Nov 04

Cognitive Apprenticeship and the 21st Century Web Application

In my previous post I (literally) talked about a long historical need to provide more information than a written document can physically hold. I pointed out how footnotes have accomplished this, how these and such familiar devices as front-page headlines and teasers have evolved, and continue to evolve in the modern web-browser. I’m doing this to demonstrate how Web browsers and the three main (and open) technologies—HTML, CSS and JavaScript—can support Cognitive Apprenticeship’s goal of “making thinking visible.” Ultimately I hope to encourage classroom teachers to leverage this generation’s immersion in technology in new ways that lead not only to their own empowerment but that of all who become involved in 21st century learning environments that can stretch past boundaries of space and time.

I began to show some actual code1 [to see my “footnotes,” press the number; to close them, click or press Esc] which creates a style that can be applied at the paragraph or section level to assign an icon signalling its content or relevance to the document. I used narration, in the form of recorded audio, with pictures timed to coincide with words—a concept that is the basis of almost all elearning software, TV advertising, documentary film, even political propaganda—to explain and demonstrate what I was thinking about the topic and the technology. If you’ve followed this Cognitive Apprenticeship from the beginning I hope you can start to see now how I’ve intentionally set out to contrast a traditional academic style with an increasingly Web-enhanced one.

In so doing I used technology to solve some problems—and predictably introduced several more, demonstrating another potential technology holds, one I suspect we all have experienced. Software often contains bugs; preparing a lesson plan using pen and paper, or presenting using a comfortable and familiar paradigm such as a slide show with handouts one often feels more in control. It’s often too easy for the technology to become the focus, and not in a good way. But while many classroom teachers tell me anecdotes that conclude with a student fixing something, far fewer tell me they’ve learned to embrace that as a strategy, and are willing to jump in the deep end head first, with ample faith that together they’ll tackle whatever obstacles arise. It’s my personal goal to foster that confidence and empower educators to create such environments. Indeed, I feel there’s a certain urgency, not just for individual teachers or the profession, but for the future of public education itself.

Ursula Franklin, in her famous 1989 Massey Series lecture, noted the changing role of technology and important ways it was changing the role of technologists, distribution of labour, and the balance of power, while in her view shrinking the public sphere.

The situation in the classroom at the interface between the biosphere and the bitsphere is but one facet of the situation in the workplace within the same realm. In fact, often even the designation of workplace is no longer appropriate. Not only do new technologies, new ways of doing things, eliminate specific tasks and workplaces… but the remaining work is frequently done asynchronously in terms of both time and space.
— Ursula Franklin (1992:172)

Her distinction between what she identified as prescriptive approaches2 versus holistic3 ones led to a concern that not working together in the same space causes “opportunities for social interactions, for social learning and community building [to] disappear.” (Franklin, 1992:172). A neoliberal market model of education is paired with a neoconservative social model that work together to “change people’s understanding of themselves as members of collective groups” (Apple, 2009), a course at odds with public education’s heritage of citizenship-, character-, and democracy-building. An aggressive and well-funded movement is under way that “supports marketisation through its clear preference for incentive systems in which people are motivated by personal, not collective, gain rather than by the encouragement of social altruism. Yet, the tradition of social altruism and collective sensibilities has roots just as deep in our nations, and its expression needs to be expanded, not contracted.” (Apple, 2004; Apple, 2009).

Neither of the above authors in the works cited alludes to what I believe can only be described as a new literacy for the 21st century: fluency in coding and code. At Occupy Wall St. the techies “[built] websites, put out messages, manage[d] the ebb and flow of information about the occupation on the Internet.” (Judd, 2011) A year later “TechOps,” as the New York contingent of web-developing occupiers call themselves, built and maintained the website for the Sept. 17 anniversary events. They put together a whole host of other underlying technical infrastructure… TechOps-built database software sits behind a system to match people who needed a place to stay during the demonstrations with people who had space to offer […and built…] what has become a broad suite of web tools built specifically for Occupy activists. Using their own flavor of WordPress’ multi-site functionality, TechOps can facilitate sites like S17NYC.org and allow individual movement groups to maintain their own web presences themselves.” Those who code may have a special understanding of the saying “free as in beer, but not free as in speech” (Judd, 2012).

