Flipping Out: Everything Old Is New Again

"'But then,' thought Alice, 'shall I NEVER get any older than I am now? That'll be a
comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn!
Oh, I shouldn't like THAT!'"

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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Clearly Alice wasn't a life-long learner.

A faculty member approached me a while ago about linking materials from a third-party provider to Blackboard because she wanted to flip her classroom.  Easy enough to do, but I suggested we talk about some of the challenges of flipping so she could make the most out of the experience.  Based on what I saw of the online materials, they were a bunch of videos already available on YouTube (and of varying quality) along with some electronic exercises. And an e-book.  Somewhere in there, there were links to an e-book.

I wanted to talk to her about how she would guide her students use of the videos.  How would she ensure that her students learned what they needed to learn for the discussions and activities she was using in class? Would she provide them with some guiding questions? Objectives that should be met? Would she provide electronic quizzes so they could test their knowledge and then review what they didn't understand? I tried to explain that to her, but I'm not sure my point sunk in.  She was so excited about flipping her classroom, that I don't think she grasped the preparation needed to make the best use of those technology resources.

Flipping a classroom in its purest form is moving the initial levels of Bloom's taxonomy out of the classroom to make more time for learning at the higher levels in the classroom.  The traditional approach is to focus on the understand, remember, and apply levels in the classroom through lecture and discussion, while addressing the higher order levels outside the classroom through homework, longer term projects, research papers, for example. The idea is it is relatively easy for students to assess their understanding of those initial levels, and to review and relearn what they don't understand.  However, it is harder for them to assess their understanding at the higher levels - but you, as a teacher, are often not available to aid them in that assessment when they are trying to learn those skills.

Side note: As I was discussing the flipped paradigm with someone, he started lecturing me about Bloom's taxonomy.  I had to restrain myself from pointing out that I first learned about Bloom's taxonomy before he was born and from showing off by asking how this relates to the psychomotor and affective domains of the taxonomy. Kids these days.  Think everything is new just because they just learned about it... ;-)

Flipping a classroom is more than just making lecture videos available to students - although that is what comes the mind of most people when you talk about classroom flipping.  As I mentioned in a prior blog, I am a big fan of Gagne's instructional events. I think they are as important in a flipped environment as the traditional one, if not more so. Whether you are in the classroom or online, you still need to tell them what they're going to learn, relate it to what they know, guide them through the learning process, see if they learned it and tell them where they went wrong if they didn't, and then make sure they can apply what they learned outside of the classroom.  Gagne may have first introduced that idea 50 years ago, but it's still valid.

That's the point I tried to make to the above mentioned faculty member.  At the same time, I become involved in a grant where the grant committee decided to employ the flipped classroom to provide technology-enhanced instruction to a certain set of curricula.  Now, I have my issues with that approach, particularly since it was chosen before deciding which course to flip and it was the only technology enhancement to be used, but that wasn't my decision. However, the way we flipped the course was.

The committee seemed to be focused on lecture capture.  Unfortunately, we don't really have the resources to support that college-wide, and part of the purpose of the grant was to transform the institution - that meant anything we did in the curricula covered by the grant needed to be easily applied to others. I was determined, therefore, to use readily available materials already available on the web, and not create a lot of our own.

Here's what I had to work with. The students would access the flipped materials through Blackboard Learn.  The course was an engineering graphics course that used AutoCAD; the textbook included a DVD with tutorials on it.  AutoDESK (the makers of AutoCAD) provide a lot on resources; there are a number of videos on YouTube created by other AutoCAD users and teachers. There really wasn't any point in creating any videos of our own, since the book provided some and others were already available online.

Here's how I applied (most of) Gagne's instructional events.

Inform learners of objectives
Stimulate recall of prior learning

I created folders in Blackboard, one for each major drawing project the student had to complete.  In each folder, I started with a list of "objectives." These are not traditional performance objectives I would write for outcomes assessment; these are just designed to give students an idea of what they should know before coming to class.  For example, here is the list for orthographic projection:

To complete this project, you need to know the following:

• What is orthographic projection?
• What are the different types of lines used in orthographic projection and what do they mean?
• What are the different views used?

In AutoCAD, you should be able to do the following:

• create Layers to control properties like line type, pen width, and color.
• use Blocks to create a title block on your drawing.
• switch between model space and paper space.

Later modules include references back to prior modules; for example, the module on tolerancing references back to "objectives" from the module on dimensioning.

Present the content
Provide “learning guidance”

Then I provided them a "work guide," a PDF document they would print out and use to take notes as they read the book, watched the videos, worked through the tutorials.  This would be turned in at the beginning of class as "proof" that they did the online work.  Here is the guide for orthographic projection.

