Gdp2 2013 14-8

Teaching and learning in the era of digital technologies

TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATIONEVIDENCE-BASED ATTITUDENEURO- & TECHNO-MYTHS

More specifically…

Large use of technologies in teaching and learning• In formal teaching contexts • In semi-formal • Informal contexts

How does it change education?

1. The digital revolution

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize.(Prensky 2001)

Established and internationally accepted definitions of digital literacy are generally built on three principles: - the skills and knowledge to use a variety of digital media software applications and hardware devices, such as a computer, a mobile phone, and Internet technology; - the ability to critically understand digital media content and applications; And- the knowledge and capacity to create with digital technology. (Media Awareness Network Canada)

• 1900: Educational film• 1924: Teaching Machines(Pressey)• 1954: Teaching Machines (Skinner)• 1966: Sesame Street• 1967: Logo Turtles (Papert)• 1970s-1990s: Computer based

training/learning CBT/L• 1970s-1990s: Computer aided

instruction CAT• E-learning

2. Teaching machines

36 good learning principles embedded in video games (Gee 2005)

3. Technology-inspired education

Will video games change the way we learn? We argue here for a particular view of games—and of learning—as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies. We argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look beyond schools to the emerging arena of video games. We suggest that video games matter because they present players with simulated worlds: worlds which, if well constructed, are not just about facts or isolated skills, but embody particular social practices. Video games thus make it possible for players to participate in valued communities of practice and as a result develop the ways of thinking that organize those practices. (Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, Gee 2004)

Simulation of worlds

• playing is intrinsically motivating, because one plays for the fun of it and not because one has to. – contradiction: even if games

are for fun, if one has to play a game for learning, the game is no more just for fun.

• playing makes learning fun and effortless– opposed to school learning,

which is considered as boring and effortful

– Unfair comparison: the kind of learning that is proposed at school can hardly not be effortful because it concerns skills that do not come naturally to us

• good games are motivating because they are concrete, multi-modal, interactive, and involve the player learner in first person actions

Motivation

Teaching and learning in the era of digital technologies

TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATIONEVIDENCE-BASED ATTITUDENEURO- & TECHNO-MYTHS

How do we know IT works?

– Theoretical understanding of the principles (and limits)

– Empirical, experimental evaluation of the effects

Fair evaluation of effects

• Causality vs correlation– (Rosser et al, 2007)

• Equivalence between experimental and control group – (Gopher 1994)

• Active controls– (Robertson 2009)

• Expected effect– (Owen et al 2010)

• Polarized, ideological debates & the power of anecdotes

- Literature on media violence and cyber-addiction

• Undue interpretation of experimental and correlational studies, or: don’t rush to conclusions

- Literature on media violence and cyber-addiction

• Cognitive training in the elderly: memory, problem solving, rapid visual identification– Ball et al. 2002

• Alzheimer– Papp et al 2009

• Brain Training– Owen et al 2010– Bavelier, Green & Dye 2011

Case study:Evidence about effects on cognitive performances & learning

• Video-games & Visuo-spatial attention– Green & Bavelier 2008– Bavelier, Green & Dye 2010 – Boot et al 2008– Boot et al 2011

The trouble with transfer and generalization

In one of the most famous early studies comparing the effects of "learning a procedure" with "learning with understanding," two groups of children practiced throwing darts at a target underwater (Scholckow and Judd, described in Judd, 1908; see a conceptual replication by Hendrickson and Schroeder, 1941).One group received an explanation of refraction of light, which causes the apparent location of the target to be deceptive. The other group only practiced dart throwing, without the explanation. Both groups did equally well on the practice task, which involved a target 12 inches under water. But the group that had been instructed about the abstract principle did much better when they had to transfer to a situation in which the target was under only 4 inches of water. Because they understood what they were doing, the group that had received instruction about the refraction of light could adjust their behavior to the new task.

(Bransford et al 2000, p. 44)

A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined so that while small groups of men can pass over the roads safely, a large force will detonate the mines. A full-scale direct attack is therefore impossible. The general's solution is to divide his army into small groups, send each group to the head of a different road, and have the groups converge simultaneously on the fortress. Students memorized the information in the passage and were then asked to try another task, which was to solve the following problem You are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that may be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once and with sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed, but surrounding tissue may be damaged as well. At lower intensities the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue? Bransford et al. 2000, p. 52

In one study, a chess master, a Class A player (good but not a master), and a novice were given 5 seconds to view a chess board position from the middle of a chess game. After 5 seconds the board was covered, and each participant attempted to reconstruct the board position on another board. This procedure was repeated for multiple trials until everyone received a perfect score. On the first trial, the master player correctly placed many more pieces than the Class A player, who in turn placed more than the novice: 16, 8, and 4, respectively.However, the se results occurred only when the chess pieces were arranged in configurations that conformed to meaningful games of chess. When chess pieces were randomized and presented for 5 seconds, the recall of the chess master and Class A player were the same as the novice—they placed from 2 to 3 positions correctly. (Bransford et al. 2000, p. 23)

• “Ericsson et al. (1980) worked extensively with a college student for well over a year, increasing his capacity to remember digit strings (e.g., 982761093 …). As expected, at the outset he could remember only about seven numbers. After practice, he could remember 70 or more… How? Did he develop a general skill analogous to strengthening a "mental muscle?" No, what happened was that he learned to use his specific background knowledge to "chunk" information into meaningful groups. The student had extensive knowledge about winning times for famous track races, including the times of national and world records. For example 941003591992100 could be chunked into 94100 (9.41 seconds for 100 yards). 3591 (3 minutes, 59.1 seconds for a mile), etc. But it took the student a huge amount of practice before he could perform at his final level, and when he was tested with letter strings, he was back to remembering about seven items.” (Bransford et al. 2000, p. 40)

Concrete cases and variation is important but probably not enough

• There's a logic in this apparent limitation of the brain– an infinitely malleable brain that would change a

wealth of configurations for each new acquisition would risk to loose useful capacities just because of a new acquisition in a completely different domain

– A certain level of modularity and segregate learning effects seem to be justified, in addition to be widely demonstrated in many studies about perceptual, motor and cognitive training.

• The limits of transfer are a big preoccupation for educators – education is meaningful only when it transfers

towards ecological situations – that is outside the classroom or away from the video game console: in the real life

Teaching and learning in the era of digital technologies

TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATIONEVIDENCE-BASED ATTITUDENEURO- & TECHNO-MYTHS

• Carr 2008"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey… “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

Is technology making us more stupid/ intelligent?

Chabris & Simon 2010 The alarmists cite the concept of "neural plasticity" and talk of technology "rewiring" the brain to convince us that the new distractions make us not just less willing but less able, on a physiological level, to focus.….The appeals to neural plasticity, backed by studies showing that traumatic injuries can reorganize the brain, are largely irrelevant. The basic plan of the brain's "wiring" is determined by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do most of their work long before a child discovers Facebook and Twitter. There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one's ability to focus. Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.

Is technology making us more stupid/ intelligent?

Technomyths:

Digital natives = digital competentsDigital natives = mutants

Neuro-myths:

The infinitely plastic brainThe brain as a muscle

CRAINTES ET ESPOIRS

ETUDES EMPIRIQUES

Addiction

Violence

Entrainement cognitif

Apprentissage

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