Romanian Robotics

Posts in category Social Media in Education

Is Bigger Better?

Nov24
2012 1 Comment Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

UC Berkeley Pimental Hall: Some rights reserved by TheRealMichaelMoore

This year I noticed that my alma mater, U. C. Berkeley, had joined the MOOC movement by joining edX to offer online courses in computer science. The news reminded me of my first physics course at “Bezerkeley” with over 100 students in the same lecture hall. On the first day of the course the professor announced we were at the wrong university as at another UC campus we could have attended a smaller introductory physics class and receive more feedback than he could provide us. (Currently U.C. Berkeley has 258 courses with a class size of more than 100 undergraduate students.)

I did not take the professor’s advice and a year later I was in smaller classes having survived the freshman “weeder” classes. I survived those massive offline classes by seeking out the help of the massively overworked teacher assistants. Unlike the professors, the teacher assistants had time to give me knowledgeable feedback on how to solve problems in the class assignments. I also studied with class mates who are still some of my best friends to this day but when I was really stuck it was time to get help from a teacher’s assistant.

I am excited that high school students can now choose to take courses from U.C. Berkeley, M.I.T., Harvard and yes I hate to admit it…. Stanford but they will have to be more resourceful than I was as a college freshman to benefit from MOOC courses. By enrolling in a MOOC course my students could potentially learn C++ and Computer Graphics, Introductory Statistics, Introductory Physics, or the theory behind the Control of Mobile Robots. To make this potential learning opportunity a reality students will have to find fellow online leaners that can provide the knowledgeable feedback that the U.C. Berkeley teaching assistants provided to me as a freshman student.

My experience in massive offline classes also resulted in a benefit that no MOOC program offers, a UC Berkeley B.A. degree certifying my knowledge of Astronomy and Physics to the rest of the world. Currently MOOC courses assess students’ knowledge through a mix of online tests and peer grading. As a New York Times article points out, students who learn from participating in a MOOC course will have trouble certifying their knowledge until MOOCE or the “massively open online course evaluation” problem is solved.

My students are currently part of a massively minimized educational experience. As in most international schools, AISB limits the class size to 21 students which is much smaller than the class sizes of 40 that I taught as an Oregon public high school teacher. I may not be able to teach my students Artificial Intelligence programming or Analytic Combinatorics but I do know their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to problem solving and they can get my help when they are stuck on a problem during lunch, break, after school or by email. I can also certify my students’ knowledge of  IB Mathematics every November when I am asked to make a prediction of how well they will score on their IB external exam in May for their university applications. It is statistically scary that for the 41 students of last year’s graduating class the teachers at AISB predicted the students’ IB external exam scores with an accuracy of less than ± 1 point from a maximum possible IB point score of 45.

MOOC courses have the potential to open up a university education to anyone who has an internet connection but first the evaluation and course assistants issues must be worked out. Even with our virtual high school courses the teacher who supervises students in the program has problems evaluating their knowledge in subject areas he is unfamiliar with. The challenge for MOOC courses is to incorporate the benefits of small off line courses to make bigger better.

P.S. Here is a link to Dan Meyer’s comments on the MOOC site Udacity

Posted in MOOC - Tagged ,

Flattening the Robo Sitter Unit: Course 1 Project

Mar11
2012 3 Comments Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

The emphasis of course 1 for the COETAIL program is to use the internet as a collaborative tool by having students create and respond to blog posts. For my end of course 1 project I have decided to update a project that I gave my high school robotics class in the fall for my current middle school robotics class by adding a collaborative element using the internet.

My middle school students will be required to complete the Middle Years Program (MYP) design folder components of Investigate, Design, Plan, Create and Evaluate as part of their Mindstorms NXT robo dog sitter design project. The design cycle stages of Design and Plan require students to seek feedback on their proposed robot designs and timeline before proceeding to the Create stage.

In the high school robotics class last semester I asked students to get informal feedback on their Design and Plan stages in the classroom from their peers. With the middle school class I will be formalizing the feedback process by having them register for the Flat Classroom Project. Students will then post their design and timelines to the internet so their classmates can leave comments as feedback. Hopefully MYP tech students in other schools will also see the design plans and timelines and leave their feedback in comments.

The unit plan below follows the International Baccalaureate MYP Unit Planner so it is a bit lengthy. It also contains the required Approaches to Learning skills with collaboration being an approach discussed in the COETAIL course 1. The embedded file is a PDF file as our ATLAS unit planning software will not export an editable Word friendly document.

If you cannot see the embedded document because you do not have the correct browser plug-in go to https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B0e2a3JVS1aSbG5CRW83bWRTMTJBWUpvMnlZUnA3Zw to download the pdf file directly.

 

Posted in Robotics Classroom

Content, Connections and Creation

Feb27
2012 1 Comment Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

After reading the article “Connectivism: A Learning Theory of the Digital Age” I felt that the author missed the duality inherent in online learning. I remember being a student at UC Berkeley in 1984 when the internet was still called the ARPANET which connected only universities and defense department facilities. There were many connections that made up the ARPANET but having a connection was not very useful if you were not a researcher or a defense department employee. This all changed when hyperlinks were invented along with the first web browser, Mosaic. All of a sudden people were creating websites with content of interest to users who were neither researchers or defense department employees.

The key to the evolution of ARPANET into the internet was due to the dual nature of connections and content. Without content to interest the common person in acquiring an ARPANET connection the online world grew slowly. When Mosaic and hyperlinks made connections between content that interested everyone ARPANET became the internet which grew exponentially. Connections and content are dependent on each other. A connection without useful content is as uninteresting as listening to a phone’s dial tone.

The article overemphasizes the importance of connections alone. It does not matter how many Twitter feeds, Facebook friends or blog followers a student maintains if new concepts, skills and ideas are not being transmitted. Students learn using social media connections when they are confronted with new information and not just the echo chamber of opinions and knowledge from their peers.

To encourage students to expand their online horizons they should use technology to create. Students that write software, produce videos and write e-books must not only make connections between ideas and concepts they find on the internet but also with ideas and concepts they have created themselves. Creating content to be shared through the interet’s connections should be the top of any online Bloom’s taxonomy.

A recent New York Times article on the innovations from Bell Labs illustrates the idea that learning is not just about making connections but by making connections between people that are creating new ideas. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html) The content from the innovations at Bell Labs formed the basis for the hyper connected world we have today.

 

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