Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

Our Directorate of Teaching and Learning has organised a series of seminars over the next few months, with invited speakers from a variety of institutions across the country. They’ll be presenting on a range of topics, including academic literacy, integrating technology into teaching, working with large classes, teaching practices, and educational theory. I’ll also be presenting a session on personal learning, which will be similar to the other talks I’ve give on the topic recently.

Today we had a presentation by Doctor Brenda Leibowitz, who spoke about the relationship between language and biography / identity and their impact on teaching and learning. Here are a few short notes I took during the session.

Language studies typically look at homogeneous groups, but few look at cross-institutional and cultural communities.

Language can be intimidating for students (“the words are so complicated”), which means that texts can take longer to read, result in more guessing and reduced coherence

“Too hard to find the words, so you just make simple sentences”

Students appreciated the focus groups where someone was paying attention to their difficulties (“This gathering is like rain in the desert”)

The ability to communicate effectively depends on genre. Context has implications for language

Attitude has implications for language, as does identity

Mastery of a second language is important, but is not the sole determinant of academic success

Role of language in teaching and learning:

• Proficiency
• Social – and isolation
• Utility
• Value (exposure)
• Ideological associations

Language has an impact on social and organisational structure

Code switching

How can we introduce students to the genre of academic discourse?

“Talking and writing students into the discipline”. How do you take your students with you to the conclusion, rather than leave them behind and create a gap that they cannot cross?

• Be More Innovative Today – Make Fresh Insightful Connections « Innovation Leadership Network

  • connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation
  • Connections is a about the process where the human mind takes the same letters of the alphabet but puts them together in a unique way to create something that far more compelling than the parts that went before. All the components for innovation existed. The magic was in the connecting.
  • do something that introduces new connections into your routine today.

• Preparing Our Students to be Digital Citizens « The Principal of Change

  • I believe that the best way to learn about the world is by connecting with it
  • Before we work with our students on using these technologies, it is important that we work with them to be strong digital citizens
  • Work with your kids (as a teacher or parent) and teach them how to be responsible.  Teach them that it is okay to communicate when things are not great.  They are going on the Internet either way; will you work to help them prepare for it?

• Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning – Educational Research

  • there appears to be an understanding of supporting learners in constructing their own meanings and understandings, rather than passively consuming materials
  • there is a real excitement about the potential of using multimedia for learning, once more not just consuming but creating audio and video
  • many teachers also seem to understand the Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments are for managing students, rather than providing an active tool for learning
  • Many teachers, whilst aware of the possibilities of new media, say the education system makes it difficult for them to change existing tecahing and learning practice. The reasons vary but include lack of infrastructure, lack of understanding and support from management, an overly prescriptive curriculum, lack of time, and rigid and individualistic assessment practices
  • Can teachers themselves initiate such change bottom up through introducing new technologies and pedagogies in their own practice. Can we drive change through modernising teacher training? How effective are projects in embedding change? How about ‘innovation champions’? Can we persuade managements of the potential new ways of tecahing and learning offer?
  • This is not going to be an orderly change from ‘old’ policy and practice to a shiny new world of technology enhanced learning. It will be messy. the problem is not the modernisation of schools, but rather that our schooling systems are increasingly dysfunctional within our society and increasingly irrelevant to the way many young people communicate and develop understandings and meanings

• Don’t Fear the Teacher; Creating the Optimal Learning Environment « The Principal of Change

  • A mutual respect between teacher and student must be created to ensure that there is an opportunity for optimal learning
  • 1. Kids need to feel safe
  • safe to make mistakes, share thoughts, and know that their ideas will not be attacked or ridiculed
  • Trust must be apparent for students to succeed.
  • 2.  Students are cared for as people first
  • We always need to teach kids FIRST then curriculum.  Remember that.  Always.
  • If you enjoy what you do, have a sense of humour, and can laugh in your environment, you will do better and enjoy what you do
  • 3.  Opportunities for fun
  • Staff are encouraged to allow students to use Ipods in the classroom to not just connect with the outside world, but to also just let kids listen to music while they work.
  • Allowing students to use them responsibly in the classroom while respecting the learning of their peers is just one way we can create a better environment for students to learn
  • 4. Ideas and opinions are valued
  • Even the most famous inventors have failed before but we have to show students that even when they fall short, it is all a part of the learning process.
  • Kids need to have the opportunity to show their understanding in a way that is meaningful and relevant to them
  • 5. Opportunities for individualized learning
  • 6. Understand their knowledge and guide them to further their learning
  • I do not believe that “marks” are the best basis for this because they do not give any feedback for growth.  As teachers, it is our responsibility to give strategies to improve learning and help them further their own learning
  • 7. Student as a leader in the classroom
  • It simply can mean that they have the opportunity to show leadership in areas they excel and are passionate in
  • I appreciate learning at all times, even if it is from a child.  Not only will students appreciate that they have taught their teacher something, they will go out of their way to further their own learning to ensure that it happens again
  • 8. Opportunities for all to reflect
  • Time has to be given to students where they can self-assess their learning and put their ideas together
  • It is not the avenue that is important, but the opportunity
  • Find time in the busy school day to let students reflect on what they are learning
  • Through writing this post, I realized that this is not JUST an environment that we should try to create for our students, but for all those that we work with

• social learning on replay doesn’t work « Mollybob Goes To School

  • When I design, facilitate, or moderate webinars I come from a social learning perspective, which means that participation is key. I get rather uncomfortable if a session is filled with me talking to slides because I feel I’m not engaging my learners, and King backs this up so neatly, saying

    “discussing the material with others actually transforms how we think about it… During such interaction with another, we clarify ideas, negotiate meaning, develop new skills, and construct new knowledge: thus, learning becomes a by-product of that interaction” (1997, p. 221).