The final two folders were for AutoDESK resources and for YouTube videos (or other online videos).  It was important for them to get used to using the AutoDESK resources to learn, because AutoCAD updates every year, and they will need to be able to teach themselves when new versions are released.  I also think it's important for them to be able to see examples of effective tutorial videos.  One thing we might do in the future is provide a place in Blackboard (a discussion board or a wiki...maybe a blog) where they can share resources they found useful.  That will let us update the course in the future, and help them learn about to find good resources on their own.

Elicit performance (practice)
Provide feedback

Finally, they had a mastery quiz.  The quiz tested at the remembering and understanding levels, with maybe a couple of application questions.  It consists of all objective questions, so students get immediate feedback.  They can take it as many times as they want with no time limit, but they are advice to repeat it until they reached mastery of 80%.

As of the time I'm writing this, they have completed the first unit.  88% of the active students in the course completed the mastery quiz, and all of them attained an 80% or higher.  Many of them repeated the quiz until the received a perfect score. Note that they don't get a grade for doing any of that work; their only incentive is to be prepared to work on their projects in class.

Assess performance
Enhance retention and transfer to the job

This is what takes place in the classroom.  Instead of doing their AutoCAD projects at home, they now do them in the classroom where the teacher is available to assess how they are doing and to correct any mistakes as they try to make AutoCAD do what they want it to do.  He no longer needs to spend time explaining how layers work, for example, and can instead just tell them to go to their dimensions layer. That gives them more time in the classroom actuallty USING AutoCAD instead of talking about using AutoCAD, which, of course, leads to more effective learning.

So far, so good.  For the first two modules, 94% of enrolled students completed the mastery quiz, with 94% of them achieving mastery on the first module and 88% on the second.  Of the ones who did not achieve mastery (set at 80%), all but one was within 5% of mastery.  We don't have long-term data yet on how the flipped materials affect performance on higher order learning activities, but it's off to a good start.

The key to our (albeit limited, so far) sucess was not the use of videos.  It was the use of guided, active learning activities combined with videos and student self-assessment with immediate feedback.  Just throwing some YouTubes together does not a flipped classroom make.

Cell phones in the Classroom: Tool or Toy

"You are not attending!" said the Mouse to Alice severely. "What are you thinking of?"

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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I have this bad habit of sitting in my car in the parking lot after I get to work to enjoy a little fresh air and sunshine before I go into my windowless office for several hours.  I use the time to check email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. on my smartphone. The other day, I came across this article on Inside Higher Ed's Facebook feed.  This was about Beloit College's annual Freshman Mindset List for freshmen entering college this year for the class of 2019. I found this comment about the proliferation of cell phones very timely.

I've been thinking a lot about student engagement lately, and how we can foster an interest in lifelong learning in our students.  If you read my blog post on learning about Pluto from Twitter, you will know that I learn a lot from my phone.  Whether it's tweets or Facebook posts or Instagram photos, there is so much fascinating information right at my fingertips.

I know a lot of people view cell phones as distractions.  I view them as a learning gold mine! If I want to know something, I can look it up right away on my smartphone.  When I was in college, if you wanted to look something up, it meant going to this big building called a library, flipping through cards in the aptly named card catalog or paging through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, and then venturing in the dimly lit (and odd smelling) stacks and hoping the book or journal you wanted was there - and intact, since someone could have just ripped out the article you wanted.

Just to show you the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I gave my old iPad to my mother, who lives in a retirement community.  She takes it with her to meals, carrying it in the basket of her walker.  Whenever there is an argument among the old widow ladies, she pulls out her iPad, looks up the question, and settles the argument.

That got me thinking about how we can encourage students to use their phones as tools rather than toys.  In researching this topic, I came across an interesting article about what affects encoding into long term memory more, engagement or attention.  Not unsurprisingly, it's engagement.  Students can be paying attention to everything you say in a classroom, but if they don't have some level of interest in the topic, if they aren't curious about it, if they aren't motivated in some way to interact with the material, whatever they attend to will just go right out of short term memory and never be encoded.

Which brings me to the idea of using cell phones to foster student engagement.  Now, of course, when a student is looking at their crotch and smiling, chances are they aren't googling Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  But what if instead of making them hide their cell phones away, we encourage them to use them - just in a way that's more beneficial?

According to this infographic (if anyone can find the original source of this data, please leave it in the comments), 77% of college student smartphone users check their phone first thing in the morning.  92% use it during idle times at work or at school.  Two-thirds use it to read news articles, while four-fifths uses it for school related tasks.

