DISQUS

Science of the Invisible: Failure is an option

  • stujohnson · 1 month ago
    I wonder whether screenr-type tutorials would help rather than simply written instruction. Then again, some students would prefer written instruction and then you might have to end up doing both which would mean additional workload...
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    I'd have hoped so, but the YouTube stats from my embedded Screenr videos say not :-(
  • psychemedia · 1 month ago
    If there is too much information, then discovery can be a problem. As can giving people a long list of things they need to know before they see the need to know it/for it to be useful ("why are you telling us this...?", "why are you telling us this NOW? We don't need it for ages..." etc etc.

    The OU style is often to go overboard (why point someone to an online tutorial when you can write a 20 page one instead), albeit using a proven house style (tutorial in print) which goes stepwise through required procedures as if the tutor is sat next to you.

    If you can segment the info into FAQ points, and publish that, then the first rule of support to tell your students is 'check the FAQ'.
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    This is undeniably true, but how much information is too much? And if many students are reluctant to read anything except in desperation (lack of intellectual curiosity) does that mean that online teaching (as distinct from online learning) is impossible? And how do I tackle the issues which arise when students complain about me and say "He doesn't teach us anything?"
  • Jo Badge · 1 month ago
    oh dear. Prefacing every question with 'have you read the notes?' getting boring is it? Guess they aren't 'clicking on the related links' either :-(
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    In many cases, they're not even looking at the notes until they fail to complete the assessment. They're learning backwards, which is maybe not a bad thing for them, but it's inefficient in terms of my time, and then they say that I'm a bad teacher...
  • Liam Green-Hughes · 1 month ago
    I was once told that journalists have been aware of this issue for some time, a similar problem can occur in newspapers apparently. To get round this they will essentially sum up the story in the first paragraph, using a technique known as the "inverted pyramid" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid) to get the substance towards the top of the article. I have no idea if this would translate into education though!
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    I think the difference with online journalism is that readers are presumably visiting those sites because they want to access the content. The majority of students visit our VLE not because they want to (death of intellectual curiosity - it's no longer higher education, it's higher training) but because it's a hoop jumping exercise to pass an assessment. How do we know this? Because if we don't assess an exercise, few participate. How do we solve the problem?
  • ianmulvany · 1 month ago
    I don't know if this is related, but last week I was teaching myself the Django framework by working through the tutorial. I learned more about it when the examples I was adapting broke then I did from the tutorial directly.
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    That is related, and that's the type of authentic learning I'm referring to. But what does your experience say about the people who wrote the manual?
  • Mark Rawlinson · 1 month ago
    Failure is what I get in life, when I bake, or race, or try to guide my children's behaviour - when I stop failing, it is a sign I have learned something. You are right that it is no longer normal in education (death would be the other thing missing round here, but that is another story). Why is failure hard? Partly because so much available affirmation iand social ancietry s bound up with public exams, reports etc from nursery school, but also because it is a signal that learning needs to be done, and that is just a) hard work and b) encounter with the unfamiliar.
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    Hmm, education as affirmation. I'll need to think about that.
  • Mark Rawlinson · 1 month ago
    Learning backwards is a nice way of getting at the problem - if as you say we are in an era of higher training then the default response will be to plug in and press play without reading the instructions. Adam Phillips is brilliant on how much learning rests on desire - as he almost puts it, what would SSDS be like if we took children's sexual curiosity as a model for learning and teaching.
  • stujohnson · 1 month ago
    Hey - how come when I comment here via disqus I get your photo next to my comment?!
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    Err, don't know. Disqus knows you are registered but doesn't show your avatar - methinks the new version is a bit flaky.
  • stujohnson · 1 month ago
    Another thought - how about teaching them to skim read better? I think skimming is a perfectly legitimate form of reading provided when you get to an important bit you read in detail and probably take some kind of notes too.
  • AJCann · 1 month ago
    I agree, we all skim read, but I don't think that's the problem here. They've decided that they don't need/want to read the instructions. It's the same problem as getting people to read an instruction manual - they won't do it until after they have failed. Stuff these days is supposed to "just work". Education isn't necessarily like that.