Facebook & Mobile access

reading: Facebook for Educators (pdf)

I'm interested in using Facebook in my classes, I've tried using Twitter in the past, but very few of my students actually have it. But it turns out nearly every one of them uses Facebook. So its time to get with the times!
I had thought that what I would be doing was making a profile, 'friending' their profiles, and communicating through that. Fortunately, that's not necessary at all. Apparently I can create Groups and Pages on the class and subject, and they can like them which will put updates into their newsfeed. They can also edit and share information directly on the Groups and Pages, all without us having to 'friend' one another.

A particularly curious bit of information from the above brochure is this:

your students are already using Facebook on their mobile phones while at home or when riding the bus. Your teaching can reach them at these moments. That opens new doors for teaching and learning....for many urban and minority youth, a mobile device is their primary access point to the Internet.

"Urban Minority Youth" describes a huge section of the student community that we serve, and yet our campus has its WiFi access completely locked up. If you go to any of 20 NYC Parks soon, you can get free WiFi, but on our Campus, you need to bring a laptop to the IT department, and they will install a program that will negotiate wireless access. You can imagine that this doesn't always work, and more importantly, you can't access the network with anything other than a laptop. No phones, no smartphones, no iPods or iPads. As a faculty member I can't access the WiFi network on my phone. I have a laptop on loan from the IT group itself and it doesn't connect even though its supposed to. The only time I've been able to access the schools network is through a hardwired office in my computer, the Podiums bolted to the floor in the classrooms, or by taking my loaner wireless laptop and plugging it into an ethernet jack.

It'd be really great, just from a class-functional perspective, if we could do things like remind students which room Academic Scheduling has dropped us into today, or when we've moved to a computer lab or different science lab-room. If they could quickly get WiFi on their phone, we could do this. I could send a message from the classroom. They could message me as they're walking through the front gate. We could exchange electronic documents in the classroom and verify right there that it went through. These perhaps aren't critical things, but its just strikingly odd that we have our network caged up like this.
Our campus isn't very large, but its larger than a wireless router's broadcast range. So why can't we just have open-access to our network? You'd have to actually be on campus to use it, so only our students and faculty and staff would be able to do it, its not like people would be coming in off the street just to use our WiFi. If Starbucks can do it, why can't we? Heck, if all of the Parks in NYC can do it, why can't we? We already have the infrastructure, and I seriously doubt that our campus has some sort of internet traffic cap, so maybe its time we did this.

via Storify

E-Portfolios and Cats

re: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2011/06/eportfolios-all-thats-wrong-with-ed-tech.html

The crux of the above post is that e-portfolios were all the rage, but the fell out of favour because they add unnecessary complications, are de-socialized, have a steep learning curve, and often quickly just became ways to submit student work.

They are still alive at our campus. I don't use them and don't know anyone that uses them, but I occasionally see campus-wide-list-emails about them. Development of e-portfolios is managed by our 'Center for Advanced Technologies Training', along with many other systems, like BlackBoard, Blogs, and Wikis. Most of our faculty doesn't have their Faculty Profile webpage set up though, so I suspect that these resources are under-utilized. I know the people at our CATT and they are great, extremely helpful, so I have to think that what the above post suggests is true about a lot of electronic systems.

One comment on the above blog is interesting:

So e-portfolios are problematic if you're talking about education and learning, but in the context of schooling - the real world in which most people live, they work just fine (or as well as anything does...).

This highlights the difference between Actual Learning and Scholasticism. On the one hand our students, and this seems to be true everywhere regardless of what people say, are expected to basically jump through a set of hoops. And they approach it as such, tasks to check off in order to move up.

I was at a graduation ceremony this weekend at a high level private high school. The Valedictorian actually said just that, that they learned nothing in their school other than to use things like cliff and spark notes, and that putting work off until the night before was actually better than doing it ahead of time, not merely acceptable or sufficient but preferable because they can focus on other things to learn that are important (and he did not mean academic matters).

So it sounds like e-portfolios are great, as long as you want the same-old-same-old, or as long as you want 'top performing students' who are doing nothing.

I'll have to actually try to verify that though, maybe I need to talk to the guys over at our CATT.