And half of them use it when they are in the bathroom.

That sounds like a great opportunity use their cell phones to communicate with them and to encourage them to communicate with each other outside of the classroom (instead of catching them when you can, you can catch them IN the can...). You don't have to give out your personal phone number.  There is a free app and a website called Remind that allows you to contact students via text messages, either through the Remind.com web site or using the app on your phone. You set up a class on Remind (one Remind class of each section you teach), and give the class code to students.  They sign up by texting the class code to specific number. You can set up text messages on the web site in advance to be sent out on the date you select, you can text the entire class either from the web site or the app, or you can text an individual student.  They can text you back, and you can respond to them - again, all without giving out your personal cell phone number.

You could use the scheduling feature to send out reminders for assignment due dates or when tests are due.  You could use the individual feature to text a student who hasn't been to class for a couple of days or who is falling behind in their work. We all know how hard it is to get students to read their student email...but I bet they check their phone when that text message chimes.

But what about in class?  How do we get them to think of it as a tool in class, not a toy they have to put away? Do you remember the old clicker systems from 4 or 5 years ago?  You could embed questions in a PowerPoint that students would answer using these little handheld devices.  The clickers of today are cell phones.  You set up your poll questions on a web site, and as you present them (either on the web or in PowerPoint), students use there cell phones to respond, again, either by text or on a web site.

The one I've recommended is PollEverywhere. With PollEverywhere, you create poll questions on a web site or an app. They can be multiple choice, open-ended, or a clickable image. You can also use it to allow students to ask questions anonymously or to brainstorm ideas for problem solving. With a free account, you can create several polls but each poll can only accept up to 40 responses, and you can't track responses or participants.  You can upgrade to a paid account if you want more information about your users or large number of responses.

Another app that might be of interest is LiveBinders. Again, this is available as a website and as an app.  Livebinders is an aggregation tool that allows you store an organize a variety of resources from websites to videos to other files you upload. You can create a binder of organized information sources for students to use, or they could create their own to share with the class.  Again, they can access the binders you share with them via the web or via the app, but either way, they can use their smart phone.

I created a LiveBinder for cell phone use in the classroom. You can view it without signing up for LiveBinders.  You will find a binder with two tabs, one containing research on student cell phone use and one containing links to tools and other information about how to use the cell phone in the classroom.  The nice thing about a binder like that is I can update it as needed, and you can check back periodically to see if I've added anything. If you create your own account, you can add my binder to your shelf!

Students can create their own LiveBinder accounts and then collaborate on their own binders.  If you have a group research project, you can show them a sample binder, get them started on their own, and then they can create their own binders to share with you - all from their phone, if they want.

Another learning tool is Quizlet. Again, Quizlet is available as a website and as an app.  Remember the old flashcards we used to make when we were in school? Quizlet is the 21st century version of those.  You can create a list of questions for your students to test themselves on, and then they log into their Quizlet app on their phone to test themselves on their questions. Students can also make their own flashcards from which to study.

Finally, students can read their textbooks on their phones!  Coursesmart is an ebook provider from which students can buy or rent textbooks.  Faculty can get free access to books; I don't use paper books any more.  I can access all my textbooks and preview new ones either on the Coursesmart web site, on my iPad, or on my phone. the advantage of an ebook over a paper one is searching; I can search the ebook for a specific term and then tell students to look on a specific page for more information to their questions.  Can't do that with a paper book...

That is just the briefest taste of ways you can use cell phones as a learning tool, both in and out of the classroom. Don't forget to check back to my LiveBinder to see what else I find in the future!

Technique vs.Technology: Long Live the (Well-Designed) Lecture!

"Off with their heads!"

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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30 years ago I started my first job as an instructional designer at NCR in Dayton, OH.  I was hired in part because of my ability to design and program computer-based training in Apple Pilot; NCR had their own version of the same language.

The first major project I worked on was training for key corporate accounting policies.  The corporation had eight accounting policies that accounted for about 80% of the accounting errors made, because corporate accountants misapplied the policies.  The company was 100 years old, and many of the policies had been in place since nearly its inception.  Unfortunately, they had been modified over the years, but they had never been rewritten.  They were literally cut and pasted together! That led to a confusing mishmash of sometimes conflicting wording that was just hard to understand.

