Digital Natives as Learners

I am absolutely fascinated by the possibilities the internet offers to change not only how, but where and when we learn. There is no longer a compelling need to tether 30+ students to specific desks in a specific classroom in a specific school from 10:04 am to 11:15 am on Wednesday, November 16 to learn lesson 32 of Grade 11 Biology. Really, the only reasons our society continues to do so is out of habit, and perhaps because we don’t trust our teenagers to learn on their own, unsupervised at home because we’re out working. But that’s a discussion for a different blog entry.

For this entry, I’d like to examine some of the ideas presented by Palfrey and Gasser in Chapter 11 of Born Digital. They start with a brief description of how quickly internet use has progressed in Harvard Law School – not unusual changes, from my own experience. A rapid progression from no internet, to ethernet connectivity, to wireless. With a corresponding progression from total control over student  access to the internet, to partial control, to no control.

Palfrey and Gasser talk about how school administrators are wondering what students should do with classroom computers, how best to incorporate electronic devices such as SmartBoards into the learning environment, and how to regulate student access to the internet. I have experienced these growing pains as a classroom teacher. Cell phones are a significant problem: we spent a lot of time trying to regulate their use during class time, and, to my way of thinking, are losing that battle hands down. In fact, the frustration with cell phone use in my classroom was a significant contributing factor in my applying for the Master’s program at UVic. I see a huge upside for the use of cell phone technology in the classroom: we just need to figure out how to harness this power for good, instead of evil.

Digital natives, who are defined by Palfrey and Gasser as those born after 1980, learned in a much different educational environment than did I. They don’t read as much. Research is quick and easy: type the subject into Google, and hit search. The major reference used is Wikipedia, not Encyclopedia Britannica. They don’t need to memorize phone numbers: they’re stored in a contacts list. They can share answers to assignments and test questions quickly and easily. Essays can be purchased online. Video games can be played against users from all over the world, at any time of the day or night. But, they also have direct access to experts in many fields of study. They can read and share ideas through blogs and wikis. They are exposed to a variety of thoughts and ideas, at an incredibly rapid pace. Access to information is changing rapidly, and teachers and librarians are having a hard time keeping up.

Palfrey and Gasser seem a little more optimistic about how deeply digital natives are learning than Carr was. They acknowledge that digital natives learn about news differently than their parents, but that doesn’t mean that they learn less, or that their learning is superficial. Instead, they learn through “a multistep process that involves grazing, a “deep dive”, and a feedback loop” (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008, p. 241). This means that digital natives scan, delve deeply into a variety of information sources about a topic in which they are interested using a variety of web tools and social media sources, and then process what they’ve learned by blogging about it, or commenting in a wiki or discussion group. An exciting aspect of learning in the digital world is the access to primary sources: if you want to know what’s happening with the protests in Egypt, you can ask connected Egyptians directly! This was almost impossible in the analog world.

Palfrey and Gasser speak to the role institutions can play in the “deep dive” phase of a digital natives’ learning. Accurate, trustworthy information is needed, and this is a role the traditional, large newsgathering organizations can still play. However, these large organizations do need to come to terms with the decreased demand for print, the greater variety of sources available, and the need to compete for attention in the digital world if they are to stay relevant. Digital natives do not engage with information in the same way their parents did, and some of the onus lies with the parents and corporations to meet the needs of the digital natives, rather than the digital natives adopting now-outdated methods.

Problems associated with living connected in an online world are identified next. Multitasking does have an effect on attention and memory. The ways digital natives communicate and think are different, favouring short formats and eschewing grammar and spelling conventions. They are comfortable cutting and pasting content, and not as concerned about crediting the source.

Palfrey and Gasser go on to discuss ways in which schools can adapt to meet the educational needs of digital natives. I appreciate that they start from “what our goals are, as teachers and parents, and then figur[ing] out how technology can help us, and our kids, to reach those goals” (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008, p. 246). They also support the use of dialogue to support critical analysis, and point out that it is best utilized in a face-to-face setting. They emphasize that technology should be used where appropriate, and acknowledge that not all learning situations require a technological answer, even for digital natives. This is a position with which I agree.

They point out that the best way to address the digital divide is for schools to provide opportunities  whereby disadvantaged students can access digital resources, and learn how to use them effectively within the digital environment. They also argue that appropriate use of technology in schools includes harnessing the technology to facilitate students working and communicating in teams, using collaborative tools such as wikis, and perhaps even gaming. I agree that these technologies could prove to be very beneficial ways of engaging students in the near future.

