Pedagogy for Media Assets—2
In my work I have found it challenging to locate good media assets to treat pedagogically in aid of learning (and also, alternatively, to find good content to convert into digital media assets). Some fields are more forthcoming than others. For science subjects, for example, the Web abounds with good cheap or free authoritative images, animations, and videos unencumbered by cookie captures, registration requirements, restricted access, random pornography, marketing campaigns, advertisements, pop-up contests, or monetization schemes. In contrast, unencumbered videos and graphics on business and finance subjects are harder to come by. Most are network or cable television news clips, video blogs by amateurs, student spoofs, or storefronts for commercial enterprises.
Images are plentiful online and there are good free or low cost sources. I usually first go to Google Images—Advance Search to find what I'm look for. Depending on the course subject, my personal favorites are the Library of Congress, NASA, and open source sites such as http://www.arthist.umn.edu/aict/html/. Stock photo sites with royalty-free images also can be good sources, but in many cases you must pay for the use of an image to embed it or to download a high-resolution version of it for print publication.
To direct my efforts I always ask up front if there is a photo research and/or permissions budget for the course and if the author has any photos for use, potentially, in the course. I guess I'm thinking here of the author I worked with who had a collection of slides of apes and monkeys, which I had added to the companion web site for his textbook--back in the days when web sites for textbooks were a novelty. Imagine the images, videos, audios, and animations one might assemble today for an online course on primate evolution!
Video repositories such as YouTube and Google Video have search bars, but it often takes too much time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Edutainment or infotainment can be difficult to distinguish from uncontaminated efforts to inquire, inform, or educate. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) (http://www.ted.com/) is an example of the kind of video sources I look for when developing online courses.
Animations also abound, but most gif files are clip art or expressions of popular culture. Educational animations are mainly for elementary and high school school students, although there are wonderful animations for science and medicine. See, for example, http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Physics/Education/Interactive_Animations/. Software and tutorials exist for animating images, maps, and graphics and for creating 3-D animations, but I usually recommend investing in the services of professional digital animators to support important learning objectives using original content.
Good wav and MP3 audio files also exist online, but they may have limited applicability to most textbook subjects. For a literature course I could envision using links to Librivox recordings, for example, of people reading passages from classic works. I always encourage academic authors to record audio files or tape their lectures for use in online courses. Voice recordings of key points, pronunciation guides, or glossary terms and definitions aid the learner. An audiobook is a useful addition or alternative for many students as a content delivery platform. Providing voice recordings also makes online courses accessible to students with special needs.
Embedding files may be the best option for some projects, but care must be taken to obtain permission or, for free sites, to obtain appropriate information for the credits. Citing or linking to a URL is easier and avoids permissioning issues. This is especially true for articles. I always choose sources that do not require subscription or purchase, although in some projects I have encouraged authors and publishers to license the use of articles through repositories such as EBSCO, Gale, or ProQuest.
Google Scholar has proven to be a useful source of articles and there are many other good online open source professional association, university, and government-archived articles. It typically takes me much longer to screen articles for use in a course than to pedagogize them. Articles often provide theoretical or historical or statistical background, but in most subjects the best use of articles, I find, is to provide concrete examples for teaching and learning chapter/module concepts.
There are many good online news sources as well, if you can find stable URLs for them. Ability to update and frequency of updating is an important consideration when linking to news. Some academic portals, for example for college courses on marketing, economics, archaeology, education, astronomy, etc., may benefit from having an RSS news feed targeted to the course subject.
Other than images, videos, audios, animations, articles, and feeds, online courses can have original interactive features that are pedagogically effective and use the built-in functionalities of the Web. These features will be the subject of my next blog entry.
Labels: academic writing, e-learning, e-textbooks, higher education, hyperlinks, media assets, narrative context, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, textbook
Pedagogy for Media Assets-1
A year has passed since my last post, I see. Where did the time go? I think I got side-tracked by new opportunities and another career/life-changing transformation, which I seem to undertake every 5 to 7 years (for better or worse). In my last post I promised to discuss finding media assets and endowing them with pedagogy, and this has become especially relevant for me now as I develop more online courses. I have 3 days to catch up on posting before I begin a new contract--so here goes.
