10,000 hours doing what?

Malcolm Gladwell makes a good case for the 10,000 hour rule in his recent book, Outliers. The idea is that people who are truly great at something always spend at least 10,000 hours practice on it. While Gladwell is widely criticised by his supposed intellectual betters, largely for selling more books than them, the 10,000 hour rule idea certainlt seems sound.

So what did I spend 10,000 hours doing?

Primary and Secondary School. 15,000 hours. I learned to keep my head down, avoid bullying, and get acceptible grades in predictable tests on boring topics with a minimum of effort.

University 5,000 hours. Unlearning the above.

Workplace: 12,000 hours. Office politics. Processing information into useful knowledge and communicating it to people who seemed interested at the time.

So what have you broken the 10,000 hour barrier on?

The University of the Future

"My daughter is 3 years old. In October 2023, she will probably go to University. What will that university look like? Where will it be? Will it be anywhere?"

I've started another blog, looking at issues around the future of Tertiary education. It's an issue I keep running into, and thinking about, but it is firmly out of scope for this blog, and I like to keep my promises in terms of blog content and scope. Due to my correct work focus, you can expect it to be much more active than this blog for the next while, as Ihave time to flesh out some of my thought on the topic, while I'm not currently directly involved in staff support work. If you have an interest in how Universities and Tertiary sector might look as we go through the next century, do take a look, it's at: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/

Dr. Steve Wheeler at UCC.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Steve Wheeler from University of Plymouth at UCC for a lunchtime seminar. Steve presented "It's Personal: Learning Spaces,Learning Webs" which he was later to present online to the Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks Online Symposium http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/ples/

It was a happy accident that we were able to host Steve, via his Blog we noted he was in Cork on other business, and with a couple of quick eMails everything was arranged - the efficiencies of the online world made manifest.

You can access an audio of the session here:http://www.ucc.ie/academic/ionadbairre/SteveWheeler.mp3 (15mb, 1hr)

And view the slides on Slideshare via Steve's blog here:http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-personal-learning-spaces-learning.html

Find the pain point

If you want to use technology in teaching, great, but first understand why you want to use it. Find a pain point, a teaching problem the technology will help you solve, and you are much more likely to see the process through. If you are using technology just to 'be modern' in your teaching, forget it.

A couple of years ago I did some research about usage of the Blackboard VLE in UCC. Academics I spoke to had differing views of their level of usage:

"I hardly use it at all, I only put up my powerpoints and handouts"

to

"I use it very extensively, I put up all my powerpoints and all my handouts."

For all practical purposes, regardless of their perceptions, they were all in the same boat. They put their materials on the VLE, because they had large classes. Copying and carrying 500 handouts for a lecture was torture. The VLE took it away. They used it for that, and stopped right there. They had solved their pain point, and nothing else bothered them enough to get worked up about finding a tool to solve it. But it was that issue, not quality, or access issues, that motivated most staff to use the VLE.

To successfully adapt a new technology tool, it has to solve a problem with an amount of effort that seems proportionate. Find your problem first, and then try to find the tool to solve it. The latest web 2.0 buzz topic might not be it.

So what's your problem? What takes you the most time and effort for the least learning benefit to your students? That's your pain point, and a good place to start.

The Overlooked Educators

Ionad Bairre recently ran a Teaching and Learning session for Technical Officers here in UCC. Technical officers are the folks who make the labs not blow up, demonstrate equipment, design and set up practicals and generally flit around making sure the lecturers grand vision for the course actually runs in the practical labs.

Professional Development strategies in teaching and learning often focus on the Lecturers and course leaders, and forget about everyone else. Often, it is the 'everyone else' Technical officers, postgraduate teaching assistants and so on, who front the bulk of the most effective teaching time in practically focused courses. If you are finding the lecturers a hard sell for technology assisted learning, try these people. Not surprisingly, they are very technically minded, capable, and pragmatic - all a great help for using Technology Assisted Learning tools.

The other overlooked group are the administrators. Often lecturers use their VLE's in name only. They toss an eMail or a memory stick in the direction of a departmental administrator or assistant with a general direction to 'put that up on blackboard'. Again, if you want to improve how your VLE is used, there is another overlooked community to try and reach.

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.