e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Outstanding (and Practical) Learning Styles Research Paper

    This piece [PDF] from the Learning Research Centre is one of the finest educational research articles I have read in a long time. To begin with, their literature review of the research to-date is superb. They break down each major theoretical school with its strengths and weaknesses, as well as weaknesses in research and methodology. These guys really get the science and understand why it’s so hard to produce meaningful, reliable answers. To wit, here’s the first paragraph under the subhead in their conclusions section entitled “No clear implications for pedagogy:”

    There are two separate problems here. First, learning style researchers do not speak with one voice; there is widespread disagreement about the advice that should be offered to teachers, tutors or managers. For instance, should the style of teaching be consonant with the style of learning or not? At present, there is no definitive answer to that question, because –and this brings us to the second problem– there is a dearth of rigorously controlled experiments and of longitudinal studies to test the claims of the main advocates. A move toward more controlled experiments, however, would entail a loss of ecological validity and of the opportunity to study complex learning in authentic, everyday educational settings.

    In other words, one of the reasons that some of the central theoretical claims have not been tested is that, in order to do so, you have to isolate the variable you are testing in a controlled experiment. But a controlled experiment is not like a classroom, and we don’t know how stripping away the other variables impacts the holistic learning process.

    Nevertheless, all is not lost. The authors do offer some some good suggestions about how existing research can be used to enhance education as well as how to go about deciding which research to use in what ways.

    Hot stuff.

  • Spinsanity – Countering rhetoric with reason

    Here’s another “will-somebody-please-tell-me-the-goddurned-truth-about-the-Presidential-campaign-issues” site in the same spirit as FactCheck.org. I have only had time to give it a cursory scan so far, but Spinsanity looks good at first glance. Plus, it has an RSS feed, unlike FactCheck.org.

    (Found via Wired.)

  • Two Thirds of Faculty for Online Courses Receive No Pedagogy Training

    According to this survey, a lot of universities still don’t get that teaching online involves more than knowing which buttons to click. Right now the administrations probably don’t have to care; the demand for distance learning (even weak distance learning) outstrips the supply. But that won’t last forever, and when the market tightens up, universities will be shocked to learn that their customers can now sample a course, a degree program, or even an entire school, and bag it in favor of the competition with far less effort than they can in a bricks-and-mortar world. When that day comes, the competitive differentiator for customer loyalty will be pedagogy.

    (Found via Online Learning Update.)

  • Site Themes Revamp

    I just spent the afternoon editing e-Literate’s site theme organization. There are a number of reasons why I felt this was necessary:

    • Too many posts were going into too many themes. While I deliberately chose to create a system of overlapping themes rather than a rigid taxonomy, an organization system starts to lose its value when more than half of the things being organized fit into many categories. I wanted to reduce the overlap somewhat.
    • I often wasn’t sure which categories to use for a post. There were two reasons for this. One was that I needed to add a few new categories. But the other was that some of the categories I had didn’t fit quite right. For example, as much as I love Amy Gahran’s “Arranging Ideas” angle on KM, it’s a bit too…painterly for the way my own mind works. I don’t come at KM from a writer’s perspective the way that she does. So I had to change a couple of category names to make the boundaries clearer to myself.
    • The posts listed under each theme didn’t seem to cohere well. Posts in a theme should ideally read something like a sequence of reusable learning objects, in the sense that there should be some feeling of common threads even though the individual posts were not written to be read in that explicit sequence. I didn’t have that sense of coherence when I went to the site themes page.
    • Not all theme titles were helping readers to find content. Some theme topics, like “instructional design,” were getting lots of hits from the search engines (which pay special attention to words that are written as titles on the top of your pages). Much as I like the title “Aggregation Sciences,” nobody is entering that phrase as a search term on Google. So I tried to add more searchable phrases into at least the majority of the titles.

    After reviewing the categorization of all 154 (!) of my blog entries, I feel a lot better about the organization now. And actually, I’m quite proud of an accomplishment that I didn’t even realize until I reorganized my categories. I created a new theme called “Build This, Please” which highlights my ideas for tools that I don’t have the skill to build myself. Despite the fact that e-Literate is only a little over three months old, I have actually had technologists respond to a surprisingly large number of my requests/proposals. That feels good.

  • Blogchalking: Shibboleth in Action

    A while back I referred to Shibboleth–the idea of putting an arbitrary string into a post for search engine recognition. “Blog chalking” apparently uses this technique to map the blogosphere to terrestrial geography. Basically, you enter geographical and demographic information into the Shibboleth generator. It spits out a string which is encoded in an HTML tag that you put on your web page. You can then Google the string to find other blogs whose authors have similar geographic and demographic characteristics. So I could find out who has a blog in my town, for example. The Blog Chalk people claim that doing this also raises your profile in the search engines, though I have yet to find an explanation of why this is so.

    At any rate, I think this is a cool idea and would love to see it applied to the edu-blogosphere. I’d like to be able to, for example, search for all blogs by ESL teachers, or all bloggers in the NYC area who are interested in Open Source educational software.

    Who knows? Maybe the urge will strike Stephen when he returns from Australia….

  • Using LiveJournal in EFL Classes

    Aaron Campbell at Ryukoku University has a great piece out on how to use LiveJournal to teach EFL. It has everything you’d want in this sort of an article, including a rationale for choosing the particular technology and step-by-step instructions for educators. This is one of the clearest, most concrete examples I’ve seen for using blogs in a class.

  • Why Google News Has an Anti-Kerry Bias

    According to USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review, some quirks of linguistic usage may be effectively biasing the Google News algorithm toward hard-right anti-Kerry articles. Author J. D. Lasica claims that anti-Kerry pieces will tend to refer derisively to “John Kerry” repeatedly as a derisive rhetorical device, where more mainstream articles will tend to refer to the candidate as “Senator Kerry” or just “Kerry” after the first reference. Also, attack pieces are more likely to use Kerry’s full name in their title, as in, “John Kerry Eats Babies!” Both of these factors would tend to boost fringe anti-Kerry results for a search on the term “John Kerry,” while a search on just “Kerry” tends to produce a more mainstream mix.

    (Found via Ars Technica)