The New Learning Landscape:
How do students learn in a world where traditional assessments of intelligence are radically changing, abundant knowledge is more readily available, and learning community is more important than ever?
By Stewart Mader
Technology has dramatically changed how students learn, teachers teach, and how knowledge is constructed, used, and revised. As a result, what students learn and how they learn is undergoing radical changes to make best use of this technologically empowered "pedagogical possibility" (McClintock, 1996). In "Renewing the Progressive Contract with Posterity: On the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities" McClintock (1996) has written a blueprint for the new thinking that's necessary in our present, technologically capable world. For example, when contrasting the old role of the classroom, textbook, and teacher with the new, he says:
The textbook is a meager selection of what a field of knowledge comprises, a skilled teacher is a bundle of ignorance relative to the sum of learning, and a school library a sparse collection at best. Networks reaching through the school into the classroom and to the desktop are ending the isolation and substituting a rule of abundance for that of scarcity. Such a new rule is not without its pitfalls, but to cope with these we must recognize that it is a new rule, deeply different from the old. In our extended present, the educational problem changes profoundly, shifting from stratagems for disbursing scarce knowledge to finding ways to enable people to use unlimited access to the resources of our cultures. (McClintock, 1996)
In today's world, students no longer need to live near the library of a major university or a large, culturally rich city - they have equal access to the information as those in close proximity, thanks to the Internet. Furthermore, the classroom is no longer defined by the walls, desks, and blackboard in which learning is isolated from the world, which means the classroom today should serve primarily as a meeting place in which to bring new ideas and information and discuss them as a community. In addition, McClintock observes that "new media alter the ways of knowing and the opportunities for participating in the creation of knowledge" and therefore should not be dismissed as fads but embraced and studied as unique media that are contributing to the rising status of verbal, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and combinations of these "as serious means for creating knowledge." (McClintock, 1996) He also discusses the widely observed and sometimes controversial trend whereby technology tools can augment human intelligence by working in a complementary way so that human and machine intelligence perform the tasks for which each is ideally suited. He cites word processors monitoring spelling, databases managing large stores of information, and technology reducing the need for low-level competency as examples of this development. This is something educators have debated, with some feeling that technology creates a "black box" in which students don't understand basic processes like a graphing calculator's ability to quickly solve an integral, and others feeling that technology changes what ought to be learned to advance society. Theodore Gray (2000) makes this point in an explanation of the value of having students use mathematical software to explore computational spaces instead of memorizing a multiplication table:
The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex. They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence. To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence. It is also quite false...Just like the breech-loading rifle, or the pocket calculator, modern tools such as Mathematica change (maybe a little, maybe a lot) the kinds of things that ought to be learned. Some things that used to be important are not anymore, and some new things have become important. (Gray, 2000)
Gray is essentially arguing that if we spend all our time learning the same things as earlier generations, we'll have no time left to discover new things - in other words, we have to let some knowledge go in order to focus our energy towards discovering new knowledge. This is both the core, and the most difficult to understand concept for most people. Natural inclination is to judge a student's success by measuring against a known quantity, i.e. the same measurement used to judge your own success when you were a student. Therefore, it's understandable that people who say today's students should be taught and assessed differently have found their approach greeted with skepticism, and even criticism. So how do we make the positive impact of technology on teaching and learning obvious?
Embracing Wikipedia and Community Knowledge Construction
The first step is to overcome fear of new tools like Wikipedia, and explore them with an open minded approach that considers how they could be used effectively. Students already do this, and that's why they embraced Wikipedia a (relatively) long time ago. When we teachers respond negatively to students' mention of Wikipedia in class, or citation of it in their papers, we only make ourselves look clueless and unwilling to advance our own thinking beyond the resources we were told were acceptable when we were students. A better approach would be to embrace the role of expert guide, show students how they should make Wikipedia one in a healthy mix of sources, and help them learn to back-up any information they find in Wikipedia by checking secondary sources. for that matter, checking secondary sources needn't be an arduous task; presented the right way to students it can be a fascinating adventure, and finding either contradicting information or more detailed supporting information can make a research paper or presentation all the more interesting and engaging.
What scares people about Wikipedia is that it's different from any other information source they're familiar with. An encyclopedia has typically been a very static object - something that was expected to contain thoroughly reviewed, factually accurate information - and could be trusted without knowing anything about its inner workings. Wikipedia has challenged that notion in a big - and very public - way. By offering anyone the opportunity to contribute, even anonymously, it has caused a stir in the publishing industry and opened a new debate about the potential biases that can exist in a closed publishing environment where we have to blindly trust the content that editors choose to include. The journal Nature explored this in great depth last December, when it revealed the results of a comparison of 42 corresponding articles from both encyclopedias, and found only a small gap in accuracy between the two. According to Giles (2005), "The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three." Britannica's response to this was to criticize the quality of Wikipedia, and its community model in which an expert physicist holds the same status as an amateur astronomer, but according to Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica. Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one." (Giles, 2005) Twidale goes on to point out that the advantage Wikipedia has over Britannica is that errors can be fixed very quickly. On the surface this is shows the value technology brings to an encyclopedia, but is even more significant when one considers that errors in Britannica might not be corrected until the next edition is published.
