The FOX cartoon show, King of the Hill, featured an episode last night about the use of video games in schools. Now, I like King of the Hill and I greatly enjoyed seeing Hank Hill’s obsession with propane as a video game. But, you still had the standard cliches: game programmers as teenage geeks lost in a fantasy world; video games as addictive distractions; and the rise of teenage obesity linked to video games. As an advocate of simulations and games in learning, I realized that these cliches must be challenged if games and simulations will be taken seriously in education.

Start with this 20-minute video from the Orange County Department of Education. Then, read the report from the Federation of American Scientists on educational gaming. Finally, Educause has an extensive library on educational gaming. These resources will help convince parents like Hank Hill that gaming can be educational and even encourage physical activity.

Clear and entertaining video on how RSS works:

Click To Play

Tony Karrer continues the discussion on personal learning environments by commenting on Ray Sims’ model for PLEs.  Like other diagrams of PLEs, this looks like a group of clouds that are supposedly interconnecting with each other to demonstrate knowledge sharing.  Karrer brings up a good point that Sims makes an artificial distinction between learning and doing when describing the ideal PLE.

To me, the whole idea of PLEs is the ability to take knowledge from out in the environment, making it our own, and then applying it.   But, what seems to be missing in current PLE thought is that knowledge is often created by interactions between people.  Even knowledge we create personally is refined through social interactions.  dgrey at Knowledge-at-work made some great points about this in the context of PKM.  PLE is looking more like the building blocks for communities of practice to me.

Check out the comment from David Gurteen to my previous post.  So, PKM has been around for at least seven years.  That’s a good length of time in the relatively-young field of knowledge management.

But first, he dismisses personal learning environments while promoting his half-baked “learnscape” concept (which sounds a lot like a vaguer version of personal learning environments). And he does admit that his learnscape concept is half-baked: “The environment is the web, the workplace, home, or your playground: the Learnscape. Stephen and I talked a bit about this over Unibroues, and we recognize that neither of us has this one pegged yet. It’s a concept in the making: practice before theory.” I often see this with student papers where, in not doing the necessary literature review, they claim to come up with a novel concept. Then I have the unpleasant duty of showing the student that they just reinvented the wheel. Cross may want to start here: Personal Learning Environments Blog. And here: Personal Learning and Personal Learning Environments. And this presentation from 2003.

If this wasn’t enough, Cross (with a few friends) now claims to have invented personal knowledge management: “In the second half of 2006, Harold Jarche, Judy Brown, and I conducted a series of Unworkshops to give people experience using Web 2.0 tools to improve learning. We concluded that the best starting point was what we were calling Personal Knowledge Management” Well, at least he didn’t disparage PKM and then relabel the concept before calling it his own.

According to a major thinker in PKM, David Pollard, David Gurten begin writing about PKM in February 2004. David Pollard has written extensively and brillantly about PKM along with Jack Vinson’s wonderful insights into PKM. Standing on the shoulders of these giants, I’ve even developed a framework for PKM in higher education. What is especially telling is that Cross’ “rationale” (about halfway down the posting) for PKM sounds a lot like Jim McGee’s ESJ strategy for PKM (written in 2005). I could go on but a quick Google search makes the point quite well.

Cross ends the posting with his usual confusing graphic that somehow is supposed to explain how PKM and the Learnscape fit together. I think these diagrams by David Pollard give a better explanation for PKM.

One more week to go!  I think the course redesign was a great success because the number of last-minute assignments and tearful appeals for an “A” have dropped to just two students out of 100.  I am planning to introduce a work-plan document for the summer so that students can plan out their semester.  Many students took to the open structure of setting their own due-dates but others just needed me to set some kind of schedule.

With the work-plan, I will have the students plan out their semester in terms of assignments and due dates.  That will give a little more structure plus allow me to better plan the semester myself.

Working on a project where I want to merge PKM with EPortfolios so that the student’s portfolio is more than a static display of past accomplishments.  Often, I have returned to work I have produced in the past and found new ideas that I had forgotten about.  Wouldn’t it be great if your past work could be stored in such a way that you could easily access previous ideas and thoughts which, were not relevant at the time, but could be immensely useful now?  A body of work that evolves and adapts with you.

In an earlier post, I talked about a book on bad management research and how the lessons from that book could be applied to education reseach. Thanks to the U.S. Congress, I now have a great example of bad educational research.

You’ve probably read about the “Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort” in other blogs and in the educational news channels. This is the study that claimed to find no difference in test scores whether students were taught with technology or through traditional methods.  Well, if you read the report closely, you can see a perfect example of the “Rigorous Research Delusion” - Confusing the quantity of research with the quality of research.

First, the products that were selected for study were submitted by companies and chosen by a panel based on previous research of the effectiveness of these products.  But, as the report states, of the 16 products chosen out of 160 submissions, “were not a representative sampling of reading and math technology used in schools.”

