one: I enjoyed having a chance to bounce ideas around of what we all were reading for our blog issues assignment. I can't possibly read everything, even with the help of Google Reader, so it was really nice to get a sense of what was going on in Library Blogland other than the four authors that I was following.
two: The idea of Socratic seminars sounds interesting. But the idea of being in a fishbowl while half the class critiques how well I'm discussing is majorly setting off my social anxiety buttons. It's one thing to be self-monitoring the quality of my contributions, another to have a general idea that the teacher is observing everyone for a participation grade, and quite another thing entirely to have half the class explicitly taking notes on whether you're talking too much, or not enough, or not being insightful enough, etc. And the quality of discussion that Metzger reports her class achieving with the Socratic seminars is what I remember from my high school English classes without putting people into fishbowls, though since I went to a selective all-girls Catholic high school, that might not be a fair basis for comparison.
three: I found the article "The Book Club, Exploded" really exciting. I have to say that I have never participated in a book club, apart from the book-club style small reading groups unit my sophomore year of high school, so I've never really thought about the possibilities of book clubs, even though I'm from Seattle, one of the article's model cities! I like the idea of arranging book clubs thematically, so that the club is more about a set of ideas than one particular book. I think that that could draw in people who think that book clubs are going to be like high school English redux, especially if it's marketed as being an idea/theme group rather than a book group per se. But there's also value to the old everyone reads the same book formula. I'd imagine that one of the nice things about that kind of a group is that when you refer to something in the book, everyone knows what you're talking about, which isn't always the case the rest of the time.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Week Five Response
one: On Video Games and World Salvation
Jane McGonigal made interesting points in her TED talk, but I have to say that I'm not entirely convinced. For one thing, I would have liked a better definition of what she was referring to when she talked about gaming. It seems like at the beginning, she was using gaming to refer to only MMORPGs, but then in her applications stage, she shifted to be talking more about enhanced reality. Both of those are very narrow definitions of gaming which leaves out pretty much every game I've ever played. If that's what she meant to do, that's fine, but then the talk should have been titled "MMORPGs and Enhanced Reality Can Make A Better World," not "Gaming Can Make A Better World." Maybe this is a lack of my transfer skills, but I'm having a hard time applying her hypothesis to how tabletop roleplaying games (such as Dungeons and Dragons), board games (of all sorts, including those along the lines of checkers, Parcheesi, Settlers of Catan, and Arkham Horror), arcade games (such as PacMan or Bejeweled), casual video games (such as Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Super Smash Brothers), and live-action role playing games (such as Swarthmore's annual Pterodactyl Hunt) can save the world. Secondly, I'm not even sure if her hypothesis, even applied only to MMORPGs and enhanced reality games, hangs together. I'm still not quite sure how her model really applies the competencies she claims gaming develops to the real world. Thirdly, she uncritically cited Herodotus in her argument as a historical source. As a classicist, anyone who uses the Father of Lies like that automatically loses a bit of my respect.
two: On Transfer Learning
I found the discussion in How People Learn about how people do things differently in academic vs non-academic contexts really interesting. I would have assumed that being able to do math in a supermarket or selling things on the street would have automatically translated into being able to do the same sort of thing in an academic setting, but apparently it isn't that automatic. But then I think to how I multiply numbers in my head, which generally involves things like factoring numbers and recombining them to get numbers I can keep straight in my head, and it makes a bit more sense. If I were multiplying the numbers on paper, I would go about the problem in a totally different way, by multiplying across by place values and adding the results of each pass. It isn't so surprising after all that someone who's been navigating the supermarket by doing mental math tricks is going to have difficulty applying that knowledge to the more formal mathematics involved in schools. And other subjects mutatis mutandis. I think that keeping in mind this issue of transfer is important for librarians. We've all gone through formal schooling with at least some modicum of success, which means that a large portion of how we go to think is founded on that more formal kind of learning. But many of the patrons we're going to be serving are working from the more everyday, hands-on kind of knowledge. Keeping this distinction in mind can help us in instruction, and drawing connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.
three: On High School Curricula
I can't help feeling that one reason why teachers don't use lessons like the one for teaching about central tendency described in the Wiggins and McTighe article is because they feel like they'd take so long. Going through all the steps in their lesson plan looks like it would take several days, especially in a high school where teachers may only have 45 minutes a day with each class. In contrast, the traditional plan for teaching mean, median, and mode could get covered in two days at the very most. When you have a list a mile long of things you're supposed to do before the end of the year (or even scarier, before the state standardized exams in the spring), are you going to go with the more in-depth teaching for understanding approach, even through it's going to take longer, or are you going to go for covering as much as possible as fast as possible, even if not everyone understands it as well? Unless we can either retrofit the high-stakes tests to test for understanding (or get rid of them altogether) or ensure and convince teachers and administrators that teaching for understanding will lead students to perform as well or better on these tests, I have a feeling that Door 2 is going to be the most popular option.
