Mobile Learning: Reflections in Progress

This post is a "during-course reflection" for "Mobile Learning," a course in the Advanced Studies Certificate: Distance Education Professional Development program at the University of Wisconsin (Madison).

It is written in Markdown on an iPhone 6+, using the Squarespace blogging app, Byword, and DropBox, as well as the public-bookmarking site Diigo.

The "guiding question" or "essential question" that I've brought to mobile learning is, "How might mobile devices make it easier to integrate reflection/activity on a course's subject matter with other elements of one's life, generating unpredictable possibilities for unexpected connections?"

Abstract: In a constructivist view of learning, knowledge is built, or constructed, through meaning-making activities that bring previous understandings into relation with new understandings. Learning is an irreducibly "creative" act: it is created via synthesis. Does the mobility of mobile devices make it easier to facilitate the regular integration of new understandings with the understandings (already) active in the other areas of one's life: family, play, work, etc.?

This short piece on "Connecting the Army to Digital Applications," while brief and summarizing, piqued my interest simply by its intentionality. What would it be like if seminary students, accomplishing their degree programs in real-world loci of practice (churches, non-profits or other non-government organizations, etc.), were provided class activities that could be accomplished "in the field" as opportunities presented themselves? How about their pre-program orientation, their advising, library usage, and so on? What if learners received explicit instruction on using mobile devices (from flip phones to smart phones) to do so? I have found myself preoccupied by a phrase used in this piece: that the goal is to foster "a persistent learning environment."

The "Basics" page of ADL's Mobile Learning Handbook and the Upside Learning "Quick Start Guide" ebook (edit: corrected click-through) have both helped me broaden my introductory understanding and get up on the lingo. For example, the concept of "push and pull learning" (intuitive enough to coders who use repositories like GitHub, but probably not to others) provides a kind of lever by which a fan of "just-in-time learning" to plug that set of pedagogical insights and practices into a mobile-friendly course design.

Integrating that concept of "push and pull learning" into my guiding question should become part of my final project for the course, along with the idea of "interactivity" in this piece by Jesse Stommel, noting that mobile devices facilitate an "easy move between reading and content creation."

My guiding question still makes sense to me as originally written. I found another student keen to provide Spanish-language learning resources to learners in the places where trying to use that language, and became interested in expanding on that idea (perhaps in Hebrew-languages courses that I teach occasionally).

How to Write about Ferguson

Allow me first to correct the punctuation in my title, above:

"How to Write about Ferguson?"

Now you can hear it the way it sounds in my head.

For a week and a half, I've been preoccupied by the Michael Brown tragedy, by the ensuing protests, and by the depressingly and infuriatingly (but not surprisingly) misconceived police response that still grips the city and daily threatens further loss of life. At the same time, I bang out nearly-due revisions to one writing project and draft two more, both also under deadline. At the same time, I prepare my fall upper-level course for waiting learners.

Today, Nyasha Junior, biblical scholar and public speaker, rightly has asked:

Asking again: Other than the @ONScripture piece, have any of my non-Black #SBL colleagues written on #Ferguson? If so, pls link. #aarsbl

— Nyasha Junior (@NyashaJunior) August 20, 2014

The ONScripture piece is a resource for "preaching reflections" on Michael Brown and Ferguson. "#SBL" refers to the Society of Biblical Literature, the flagship professional society for academic biblical studies.

I am primarily an academic, though I do preach occasionally, as an unordained layperson. I teach the literature of ancient Israel, understood as having two interpretive "anchor points": the likely meaning of biblical texts in their ancient Near Eastern social/historical context, and the range of possible meanings such texts may support for us johnny-come-lately readers in our own social/historical contexts. Additionally, my job description asks me to explore digital learning, finding and modeling better practices of online pedagogy.

My habitual mode, then, is less to tell people HOW to interpret biblical texts in light of the murder of an unarmed Black teen by a white law enforcement officer, and more to PREPARE learners to generate such interpretations as they might find liberating, for themselves and for others.

My habitual mode is less to rally faculty colleagues to a particular understanding of the racist and preposterously over-militarized police response in Ferguson, and more to rally them to the possibilities for facilitating online communities of inquiry where they and their learners can be genuinely present to one another in a time of crisis, even if the learners are prevented (usually for economic reasons) from enjoying on-campus residency.

In an upper-level seminar on "Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Old Testament in the New Testament," I may ask learners to write creative, biblically-allusive blog posts on Ferguson, white power, and casual brutality. Persuading faculty colleagues to learn to live-stream lectures & panels, I may appeal to their desire to reach at-risk communities…perhaps including Ferguson. I'm working up notes! But shit takes time. And the revisions, and the drafting, and the fall classes.