Palfrey and Gasser (2008) give me some hope, when they say that:

Television didn’t transform education. Neither will the Internet. But it will be another tool for teachers to use in their effort to reach students in the classroom. It will also be a means by which students learn outside of the classroom. (p. 250)

That makes me feel like there is a role for a teacher to play in the classroom of the future. The tricky part, however, is figuring out just what that role will be.

Reference

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York, NY: Basic Books.

"Don’t Make Me Think"

Interesting comparison, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (see previous Blog posting) to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Krug is a noted expert on web usability, and writes about website design. His major tenet is that whatever a user does online, should be self-evident. Links should look like links, buttons should look like buttons, search and other features of the web page should be obvious, and words should be provided sparingly. As a user, you should always know where you are, what the most important items on a web page are, and what options you have for links.

Krug reinforces what Carr said, but comes from a very different perspective. Krug is interested in getting users to what they’re interested in as quickly as possible. He accepts that users aren’t on the web to think, and he’s OK with that: in fact, he supports it! He likens web users to people rushing by highway billboard signs at 100 km/h – they don’t have much time to process the visual message with which you’re presenting them, so you’d better make sure the page design uses a clear visual hierarchy, follows expected conventions, is broken up into clearly-defined areas, has no visual noise or distractions, and makes clickable links obvious and immediately recognizable. He knows you’re skimming for information and therefore won’t be on this site for long, and designs the site accordingly.

I am fascinated by his ideas on page design, and know from experience as both a user of the internet and a designer of web pages that they work. What appals me, however, are the assumptions upon which this line of thinking is based: users are only passing through your site on their way to somewhere else. They’ll take what they need, and then leave – likely within about 30 seconds. This, along with the ideas developed much more fully in Carr’s book, indicate to me that the web is not the best place for learning to occur.

What encourages me is that, although the web doesn’t appear to be the most effective place for learning to occur, it can be an excellent vehicle through which thought-provoking content can be delivered for consumption offline, or by which effective learner-to-learner interactions can occur. My take-home message from Krug is how to lay out my web pages to make it easy for a learner to get what they need. The message I got from Carr is that the real thinking and learning is going to have to occur offline, away from the internet. A challenge I still need to resolve: how to utilize tools available to me as an online course developer (such as synchronous discussions and wikis) to capture the rich interaction I find to be one of the best parts about the experience in the face-to-face classroom environment.

Reference

Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.

This is Your Brain Online

“Don’t let me get too deep” (Brickell & Withrow, 1988).

Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows is a fascinating read. In Chapter Seven “The Juggler’s Brain”, he clearly, succinctly, and frighteningly (at least, for an educator planning to develop and deliver a course in an online environment), answers the question “What can science tell us about the actual effects that internet use is having on the way our minds work?” (Carr, 2010).

The bad news: Carr’s answer is that one’s brain buzzing through an online environment doesn’t work in a manner conducive to long-term learning and retention. Working within an online environment promotes “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning” (Carr, 2010). Although visual, auditory, and sensory-somatic pathways are engaged both simultaneously and continuously, this engagement is occurring at a superficial level. Users quickly are drawn into the online environment, and, once there, often become largely oblivious to the outside world. However, although attentive to what they’re seeing in cyberspace, few users are doing anything resembling thinking. Instead, their time is spent flitting from link to link, grazing bits of data as they follow the trail of whatever happens to be of interest to them at the time.

Online, most users are easily and continually distracted. Their attention might be attracted to a kernel of information on one website, only to be sent skittering off in another direction as they follow whatever link appeared most interesting to them at the time. The presence of hyperlinks makes reading in the online world a very different experience from that of reading a book. Readers no longer have to follow a single track of words along a linear narrative, reading to understand the author’s thoughts: they can hop, skip, and jump along whichever path they choose, and never follow the same data trail twice.

It turns out that linking ideas to one another through hypertext neither promotes learning nor increases understanding. Research shows that online readers will click provided hyperlinks as they meander through the online environment. It was originally thought that the ability to interconnect data through hypertext would be a good thing, providing users with a richer, more nuanced understanding of the relationships and points of contact between related concepts. Instead, researchers have found that learners reading hyperlinked text leave the experience disoriented, confused, and with a muddled understanding of the interrelated concepts. Looking more closely at these findings, it appears that hypertext increases the cognitive load on the brain to a point at which the capacity of working memory is exceeded, resulting in decreased comprehension and understanding. This is not the way I want my learners leaving a learning interaction.

