The paradoxical future of digital learning

What constitutes learning in the 21st century will be contested terrain as our society strives toward post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition and production without having yet overcome the educational contradictions and failings of the industrial age. Educational reformers suggest that the advent of new technologies will radically transform what people learn, how they learn, and where they learn, yet studies of diverse learners’ use of new media cast doubt on the speed and extent of change. Drawing on recent empirical and theoretical work, this essay critically examines beliefs about the nature of digital learning and points to the role of social, culture, and economic factors in shaping and constraining educational transformation in the digital era. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Changing What We Might Have Done on Our Own: Improving Classroom Culture and Learning through Teacher Collaboration

Abstract

Student achievement is not always the equivalent of what students learn, especially when educators use their feedback to shape daily instruction. When students share their classroom experiences, we can determine better ways to create interdisciplinary partnerships, manage workload, enhance historical understandings, and communicate conclusions. Being able to trust in what students are doing in class, how well they are doing it, and what they will be able to do motivated the authors, who are two veteran educators, to reevaluate when their own teaching seemed most effective. What they discovered is incongruent with the traditional delivery of instruction by a single teacher. The authors found that their collaboration as co-teachers not only benefited their students but increased their own professional learning in terms of pedagogy, content knowledge, and the use of disciplinary literacy.     

Teachers’ professional development: a theoretical review

Background and purpose:?The article reviews studies that focus on the professional development of teachers after they have completed their basic teacher training. Teacher professional development is defined as teachers’ learning: how they learn to learn and how they apply their knowledge in practice to support pupils’ learning. The research question addressed in the article is: How do experienced teachers learn?

Main argument:?The review is framed by theories within the constructivist paradigm. From this perspective, knowledge is perceived as the construction of meaning and understanding within social interaction. The social surroundings are seen as decisive for how the individual learns and develops. It is argued that courses and lectures, or ‘times for telling’, and teachers’ development of a metacognitive attitude are decisive factors for teachers’ learning within a constructivist frame of reference.

Sources of evidence and method:?To attempt to answer the research question, a search was conducted of the subject of pedagogy in the ISI WEB of Science (search undertaken 9 August 2011) using the search strings ‘teacher learning’, ‘teacher development’ and ‘teacher professional development’, and covering the period from 2009 to 2011 to probe the most recent decade of research. Articles that dealt with basic education, primary and secondary school, were selected, and articles that dealt with learning using digital tools and the internet and newly trained teachers were rejected. A set of 31 articles was selected from this search. To ensure width and depth of coverage, this was supplemented by a selection of review studies and research on further education in respect of teachers’ learning. The texts were analysed by means of open and axial coding, developing main and sub-categories.

Conclusions:?The review of articles shows that both individual and organisational factors impact teachers’ learning. Teacher co-operation has importance for how they develop, and some of the teachers can lead such learning activities themselves. Moreover, a positive school culture with a good atmosphere and understanding of teachers’ learning, in addition to co-operation with external resource persons, may impact the professional development of teachers. The article concludes with the reflection that learning in school is the best arena for further development of teachers.     

“It was smart when:” Supporting prospective teachers’ noticing of students’ mathematical strengths

Learning to name and notice students’ mathematical strengths is a challenging process requiring time and multiple iterations of practice for prospective teachers (PTs) to adopt. Mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) can approximate and decompose the complex practice of naming and noticing students’ mathematical strengths so PTs learn to teach mathematics while emphasizing what students know and can do. This study uses two tools MTEs can use to support PTs as they learn to name and notice students’ mathematical strengths: A LessonSketch experience, a digital platform with comic-based storyboards showing children engaged in a mathematics task, and a strengths-based sentence frame. Our study presents the findings from the 111 noticing statements from 18 PTs as they engaged in the LessonSketch digital experience and practiced making noticing statements about what children know about mathematics. The study found that after a sentence-frame intervention, the PTs are more likely to use strengths-based language and more likely to identify mathematical evidence in their noticing statements. Uncommitted language (statements that do not align with a strength- or deficit-based coding scheme), suggests a fruitful, yet complex space for supporting more PTs as they learn to name and notice students’ mathematical strengths. The paper concludes with implications for future research in teacher education.