For now, I'm a white academic whose relative privilege would allow him to monitor Ferguson passively while sweating out those scholarly revisions and drafts. For whom Ferguson is important but for whom (let's face it) Ferguson need not be treated as urgently as some other things in his life. How can I write about Ferguson now?

Like this, apparently. And by letting people know, here and on my Facebook feed, that I am Tweeting about #Ferguson and (more importantly) Retweeting about #Ferguson, and that they should be too. By letting people know that they can become better informed. That other academics are trying to figure out what we owe our learners now and later in response to Ferguson.

If you are a non-Black biblical scholar, then (aside from preaching), how do you write about Ferguson?

Connected Courses

Talk about just-in-time learning. One day, I begin to fumble through creation of a "connected course" for 2015. Next day (more or less), my Twitter feed coughs up an invitation to Connected Courses,

a collaborative community of faculty in higher education developing networked, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.

This is gonna be great.

A Sense of Entitlement

Is it "a sense of entitlement" if students are actually entitled to it? To what are learners in fact entitled?

A recent Language Log post tracks the meaning of the word "entitlement" over time. I was surprised to see how early it acquired negative connotations. Originally meaning something to which a person is legitimately entitled (think of going to college on the GI bill, for example), it came quickly to be used in contexts where a person believes they are entitled to something on which they actually have no legitimate claim. The string, "…sense of entitlement…" is common.

You hear a lot in higher ed these days about the "sense of entitlement" among students, and this does point to a genuine problem. Grade inflation is real, as is a consumer mentality around education: you hear sentiments like "I pay the teacher's salary, so they have to do x for me," where x = "respect my learning style," "cut me a break because of my full-time job," "avoid offending me." (Side point: an instructor is no more employed by her learners than a waiter is employed by the guy ordering a steak.)

But are learners entitled to nothing? I'll offer today two things to which a learner is, in my view, entitled: Clarity regarding time commitments, and clarity regarding assessments.

Time commitments: A learner is entitled to know how many hours the course work is designed to take. Many of my students work long hours (usually in a church), and frankly, should either be working fewer hours or taking fewer classes ("But my scholarship requires…"). It's a real systemic problem in need of address. At the same time, we all know that being squeezed from both sides is the human condition: it's how you develop muscle, and learning to "push back" against one's employer is a survival skill.

I often say,

Here is the difference between me and your church employer. The church will never tell you it has "enough" of your time. It will always want more. Me, I will design my course in such a way that its time requirements are predictable: about so many hours of reading, about so many hours of activities. If you are spending (say) 6-8 hours each week, outside of class, on this 3-credit course, and not getting the results you want, then come see me. I won't simply say, "spend more time." I'll first work with you to help you make the most of that 6-8 hours.

Some students will, in fact, need to put in more time than others, especially if language is an issue, or they have a poor background in reading. Maybe some can only achieve sub-"A" work in the time that they have. But again, if they put in the time, they are entitled to my help on getting the most out of that time.

(Side note to instructors: do you know how many words are in your assigned readings? Do you know what reading rates are typical for your learners?)

Assessments: A learner who attempts to "meet the bar" of expectations is entitled to know where the bars are set. I am a convert to rubrics, and have all the fanaticism of a convert. No matter how carefully I try to write my expectations into paragraphs of prose, it's not enough. The fact is, I do have, in my head, 1) a list of things that I am assessing in an assignment, and 2) a mental picture of what "not good enough," "good enough," and "more than good enough" looks like for each of those things I am looking for. The learners deserve to have access to that "mental map," taken out of my head and spelled out visibly on paper. Here is an example of my assessment rubrics: the assignment is peer review. (Imagine the learners have written a draft of a paper, and are to review one another's drafts; they are graded on their peer reviews, so this is the rubric for that review.)

What challenges have I overlooked regarding time commitments and assessments? To what else, in your view, are learners "entitled"? How do you view student "entitlements"?

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[A Sense of Entitlement was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/10/08. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

What Makes it Play-skool? Fear and Safety in the Learning Space

Play-skool and peer review: Commonly, I have my class write a project in stages, with peer review of each stage. Every time I introduce peer review to my learners, they go willingly enough through the exercise, submitting their work to one another and accomplishing their reviews. Then, as reliably as heartbreak, one of them asks optimistically, "So when will we get our real feedback?"

"You just got it," I reply with the even voice of long practice. Cue chill breeze and blowing dry leaves in twilight.

On the next round, the peer reviews are always better: more detailed, more genuine, in closer engagement with the assignment rubrics. The reviewers tackle their assessments as if something were actually at stake, which of course it is.

They have discerned the truth: peer review, in my class, is not "Play-skool." It's the real thing. They are afraid to let one another down, and they should be. A "safe space" is suddenly something that it's up to them to construct.

