Technology, distraction and harnessing our brains

Image courtesy of Hunter Langston

I try not to call myself a technology evangelist, but I do believe that when used appropriately technology can enhance learning. So I've found it concerning to come across a number of articles in the past week highlighting the growing concern that certain technologies might be hampering students' ability to both concentrate and learn. But to what extent is this really a new phenomenon?

Our mind is unquestionably the most powerful technology we have at our disposal. But in the same way as the internet, laptops and mobile devices, our mind can also be a huge distraction. The ability to focus our attention and our thinking, even for a short period of time, is challenging. If you have ever tried to meditate and focus on being ‘in the moment’, you will appreciate the power of the subconscious to distract your focus, constantly throwing up disjointed thoughts and observations. Sometimes when I meditate I wonder how I manage to achieve anything at all amongst all the noise.

The ability to focus our attention for sustained periods of time is an essential part of consciousness, and developing and improving the ability to focus attention is an implicit in programmes of learning. Although presenting students with more stimuli in the form of information may capture their attention for a period of time, the length of this period will very considerably from person to person depending on their state of mind. There are also a range of variable including the tutor’s charisma, the way in which the information is presented, and the pedagogical approach chosen for the learning activity.

My point is that laptops, mobiles and the internet are tools just as the brain is a tool. The extent to which they are useful or distracting depends on the ability to harness and use them with focused attention. Few would deny that these tools have changed and will continue to change how we learn for the foreseeable future. But in light of this fact, perhaps there is a corresponding need to place greater emphasis on our ability to harness our attention.

Meditation is an effective way to help us become more aware of what it feels like to really focus. A basic three-minute breathing exercise at the start of each class would help clear the brain of at least some of the subconscious distractions that will hamper our ability to focus our attention. Rather than blaming technology for increasing distraction and disrupting concentration, perhaps we should instead consider trying to help ourselves and our students develop our thinking processes to take greater advantage of the affordances of these tools.
 
(And a big thank you to Hunter Langston for his excellent image above).

Using Turnitin to support academic referencing

What is Turnitin?
 
Turnitin is a tool that enables staff and students to verify the academic integrity of written work. While some institutions take a punitive approach to using Turnitin, UCA has adopted a more formative position and advocates that is is used as a tool to support student learning. Although use of Turnitin is not currently mandatory, the university recommends that all students have an opportunity to submit some of their written work through Turnitin so that they can identify any weaknesses with referencing or academic writing.

Once a student uploads a piece of work through Turnitin they obtain what is known as an Originality Report. This indicates the percentage of text that has been found elsewhere on the internet in books, journals and websites. As Turnitin is not a perfect tool there is no fixed threshold above which a piece of work is deemed to be unacceptable. However, tutors are strongly advised to investigate any work where over 10% of the text  is deemed to have been copied from external sources. 


Help with Turnitin

The following videos demonstrate how to set up Turnitin, and what happens when a student submits a piece of work through Turnitin:
 

• Setting up a Turnitin assignment
• TurnItIn: Submitting Work Electronically 
• TurnItIn: Understanding the Originality Report

In addition, UCA provides an Academic Integrity website and Harvard referencing guide to help staff and students address problems with academic writing and referencing:
 

• Academic Integrity - approaching your work honestly
• Harvard Referencing - always source your work

Improving writing and reflection with blogs

How can blogs improve writing and reflective skills?

The act of blogging is beneficial to students on many levels. Although it is a more informal way of writing than a traditional essay, this informality can be an advantage as it reduces the pressure on students to aim for perfection in their writing. In addition, asking students to write their thoughts on a blog obliges then to reflect before doing so, thus helping them to consolidate the knowledge they have acquired. Ferdig and Trammell (2004) summarise the four main pedagogic benefits of blogging for students: 

1. Assisting students to become subject matter experts through a process of regular scouring, filtering and posting.
2. Increasing student interest and ownership in learning.
3. Giving students legitimate chances to participate and enculturating them into a community of practice.
4. Providing opportunities for diverse perspectives. 

Students themselves also report that they find blogging a useful way to learn, stating that "their creativity and productivity skyrocketed because they knew that their work had the potential to be viewed quickly by an authentic audience that mattered to them."

In this article, students commented that "blogging is also a great way to put your writing skills into practice in the real world and develop stronger communication and organization skills" and "starting a blog while in college can help you in your specific industry niche".


A UCA case study

The introduction of mandatory blogging helped reverse the decline in academic standards in the CG Arts and Animation course at UCA Rochester. The course went from a 100% dissatisfaction rating to one of 100% satisfaction within two years, with the blogs leading to a significant improvement in students' writing and critical thinking abilities. This case study explains the role of blogs helping the tutor to turn the course around:

Blogging all over the world: can blogs enhance student engagement by creating a community of practice around a course?

