Transcriber: Patricia Álvarez Reviewer: Denise RQ
I have committed my career to education
so it may surprise you to know that I've always been a bad student.
I started off OK.
In elementary school
I was the kind of kid who would hurry to get his homework done,
in those gaps before recess and on the way home, on the bus,
so that I could consolidate my time
to spend on the kinds of things that I wanted to do.
In middle school, I was the kid who would get in trouble for drawing
when I was supposed to be paying attention.
And I was starting to discover that I didn't always agree
with the ideas that the teacher had for my time and energy.
In high school, I would be sitting in the back row of the class
reading a novel when the teacher was lecturing.
When I went to class at all.
Often I would skip class.
I wasn't a hopeless case,
I might go to the library and learn about things I was interested in.
I might just go to the river, near my school,
and read, or draw, or write stories.
Just so my kids understand
because I know they're going to watch this:
not paying attention in school comes at a price.
When it came time for me to enter my senior year,
I found that I didn't have enough credits to graduate.
Thankfully, my parents had the idea to convince the school
to let me take independent study courses from the university
to make up the credits.
This was the early '90s and the height of technology
was audio cassettes and paper based assignments.
But I discovered that the media didn't really matter.
Because I was able to learn at my own pace and at my own place,
I could outpace the high school calendar
and learning actually became more enjoyable,
and I actually did a better job at it too.
Yay, I made it.
I went on to college and about the time I entered in college,
there was this thing called the World Wide Web,
and I had been so compelled and impressed
by that independent study experience that I immediately latched on the idea
that this Internet can help us learn differently.
And I was right.
Up until that time, I'd really thought about online education
in terms of giving you access to all these great resources
anytime, anyplace,
and also for adding that flexibility of time and space.
I didn't really think about the human interaction part of it
until one semester, an English literature professor said:
"We are going yo use this thing called the online bulletin board for discussions,
that are going to go on outside of class, in between our regular sessions.
I know, online discussions are like old hat.
This is one of the earliest forms of online education.
You are going to have to bear with me a little bit
as I walk through why these are an important way to illustrate
the flexibility of online tools for teaching.
Let's start by thinking about the traditional face to face class.
You are a teacher, and you have your class in front of you.
You may ask them a question.
As soon as you ask that question, the clock starts ticking,
and it's a race with all the students in the class
to see who can come up with an answer and quickly raise their hand.
You are going to call on maybe one or two of them,
whoever you may notice.
And then they are going to have a chance
to articulate their answer orally, in front of their peers,
with what limited knowledge and resources are available to them
at that time and space.
You don't have time to call on everybody,
which is probably just as well
because not everybody is ready to respond, and not everybody wants to respond.
Let's compare that to the online discussion.
In an online discussion, you might post a question on Monday,
and give students until the following Monday
to make their responses.
So now students are not racing against the clock.
They have time to think about their response.
They can refer to external resources, books, materials, websites, whatever,
and they all have a chance to respond.
You can actually enforce that expectation that everybody participates.
Because it's online, you as the teacher, now have a way to measure
both the quantity and the quality of their responses.
This is a good way for you to use that
as another form of assessment of their understanding.
Finally, because it's online, it's preserved,
and students can use those historic discussions
to help them prepare for exams, or write their papers,
or just to reflect on their learning at any point in the future.
I was sold and from grad school on, I dedicated almost all my energy
to designing and developing online courses and programs.
So let's fast forward a decade.
I've been doing this at the university for quite some time.
I myself had been teaching online for a number of years;
when my team was tasked with leading a new blended teaching initiative
where we would take parts of a face to face class experience
and replace it with online activities.
I thought: this is great.
I can get more faculty teaching online by easing them in through blended.
And I thought: let me go first.
Let me be the guinea pig and show you how it's done, right?
Because we can take my online course
and take it back into the face to face classroom.
This is going to be amazing, I thought.
And turned out to be a disaster
because I had been teaching online for so long, I had been out
of the face to face environment for so long,
I didn't understand what to do with the time and the space.
So I did what was probably the worst thing imaginable:
I took that existing online course and I built on top of it.
And I started by replicating the materials that I had already created online
in the classroom, via lecture.
So every single week in the face to face sessions,
students would come in,
and they would here the exact same stuff that they had already seen online.
I ended up doing what a lot of teachers do when they build a blended course
which is to create a course and a half.
This didn't do much to help my reputation as a tough teacher, I can tell you.
And because it was redundant, the students stopped attending the class
and their engagement started to dwindled.
And I felt really bad about it.
The right way to go about doing a blended course
is to first start by fully understanding
the benefits and the limitations of both modes, online and face to face,
and to create assessments and activities in line with those outcomes
according to the different affordances of each.
So I created some new in class activities.
We did peer critiques face to face, to help soften the blow.
We did some usability tests, some MOOC usability tests,
so that students could actually see all of the actions of their classmates,
and we did some hands-on problem solving that took advantage of real time.
Today, technology continues to advance, and I think we are starting to see
some of those limitations of online fade away.
For example, that same online discussion forum,
that same asynchronous discussion forum,
can happen, not just with text, but also with video.
It can happen in just a couple of clicks, on your laptop or even on your phone.
But the idea of blending online and face to face is still fascinating,
in part because today, we all live blended lives.