The company had tried to develop training on these policies in the past.  Their most recent effort was an interactive video disc (it was the 80's and IVD was the next best thing...not so much), which was little more than a talking head reading the policies. Needless to say, this was not very effective. If I thought the policies were hard to read in print and understand, imagine how hard they were to listen to and understand.  Or stay awake. So they asked me to design computer-based training modules for the policies

Using good instructional design principles, I did a task analysis and a needs assessment and using Gagne's instructional events, came up with a modular design that started with an overview statement of the policy, a brief review of related policies, a detailed explanation of its application, examples of its proper application and examples of its improper application.  Each module ended with a quiz that the learners had to repeat until mastery and that would loop them back to the appropriate part of the training for remediation.  I worked with a couple of corporate accountants at NCR (including one with the last name Cashdollar...is there a better name for an accountant?)  who explained how the policies were supposed to be applied.  They also developed the overview statements and examples and had to check my explanations of the policy application in the training.

I finished the first four modules, and we had a checkpoint meeting.  I didn't hear anything for days, and then I was told to stop working on the project.  I couldn't imagine what was wrong!  It was great training, everything worked well, but maybe I took too many liberties and verged too far from the policies for the corporate stuffed shirts' comfort level. It was a long couple of weeks.

Then I finally heard from the accountants.  They loved the training.  They loved it so much, that they convinced their bosses that the policies needed to be rewritten from scratch following the same format I used in the training - policy statement, related policies, policy explanation, examples, non-examples. However, I had to wait until they could get that done before I could continue with the project.

I left the company before the project was done (I only stayed at NCR for 10 months).  However, someone else finished the project, and I heard months later that corporate loved the training, that their error rate was down significantly. Personally, I think it was because they finally wrote the policies in a way they could be understood.   But f they want to credit the training, hey, I'll take that.

The take-away here is not that the computer-based training was so great, but that the technique used to develop it was effective. Technology in and of itself is never the answer.  I'm not such a hardliner as Richard Clark, who likens educational technology used to deliver instruction to the truck delivering your groceries ("The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition."). He believed that any differences found in media comparison studies (where media-based instruction is compared to traditional lecture based instruction) could be attributed to greater effort in the design of media-based instruction, not the media itself.

I'm more on Kozma's side, who asserts that eventually media will affect instruction, once you find the right medium for the right instruction. I agree with Clark that good instructional design is the most important factor; well-designed "media-free" instruction will always trump poorly designed media-enhanced instruction. However, part of the instructional design process is finding the most effective means of instructional delivery, and sometimes that includes using media and technology.

Today, it's often argued that we do our students a disservice if we don't use technology.  After all, they use technology everyday, so we should, too.  Indeed, just today I saw a post in my Facebook feed from Inside Higher Ed with the quote, "We shouldn’t use the digital revolution to continue outdated forms of higher education, like the lecture." On the one hand, I agree with Clark, that using technology to deliver a lecture does not automatically make the lecture better.  But on the other, I disagree that the lecture is an outdated mode of instruction. After all, if you think about it, what is a Ted Talk, but a lecture?  Granted, it's often a lecture that uses technology, and you can watch it online...but it's still one-way communication, the sage on the stage as we say, and it is very, very popular. In fact, one of the most popular TedTalks, Susan Cain's The Power of Introverts, uses almost no technology at all (she wears a microphone since it was delivered in an auditorium, and, of course, it was recorded). So no, the lecture is not outdated.

What should be dead - but unfortunately isn't - is the idea that technology will solve all our problems. What technology does is give us options. It doesn't give us answers. In fact, technology often makes it HARDER to do our jobs well, because in addition to being subject matter experts who can tell people what we know, we also need to be media and technology experts - or at least be willing to work with those that are.  We need to be able to somehow know when it is and it isn't appropriate to use technology and how to best use it when we do.  For me, that's easier, since I am an instructional designer as well as a teacher.  It's what I've done for 30 years.

But for many teachers and professors, they rely on their textbook publishers or other providers to tell them what to do.  And that's a danger, because their ultimate goal is to make money.  Yes, it's nice to use the latest and greatest resource from wherever, but you still need to make sure it's appropriate for your students.  You still need to structure the use of that technology. You still need to ensure that students know what they are supposed to learn, know that they've learned it, and know how to use what they've learned in the future. *cough*Gagne*cough*

And that's what I did when I designed the Key Corporate Accounting Policies training at NCR, which is why it was effective.  The technology wasn't the difference, it was the technique used.  While I made the most of the capabilities of the technology to provide remediation as needed, it was good instructional design technique that made the real difference.  The technique not only resulted in well-design CBT but better written policies.

