Teaching virtual design in a physical world

I first became familiar with the term "digital fabrication" when I was finishing up my dissertation at the University of Virginia. My advisor, Glen Bull, came into my office one day and asked me to watch a demo with a machine he had recently found. I watched with fascination as he created a 3-D model on the computer, printed it as a 2-D net, cut it out in seconds on the CraftROBO machine and folded it into an exact replica of the model on the screen. This was amazing on several fronts:

• It took a matter of minutes to do what would have taken me a whole math lesson (or more) to do with my 4th grade students
• The fold lines were clean and perforated. The physical object actually looked like the model on the screen. For students who have been spoon fed high-quality media since birth, that makes a difference.
• The design was separate from the actual object, which means I could go back to the computer model and make alterations/corrections, then print another one.

That final point is, in my opinion, significant. Let me explain this by making a comparison to the writing process. For children, the act of writing something by hand is laborious. It's labor-intensive to me, and I've been doing it for 35 years. So, when children write something on paper, they want that to be the first and final copy of that particular piece of writing. It's not that they don't like proofreading, editing and revising, but every change they make means another word, sentence, paragraph or page they will have to rewrite. Writing, in addition to being cognitively demanding, is physically demanding on a child's fine-motor skills. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell is right, that the best people in a certain field aren't always the most naturally gifted, but those in the right place at the right time with the opportunity to perfect their skills. Maybe the best writers in school are those that don't get burned out from the physical act of writing.

The same is true when students are creating things in the classroom. I used to have my students cut out nets from graph paper and fold those shapes into 3-dimensional objects. After spending more than one math lesson to do this,  we could finally get to the learning. This is not considered efficient in the business or medical world, yet in education we just kind of shrug it off and learn to deal with it. And what happened if a student's shape was not exactly symmetrical or was missing a side? Well, they got to be the kid with the lopsided shape. What if I wanted to demonstrate how changing the dimensions of the shape could conserve volume but change surface area? I guess I could have the students cut out a new shape, but there goes another 15-20 minutes. The fact that the media students used to design the object also became the object used to teach the concept was problematic.

This is not as much of a problem when the students design their model on the computer because they can manipulate it without having to physically create another shape. And for all those Piaget and Montessori fans out there, the end result is still a physical object that students can touch and compare. Students learn the basic foundations of rapid prototyping and iterative design, two principals and practices that pretty much define research and development. This is a far cry from the current model of "one and done" projects in schools today.

Below is  a video created by the folks in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia who are starting to explore how digital fabrication can be applied in schools to enhance student learning.

I will follow up in a couple of days and explain how I took this concept and turned it into a learning activity for my preservice teachers.

Students and informal learning

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to contribute to an ISTE book, Teaching with Digital Video, an effort put together by Glen Bull and Lynn Bell. One of the chapters I helped write discussed student-created video in informal learning environments. The premise of this chapter is that rich, deep learning can (and do) take place in settings other than school and without a teacher's direction. I was able to provide a few examples of such learning in the chapter.

Along these lines, I have been working with a News Media club at a private K-8 school, and one of the things the students wanted to learn was how to edit video and use a green screen. The school just happened to have recently invested in a green screen and video editing software, so the conditions were perfect for trying out the new equipment.

Because this is a club, rather than a core class, combined with the fact that the students are all new to video editing, I decided to start with something small and simple, which in this case was Charades. I told the students which scenario to act out, and we filmed them performing in front of the green screen. After each student had a chance to participate (twice!), we went to the computer lab and did some simple editing. You can click on the link below to see the result of our efforts, a simple 1-minute video:

• http://ltec4100.magnify.net/video/Green-Screen-demo

The thing that excites me about this experience is not the technology, but the students' response to the activity. I had students stopping me in the hall later that day asking me when we were going to use the green screen again. I could tell their ideas and creativity were flowing. Green screen is cool, but students who are excited about being creative and taking ownership of their own learning is even cooler.

It's the pedagogy, teacher.

This was a phrase that got tossed into our conversations from time to time in grad school. It's a silly play on the famous phrase from the 1992 Presidential election. When you spend the majority of your time talking and working with other Instructional Technology doc students, it's easy to get sucked into the technology black hole of creating and tweaking new technology tools for teachers and students. There is definitely a time and place for new innovations, but sometimes the most appropriate solution to an educational problem lies in an innovative use of an existing tool. Almost every one of our conversations came down to this point: It's not the tool so much as what you (the teacher and/or students) do with the tool. Along these lines, the concept of repurposing resonates with me. Anyway, I read a post today by Dan Meyer that reminded me once again that technology is really only as good as the teacher who is using it. I won't recap the entire post, but the conversation just goes to show that a teacher can find ways to make a very long video of water being poured into a tank engaging to the students. This also reminds me of the Clark and Kozma debate, though the conversation highlighted on Meyer's blog is much less about the technology and more about how teachers use media and their students' responses to it.

The take-away message for me? Don't underestimate the art of creative and innovative teaching.

The Powerlessness of Some Stories

I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects. This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the  course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.

Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:

6th Graders	Preservice Teachers
Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher	Took or found their own images
Most of the stories used the same images	Every story was completely unique
Narrative was an expository essay	Narrative was a story
Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic)	Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic)
Stories did not have music	Stories had music
Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember	Stories reflected personal learning

I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.

This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.

