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.