College students “unimpressed” with their professors’ use of technology

Campus Technology reports:

While students and faculty seem to agree on the importance of technology in education, the two groups do not agree on how well it’s being implemented. According to new research released Monday, only 38 percent of students indicated that their instructors “understand technology and fully integrate it into their classes.” Students also rated that lack of understanding as “the biggest obstacle to classroom technology integration.”

Despite this, 74 percent of higher education instructors polled indicated that they “incorporate technology into every class or nearly every class,” and 67 percent said they were “satisfied with their technology professional development.”

U.S. Department of Education names new director for state ed tech grant program

Education Week reports:

After months of anticipation about who would head educational technology initiatives at the U.S. Department of Education, ed-tech advocates praised the appointment of Karen Cator yesterday, saying the former educator and Apple executive brings to the job a passion for the potential of technology to improve teaching and learning.

The long-awaited appointment comes at a time when interest in how technology can be used to improve education is growing as more K-12 schools offer online courses, use mobile technologies such as cellphones and laptops, and put in place high-tech data-analysis tools.

Schools becoming concerned about electronic communications between teachers and students

Education Week reports:

A new state law requires all Louisiana districts to implement policies requiring documentation of every electronic interaction between teachers and students through a nonschool-issued device, such as a personal cellphone or e-mail account, by Nov.15. Parents also have the option of forbidding any communication between teachers and their child through personal electronic devices.

Similar policies exist in many school districts across the country, and at least one other state has considered such legislation in recent years. But critics question the measures, saying they will likely restrict appropriate communication between teachers and students and discourage the use of new technologies.

“The motivation for the bill was growing problems with [interactions] that started relatively innocently and escalated from there,” said state Rep. Frank A. Hoffman, the Republican who wrote the bill, which Gov. Bobby Jindal signed into law in June. “It’s to head something off before it ever gets started…”

Open educational resources bring the world’s universities to your computer desktop

NEWSWEEK reports:

In addition to [YouTube's education-focused YouTube EDU], Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world’s top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. “There is a real appetite for content that is not just a sneezing-cat video,” says Peter Bradwell, a researcher for the British academic think tank Demos. “There is a growing desire for intellectually stimulating material that is easily accessible.”

MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers free access to most of the school’s course material and lectures on subjects like Anglo-American folk music and the behavior of algorithms. iTunes U provides free lectures, discussions, and conferences from schools like Oxford, Yale, and the French business institute HEC Paris. “The beauty of this platform is that it brings your material to a much wider audience,” says Carolyn Culver, head of strategic communications for Oxford.

Can the Amazon Kindle challenge paper textbooks?

In May of this year, Amazon announced a partnership with six universities and a number of textbook publishers. College students would be given Kindles with textbooks pre-loaded onto the devices. The goal of the project was to determine how students’ experiences using the ebook reader compared with traditional paper textbooks.

The AP (via USA Today) reports that students’ response to the Kindle have been, to quote the article, “lukewarm.”

See my previous post about efforts to replace textbooks with digital resources.

The “new science of learning”

The journal Science has published a paper on a developing “new science of learning.” The article’s abstract states:

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

The article is available here (subscription required). Science Daily has a summary of the article here.

Note: this is cross-posted with my Cognitive Science Blog.

Replacing textbooks with digital resources

The NY Times reports:

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

Does the U.S. face a shortage of scientists and engineers?

USA Today reports:

As the push to train more young people in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in science, math and technology may be a stretch.

One example: Numbers from the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics issued Tuesday showed the unemployment rate for electrical engineers hit a record high, 8.6%, in the second quarter, more than doubling from 4.1% in the first quarter.

The rate for all engineers climbed to 5.5%, up from 3.9% in the first quarter. Those are still better than the nation’s overall unemployment rate of 9.7%, but the world is also still minting thousands of new graduates.

U.S. colleges graduated about 460,000 scientists and engineers combined in 2005 (many in social and behavioral sciences), according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, emerging nations such as India and China produced nearly 700,000 engineers alone. But the slow growth of U.S.-born STEM workers, analysts say, may have less to do with funding commitments than with cloudy career paths and low wages relative to other specialized careers such as medicine, law and finance.

Among the most vocal critics: Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research. He says there are “substantially more scientists and engineers” graduating from the USA’s universities than can find attractive jobs.

“Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive” compared with other career paths, he told Congress in 2007.

