Serendipity35

You may have heard it said that since the decade after the 1918 flu epidemic was the Roaring Twenties in the U.S>, there is a theory that when the current pandemic ends we might have another Roaring Twenties for the 21st century. The roaring 1920s roared in economics, invention, and cultural craziness.

Much of the roaring was based on “pent-up demand” and I'm hearing that again now even in this spring when the vaccines are being distributed and some people seem to think the pandemic is over. I hear people say that at least we can see "the light at the end of the tunnel." Of course, when you do see the light, you are still in the tunnel.

With the virus under control, local restrictions lifting and spirits improving, the idea is that consumers will be rushing out to spend their government stimulus checks and money saved while sheltering in. 

As far as economics, we have all kinds of indicators, such as consumer confidence (how Americans are feeling about the economy) and recently it was at its highest point since the pandemic started.

The post-pandemic and post-WWI decade had a wide range of inventions: quick-frozen foods, the Band-Aid®, electric blenders, early television, vacuum cleaner, bulldozers, cheeseburgers, the radio altimeter and penicillin. The war had contributed to innovations and now that soldiers were home and money shifted from wartime needs to other things, inventions roared.

There is also a pent-up desire to get out and enjoy life again. I don't know that we'll have some of the cultural craziness we often associate with the 1920ss, but certainly, people are eager to go out to restaurants and go on vacations again. The hospitality and entertainment industries are eager for a comeback.

But will there be a comeback? I wonder if movie theaters will return to pre-pandemic levels ever again, even if there is a brief pent-up surge early in the recovery. We have become very comfortable with watching movies on streaming services including brand new films and libraries of old and new programs to binge comfortably from our home couch.

What about the 9 million jobs that still need to return? Not everyone has been saving monet the past year and eager to spend. Millions of people struggled and are still struggling.

Finally, I don't hear much discussion about a roaring twenties for education. There is pent-up desire to get back to "normal" schooling in K-12 and higher education. It seems like that will happen this fall. But will it last? Parents are eager to have their childdren return. Some students and some teacher are also ready to return, but not all. I suspect that some teachers and students have found online learning appealing. It would not surprise me if in the 2020s we see more online learning than pre-pandemic and more hybrid education with online and some face-to-face.

Reading on the Open Campus blog and earlier on the ACT blog got me thinking about how the long tail of this pandemic will be felt in education. One area that seems to be changed in the long term is admissions testing and perhaps testing for placement in general.

Many colleges have extended their test-optional policies that began last year into this year. Those schools include the entire Ivy League and big players like Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Most predictions have said that the SAT and the ACT will never return to the role they played, but colleges still need some way of assessing both if a student should be admitted and where they should be placed after admission.

For admissions, it seems that the two measures being used are the "rigor" of the classes that applicants took in high school and their grades in them.

The term "rigor" in education is difficult to determine. It is used to describe instruction, coursework, learning experiences, and expectations that are challenging. On a micro level, I might say that a  multiple-choice test on a novel is not as rigorous as an essay test. But measuring rigor for a high school course at a distance by a college is difficult. Clearly, an honors junior English course at one high school is not equal to those at other schools.

What colleges have been doing is collecting data on students who already enrolled and comparing them to their high-school courses and grades. When they have enough data on a particular high school (starting with the highest sending schools), they can track the grade-point averages (GPA), freshman year success, and eventual degree completions of students from that particular school.

?Even when I applied to college in the last century, placement tests given at the college after admission played a much more significant role in my college course selection and path.

Besides helping to decide if a student is admitted to the college, these tests are supposed to measure readiness and predict success. One of those posts I read gives the example that 93% of test-optional applicants to Georgia Tech took calculus in high school, but that isn’t really part of the SAT’s math section. Since students will be required to have calculus, how useful is that SAT score? 

We'll see what a few years of test-optional college admissions produce. As others have said, the pandemic will have a very long tail for higher education. 

Amber MacArthur's newsletter turned me on to a new book by The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose called Futureproof. which considers the question Is your job future-proof? 

First thought: Is any job future-proof? I'd guess that we will always need doctors, farmers, teachers, police and a bunch of other professions, but as they change will they remain recognizable as their former professions?

As a teacher, I've been hearing for decades that we'd be replaced someday by computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. It hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen after I have left the planet.

The age of automation has been with us since the last century. We have all seen how some industries, like automakers, have automated many jobs that were done by humans. Some humans are still there working with robots and such but not very many. I once toured a beer bottling facility and the observation area was decorated with a timeline showing the place over the years. The thing that immediately hit me was that as we moved through the 20th-century photos was that people were vanishing from the photos. A crowd of humans was putting bottles into boxes in the 1920s and on the floor in front of me now was one person on a platform operating controls for it all to be done by automation.

Automation doesn't take breaks, call in sick, slow down at the end of the day, join a union, or mind working 24/7 for no extra pay.