Slight shift of gears: In a recent faculty discussion about race and racism, we compared notes about how we address systemic racism (or, for another example, systemic mysogyny) as a subject matter in our various courses. As often happens, a colleague mentioned the frustration expressed in class (sometimes professionally, more often unskillfully) by the white man, usually young, who feels targeted in such a discussion. We talked about how to facilitate a safe space for him, but at the same time, we agreed that that's just the way the ball bounces: "The learning space is never completely safe. And shouldn't be." If it were completely safe, it wouldn't be a learning space.

It would be Play-skool.

So. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that the creative activity of making meaning can only happen in a space where fear has been removed…or removed enough, or removed in the right places. I have determined this in the crucible of fairly long experience. But at the same time, if all possible fears have been removed, if the space is made unsurpassingly safe…then we're in Play-skool, and learning is done.

Thoughts coming later on parsing this out more completely. What are your thoughts on fear, learner safety, and Play-skool?

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[What Makes it Play-skool? Fear and Safety in the Learning Space was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/10/01. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

See You at THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy

It's official: I will be attending THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy in Portland OR, on October 20-21.

Last year, I made it to THATCamp Pedagogy in Poughkeepsie NJ. I would love to see a more-or-less annual pedagogy unconference unfold, in some form or other.

More as we get close, but you can expect some live-tweeting and blogging from THATCamp Hybrid Ped.

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[See You at THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/13. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The Real First Day, RBoC

Classes start a week from tomorrow. But as of today, summer is officially over.

Today begins our 2-day faculty retreat. Then, the rest of the week is new-student orientation. Then, a relatively joyless Labor Day weekend filled with the last-minute labors of course preparation. Then finally, "Good morning, eager young minds."

Here are my start-of-term Random Bullets of Crap:

• Try to chill out and enjoy faculty retreat for two days;
• Prepare for student orientation session on online coursework and our Bible Content course;
• Get advisees safely settled into their sockets for the term;
• Finish planning, syllabus, and LMS build for online course Intro to Old Testament;
• Complete last set of Flickr slides for face-to-face course Elementary Biblical Hebrew;
• Make progress in home stretch of online course in online pedagogy;
• Make long-postponed repairs to my suits: buttons, hems;
• Office housekeeping: get plant out of water pitcher into planter, and swap out cafeteria plastic tableware for a couple of sets of proper, if cheap, table settings.

Where are you in the start of the term? What are your own random bullets?

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[The Real First Day, RBoC was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/27. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Making Better Ancient-Language Reading Exams

Some modern-language "reading exams" reflect a sound pedagogy that 1) reflects communicative learning of the target language, 2) offers clarity of expectations for assessment. I would love to see graduate reading exams in Hebrew and Greek achieve that same pedagogical footing, incorporating an extemporaneous oral component and rubrics made available to the learner.

The "reading exam" is well known to many graduate students. Because introductory and intermediate foreign-langauge courses vary from school to school, most Ph.D. programs will ask applicants to take a reading exam to show their proficiency in a given "research language" (often German, French, Italian). In some cases, a program might ask for a similar examination for an ancient ("dead") language: in my field, for example, Hellenistic Greek or Biblical Hebrew.

Reading exams tend to vary with the idiosyncracies of the examining instructor. A departmental guideline might offer expectations or options regarding format: our own offers the student a choice of having two "unseen" texts to translate, or else having to answer comprehension questions (posed in English) on both an "unseen" text and a set of short "seen" texts. Beyond the formatting guidelines, though, expectations are usually pretty opaque. How long will it be? Will the content be related to the learner's field of study? What kinds of errors are important? Is it better to turn in an incomplete exam that is error-free in what it accomplishes, or is it better to finish with some parts left really rough? "Only the Shadow knows."

Some modern language reading exams reflect an expectation that the student has really learned to communicate extemporaneously in the target language, for example by an oral component with "Q and A" conducted in that language. To my knowledge, exams in Hebrew and Greek never include this, because so very few seminaries or divinity schools teach biblical languages using communicative-language/second-language-acquisitions methods. (The overwhelmingly common model is to teach the elementary linguistics of the target language; believe it or not, in many courses, the target material is not even read out loud by the learner.)

Here's what I would like to see in ancient language reading exams:

1. Extemporaneous, oral component: This could be small or large. At minimum, the exam itself could be simple translation, but preceded by a "social" exchange in the target language (welcoming the student, pleasantries, getting settled). At most, the entire exam could be a discussion, in the target language, of readings that have been accomplished ahead of time by the student. I might like to see an exam that splits the difference:
   • a brief social exchange in the target language;
   • simple translation of a reading not seen before by the learner;
   • a handful of comprehension questions, in the target language, concerning a reading that the learner has pre-read.
2. Rubrics for assessment: The truth is, not every mistake counts equally in assessment, and (depending on the assessor) some mistakes won't count at all. For example, an assessor might not detract from the student's score if she appears to transform a passive form into an active form while preserving the correct meaning. These matters should be agreed upon within a department, and made available to the student in a rubric.
3. Word count expectations: In a timed exam, how many words/minute can the student expect to be asked to translate? This needn't be the same for all languages and all programs, but again should be made clear in the rubric. From the very few examples I have been able to put my hand to, I think that 4+ words/minute (250/hour) is reasonable for modern research languages; for ancient languages (Latin, Hebrew, Greek) I would like to think that the same expectation is within reach, while about half that (2-3 words/minute) is usual.

