alternote blog

Hurricane Irene is hurtling toward the Northeast this weekend. If you can keep your wifi afloat, we found some amazing videos from MIT’s post-Katrina symposia titled Big Questions after Big Hurricanes. Based on their research, many incredible professors discussed what impact hurricanes have and will have on the world. 

Warning: the videos are over an hour each. But with mass transit shutdowns and 120mph winds, what else will you be doing?  

Above, is a talk by Kerry Emanuel, an MIT Professor who specializes in atmospheric convection and the mechanisms acting to intensify hurricanes.

Other symposia panels to check out include:

How Can We Improve Disaster Response? 

Kenneth Oye, Richard C. Larson, Yossi Sheffi: “Even if the U.S. draws the right lessons from Hurricane Katrina, panelists suggest, the nation may still be caught short in the next disaster.” 

What’s so Natural About Natural Disasters? 

David A. Mindell “the prosaic networks surrounding us, from highways to electrical power, sewers, water, and communication, are all more or less necessary for life as we know it—but some are necessary for survival”

David S. Jones “Some epidemics have natural origins, then spiral out of control when they begin to circulate among humans, particularly those residing in the developing world.”     Meg Jacobs “What might appear as a political gaffe is the result of a quarter-century effort to purge the idea that government should respond to disaster,”

John Burk, a 9th grade physics teacher in Atlanta, uses Angry Birds to teach the laws of projectile motion in the classroom.

On the surface, this sounds fun/playful. The implications of this are large in the scheme of the direction our education should be headed in. We need to take what's familiar to students to make things easier to grasp. The content of a class will always be as difficult as it always was, but the method in which its conveyed plays a critical role in whether or not its effectively absorbed. 

With alternote, we're playing with the fact that students are familiar with chatting with other friends over Skype, Facebook, and GChat. We're playing with their familiarity to a Facebook wall and how they share links and photos. We're playing with their familiarity of comment threads and discussions, liking systems and upvoting systems (think Reddit). 

With the recent boom in Twitter use, there have been a ton of talk about its uses in the classroom to boost participation, crowdsource questions, and create conversations around classroom topics. It's all true, and there are definitely great uses for it in the classroom, but it's important to realize that by no means is it the end solution to this problem of passivity / lack of interaction. 

After reading a bit into Fred Wilson's experience in Dr. Tom Eisenmann's classroom at HBS with the class live tweeting, I reached out to Dr. Eisenmann himself, and he pointed out a few pros and cons: It was great that students voiced insightful points that wouldn't have otherwise showed up in the main discussion. On the same note though, as a public medium, there's a lot of noise that mixes in with the tweeting of conversations around the class, making it ill-suited for the classroom. A channel created specifically for the classroom would be better suited. 

Sir Ken Robinson also makes a good point that we're "educated" that the answer is "at the back" of the book. We're not supposed to look there because that's cheating. Outside of school, however, that's not cheating. It's collaboration. Funny enough, it leads to the best results and outcomes. By atomizing people and judging them separately, "we form a disjunction between them and their natural learning environments."

"Great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth."

A sociology professor at Penn, Herb Smith, once said that almost all students learn by analogy. It's near impossible for most people to learn on a blank slate. That said, information taught needs to come in forms that allow students to create relations to things they already understand. Frankly, I think students can relay this information in a comprehendible fashion better than a 50+ y.o. Ph. D. could, just by nature of their understanding. 

That's why we form study groups when studying for exams. More student-to-student engagement is necessary to make class sessions more valuable. 

Sir Ken Robinson posits that the purpose of education is to prepare us for the future. Standards of education are raising, but the system of education we're stuck in is based on what we did in the past. That is world is changing is a call to action for the education system to change.  

He makes an interesting point about how the arts create aesthetic experiences - ones where your senses operate at their peak, as you're present in the moment, resonating with your experience. The current education system, outside of the arts, however, push us to shut ourselves off, to deaden outselves from our surroundings. 

Schooling needs to wake students up, not put them to sleep. 

The thing about the classroom as it is now is that it's a one-sided experience. Professor speaks, students listen. It's standardized for everyone. But everyone is different. They remember and digest information in different ways. Standardization makes no sense.

I don't think there's much argument that the LMS industry has been waiting for newcomers to chip away at Blackboard and rightfully snag their share. Blackboard is terribly broken, and a miserably designed interface that doesn't encourage use of its 80245 features. A better interface is needed, and these are being achieved by Instructure (Canvas), Coursekit, and Desire2Learn.

One could argue that a cleaner, more approachable interface is what we students need to start making learning a social experience. We think students need a real incentive to actually use the services (and no, having it influence your participation grade doesn't count as real incentive). As Watters, from HackEducation, says in the article:

I want to see more companies working on improving teaching and learning with technology, not just improving schools’ course administration.

There needs to first be created an interest among students in engaging in the context of the classroom, and I don't think any LMS actually does that today. 

They might make it easy to engage, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's interesting for students to take part.

Sugata Misra tackles one of the greatest problems of education - the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments...he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.- TED.com

Brilliant TED talk about encouraging new learning methods in rural villages to actually bring education to areas where its not. Misra does this primarily by placing computers with internet access in villages. Not enough computers for all the students -- rather, just enough for the students to create groups and surround computers in those groups.

Although in colleges today, there are plenty of professors and education surrounding the students. We believe the fundamental problem is not that there's a lack of education, but a lack of effective way to take that education in. Misra makes a brilliant point about how instead of giving four students four computers, it's a crucial element of the experiment to give one computer to each of the four. That way, they have to discuss and collaborate in their search for information on topics they're instructed to learn (on their own). Without that conversation, there would be little photographic memory of the content. 

Because of the conversation that ensued while learning the material, he could quiz the students on the content two months after they learned it without giving them access to computers, and what happened? They achieved the same scores they did two months ago with the information access.

Real learning happens when it has context, when students are not only able to talk to each other about what they're learning, but are motivated to actually do it. That motivation comes where there is interest in the content. 

Advances in technology have made it almost too easy to lose focus in class, to leave the classroom and stay ignorant to class content until exams/projects/papers roll around. From this sprouts the mentality that it's okay to walk out of class thinking, "What the heck did I just learn?" or "It's okay. I'll just read the textbook when the final rolls around." 

Ultimately, a huge portion of learning for the average student's classes is done in a week while studying with his/her friends for exams, and its value is shortchanged. 

Learning isn't done for the purpose of taking tests. Learning is done for the purpose of learning. Here, at alternote, we want to spread that last week to the entire semester, and we want to make the entire class experience an interactive experience that's about more than just cramming.

Research tells us learning needs to shift towards becoming more collaborative. Conversations about course content need to have a place in the classroom. Answers to questions should be easy to crowdsource during class, as the questions pop up. Waiting till office hours to understand topics doesn't work when you're dealing with short attention spans.

The only way to foster real learning is by flipping the classroom on its head and turning it into a place for students to interact, to engage with the content and their fellow students.