Category: Pedagogy

On using Wikipedia

Slate magazine has an interesting interview with a disaffected co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. I like what he says about how to use Wikipedia, or any other reference resource:

What Wikipedians themselves would say—and I agree with them on this one—is that Wikipedia has finally awakened in people an understanding that even carefully edited resources can frequently be wrong and have to be treated with skepticism and that ultimately we are responsible for what we believe. That means constantly going back and checking what we thought was established or what we thought we knew. Wikipedians often say that you should never trust any one source, including Wikipedia.

That’s not anything new; it’s always been the case that you should check your source against another source. It’s just that the way that the Internet has exposed the editorial process has, for more critical-minded people, made it absolutely plain just how much responsibility we ourselves bear to believe the right thing. – Larry Sanger in Schulz, 2010

I also agree with what he says about how he personally uses internet resources:

Which resources I turn to greatly depend on what sort of information I’m looking for. One of my favorite information resources is Google Maps and Bing Maps. I’ve often used Google Scholar for an essay I’ve been working on lately. When I’m looking for some quick fact, of the sort one finds from an almanac or other reference book, I generally search in Google and then pick a non-Wikipedia source. If there doesn’t seem to be anything as efficient, I’ll fall back on the Wikipedia source. If I’m doing serious research, I don’t spend much time on Wikipedia at all, I’m afraid. I do look in on Citizendium’s offerings from time to time, when I think it might have something on the topic. I also not infrequently grab various books from my bookshelves, the old-fashioned way. – Larry Sanger in Schulz, 2010

We’ll start this year with Wikipedia unblocked, but I’m working on a lesson on how to use it properly.

To teach effectively, you need to speak the same language

An interesting research project has shown that the same parts of the brain light up when you’re telling a story as when you’re listening to the story. So much so, that you begin to anticipate and parts of the your brain actually light up before the same parts in the storyteller’s. And the greater the synchronization, the greater the recall of the story.

The researchers found considerable synchronization between Silbert’s brain-activation patterns and those of her listeners as the story unfolded. For example, as Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says. – Balter, 2010

That’s fascinating enough, but the control of their experiment was to have listeners listen to a story in a language they did not know. There was not the same synchronization. This means, if we extrapolate a little, that the amount of language comprehension determines how much you learn from a conversation, or hearing a story, or listening to a lecture, or even for understanding a set of oral instructions.

So if you want students to remember something you need to speak in their language. Language here refers not just to English versus Russian or whatever, but speaking using common idioms that the student is, like, you know, familiar with.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

James Paul Gee has written a lot about this type of communication, and what it means for learning. He argues that meaning is situated, that is, how we understand something that is said to us depends a lot on our previous history and experiences. The most effective communication only really occurs within communities that have shared the same, or similar, experiences.

We are as teachers, of course, trying to expand student’s ability to use language, and introduce them to the language of different communities. But we should probably pay attention to how we speak in different contexts, and speak in their language when we want them to really remember something.

Approximating reality

The world is ridiculously complicated. We construct models to represent what we see and think we understand. Simple models of complex phenomena, and we’re happy when our models represent the most important patterns.

We would, of course, often like to understand the details, so we add more detail to our models. And our models get closer to reality. Yet as our models represent the world in more and more detail they themselves become more and more complex. All the simple parts of the models start to interact in increasingly unexpected ways, until it becomes almost as difficult to interpret the model as it is to understand the real world.

It’s a good thing we see beauty in complexity.

Montessori Homeschool

I ran into the blog Somewhat in the Air by a parent who is doing Montessori style Homeschool for a couple boys (hat tip to Ms. De La Cruz). The kids are in elementary but approaching middle school age and they have some great links to resources that they use for projects that would also work well in the classroom or for individual projects.

The blog also contains some of the students’ work and the author’s reflections on Montessori philosophy. It’s a fascinating read and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it evolves as the kids grow older.

Montessori Middle School Training/Research Projects

Maria Montessori developed her method teaching through careful observation of children and how they learn, which is why her method had held up so well over time and aligns so well with modern pedagogy (see Lillard, 2005). Montessori’s worked early childhood through elementary kids, and while she did some serious thinking and writing about secondary education, she did not put those thoughts into action herself.

Over the last 20 years or so Betsy Coe has developed, at School of the Woods, an exceptional middle school (and now high school) program based on Montessori’s ideas and tied to close observation of early adolescents and our growing understanding of their cognitive and neurological development. Unlike Montessori’s boarding school model (e.g. Hershey Montessori), Dr. Coe’s is primarily a day school but with “land-labs” one week out of every six, where student get to go out and live on the land.