Keep that in mind when you are being told that this technology will solve all your problems and engage your students and improve their test scores.  You still need good techniques to use it effectively.  A talking head on video is no more effective than a talking head in a classroom.  It's still just a talking head. And the talking head in the classroom can adapt.

Sometimes I get it right

"...if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

- Lewis Carroll,Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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For a variety of reasons, I've been feeling sorry for myself lately. When it seems all you do is swim against the current or push against the crowd, you get...tired.

Then I graded Physical Science in the News blogs for one of my online courses.  The assignment was to find an article about fiber optics and then blog about it.  As I read their blogs, I came across this comment from a student:

I never would have understood why this was important if I hadn't taken this course.

The article in question was about fiber optic cables for high speed Internet access for a local community that lacked such service. It was from a local source, so it was a story the student probably would have come across even without the assignment. But because of this assignment, the student now realized that there is a connection between what is learned in class and what goes on in the real world. Isn't that what we all want to have happen?

You know, some times I really do know what I'm doing. I need to remember that more often.

Storify - a Tool to Organize Even My Stream of Consciousness

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.” 

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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I just found my new best friend, Storify!

Storify is a way to aggregate multiple social media sources into one stream.  I had seen other people publish from Storify to Twitter and such, but I hadn't tried it myself.  Then as I was checking my twitter feed, I came across the best explanation of the inflation after the big bang I had ever heard.  This was something my students struggle with, and I wanted to preserve the stream of tweets to share with them in my astronomy course.

Storify was very easy to use! I logged into it with my Twitter log in, create a new Storify, searched twitter for the person whose tweets I wanted to save, and then just started to drag and drop them into the stream.

This is what I came up with: CMB, the Big Bang, and Inflation

Turns out google has an extension to help you Storify, so I've installed that as well.  I'm going to try storifying some of the social media posts about Pluto next.

But first, back to grading astronomy and physics blogs...

My Next Big Crazy Idea - Ditching the Textbook

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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Where do I go from here?  How do I use my experience in the rabbit hole to provide better learning experiences for my students?

Realizing how much I learned from non-print resources, I decided to redesign my online Descriptive Astronomy course to ditch the textbook.  I'm not talking about going from a traditional print book to an ebook or freebook. I'm talking about ditching any sort of linear reading material at all.

Instead, I plan to adopt a more inquiry based approach to the course, giving my students specific problems to solve and curating a set of resources for them to use as a jumping off point into their own searches.  Ideally, as they find their own resources, we as a class can collate those in a class wiki.  I might divide students into groups on different projects and have them report back to the class on their findings or I might have them pick what they want to investigate next.  Don't know yet.  Lots of possibilities floating around in my head.

My first step is to rewrite the syllabus from a knowledge-based to an inquiry-based format.  For example, instead an objective like:

Provide a capsule summary of our solar system

A more inquiry-based approach would be more like this:

• Investigate the physical and orbital properties of objects in the solar system
• Categorize objects in the solar system based on various properties
• Develop a classification scheme for objects in the solar system based on trends across various categories of properties.

Instead of spending a week reading about terrestrial planets, a week about gas and ice giants, and a week about the small bodies, they could spend three weeks actually doing science and thinking critically. Instead of memorizing and spitting back nice little charts in the textbook that summarize the similarities and differences between objects in the solar system, they can make those charts themselves.

Heck, if I play my cards right, I might even get them to write their own final exam questions...

Blackboard has started a #100DaysOfLearning campaign across social media.  They kicked it off on July 21, so counting today (July 26), I have 95 more days of learning.  I'm committed to spending at least part of each of those days remaining in the original 100 working on learning how to redesign my online course to encourage my students to be more active learners.

Part 2: How I Used Social Media to Learn about Ice Mountains on Pluto - It's All Twitter's Fault

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

-  Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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If you read my post about MOOCs, you may have gleaned that I like astronomy. I also use Twitter a bit.  It turns out, so do a lot of astronomers.  I mentioned following Dr. Mike Brown, the professor for one of the MOOCs I took; I also follow Dr. Adam Frank who taught the other one. Following them, led to, in no particular order:

• Dr. Katie Mack
• Emily Lackdawalla
• Dr. Sarah Horst
• Dr. Pamela Gay
• Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer
• Dr. Alan Stern
• Dr. Alex Parker
• Alexandra Witze
• Astronaut Chris Hadfield
• NASA
• Mars Curiosity Rover
• Hubble Telescope
• Kepler Telescope
• Astro Pic of the Day
• NASA New Horizons

You probably heard we flew to Pluto recently.  Well, technically we flew PAST Pluto, snapped lots of pictures, and waited for it to phone home, fingers crossed all the time.  As a self-admitted astronomy nerd, this was pretty cool for me (and apparently for the New York Times, since it made the front page, above the fold).