Franklin, in 1989, was perhaps just a bit too early to fully anticipate the complex socio-politico-economic forces that would result in Twitter, a commercial start-up, empowering the Arab Spring. But Apple’s 2009 essay describes in full the motives and methods we see manifesting in high-stakes testing and redistribution of public resources to private concerns that are part of many ed “reform” efforts. I believe there’s a need for further research into the roles of social networking within emerging communities of practice, but also its influence on communities of practices’ emerging. In the meantime, code literacy is something that’s fun and beneficial to pursue, which you can leverage within many learning environments to help create the kinds of authentic, situated opportunities for discovery and knowledge construction project- and inquiry-based learning models are touted for. And while you probably don’t have the next Dimitri Gaskin in your class, you almost certainly have more expertise available than you’ve imagine or tapped.

All of the jQuery JavaScript scripts I’ve used so far are my own—and all of them contain flaws that were part of my learning process. Currently my Footnotes script works with this WordPress theme (or any theme that uses <article> elements for posts), I simply hit the HTML tab on my WordPress editor and create a <sup> element of class=”footnote” and down below a numbered (“organized”) list of class <ol class=”footnotes”></ol> and it automatically creates a rollover/keypress on the number. In this version I have to hard code the numbers in the <sup> tags… so if I move a list item or add one in between I have to manually renumber. One of the first tasks for a group could be to improve on that. If a classroom or school has a blog or web page, and they use it for student writing, and they encourage using such common conventions as footnotes, then it might be an intrinsically motivating project to design and implement something that facilitates and modernizes the process in a way students can own.

My footnotes script is part-way to becoming a jQuery plugin. You may or may not know what that is, but I’ll wager you know someone who does. It’s only part-way done because I’m  trying to think more like a programmer so I’m learning about design patterns and building in stages. The Smashing Magazine article in that link contains links to all the information one needs to finish it. In my next and hopefully final instalment I’ll talk about a project I have in mind that I think holds benefits for classroom teachers who are still tentative about technology and/or looking for creative ways to include it, one that demystifies programming and the coding culture, and hopefully creates space in the classroom for activities and knowledge that may already be taking place informally outside, extending access and creating new opportunities.

§


    Notes:

  1. For example, if you provide the path to a 36×36 pixel image representing a rubric or video:
    .bg-rubric {
    background: transparent url(“..path_to/rubric.png”) no-repeat 3px 3px; padding:3px 9px 3px 36px;
    }
    .bg-video {
    background: transparent url(“..path_to/video.png”) no-repeat 3px 3px; padding:3px 9px 3px 36px; }
  2. See for example, Harvard Business School’s aggressively disruptive, top down, market-model for education reform in Christensen et al., 2009
  3. See for example, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s “Beyond the Bake Sale: A Community- Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools,” (Warren et al., 2009), PDF available from The Logan Square Neighborhood Association http://bit.ly/nYwbjK accessed 2012-11-03

References

Apple, Michael W. (2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Apple, Michael W. (2006), Understanding and Interrupting Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism in Education, Pedagogies: An International
Journal
, 1:1, 21-26

Christensen, Clayton; Johnson, Curtis W.; Horn, Michael B. (2008), Disrupting Class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw Hill, 288 pages.

Judd, Nick (2011). #OWS: Tech-Savvy Occupiers Hope to Open-Source a Movement, http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/ows-tech-savvy-occupiers-hope-open-source-movement, accessed 2012-11-03

Judd, Nick (2012). How Free Software Activists are Hacking Occupy’s Source Code, accessed at http://techpresident.com/news/22867/how-free-software-activists-are-hacking-occupys-source-code 2012-10-23

Osmani, Addy (2011). Essential jQuery Plugin Patterns, http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/11/essential-jquery-plugin-patterns/, accessed 2012-11-03

Franklin, Ursula. (1992, rev ed. 1999) The Real World of Technology. (CBC Massey lectures series.) Concord, ON: House of Anansi Press Limited, 206 pages.

Kreiss, Daniel and Tufekci, Zeynep (2012). Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics (September 17, 2012). Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13:3 (Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2147711

Warren, Mark R.; Hong, Soo; Rubin Leung, Carolyn; Uy, Phitsamay Sychitkokhong (2009). Beyond the Bake Sale: A Community- Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools, Teachers College Record Volume 111, Number 9, September 2009, pp. 2209–2254

Nov 01

21st Century Cognitive Apprenticeship: 4 Ways We Make Thinking Visible

Back in 2005 Dorian Peters posted a summary of Mayer’s Principles for the design of Multimedia Learning I’ve visited frequently. I read it again today through the lens of cognitive apprenticeship and made some connections. Two essential components of apprenticeship models and multimedia design are narration and its timing, which is probably why software applications like Adobe Captivate, PowerPoint, or PowToons contain various ways to synchronize the appearance of objects with audio, visuals and text. The framework and principles can help form a checklist to improve the Who, What, When, Where, and How of choosing what to include in learning environments, all of which illuminate two distinct aspects of the Why — a given that someone wants to learn the stuff, and our ability to assess that including something in specific ways — or not — helps achieve that goal.