The first item could only be used, of course, with a learner whose instruction has prepared her for it. The second and third items, however, should be incorporated into every program's guidelines for foreign-language reading exams.

What is your experience with "reading exams"? Does your experience with them give you grounds to critically assess my observations or suggestions?

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[Making Better Ancient-Language Reading Exams was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/22. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else

Twitter has published the coming changes to how it allows applications (programs) to use its service, and these changes spell debilitating problems for educators who use Twitter.

Teachers on Twitter overwhelmingly favor some form of "active learning" or constructivist pedagogy: whether in face-to-face or online courses, the idea is that students learn by doing, making, building (often collaboratively). As part of a typical learning cycle, the learner is exposed to knowledge or information or has an experience facilitated by the course designer, and then goes on to make something in response. By working (often with others) to create something (a paper, a debate, a presentation, a tool), the learner makes original connections between data points and thereby constructs new meanings for herself. The result is a perception-changing experience of the subject matter. Make sense? Making a thing > making meaning.

Twitter's changes will make it impossible for many educators on Twitter to facilitate the kinds of activities that accomplish this. For one depressing example, take Storify. Educators use the dickens out of Storify, for good reason. After a student has had some instructor-facilitated, varied experience mediated through (say) Twitter, blog posts, news articles, Facebook, and so on, she can use Storify to make meaning of that experience, and to create a digital narrative of that experience for others. But look at Twitter's "rule 5a" for Time lines:

Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.

As far as I can see, this is a bullet in the head for the use of Storify with Twitter.

The "big picture" of Twitter's changes to its API can be seen in the quadrant at the bottom of the announcement…or even better, in Dan Wineman's improvement to the graphic. As I tweeted before, the graphic amounts to this:

• business engagement, business analytics, consumer analytics = GOOD.
• consumer engagement = BAD.

In Rene Ritchie's words, "Twitter wants to marginalize apps used by me, and maximize apps that would use me and my data."

Welcome to the Facebook-ization of Twitter, the perhaps inevitable result in services that are free to consumers and depend on leveraging their attention to advertisements. In a later post: "Welcome to App-dot-net."

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[Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/17. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Participant Pedagogy: a MOOCMOOC Production

(This week, I am a learner in a Massive Open Online Course—a MOOC—that is on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses. Yes, it's a Moocmooc. Our assignment today is a short post about "participant pedagogy.")

In Jesse's post today and elsewhere, he kicks "learner-centered learning" up a notch (Emeril style!): for the course designer, it's no longer just a matter of asking, "What does the learner need in order to accomplish the learning that the course asks of her?" It goes further, asking, "What role does the learner need to take in joining in the design of the course during the course itself?" How do I design a course such that the learners, as part of their learning, make decisions about the structure and expectations of the course?

This raises for me a distinction that I have learned regarding course design: the difference between closed-ended "selected response" assessments (multiple choice, short answer, matching, true/false) and open-ended "constructed response" assessments (learning logs, presentations, discussion, portfolios, productions such as artwork). When we talk about these, we usually are talking about how to assess a student's control of a subject matter: geology, history, a language, mathematics, or whatever.

But Jesse's post makes me review the ways in which I empower students to participate in course design, and I realize that it is mostly in a "selected response" style: I allow the learners to choose among options that I have set. For example, for their final project, I will give the learners a set of rubrics that tell them what that project must accomplish, then I let them choose between, say, a thesis paper or a digital visual essay ("selected response"). What I have resisted doing is to allow them an open-ended choice: "Go ahead and come up with something that will accomplish the requirements of the rubric" ("constructed response").

My reasons for resisting this have more to do with how I perceive my own limitations than theirs: What if I fail to equip them to make good choices? (And by "good choices," I don't even mean "choices that lead to a good product"; I mean, "What if they make choices that don't even lead to a learning process? What if they don't even "fail well"?)

If you are an instructor, what kinds of "participant power" have you given your learners to shape their learning experience: closed-ended "selected response" or open-ended "constructed response"? If you are a student, what kinds of "participant power" have you been given? What kind have you wanted? What has happened as a result?

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[Participant Pedagogy: a MOOCMOOC Production was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/15. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]