Serendipity35

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.

A decade or two ago when I was teaching one of my social media courses at NJIT, I used to ask students to write a short paper on what they thought was the first social medium or platform. It's one of those questions without a definitive answer and I received a variety of answers over the years. 

Now that we are even deeper into social media and students are even younger - this year's college freshman was born in the 21st century - the early days and history of social media is buried a bit deeper.

The most common answers go back to the 1970s and 80s with forums, bulletin boards and things like AOL's Instant Messenger.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, websites and fledgling social sites and tools were not commercialized. No advertising. How things have changed.

But there were always a few students who went pre-Internet.

On May 24, 1844, some electronic dots and dashes were tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine sending a first electronic message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Perhaps, Samuel Morse was prescient about what was to come with his scientific achievement since he wrote, “What hath God wrought?” This was communication and could be two-way but wasn't really a social network. Eventually, there did become a network of users and telegrams could be sent to multiple users.

Technology began to change very rapidly in the 20th Century. After the first super computers were created in the 1940s, scientists and engineers began to develop ways to create networks between those computers, and this would later lead to the birth of the Internet. 

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory appeared in 1973 and true electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online early in 1978. BBS in big cities were running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers.

Let's back up a bit and look at the PLATO system launched in 1960. It was developed at the University of Illinois and then commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. Later, it would offer early forms of social media features, In 1973, Notes (PLATO's message-forum application) was added and TERM-talk was an instant-messaging feature. The Talkomatic may be the first online chat room. There was also News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper and blog. PLATO used Access Lists so that a note file or other application you created could be limited in access to a certain set of users, such as friends, classmates, or co-workers.

Some people point to the emergence in 1967-69 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an early digital network, created by the United States Department of Defense, that allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data. Though not intended to be "social," apparently social niceties did emerge and by the late-1970s non-government and business ideas passed back and forth and a network etiquette (netiquette) was described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

ARPANET evolved into the Internet after the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification were witten by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in 1974. This was followed by Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

1985 saw the introduction of The Well and GENie. GENie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created for GE and GENie was still used well into the late 1990s. It had 350,000 users at its peak and was only made redundant by the development of the World Wide Web.

In 1987, the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and the subsequent models of both Apple Mac computers and PCs, better modems, and the slow increase of bandwidth allowed users to do more online. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s.

The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s. Message forums became Internet forums.

A number of platforms appeared tht had social tools inlcuding GeoCities (1994) Classmates.com (1995).

The first recognizable social media site might be Six Degrees which appeared in 1997. Users created profiles, give school affiliations and could "friend" other users. It differed from instant-messaging clients (such as ICQ and AOL's AIM) or chat clients (like IRC and iChat) because people used their real names.

It would be 2003 when Myspace launched and by 2006 it had become the most visited website on the planet. Sharing music was a big part of its appeal.

Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University to be used there. But it caught on, spread to other colleges and in June 2004 the company he had started around "TheFacebook" moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2008, it had eclipsed MySpace and in December, 2009, with 350 million registered users it became the most popular social platform in the world.

The original URL - thefacebook.com - still redirects to the renamed Facebook. Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake in 2011 for $35 million, but it failed to regain popularity.

If Google seems to be missing in this history it is because its attempts to enter social (Orkut and Google+) both failed. Google+ ended in 2018 with the final nail in its coffine being a data security breach that compromised the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users.

REFERENCES

online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/ 

digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/

Infographic via socialmediatoday.com