Digital Distractions 2

A friend passed along an article from Wired about the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.com). Seems like everyone from the average student to Bill Gates is enamoured with the work being done. The founder, Sal Khan, started with creating math videos to help his niece get through math. Word spread that these videos actually helped his niece, other family relatives and friends learn math concepts. In the vein of “you have to be good to be lucky and lucky to be good” and being located in Silicon Valley allowed Sal to put together an impressive list of DIY Math and Science videos (and a few other subjects). As the story goes, Bill Gates discovered the site, had his kids use it and then told the world. Oh yeah, and he threw in a million bucks or so to help it along.

The videos are Sal talking with appropriate enthusiasm and a whiteboard or several pictures. They are very basic in look and feel with a good solid foundation in content. They are like worked examples the teacher does in class, but delivered in a just in time model. Plus they fit my criteria for anything related to technology in education – they are executed with simplicity that is clear and appropriate for the learner. And 2400 videos later the Academy appears to be doing quite well.

Thinking a bit more about this story, I’m struck by two things that tie back our theme of Digital Distractions. First that content is key for learning new things and second, learning new things is brain based, not behaviour based.

Content Matters

In the Wired story, Bill Gates is purported to remark “what use is a person to society if he had can’t multiply”. I doubt Mr Gates realized the multiple levels of meaning he projected with that statement. But his comment does point to a current issue in education. It comes under the heading of 21^st Century Learning. If I understand the gist of this particular educational bandwagon, schools should be training students to be prepared to operate within an information rich society. Lists of skills related to verbs or doing actions follow in an authoritative tone or report and people are lead to believe this will lead to preparing kids for the future. This short video illustrates my point. Sadly, this is a seriously misguided vision and will probably lead most people to realize the whole 21^st Century Learning agenda is yet another ill-conceived, poorly thought out waste of precious resources. And not because it’s a bad idea, in fact it’s a great idea. The problem is because the focus is wrongly and exclusively placed on skills.

It’s a seductive argument that with access to unlimited information in this “Age of Google”, why should we need to be teaching content. What you hear from followers of the vision is we should be teaching students to develop the skills needed to access and use the digital information. After all, most jobs students will have as adults don’t even exist right now. As an educational system we need to be developing higher order thinking skills that will serve our students in a variety of potential future contexts of their life.

This line of thought fits nicely into how most educators were trained and how they developed their personal philosophy on teaching and learning. In general, this thinking usually aligns along the behavioural psychology lines of constructivism where students build their own understandings through a variety of experiences provided by the teacher, and more recently by the students themselves. Or put another way, you learn by doing, not by being told. Many will recognize the spirit of John Dewey rising up with those words. Up until recently, I would align my own thinking to this school of thought. In fact, I would argue that the 1 million textbooks with my name on it would be rooted in constructivism. But, over the past few years, a niggling thought kept entering my brain and I couldn’t shake it...How do students learn new concepts?

This particular niggling thought germinated when my eldest son was in grade 4 and I was helping him with his math homework. He was given a task of figuring out which three digit numbers were divisible by certain single digit numbers. For example, could 467 be divisible by 7. With no instruction or support, he was to discover algorithms for these problems. Since neither one of us had a clue, I went to the Internet and eventually found the solution which we applied. Total learning in this situation was zero. And he sure wasn’t motivated to continue with the lesson.

Now supporters of the 21^st Learning might, wrongly, point out I achieved exactly what they say is the future for education and how kids should learn. If you don’t know the answer, just go to the Internet and find it. Common sense might even lead you to think they would be correct in this statement, but sadly they are completely wrong.

The original intent of my son’s lesson was for students to work on number theory. The activity was originally designed to build a foundational skill in the learning process of mathematics. Sadly it failed to achieve it’s desired outcome because it assumes the novice learner was an expert. This point is key because this is where the findings of cognitive science begin to better address that niggling concern I have had about how students learn.

Cognitive Load Theory – Starting to Understand How We Learn

I’ve had a few people ask me where I built my philosophy on learning and how did I move from the accepted constructivist philosophy engrained into me over many years of teaching and writing. The story starts with a belief that currently educators are artists in their craft. With very little evidence they regularly diagnose, to the best of their ability, student learning styles, learning difficulties and various other student learning issues. I’ve argued that many years from now, when we understand how the brain learns, we’ll look back and wonder how we were able to teach children with such techniques. A bit like comparing Doctors and their practice in the 1600’s to today. And that’s where we need our thinking on learning to go. We need to consider the research being done on cognition and learning.

In recent years the field of cognitive science has embraced technologies like MRI brain scans and evidence based research to begin building an understanding of how the brain learns. Now I am the first to admit I am no expert in this field, but I have been impressed with the work by Bob Sweller from the University of South Wales and his work on Cognitive Load theory

Originally based on the study how to better create instructional manuals, Cognitive Load theory is an evidence-based cognitive theory that provides a basis for describing how we learn within the context of the brain. I like this theory because it is evidence based, focuses on the brain and the findings can be clearly demonstrated in the classroom.

The starting point for Cognitive Load Theory is the most basic question in learning. How does information get from the short term, or working memory, to long term memory. Such a basic question and yet, so little is known.

Sweller identifies five foundational principles that underpin human cognition and  Cognitive Load Theory. Listed here, future posts will consider each of these in the context of learning and digital distractions. For those of you that have spent time considering how we learn, you may have troubles accepting the words below. I did and had to keep reminding myself that these beliefs arise from evidence-based research.

1. Information Storage – Human cognition includes a large store of information that governs the bulk of its activity. Long term memory provides this functions.

2. Borrowing and Reorganizing – Almost all information held in long term memory has been borrowed from all other long term memory stores.

3. Randomness as Genesis - Random generation followed by tests of effectiveness provide the initial source for the generation of all information held in long term memory.

4. Narrow Limits of Change – All effective changes to long term memory occur slowly and incrementally.

5. Organizing and Linking – Unlimited amounts of organized information from long term memory can be used by working memory to determine interactions with the external world.

I, along with others holding similar beliefs, take from this that learning involves building schema that we borrow, or learn, from others. These schema move the learner from the novice to the expert problem solver. No amount of searching for answers in an unconnected, undisciplined manner will provide the learning environment necessary for deep understanding. We need to build our own schema, but do so with the support of others.

And that’s where I go down a different path than many of the educational gurus speaking to the masses today. Learning requires a deep understanding of content gathered through working with experts who model how to learn new and sometimes difficult material. All the searching online for an answer will never get the student to the spot where they can engage in open ended, creative problem solving until they are an expert problem solver themselves in a given area of study . This is where we need to start the conversation around the 21^st Century Learner.

Or put another way ...there is no free lunch when it comes to learning ...... even with Google!