New Horizon's closest approach happened to occur right after the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the largest conventions for people who like sciency, comicy, sci-fiy, nerdy things...like me. That weekend, my twitter feed was filled with the #PlutoFyBly and #SDCC2015 hastags.

  

It was all very interesting, but not yet obsession inducing, until Dr. Brown tweeted this:

Wait, what? Tholins? Dahell are tholins? Is that like The Tholian Web? A quick google search took me to Wikipedia (not pure evil, Wikipedia is a good place to start a search for information, just never a good place to end it).  There I learned that tholins are strange organic compounds not found on Earth, but formed when organic (carbon-based) compounds with which we are familiar, like methane, break down and ionize, and then reform into new compounds - tholins.  We don't see them on earth because of the extreme conditions needed form them to form...conditions like you might find on, oh, I don't know, Pluto, maybe?

So, I took a look at the references for the Wikipedia article, and found an article from NASA, Pluto: The 'Other' Red Planet, which gave a more detailed explanation about how tholins formed and why scientists believed they would find them on Pluto.  That led me to poke around on NASA's website for other information...and gave me a few more Twitter accounts to follow, as well as Instagram and YouTube and Google+ and blogs and ... down the rabbit hole I went.

So, that brings me to the point of this blog (finally).  Down the rabbit hole is the metaphor I use for that experience of learning something that excites you so much, that you get lost in the search for understanding.  Like Alice chasing a rabbit, you chase after that knowledge, following it wherever it leads you, which might start with Wikipedia, take a stroll through Twitter, leave you stranded at a blog for a while, tease you with a few YouTubes or some live newsfeeds...all of those sources of information you have at your fingertips.

I ended up spending all afternoon reading about Pluto and...other stuff.  I found a post by Emily Lackdawalla that explained what to expect with the flyby with links to all sorts of other things. I went to the Bad Astronomer's blog to read his very understandable explanations of what was going on. I bookmarked NASA TV and its feed on Ustream as a back up to watch the press conferences. I loaded Persicope on my iPhone so I could watch Pamela Gay's post-press conference explanations of what was found.  I even loaded a free Pluto Safari app on my phone that keeps me updated on the latest findings from our little dwarf planet.

The next day I watched two press conferences, one for when the fly by occurred and one later that night when Pluto phone home.  It was exciting to see the scientists learn that the New Horizons probe was still working.  Even more exciting were the press conferences in which they described some of the photos and data coming back. NASA and the New Horizons team were releasing information through social media to everyone at the same time they were telling the traditional media.  In fact, they released that now famous picture of Pluto and its heart on Instagram before the news conference - social media got it before traditional media did.

While watching the phone home conference, I posted to Facebook.  An old college friend of mine who majored in computer science asked about the communication protocol with New Horizons. I was able to find information on Emily Lackdawalla's blog that included a link to a Google Books entry about the probe...including the communications protocol.  Yes, I was trying to pull my friends into the rabbit hole with me.

The photo on the front page of the New York Times was discussed at the NASA press conference.  I doubt I'll ever forget when the scientists discussed that photo at one of their press conference.  Their excitement was contagious! They explained that they found no impact craters in this area, which meant the surface had to be relatively young, which meant there was resurfacing going on.  The mountains were actually mountains of water ice, the only type of ice strong enough to maintain those massive shapes (methane and nitrogen ices are too soft).  Something had to heave that ice into that formation.  Those two things meant there was probably some sort of geological activity, which meant the interior of Pluto might be warmish...which goes against what we know about planet formation!  In other words, I was watching new science being made.

I spent a lot of time looking at pictures. In my Science of the Solar System MOOC, we learned that planetary geologists look at images of solar system objects to try to find formations that look similar to thing we find on Earth, because here we can do observations  to figure out how they formed and extrapolate those findings to similar formations on other objects.  In other words, if you see outflow channels on Mars and you realize they look like the Channeled Scablands of the Northwest United States, then you can make an educated guess that the same type of flooding event cause both, which means at some point, there was probably flowing water on Mars.   So I tried applying what I learned in that class to what was happening in the real world (that world, of course, being Pluto...).

In other words, I was doing just what I hope my students do to learn.

And then I had an epiphany.  I learned all this stuff without ever opening a textbook or stepping inside a classroom.  Everything was quite literally available to me at my fingertips, either on my laptop or my iPad or my iPhone...and sometimes all at once (there's nothing quite like watching a press conference on your computer while refreshing Instagram on your tablet and Twitter on your phone). I didn't read a chapter in a book and take a multiple choice quiz on it.  I found something that excited me and learned about it. And I'm still learning about it.

