Learning to Love (not Loathe) Layers

‘You don’t know much,’ said the Duchess; ‘and that’s a fact.’

- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

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So, I had a bit of an "Ah-ha!" moment this morning. Bear with me for a moment while I set the stage...

As I mentioned before, in the past year or so, I have taken several free, online courses to learn how to use Adobe products to create visual learning experiences for my online students. One of the cool things about Adobe software is you learn about something in one product and it generally applies to others.  That's usually a good thing.

Except for layers.  Layers have been the bane of my existence. Now, layers sound like really cool things.  Every shape you draw in Illustrator, every object you animate in After Effects, every track you add in Premiere, every mask you create in Photoshop resides on a separate layer.  You can group layers and ungroup them, you can turn them on and off, you move them around, which is important since whatever is in the top layer is what you see...unless you change the layer's opacity or you turn it off. You can isolate an object to modify it by selecting its layer. You can duplicate an object by duplicating its layer. You can even nest layers within layers creating levels of sublayers.

Layers are pretty fundamental to the effective and efficient use of this software. In fact, they are so fundamental, that I never really learned about them in these courses.  Or rather, I was never taught about layers.  I was taught how to do things, and in that process, saw how layers aided that process, but at no point was there a lesson about layers and how they work.  Most of what I know about layers involved a lot trial and error and fair amount of swearing.

I understand the rational behind this; my situation of having zero, zip, nada, niente, nichts experience with Adobe software as well as no graphic design background when I started taking these courses is pretty unique, something I quickly realized from the very start. There may be a bit of self-selection going on there though. Since these are free courses, and there is no penalty for not finishing (*cough*UX to UI *cough*)(*cough*twice*cough*)(*cough*3rd time's the charm*cough*), someone who feels they don't have the background knowledge may drop out early.

I know not everyone is as persistent as I am.  Those of you who know me might say stubborn. Those of who know me really well might say pig-headed.

But I had a big problem I wanted to solve, and so I was willing to put up with a whole lot of discomfort to work on solving that. I would have liked to have a LITTLE more information to start with, but that's the challenge of teaching people with a variety of background skills, balancing teaching the lowest levels without boring the higher ones.  It's also part of the expert-novice dichotomy; experts often forget all the little bits and pieces they had to learn to become experts (that's why newly-learned are sometimes better teachers for true novices than experts, which is the subject for another post...)

OK, we're almost to the Ah-Ha! moment.

One of the first Adobe apps I learned to use was Illustrator, and I use it a lot.  In fact, I probably use it more than anything else. I often use it to draw images like those to the right that show a process over a period of time...like the evolution of stars in a cluster over 10 billion years.  These images are all the same except for two things; the time frame and the position of the stars. The way I created these was to do the first one, save it, save a copy, modify the time and the star pattern on that, save it, save a copy, modify the time and star pattern on that, and repeat three more times. That worked, but it left me with six versions of the same illustration...six versions which I had to fix when I realized I had a typo in the word Luminosity.

I used Illustrator for MONTHS before I realized it used layers. Then I decided to learn Character Animator, and I had to learn how to use layers in Illustrator.  It was painful. Productive...but painful.

This morning, I was working on another project that involved making a change to something I created in one app (an animation in After Effects) which automatically updated in a project in which I used it in another app (a movie in Premiere Pro).  As I was marvelling over that, I thought how cool it would be if I made a change in one version of an Illustrator project - like fixing a typo in Luminosity - it would automatically update in all versions.

And then I had my Ah-Ha! moment. Those of you who know me know it was more like a "Karen, you idiot" moment.  Those of you know know me really well know it was more like a "Karen, you dumbf---" moment.

I realized I could have used layers.  I could have created one project, grouped the time and star pattern, duplicated that group five times, changing the time span and star pattern in each group. Then when I export the image as a PNG to use it in my interactive lectures, I can hide each group in turn to get my sequence of main sequence turn-off images for a stellar cluster.

