Unfortunately, I could not make it to the morning sessions at TLT this past Saturday. The sessions that I attended in the afternoon made me feel like, perhaps, I missed out on some of the more interesting presentations. Below are the sessions that I attended:
Effective Use of Twitter in Academia? Believe it!
Games and Gamification: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Animated Flying Electrons: Using Time-Lapse Videos to Explain Oxidation and Reduction in Chemical Reactions
Planning for the Class of 2020 and Beyond
I only briefly attended the Twitter session, as I was kind of bored with their introduction. I left and went to the Games and Gamification session, unfortunately missing their introduction, consequently. From what I gathered from the amount that I saw, the professors involved were using games of chance and voting within the classroom to encourage students to participate in activities. I saw that Phil was in this session, as well, so he might be able to explain to me the context of the classroom that used voting to determine article publishing popularity. I think that this professor had students vote on weekly, student-published articles. Those that got the most number of votes won for the week and were awarded some sort of prize. I did not catch what this professor used for prizes, but she stressed that it was not related to grades. Voting, was also voluntary for students.
In reaction to this session, I was kind of unsure about some of the comments this professor made about gamification. It seemed to me that she looked at it as a way to manipulate the students into doing what she wanted. Again, maybe Phil remembers some of the comments that she made, but they rubbed me the wrong way. In addition, I see many complications that could arise from attaching prizes and rewards to blogging and voting. People could cheat, or game the system, voting for popularity in terms of the people they know or like, rather than the content of the material posted. Also, this could have an influence on what people post. Do they post material that has shock value and will encourage people to vote for them, or do they post material that is reflective, meaningful, and well-crafted. Will students get frustrated if they consider their posts superior or requiring more thought, and see a less thoughtful post winning? Overall, I think there are some negative effects that the professors did not consider.
Animated Flying Electrons was a presentation where a professor teamed with a curriculum designer to create visualizations to describe how oxidation and reduction occurs. The first visualization that the professor and designer created was a powerpoint animation, which was fairly well-crafted, but did not seem to be any break-through as far as visualizations go. The second visualization supposedly took three months to create! This was really baffling to me. The professor and designer created a stop-motion film of two six-hour reactions: one that was showing the reduction of copper, and one that was showing the oxidation of copper. The video was simple and well done, but I was very confused as to why it took this pair that long to construct a video that shouldn’t take longer than a day to construct. There was no dialogue in the video either. The designer concluded by explaining other contexts where time-lapse videography could be useful. There was no talk of the effect that the visualization had on student understanding!
In reflection, I couldn’t help but think that professors may not be using their students as a resource, as often as they should. In the sessions I attended, I did not see any examples of teacher-student collaboration. In the case of the chemistry stop-motion film, I think that the average student could have created the video in a much shorter time. Instead of a professor constructed video, why not have students construct their own stop-motion videos? I know that several sessions did have teacher-student collaboration components, and I would be interested to hear what examples everyone saw.
I found the panel discussion at the end of the symposium interesting. Unfortunately, it seemed that the Onward State representative fielded much of the questions from the audience. I also disagreed with much that the OS representative said about why Penn State has the reputation that it does, and why it is currently superior to online learning environments. There seemed to be an emphasis on the “college experience” rather than the quality of the instruction or the building of community. I was much more interested in the comments by the other student panelists and their insights from experience. Someone had mentioned during the discussion that online learning has been shown to rival our current learning system and I was saddened that I didn’t get to respond due to time limitations. I was really eager to respond that perhaps this is a sign that out current learning system is not as complex as it should be. Perhaps there isn’t the communication between professor and student, community collaboration, and identity transformation that a university of this reputation should be encouraging.
I was glad that I attended, encouraged by community dialogue during the panel discussion, but saddened by the “breakthroughs” that the sessions I attended presented.