saw this in the email today. our book is in production stage now:
looking forward to the expected completion in jun 2020. all thanks goes to my 老师 for making this possible (:
book in production
class size, learning, and teaching
was at a chat the other day and was prompted the question “people says class size matters. what do you think?” and my response created on-the-fly goes somewhat like this:
the term of ‘class size’ concerns two main ideas: 1. classroom management, and 2. learning. the two ideas are inter-related, but often the first idea may become the focus, especially in a classroom where lessons are transmissionist (i.e., the teacher talks and ‘download’ knowledge to students who are (assumed to be) listening, and learning (is assumed) to take place by (passive) listening with the occasional IRE discourse). in such a case, class size matters if there are many ‘disruptive’ students; but it probably doesnt matter if the students are all students who are non-disruptive to the lesson delivery, and of course, the IRE discourse.
what if learning is a participatory, interactive, and social phenomenon? such learning would often be carried out in group settings. given a class of 40, how many groups should a teacher allow students to form? from a classroom management perspective, the fewer the groups may appear to be easier for managing and control. 40 divided by 8 gives 5 groups, and a teacher needs to only manage 5 groups. however, literature on collaborative learning would advise groups of 3-4 for more effective learning in groups. that would mean 10 groups, doubling the 5 earlier. assuming a teacher has designed and put in place processes and scaffolds to guide effective group work, the teacher’s work does not end here. the teacher now becomes the facilitator of learning. facilitation, a word often used, is difficult in practice as it may require a teacher to analyse the current state of learning, prompt questions, probe students’ thinking, provide alternate perspectives, all actions on-the-fly to effectively customised what s/he is going to say when s/he appears at each group. would class size matter? given that curriculum time is fixed, the amount of meaningful facilitation for deeper learning a teacher can provide to students would be divided by the number of groups. smaller number of groups means more quality time for each group of students. this applies to facilitation of online discourse for learning too. so, does class size matter?
transmissionist or participatory, a teacher will provide assignments for students to complete. given a class of 40, let’s start with transmissionist way of learning – each student is required to submit a 3-min oral performance recorded and uploaded to the LMS, a teacher would need to spend at least 120 mins just to listen to each audio clip, without considering the amount of time needed to assess, think, and provide meaningful feedback to each student/recording. if the class is made up of 30 students, the difference would be 30 mins of listening time. the same computation can apply to written assignments too. if learning is participatory – each student is required to write an online post, and thereafter reply to at least 2 peers’ posts to learn through interaction. the number of posts a class of 30 students, versus a class of 40 students, could be significantly different. so, does class size matter?
so in conclusion, does class size matter? your perspective (and conception) of learning would determine the answer.
记iMTL 进阶课 in-progress
yesterday was the second f2f lesson of our iMTL 进阶课 (wondering why the english course title uses ‘intermediate’?). the first f2f was exactly 1 month ago. in this course, the (old) title (which 露丝 and I din bother to change) included keywords ‘SDL’ and ‘CoL’. so, i had used the first hour of yesterday’s session to conduct a co-generative dialogue on 自主学习 (self-directed learning). and the following is the reification of our discourse:
towards the end of the conversation, i was pleasantly surprised that most, if not all, of the key ideas of SDL were surfaced without me needing to introduce them. sounds like a phenomenographic dialogue (if such thing exists; if not can cite Tan, 2019). realised this when i ran through the deck of slides adapted from a 12470 Clinic conducted some three years ago. was interested to see what the individually meaningful ideas that the teachers (馨云、一凤、伟如、美娴、崇蕾、侯琳、玉侠、春容) had created, i allowed them to complete a 2-qn survey via google form:
and here’s what they wrote:
| q1. 我原来以为 … … | q2. 我现在认识到 … … |
| 让学生自己完成作业就能算是自主学习。 | 自主学习包含了教师充足的设计与准备，让学生能够明白自己需要学什么、提供选择并给予学生自我评估的机会。 |
| 促进小学生完全自主学习是可能的，现在明白这个能力需要时间的发展。 | 在小学阶段培养学生自主学习的能力是十分重要的。 |
| Self directed learning 很容易达成 | 学生需要确定学习目标和监督学习进展等 |
| SDL就是E learning | SDL 可以和很多东西有关。比如：老师的角色是什么、学生的学习效率如何 |
| 学生只要是能独立完成学习任务就是自主学习（如ezhishi） | 自主学习也有分几个等级，可以让学生主动找出自己需要学习什么，并自主地去提问，找答案。 |
| 自主学习是让学生单独、独立地学习 | 在小学阶段，老师还是得先设计出学习活动让学生参与。适当地使用ICT能提高教学效应。 |
| 自主学习是学生有不同学习方式的选择。 | 我们现在正处于学生是被动状态，要想让学生养成自主学习的习惯需要长时间的培养。 |
| 自主学习就是要让学生学习时有自主权，依据学生所需要或缺乏的那一块，提供更多的学习活动，辅助他们，让他们能够成功学习。 | 的确如此。接触了一个新的概念solo taxonomy |
| 自主学习只是做活动 | 对主动学习有更深一层的理解，例如：学习动机、让学生能有想要学习的动机以及引学练用评和自主学习有密切的关系。 |
looks like 满满的学习 to you? and it’s not through transmission (of knowledge).