First, a clarification of terms. In education, pedagogy refers to teaching, especially instructional strategies. In educational publishing, the term extends to any material that supports subject content, especially material that aids learners in discovering, acquiring, or mastering that content. The material may be on the page (in the textbook) and/or in ancillaries or supplements (in the textbook package).
Textbook pedagogy may include, for example, overviews, outlines, focus questions, headings, key terms, summaries, figures, tables, images, illustrations, cartoons, captions, summaries, review questions, applications, bibliographies, timelines, marginalia, any material especially selected to be set off from narrative text (e.g., boxes), and so on. Pedagogical material that accompanies the text in a supplement or on a web site might be questions or assignments or problem sets in a reader, workbook, or lab manual; practice tests; study guide; slides; animations; links; video; software applications, etc.
Whatever model of learning you prefer, interactivity is implicit in the concept of pedagogy, as an extension of the relationship and communication between teachers and students. I think this implicit interactivity is the principal reason that the Internet has so rapidly become the place where education takes place. The Internet is a natural fit, a true home, a global classroom for teaching and learning for the constructivist and the objectivist, and the Socratic and the didact, alike.
Publishers use the term media asset to refer to digitized text, still images, moving images, sound files, hyperlinks, and user interface capabilities (such as mouseover, drag and drop, poll, chat, email, etc.) that can function pedagogically (can teach). Thus, media assets are pedagogical devices that can be digitized and delivered electronically or online. To function as pedagogical devices, media assets must be chosen and illuminated by people with content knowledge working in an educator role. You must write the question, activity, assignment, or annotation that will transform a media asset into a learning experience or learning object.
For example, the pedagogy for a chapter in a history textbook may include maps, drawn to spec and digitized. Your map specs might include instructions for an interactive key (different colors will show the extent of successive Bantu migrations, for example) or for an animation (moving lines will show the dispersal of groups at different times). The key and animation must address or help to satisfy a learning objective for the chapter (e.g., After reading this chapter, students will identify and trace the waves of Bantu migration, explain the push-pull factors that caused the migrations, and summarize their impacts on the history of sub-Saharan Africa). The map thus appears as a static image (art) in the text and as an interactive image (media asset) on a CD or web site.
But wait! To have pedagogical value, the interactivity must mean more than just being able to learn from manipulating the object. The mind of the learner must be engaged to relate the experience to the concepts and facts expressed in the text in aid of the learning objective. How will this engagement take place? Questioning is by far the most popular pedagogical device used in such a case. The student answers questions about the media asset, relating it to the instructional content, gets answers and answer feedback, and perhaps follows up with an online search or a reading or a discussion or a problem to solve or a hypothesis to test, and so on.
E.g., What dates did the Bantu migrations shown on the map span? What two paths did the first wave of migration take? How did physical and cultural geography affect the spread of the first migrants and subsequent migrations What was the overall extent of spread, and what push-pull factors account for this spread? What impacts did the Bantu migrations have on indigenous peoples? Etc.
So, finding or creating a media asset and endowing that asset with pedagogical value are two different functions that together invite both interactivity and engagement. Together they are greater than the media asset per se, as they embrace the broader intended learning. For example, aside from the specific geographic information your map reinforces, the concept of push-pull factors transfers to other migrations on other continents among other peoples at other times. Your map activity has pedagogical value to the extent that it encourages learners to question or apply this concept.
Labels: academic writing, educational publishing, instruction, Internet, learning object, media assets, open education, pedagogical value, pedagogy, teaching
Wiki Textbooks 4
What Role for Instructors?
Wiki classrooms seem to turn instructors from imparters of knowledge into gatekeepers (and, necessarily, censors) in the global information network. Instructors provide the structure and tools for self-directed knowledge quests, and self-publishing professors and scholars help provide the theory and research that populate the web and constitute that knowledge. Potentially, everyone--and noone--is the expert. This raises an accountability issue.