So that brings me to the big question, and what I'll try to answer in this blog...how do I inspire my students to take their own trips down the rabbit hole?  What can I, as a teacher, do to change my pedagogy to one that will help encourage my students to be lifelong learners?  So stayed tuned if you want to learn more about things like social media in education or flipping classrooms or cell phones in the classroom.  Follow me down the rabbit hole. I don't know where we'll end up, but I hope it will be an interesting journey.

                                                                                      

Part 1: How I Used Social Media to Learn about Ice Mountains on Pluto - MOOCs

"I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole–and yet–and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!’

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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Lately, my Facebook friends have seen a lot of status updates like the one to the right:

No doubt some (most?) thought, "Karen's done lost her mind again." No, not really.  I just got lost chasing a rabbit down its hole for a few days, and it was fun! So much fun, that I thought I'd start a blog about what I find exciting about learning and teaching and designing instruction, using my experience of the last few days as a start. But before I share my adventures in that particular rabbit hole, let my explain how I got there.

When I was in college at Penn State, I started out as a physics major and then switched to secondary education, physics and math certifications.  However, although I never wanted to be an astronomer, I loved astronomy, so I took as many astronomy courses as I could, just one of the many reasons I graduated with about 30 credits more than I needed (but I still did it in four years!).  I joined the Penn State Astronomy Club, where I was the press officer ("Look, up in the Sky!  It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - come find out at the Astronomy Open House tonight on the roof of Davey Lab!"). They say you never forget your first time, and it's true; I'll never forget the first time I looked through those telescope lenses and saw the rings of Saturn or the Great Red Spot of Jupiter or the Moon up close and personal. I even muddled through Solar Physics and Astrophysics (and all those differential equations) with real astronomy majors.

After a few years, I gave up teaching high school physics, went back to Penn State for grad school (Instructional Systems), became an instructional designer, and after several years developing computer-based training programs in industry and another stint at Penn State for grad school (Educational Psychology), I landed at a community college back in my home state of Pennsylvania. About ten years ago, when the Science department was looking for an non-lab science course they could offer online, I basically said, "Oooh, ooh, have I got a deal for you!" and PHY 111 701 was born. PHY 111 is Descriptive Astronomy, designed for non-science transfer students with very limited math, nothing beyond what you need to understand Newton's Laws of Motion or Kepler's Laws. Granted, it had been a very long time since I had taken an astronomy course (when I was in college, Pluto was still a planet, we hadn't sent a probe to Jupiter yet, and the Hubble telescope was still a pipe dream), but I looked at the textbooks and was confident that I remembered enough to provide a good experience for my students.

Then a few years ago I tried a new assignment.  I don't like doing the same thing in my online courses all the time; not only does it get stale, but the technology changes, providing us better tools to encourage student learning.  A Blackboard Learn upgrade had introduced some social media tools, including blogs and journals.  I decided to assign a weekly Astronomy in the News Blog, in which students must find a current news article on a topic I give them, provide a link to the article, summarize it, describe one thing they learned, and one question they still had (they also had to read and comment on at least two blogs from their classmates). As I gave them feedback on their blogs, I would read the article they found and try to answer their questions. I teach general education courses, and I believe the purpose of general education at least in part is to relate what you are learning in the classroom to what you encounter in life. These blogs do a great job of showing students that what they are learning can be used to understand things that are going on around them right now.

That was my first glimpse into that particular rabbit hole.  Reading all those articles and researching what I didn't know showed me things had changed a bit since I graduated from college.  Black holes, the Kuiper Belt, and exoplanets, oh my! Reading these articles wasn't enough; I decided I had to update my astronomy skills and soon.

Rather than risking the expense and ignominious failure of a traditional - or even online - college astronomy class, I looked into MOOCs.  A  MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course, usually a free course with open enrollment to anyone in the world. I found just what I was looking for at Coursera, a course called Confronting The Big Questions: Highlights of Modern Astronomy, offered by Dr. Adam Frank from the University of Rochester.  It lasted about a month, wasn't too hard, and I received my Statement of Accomplishment With Distinction.

