Powerpoint in the Army: Dumb Dumb Bullets

There's an interesting essay in the Armed Forces Journal (which, no doubt, you all read. I only spotted it via Boing Boing) about the negative influence of Powerpoint in decision making. The premise is that the shift away from briefing papers to Powerpoint presentations changes how decision are made for the worse. Much of the points the author argues are as relevant for teaching as decision making. I'd get a coffee and read it, if I was you.

One of the points made was how instead of a short paper being circulated before a meeting where a decision was to be made, much time was spent in the meeting going through the powerpoint slides. Thus people did not review the material in advance, or in the level of depth, or have time to reflect on it before the meeting where the decision was made. Instead of having, say, 20 minutes to discuss an issue and make a decision, there was a 15 minute powerpoint, then 5 minutes to discuss and decide.

And in lectures, we spend 55 minutes in Powerpoint, and zero time in discussion and reflection...
Are the lessons applicable? Could we expect students to review a couple of pages of material before a 'lecture'? Can we expect them then to participate in a discussion of the material, instead of simply listening and writing it all down? Probably not, but should we expect more of them? If we, as teachers, up our game, will they, as students, do the same?

Blended Learning: The H1N1 incentive.

An interesting juxtaposition of events today. I ran the first of what promises to be a long series of workshops on the theme of "Yes, but how do I teach with that?" this one looking at teaching with Audio. As I left, my wife (A GP) rang me and asked me to get some Tamiflu on the way home. Sudden onset flu, outside of normal flu season, with very (very) small kids in the house? We're taking no chances.
My brother points out that, even if the pandemic amounts to no more than a bad flu season, anyone in the next 12 months who has so much as a sniffle will be staying off campus until it clears up. Given the level of coughs and sniffles in a typical Irish winter, we'll be facing massive absenteeism in lectures, and shedloads of medical certificates come exam time. One way around this is to make heavy use of online learning to help those who stay off campus to fill in the gaps. Whether it's just coursecasting of lecture recordings, or full up blended learning, there is a strong incentive here to move our VLE usage past uploading the Powerpoints if we want to get through this academic year without more chaos than usual. Otherwise, we'll have a very busy autumn repeat season in 2010.

Power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely

Edward Tufte, originated the quote in the title in his 2003 Wired article , is one of many critics of Powerpoint. His famous essay 'The cognitive style of Powerpoint: pitching out corrupts in" elaborates the criticism better than I could. In the essay, he shows that Powerpoint may truly be a 'killer app', as he describes how a cryptic Powerpoint slide hid the severity of the problem which would lead to the loss of the Space Shuttle Colombia, and seven lives.

And yet, here we are. Powerpoint is probably the most widely used teaching software on earth, (despite ranking only 10th in Jane Hartes top 100 list). Who will rid us of this terrible tool!

Powerpoint's great virtue was that it gave poor speakers a frame to prepare. It established an expectation that there would be slides. Thus, folks would would previously have muttered through a 20 minute presentation in an hour or so have to actually prepare and think through their material in advance. The linear prison of Powerpoint forces a linear narrative upon them. For some lecturers I know, this was nothing short of revolutionary. But the virtue of revolution depends on your point of view. This very structure sucks the greatness from the heart of many great, or even above average speakers, as the Gettysburg Address Powerpoint slides (a must see, if you haven't) demonstrate with wit.

If you do use Powerpoint for teaching, please try and use it better, or less. Presentation Zen is the best resource for in this area I have come across so far-there is a book also, alas not in our Universities otherwise excellent library. Neither is Slide:ology, another good text in a simlar vein.

Another useful resource on presentation style is the TED talks. Note the near total non use of Powerpoint. It's worth watching some of their top 10 talks, for style alone, if not content. Widely circulated on the web are their speaker tips, The TED Commandments.

Finding reusable images on Google

Google have added to their image search, allowing you to now search images filtered by licence.

So what?

Just the other day, I was looking for an image of Bloom's taxonomy for a slide. Google image search found me hundreds, but no clue as to whether I was allowed to reuse the images. Today, I can just go to the advanced search filter the results for 'labelled for reuse' and I'm done, now I have an image I know I can freely use. It's a small thing, but it isn't much trouble and means I'm not faced with a choice of stealing someone's graphic, or putting in the hard yards to redraw it.

