Rare is the time when all apps are up to date.

He who holds his finger too long in one place is rewarded only by the wiggling of icons.

The app is never free if it features in-app purchases.

The child does not interact with the device; the child interacts with the content. And smudges the screen with peanut butter.

Courses for preservice teachers

Problems of size and time

Education majors in their first year of study are exposed to a variety of courses designed to introduce key concepts in K-12 teaching, including the history and current state of the education system, methods of teaching, and the potential of educational technology.  These courses contain large amounts of important, foundational content to be digested, often in limited time, and – due to their early placement in programs of study and the fact that they are required of all students, regardless of intended specialty – are frequently are marked by large enrollments.  As a result, they are often taught in lecture format.  Cooper (1995) notes that such large-scale lecture courses are “not the most effective method, particularly from the viewpoint of the student;” in these courses, students are placed in passive roles that are not conducive to learning, a point particularly underscored by the foundational nature of the content being covered in these classes.

Cooperative strategies

One practical solution to the problems of course size and limited time is to employ strategies that make “large classes seem small” (Cooper & Robinson, 2000).  One such strategy, cooperative learning, had its origins in K-12 education, but evidence supports the notion that it can be effective as an instructional strategy at the college level as well (Johnson et al., 1987, in Cooper, 1995).  Cooperative learning allows students to work in pairs or small groups to learn academic material.  Studies have shown that students working in properly-facilitated cooperative situations outperform their peers who are not partnered (Leung & Chung, 1997; Slavin, 1983, 1996; Tsay & Brady 2010).  Cooperative learning has also been shown to assist in the development of classroom community (Cooper & Robinson, 2000), which itself can increase “the flow of information among all learners, the availability of support, commitment,” and attitudes toward subject matter (Cooper, 1995; Rovai, 2001).  Despite these advantages, in many instances of cooperative learning, the instructor is still responsible for the entirety of the subject matter, and may still find time a limiting factor.

Team-based learning

Team-based learning (TBL) is a specific cooperative learning strategy designed to remove these burdens from instructors and shift responsibility to learners.  TBL relies upon an “intense use of small groups … to develop and take advantage of the special capabilities of high-performance learning teams” (Fink, 2004).

Overview

In TBL environments, students become responsible for assimilating most of the course content outside of class time by interacting with instructional materials such as textbooks and other resources.  Students are typically willing to take on this responsibility so long as they are given reasons to understand why the concepts for which they are primarily responsible are important; to this end, individual work consists not only of reading and other exposure to materials, but also to increasingly complex problems of application of the materials.  This hallmark of TBL also helps elevate student outcomes to higher-level learning objectives, moving from recall to application and synthesis.  This individual work is only the foundation, though, for what occurs in class.

As students show up for each new class meeting, they interact “with their teammates during the Readiness Assurance Process” (Michaelsen, 2004).  The Readiness Assurance Process, or “RAT,” is a two-part assessment that occurs at the beginning of each unit of instruction (course meeting).  Part one of the RAT is geared towards individual accountability, and typically consists of a small number (around 20) of multiple choice questions designed to allow students to demonstrate mastery of basic content.  Once students have turned in their individual answers, each group – established at the beginning of the course based on specific criteria related to learning objectives and unchanging in membership – then collectively answers the same set of questions.  As they do so, they must discuss their reasoning and resolve any difference of opinion by allowing each member to “voice and defend their choice on every question” (Michaelson, 2004).  Both assessments – the individual responses and the overall group response – count towards students’ grades in the course, and should take a relatively small amount of time.

It is after these Readiness Assurance Tests are over that the real work of Team-Based Learning begins.  The instructor typically gives immediate feedback on the results of the RATs, and then shifts student activity towards application-oriented activities.  Just as individual learners have been practicing, outside of class, application of course content to real-world problems, teams are given in-class problems of increased sophistication to work through.  In a given course session, each team may work through several practice problems that require members of each group to take and defend positions based on experience and exposure to course content, and ultimately to synthesis distinct voices into a unified group position and solution.  After several rounds of practice, there is a whole-group review process and debriefing, and then teams may then be given a final problem the solution to which will be graded.

Technology in support of TBL

The benefits of TBL include a more effective use of course time, active learner engagement with content; higher-level student outcomes, and more positive student opinions about courses and course content.(Michaelsen , 2004; Yost, 2007; Tsay & Brady, 2010).  But these benefits also come at a price: instructors wishing to implement TBL must dramatically redesign courses and shift their own roles so that they act as facilitators.  There is no workaround for these commitments.  Still, TBL provides some challenges that may be ameliorated, and among these are the isolated nature of student work outside of class; the class time required to assess RAT responses and provide feedback; and the nature of how groups are expected to share their responses.