     

Helping students learn ‘how to learn’ from texts: Towards an ITS for developing metacognition

Intelligent tutoring systems have most frequently concentrated on imparting domain knowledge. However, there is another important aspect to learning. This is the meta level knowledge abouthow to learn a domain. Metacognition is a very important feature of learning. It consists of being aware of and regulating one's own cognitions.Good students have full control over their learning and see it as a planful and purposive activity. They reflect on their learning activities, are aware of a variety of strategies, and they oversee and monitor the application of these strategies, i.e. they are proficient in metacognitive activities. This paper describes a computer based system that helps students to learn these important self regulation skills. Students work with the system in pairs, and they can use it with any text from which they wish to learn. Apart from being used as a study aid, the system is being used as a tool to gather data about students learning processes.     

Staff appraisal: Lessons from United Kingdom industry?

Abstract

This paper examines staff appraisal and development in industrial and commercial organizations in the United Kingdom and discusses the extent to which the educational system can learn from them.

The appraisal and development programmes in three large organizations in the East Midlands region of England are reviewed and the extent to which the sort of models found in business might be applied to education is considered.

It is argued that industrial/commercial models of staff appraisal can be applied effectively in the educational context as long as they are tied in with the staff development process. A tenative list of recommendations felt to be applicable to the introduction of appraisal in education, and particularly further education, is provided.     

VET students’ integration of knowledge engaged with in school-based and workplace-based learning environments in the Netherlands

In vocational education, students learn in different school-based and workplace-based learning environments and engage with different types of knowledge in these environments. Students are expected to integrate these experiences and make meaning of them in relation to their own professional knowledge base. This study focuses both on what types of knowledge students learn in these environments and how they integrate these different types of knowledge. Individual and group interviews were conducted with students, teachers and workplace supervisors in a vocational programme in the Netherlands. Results show that students recognise the importance of vocational knowledge learned in school-based learning environments while they are in the workplace and vice versa, and continuously contextualise knowledge to make it applicable for new circumstances. Also, students learn differently at school due to their experiences in the workplace.     

Motivations of Chinese Learners of Japanese in Mainland China

This article reports on the motivations of Chinese learners to learn Japanese in light of increasing diplomatic tensions between China and Japan over the last three decades. In the study, 35 Chinese learners of Japanese were selected, according to the time they began learning, to examine their motivations to learn Japanese as mediated by shifting sociopolitical conditions. Most began learning the language without enthusiasm, but became motivated and sustained their motivation to learn or use Japanese as they gained new Shiye (视野) (vision), Chuang (窗) (perspective), renshi (认识) (understanding), and other desirable attributes for their self-development. This improved their understanding of both the target language speakers’ communities and their own. These findings suggest that teachers and learners of Japanese could bridge the gap between the two communities (i.e., Chinese and Japanese) through language learning to sustain peaceful exchanges between them.     

We Can Still Learn About Probability by Rolling Dice and Tossing Coins

Rolling dice and tossing coins can still be used to teach probability even if students know (or think they know) what happens in these experiments. This article considers many simple variations of these experiments which are interesting, potentially enjoyable and challenging. Using these variations can cause students (and teachers) to think again about the statistical issues involved – and learn in the process.     

Open the door,let's explore: Neighborhood field trips

Trips give adults an opportunity to see for themselves something they have heard or read about. Trips serve not only that same function for children, but also its opposite. They give children an opportunity to see for themselves something they will learn more about later in pictures or books or through conversation. Children learn to make sense of the world around them through many different experiences. The greater the quantity and variety of experiences, the greater the learning potential. Rhoda Redleaf is a child development specialist with Resources for Child Caring in St. Paul, MN. This article is excerpted, with permission, from Open the Door, Let's Explore, ©1983, Toys 'n Things Press. The book is available for $8.95 plus $1.75 shipping and handling from: Toys 'n Things Press, 906 North Dale Street, St. Paul, MN 55103.     