For decades educators have been calling for nondidactic approaches to instruction, for instructors to be mentors and guides and sounding boards rather than "sage on the stage" lecturers. Now that the classroom is the Internet and the textbook is a class project, this change in job description is really happening for the first time. How does it sit with academics? Is it a relief or an imposition to not be accountable for what one knows or imparts to students? Are measures of teaching effectiveness to be reduced to classroom management skills?
I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, I know that what I know is not a thing that I possess that I can just hand off to others. What I know is just as constructed from my thought and experience as students' knowledge is for them. The amount and quality of thought and experience is certainly different, however. How would that difference be reflected in a wiki classroom or a wiki textbook? When I try to imagine this, I see myself having to structure and direct investigations without imposing content. I see myself teaching critical thinking skills rather than my subject area. Wouldn't this make me more a technician than an expert or preferred knowledge source in my field? Is this to be the role of college instructors, and, if so, what outcomes might result in higher education?
I wish there would be some comments!
Labels: academic writing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 3
How Will We Know What to Accept as True?
I suppose we can have confidence in the currency and accuracy of information in students' wikitexts to the extent that instructors serve as the final arbiters--and to the extent that the instructors themselves are credible as authorities in the subject. In this context a wiki textbook is a hermetic product, no different, really, from the unique pedagogical dynamics of the classroom in which a particular instructor and his or her students perform their rituals and epiphanies. But what about online textbooks produced this way that are thrown out to the world? What is the authorship? Can we have confidence that the content is correct and that the ethics of authorship are observed?
Conventionally, authors and publishers of textbooks are authoritative, identified, and accountable for documented content that is periodically revised. In a public wiki document, however, authors are anybody and content constantly changes. What is true one moment may be swept away the next--by anyone. What is seen as politically incorrect or unfavorable to any particular entity (such as a group or government or corporation) can be cleansed--anonymously, repeatedly. Vandalism and deliberate misinformation are commonplace. Content is supposed to be self-correcting, as self-appointed experts police entries until the truth is fleetingly achieved consensually.
There is a demonstration site by Jon Udell--very effective--that shows changes to a wikipedia entry over time using the electronic equivalent of time-lapse photography with voiceover. It shows the progressive development and correction of information about the use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html). The demo shows how corrupt entries are removed within seconds of appearing, how accuracy is continually honed through word substitutions, and how organization is gradually imposed on information after it appears--a breathtaking view of bottom-up processing at work. I think the demo is intended to inspire confidence in wikis as reliable sources of information, filtered as they are through a meta leveling mechanism: the online general public, which collectively knows what truth it wants.
I am not inspired to confidence, however. It scares me to death. The online general public has decided that we should learn and care about heavy metal bands and why they use umlauts in their names. The online general public also has decided that "Hitler-like," "Nazi-inspired" and "skinhead-related" are all too strong to explain the typographic preference for umlauts. They have decided on "Germanic" and "Gothic" but cite no etymologies, primary sources, or theories that might enlighten us on the first use of the umlaut in a band name and why it inspired such a raft of imitators. Is this truth as trivia? Democracy as tyranny?
Labels: academic writing, college textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 2
Tests of student writing performance often show that students need more help in developing topics—using detail and citing examples (Newkirk, 1999). As a publisher (and former academic and textbook editor), I often find precisely the same problems in the writings of students’ instructors--manuscripts with page after page of unrelentingly abstract prose, excessive jargon, paragraph after paragraph on constructs with no hint that they have empirical analogs in the real world. This kind of writing does not raise or maintain intellectual standards; it prevents or impedes learning!
When asked to provide topical development with expository details and concrete examples, many academic authors are offended. They call it dumbing down. My beef is with academics who attribute dumbing down to textbook publishers as an excuse for their bad writing.
