I’ve been in Juneau for a few days taking part in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Arctic Science Conference. I was privileged to have the opportunity to run a distance education segment in partnership with my colleague Carol Gering (see session abstracts, resources, slides, etc.)… which morphed for natural reasons into a session on science education in general. What follows are thoughts based on my presentation and having heard from a variety of scientists, educators and authors.
Fighting a Common Foe
A recurring theme in presentations from educators, researchers and authors was the problem of scientific illiteracy, innumeracy and apparent understanding. At issue is how to best teach students who may only (and often reluctantly) take a single science course in their higher education career but who will go on to be voters, politicians and policy-makers making decisions that are practically random without a sense of basic scientific principles. It’s too easy to play the scientific literacy “gotcha” game ala Jay Leno or E. D. Hirsch, extrapolating from a random person’s inability to come up with the chemical formula for water a global educational decline, but it’s hard to dispute that there’s a significant problem.
Seems to me that some answers lie in: promoting inquiry- and problem-based learning, connecting local and place-based knowledge to science activities, having students act as citizen-scientists, giving students tools that they can come back to after the specific course or activity in which they use them, and making use of curriculum development methods that specifically address the problem of apparent understanding. There are probably many more strategies I’m forgetting or am unaware of.
Natural Limits of Replication
There’s good reason for science educators to be excited about developments in virtual worlds such as Second Life and OpenSim. But at the point where the rubber meets the road for most educators in their daily practice, significant independent development in these environments is problematic due to constraints on time and resources.
Major initiatives in virtual worlds are often extremely expensive, beyond the resources of most instructors and even most programs. Even more problematic, too much of the development in these environments seems intent on replicating real-world environments in ways that are unnecessary and unproductive. I’m firmly behind efforts to bring science (and other) educational activities into virtual worlds, but the question that constantly has to be asked is: why? What affordances of the immersive environment are being taken advantage of? Can the time and effort spent to develop in such a top-heavy, closed environment be better spent developing in a more open way? I don’t see any benefit in creating, for example, a simulated science lab in Second Life that doesn’t take advantage of the benefits of virtual worlds (scale, spatial orientation, etc)… such a virtual lab bench could be created at less expense using simple web programs, applets and Flash components. And then be re-usable and shareable.
Of course this doesn’t apply when the virtual world is used in a way that goes beyond replication… but examples of such developments seem few and far between.
Open Teaching
At the other end of the developmental spectrum from expensive, top-down developments in virtual worlds is the crying need for educators to teach openly. Open Education advocates are seeing the need to take the next step from content provision to sharing of process, context and developing collaborative teaching activities. I’m convinced this is the way forward—if we teach openly, content is not only generated naturally, but it is naturally contextualized and the educational process(es) in which it was embedded made accessible.
It’s astounding to me (though it shouldn’t be) to attend conferences like this and see yet again how many things—artifacts, documentation, records, instructor and student work—is inaccessible. Amazement and surprise at what colleagues—often within the same institution, sometimes within the same program or school—are doing is the norm. Sometimes this is due to being required to use (or in the habit of using) an LMS. More often the idea of defaulting to being open and making closed activity the exception—and there are legitimate exceptions!—hasn’t even been considered or is seen as “more work.”
Using Open Education Resources
Surprisingly, a significant number of educators and scientists I spoke with were not only unaware of the Open Education movement, but even Open Education Resources as a simple content resource for enhancing teaching were only vaguely familiar. The process of finding and using OERs is not just a boost for teachers with limited time but provides an invaluable entree into thinking about Open Education.
Giving Students the Tools
In many institutions, including my own, distance educators are a particularly overworked group, laboring despite systemic issues understanding what distance learning is and how much effort and time it takes to provide a good student experience. So it’s understandable that many educators default to the “read, read, test” model of distance education and rely heavily on proprietary tools that come with textbook web sites or CDs.
“Web 2.0” (or whatever you want to call it) has the potential to transform methods of science teaching. This comes in (at least) two forms: applications that facilitate collaboration, community and publication—the same processes we see across disciplines—and the variety of applications that could be of specific use for science classes, such as visualization, concept-mapping, and calculating apps.
Further, these are tools that students can take with them from class to class and then beyond into their careers… building the famed PLE.
Awareness of these resources would be heightened by open teaching practices!