looking forward to the next session on 14 Sep for more knowledge creation (:
mobile first, a musing
a recent buzz word related to development at work — mobile first, or more specifically mobile first design — is today a key consideration for content providers and technological solution builders as mobile devices are everywhere, and these devices serve as one key source through which we consume contents around us. but, is mobile first the sole consideration, where learning is concerned? well, how about this — if there’s a first, there’s a second? mobile first certainly does not mean mobile #only; so what’s next?
any discussion of technology and learning (or ‘digital learning’ some would prefer), it is always #ThinkAffordances — what is your design/objectives of learning, and how can technology (e.g. feature/function/tool/app/platform) enable your desired learning design? those of us who have experienced it would agree with me that chat (aka instant msging; e.g. WhatsApp), and even fb wall post+comments do not quite afford deep discussions that lead to rise-above of ideas. expressing individual’s ideas is easy; but to build on each other’s ideas, extend the ideas, improve on the ideas, counter-propose arguments, provide different perspectives, many of these acts of co-creating a common meaning is lost within the scrolling messages. in short, fb wall post+comments set up do not afford deep (digital) learning, currently.
so, what does? discussion forums (DF) do afford deep learning as described above (of cos, i will propose that knowledge forum (KF) is specially designed for this and is thus good-er). however, DF as we know it traditionally (oh btw, it’s a 20+ yr old technology), does not go well with the idea of mobile first design. the way discussions’ organised on screen traditionally, including threading, quoting, branching off, referencing back to other posts, is difficult to automatically fit on screens while displaying the discussions in way visually good for participants or readers of discussions. DF, in order to become mobile-first needs a rethink of its good old interface.
the term DF still invokes a tool-centric perspective. taking the affordance perspective, we can, and should examine what are the affordances of DF (and even KF) in enabling deep learning, and create them within existing mobile-first friendly solutions. in the process, DF as we have experienced it, may become a past, and it’s perfectly fine from a technological advancement perspective. the affordances of DF lives on.
going back to the fb wall post+comments idea, how can we improve it to afford deep learning per DF? first, we will need to invoke the concept of sub-walls (cf. discussion threads; sub-forums), where there can be more than one walls (cf. fb). and here’s probably a list of ‘requirements’ i would like to see:
- there can be any number of sub-walls as a learner chooses to maintain.
- to create a new sub-wall, one can select any existing post from the main wall or any sub-wall (together with existing likes, sharing info and comments), and pipe it into the new sub-wall.
- each sub-wall has an unique identifier (e.g. a URL) that enables one to link back or to point to it in any post, comment in any (sub-)wall.
- sub-walls will be arranged in reverse chronological order by default; and so are the posts and comments within.
- one are allowed to pin any sub-wall, or any post within it, so that it is always on-top.
- one can create and add a title/topic for each sub-wall to indicate the discourse topic to other participant/viewer.
- one can define and add tag(s) to a sub-wall to facilitate personal classification, search and retrieval
- everyone can add comments to any contents within a sub-wall
- when adding a comment in sub-wall, one can upload images, documents, media, hyperlinks as part of the comment
- visually, one should be able to easily identify any sub-wall that contains a new activity or reply/ to him/her; the ‘new’-ness visual cue is individualised and user-specific.
- visually, within a sub-wall, one should see up to 3 levels of hierarchical nesting for comments to a post. this hierarchical view allows one to easily identify the relationship among comments and to focus their attention over selected comment(s) as desired.
- participants will receive notification of new comment added to a sub-wall to enable them to return to continue the discourse (viewer can choose to follow and be notified too)
to end off, #mobilefirst (design) is not #mobileOnly (design); learning sciences folks can do wonders with computing folks when the two groups pool their brains together (:
to end off x2, finally, may i wish my Muslim friends:
[afternote] a note for self, it took 5 hours for this post to be first mooted in the morning while flipping newspaper, to connecting it with an idea@work, to typing and organising the ideas, to finally publishing it to the www & fb. now, who says learning (online) is fast? not for the slow-learner-me definitely (:
demystifying the learning process
saw this not-too-new 2017 article on mindshift introducing some ideas teachers can help students to see the (true) nature of learning, and help them develop useful habits of learning. these ideas were proposed by Barbara Oakley. ignore the title of the article cos to me, EVERYONE struggles, from time to time, and whether one would like to admit it or not.
some lines, including words from Oakley, in the article that caught my attention:
“…the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material — only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. ”
“students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: ‘There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.'”
“Learning is all about developing strong chains.” (cf. chunks)
“familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors ‘rapidly on-board’ new ideas.”
“…’Pomodoro Technique.’ Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off. At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. “
“…I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously.”
one idea chunk came to my mind as i read the article: micro-learning. what myth(s) are pple propagating with this term and it’s associated ‘benefits’ for learning i wonder. is learning fast? how often is learning fast?