There’s a lot to say about Dr. Coe’s program (which will be well explained in her upcoming book) but you can glean some of her influence from this blog, because I trained with her over the last two summers at the Houston Montessori Center.

One of the key tenets that Coe shares with Montessori is that the primary job of the teacher is to observe the students, their interactions and their environment. You apply the scientific process to the classroom. Observe, hypothesize, test and make the necessary changes. As such, a key part of the training program is the research project.

For the research project teachers in training have to apply the process to some aspect of their class and write it up. My own project was on the utility of my classroom wiki, which I’ve said a bit about previously. My peers did quite a wide variety of excellent projects, and I’ve asked them to share their experiences with me for the blog. I’m one of those people who’d collect bits of string because they might be useful in the future (hence the blog), so I’m loathe to let their experiences and efforts just disappear since it is unlikely that much of this work will be published.

I plan to post summaries of the research projects so there is a record of who did what, and I apologize for any mistakes I make in condensing the work. My goal is to create at least one node for discussion so that we might add these small anecdotes to the collective gestalt as we attempt to not replicate the interesting errors of others but make brand-new errors of our own.

Since most of this work is not formal research I’ll use the tag anecdotal research to help keep track of things.

Using technology for project based learning

Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss have a new book out on using information technology in large-scale projects called, “Reinventing Project-Based Learning“. While you can do great projects without technology, they say,

… what a richer, more authentic landscape it is when students have access to resources, tools, strategies, and concerns found outside the classroom walls.

There are a ridiculous amount of real data available out their on the web, from economic data (FRED) to real-time stream gauging for the entire U.S. (USGS). And many come with online tools to process the data.

In addition, things like wikis make collaboration possible even for home-work projects in a way that was not possible in the past.

For myself, the book provides an interesting guide for for tailoring and improving the structure of the projects I already do, but there is a good bit of information introducing different types of technology to those interested in incorporating it for the first time. I’d be interested to see what teachers new to experimenting with project-based learning with new technology think about the book.

Website design

Teaching website design can be done in two ways. The easy way is to use one the the many, very good, software packages. Adobe Dreamweaver is a fairly popular commercial package, while Mozilla’s SeaMonkey (from the creators of Firefox) is a free, open-source alternative.

The longer way to teach web design, which I prefer, is to start with HTML and CSS and build a fundamental understanding of how webpages work.

Chakita J., who teaches technology at the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis and shares my approach to the subject recommends , “The Complete Reference HTML” by Thomas Powell.

The Wiki

One of the most significant developments of the information revolution has been the creation of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the software that makes it possible. Wikipedia has democratized the creation and sharing of information. Anyone can edit the encyclopedia, and anyone can access and adapt the information by observing simple and free license. And the information in Wikipedia is remarkably accurate, comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles, 2005).

The democratic creation and sharing of information shares much with the ethos of Montessori. There is a respect for the participation of anyone who wishes to contribute, contained within strong mechanisms for self-correction.

The basis for this success is the Wiki website software. There are quite a number of stand-alone or software suites that allow the creation of wikis. Wikimatrix, (2010) provides an extensive list, as well as questionnaires that offers suggestions about which wiki would best meet different users’ needs. Mediawiki, the software used by Wikipedia, is designed to be open and allow easy editing, while others give users and administrators greater control of what anyone can see and change.

Wikipedia uses the Mediawiki wiki software.

Based on its reliability, as proven by its ubiquity on the internet, its cost (free) and its ease of editing, I have chosen to use Mediawiki for my middle school wiki. The only significant difference from the standard Wikipedia installation is that I have password-protected access past the front page of the wiki to anyone not in the class. Once past the front page, a world of creation and community sharing opens up.

I have been using the wiki extensively for the last two years, and it is the central point of reference for my class. Students write their assignments on the wiki, they can find out what’s on the study-guides on the wiki, they often use it to communicate with their peers, and they have access to all the information and presentations created by their peers so they have a database of knowledge directly relevant to what we’re studying in the class.

Navigation bar for the middle-school wiki.

As a teacher, I believe our class wiki is one of the most powerful additions to the classroom community. It has been a great organizational aid for myself as well as the students. Presentation notes, video, reading assignments are all linked directly to the relevant study-guide. It drastically reduces the amount of paper necessary to hand out and to keep organized, which is especially important with our two-year cycle of work.

Yet, as with any type of new technology, it is important to get other, independent perspectives on the efficacy of the wiki. There are potential issues. Reaching the diversity of learning styles is an important element of teaching.

Assessment is, by necessity, an ongoing project. I will start by surveying my students to investigate how they use the wiki perceive its utility. The outcome of this investigation should provide guidelines for how the wiki needs to be adapted to be most useful and guide future research.