and editable on mymedia.adelaide.edu.au with the other session editing capabilities. This text is then automatically included when you embed an individual session on a page.
We experiemented with a few ways to get the note text on the playlist, but because of the arbitary size the text could be, it was tricky to keep the playlist a certain size. Just showing the note of the current playing video was investigated, but it didnt really solve the problem! However, if you click on ‘download links +’ below the playlist, you get the download links, with recording names and the notes! The recording names match up with the names in the playlist, so you can locate the right one and select it.
The next iteration of the playlist will hopefully include the notes inline, reducing the step of expanding the download links to read them!
My younger daughter started kindy last week, and I got to actually be there for the beginning of her first day. It was one of those moments only a parent can understand as I realised with both excitement and sadness that my little baby was not a baby any more.
But this is a maths learning blog, so as much as the above point really is all that needs to be said, I will make just one more: kindy is awesome!
Of course I already knew it was awesome – my wife is a kindy teacher and director and anything she is involved with is definitely awesome – but the true awesomeness of it was brought home to me once more as I stood there in my daughter’s own kindy.
I looked around, and everywhere I looked was something specifically designed for learning, and learning was actually happening there.
The activities chosen allowed each child to choose to learn in their own way: Some activities were quiet and some were loud; some required social interaction and some were individual; some involved running, some hand-eye coordination, and some sitting still; some needed deep thought and some creativity – and every activity was encouraging learning.
The free-form structure allowed each child to choose what to learn at their own pace: children decided what to do as the whim took them, and didn’t need to wait for anyone else to tell them it was ok, and didn’t need to wait for everyone to be ready. They just started playing, and therefore just started learning straight away.
The staff were in the thick of it helping learning to happen: they moved from one place to the next, talking to the children and turning ordinary moments into teaching moments. It was clear that at some point they would move to the “group time” areas and help the students draw together the ideas they had encountered in their play. And finally, they were also constantly setting up and re-setting up the environment so that new children could keep learning there.
I was in total awe of the whole thing, and it made me wish again that we could make uni more like kindy – a place where the staff choose learning environments and materials that students could interact with in their own way and still learn, but where staff are always ready to help make learning happen.
I have been accused in the past of making the Maths Learning Centre too kindy-like. But in my mind, I could never make it too much like kindy.
Once upon a time at my place we used to watch “New Zealand’s Next Top Model” and “America’s Next Top Model”. They were a bit of light fluff that we could have on while doing something else.
Every week in the show, the remaining models had a photoshoot. This involved some famous photographer taking photos of the models, after dressing them up in themed costumes, or painting them in mud, or dunking them in water, or getting them to jump on trampolines etc.
And every week the same thing happened: as the photographers took the photos, they displayed very clearly in their demeanour that they were happy with some of the models, and unhappy with others. When the photographer was happy, they smiled and they looked like they were enjoying themselves; when they wre unhappy, they had a steely look of determination as if they just couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over.
And what was the reason the photographers were so happy with some of the models? Well, they said it was because the models actually listened to their instructions. They did what the photographers asked them to do even if it sounded silly, and even if it meant admitting they didn’t know how to do it without being given instructions. Other models, on the other hand, just continued to do whatever they thought was best regardless of what the photographers said and how unhappy the photographers became.
And every so often I am reminded of these photographers when I am working with students in the Maths Learning Centre – I too have times when I am happy or unhappy because of the behaviour of the people I work with.
I don’t mind in the slightest if the students don’t understand my first explanation and I have to try another and another – that’s all part of the job. What I mind is when I ask them to do something that will help them learn – like looking up something in their notes or writing down a particular fact on their page – and they flatly refuse to do it. It makes me so angry!
On the other hand, some students happily take all suggestions. They are willing to give anything a go, and when they’re in the same situation next time they give it a go again without needing the sugesstion. Just like the happy photographers, I come away from these interactions with a smile.
And I get something else from this that the photographers don’t: These students who listen, usually succeed in understanding their maths. And who wouldn’t be happy about that?
A couple of weeks ago I found out that OZCOTS (Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics) was being held here in Adelaide. I thought that I should go to it, since I seem to be spending rather a lot of time teaching statistics these days. And so I went.
As it turned out, I didn’t learn all that much I didn’t already know. But this is a good thing: It’s always nice to have the things you knew instinctively confirmed by those with more experience than you. So, here is a list of things I didn’t learn from OZCOTS 2012:
“Real life” examples are good for teaching stats, but much more important is to have MORE examples.
Successful stats courses depend on all the staff who interact with the students having the same goals.
Statistical software often distracts students from the real learning.
The reason students find maths boring is because they don’t understand it – being useful is secondary.
Students like to have the option of talking to someone about their learning, no matter how many other resources you give them.
Of course, there were a few new things I DID learn (such as all about how to measure ESP, and the behaviour of badgers under pressure), but they can wait for some other time…