Quantification of Qualitative Data

Reading: Libarkin, Kurdziel, & Anderson 2007 College Student Conceptions of Geological Time and the Disconnect Between Ordering and Scale. J. Geoscience Ed 55(5) November

In this study Libarkin and co. continue their work on learning about how students learn. And importantly, learning what the students don't learn. They use questions from the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) to evaluate a range of students from a range of colleges. One pretty neat thing they did was to give the students complete a timeline. The timeline had Earth Forms at the bottom and today at the top. They were asked to put in the following events in order and record the time that those events occurred:

1. First Life on Earth
2. Appearance of the Dinosaurs
3. Disappearance of the Dinosaurs
4. Appearance of Man

Most students did pretty good on the sequence of events, only a few did crazy things like have dinosaurs appear, then Man, then dinosaurs disappear. They did OK on getting the dates in. Nearly all students failed to get the scale correct, even when given the timeline on graph paper. They'd do things like have dinosaurs appear and die out in the middle of the time line, have humans appear way too far down the time line, etc. Interesting enough of a result on its own.

But then Libarkin et al went a step further and mapped the timeline results to a Ternary diagram.

A Ternary Diagram is basically a chart, like any data you can chart you find out the x-axis value, the y-axis value and plot a point where they intersect. Here, instead of two axes, there are three and they cross each other. The diagram itself looks like a triangle, the axes run through the corners of the triangle. The other neat thing about a Ternary diagram is that the three axes need to all sum together to make a whole, so a Timeline naturally lends itself to this sort of analysis.

The authors set out to plot each student's timeline on the Ternary Diagram. They determined the percentage of the total timeline for three intervals:

1. Earth Forms - First Life
2. First Life - Man
3. Man - Today

Each of these intervals make up an axis in the diagram (well, technically the percentage of the whole that each interval is makes up an axis). So now every student timeline has a value for each axis and can be plotted on the diagram. This allows the student timelines to be compared and analysed further. Typically, in geology, Ternary Diagrams are used to represent phases: phases of minerals, types of sediment, etc. A geological Ternary diagram will usually have several areas mapped out on it that correspond to, say, K-feldspar, or biogenic ooze, depending on the diagram. Here the authors feel that they've discerned a few 'phases' of student concepts. The creationist students tend to plot together, the students in an "Honors Natural History Field Course" mark out a phase, and between lies a wide space where other students fall into.

Fortunately, the point that represents reality, the scientific concensus on the issue, falls within the same 'phase' as the Honors Students. BUT, the Honors students phase is really large. Their answers aren't ALL over the place, they don't cross into Young Earth Creationist (YEC) territory, but a helluva lot of them are just completely wrong.

It might be better to think of the diagram as having three phases, a small circular phase around the correct answer, meaning that there is an agreed upon answer, and some error is allowed for amoung students. A second YEC phase, just like in the paper, and a third phase, everything else. Viewed that way, you can see that the Honors students DO NOT cluster in the "Correct" phase. The smallest spread (but also a very small sample size) is from "Students in a small elite private University in the Northeast (and they were enrolled in a gen ed bio coure)", and following that, to me it looks like a "Large State University in the SouthWest". So you might think that small elite Universities are faring better in their geoscience education, except that he "Honors College, Natural Science Field Course" students were from a "Large State University in the East".

As far as demographics go, they were typical of what I've seen in geoscience courses (keeping in mind that these weren't all students from geoscience courses in the first place), that is to say, a buncha white kids. Couple of other ethnicities represented, but no black students. Thats probably another issue best examined at another time.

I don't know if this is standard practice in the social sciences either but in the demographic section, one student abstained from reporting their ethnicity, and was counted as a Caucasian. For some reason I find that humorous; is it expected that non-whites will always fillout demographic information, or is it expected that only white people wouldn't bother to do it (or is that the same thing)?

By the way, most of the above blather about the procedure and results is distilled into its essence in the paper as:

"The timeline distance between three pairs of events, normalized to the sum of these distances, generates a ternary diagram from which conceptual zoning can be identified."

I think that the Lacodaemeons would've loved scientific writing.