Jane McGonigal made interesting points in her TED talk, but I have to say that I'm not entirely convinced. For one thing, I would have liked a better definition of what she was referring to when she talked about gaming. It seems like at the beginning, she was using gaming to refer to only MMORPGs, but then in her applications stage, she shifted to be talking more about enhanced reality. Both of those are very narrow definitions of gaming which leaves out pretty much every game I've ever played. If that's what she meant to do, that's fine, but then the talk should have been titled "MMORPGs and Enhanced Reality Can Make A Better World," not "Gaming Can Make A Better World." Maybe this is a lack of my transfer skills, but I'm having a hard time applying her hypothesis to how tabletop roleplaying games (such as Dungeons and Dragons), board games (of all sorts, including those along the lines of checkers, Parcheesi, Settlers of Catan, and Arkham Horror), arcade games (such as PacMan or Bejeweled), casual video games (such as Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Super Smash Brothers), and live-action role playing games (such as Swarthmore's annual Pterodactyl Hunt) can save the world. Secondly, I'm not even sure if her hypothesis, even applied only to MMORPGs and enhanced reality games, hangs together. I'm still not quite sure how her model really applies the competencies she claims gaming develops to the real world. Thirdly, she uncritically cited Herodotus in her argument as a historical source. As a classicist, anyone who uses the Father of Lies like that automatically loses a bit of my respect.
two: On Transfer Learning
I found the discussion in How People Learn about how people do things differently in academic vs non-academic contexts really interesting. I would have assumed that being able to do math in a supermarket or selling things on the street would have automatically translated into being able to do the same sort of thing in an academic setting, but apparently it isn't that automatic. But then I think to how I multiply numbers in my head, which generally involves things like factoring numbers and recombining them to get numbers I can keep straight in my head, and it makes a bit more sense. If I were multiplying the numbers on paper, I would go about the problem in a totally different way, by multiplying across by place values and adding the results of each pass. It isn't so surprising after all that someone who's been navigating the supermarket by doing mental math tricks is going to have difficulty applying that knowledge to the more formal mathematics involved in schools. And other subjects mutatis mutandis. I think that keeping in mind this issue of transfer is important for librarians. We've all gone through formal schooling with at least some modicum of success, which means that a large portion of how we go to think is founded on that more formal kind of learning. But many of the patrons we're going to be serving are working from the more everyday, hands-on kind of knowledge. Keeping this distinction in mind can help us in instruction, and drawing connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.
three: On High School Curricula
I can't help feeling that one reason why teachers don't use lessons like the one for teaching about central tendency described in the Wiggins and McTighe article is because they feel like they'd take so long. Going through all the steps in their lesson plan looks like it would take several days, especially in a high school where teachers may only have 45 minutes a day with each class. In contrast, the traditional plan for teaching mean, median, and mode could get covered in two days at the very most. When you have a list a mile long of things you're supposed to do before the end of the year (or even scarier, before the state standardized exams in the spring), are you going to go with the more in-depth teaching for understanding approach, even through it's going to take longer, or are you going to go for covering as much as possible as fast as possible, even if not everyone understands it as well? Unless we can either retrofit the high-stakes tests to test for understanding (or get rid of them altogether) or ensure and convince teachers and administrators that teaching for understanding will lead students to perform as well or better on these tests, I have a feeling that Door 2 is going to be the most popular option.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Week Four Response
one: props to the folks whose screencasts we watched in class. They were both really professional and did a good job of explaining how to use the tool they were about and making it seem friendly at the same time.
two: on the word "use" -- the reason it's so difficult to come up with a definition of "information literacy" that does not include the word "use" is that it's the most common word in the English language to describe the action/process of taking something and doing something with it for a purpose. So yes, it's an incredibly vague word, but that's how languages tend to work a lot of the time -- common words have a wide range of meaning, determined by the context of where they were used. If you want an great example, take a look at the entry for "ago" in a good Latin dictionary sometime. The entry's at least a full column long.