Research into memory has shown that long-term memory is not just a large storehouse of details and facts, but that information is organized into interconnected patterns of understanding called schemas. Short-term memory has a very limited capacity: it likely is not even as much as the famous 7 plus or minus 2 items proposed by George Miller in 1956. This means that very little information gets transferred from short-term memory into working memory, and without this crucial step, nothing makes it into long-term memory. When working online, information is rushing into a user’s brain at an incredible rate. The cognitive load is tremendous, which means that very little of this steady stream of information flow can be diverted from the massive data influx and transferred into long-term memory. If information doesn’t get transferred into long-term memory, schemas cannot be constructed. As a result, learning is impaired. Understanding becomes superficial, at best. Again, not how I want my learners to leave a learning interaction.

This effect appears to stem from the mechanism by which online readers process text. When asked how users read when online, noted usability expert Jakob Nielsen is quoted by Carr as saying “They don’t”. Other research supports Nielsen’s position: many studies reviewed by Carr revealed that online readers tend to skim for information, spending, on average, less than thirty seconds on each web page viewed. Analysis of post-secondary learners conducting academic research online showed a similar superficiality to their reading: even these learners tended to browse titles, tables of contents, and abstracts rather than reading and carefully analyzing entire articles. This frightens me considerably. As an instructor, I don’t want to be teaching a course full of indiscriminate hunter-gatherers: I want to teach learners who roll up their sleeves and dig into a passage of text, and who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty wrestling with the content of ideas the ideas they find there!

Carr follows this up with a description of what seems to be a fundamental change in the way users who spend a lot of time online use their brains. Quoting from a 2008 blog entry by Michael Merzenich, Carr says “When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains...HEAVY USE [of the internet] HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES” (italics in original). This concerns me a great deal. Carr tells me that I cannot assume online learners will read and analyze a carefully-crafted argument or description of content. In fact, according to Nielsen, I cannot assume they will read AT ALL. As Merzenich says, their brains have been changed through long-term interaction with the internet: they expect to work quickly and superficially, and have re-wired their brains so they do just that. Obviously, this is going to pose a tremendous challenge to anyone trying to facilitate deep, retentive learning in an online environment!

References:

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows. NY, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Brickell, E. & Withrow, K. (1988). What I Am [Recorded by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians]. On Shooting rubberbands at the stars [CD]. New York, NY: Geffen.

Writing for the Web

Reading Prioritizing Web Usability by Nielsen and Loranger is one of the best ways I know of to learn how to write for the web. When I was seconded to Alberta Education as a Resource Manager for the LearnAlberta project, I was asked to read this book as preparation for writing web content. Through it I learned that writing for the web is very different from other types of writing, and Nielsen and Loranger backed up what they were saying with results from studies of web users. The fact that what they said made sense to me based on my own experience using the web sealed the deal for me: I whole-heartedly adopted their recommendations.

Prioritizing Web Usability concisely outlined best practices in writing content for web delivery. With plenty of evidence to show that the experience of reading online is very different from the experience of reading offline, Nielsen and Loranger clearly explain the ways in which writing for an online audience has to be done differently. To honour their work, I present what I feel are their key findings below, written in a web-friendly format.

Layout Enhances Reading

·         short paragraphs containing concise text

·         cluster information into meaningful, easily-scanned chunks using:

o   subheadings

o   white space

o   bullet points

·         provide objective, neutral language in a clear voice

·         break content into multiple pages linked via hypertext

Writing Style

·         start with your conclusion (inverted pyramid), then gradually add detail

·         topic sentence = conclusion

·         1 idea / paragraph

·         simple sentence structure

·         avoid metaphors

·         allow users to select only those topics about which they care to read

·         1 topic / page: users don’t like to scroll

Page Title Importance

·         title is microcontent: all the user sees in a bookmark

·         be concise: 2-6 words; 40-60 characters

·         each page must have a unique title

·         information-carrying terms should be used at the beginning of the title, and should match user’s need

·         title should be a slogan for the page, and doesn’t have to be grammatically correct

Headline Use

·         should stand on its own, since often provided out of context (e.g., as search engine hit)