And then I realized I could have used it in this image where I created multiple versions of this one to teach the breakout of the four fundamental forces after the Big Bang.

 Or this one I where I used multiple versions to teach the major epochs in the timeline of the universe from the Big Bang to present day.

Or these that show the different possible fates of the universe.

And don't even get me started on this one.  I must have a dozen different versions of this - which I will need to completely redo if they discover Planet 9, which would be a trans-Neptunian planet, of which there currently are none in the Solar System

That Ah-Ha! moment is when the light bulb goes off.  Its when all those higher order thinking skills finally come together. You have analyzed your learning and evaluated its usefulness and created  your own understanding of how something works or how it relates to your world. In the words of American Idol, you've made it your own.

This is important because it makes for deeper and more meaningful learning.  Earlier in my Adobe journey someone could have made that suggestion, and I would have understood it, but I would not have internalized it as much.  I would not have had that moment where suddenly it all came together and finally made sense - to me, not to someone else.

That is hard to do in a classroom.  As teachers, our first instinct is to explain, to direct, to guide to the correct path. Sometimes it's because it takes more time than we have to wait for that understanding to occur naturally in each student. Sometimes it's because we assume a student won't get to that point, and we want to help them. Sometimes it's just a natural instinct to fix a problem.

But maybe the next time you see a student struggling, take a moment to let them work it out on their own.  If they ask for help, give them guidance on how to figure out the answer rather than guiding them to the answer. Work on their problem solving skills instead of solving the problem for them. It may take longer to get there, but in the end they will learn more and better.

I now have a grudging respect for layers.  I may not actually love them, but I no longer loathe them...much.  I have my Ah-Ha! understanding of them and how they can make what I do easier.  That's the sort of learning moment we should want our students to experience at some point, rather than feel like we need to explain everything. It's a powerful moment.

I still hate Photoshop, though.

Thinking Outside the Box: Higher-Order Thinking Skills

"For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."

- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

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I have been thinking about higher-order thinking skills a lot lately.  From trying to make my online courses more engaging to talking to faculty about flipped learning to taking an Adobe course where we explore ways to increase creativity in students, higher-order thinking has been, well, on my mind.

So, what are higher-order thinking skills? I'm glad you asked...

We have all heard of Bloom's taxonomy, a way of classifying learning objectives that has been around for decades. It consisted of six categories named for the type of learning outcome they described: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

The taxonomy was modified more recently to use verbs as category names (since learning objectives use verbs to describe observable, measurable behavior) and to modify two categories. Instead of describing types of learning outcomes, the new descriptors defined how learners used and interacted with knowledge: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.

There are lots of lists out there with verbs you can use to write objectives at each level, as well as directions for how to write learning objectives based on Bloom's taxonomy, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

Bloom's taxonomy is normally described as a hierarchy, with one level leading to the next. The higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are the ones on the top of the hierarchy, with lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) at the bottom.

It is usually presented in a pyramid diagram like the one to the right. I tend not to like that one, for two reasons.  First, making "Remember" the largest area makes it seem like it is the most important, or that you should have more objectives of that level than others. Second, it puts the levels in a hierarchy, implying you need to master objectives at one level before you can move on to the next.

(Not to mention my OCD gets itchy when you can't fit the labels for the top two levels inside the pyramid...)

Some people present the pyramid flipped, with the point at the bottom. This emphasizes the importance of the upper levels, but it still maintains the hierarchical nature of all the levels.  In my opinion, all of the layers are not hierarchical, so this scheme still is not ideal.

In this scheme, the higher-order thinking skills are Analyze, Evaluate, and Create, while the lower-order ones are Remember, Understand, and Apply.  The lower-order skills are somewhat hierarchical; generally, in order to apply knowledge you need to understand it and to understand it you need to remember it.  However, trying to apply knowledge often leads to greater understanding, and the more you use knowledge, the likelier you are to remember it, so that hierarchy is not perfect.

(And then there's that whole OCD with the labels outside the pyramid boundaries...)

