למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Adios Ed Tech. Hola something else.

educational technology is not becoming more human; it is making the human a technology

The software “learns” from the students and adapts the content to each student. End result? Better learning gains, less time spent on irrelevant content, less time spent on reviewing content that the student already knows, reduced costs, tutor support when needed, and so on.

robs learners of the development of the key attributes needed for continual learning – metacognitive, goal setting, and self-regulation – because it makes those decisions on behalf of the learner.

What we need to do today is create adaptive learners rather than adaptive learning. Our software should develop those attributes of learners that are required to function with ambiguity and complexity.

It is here, in analytics and data use in education, that far more attention and awareness is needed than is currently evident. Algorithms will subsume most of our educational practices as they will embody certain pedagogies, support roles, and even faculty practices. Quite simply, the shape of tomorrow’s university is now actively being coded into analytics models. I’m generally fine with this as a concept, but quite nervous about this as an action.

Recent efforts to “improve” online course “integrity” have led to various rubrics, standards, and evaluative tools, wielded by administrators and instructional improvement teams. These assess the “quality” of an online course. The ones I’ve seen, and the faculty I’ve talked to who have been subject to them, note that the rubrics clearly prefer the Online Class A model: content-based, simply laid out, clearly expressing not only expectations but overall outcomes. Complexity is seen as “cognitive overload” and is discouraged.

Although the teams and projects deny that the intention is to standardize online classes, to make them “cookie cutter”, that is the likely result.

Many, many students complain that their online classes are impersonal, that they feel like they’re just learning from a computer instead of a person (and in the case of instructors who adopt course cartridges, that is often true). Students come to believe that this is what an online class is – a list of tasks to be completed and graded, rather than a learning experience.

We are being told that the days of “cobbling” our own systems together are over, that we need to join the “community” of large initiatives designed to create more accountable and approvable online classes.

We must step down from our role as innovators and join the parade, marching together. We must realize that it is time to, in a word, simplify.

Do we wish to encourage that sort of simplification for our students, when employers have made it clear that what they want is workers who can actually learn? Are such industrial models appropriate in a post-industrial world?

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking

Among the article’s many strengths: it confirms what we knew all along. The way we did things back in the day – that way was better.

Mueller and Oppenheimer picked a research question with two impressive qualities: teachers agree that it’s a really important inquiry, and it’s relatively easy to investigate.

Here we arrive at Mueller and Oppenheimer’s key finding: laptop note takers write more words, but they use this excess word capacity to write more VERBATIM words. Because hand-writers simply can’t write down everything the lecturer says, they have to REWORD the ideas in the lecture. This rewording leads to more cognitive effort, and that cognitive effort leads to more learning.

If students succeed in this project, then they will end up with an awesome classroom superpower: the ability to write more words AND reworded words. With this superpower, they should remember even more than the hand-writers, who write fewer words that are reworded words. This likelihood, in fact, flows directly from Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research.

For nearly 30 years, pundits have predicted that education technology would disrupt higher education. Online courses will reduce costs and create unprecedented access to higher education, so the argument goes. Likewise, adaptive learning will improve — or replace — the art of teaching as the right digital content is delivered at the right time to each individual learner.

It’s looking increasingly like none of these are the game-changers we expected.

the advent of a new digital language that connects higher education and the labor market and, in so doing, exerts profound changes on both.

The historic disconnect between higher education and the needs of the labor market is a data problem.

will close the gap between higher education and the labor market and usher in a new era in human capital.

It may be that liberal arts courses provide high-value competencies that predict career success across many professions.