Mayer (2001, 2003, 2005) presented research-based principles for the design of multimedia messages. His fundamental principle is the multimedia principle itself: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. Peters has organized the principles into sets:

  • Principles for managing essential processing  more»
    • Segmenting principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
    • Pre-training principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
    • Modality principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
  • Principles for reducing extraneous processing  more»
    • Coherence principle: People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
    • Redundancy principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on on-screen text.
    • Signaling principle: People learn better when the words include cues about the organization of the presentation.
    • Spatial contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
    • Temporal contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
  • Principles based on social cues  more»
    • Personalization principle: People learn better when the words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
    • Voice principle: People learn better when words are spoken in a standard-accented human voice than in a machine voice or foreign-accented human voice.
    • Image principle: People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.
  • One last principle,” the Individual differences principle.  more»
    Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners. Design effects are stronger for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners.

More about these in a moment. These principles illustrate a point of mine: that what Collins, Brown, Duguid, Newman, Holum et al. (see my posts here and here) bring with their theory of cognitive apprenticeship is a practical framework by which to apply such good principles. Conversely, the principles can guide the how, when, who, where, and why of specific situations. Consider the statement that teachers (who may often be more generally deemed “designers” of learning experiences) should show the processes of the task and make them visible to students (Collins et al.., 1991:). The common root of processes and processing reveals the relationship. The set of essential processing principles informs the design and planning stages, with a strong nod to individualization. Extraneous processing are filters and fine-tuning strategies. Both sets speak to content, method and sequence in Collins’s language. The fourth member of that set in cognitive apprenticeship lingo is sociology, and Mayer offers guidance here as well.

I’m going to apply Mayer’s fundamental principle now and try to enhance this communication with narration and pictures. Maybe you’ve never thought of footnotes as technology before, but they are a highly developed device1, designed to make an author’s thinking visible.

I use this icon to exclaim or assert something. I assert that this is one way to make thinking visible. For a web site, it’s easy to use CSS to make a set of icons. available, as I’ve done for this one. Of course the meanings of the icons must be communicated throughout the community and a common understanding shared by those who use them. Press the letter N to open this “Note” showing my growing list. The letter U opens my Audio narration in which I discuss 4 simple things we’ve done within documents to make thinking visible, and how each can be enhanced with the 3 main Web technologies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Icons Used Here

  • Assertion 
  • Argument 
  • Audio 
  • Decision 
  • Web page 
  • Idea 
  • Issue 
  • List 
  • Idea Map 
  • Con 
  • Note 
  • + Pro 
  • Position 
  • Rubric 
  • Video 

This icon is not in the original Compendium set. I added it because I thought it filled a need.

Using icons is another thing on my list. It’s not a new idea, but applying it specifically when managing essential processing, thinking about segmenting and pre-training (prerequisite knowledge?) while imagining and planning authentic environments, or striving to reduce extraneous processing throughout demonstration and coaching phases. A consistent icon set provides coherence by signaling and providing cues about the content. For more ways, roll your mouse over the list icon, or press the L key to open my List. Press N to open a Note displaying the list. Press U to open my Audio narration for this content.

  • Icon sets
  • “More »” links  more»
    More links reduce extraneous information and communicate which points you think are important.
  • Footnotes2
  • Narration & animation

§


    Footnotes:
  1. Anthony Grafton, in The Footnote: A Curious History (1999) points to men like Pierre Bayle, who “…made the footnote a powerful tool in philosophical and historical polemics; and Edward Gibbon, who transformed it into a high form of literary artistry. Proceeding with the spirit of an intellectual mystery and peppered with intriguing and revealing remarks by those who “made” this history, The Footnote brings what is so often relegated to afterthought and marginalia to its rightful place in the center of the literary life of the mind…” (cover notes).
  2. With JavaScript the eye never has to leave the main text. It can count them for you, too!

References

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2003). E-learning and the Science of Instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning New York: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge Hanbook of Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grafton, Anthony (1999). The Footnote: A Curious History, Boston: Harvard University Press, 241 pages.

IDEO (2011). The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators, http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/, 94 pages.

Peters, Dorian (2005). Mayer’s Principles for the design of Multimedia Learning, blog http://designerelearning.blogspot.ca/2005/09/mayers-principles-for-design-of.html retrieved 2012-10-10.