Fortnightly Mailing

Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning

Updated 19/3/2007, 11/4/2007, 23/5/2007, 26/1/2009

Sheffield's Learning Light (a not for profit company set up with Government and EC funding to serve as a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace and in organisational learning best practice") has published some interesting 3-4 page briefings by Southampton University's Dr Itiel Dror about the science of learning. Currently these are freely available, and it will be a shame if they are removed from public view, not least because their production has been publicly funded they have now been removed from public view. Fortunately, all of them remain available as a single PDF file, from from the im+m site. Titles are as follows:

1. It is not what you teach, but what they learn that counts!
2. Shall I Remember? How learning technologies should facilitate, but too often hinder, memory;
3. The architecture of human cognition paves the way to efficient and effective learning;
4. The three C’s of learning: Control, Challenge and Commitment - this is the one to read if you've only time to read one of them;
5. Meta-cognition and Cognitive Strategy Instruction - when I first looked (12/3/2007) there were some errors in an illustrative quiz in this document which reduced its impact somewhat - (19/3/2007) all but the "mootest" has now been corrected;
6. Cognitive awareness.

Yochai Benkler - The Wealth of Networks

Updated 26/3/2007

Two years ago I mentioned Yochai Benkler's essay Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, which "offers a framework to explain large-scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods". Last year Benkler, who is an academic lawyer at Yale University, published The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (also freely available under a Creative Commons license), and reviewed here by Paul Miller in the Financial Times.  Here is a post by David Weinberger written during a talk on 5 March 2007 by Benkler, from where I stumbled onto this Wiki, which has been set up as "an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment" based on The Wealth of Networks. (Coming to it cold it is not immediately obvious whether and if yes how the Wiki is succeeding in the task.)

26/3/2007. If you can bear the over-long welcoming remarks, listen to and watch Benkler's 70 minute "Freedom in the Commons" lecture available from this page on the Duke Law School web site.

That Quiz - Maths Test Activities

Thanks to Iain Howie for this link to That Quiz - Math Test Activities, which describes itself thus.

"ThatQuiz is a free online resource for math practice and testing. It was written in the summer of 2004 and later expanded according to teacher needs and requests. The original goal was to provide easily accessible software for schools which were not fully utilizing the computers they had in their classrooms. The site has also become popular for students who want extra math practice at home. Although the first tests available were most suitable for elementary school students, new areas have been added for higher grades: algebra, angles, triangles, probability and geometry. All users have access to all of the tests without registration. There is no reason for students to register since the additional features are only useful for teachers. Registration is free and teachers who choose to register receive record-keeping of scores for their classes. They have access to more precise test-generation tools, can create single tests with questions from different categories, can create matching and multiple choice questions, and can access a public test library ."

The site is also available in Spanish.

Tools for colleges to self-assess their e-learning activity

Section from DSA "output grid", where F = Fully adequate; L = Largely adequate; P = Partly adequate; N = Not adequate.

Since January I've had a smallish role in a Sero Consulting Ltd project for the Scottish Funding Council to produce a Baseline study of e-activity in Scotland's Colleges. The main tools that colleges will be using during this study - in particular an Excel-based "Development Self-Audit" Workbook, and an Introductory Handbook - are accessible from the Sero web site. Published under a Creative Commons license, they are based on a simplified version of Stephen Marshall's eMM Process Assessment Workbook and have been prepared with input from Stephen.

Meanings and origins of English sayings and phrases and idioms

Gary Martin, whose reasonably-priced subscription-based Phrase Thesaurus is worth a close look, also runs a free companion Phrase Finder site, with the meanings and origins of over 1200 phrases and sayings. The latter is successfully funded by advertising.

Clive Shepherd summarises Itiel Dror on the science of learning

Really good post by Clive Shepherd summarising a talk by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Itiel Dror that Clive attended . The key point for me, in Clive's summary, is:

"The brain is a machine with limited resources for processing the enormous quantity of information received by the senses. As a result, attention is extremely selective and the brain must rely on all sorts of shortcuts if it is to cope effectively."

This squares with one of the main theses of "The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size" by Tor Nørretranders  a book that influenced me a lot, and that I wish more multimedia designers had read. More about the nature of consciousness than about learning, it provides convincing evidence that the conscious mind is only able to deal with a tiny proportion of the data it receives - perhaps as little as 30 bits per second. The mind then creates a "media-rich" consciousness from this thin data-stream. We've evolved to interpret the sensually complex real world in an effective way; but that does not mean that our brains are good at interpreting media-rich learning materials, which should hence be used (if used) with great care. As Clive summarises:

"Teachers/designers can adopt two strategies to reduce the risk of learners experiencing cognitive overload: provide less information (quantitative approach) or take much more care about how this information is communicated (qualitative approach)."

The case for and against laptops in classrooms

There are more good web logs than you can hope to keep tabs on. One of the ones I do not look at often enough is John Mayer's CALIopolis.  (John runs CALI, a long-standing consortium of US law schools that research and develop computer-mediated legal instruction and support institutions using technology and distance learning in legal education.) I enjoyed two recent pieces by John [I - FOR - 28/1/2007 , II- AGAINST - 30/1/2007] concerning the case for, or not, banning laptops (or cutting internet access) in law school classrooms.

Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP)

The Re-Engineering Assessment Practices Project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council, has got a new web site, from which you can get more information about the project, and, in particular, access a range of research into, and resources about, assessment practices and methods.

New UK study examines the effectiveness of interactive whiteboards

The DfES has just published a new large-scale evaluation of the impact in London schools of interactive whiteboards on pedagogy and pupil performance. The study, which was immediately used by the London Evening Standard as a stick to beat the Government (see How £50m went to waste on a whiteboard), is by Gemma Moss, Carey Jewitt, Ros Levacic, Vicky Armstrong, Alejandra Cardini, and Frances Castle, and was commissioned by the DfES from the Institute of Education. It provides a case-study rich snapshot of practice in London schools, along with an inconclusive statistical analysis of pupil attainment data.  The study can be freely downloaded as a PDF. I include the "findings summary" in the continuation post below, and the "detailed findings" section of the report's 6-page executive summary is worth reading. In short, as you'd expect, interactive whiteboards are no panacea; their novelty soon wears off; used badly they reinforce bad teaching, and may detract from good teaching: and in some circumstances they slow down rather than speed up learning. Are they worth the money? This issue is simply not addressed in the study, which, disappointingly, is devoid of any economic analysis.

Demos publishes "Their Space - Education for a digital generation"

Thanks to Josie Fraser for spotting and reviewing a new Demos report, by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, Their Space - Education for a digital generation, available as for download as a 300 kB PDF. This ~80 page report, which has its main focus on school-aged learners, is worth reading closely. In particular, it calmly disposes of some of the myths that dominate current thinking about technology and education, for example:

1. The internet is too dangerous for children.
2. Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over
   their lives.
3. There is an epidemic of internet plagiarism in schools.
4. We're seeing the rise of a generation of passive consumers.
5. All gaming is good.
6. All children are cyberkids.

And the report, whilst avoiding being prescriptive, hits several of the right nails on the head, for example that the Internet, and the freely available tools, ways of working and connecting, and the content that it provides, makes a pretty good (albeit incomplete) learning environment.