markmorton's blog

Wikis are an online tool that allow numerous individuals to access and edit the same document at the same time. They are a powerful educational tool in the right situations, but the problem is that there are scores of wiki applications — which one is best for your purposes? Well, to help you choose, you might make use of the online Wiki Wizard, which asks you a series of questions and then recommends a handful based upon your responses. Try the Wiki Wizard here.

You’ve probably already heard about Twitter, a micro-blogging application that appeared in 2006 and which has surged in popularity over the past year. Oprah, for example, is now on Twitter, and CNN offers news updates via Twitter. Posts to Twitter (which are called tweets) are brief — no longer than 140 characters, which is perfect for sharing a quick update about what you’re doing or reading, for disseminating a web address to a useful site, or for asking your Twitter “followers” a question. Universities have also begun to use Twitter to good purpose. I’ve provided a complete list of university Twitter sites at the end of this post, but one in particular stands out as especially interesting.

I managed to achieve “flow” this morning. This is not, I should clarify, an admission of prostate problems, but rather a celebration of having achieved a cognitive state so engrossing that several hours passed without my noticing. The notion of flow was originated by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, but it’s a state of mind that we all (hopefully) get to experience from time to time, either in our work or while we’re engaged in a favorite hobby.

Tired of not being able to access millions of pages of information while you’re relaxing at the cottage or stricken with insomnia on an eight-hour flight to Istanbul? Frustrated by your inability to settle trivial disputes because the pub where you and your friends are disputing doesn’t have a wireless hotspot? Those pesky scenarios can now be a thing of the past thanks to WikiTaxi, which allows you to download Wikipedia in its entirety — all three million entries — and access them on your laptop, even when the Internet is nowhere to be found.

My nephew, who is studying Korean, recently told me about a free website that facilitates the learning of a second language by making use of social networking in the form of peer tutoring. The site in question is called LiveMocha, and it’s like many websites devoted to learning second languages in that it includes content such as flash cards, vocabulary drills, and so on.

A few years ago, I established a "Loving to Learn Day" at my university, an event that I would be glad to see taken up at other institutions. Essentially, Loving to Learn Day is an opportunity for members of university communities, as well as the public at large, to reflect on their love of learning. To help motivate people to undertake this reflection, I devise a different contest each year (with prizes being provided by my university's bookstore). This year, for example, I've invited people to submit a paragraph describing the one thing that they are most glad to have learned over the past year. Please take a look at the webpage that I've created for the event:

http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/L2L

I recently gave a workshop on how a "best-practice" approach to using clickers can help remedy a number of instructional challenges. However, rather than use PowerPoint, which I find constraining in that assumes a linear pathway through the presentation material, I created a concept map using Cmaps. The nodes of the concept map are hyperlinked to webpages that correspond to "slides." Once the workshop got going, I was able to jump to whatever node was relevant to that aspect of the discussion. All in all, it worked quite well, and helped make the workshop more dynamic and interactive. The concept map is available here: http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/clickers.html . Feel free to make use of it, or to give me feedback.

-- Mark

I recently came across a couple of great passages from Boswell's Life of Johnson. (Samuel Johnson, as you probably know,  was one of the greatest English authors of the eighteenth century, and had a gift for cranky wit; James Boswell was a friend who followed him around in order to record his pronouncements). In the first passage below, Johnson shows himself to be an early advocate of active learning. In the second passage, he reveals his impatience with "theory!"   :)

"People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures -- you might teach the making of shoes by lectures!"

We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. Johnson: "Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare.  Sir, while you are considering which of the two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both."

One of the faculty members at my university teaches large classes of students (in Accounting and Management), and he's eager to implement Active Learning into these courses. An obvious challenge, however, is that the students themselves tend to be skeptical of Active Learning; they are familiar with the Sage on the Stage approach, and thus they are often reluctant to embrace a teaching strategy that is not a straight lecture. To help address this challenge, I've offered to attend the instructor's course (at the beginning of the term) with a view to making a presentation (and facilitating a discussion or debate) about Active Learning. Essentially, I want to persuade the students that Active Learning can improve their performance, and therefore they should welcome their instructor's Active Learning teaching strategies. In preparation for this, I reviewed a number of studies of the efficacy of Active Learning, extracted the most salient passages, and pulled them together into a single document. That document is attached.

RateMyHeuristic.Com

Mark Morton, Instructional Program Manager, Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology

Everyone loves a heuristic: a handy, tidy, bulleted, get-down-to-brass-tacks distillation of the best practices for navigating your way through a complex system or situation. In higher education, one of the best known heuristics must surely be the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” devised in 1987 by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson. As you probably know, Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles encourage things like “student/faculty contact,” “prompt feedback,” and so on. Other heuristics have also been proposed as alternatives to that of Chickering and Gamson. For example, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) advocates “Five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice,” such as “level of academic challenge” and “active and collaborative learning.” Likewise, Patrick Terenzini, the author of the award-winning How College Affects Students, identifies “Six Characteristics of Learning and Development,” including “real world activities” and “unbounded by time or place.”