The appropriate integration of instructional technology can address these issues.  Students working independently outside of class, for instance, can still be connected to their peers and the instructor through careful employment of communications tools – including email, of course, but also encompassing social media platforms such as Twitter and videoconferencing software such as iChat, Facetime, or Skype.  These tools may, in fact, further enhance the sense of classroom community that TBL fosters.

Technology may also allow instructors to claim back even more classroom time for TBL activities.  Through the use of audience response systems, for instance, the Readiness Assurance Tests can be completed, scored, and given feedback much more quickly than with traditional methods that involve using and collecting paper-based forms.  Descriptive data about responses can also be immediately shared with the entire group, allowing instructors to provide better feedback to dispel misconceptions or correct errors.

Group communication can also be enhanced using technology.  Group sharing in TBL is done orally in class, and as a result, there is little record of group “products” as teams work to solve complex problems.  Using digital video and audio capture, instructors can create online repositories of archived TBL sessions, which can be useful as study aids for students, as the basis for instructor work on improving the TBL process, and as demonstrations of effective TBL techniques.

Bibliography

Cooper, J. L., & Robinson, P. (2000). The argument for making large classes seem small. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2000(81), 5-16.

Cooper, M. M. (1995). Cooperative learning: An approach for large enrollment courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 72(2), 162.

Fink, L. D. (2004). Beyond small groups: Harnessing the extraordinary powers of learning teams. In L. K. Michaelsen, A. B. Knight, & L. D. Fink (Eds.), Team-Based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, Inc.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., Smith, K.A. Learning together and alone: cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning.  Holt, Rinehard, and Winston: New York, 1987

Leung, C. D., & Chung, C. (1997). Student achievement in an educational technology course as enhanced by cooperative learning. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 6(4), 337-343.

Michaelsen, L. K. (2004). Getting started with team-based learning. In L. K. Michaelsen, A. B. Knight, & L. D. Fink (Eds.), Team-Based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, Inc.

Rovai, A. P. (2001). Building classroom community at a distance: A case study. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49(4), 33-48.

Slavin, R. E. (1983). When does cooperative learning increase student achievement? Psychological Bulletin, 94(3), 429-445.

Slavin, R. E. (1996). Research on cooperative learning and achievement: What we know, what we need to know. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21, 43-69.

Tsay, M., & Brady, M. (2010). A case study of cooperative learning and communication pedagogy: Does working in teams make a difference? Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(2), 12.

Yost, S. A., & Lane, D. R. (2007). Implementing a problem-based multi-disciplinary civil engineering design capstone: Evolution, assessment, and lessons learned with industry partners. In American society for engineering education southeastern section annual conference, Louisville, KY.

The Apple II had a keyboard that can only be described as satisfying. I loved the way the keys felt under my fingers —— the resistance as I pressed down and the chunky click as they finally gave way —— and I still have the muscle memory in my hands that reminds me of the experience. It was 1983, I was at my cousin Mark’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I was playing Mystery House on his Mark’s computer, enjoying every minute of the brief turn I got to sit at the computer and type instead of yelling out excited suggestions for our next move.

When I returned home to Virginia, my coveting began in earnest. I looked at my Atari 800XL computer and its glacial cassette tape drive, and tried to convince myself that waiting half an hour to play a game of Blue Max was every bit as cool as using Mark’s floppy disk drive to boot up HMS Impetuous, The Oregon Trail, or any of the other games we played until the early hours of the morning.

When Macintosh came out in 1984, I knew I needed one. I never got a Mac proper, but when Santa gave me an Apple //c for Christmas, I was in heaven. I ended up with two floppy drives, an Imagewriter II printer, a KoalaPad graphics tablet, an Apple II joystick, and countless games. I spent nights and weekends in front of that computer, and just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to spend any more of my time using it, I got an Apple Personal Modem 300. Once I’d discovered Bulletin Board Systems like Tidewater Virginia’s Apple Crate BBS, I pretty much cemented the possibility that my middle and high school years would be girl-free¹.

There was something special about using that computer. Or, rather, a series of somethings special that integrated into a holistic experience the end result of which is that I enjoyed using the computer for the sake of using the computer, regardless of what I was doing with it. This was a truism that I again became cognizant of many years later when working in OS X for the first time.