Incidentally, those of you in UCC can find our own image catalog, of nice stock footage of the campus here:http://upic.ucc.ie/

The Art of Public Speaking

Scott Berkun posted an interesting review of the literature on public speaking, part of his research for his upcoming book. I note public speaking a central aspect of lecturing technique, rather than being technology, so I'm slightly off piste here, but his blog posting on the topic is worth a look.

Two books seem to come out of top in his view:

"What's the use of Lectures" by Donald Bligh. (for UCC readers, we have it, 378.1 Blig, up on Q+2)

"Public Speaking for Success" by Dale Carnegie - the original of the species. Not in our library, it seems, but you can download it for free as an eBook from Project Gutenberg.

Worthwhile poolside reading.

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

If you follow any Education blogs other than this one, you'll have heard of the report recently released by the US Department of Education, on the evidence around online learning (I assume, in this blog, that you don't spend spend all day reading eLearning blogs and thus may have missed it).

It is a thorough report, and well worth a review if you are interested in the field. The take home points, to me, from the executive summary are:

"On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

"Blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se."

So, blended learning is better, but it might be because better lecturers who tend to do it, and making good blended learning requires more effort and thought to go into the course development than simply turning up in Boole 4 and talking for an hour a week.

Regardless of whether blended learning is better because of the medium, or the message, that finding is good enough for me. Blended learning will lift your game. Terms starts in three months, you have enough time. Give me a call if you need a hand.

You can view the full text of the report here:

http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Formative Assessment: Why should students care?

Formative assessment is, in a nutshell, assessment that helps to guide your learning in the future, rather than measuring what you learned in the past. It guides students on where they might need to focus their study and teachers on where they might need to review or cover topics in more details. Online, machine gradable assessment tools have big practical advantages in this area. The instant grade means instant feedback to students - not two weeks later when the module is nearing it's end. An online, machine gradable approach means formative assessment can be 'small and often', without crushing the lecturer under a paper mountain.

One of the two great challenges of online formative assessment is how to actually get the students to do it if it does not contribute directly to a final grade. Assessment drives behaviour. Students will do almost anything (bar study!) to get grades. The rational utilitarian human, beloved of economists, fills our campus, if not our lecture halls. A cunningly devised 1000 question MCQ bank might be a great tool for them to assess their level of knowledge, but if there is no grade attached to it, and they know the final exam is two essay questions, it'll never see a click. They may agree with their lecturers that the formative assessment will help them learn, and be of great benefit, but they won't do it.

Medical Students, of course, are seldom far from their MCQ practice books, always testing their knowledge against practice questions - self directed formative assessment. This is because so much of their assessment appears to rest on questions of this type (if not here in UCC, beyond it). The practice questions are a valid simulation of the real assessment event - they have authenticity to the students. That doesn't mean you need to turn your final exam into an MCQ fest. Questiosn about the content of an audio file might be great prep for an oral exam in languages. Questions about an image could be useful prep for a practical exam in mineralogy or pathology.

Another approach is to get them to do the formative tests in class. This is tricky for an online assessment, as they may not have easy web access in class. If you revert to paper, you are back to marking again (unless you take the time in class to do a peer marking exercise).

Feedback is also important. If the students know that you will take note of the results to guide your teaching - revising topics where students scored poorly, they are more likely to pay attention to the assessments as worthwhile expenditure of their precious time.

Bear in mind is that machine gradable questions are not all MCQs - 'Who want's to be a millionairre' style fact recall tests. Blackboard alone supports 14 different question types. With creativity and thought, they can be genuine tests of high level reasoning an critical thinking. I'm currently collating an example set of such 'smart questions' for a workshop on the topic (contributions welcome!).

There is also no reason you can't mix in non-machine gradable questions in your online assessment. Most systems will support questions with free text responses, and even two or three in the mix could lift the test to a higher level. For example, in the humanities, you might ask some MCQ style questions about whether a given historical text (or audio of a speech) is incomplete, biased or unbalanced in one direction or other to test a readers critical reading skills. Then have a short free text question where they elaborate on why they imagine the bias exists. It will slow down the assessment, but not as much as running full pen and ink test.