When I was done patting myself on the back for that, I got cocky and decided to try another one, The Science of the Solar System, offered by Dr. Mike Brown from Caltech. That one interested me because I had read Dr. Brown's book, How I Killed Pluto (and Why It Had It Coming). Dr. Brown teaches planetary science at Caltech and used the Coursera platform to "flip" his Science of the Solar System class, providing lecture videos and objective quizzes online so he and his students could focus on discussion and problem solving in the classroom. However, he opened the online portion up FOR FREE to anyone in the world who wanted to learn from an expert in the field. Not only did the concept interest me as an instructional designer, I loved Dr. Brown's book so much, I thought it would be a kick to learn from him.

To say I quickly found myself in the weeds is an understatement.  It. Was. HARD.  Seriously, who knew a quiz with just 10-15 multiple choice or short answer questions on it could be so difficult? I had a whole new appreciation for what my students go through.  So after a few weeks, I unenrolled, decided to follow Dr. Brown on Twitter, and thought that was that.

Then early this spring, Dr. Brown tweeted this:

Oh, crap.  He was offering the same course again. Like the hackles on a dog facing an invader in his territory, I could feel my innate desire to Succeed At All Costs raising its ugly head. Failing to complete the same course the previous spring stuck in my craw...so I logged on to Coursera and enrolled in the course.  Again.

This time I was determined to succeed.  I knew what went wrong last time, and I knew how to fix it, and I knew how much work that would be, but I was determined to get it right this time, not just because, you know, I hate failing, but because I honestly wanted to learn the content this time.  I want to be able to share the best information I can with my students, not just what is in their textbooks. And yes, I hate failing.

 40 years ago I got an A in my high school physics class, but my teacher put in the comments "Works below ability."  I still haven't forgotten that...

The first time I tried the course, I approached it as a rather passive learner.  I watched the videos, took some notes, tried the quizzes, managed to get through the first one on the third try, and then failed miserably at the second one. Now, in my defense, questions like:

...aren't exactly easy, but they are doable since others in the class managed to do OK.

So I decided to practice what I preach to my own students and be an active learner in the class.  Rather than just watch the videos and take some notes, every week I downloaded the screen capture files for the ten lectures that week.  I converted the text files into Word documents, took out all the line breaks, and reformatted the text into a readable document by reading it, adding paragraph breaks where they made sense, took out some repetitive wording and speaking hesitations (captioners caption EVERYTHING), fixed spelling mistakes where possible - pretty low level processing of information, but it was a start.  The next pass I took was when watching the videos, and I started looking deeper into content.  I added mathematical formulas where necessary, fixed more spelling and grammar, and changed some paragraph formatting to make more sense. That required a little deeper processing and greater understanding of the content.  The final pass I took through involved just watching the videos and pausing at logical spots to do a screen capture and then paste it into the Word document.  Again, I was processing the information in yet another way (much more graphically and aurally than textually), and creating a great set of notes in the process.

I also was much more active in the discussion forums this time, again, practicing what I preach about cooperative learning.  I answered questions from other students where I could and read the answers others gave to the ones I couldn't.  I noticed that others were bemoaning the lack of lecture notes for the class. With the permission of the professor, I posted mine in Dropbox, and posted the links to them in the discussion forums.  This is a sample of what I created and shared with the class.

I picked this example, because my father helped design the heat shield for the Galileo Atmopheric Probe before he retired.  And because I chastised Dr. Brown for saying heat shields burn instead of ablate.

This time it worked.  It was nine long weeks of text reformatting, lecture watching, discussion postings, and quiz retaking, but at the end of the course, I correctly answered 49/51 questions in my final quiz submissions.  One question I got wrong on the last attempt despite having gotten it correct on a prior attempt, because I got cocky and read the answers too quickly and picked the answer with the correct numbers transposed, but I KNEW the correct answer so that doesn't count.  The other one I never managed to get right...until today.  That was the question I screencapped several paragraphs ago, and that I finally figured out as I was finding a good lecture document to share with you.  So I win!  I got all the answers correct!  Just not in the timeframe of the course...but close enough for my innate desire to Succeed At All Costs to be satisfied. (Note that in the course results, it lists my grade as 100% because I did the extra credit quiz, but that wasn't good enough because I Still Got One Question Wrong.)

Yes, I know I just spent an entire paragraph justifying why the two questions I got wrong don't really count as wrong.  Deal with it.  I've dealt with it for 56 years.

So, that's how I got to the edge of the rabbit hole.  Well, to the edge, lying on the ground, leaning over into the hole up to my waist...but I hadn't fallen in yet.  That took a little thing called the New Horizons Mission and tholins and ice mountains on Pluto to send me over the edge.  Stay tuned for Part 2...

BTW, if you followed those links I included while discussing MOOCs, you've had a taste of the rabbit hole, but only a taste.  It goes waaay deeper than that.