By the late 1980s, I’d written more papers on that computer than I care to consider, watching each page print out in dot-matrixy glory at a blazingly fast two pages per minute. When I packed for my first year of college, the Apple //c came with me, by then over half a decade old, but comfortable, useful, and somehow almost a part of my identity.

If that sounds silly, it might be that you’ve never owned an Apple product. That little Apple //c found a place in my identity. It was a daily part of my life, and one that helped me in the aspects of my life that were important at the time, from work to play, and I grew accustomed to it. The same can be said for all the subsequent Apple hardware and software I’ve ever bought —² — the iPods; the Powerbooks, iBooks, MacBook Pros, and iMacs; the iPhones; the iPads —— they’ve all been regular parts of my day that let me do or experience something I wanted to, and they did so in a way that was enjoyable, intuitive, stress-free, reliable, and beautiful.

This week, when the news broke that Steve Jobs had died after a years-long struggle with pancreatic cancer, many seemed surprised that makeshift memorials were being created at Apple stores around the world. People left flowers and floppy disks on the ground and placed Post-It notes on the windows. Commentators noted that Steve Jobs’ death evoked that of a celebrity in the true grief it seemed to exact from the public.

It’s unsurprising, though, if you’ve had the same kinds of experiences I’ve had — those daily interactions with gorgeous and usable products that manipulate how we experience the world in such a way that we can’t ever imagine going back to how things were before. Steve Jobs, more than anyone else, was directly responsible for those interactions and their sum total, and therefore the new ways we view the world and experience it. Steve Jobs had a direct and sizable impact on the lives of anyone who used Apple products more than just passingly, and his absence is something that makes us wonder if we’ll ever have similar experiences again.

I don’t think we’re afraid of a world without Steve Jobs. I think we’re afraid that our view of that world will never again be changed like it was, once.

---

¹ Somehow, my wonderful wife saw through the layers of Total Nerd.
² Honey, if you’re reading this, please don’t do the math to figure out how much all that stuff has cost.

For years, I’d wanted to keep track of what I was reading. My dream was to reach the end of the year and have a way to review, at a glance, every book I’d gone through in the past 12 months. I tried to do this several ways over several years: paper journals, spreadsheets, Google Docs, and even a home-brewed online database and form – but I never seemed quite able to keep up with it.

Then I found Goodreads. At its most basic, Goodreads lets you “keep track of what you’ve read and organize your books into virtual bookshelves.” Whenever you start a new book, you can easily add it to your inventory by title, author, or even ISBN code. By default, it goes onto your “Currently Reading” shelf, but you can add it to additional shelves as well – for example, science, fiction, biography, and so on. As you read, you can update your progress by entering the page number you’re currently on (or the percentage of the book you’ve completed), and when you’re finished, you can rate the book and write a review.

These features alone would be sufficient for what I was looking for, but Goodreads makes itself even more useful by adding a social aspect to its offerings. You can follow other Goodreads users and have their updates, reviews, and ratings show up on your main page (like a Twitter feed). You can send private messages to other users, recommend books to them, and add the books they’ve read to your shelves (I’ve found the to read shelf very useful for remembering books I’d like to eventually read.

Goodreads addresses my desire to track my reading. The second site I’m discussing in this post adds value to books after they’ve been read.

If you’re like me, you hang on to books after you’re done with them, even if you know you’ll never pick them up again. For those books, I’ve turned to Paperbackswap, which – as the name implies – allows you to trade books you’re done with for books that are new to you.

When you first join Paperbackswap (it’s free), you’re asked to add books to your personal inventory. By entering the ISBN of books you own but are willing to trade, you allow other users to browse your collection and request books from you. When you add your first ten books, you receive one “credit,” which is good for selecting any book in any other user’s collection. Once you’ve selected a book, the user will mail it to you at no charge to you.

The other side of the deal, of course, is that you agree to send books to other users who request them. This is typically done through USPS Media Mail service, which costs under $3 for a typical paperback. Paperbackswap lets you print postage straight from the website, and you can mail the books from your own home.

Over the past six months, I’ve posted about three dozen books and mailed about fifteen. I’ve also selected and received about twenty books – from popular fiction to children’s stories to older books that I’d been looking for for a while.

If you’re inclined to check these sites out, please feel free to add me as a friend on both – and let me know what you think of them.

Here’s how to find me: On Goodreads On Paperbackswap

Here’s an interesting infographic on the current state (2011) of the “Digital Divide,” the gap between those who have access to information technology and those who don’t. In a radio essay earlier this year, I argued that educators must begin to revisit considerations of the Digital Divide in the current age of social media.

more