Building Learning Communities and Encouraging Collaboration
So how does this all tie into Theodore Gray's point that to gain new knowledge we must be willing to make room for it by changing and evolving the definition of what's essential to learn? Using a wiki reduces the instances of students working in isolation and provides a good foundation for a learning community. It also makes the knowledge construction process much more transparent, and offers a teacher many more points of assessment and guidance than only seeing a student's or group's final paper or presentation. "A community of practice also provides direct cognitive and sociocollaborative support for the efforts of the group's individual members. Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process does not fall to any one individual. In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for constructing scientific meanings." (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000) This kind of support can improve students' confidence in their ability to learn. Many students initially approach topics in stereotypically tougher subjects like math and science with doubt about their ability to understand it. This apprehension is confirmed when they are given assignments & problem sets with little coaching on how to develop a problem solving strategy, then left to figure it out on their own. The everyday classroom should adopt the strategies often used in tutoring programs. When I was an undergraduate chemistry major, I worked for the department tutoring program which employed the guided coaching, community learning, and problem solving strategies in small groups that should have taken place in the regular classroom. The students in this program were there because they were in danger of failing classes that were taught in the traditional, impersonal manner. Ironically, by being in danger of failing, these students had made themselves eligible for the kind of instruction that probably would have kept them far from the brink of failing in the first place.
Learning that blends community and focused guidance from an instructor can also have a very positive impact in large classes where it's very difficult to address individual students' learning needs. For example, in a class of 60, the students might be asked work in 12 groups of five to read a chapter in the textbook and identify the top five things they'd like covered in more depth. The instructor can ask for these lists to be compiled collaboratively using a wiki, and then he or she can look at what each group wants covered and what items all the groups have in common on their lists. This allows the needs of individual students to be efficiently channeled to the instructor so she or he can create a customized, more focused lecture. The presence of the groups of five gives students a second level of even more personal support, since it creates the community social structure that's conducive to group studying and greater connections between students. Portions of this idea are based on the principles of Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT), a method developed by Wolfgang Christian, Andrew Gavrin, Gregor Novak, and Evelyn Patterson in 1999 which uses individual student feedback via email to give the instructor the necessary information to customize her or his lecture. This idea updates JiTT to take advantage of the wiki as both a collaborative source of feedback for the instructor, and the basis for greater community and collaboration within each group.
A third idea that can increase community learning and engage students in collaborative knowledge construction is a method I've developed whereby students in a college level science course would collaboratively author a paper to simulate the process undertaken by professional researchers to publish their research in a peer-reviewed form. Working in groups intended to resemble scientific research groups, students choose an existing topic or propose a new topic for addition to the site, with the understanding that the paper they produce will be peer-reviewed and can be published on a public wiki. Initially, each group is given a private wiki page that only group members can edit, which they use throughout their research, writing, and revision. As they research the scientific literature and publications, each group will use the wiki page to document sources, take notes, and outline their paper. They then use the information gathered to prepare a paper, using the wiki as collaborative writing space. Along the way, the teacher can check their reference collection and notes to be sure they're on the right track and provide guidance on their draft, just like a colleague might do for a academic paper about to be published. Once paper drafts are finished, each group submits their paper for peer review by a small group consisting of their teacher, and another teacher, and scientists familiar with the course subject matter. Comments are posted by the peer-review group on the wiki page, and each group is given time to incorporate them before submission for publication. This model motivates students with the idea that a high quality final product can be published for the world to see, so the quality of the finished product becomes more important than just a grade. Furthermore, use of the wiki provides the teacher with numerous moments of assessment and guidance throughout the project, thus ensuring that students aren't isolated throughout the learning process.
In the larger perspective, this method helps prepare a new group of scientists who understand the new generation of collaborative technology because of their positive, productive experience with it as students. Butler (2005) explores the missed potential of tools like the blog and wiki because of the reluctance of some scientists to adopt these tools, or even acknowledge them. In an example of the powerful impact of online community, Paul Myers of the University of Minnesota says, "Put a description of your paper on a blog, and people far from your usual circle start thinking about the subject. They bring up interesting perspectives. By sharing ideas online, you get feedback and new research ideas, he says." (Butler, 2005) As teachers, we can encourage our students to do this by giving them a good example from which to start, and the confidence that goes with it. In doing so, we can fulfill the idea that the classroom is a meeting place for the exchange and evolution of ideas.
References
- Bransford, J. D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (Eds.). (2000) How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council.
- Christian, W., Gavrin, A., Novak, G., & Patterson, E. (1999) Just-In-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Technology. New York: Prentice Hall.
Giles, J. (2005). Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature (438) 900-901. Retrieved December 5, 2006 from: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
- Glynn, J. & Gray, T. (2000). The Beginners Guide to Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- McClintock, R. O. (1996). Renewing the Progressive Contract with Posterity: On the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities. Retrieved December 4, 2006 from Columbia University Digital Text Project web site: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/mcclintock/renew/index.htm