three: I know all the reasons why peer reviewing (in the sense of looking at them in class, etc, not in the sense of peer-reviewed academic journals) papers is such a good idea. I know that it's good to practice your critique skills on real documents written by people at roughly your level, that reviewing other people's work helps you to improve your own, that it helps reduce teachers' work loads, every reason in the book, but the fact is, I absolutely hate having to look at and comment on other people's work. I never know what to say unless the work in question is really bad, and then I get in trouble for tearing it to bits. I also never seem to get useful feedback from when other people peer review my papers, so the entire process feels like a waste of energy. That's not to say that I've never gotten useful help from friends on my assignments, but it seems to work better if I go to a particular person for help with a particular issue, or even ask a particular one of my friends what they think of something that I've been working on, rather than the "everyone pass your papers to the person on the right" model that I tend to associate with formal peer reviewing in classrooms. I thought that one point that Sadler made was really true -- that it's really hard to say anything about something unexceptional. But for peer review (or anything really), for some reason it's not okay to say, "It was okay. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not going to win a Pulitzer. But it's solid and competent." Why does everything we do have to be outstanding? What's wrong with doing a competent, workman-like job?
four: on connecting teaching/learning with the real world: There needs to be a better way of connecting science-for-school and math-for-school with science-for-real and math-for-real (especially the math, since the disconnect seems to be almost total). I will admit that my experience with science-for-real and math-for-real has been rather limited and second-hand, but it seems to me that there's no connection between science and math as they are taught high-school and lower and what real live scientists and mathematicians do. Science-for-real isn't about memorizing a bazillion factoids, and math-for-real isn't about doing pages and pages of exercises. It's tricky, because to get to what real live scientists and mathematicians do you do need that general background of knowledge, but there's also very little understanding going on about what science-for-real and especially math-for-real even are. I had no idea until I got to college and started hanging out with people taking upper-level math that math was really about ideas and concepts, and that it was possible to be creative and make new discoveries in math, and that there was more to math than pages of cut-and-dried exercises that just got more complicated the further along you got. Maybe I'm trying to argue that upper and lower level math need to be integrated (no pun intended) more, instead of existing as almost completely different domains. But then I think, does everyone need to be able to do upper level math, or should we settle for just everyone being able to balance a checkbook?
two: on the word "use" -- the reason it's so difficult to come up with a definition of "information literacy" that does not include the word "use" is that it's the most common word in the English language to describe the action/process of taking something and doing something with it for a purpose. So yes, it's an incredibly vague word, but that's how languages tend to work a lot of the time -- common words have a wide range of meaning, determined by the context of where they were used. If you want an great example, take a look at the entry for "ago" in a good Latin dictionary sometime. The entry's at least a full column long.
three: I know all the reasons why peer reviewing (in the sense of looking at them in class, etc, not in the sense of peer-reviewed academic journals) papers is such a good idea. I know that it's good to practice your critique skills on real documents written by people at roughly your level, that reviewing other people's work helps you to improve your own, that it helps reduce teachers' work loads, every reason in the book, but the fact is, I absolutely hate having to look at and comment on other people's work. I never know what to say unless the work in question is really bad, and then I get in trouble for tearing it to bits. I also never seem to get useful feedback from when other people peer review my papers, so the entire process feels like a waste of energy. That's not to say that I've never gotten useful help from friends on my assignments, but it seems to work better if I go to a particular person for help with a particular issue, or even ask a particular one of my friends what they think of something that I've been working on, rather than the "everyone pass your papers to the person on the right" model that I tend to associate with formal peer reviewing in classrooms. I thought that one point that Sadler made was really true -- that it's really hard to say anything about something unexceptional. But for peer review (or anything really), for some reason it's not okay to say, "It was okay. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not going to win a Pulitzer. But it's solid and competent." Why does everything we do have to be outstanding? What's wrong with doing a competent, workman-like job?
four: on connecting teaching/learning with the real world: There needs to be a better way of connecting science-for-school and math-for-school with science-for-real and math-for-real (especially the math, since the disconnect seems to be almost total). I will admit that my experience with science-for-real and math-for-real has been rather limited and second-hand, but it seems to me that there's no connection between science and math as they are taught high-school and lower and what real live scientists and mathematicians do. Science-for-real isn't about memorizing a bazillion factoids, and math-for-real isn't about doing pages and pages of exercises. It's tricky, because to get to what real live scientists and mathematicians do you do need that general background of knowledge, but there's also very little understanding going on about what science-for-real and especially math-for-real even are. I had no idea until I got to college and started hanging out with people taking upper-level math that math was really about ideas and concepts, and that it was possible to be creative and make new discoveries in math, and that there was more to math than pages of cut-and-dried exercises that just got more complicated the further along you got. Maybe I'm trying to argue that upper and lower level math need to be integrated (no pun intended) more, instead of existing as almost completely different domains. But then I think, does everyone need to be able to do upper level math, or should we settle for just everyone being able to balance a checkbook?
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