Teaching Naked E-Book

José Antonio Bowen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

You've heard about "flipping your classroom"—now find out how to do it! Introducing a new way to think about higher education, learning, and technology that prioritizes the benefits of the human dimension. José Bowen recognizes that technology is profoundly changing education and that if students are going to continue to pay enormous sums for campus classes, colleges will need to provide more than what can be found online and maximize "naked" face-to-face contact with faculty. Here, he illustrates how technology is most powerfully used outside the classroom, and, when used effectively, how it can ensure that students arrive to class more prepared for meaningful interaction with faculty. Bowen offers practical advice for faculty and administrators on how to engage students with new technology while restructuring classes into more active learning environments.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

About the Author

Part I: The New Digital Landscape

Chapter 1: The Flat Classroom and Global Competition

The Ubiquity of E-learning

The Inevitability of Competition

Higher Education Online

Learning or Credentials?

A Pricing Structure that Will Not Survive

Creating Value

Education in the New Global Marketplace

Chapter 2: Social Proximity and the Virtual Classroom

Virtual Communities

Embracing E-Communications

Facebook

Twitter

Skype

The Virtual Classroom

Economic and Curricular Implications

Chapter 3: Games, Customization, and Learning

Customization

Customization and Education

Customizing Learning with Games

Customizing Information with Apps

Customizing Education with Games and Apps

Part II: Designing 21st-Century Courses

Chapter 4: Designing College More Like a Video Game

Brain Development

Models of Intellectual Development

Models for Designing Educational Experiences

Contexts for Learning

Motivating Change with High Standards and Low Stakes

Integrated Course Design

Chapter 5: Technology for Information Delivery

Creating Class Time with E-Communication

E-mail as a Teaching Technique

Technology for First Exposure

Podcasts are Better than Lectures

Existing Podcasts and Video

Make Your Own Podcasts

Learning Modules

Advance Preparation as a Learning Strategy

Chapter 6: Technology for Engagement

Technology for Student Motivation

Technology for Application and Integration

Technology for Community

Technology for Information Literacy

Chapter 7: Technology for Assessment

Multiple-Choice Tests Before Class

Just-in-Time Teaching

Writing

Peer Feedback on Writing

Games for Assessment

Rethinking the Test: Authority and Collaboration

Aligning Classroom Activities and Assessment

Chapter 8: The Naked Classroom

The Place of Lecture

Active Learning for Classroom Engagement

Structuring Good Discussion

The Lab and the Studio

High-Impact Student–Faculty Interaction

Leveraging Personal Technology in the Classroom

The Classroom as a Stimulating Learning Environment

Part III: Strategies for Universities of the Future

Chapter 9: The Educational Product in the Internet Age

Music Delivery Before the Internet

The Internet Transformation in Books and Journalism

Lesson 1: The Product Can Change

Lesson 2: Customization and Social Isolation Will Increase

Lesson 3: More Choices Create New Gatekeepers

Our Product is an Experience

Our Product is Local

Our Product is a Hybrid

Our Product is Unique

Finding the Right Hybrid

Chapter 10: The Naked Curriculum

Turn Professors into Curators

Rethink the Units of Learning

Improve Curricular Progression

The Naked Curriculum

Chapter 11: The Naked Campus

Integrate Your Infrastructure

Reconsider Price Discounting

Create Learning-Based Pricing

Specialize: Identify Your Market and Serve It

Become a Curator of Risk

Integrate Learning

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowen, José Antonio.

Teaching naked: how moving technology out of your college classroom will improve student learning / José Bowen. — First edition.

pages cm. — (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-11035-5; ISBN 978-1-118-22428-1 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-23808-0 (epub); ISBN 978-1-118-26240-5 (mobipocket)

1. Educational technology. 2. Education—Effect of technological innovations on. 3. School improvement programs. 4. Blended learning. I. Title.