Futureproof's subtitle is "9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation" and the first rule is to "Be Surprising, Social, and Scarce." Roose's approach is to do things yourself to protect your job.

It's not about defeating the machines because they are here and not leaving and it doesn’t just change our jobs. It changes our entire life experience with AI and algorithms influencing what you watch on screens, what you listen to, the news you get, and on and on. 

It's not about becoming like a machine. In fact, Roose thinks you need to be more human. What are the creative, inspiring, and meaningful things you can do that even the most advanced AI can’t do? At least, not yet.

Better technology for medical imaging was welcomed into hospitals, but you still needed humans to read those x-rays, scans, and such. But now, we are finding that AI might be able to more accurately read those results without bias and using comparisons to an ever-growing data collection of other results. 

Chess and Go players once thought no machine could beat a master. Wrong.

There is too much in the book to summarize here but think about some of these provocative personal rules: Resist machine drift; Leave handprints; Demote your devices; Treat AI like a chimp army.
 
Think about one of those rules: "Leave Handprints." It's the idea that we still value human artisanship and service. People are willing to pay a premium for some handmade items - such as artwork - or to be served in a restaurant. 

 

 

 

 

There is no shortage of models of learning. If you study pedagogy, you learn about Behaviorism (Pavlov), Cognitivism (Paget), Meaningful Learning Theory (Ausubel), Social Learning Theory (Bandura), Social Constructivism (Vygotsky) and Multiple Intelligences (Gardner) - and that list in incomplete.

There are also a good number of visual representations of learning that appear as a pyramid, steps, roadmap or the cone shown here.

The Cone of Learning shown here is based on the theory that true "learning" means that we remember what was learned. But looking at it, you would say that reading is a method from which little is retained or learned. If you tested me on a book I read last year, I would probably fail. And yet, I would maintain that what I do remember may well be the most important learning that I personally needed from the book.

Many interpretations of this model of learning would stress that after reading moving up the cone to talk about the reading and giving a presentation about it would make the content far better learned. Personally, it is true that the novels I know best are those I have taught to others.

This movement up the cone of learning can be viewed as moving from passive to active learning.

Passive learning is broadly defined as a method of learning or instruction where students receive information from the instructor and internalize it. Without much or any feedback from the instructor or source of information, this learning may require memorization, rote learning, direct instruction and lecture. Passive learning is frequently passive listening. It is often teacher-centered.

Criticism of passive listening has been strong saying that students retain information only until they are assessed and the learning does not stay with them. Active learning is promoted as a teaching method aimed at solving this problem.

Unfortunately, sometimes passive learning is seen as bad while active is good. It becomes active versus passive when really one doesn't really succeed without the other.

In looking at the advantages of passive learning, you would include how it exposes us to new material. It gives a teacher greater control over the students. It can be and should be prepared in advance via lecture notes, handouts, audiovisual media and the concepts and content can be organized and structured in a meaningful manner;. It is effective for large audiences.

Passive learning dangerously needs to make the assumption that students will receive the subject matter with open minds. They can be - also dangerously - as empty vessels that need to be filled with a dump of knowledge, or that they are dry sponges hungry to absorb the learning.

It can be difficult to assess how well students are learning content. What would be a passive way to confirm learning from a student who has read a chapter? A test? Ineffective. Repeating or remembering information without reflecting or demonstrating an understanding seems like a poor model of learning.

Nigel Nisbet describes the differences between active learning and passive learning to an audience of school superintendents.

Active learning is defined in different ways:
"anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991)
"anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening and taking notes" (Felder & Brent, 2009).

Active learning strategies can be mixed with passive activities. Activities can be as short as a few minutes that are integrated into a lecture. Reading and writing can be passive but when combined with discussion, problem solving, or cooperative learning they can become active.

Active learning puts the responsibility on both the teacher and the students. Teachers using an active learning style are responsible for knowing the subject they teach, but also the best methods of assessing, starting discussions and providing activities for reflection and continued learning outside of class. Students need to be prepared to discuss each day’s topic, write down their thoughts on the subject, participate in group study outside of class, and work cooperatively inside and outside of the classroom.

Most assessment in passive learning is fairly strict with one right answer, while in active learning there is more flexibility. As shown on the cone diagram, passively watch a film might be evaluated with a test or essay assignment - also passive. Evaluating the understanding of reading about the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers in a math class might be evaluated with an outdoors search for the ratio in nature.

Neither passive nor active is best. Active learning requires some passive learning. As Benjamin Bloom showed, knowledge is a basis for higher-level thinking. That might be the learning in primary grades or the 101 level course in college. The danger is learning that is all passive with any higher-level and active learning experiences. It is also dangerous to leap to active learning without a foundation of knowledge and the ability of students to learn on-their-own passively sometimes.