Learning from Chemical Visualizations: Comparing generation and selection

Dynamic visualizations can make unseen phenomena such as chemical reactions visible but students need guidance to benefit from them. This study explores the value of generating drawings versus selecting among alternatives to guide students to learn chemical reactions from a dynamic visualization of hydrogen combustion as part of an online inquiry unit. In prior research, generation has been more successful than selection in helping students distinguish among ideas to learn complex topics. However, selecting among perplexing alternatives may motivate learners to distinguish among ideas they might otherwise neglect. To test the value of selection for helping students distinguish ideas, this study contrasted complex selection (involving normative as well as non-normative ideas identified in prior research) from typical selection (involving images from the visualization). Results showed that all conditions improved student understanding and that typical selection was less effective than generation while complex selection was as successful as generation. In both generation and complex selection students revisited the visualization while learning, whereas revisiting was rare in typical selection. These results support the idea that distinguishing among common non-normative ideas is more valuable than distinguishing among images from the visualization. In addition, for students with low prior knowledge, both generation and complex selection had some advantages. Overall, the results suggest that students learning from complex visualizations could benefit from a combination of complex selection and generation.     

Informed learning design: teaching and learning through engagement with information

ABSTRACT

While higher education teachers are able to use information in sophisticated ways to learn and communicate within their disciplines, they may not be accustomed to teaching their students to use information creatively and reflectively to support their work in a course. This article introduces informed learning design, a curriculum design model by which teachers specifically enable students to learn course content through intentional engagement with information. Drawing from informed learning pedagogy and the variation theory of learning, the design model outlines an instructional pattern for enabling student awareness of critical aspects and features of the object being studied related to both information use and course content.     

Memory span for heterospecific individuals' odors in an ant, Cataglyphis cursor

Only recently have researchers studied the ability of ants to learn and remember individual heterospecific odors. Cataglyphis cursor adults have the capacity to learn these odors, but the duration of their memory and the factors that affect its formation remain unknown. We used a habituation/discrimination paradigm to study some of these issues. C. cursor adult workers were familiarized to an anesthetized Camponotus aethiops on four successive encounters. Then they were either isolated or placed with 20 nestmates for a certain length of time before undergoing a discrimination test that consisted of reintroducing the familiar C. aethiops, as well as introducing an unknown member of the same colony. The results showed that adult C. cursor ants can retain in memory a complex individual odor for at least 30 min, as well as differentiate it from the odor of another closely related individual. However, when ants were replaced in a rich social background between the habituation and the discrimination trials, we did not observe a significant discrimination between the known and unknown C. aethiops ants. Our study shows, for the first time, the existence of long-term memory for individual odors in mature ant workers.     

Lost (and Found) in Translation: Learning from German Language Educators

This essay introduces two presentations (or Vorträge) by Ulf Abraham and Thomas Zabka that were originally published in the German journal, Didaktik Deutsch. I reflect on the complexities of translation and intercultural communication, and ask how we might meaningfully compare the policy environment of one country with that of another. In this era of globalisation and standards-based reforms it is easy to suppose that those reforms are the same everywhere. The essays by Abraham and Zabka, however, provide insights into a policy environment where debates about the importance of language and literature are being played out differently vis-à-vis standards-based reforms than is the case in the Anglophone world. I ask what we can learn from these essays, and how the insights they provide might be applied in an Anglophone context.     

Letter name knowledge and the ability to learn to read by processing letter–phoneme relations in words: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Previous studies [Scott & Ehri (1990) Journal of Reading Behavior22: 149–166; de Abreu & Cardoso-Martins (1998) Reading and Writing:An Interdisciplinary Journal 10: 85–104] have shown thatprereaders who know the names of the lettersuse a visual–phonological strategy to learn toread words in which the names of one or moreletters can be clearly detected in thepronunciation of the words. The present resultsextend these findings by showing that BrazilianPortuguese-speaking prereaders who know thenames of the letters can process letter–soundrelations to learn to read spellings in whichthe letters correspond to phonemes, not toletter names. Following Ehri & Wilce'sprocedure [(1985) Reading Research Quarterly 20:163–179], Brazilian preschool childrenlearned to read two types of simplifiedspellings: phonetic spellings, that is,spellings in which the letters corresponded tophonemes in the pronunciation of the words(e.g., SPT for sapato), and visualspellings, that is, spellings in which theletters did not correspond to sounds in thepronunciation of the words, but which werevisually more salient (e.g., VST for pijama). The children learned to read thephonetic spellings more easily than the visualspellings, suggesting that they recognized theletter–phoneme relations in learning to readthe phonetic spellings. This interpretation isbolstered by the results of correlationalanalyses between knowledge of letter sounds andperformance on the two word-learning tasks.While knowledge of letter–phonemecorrespondences did not correlate withperformance on the word-learning task with thevisual spellings, it correlated significantlyand positively with the children's ability tolearn to read the phonetic spellings.     