LB1028.3+

371.33—dc23

2012016814

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

Preface

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Abraham Lincoln

The future of higher education is deeply intertwined with new technologies. Technology has changed students and professors, how we access knowledge, the nature of community, the habits of learning, our understanding of patience, and virtually everything about education. It has also created an expanding global market for online learning that will continue to increase in quality, efficiency, and flexibility. Considering these changes, the value of a bricks-and-mortar university will remain in its face-to-face (i.e., naked) interaction between faculty and students. As the traditional model of college is challenged by changes in demographics and college preparation, for-profit institutions, hybrid class schedules with night and weekend meetings, free online learning, and even free certificates from the best traditional brands, it is widely predicted that there will be fewer students enrolled in expensive, inflexible, full-time, four-year degrees (Van Der Werf & Sabatier, 2009). If we want campus education to survive, then we need to focus on the experience of direct physical interaction in higher education and make it worth the extra money it will always cost to deliver.

We know from Alexander Astin’s What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited (1993) that student engagement and faculty–student interaction matter most in student learning. At the heart of Teaching Naked is the seeming paradox that technology can be harnessed to enhance the widely desired goals of increased student engagement and faculty–student interaction but that it is most powerfully used outside of class as a way to increase naked, nontechnological interaction with students inside the classroom. This book addresses the why and how of this paradox and provides specific guidance for faculty and administrators on how to leverage both technology and face-to-face classes to improve student learning and ensure the survival of the bricks-and-mortar university. Thus, the aim of this book is to connect the practical questions of immediate interest to professors with the larger managerial and policy challenges facing administrators.

The Tyranny of Common Sense

Abraham Lincoln argued against the tyranny of common sense, the invisible belief system that limits our imagination by mandating obvious and singular ways to do things. It is their “commonness” that makes these assumptions and attitudes transparent and therefore so dangerous.

Common sense tells academics that our students are learning because of what we do in the classroom. But it is a common misconception that everything that successful people do contributes to their success. A teacher might be successful because he is excellent at explaining complex problems in a simple manner, but after a few teaching awards it is easy to start believing that the soft voice and the no-late-work policy also contribute to his success, when in fact changing both of those tactics might make him even better. Since common sense tells him that he deserves his success, it is hard to convince him to change. Similarly, American education has been incredibly successful, but not everything we do has contributed to that success.

We were all taught with lectures, and we all give them despite a mountain of evidence showing that they are poor transmitters of content and even worse tools for learning. When our students learn, we attribute their learning to our current methods. We persist because common sense tells us that lecturing is working. But any analysis of how we might improve student learning has to start with the dissection of everything we currently do.

In America, for example, there is a deeply held assumption about modularity in the liberal arts. We believe that the order in which students take courses is only slightly important. We encourage students to take a majority of their general education courses in the first two years, but in reality we routinely mix seniors and freshmen in the same course and then do not expect more from the seniors in our grading. For the British, and most other academics around the world, this “common-sense” approach is nonsense that can only be justified by some economic necessity. A sequential curriculum is routine in most other countries: first-year students must master rudimentary skills before they move on to higher levels of thinking and analysis. Americans can see the logic of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956, rev. Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) that progresses from remembering and understanding to applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating; even so, most American general education curricula are structured around content and continue to allow students to acquire that content in almost any order. Most college major curricula contain a modicum of progression, with “gateway” and “capstone” courses. However, few American institutions expect or assess integration of learning outcomes between general education and the major, so we have no idea if our modular curriculum structure is working or is just an old form of “common sense.”

We believe that a liberal arts education works, but there is little evidence to support this contention and lots of evidence that we could be doing better. In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa (2011) conclude that the first three semesters of a college education have “a barely noticeable impact on students’ skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” (p. 35). Of 2,300 students at 24 institutions, 45% showed no statistically significant improvement in these skills during the first year and a half of college. The Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education led by Charles Blaich confirms that while a majority of students show moderate improvement in some thinking skills, more than a third demonstrate a decline in these same areas. The majority of seniors actually graduate with less academic motivation and openness to diversity than when they started (Blaich & Wise, 2011).

We won’t really know what works and how to do better until we embrace a culture of integrated assessment. Everyone in higher education is aware of the pressures for assessment. Like all human beings, faculty do not like being told what to do, especially by people from other professions who do not really understand the nuances of what faculty do. Nevertheless, until we embrace a culture of assessment, we will not know if anything we are doing is working.

