Towards an Open Pedagogy

Too much emphasis when talking about OPEN Educational Resources is on free textbooks and cost savings and not enough on the many other resources available that allow educators to customize their curriculum and even allow for individual differences.  

The longtime practice of curriculum designed around a commercial textbook needs to end. I have written here about what I called Open Everything. What I am now calling Open Pedagogy would be under that umbrella term. Others have called this pedagogy Open Educational Practices (OEP). In either case, it is the use of Open Educational Resources for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. In this, I include the open sharing of not only the resources, but also of the teaching practices.  

Currently, I would say the level of openness we see is low. Others have defined the levels as: Low - teachers believe they know what learners have to learn. A focus on knowledge transfer. Medium - Predetermined Objectives (closed environment) but, using open pedagogical models and encourage dialogue and Problem-based learning. And the goal is for the highest level when Learning Objectives and pathways are highly governed by the learners.

excerpted from Digital Humanities and Open Pedagogy | SERENDIPITY35 - thoughts on learning

Is Learning Flipping?

The flipped classroom has been used in different ways for the past decade in education. More recently, the idea of flipping professional development has been experimented with at schools and in corporate training. In both cases, the idea is to rethink what we want to spend our time with in face-to-face sessions and how can we move learning before and after those sessions to be more self-directed.

I am doing a presentation this week at the 2015 Annual Member Conference hosted by the Connecticut Education Network (CEN) on flipped learning. This event draws participants from educators (K-12 and higher ed), municipalities, libraries, local businesses and State of Connecticut agencies.

I asked for my session to be paired with another session by Edward Iglesias who is the Educational Administrator for Central Connecticut State University on Library Makerspaces and Community Organizations.

I want to not just talk about how flipped learning might work in any school setting, but also to have the participants try some flipped learning before and at the session. My flipped exercise is to ask those who will attend my session on "Flipping the Learning Model" to try a simple activity BEFORE the conference. By flipping this portion of the learning, we gain time in the session, and get to focus on the portion that I consider to be more critical to the face-to-face learning.

You take a chance in doing this - What if no one does the pre-activity?

It's the same chance we take as teachers at all levels when we assign homework that will lead into a class session. As an English teacher for the past four decades, I have often had the experience of wanting to discuss an assigned reading and finding that only a portion of the class has done the reading (or purchased the book!).

What do I do in that situation? Stop the lesson? Do the reading in class? Proceed with the discussion using those who did the reading? I have probably done all of those things at some time depending on the lesson and the grade level, but how can we increase the number of learners who complete the activities before attending the live sessions?

For this particular "homework" the assignment concerns Smartphone Audio Enhancement. The task I have set for attendees is to experiment with one or more ways to increase the volume and sound quality of a smartphone using simple materials and no electronics or additional power.

They are asked to bring at least one result of their DIY experimentation to the live session.

I made a web page with samples but I am hoping that a few people will go deeper and experiment on their own with original designs.

In our face-to-face session, we will test samples with a decibel meter, and we will discuss how this simple exercise can be applied to classroom learning. The applications are deliberately not stated by me beforehand, though applying it to math and physics are obvious choices. But getting other areas to think about the applications of this pedagogy - if not this particular lesson - is more important.

Overall, I want attendees to see that flipped learning in a classroom or for professional development or personal growth is less about when and where we learn and more importantly about how we learn. We know students are learning in and out of the classroom. They are learning what we want them to learn and what they want to learn. They are using traditional educational tools and methods, and tools they have discovered on their own and in ways we never considered.

I think about the idea that things are often flipped over in a revolution. Don't back away. Join in!

An Educational Path to Media Convergence

Imagine this: a language arts teacher asks her middle school students to translate a poem into computer code. The students use icons or letters to produce a new language and way of seeing poetry. They can also translate the poem’s code into an actual programming language, such as Scratch,  and so animate the poem. They could put the poem into LEGO Mindstorms EV3's robot-programming language to create - well, that is yet to be seen.

This is transmedia - the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using digital technologies. It is not to be confused with traditional cross-platform media sequels or adaptations, such as a novel made into a film.

The poetry activity lets students see connections between languages, grammar and code.
Transmedia, literally “across media” may have its origin in entertainment franchises, but it is being pulled into education purposes.

It is a constructivist educational pedagogy that supports student-centered learning. It requires students to use personalized meaning-making. [8]is both valuable and becoming more and more common. While teachers like Sansing are using coding and programming in their language arts instruction, others are taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated apps and interactive media for classroom use.