When I wake up, my phone has been tracking my sleep patterns.
I know, I'm kind of a nerd.
You guys probably all use an online calendar
to help you get to physical appointments on time.
And when I collaborate on a document with my colleagues,
it's usually online, even if we are in the same room.
When I go out to lunch with a friend, we use an app to help us find restaurants,
and so on and so forth.
So while I'm teaching classes nowadays, my LMS will notify me
when there are new assignments I need to grade,
which helps me be more prompting giving feedback,
and I can give feedback using multimedia.
It's really interesting to think about
how our lives are becoming increasingly blended.
But it does make me wonder if perhaps,
in the same way that I built a course and a half for my students,
we might not be building a life and a half for ourselves.
Because we have access to information all the time.
We are almost constantly connected,
and because time now seems so easily managed,
we think we can do it all.
How did we get this way?
Let me give you a little bit of perspective
by sharing with you David Levy's ideas about the history of reading,
as they move through these three different stages:
from intensive to extensive to hyperextensive.
So the intensive stage of reading was when there were very few books,
they were all made by hand,
very few people knew how to read and had access to those books,
and so they did read those books very intensely, very deeply,
in a very narrow set of topics.
Then, the Gutenberg press came.
Reading materials were made more accessible to more people.
Society's literacy rates improved,
and the extensive stage of reading lasted through the 20th century,
and it gave us access to enough kinds of reading materials and information
that we could go fairly broad and fairly deep on any given topic.
Then came the web,
and the floodgates of information were opened up.
Now, when we go looking for information,
we can find just that one particular piece of information on the web
that satisfies our need at any given moment.
This is called the hyperextensive stage,
where we move very broadly and rather shallowy
from one piece of information to the other.
So this idea of hyperextensive reading
is backed up by evidence from usability studies
that use eye-tracking software to understand what you are looking at
and what you are reading at any given point in time on the web.
And this study showed
that not only do people read very little online,
but they moved from one webpage to another very rapidly.
These habits are encapsulated in this term: informavore
which is a way of describing our behaviour online,
as we track down the scent of information.
This always has a cost-benefit decision associated with it
as we get online, and we go from one page to another,
we click on one link or another.
The benefits are going to be new information, more information,
some sort of social reinforcement, some kind of entertainment, perhaps.
But the cost is always going to be our time and energy,
and I think Eliot was speaking ironically here when he said:
"There will be time, there will time..."
because there is never enough time.
And so, we multitask.
And it doesn't really work.
It just puts us in this state of continuous partial attention,
and the thing that is more painful to me
is that it inhibits us from entering states of flow.
The states of flow which Csíkszentmihályi describes
as those periods of concentrated attention where you are able to focus
on the thing that you are really good at in a challenging way,
and your sense of time and space warps.
You are in that moment,
and not only are you on the path to mastery,
but you are fulfilling your potential, and you are fully enjoying life.
This is my son, his name is Willem.
He is 11.
Don't let the computer fool you.
Willem is the poster child for flow states.
In fact, in this picture,
he's building a computer game using the software Scratch.
He does this everyday for hours, literally hours everyday.
He gets so concentrated, his attention is so focused,
that he actually can't stand to be interrupted.
He gets a little bit angry, even at the mildest distraction
that might impede his progress in building his game.
And I like that.
I kind of want that for myself, right?
Keep in mind, Willem is not connected.
He has access to the Internet, but he doesn't really use it.
He's not really interested in that.
He doesn't have a phone of his own.
He is probably unusual in that respect.
I don't mind, but I do worry that someday,
he's going to have to sacrifice his habits of focus and attention
to the gods of constant connectivity.
So, what's a parent to do?
Do we give in?
Do we make them unplug?
Howard Rheingold says there is another way.
Recognizing that there is no turning back from the changing society,
we really just have to adapt.
We have to adapt our tools, and we have to adapt our practices.
And interestingly, this fascination,
or this challenge of attention and distraction, is not new.
Thoreau talked about it.
But it may be exacerbated by the modern age.
In fact, I think we all would agree that it probably is.
There have been some good ideas already to help us out.
For example, the isolator.
(Laughter)
Who wants one? I want one.
There is no magic bullet.
Nor is there a magic bulletshape helmet.
While I believe that technology can help,
and we need to continuously strive to create new tools
to help us develop focus and to manage information,
I think there is something else we have to do too.
I think in the same way that I had to fully understand
the benefits and limitations of online and face to face,
we have to also understand the benefits and limitations,
the affordances of an intensive and hyperextensive mode of learning.
Just as I had to rebuild my blended course to reflect those affordances,
we may have to rebuild all of our courses to reflect this.
I think this is especially true in an era of lifelong learning
because, even if the classroom were an isolator,
what happens when they leave?
Ultimately, we need students to be completely independent.
We need to help them gain the ability to learn
and to create on their own, in their own places,
without the teacher, without structure,
we need them to be equally comfortable
practicing hyperextensive or intensive modes of learning.
And it's really not an option to choose one or the other.
We have to choose both.
We have to be able to do so deliberately.
We have to purposely not just blend,
because that suggests a simple co-mingling of the two,
but we have to very artfully remix the way that we learn every single day.
That is all. Thank you.
(Applause)