Improving student learning requires articulating learning outcomes, collecting data, and embracing a feedback loop that uses results to inform change. Blaich and Wise (2011) also found that of the 19 institutions that participated in the initial 2006 Wabash study, nearly 40% had not communicated the findings to their campuses by 2011 and only 25% had tried to make any improvements as a result. Another characteristic of common sense (and a difficulty implicit in any significant learning) is that, when we are confronted with new data or ideas that might fundamentally challenge our core beliefs, if we can make no sense of them, we ignore them; if we have only round holes, we simply abandon the square pegs.

One challenge to common sense is to reconsider how and where to best use technology. I’ve chosen to focus on technology for four reasons. First, it is obvious and unstoppable. Our students arrive with laptops and iPads and want to know how they will be used in their education. No one would move to Spain and expect to teach only in English; we need to understand the language, habits, and assumptions of our students. Second, technology is driving the new global market; higher education’s competition is now a flat screen. Third, technology has radically altered the availability of knowledge and thus changes the content delivery part of what universities were created to do. Our response should be to focus on core liberal arts skills—critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—but we need to understand how the importance and application of these skills are enhanced by changes in technology. Fourth, technology has shifted the nature of the classroom. Learning now happens in more mobile, customized, and varied ways. We need to consider how we can advance student learning by thinking equally about learning environments inside and outside the classroom.

Dual Audiences

This book is written for dual audiences—higher education faculty and administrators—with the dual purpose of illuminating both the why and the how of our technological and pedagogical future. It is crucial that both teachers and the administrators who support them understand the changes that technology is bringing and what practical steps are necessary to prepare.

Faculty need strategies for integrating technology. Therefore, this book contains practical resources and ideas for motivating students to engage with course content outside of class, thereby expanding the quantity and quality of interaction in class. Faculty will find many examples of “implementation,” from expanding your repertoire of technological tools with Twitter and podcasts to using technology to facilitate more traditional pedagogies such as writing and active learning and even to make office hours easier.

Technology, however, is a means to an end. Technology is a technique, not a strategy. Strategies for learning have been the subject of exhaustive research, and new technology will not (at least not immediately) alter the way brains function and human beings learn. My goal, therefore, is to show how new technologies can support and enhance best practices in pedagogy. The principles of course design will not change, but technology creates many new ways to motivate student interaction with content and gives both students and faculty more control over the sequence of interactions.

Administrators who support faculty will find discussions of policy and administrative challenges resulting from the increasing quality and decreasing cost of online education. Increasing the value of bricks-and-mortar education will require more investment in student and faculty technology, different schedules and sizes of rooms, alternative pricing structures, new classroom furniture, and perhaps different definitions of faculty work and even different sorts of teachers.

Faculty are a heterogeneous group with a wide variety of talents; using this variety requires a flexible administration. Faculty who are comfortable with technology will find ideas for moving that technology out of the classroom or using it to increase interaction with students. Other faculty have been teaching naked all along but perhaps without knowing how to use technology to help students engage with content outside of the classroom. For both sets of faculty, this book will provide new ways to enhance current strategies. Not every faculty member will willingly embrace technology, but adopting such a position will make engaging 21st-century students increasing difficult. There are also many easy points of entry to this new world.

A wide array of new technology is available—some of it easy for faculty and cheap for administrators but others requiring more time, expertise, and money. I will emphasize the easiest and cheapest options for engaging students through technology first, but the point of this book is to make faculty and administrators aware of the range of available choices so they can select a practical mix that is appropriate for their situation, always keeping in mind that the goal is to enhance learning. Both faculty and administrators need to understand the arguments for and against using new technologies and the practical implications of going ahead or doing nothing.

Outline and Structure

Part One describes the new digital landscape in three chapters outlining the major changes—in technology and in students—with significant implications for education. Chapter One describes how the explosion of e-learning options is altering the marketplace for higher education. In Chapter Two, it becomes clear that today’s college students consider physical proximity unnecessary for social networking, enjoyment (even sex), and, most importantly for our purposes, learning. Chapter Three describes how, with their ability to customize the challenge for the user, games have become the model learning environment and can teach us a great deal about the importance of customization in course design.