·         use plain language

·         avoid teasers

·         information-carrying terms should be used at the beginning of the headline

Legibility

·         black text on plain white background best

·         large font that can be resized if desired

·         stationary text (not animated)

·         left-justified by default; centred or right-justified only for effect

·         serif font is easier to read if resolution is adequate; use sans-serif such as Verdana if smaller

Follow Conventions

·         users can construct meaning more easily when the page functions in a manner to which they have become accustomed

·         unvisited hyperlinks should be indicated using blue underlined text

·         visited hyperlinks should be indicated using purple underlined text

·         avoid underlining text that is not a hyperlink, as it confuses users

·         ALT text should be provided for all images used (accessibility issue)

·         WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes should be included on all images and tables

Following these guidelines makes it easier for users to extract meaning from information delivered in an online environment.

References

Nielsen, J. & Loranger, H. (2006). Prioritizing web usability. Berkely, CA:  New Riders.

Moodle 1.9 at UVic: List and Description of Available Resources and Activities

Like many universities, the University of Victoria uses Moodle as its course management system. Moodle is actually an acronym; the letters represent Modular, Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It is an open-source software product, originally developed by Martin Dougiamas in 1999.

Part of the work I carried out for this course was to develop an online version of the University of Victoria course EDCI 531: Critical Discourses in Curriculum Studies. To prepare the online version of the course, I first needed to familiarize myself with the various features available to use as course building blocks in Moodle 1.9, the development platform I’d be using. These features are summarized below.

1.       Resources – static items that are posted by the owner of the course. The learner is only able to read, save, and print any resources available to them.

a.       Book – write or upload an entire book, organized into chapters if desired

b.      Label – image or text that helps organize the layout of any course page

c.       Text page – plain text page

d.      Web page – page provided in HTML format (simple HTML editor provided)

e.      Hyperlink – link to a file or website

f.        Directory – display a folder in which several files are located (e.g. course readings in PDF format)

g.       IMS content package – specially formatted learning content package

2.       Activities – interactive items that are posted by the owner of the course. The learner must do something as part of the activity, and then send a product they’ve created to the owner of the course.

a.       Chat – real-time, synchronous discussion, in text form

b.      Choice – instructor poses question, to which learners respond by selecting one of the given choices

c.       Database – participants enter data into a form developed by instructor

d.      Drop Box (formerly Assignment) – instructor specifies a task; learners prepare digital content and upload it when finished. Instructor can mark assignment electronically using track changes, and email marked file back to learner.

e.      Feedback – instructor creates a survey to which learners may respond

f.        Forum – asynchronous discussion board or threaded discussion

g.       Glossary – dictionary of terms; could also be used to group resources alphabetically

h.      Hot Potatoes quiz – instructor can create a quiz using the freeware program “Hot Potatoes”

i.         Journal – allows learners to reflect on a particular topic, and refine their reflection over a specified time period

j.        Lesson – similar to a guided tutorial: information written by the instructor is presented, followed by a question. The learner’s answer to the question determines their next step (review, advance along current learning pathway, or move to an alternate learning pathway).

k.       Media Player – instructor can embed a media object for the learner to use

l.         Offline Activity – instructor provides information on an assignment to be completed outside of Moodle (e.g., in class or at home)

m.    Online Text Submission – learner directly uploads text response online, without having to upload a file. Instructor can comment within the text, if desired.

n.      Open University (OU) Blog – all members of a course can work together to create a blog

o.      Open University (OU) Wiki – after the instructor creates the starting page for a Wiki, all learners can contribute content

p.      Podcast – instructor can post an audio/video series

q.      Quiz – instructor can design or import quizzes that use multiple choice, short answer, or true-false questions. Quizzes can be self-grading and provide feedback to the learner. Quizzes also feature the ability to randomly sort both questions and distractors.

r.        Turnitin – tool that compares submitted papers to available databases to help detect plagiarism

References:

Collman, C. (2011, November 23). About moodle. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/About_Moodle

Dougiamas, M. (n.d.) Martin Dougiamas (using moodle). http://moodle.org/user/view.php?id=1&course=5

Holt, D. (2011, November 13). Moodle site – basic structure. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Moodle_site_-_basic_structure

Cooch, M. (2011, November 9). Resources. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Resources

Cooch, M. (2011, December 14). Activities. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Activities