Second, can you spot the whopping assumption made in this statement on how the experimental and control groups were selected?  “Teachers in the treatment group were to implement a designated product as part of their reading or math instruction. Teachers in the control group were to teach reading or math as they would have normally, possibly using technology products already available to them. Because the only difference on average between groups is whether teachers were assigned to use study products, test-score differences could be attributed to being assigned to use a product, after allowing for sampling variability.”  Here’s a hint - was there any pretesting done to determine how effective the chosen teachers were in instructing students?  And what about the technology that the control group teachers used?  Was that effect factored in?

Third, although the study based the effectiveness on test scores, the primary means of measuring effectiveness was three in-class observations and interviews with the teachers.  This was probably because the test score data could have been affected by a combination of factors including the use of technology.

Fourth, consider the implications of this finding:  “Data from classroom observations indicated that, compared to students in control classrooms where the same subject was taught without using the selected products, students using products were more likely to be observed working with academic content on their own and less likely to be listening to a lecture or participating in question-and-answer sessions. Treatment teachers were more likely than control teachers to be observed working with individual students to facilitate their learning (such as by pointing out key ideas or giving hints or suggestions on tackling the task students were working on) rather than leading whole-class activities.”

There was a major difference in teaching methods between the groups and the teaching method used by the treatment group seems to be the preferred method of teaching students.  Doesn’t this seem to suggest that individualized attention to students is not any more effective than just lecturing to students?  And what is the causal link between the technology and the teaching method?

There are just too many holes and unwarranted assumptions in the study to justify the conclusion that technology has no effect on learning.  There is a great deal of attention to the number of schools, teachers, and students that were involved in the study but, if the research design is faulty, so are the conclusions.

Jay Cross quotes Clive Shepherd who quotes a 1986 study that purportedly demonstrates that over 99% of what we learn is nonconscious. In other words, less than 1% of what students learn is through formal instruction while over 99% of what they actually learn is through soaking up knowledge from just being in the classroom.

Again, Cross proves that one thing that informal learning can’t seem to teach you is statistics. First he creates this 80% informal learning - 20% formal learning “statistic” and now he ramps it up even more with 99% informal learning - 1% formal learning “research.” The first red flag is that Cross is basing his conclusion on a twenty-year old study. I bet a quick search of the literature will dispute the findings of the 1986 study.

But just critically thinking about this statement can quickly disprove it.  How is nonconscious learning defined?  What is conscious learning?  How do you measure nonconscious learning?  Are the nonverbal cues from the teacher contributing to nonconscious learning?  Is the way that the room is decorated also contributing to nonconscious learning?  What is the dividing line here?

This seems to be another attempt by Cross to trot-out his “learnscape” concept which is more like the “Field of Dreams” theory of training and education - if you build it, they will learn. It makes a great movie but I wouldn’t base a training program or a college course on it.

Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES Blog does a great job in criticizing the Federal Study on the ineffectiveness of educational technology. I especially like this point: “C’mon people, let’s speak the truth and make meaningful distinctions between educational software that pretends to replace teachers and technology that gives students agency and supports a learning community.”

I love when the same issue of a magazine or newspaper publishes contradictory headlines.  On April 4th, Education Week had this story:  Federal Study Finds No Edge for Students Using Technology-Based Reading and Math Products.  But, two days earlier, Education Week published this story: New Breed of Digital Tutors Yielding Learning Gains.

So, why does one study show that their is no benefit to using technology when another study demonstrates a benefit?  The key is how the technologyis used in teaching.  As the Digital Tutor demonstrates, the technology is designed to interact with the student and provide a customized experience.  In the Federal Study, there was no mention of how the technology was used in the classroom.  In fact, the control group was also allowed to use some technology which clearly invalidates this design.  And every teacher who used the technology said they would again.  There is something fishy about the Federal Study.

The real issue here is student engagement.  There is not much difference between the traditional chalkboard lecture and PowerPoint lecture if there is no student engagement.  If the learning experience is delivered without concern for the individual student’s need or adjusted for that student’s learning style, then it doesn’t matter if technology is used or not.  Learning has to engage the student.  All technology does is make it easier for the teacher to do this.

Any tool, if it is misused, is not going to produce desired results.  But, when educational technology is used properly, you will see benefits.

In preparation for a new talk on Personal Knowledge Management for students and teachers, I’ve been cataloging the various widgets based on their educational uses.  I think what would be helpful is an application that could be used to arrange and store the various widgets.  What would be really helpful if there is a way to have the widgets talk to each other on this platform.

Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins gave a great presentation at the University of Louisville Delphi’s Center on using Second Life as a teaching platform. The University just bought an island and there has been some interest by the faculty in teaching classes in Second Life. Intellagirl did a great job with getting folks started in Second Life and how to really use the environment to teach great lessons. Ask her about her students’ experiences as the Kool-Aid Guy when they went dancing in a Second Life Club.

And here I am on the Delphi Center’s Island. I wish I had a hammock in my First Life classrooms.