Creating and sustaining online discussion

Q. Why is online discussion useful? 
 
Creating opportunities for online discussion is an effective way of supporting students' language skills. Moreover, the majority of both Home and EU students now entering university have grown up with online communication via social networking sites and many expect that their university learning experience will incorporate these technologies.

Online discussion supports learning in the following ways:

• By increasing opportunities for students to read and write about their subject
• By making it easier for less confident students to contribute to class discussion
• By fostering supportive relationships and a sense of community amongst students

Q. How might I incorporate online discussion in my teaching?

There are many ways of introducing online discussion to your students, but before doing so it is important that you clarify how it will support their learning. Simply asking students to share their thoughts and ideas on a blog is unlikely to work unless they can clearly see the reasons for doing so. It's also important that you are prepared to participate in the online discussion as tutor presence is as important online as it is in the physical classroom. Building on the reasons listed above, here are some examples of how you might introduce online discussion:

Create a class blog and post a weekly discussion question

Setting up a class blog is quick and easy, but it can be a powerful way of stimulating discussion with a new group of students. The Postgraduate course at UCA Farnham used a class blog to encourage less confident students to feel connected to the course. At the end of the first lesson, students were asked to upload a link to one of their favourite songs and write a few sentences about why they liked the song. The tutor also shared a link to one of her favourite songs. This activity was a great ice-breaker as it enabled students to share something about which they were passionate and encouraged them to comment on other students' songs. Here are some more suggestions for kick-starting conversation:

7 conversation starters to stimulate discussion

Students who are sometimes too shy to contribute to class discussion often prefer online discussion as they have time to think about what they want to say before sharing it with the group. In addition, providing students with the abiliity to converse with each other online can foster a sense of community around the cohort. The following articles provides further reading about the benefits of creating an online learning community around your course:

4 reasons to build an online learning community
Make the community about your members


Use Twitter to encourage communication and collaboration
 
Despite the exponential increase in the use of Twitter many people are still unaware of its potential to enhance learning and discussion. Several courses at UCA have created a course Twitter account which they use to send messages and share links to useful resources with their students. Here are some tips for using Twitter in the classroom:

60 inspiring examples of Twitter in the classroom
50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom
Using Twitter for teaching and research

Ideas for online group work

I'm in the process of putting together some tips to help tutors set up online learning activities. This post considers ways of introducing online group work.


Q. What are the advantages of online group work?

Image courtesy of flickr user @gavinkeech

A. Providing opportunities for students to collaborate online can significantly extend their opportunities to learn. Students now entering university are often comfortable with communicating online, and constructing a collaborative online learning task can help them develop a range of skills including:

    literacy and grammar
    negotiation
    appropriate online etiquette and language
    presentation
    communication
    team work
    critical thinking


Q. What sort of activities could I create?

Small-group blogs

Blogs are normally associated with individual learning activities, but they are also able to support group work. One example is to divide students into small groups and allocate a blog to each group, and in addition to creating a final presentation ask them to record all the research, inspiration and discussion that happened along the way. The blog provides a linear folio of research and ideas that both the students and the tutor can access in order to track the progress of the project.

Students can use 'tags' to organise their blog posts and indicate the ones that they would like the tutor to mark. Asking students to tag the blog posts that they would like to submit for final review obliges them to critically reflect on the work they have generated before selecting items to be submitted. In addition, tagging can help with the assessment of each group blog as it prevents the tutor from having to scroll through the whole blog looking for tne final pieces of content.


Whole-class blogs and discussion boards

Setting weekly discussion tasks is an effective way of encouraging students to collaborate in between taught sessions. For example, at the end of a session you can set a question for your students to discuss based on what has been covered so far, or on a topic that you want them to research. This question is posted on a class blog or discussion board. The following taught session then begins with a discussion of the content that students have uploaded.

Another variation on this activity is to set up two or three blogs / discussion boards and to post a different question on each. Students' homework is to write a short summary against each of the questions, and their responses are then used as a basis for discussion at the beginning of the next taught session.


Group mind-mapping with Prezi

Prezi is usually used as an alternative to Powerpoint, but it is also a good tool for supporting visual collaboration. Similar to the group blog activity, students work in small groups and are each allocated a Prezi. Each group is asked to gather visual research on a given topic and upload it to their Prezi workspace.

Using the comments feature, students are then asked to comment on and critique the research of other groups. Tutors can also provide targeted formative feedback on each group's work-in-progress and share additional links that they might find useful.