Part Two, the pedagogical heart of the book, contains five chapters that guide faculty through the design of courses that use technology outside of class to prepare students for face-to-face classroom interaction. Our most precious (and expensive) asset is student-faculty interaction, and “naked” pedagogy is an attempt to use technology in a new way to maximize deep learning. Chapter Four summarizes current research in the brain, learning, and course design and demonstrates that the courses with the most long-term effect create a sequence of learning experiences, involving both technology and classroom interaction, that changes the way students think. Chapter Five suggests practical ways to use the multiple formats and vast knowledge available on the Internet to replace the lecture as a point of first contact with course material. Chapter Six then discusses how to use e-communication and social networks to engage students with new assignments and constant learning. Chapter Seven makes the case that rethinking the processes and nature of assessment not only frees up class time but also motivates preparation for more transformative learning in class. With prepared students, Chapter Eight demonstrates how we can make our naked classrooms into interactive exploration spaces. The focus of Part Two is on practical advice for making both the online and live classroom experiences richer and better for all students.

Part Three turns to the institutional changes necessary to support these new course designs and to ensure that there is enough learning at our physical institutions to guarantee their survival against newer and more innovative competition. In Chapter Nine, the lessons of other intellectual property industries (music, books, and journalism) provide a framework for thinking about how technology may change not only the delivery of your product but also its very nature. The focus in Chapter Ten is on faculty, curriculum, and how we can motivate more innovation and more learning. Chapter Eleven considers the campus infrastructure: What is the difference between the product and the packaging for a university? How can face-to-face education be made worth its additional cost? What are the implications of naked teaching for the design and allocation of space and schedules?

Our product is learning, but its context has changed. Before the Internet, when knowledge was both rare and localized, universities could change lives simply by opening the doors of knowledge. Now that information is free and always available on students’ phones, they need thinking and analytical skills more than ever. To survive in the digital world, universities will need to convince students and parents of three things: (1) learning takes place when students and faculty interact in classrooms; (2) this learning is different from the learning that happens when you learn on your phone; and (3) this learning is worth the massive expense of a face-to-face education. Technology makes it possible to improve learning in classrooms, but it is most effective when it is designed into out-of-class experiences and removed from classrooms. This book presents a new way to think about the relationships among higher education, learning, and technology.

Acknowledgments

Like most faculty, I have not been trained in pedagogy. I am, therefore, extremely grateful to all of my friends and colleagues who have supported my learning curve in a new field. Within my discipline, I’ve received tremendous support from the Musicology Pedagogy Study Group of the American Musicology Society (AMS), which has finally brought pedagogy to the table in our national society. Matt Baumer, Matthew Balensuela, Jocylen Neal, Jessie Fillerup, Mary Natvig, Mark Clague, and the rest of my AMS colleagues have taught me a great deal about teaching. Chapters Four and Six adapt some of the material from Bowen (2011), which Jessie especially encouraged me to write.

At Stanford University and the University of Southampton (England), I had chairs, friends, teachers, and colleagues who were ideal role models and also supported my teaching experimentation. At Georgetown University, I met Randy Bass, who introduced me to a real scholarship of pedagogy and who also supported the development of new technology in my teaching. I also had fantastic classroom role models and amazing teachers in Patrick Warfield, Anthony del Donna, and Robynn Stilwell. At Miami University I met Glenn Platt, who introduced me to the “inverted classroom,” and Britt Carr, who, along with his wonderful team of visionary course designers and technology people, transformed my teaching. They helped me design and execute my first learning games in 2003.