The idea of a hierarchy falls apart at the higher-order levels.  Analyzing involves breaking something down to its component parts, identifying or forming relationships among those parts, and separating facts from inferences or opinions. Evaluation is the process of forming judgments or placing value on ideas or products. Finally, creating is the process of making something new, forming new and original relationships between elements to produce something where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Each one of those higher-order skills are separate, even if they are related. As you create something new, you need to evaluate its effectiveness.  Part of that creation process involves analyzing the relationship among the elements.

I drew this image to describe my thoughts on Bloom's taxonomy. I like this approach because it shows the relative importance of higher-order learning objectives along with the interconnectedness of the lower-order objectives. It represents the lower-order objectives support of the higher-order ones, but does not imply a hierarchy within those orders.

By the way, I used higher-order thinking to draw this picture. I created it, of course, but I also had to analyze what I considered to be the relationships among the categories, and evaluate how well my diagram demonstrated those relationships.  I also analyzed what the traditional diagrams showed and evaluated them to determine what I thought they didn't emphasize.  All of that is built on remembering and understanding Bloom's taxonomy in the first place, and about 35 years of applying it to writing learning objectives.

Why is this important? A number of research studies show the increased importance of creativity as a leadership quality in business. IBM surveyed 1500 CEOs from 60 countries, and creativity emerged as the most crucial factor for success. Adobe surveyed students and teachers globally about the importance of creativity in education.  Both felt creativity will be essential in the future workforce; 94% of teachers believe that GenZ students will have careers that do not yet exist.

Problem-solving and critical thinking are often cited as some of the top skills employers want.  These skills require all of the higher-order thinking skills, analyzing a problem's complexity, identifying relationships among data, creating possible solutions, and evaluating their effectiveness. However, the majority of employers say students lack the problem solving skills needed to succeed in the workplace.

Clearly, higher-order thinking skills are important Flipping the classroom, authentic assessment, problem- and project- based learning are all ways we can encourage the development of higher-order thinking in students. Unfortunately, the traditional method of direct lecture instruction and multiple choice assessment, does not encourage this way of thinking.  It may have been the way most of our college courses were taught, but if we were honest with ourselves, we might realize those courses could have been taught more effectively.

Over the next several weeks, I will talk about specific ways to encourage higher-order thinking skills in the traditional and online classroom.  From things I have tried, like moving to all essay exams and gamifying  deadlines to things I have helped others try like flipping the classroom and learning by doing, all of these techniques require faculty to do certain things.

1. Embrace failure. Be willing to fail and to allow your students to fail. Not everything you do will work, and students will not always be successful.  That doesn't mean you should give up any more than they should. If we never tried anything new for the fear of failing, we never would learn how to walk.
2. Rethink assessment. The ability to assess one's own learning is a higher-order thinking skill, so students need to be taught it.  However, we tend to view assessment as a means to a grade.  Giving students low-stakes ways to assess their learning is key, but it is a balancing act. You need to give them enough incentive to complete the assessment (like a grade) but still make sure that failure doesn't discourage them.
3. Reward the good. We tend to punish bad behavior instead of rewarding good behavior. Instead of assessing a late penalty or not accepting late work, try offering incentives to motivate students to do work on time.  If there is work you want students to complete before class, give them additional time or attempts; students who choose not to do the work on time don't get a penalty for turning work in late (only if it does not cause you more work).
4. Encourage creativity. Why do we insist students write answers to exams? While good written communication skills are important, employers are becoming more interested in verbal and visual communication skills as well.  By giving students options in how to communicate what they have learned, you are making the learning more relevant to them.
5. Be uncomfortable. This image popped up in my twitter feed last year. I think this may be something college faculty, in particular, find challenging, being put in the position of not being the expert in something. In order to learn or try something new, you need to acknowledge that the way you have always done it may not have been the most effective. That makes people uncomfortable. But that's not a bad thing...

So keep thinking about higher-order thinking skills, and use those higher-order thinking skills to try new ways to encourage them in your students.