Revising expository writing to make it accessible to learners is not and should not involve dumbing down in either form or intent. Offering concrete examples is not dumbing down, for example. Concrete elaborations let readers imagine, visualize, or identify with representations or exemplars of an abstraction. This vicarious experience, in turn, engenders self-confidence in learners, who more readily rise to the challenge of grasping the difficult or complex idea in aid of which the concrete example was advanced.
A challenge with professors as authors is that many tend to regard their works as sacrosanct products of their intellect and standing, both hard-won. Frequently, then, they interpret requests for revision or development of their manuscript as the publisher’s nefarious effort either to abridge academic freedom or to dumb down a scholarly work. These are misconceptions. There are legitimate reasons, such as the following, that editors might ask textbook authors to change their organization or content.
• The book will be too long for its intended market or predetermined level of investment and has to be cut.
• Concepts lack adequate elaboration through concrete examples.
• Sources are not cited.
• Undocumented opinions are presented as facts.
• Undocumented facts seem inaccurate or misleading.
• Information seems outdated or lacks currency.
• Topical coverage seems unbalanced, biased, or unexpected for the course.
• Material is judged to be strongly offensive to some or all readers.
• Examples, language, or expression are inappropriate to the intended reader, course, or subject.
• Vocabulary level is inappropriate for the course level.
• The writing is ungrammatical, wordy, or full of “pomo-babble.”
• Digressions or redundancy compromise meaning or coherence.
• Material is too similar to that in competing textbooks.
• Material invites claims of plagiarism or copyright infringement.
• Chapters lack appropriate apparatus and pedagogy.
• The manuscript departs significantly from the previously agreed-upon book plan.
None of these reasons involves a request to dumb down. Thus, academic authors should not make this claim to excuse writing that is bad or inappropriate to their audience, course, or mission. Nor should they take it upon themselves to adulterate the knowledge they are attempting to convey. Students—whatever their state of knowledge—can detect gratuitously dumbed-down prose in an instant and are justifiably insulted. Dumbed-down prose is, in Orwell’s beloved cuttlefish ink analogy, insincere (Orwell, 1946).
In truth, textbooks need to be clear, coherent, and concise—the three C’s championed by William Strunk so long ago (1918). In addition, textbooks need to address their true readers—the actual students whose learning is at stake, not the professor’s dissertation committee, journal review board, or tenure committee, not colleagues, critics, or prize panels. On the other hand, meeting learners “where they are” in their intellectual development does not require leaving out either big words or big ideas, especially when glossaries or pronunciation guides are provided in textbooks. Rather, meeting learners “where they are” requires clarity, coherence, and concision of exposition. Knowledge about learning also is important, for in the end analysis, textbook writing is teaching.
The solution? I think institutions of higher learning, academic departments, professional degree programs, and scholarly publications should provide more opportunities (and more rewards) for academics to learn to write sound expository prose. We also can hope for a more balanced attitude toward textbook publishing as both a vital form of teaching and a valid form of scholarship.
Labels: academic authors, academic writing, textbook writing
Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 1
Of course, it's an exaggeration to say that academic authors can't write. I say it in the the same sense that "white boys can't jump." But still, among the many academic authors I've worked with, only two or three of them would I say were good writers. Most are wordy and imprecise, inconsistent in style, unclear in exposition, inflated in jargon and ego, pedagogically unsound, and, worst, they lack an authentic and attractive authorial voice (the one true source of a textbook's success).
Many other observers have noticed problems with academic writing, such as the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s famous Bad Writing Contests (Dutton, 1996; see www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm). Canadian journalist Robert Fulford referred to academic writing as "pomo-babble"—“the tortured polysyllabic prose common in academic writing” (National Post, 7/15/03):
“Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don’t even know they are doing it…. Crimes against language are not victimless, of course. Academic life has become a publish and perish world: Professors publish, literacy perishes. Students perish too.”
I find it ironic that so few professors write well, especially for students, and that even fewer recognize this fact. Why is this? What are they doing wrong? And what can be done to improve the quality of writing for both scholars and college students? If you have thoughts on these questions, I hope you will comment.
Labels: academic authors, academic writing, writing