Responding to expressed needs

In this article, John Cowan (Open University in Scotland), Carlos Alonzo‐Blanqueto (University of Merida, Yucatan) and Derek Fordyce (Heriot‐Watt University) describe their efforts to offer learners genuine openness as regards course content. They draw on three examples from diverse situations to illustrate their use of the ‘sideline tutor’, an arrangement by which learners can directly influence the choice of what they are about to learn and what the teacher teaches’.     

Learning to Read Words in Albanian: A Skill Easily Acquired

According to many views of literacy development, prereaders use a logographic approach when they attempt to link print and speech. If so, these children should find pairs in which the spelling–pronunciation links are consistent with their writing system no easier to learn than arbitrary pairs. We tested this idea by comparing the ability of U.S. prereaders (M age = 4 years 9 months) to learn phonetically motivated pairs like AP–ape and MA–may and arbitrary pairs like OM–ape and PO–may. In both spelling and reading tasks, children learned the pairs with vowel letter name cues more easily than the arbitrary pairs. Phonetically motivated pairs were especially advantaged when the vowel letter names were at the beginning (e.g., AP–ape) rather than the end (MA–may). Prereaders who have some knowledge about letters, as U.S. preschoolers typically do, are not limited to a logographic approach in learning about print.     

Recognising Difference: the Romani ‘Gypsy’ child socialisation and education process

There is considerable conflict between Romani Gypsy child socialisation and education processes and mainstream education practices. In Romani communities children are encouraged to show initiative and independence at an early age. They learn by participating in the communities’ economic activities and observing adult verbal and non‐verbal communication skills. In mainstream education, by comparison, they learn in an enclosed classroom where they are rarely able to initiate or create their own learning experiences. Due to the increasing demands of industrialised societies, literacy is vital for Romani people. However, education systems are at present failing to meet the needs of these children. Structural inequalities such as poverty and racism, coupled with differing viewpoints on the benefits of education, continue to contribute to the low participation rates of Romani children in mainstream schools.     

Table of Contents

• High‐achieving black collegians
  • by Sharon Fries‐Britt
  • How well do we understand the experiences of high‐achieving black students? The author says we have a lot to learn about their important roles in both our institutions and society at large.
• The search for a college commons
  • by Thomas Klein
  • How can we restructure our campuses to encourage the new kinds of learning we all know as so vital for the future of higher education? The author looks to the past for the answer.
• Listening to students: Richard J. Light talks to Charles C. Schroeder
  • What we can learn by simply giving students the chance to tell their stories and reflect on their experiences.

• DEPARTMENTS
• In practice—rainbow visibility: How one catholic university responded to intolerance
  • by Cheryl Getz and Evelyn A. Kirkley
  • When respect for the individual's dignity is threatened, education is often the best medicine.
• Campus commons—bulking up
  • by Lee Burdette Williams
  • How one university “mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.”
• Bottom line—imitate me
  • by William H. Willimon
  • Like it or not, example is the most potent instructor.

     

The Traffic in Meaning

This paper was addressed to an American audience in response to Mary Louise Pratt's Una Lecture, “English-only vs. National Security: Language and contemporary geopolitics”, at the University of California, Berkeley on March 16, 2004. It makes the point that it is not enough for Americans to learn foreign languages; they must also understand that speaking a language other than English is an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. Increasing the glossodiversity of the U.S. should be accompanied by an increase in semiodiversity, that is, an opening up of language learners to the diversity of worldviews both in the U.S. and in the world today. The paper is followed by responses by Alastair Pennycook and Azirah Hashim, to which Claire Kramsch gives a brief reply.