Blended instruction more effective than either face-to-face or online instruction alone, study suggests

T.H.E. Journal reports:

The United States Department of Education reported recently that it’s found some evidence to support the notion that blended learning is more effective than either face to face or online learning by themselves. Further, between online and face to face instruction, online is at least as good and may even have the advantage in terms of improving student achievement and potentially expanding the amount of time (and quality time) students spend learning.

The Department of Education report is availabl as a PDF here.

Fighting social stereotypes with the aid of video games

Note: this is cross-posted with my Cognitive Science Blog

Science Daily reports:

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The researchers set out to create virtual worlds with characters that children could interact and empathise with powerfully enough to change their own attitudes and behaviour.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

Finding new ways to resolve such problems is important, says eCIRCUS coordinator Ruth Aylett, because they are pervasive, hurtful, and can cause lasting psychological damage.

“Knowledge-based interventions don’t necessarily succeed,” says Aylett. “If we’re able to reduce victimisation, we’re giving people a way to get out of a very painful situation and improve the quality of their lives.”

FearNot! – help for bullied children

The eCIRCUS researchers first focused on primary school children who were the victims of bullying. They drew on recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other.

“Emotion is an essential part of human interaction,” says Aylett, “so education about human social interaction must include feelings.”

The theories led them to expect that if they could get children to empathise with and try to help victims of bullying in a virtual world, the children could try out different strategies, experience the results, and develop better ways to deal with bullying in their own lives.

The researchers used a computer program, called FearNot! (Fun with Empathic Agents to Achieve Novel Outcomes in Teaching), that had been developed as an initial small prototype by an earlier European research effort called VICTEC.

The eCIRCUS team made FearNot! much richer in content and more open-ended. For example, they provided virtual bullying victims with the ability to remember strategies that they have tried. Those memories allow the virtual characters to reject approaches that have failed and ask the children who are helping them in the simulation to come up with better ideas.

“We are the first people to produce software for dealing with bullying that is not pre-scripted,” says Aylett. “We’ve produced something that is genuinely interactive to the individual responses of each child.”

To test the effectiveness of FearNot!, the eCIRCUS team tried it out with close to 1000 students in 30 primary schools across Germany and the UK.

The researchers tested FearNot! by comparing a group of users and a control group of non-users, similar to the method used for testing medical treatments.

Students in selected classes spent a total of 1.5 hours playing FearNot! over the course of three weeks.

The results were encouraging. “It definitely reduces victimisation in the short term,” says Aylett. “It has a significant positive effect even at this low exposure.”

Although further work is needed to demonstrate long-term effects, Aylett is confident that if all the children in a school experienced FearNot! over a longer term, and as part of a social learning curriculum, bullying and victimisation would be reduced.

“FearNot! has achieved its objectives very well,” says Aylett. “You’d need a games or educational software company to take it further.”

ORIENT – empathising with newcomers

While FearNot! has younger children interacting with cartoon-like characters in a simple world, ORIENT immerses older students in a much more vivid and complex virtual world, where they learn to empathise with and accept newcomers from other cultures.

In ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and “beamed down” as a team to save the planet Orient.

Planet Orient is populated by aliens called Sprytes, who look rather like large bipedal tree frogs and who have their own language and customs. Students have to learn a lot about the Sprytes and empathise with them in order to help them.

“We wanted users to feel adrift in this alien culture,” says Aylett. “How can you empathise with new people in your own culture if you’ve never experienced being adrift yourself?”

The software that shapes what happens as students interact with the Sprytes acts like the director of an improvisational drama. The software starts and ends scenes, chooses which characters appear, and can impose challenges such as a storm.

Each Spryte has its own goals, feelings and memories that control what it does and that can change based on experience. The interaction between the Sprytes and the students produces an unpredictable “emergent narrative”.

“There’s no fixed plot,” says Aylett. “Our characters are acting autonomously, making up their minds as they go.”

According to Aylett, students standing in front of a large screen and interacting with these psychologically believable aliens soon respond as if they were real. “ORIENT produces the feeling of really being there,” she says.

Although ORIENT needs further development and testing, Aylett believes it has the potential to help solve a major social problem by spurring students to change their attitudes toward students from other cultures.

“It’s the attitudes of the host community that can either make new students welcome or make their lives miserable,” she says.

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

The eCircus Web site is here.