Considering Teachers and Learners—Being an Open Scientist
Research scientists too need to adapt their practices and activities, keeping educators in mind. Students—whether they are taking a single required science class or in are in the process of becoming a scientist—are often not just unclear about what science and its fundamental principles are, but also about what a scientist does.
Scientists should consider how their work and practices can be shared with teachers and learners as part of their ongoing activities, including such things as the formation of hypothesis and research questions, the administrative business of writing grant proposals, data collection and refinement, false starts and dead-ends. One thing that’s been made abundantly clear as social software and other technologies have opened up formerly hidden, obscured and/or opaque processes is a kind of rule of unintended educational consequences: the set of artifacts and activities any individual or small group thinks is worthwhile to share is almost always much smaller than the set that ultimately turns out to be useful.
The idea of the “open scholar” proposed at the Academic Evolution blog (h/t Martin Weller) is precisely what I have in mind, and it is articulated well there:
“It’s like this: there is great value to others to see the methods used in pursuing knowledge, the various attempts in pursuing solutions (failures as much as successes), the data generated (especially beyond the subset of data used for drawing conclusions in the study at hand), and the various resources used to mount the investigation (whether that is lab equipment, social resources, bibliography, theory, or protocols). Again, there is great value in others being allowed to see this whole context of inquiry, not just the final outcome for the specific study at hand.”
Publishing Informally
At one time or another, scientists must grapple with—and sometimes spend valuable time they’d rather use doing something else—writing for (and otherwise communicating with) non-scientists, including administration, funding agencies, and the public. Teachers and learners are another group that scientists need to keep in mind in the same way. The effects of addressing that group may not be as immediate and obvious as research dollars, but in their own way they are just as critical.
Instead of working out of sight until the moment a full-fledged research publication in a peer-reviewed journal emerges, take advantage of easy methods for informal publication along the way: blog about ongoing activities and the experience of being a scientist, make some data available in a useful form, spend 30 minutes every few weeks writing a bite-sized piece on some aspect of research as if explaining it to a high school class or a new college student or the child of a friend.
Innovating Within (and Expanding on) Traditional Publication
In addition to creating many more points at which “publication” is possible, the ubiquity of lightweight tools for sharing and collaboration create affordances that can enhance or expand the traditional publication process.
For example, a colleague of mine has spoken to representatives of the National Science Foundation about substituting creation of educational materials—open courseware, learning modules, OERs– based on project results and data for the much dreaded final/project reports that grants require (and which often get done poorly, if at all). They were very enthusiastic about the possibility.
Serendipitously, the aforementioned Martin Weller is modeling another method: he’s using his blog to publish the draft of a paper (accepted for publication in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education) to solicit comments and review which will be integrated into the final published piece.
And while they may not be innovative opportunities, it is certainly useful to consider expanding on traditional avenues of publication by selecting an Open Access Journal for publication (or re-publication) and submitting published articles to the Cornell University Library arXiv.
Recognizing the Value of Reputation and Social/Intellectual Currency
Research and teaching don’t happen in a vacuum even if both activities are sometimes pursued as if they are. I’m not writing here about becoming a selfless egalitarian, sacrificing one’s own times and activities for the good of all. While I do believe educators and scientists have a moral obligation—and most educational institutes a mandate—to share openly in their content and processes, the activities I’m talking about can be considered as pure functions of self-interest.
Many studies have shown that publication in Open Access Journals (and using other open publication techniques) results in far more citations than other methods. Without becoming a pop-science writer—which I have nothing against at all, but isn’t necessary to be rewarded– informal publication and sharing enhance a scientist’s reputation, engaging the virtuous circle in which intellectual currency becomes social currency and vice-versa, leading to enhanced consciousness, recognition, potential for expanded publication, funding, the works.
I’m not advocating radical transformation, which is impractical for most. Much of what I’m writing about can occur just fine within and alongside traditional operations. There are clear concerns to be considered: keeping necessarily proprietary information secure, not sharing information that could be too easily misconstrued, etc. Incremental change is probably the only way to go for most scientists and educator. More important is adopting a change in posture, in mindset, in consciousness—making open scholarship and education a regular option (if not a default) and considering teaching and learning as a natural, everyday part of the context of research—which allows for the cumulative effect of many small, subtle and relatively painless changes to effect overall transformation.