6 Cs of a Digital Pedagogy

Following on from the Higher Education Academy's excellent Digital Humanities summit, I've been doing some thinking around the digital skills that we expect students to acquire.

The digital age has put more information within our grasp than ever before in History. While in many ways this is hugely empowering for students in Higher Education, it also potentially presents quite a serious challenge to their learning process. The era of ubiquitous content is changing the role of educators too, as we need to help students contextualise and critically evaluate the many sources of information with which they are now presented.

In the distant, pre-internet past, there was less information within easy reach. 'Searching' often meant going to the Library and hunting through the bookshelves. I can't be sure, but I suspect that being less inundated with resources perhaps made it easier for students to critique the sources of information at their disposal.

But in an age where information is so readily available there is a danger that a student will aim to try and find the article or blog post that best represents their own opinion, rather than taking the time to reflect and formulate an opinion. As a PhD student myself I am all too often guilty of this, it's much easier to keep searching for that one article that sums everything up perfectly than to write it yourself.

There is a danger that ease of access to information could create a generation of students who aren't sufficiently inclined or equipped to challenge existing knowledge. This increased passivity is arguably being facilitated by the ability of technology to make all the information we could ever want available on demand. So what can we do about it?

One possible strategy is to place critique and questioning at the centre of the learning process. Creating regular opportunities for students to formulate, share and justify their opinions is increasingly important if they are to survive being drowned in a sea of content.


The above is very much a work in progress, but the 6 C model represents my first attempt at developing a digital pedagogy which responds to the problem of 'information overload'. Students 1) consume information about a topic from multiple sources. They 2) compare these sources, then 3) critique and question them in order to assess their relative worth. Students then 4) curate those sources which they judge to be of value, and 5) create a piece of writing in which they give their own opinion about the topic. Finally, they 6) collaborate with their network by sharing their resource, inviting comments and discussion which oblige them to justify their position.

Does this model work for you? What would you add / remove / change?

Visions for the future of Digital Humanities

Earlier this week I was very fortunate to be invited to the Digital Humanities summit hosted by the Higher Education Academy. I don't profess to be anything like an expert in the Digital Humanities (or 'DH' to those in the know), but the HEA had pulled together a group of people whose expertise they believed would be useful in discussing the possible futures for this emerging area of scholarship.

The day consisted of two group-based practical workshops aimed at trying to visualise both current and future interpretations of DH. I had the opportunity to work with some wonderfully creative people, and given my lack of experience in this area it was useful to begin with an attempt to visualise the current landscape.
  
For the first workshop our group used the metaphor of a kitchen to describe DH, with a range of 'ingredients' (digital artifacts, skills etc), 'rules' (policies, legal requirements, IPR etc), 'people' (chef = thought leader, funders = restaurant backers, customers = end users etc). We also put forward the idea of a 'recipe book' in which the recipes might be created using a range of combinations of the above:

The second workshop began with a discussion of the ways in which DH might evolve. Although I don't have a detailed knowledge of DH, I was instantly struck by what I felt were similarities to the Technology Enhanced Learning field. To put it briefly, there has been great enthusiasm (and money) around the TEL field over the last 20 years, but this has more recently begun to give way to a sense of pessimism due to the noticeable lack of evidence that technology has enhanced learning.

Despite the enthusiasm around DH, I can't help but feel that the need to talk about 'digital' humanities as something separate from 'humanities' represents a possible failure of humanities disciplines to embed technology effectively. The similarities with TEL and e-learning are clear: the more the 'digital' is perceived as something separate from the discipline itself the less likely it is to become seamlessly integrated into that discipline.

However, our apparent pessimism soon gave way to rampant creativity! In attempting to visualise a future of DH we used the metaphor of a tapestry, in which the tapestry represents a discipline and the 'digital-ness' is woven seamlessly through. We felt there was a strong skills acquisition element to DH, and these skills were written as post-its and also woven in to the fabric of the tapestry. The need for progress to be driven by pedagogy represented another similarity to the TEL field, and pedagogy was therefore placed squarely at the centre of the tapestry.
 
Having pursued the metaphor to its logical conclusion, my feeling - and perhaps hope - is that in a generation or so DH will cease to exist. Its disappearance will represent the successful integration of the digital into humanities disciplines, facilitated in part by the gradual permeation in the sector of academics with increased digital skills.

Thank you to the Higher Education Academy for allowing us all to get creative, and a big thank you to my #dhtapesty team members for their inspiration and expert weaving! A Storify record of our presentation can be viewed below, and for a full record of the event please use the #teachDH hashtag.