Roger Schank, the learning theorist, used to refer to this as the importance of expectation failure. The there are two scenarios where learning cannot happen — first, where everything goes as planned, and second, where no initial expectation is set.

Great teachers know this, and gravitate towards activities that create expectation failure. But even with the activities you are already doing you can usually create some form of expectation failure for the students by having them briefly record immediate reactions before class discussion or project work. What is there impression of Hamlet’s character? How do they think U.S. Vietnam casualties compared to Korea or Iraq? What will happen when you combine Chemical A with Chemical D?

It’s not enough to throw the question out there to the students. Make them talk about it in groups, or write it down. Make them own the expectation. Because it’s only through that that they will get the expectation failure they need to learn.

Math Questioning from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.

This one is great too:

Refining Solutions from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.

And here’s the document that has questions for reflection on the practice we see in the video.

George doesn’t provide easy answers here about content, and I’m finding as I think through the KLTC I don’t have pat answers either. But these are the right questions:

Content providers to education, after a long period of drubbing, are beginning to find their niche and to push their agenda: high value content, interactive content, well-organized and structured content. During the conference, we heard that publishers feel that we need them and that without their contributions, we are somewhat lost. Quality, structured content was presented as the means to solve education’s dilemmas.

While context is the primary determinant of how we balance content and interaction, I have a different view of content from what publishers promote. I’m not convinced that nicely packaged and structured content is what we need. Yes, I can understand how well structured content can lead to content personalization. But beautiful structures are of limited value when they fail to serve the needs of society. Properly tagged content, tied to learning objectives and learning profiles means nothing if it doesn’t assist in developing the learners ability to produce personal content (rather than being fed personalized content).

We can organize our content in two primary ways: technologically or socially. These methods have some overlap. Technology enables the social (folksonomies) and the social drives the technological (Facebook). There seems to be a drive to organize the worlds content in a type of digital Library of Alexandria. I think that’s a reasonable idea. But we have to ask ourselves how digital content should be organized based on what it is rather than on our assumptions of content organization.

If we were to build a library today, what would it look like? What would we include? How would we make sense of it? Do we worry about having too much? Or do we take a Google-like approach and dump everything, wherever, and apply intelligence at the point of search. Do we need organization applied at the point of content creation or do we need it applied at the point of use or search?

Quality of content is a genuine concern. A pure dichotomy doesn’t exist, but we can see points of tension: Apple App Store vs Androd Apps, Britannica vs Wikipedia. How much curation do we need? How will we determine quality? How will end-user feedback inform our actions?

The availability of open educational resources also changes the teachers role in relation to content. Teachers should use freely available resources wherever possible. If resources don’t exist on a subject, these should be developed collaboratively across school systems. In terms of content, learners should create, teachers should curate.

Each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, Information Today magazine covers the differences (and general limitations) of the two search products here.

It’s pretty lightweight, the sort of thing that one could use to sketch out an assessment design in the space of an hour or so.

Sample Project-based Learning Assessment Plan

We agree. People participating in the Keene Learning and Teaching Commons are encouraged to openly license their material. Creative Commons licensing is a great way to do that. The document below explains the very simple scheme of the Creative Commons license in a way anyone can understand. If after reading it you would like help adding license indicators to your Keene Commons site, shoot me an email and I’ll show you how (it will take literally 90 seconds).

Creative Commons – Draft 1

Pronovost recruited some more colleagues, and they made some more checklists. One aimed to insure that nurses observe patients for pain at least once every four hours and provide timely pain medication. This reduced the likelihood of a patient’s experiencing untreated pain from forty-one per cent to three per cent. They tested a checklist for patients on mechanical ventilation, making sure that, for instance, the head of each patient’s bed was propped up at least thirty degrees so that oral secretions couldn’t go into the windpipe, and antacid medication was given to prevent stomach ulcers. The proportion of patients who didn’t receive the recommended care dropped from seventy per cent to four per cent; the occurrence of pneumonias fell by a quarter; and twenty-one fewer patients died than in the previous year. The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.

I have some skepticism about grand pronouncements (Checklists will save the world!), but the truth is that professionally I often use checklists when it is critical to get something right, or when I am steering into territory unfamiliar to me. And they work — I couldn’t do my job without them.

So I’m wondering two things:

• Are there any faculty that have “teaching” checklists they want to share? (E.g. “This is the procedure I use when introducing a new concept”.)
• Are there any faculty that have student facing checklists out there?  (E.g. “10 things to check your paper for before you turn it in.”)

It think these could be incredibly powerful things. If you have some, I’d love to see them/share them.

I am pleased to inform you that the work of Anna P. McLean (Biology ‘11), Elizabeth A. Neuhardt (Chemistry ‘10), and Joel P. St. John (Chemistry ‘11) has been published in the international scientific journal Transition Metal Chemistry. The link to the online version of our paper, “Benchtop synthesis and crystal structure determination of a monomeric N-heterocyclic carbene complex of copper(I) chloride” is http://tinyurl.com/yc8vzk3.

Carbene complexes of copper(I) chloride are used as catalysts in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Previous methods of preparation of these compounds required very expensive equipment and time-consuming procedures. We have developed a new method of making these important catalysts from inexpensive materials with standard laboratory equipment. Using our new technique, the students were able to prepare and study a carbene copper(I) chloride that had never been made before. Structural studies of this compound were then conducted in collaboration with Dr M. Findlater of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Our method of preparing carbene complexes of copper(I) chloride is now being developed as a teaching experiment to be performed in undergraduate inorganic chemistry laboratory courses.

Syllabi should probably always have some FERPA guidance on them, but the situation is particularly important to classes using Web 2.0 technology, where encouraging students to cultivate a public presence is often an important pedagogical technique. In discussion with the Registrar and IT we determined that :

• Classes using such techniques must provide reasonable accommodation to students who have issues with “being public”
• For issues that relate to “being public”, that accommodation can be agreed on between the student and the professor.  It could involve the use of pseudonyms, or an alternative non-public assignment the student could work on. The professor should always state this in the syllabus, so that students understand they have the option to request this.
• For issues relating to grades, or official records, there is a much more rigid line. Under no circumstance can any official educational record be divulged without explicit written permission of the student, specifying exactly the people to whom the record will be released.
• Professor comments on blogs are not, in most cases, official student records. They are not information maintained by the college, not part of any permanent assessment, and as long as they do not mention grades, etc., are probably best seen as ephemeral notes or classroom comments.
• Here’s an interesting point I hadn’t thought of before: if you can’t do it on the web because of FERPA, you can’t do it in class either. FERPA makes no distinction between revealing elements of the educational record to a students classmates and revealing them to the greater web. A comment that related to a student’s grade that was illegal on the web would likely also be illegal in the classroom. If you can’t force students to post their art on the web (and you likely can’t — you have to provide an alternative to those who ask), you can’t force them to post it in the school’s hallway either.

That said, the key word is accommodation. With the exception of official student records, which must be treated strictly, most FERPA issues come down to whether the professor and the student can jointly work out an alternative that meets the needs of the course and with which the student feels comfortable.  And the first step in that process is letting students know they can request accommodation, and that doing so will not affect their grade.

Which, coming full circle here, is why we hope to develop some syllabus boilerplate that deals with this issue. And we’d like to thank the Registrar’s office and IT for offering to work with us on this very exciting project (and Jenny and Matt for starting this ball rolling).