In my department we have bi-monthly research meetings, where we report back on our research activities (we get dedicated research time and so need to account for how we’ve used that time). We’ve recently changed the format of the meeting to include a topical discussion or presentation, rather than simply reporting progress back to the group.

Today was our first session in this new format and we discussed some of the issues around supervision. Everyone in the department is responsible for supervising either a group of 4th year physiotherapy students as they go through the process of conducting a research project, or a group of postgraduate students who are working on their degrees. Here are some notes I took during the session.

Contracts are useful, not only between the supervisor and student, but between the students themselves (in cases of group research). We often find that some students don’t participate or contribute to the process as much as the rest of the group, which has the potential to cause conflict, especially when marks are involved. While conflict does give the opportunity to work through conflict management processes with the group (not desirable, but still a learning opportunity), a contract that outlines responsibilities, roles, expectations, accountability and consequences, may go some way to reducing it’s likelihood.

The issue of supervision style was raised, and it was pointed out that often supervisors will have a different way of approaching supervision. In addition, students have different ways that they want to be supervised. It seems that managing expectations in terms of communicating personal preferences is important to begin with, and probably to keep reviewing during the process.

As a research supervisor, it’s important to have prepared a plan for moving the project forward. At PhD level, it’s largely the responsibility of the student to manage this, but undergraduate and Masters students (generally) aren’t ready to completely manage their own projects. One useful project management tool that was suggested was to use Gantt charts to plan the project over time.

Finally, we need to go over what “academic writing” actually means. Students are often under the impression that it’s about using big words and complicated sentence structure, when all we’re really looking for is argument construction and defense. Academic writing is about conveying ideas in simple language, something our students don’t always understand.

I enjoyed the session, and although it lacked structure, it gave us the opportunity to discuss the issues faced during the supervision process. It’s always nice to be able to draw on the experience of professors and seasoned researchers, and I’m looking forward to our next sessions. I’ll be presenting a session on systematic reviews with a colleague in 2 weeks time, and will be putting that up here too.

Edit: I just had a colleague point out that we also discussed the role of feedback in supervision. I haven’t included those details in this post, because I have a more comprehensive post dealing with feedback that I’m working on at the moment, which can be found here.

I’m busy reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, and wanted to share some of the takeaway points that made me think about how I could change my own teaching practice. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I may update this post when I do.

The premise of the book is that we aren’t always the rational beings we believe we are, and that there are powerful emotional factors that cause us to make decisions that are often counterintuitive. If we understand how these factors predictably make us less rational, we might be able to affect greater self-control over our lives, and be better off for it.

One of the ideas that really got my attention was how we respond to social and market norms in our everyday interactions with other people. When you think about it, a lot of what we do as teachers has nothing to do with market norms i.e. we don’t work the hours we do because we’re paid appropriately. Social norms mean that we go above and beyond what is required of us possibly because we have a sense of shared purpose or a belief that we’re contributing to something more important than money. In other words, people are motivated to work harder when they believe they’re in a socially-orientated relationship, rather than one in which market values dominate. Ariely also conducted experiments showing that when market and social norms collide, relationships that were based on the social norms are disrupted and can take years to rebuild. This has implications when we start thinking about building communities of practice in our professional domains, and it seems that we would do well to base our interactions on a shared sense of purpose, rather than financial reward. I know from recent conversations with students with whom I have a good relationship, that they try harder to impress me with their work, and worry less about the mark they receive, than they do with other lecturers who don’t engage with them at all. For me, this is a powerful incentive to engage with students not only on a cognitive level, but on a social level as well.

Ariely also shows clearly how emotionally heightened states cause us to make bad decisions for ourselves and for those around us. How many times have we made a bad decision when we’re angry? When I think about it (and if I’m honest with myself), I know that I’ve been guilty of being a stricter assessor when I’m in a bad mood, than when I’m having a good day. I know that my marking isn’t as objective as I’d like it to be, but to be shown the evidence of how much it influences my behaviour has made me commit to avoid marking students’ work when I’m upset.

When discussing procrastination, Ariely makes the observation that when students are given absolute submission dates for assignments that are appropriately spaced, they do better than students who are given flexibility in determining their own submission dates. I know that recently I’ve started including draft deadlines into assignments to “encourage” students to begin work their on assignments early, and to continue improving their work up until the final submission date. Last year I saw students who participated in the drafting process score significantly higher marks than those who chose to submit only one, final version of the assignment. Students will procrastinate if left to themselves, and I guess we need to decide if we’re OK with that, or to rather try and figure out how to more effectively guide them through the process of making regular improvement through regular feedback.

The final point I wanted to highlight is from a TED presentation that Ariely gave (although it might be in the book too), where he finds that students are less likely to cheat after thinking about the 10 commandments. It turns out that signing an honour code might not be as pointless as I’d previously thought.

You can also see Ariely discuss some of his ideas at these 2 TED talks:

• Are we in control of our own decisions?
• Our buggy moral code

Just got back from watching 6 groups of 4th year physiology students present the results or their research projects at a competition.

There were a few things that struck me:

• The “examiners” were all clinicians with few research credentials
• Many of the the students who presented had little understanding of the results they presented, especially those who made use of statistics (the examiners were just as clueless)
• Most of the studies were methodologically flawed, a point that was lost on the examiners
• Our students really struggle with confidence and presentation skills, which comes across clearly when pitted against students from other universities (there seems to be an inferiority complex that they inherit when they arrive…many complex socio-economic factors involved)

All in all I think our students did well and am proud of their achievements.