Some of this occurred ten years ago in classes using virtual worlds like Second Life, and now is happening to a degree with young students building environments in Minecraft. But the retelling of a poem in a programming language is a big leap from visualizing a novel on paper or on a screen.

Transmedia storytelling emerged from outside education in the world of commercial media. The term “transmedia” seems to have been coined in 1991 by Marsha Kinder in her book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games. The media examples she uses may be a decade old but her descriptions of how cross-platform entertainment franchises (such as "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” who have returned to the big screen this summer) successfully cross mediums.

In the classroom, transmedia does not seem as odd today with the multiple platforms students already use to connect and communicate. They probably do that more frequently and with more enthusiasm and facility outside of classrooms. It is unfortunate that it is not being utilized more by educators.

Transmedia as a pedagogical tool with students interacting with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr opens up new viewpoints, and resources in a shared way that can be immersive.

It is a natural path to thinking critically, ownership of learning and the natural acquisition of knowledge.

In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins, founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program, posits that it's not as simple as new media will replace old media. He says that it is more likely that new media will interact with older media in a complex relationship which he calls "convergence culture."

Transmedia might be one educational path to convergence.

MORE

• T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play
• Transmedia and Education: How Transmedia Is Changing the Way We Learn

Quest-based Learning

Perceval and the quest for the Grail

Quest-based learning (QBL) is an instructional theory that uses elements of game design and learning communities to support student choice while still operating within the context of a standards-based curriculum.

Many educators and many schools at all levels are uncomfortable moving away from a top-down approach to information acquisition. So, QBL may bee seen as moving out of many comfort zones.

Some game-based feedback tools - not games - like experience points, progress bars, badges, and achievements are motivating and meaningful to students.

Rather than design courses via textbook learning and lectures, QBL classes require students to select quests and progress at their own pace through a series of educational activities. This may remind educators of project-based learning or problem-based learning, but the unique element is the self-selection part of the design.

Quests are often online learning activities that address the core of the subject matter. These might be an audio podcast, a short video or collaborating online with classmates in discussion or composing.

For me, the most important thing is not putting the quest-based learning label on the pedagogy, but the inclusion of the QBL elements in course design.

In a white paper by Chris Haskell (Boise State University), he explains that QBL lesson design "focuses on an individualized and flexible curricular experience. In QBL, students can select activities, called quests, rather than assignments in a fixed linear order. Students leverage choice to promote engagement rather than waiting for a due date.”

Hands might be raised immediately to question how autonomy over what and when to learn would have any effect on academic achievement. Haskell and a colleague implemented an experimental QBL curriculum with pre-service teacher candidates in 2010 and they found “93% of students using this approach reached the winning condition, described as receiving a course grade of ‘A’ . . . the average completion time was reduced from 16 weeks to 12 ½ weeks with one student completing [the course] in just four.”

It's interesting that this experiment started in higher ed and is being moved down to K-12, since much innovation in teaching and pedagogy moves up from the lower grade levels.

Will this quest lead to a holy grail for teaching? No. there is no grail. It's all in the journey.

This post also appears at Serendipity35

But Has Technology Really Changed Your Pedagogy?

Although those of us in educational technology constantly talk about how it has changed education and how it will change education, it is much harder to explain how it has changed teaching.

If all the technology you use in the classroom were gone tomorrow, how would it affect the way you teach? 

Has your philosophy, your pedagogy or your methodology changed  in any permanent way?

Take away the computers and the Internet and projectors, your electronic gradebook and all the rest, and I am sure any good teacher could still teach.

There are media stories all the time about people trying to go "cold turkey" on their connections by giving up the Net or their smartphones. It's difficult, But I suspect that giving up all the technology in your classroom would be easier for most teachers K-20.

Could you go back to paper books, papers, pens, a non-digital whiteboard  or easel?  Sure, you could. But would you actually teach differently?

I have read several times that if doctors, engineers or even farmers lost all the technology created in the past 30 years, they would have a very difficult time doing their jobs as well using the methodologies of 1983. Not true of teachers?

Yes, this is a very hypothetical question to ask and the technology isn't going away (except for those short-term situations after disasters). My thought experiment is to take the 2013 math teacher and put her in a 1983 classroom world. How does she teach? Whatever falls away is what technology changed in her pedagogy. Would the science teacher be more affected than the language teacher?

My own personal reflection on this is that as much as I use technology in my preparation to teach and in the classroom, I don't think my own teaching style has been dramatically changed over the years by technology.

The biggest exception is my online teaching. If that needed to go back to 1983 and some correspondence model of distance learning, it would require a major shift in my content and my methods - but my philosophy and pedagogy would not change as much.