The Power of Stories

I have recently been reading (and re-reading) some interviews I conducted with former teacher education students at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the interviews was to ask each person, who also happens to be in his or her first year of teaching, which aspects of their educational technology coursework they are using now that they are full-time teachers. The information obtained from these interviews has been fascinating, but what is even more amazing is how much they remember from the Digital Storytelling project we did. Most of these teachers were in different sections of my class and made their digital stories about various (sometimes random) topics. Some of them did creative writing, while others told personal stories. Some of the movies were based on a topic from the school curriculum, while other themes will likely NEVER find their way into a textbook or unit of study. I always made a big deal about these movies. I would put them all into one, long movie and added my own silly introduction and somewhat sentimental/inspiring conclusion. We brought in food and generally had a lot of fun watching everyone's story. It was always a great way to end the semester.

As I was reading through one of the interview scripts, it dawned on me that I actually remembered the movie made by every participant in my study (n=8). So, as an experiment I went back and looked at every class list from every ed. tech. class I taught at UVa. Sure enough, I could recall what every single person's movie was about, just from reading each name! Stories about fathers who immigrated from other countries, stories of working with special needs students, stories told from a dog's perspective, stories about stuffed animals that wandered away from their class on a field trip and discovered the UVa Grounds in the process. Stories using scanned photographs, stories that were hand-drawn, stories using images from a memorable experience, stories with roommates posing as the characters in the story. I was amazed and was briefly lost in the symphony of stories washing over my memory. I remember pitching digital storytelling as a great activity to engage students in writing, but it's now clear to me that the real power of stories was completely lost on me at the time. People connect, identify, place themselves in, and yes, even remember stories.

Has anyone else experienced this power in their own use of stories in the classroom?

Research and Evidence

From early on in my doctoral studies, I gravitated toward research that had practical implications. I am not suggesting that survey research is not practical, but for the most part it really didn't interest me that much. I was far more interested in studies that measured things that matter to teachers and students: time on task, engagement with the instruction, student artifacts and learning. As a teacher, these were the things that interested me. I had to be sensitive to each student as an individual and the different factors that directly influenced their lives, but I felt more compelled to make my classroom as exciting as possible than I did to try to change their lives at home or their attitudes toward school. This is just where I chose to put my time and energy. So, when I see research that is really creative, unique or practical, I am suddenly interested. There are two such studies that I find fascinating. The first is a study about the influence of success or failure on perception. This could have easily been done with a research instrument (survey, questionnaire, etc.), but these researchers chose to measure the influence of success or failure (in this case, kicking field goals) by having participants adjust a miniature goal post to the size they thought was to scale after they had just attempted 10 field goals. People who kicked too low routinely adjusted the mini goal post too high; people who kicked wide right or left would judge the distance between the goal posts to be more narrow than they really are. Even more surprising, the more field goals a person made, the wider they adjusted the goal posts. It's fascinating to think that people standing side-by-side, based on their success at kicking field goals, were actually not looking at the same object. I really like this study because it accurately reflects how people might actually perceive objects or experiences with which they have had past success or failure. I used to notice something similar with my students in regard to reading ability. Those who struggled with reading were more likely to perceive words with a lot of letters as harder. I found them skipping past or mumbling long words, even if the words weren't really that hard to read (e.g., doorstop). I have no formal data, just my own experience, to back this up, but based on the findings of the field goal study it makes sense that this phenomenon would apply to other areas of life.

The second study, if one can call it that, is based on a series of VW commercials. The premise is that people will be more likely to do otherwise mundane or bothersome activities if they are made to be fun. You need to watch the videos to see what I am talking about. What I find interesting is the way they measure the influence of "fun" on the desired behavior: the number of people using a recycling  bin, number of people using the stairs and the weight of the trash in a garbage can. Each of these outcomes measure exactly what the fun was meant to increase. No surveys or other validated instruments; just an increase in the thing that is meant to be increased.

Of course, student outcomes aren't as tidy as the number of people to use the stairs instead of the escalator in a 24-hour period. Concepts such as "understanding," "effort," and "engagement" are really hard to define, thus, are hard to measure. But there are some things that teachers would like see more of from their students that can be measured: time on task, attention to detail, and higher-order thinking. These two studies have breathed a little life into my interest in student outcomes and classroom-based research. They are innovative, creative and, at least to the people who are interested in perception or increasing civic-minded behavior, relevant. Research should be, if nothing else, relevant.

I can still hear the words of two of my professors ...

Professor A: By the time you leave my class, I want you all to be from Missouri. Why Missouri? Because it's the Show-Me State, and if you make claims based on your research, you need to show me. Your data should show me something.

Professor B: If something exists, then it exists in some amount and can, therefore, be measured.

I didn't realize this at the time, but these have become words to live by.

Mercy is new every morning

After a night of self-reflection (and loathing), I find the words of Ira Glass very encouraging and full of hope. I feel much better now and I'm ready for the next class meeting.

Sleep and Creativity

I read this post on Lifehacker the other day, which was timely considering my lack of sleep this week. I took Monday off to spend time with my family, and my week was unusually full with meetings and other time-drainers. So, instead of carving out time at work to write and plan for class meetings, I did most of this until the wee hours of the morning. People who know me are aware of my struggles with staying alert at night. In an earlier time in my life, I used to meet a couple of my buddies every Monday to watch football, and I can't remember one time when I stayed awake for the whole game. However, I had no problem waking up at 5:00 a.m. for a 5-6 mile run. Clearly, I am a morning person. In my efforts to create a schedule for myself that includes writing, planning, service, research, teaching, and oh yeah, family, I find it increasingly easier to give up the one thing that usually helps me stay focused ... sleep. The later I stay up, and the more often I stay up late, the more of a decrease I notice in my creativity, yet it's the same creativity I strive to find when I am staying up late scratching out a couple of extra hours of work.

This is a personal problem, I know, but it definitely falls within the "things they don't tell you in grad. school" category. It's probably better if we (new faculty) discover this kind of thing ourselves, anyway. If I ever get the opportunity to mentor doc students or new faculty, I will be sure to put this on the list.