At Southern Methodist University (SMU), I have been well supported by a dedicated team of technology folks including Jason Warner, David Sedman, Brad Boeke, Steve Snider, and Ian Aberle. I am grateful for comments on the early drafts or outlines from Tony Cortese, Laurie Campbell, Abby Bartoshesky, and David Chard. More SMU colleagues, Patty Alvey, Karen Drennan, Andrew Kaufmann, Marty Sweidel, Kris Vetter, and Deanna Johnson, either read sections, fed me ideas, considered tag lines, or provided support in the office. Thanks also to Afomia Hallemeskel, who alphabetized and checked the formatting of the bibliography (without the aid of advanced technology), and the other students who did support work.

David Brightman has been an amazingly supportive and thoughtful publisher who has shaped my thinking about this project. Judith Miller has been the ideal editor: responsive, thoughtful, knowledgeable, insightful, and patient. This book would be something very different without both of them.

Thank you to everyone who helped and encouraged me. I am deeply grateful to colleagues from all over the country who told me they were already teaching naked or helped me learn something new. Thank you to all of the course designers or directors of learning centers, like Lynn Jones Eaton, Rhonda Blackburn, Ben Wu, Suzanne Tapp, Jacki Thomas, Linda Roesch, and Harry Meeuwsen and many others, who were willing to teach me and allow me to learn with (i.e., experiment on) your faculty. My new pedagogy colleagues have also been very generous in putting up with my many questions: thanks to Ken Bain, Peggy Cohen, Catherine Wehlburg, Eric Booth, and especially James Rhem, who was willing to publish the initial “Teaching Naked” article (Bowen, 2006) when no one else would.

My college friend Kraig Robson has been generous beyond measure, keeping me going, reading chapters, and even building a website but mostly by being a challenging thinker and being willing to talk and think about hard problems. The suggestions and support from everyone were wonderful, but the errors and mistakes that remain are mine alone. I am also extremely grateful for all of the women in my life who put up with several long stretches of the same sweatshirt (you know the one), especially over the holidays. My very deep apologies and gratitude to Naomi, Kimberly, Molly, Daisy, Katie, Chloe, Tosca, and even Latte (our kitty-dog).

About the Author

José Antonio Bowen is Algur H. Meadows Chair and dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Bowen has taught at Stanford, Georgetown, Miami Universities, and the University of Southampton, England.

He has written over 100 scholarly articles, edited the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, and contributed to Discover Jazz (Pearson, 2011). He is an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011).

He has appeared in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. He has written a symphony (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), a film score, and music for Hubert Laws, Jerry Garcia, and many others.

He is currently on the editorial board for Jazz Research Journal, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and Per Musi: Revista Acadêmica de Música. He is a founding board member of the National Recording Preservation Board for the Library of Congress and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in England.

Bowen has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, USA Today, US News & World Report, and on NPR.

Bowen has also been a pioneer in active learning and the use of technology in higher education, including podcasts and online games <http://www.josebowen.com>, and has been honored by students and colleagues for his teaching at SMU, Miami, Georgetown and at Stanford, where he won a Centennial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1990.

Part I

The New Digital Landscape

Chapter 1

The Flat Classroom and Global Competition

The new classroom is a flat screen. The leading edge of a transformation in learning through technology can be seen in corporate learning, military training, distance learning, K–12 education, and a plethora of medical, legal, governmental, and other certifications. In 2009, 29.3% of college students were taking at least one online course, up from 21.6% in fall 2007 (Allen & Seaman, 2010). New technology offers new learning environments, expanded potential for environmental and social good, and economies of scale. E-learning is the experience and expectation of our entering students, and it will continue to compete with traditional universities for eyeballs as well as dollars.

At the same time, higher education remains one of the few industries where the price, even though increasingly out of range for many consumers, fails to cover the true cost of delivering the product. A new for-profit sector has removed much of the “overhead” of traditional universities, and is delivering learning more cheaply. In higher education, the pricing gap between cheap and expensive products is colossal, yet there is little evidence that the price difference even remotely reflects the quality of learning. While a handful of elite universities will remain able to charge elite prices because of their brand equity, history, alumni networks, high demand, and limited supply, the vast majority of American universities are about to face a perfect storm of new global technological competition that will put even more pressure and scrutiny on tuition prices. In a reversal of recent trends, a likely outcome is a reduction in both what it costs to deliver a quality education and what people are willing to pay.