Author Archives: WMillhiser

On January 20th, two articles in the popular press reported new brain research that suggests certain benefits of note-taking by hand and taking tests.

1. “Write it don’t type it if you want knowledge to stick: Children and students who write by hand learn better than those who type, a study shows” by Richard Alleyne, The Telegraph, 20-Jan-2011.  (The print edition used a different title: “The pen is mightier than the keyboard as a teaching aid”.)
2. “To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test: Test-taking actually helps people learn, and it works better than repeated studying, according to new research” by P. Belluck, New York Times, 20-Jan-2011.

Of interest?

I’m certain many of you saw this: the New York Times ran four pieces on academic integrity in the last 30 days.  Interesting reading.  I especially recommend Alfie Kohn’s comments in the second article.

1. “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery,” by T. Gabriel, NY Times, July 5, 2010.

For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.

That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)

The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.

“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”

2. “Room for Debate: When Did Cheating Become an Epidemic?” by M. Bauerlein, A. Kohn, A. Daines, M. Pease, NY Times, July 12, 2010.

Alfie Kohn asks,

Rather than counting the number of students who cheat, or figuring out how to catch (or deter) them, I’d prefer to ask two questions that rarely figure in these discussions: What kinds of teaching elicit cheating? And what assumptions and values lead us to define some acts as cheating in the first place?

By the way, I recommend Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

3. “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)” by B. Staples, NY Times, July 12, 2010.

This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.

4. “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” by T. Gabriel, NY Times, August 1, 2010.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students—who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking—understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Did you notice that a software alternative to MS PowerPoint and Apple Keynote emerged from this year’s student presentations? It’s called Prezi (prezi.com). If you haven’t seen it, the idea is this: instead of thinking in terms of slides, imagine arranging all your presentation information on a large canvas as you might on a white board. Then instruct the software how to zoom in and out of various regions of that canvas in a way that complements the story you want to tell.

An illustrative example is on the Prezi website; another is James Geary’s 2009 T.E.D. presentation, though so far the best I’ve seen so far comes from our students. Prezi is web-based and free if your file size is 500MB or smaller (due to a special offer for students and teachers) and was recently reviewed in the NY Times and an HBR.org blog.

What does Edward Tufte say about the cognitive style of Prezi? Is it indeed more intuitive? Is it a fad? How does one create a traditional slide deck for clients? I don’t know.

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Speaking of presentation software, did you see that there are now apps to control PowerPoint and Keynote remotely from your iPhone? Even though I already use a USB remote control, I am experimenting with the iPhone Keynote Remote right now. All one needs is an iPhone and computer on the same wireless network. Hold the iPhone horizontally (in landscape orientation) and you’ll see the current and next slides side by side, though most text is too small to read. Hold the iPhone vertically and you’ll see the current slide and notes.  Swipe your finger to advance slides. My hope is that this $0.99 app will buy more eye contact with students and less looking over my shoulder.

At Baruch College’s March 26 “13th annual Teaching and Technology Conference” I led a session with the same name as this blog post. I’d like to share the basis of that talk for those with interest.

Disclaimer: When it comes to digital video, I am not the fountain of all knowledge. There are people all over CUNY (and NYU) doing rather innovative things with video—some of whom I had the pleasure of meeting in my talk. That said, technological innovations have made it so easy to weave video into a lecture that the question is shifting from whether you should adopt video to how you should do so. All you need is a $150 digital camera with a movie mode, namely, any camera on the market.  Your iPhone works great too.

Background: In my subject (operations management, a discipline that combines management, economics, statistics and engineering) video can demonstrate complex ideas in large lectures that are difficult to get across in words.  There also seems to be a growing understanding that large lectures benefit from small breaks and changes in the routine, video being an important option (e.g., see the paper here).

For now, I’m not talking about creating instructional video tutorials, but something relatively simpler. The focus is three types of video.

1. Bringing the real world inside the lecture hall. I always carry a compact digital camera around NYC and shoot video and stills whenever I see something relevant to class: an interesting inventory system in a Soho retail store, the queueing system at Whole Foods, the supply chain strategy posted on the windows of American Apparel, etc. Students always sit up and listen when one shares these videos.  (Hint: it’s always better to ask first, film second.)
2. Debriefing. My students also learn through games and simulations. I’ve started filming with my iPhone or compact digital camera to capture the students and their game boards as a game progresses. Lots and lots of little movie clips. I’ve begun interviewing during the games—like reality TV—to ask about the situations and choices students are making (one has to be careful to do so without distracting from their play). These efforts have added a level of richness and engagement to the post-game debriefing that I never anticipated.  (Hint: students seem a little less intimidated by an iPhone than a proper camera.)
3. Improving presentation skills. I now film my students while they give project presentations. For their personal development, they view their presentation videos and give me a critique/reaction of what they saw. The  “iTunes U” is a good place to host such video, but more on this shortly.

Software: Regardless of shooting video clips and stills outside or inside the classroom, my favorite way to present these to a class is by uploading all the content to iPhoto and then dragging and dropping into Apple’s equivalent to PowerPoint called Keynote. Each still image gets its own slide, as does each video clip. It creates the modern equivalent of a slide show, except the slides that contain video play as movies. I prepare this on my Apple MacBook Pro notebook computer, close the computer, carry it to the classroom, open, plug into the overhead projector, and voilà… it’s that easy. (PC users: you can drag and drop stills and video into PowerPoint too.)

Sometimes I shoot a number of short videos that I want to stitch together to create a single video. In this case, Apple’s iMovie (part of the iLife software suite) is a good tool for the job. It’s relatively easy to use, and costs less than $100. PC users can do the same with Movie Maker, included free with Windows XP, Vista and 7.

What if you want students (or the world) to access the videos via the WWW? To restrict access only to students, the best option I’ve seen so far is “iTunes U,” which interfaces through Blackboard, and under the right settings, creates a place for your videos that only Blackboard course users can access (all users will need the free iTunes download). Contact Kevin Wolff in BCTC for details.  I like this option for student presentations. The students can see and critique their presentations in the safety of knowing that the rest of the world will not.

Public sharing options include Vimeo, Blip.TV, Flickr, YouTube, but you’ll need to be careful about obtaining consent of people pictured in your videos before posting to the web. Finally, if appropriate, consider BCTC’s video hosting options.

So… what are you doing with video?

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Special thanks to Prof. Sara Rofofsky Marcus, Queensborough Community College for motivating this post, and to the folks in Baruch College Technology Center (BCTC) for the generous grant that allowed this.

I’ve got a section of 120 students this semester. I’ve taught it before and always enjoy the group—there’s so much energy at 7:30 at night. Thinking about the class, I recently reread Joan Middendorf and Alan Kalish’s “The ‘Change-Up’ in Lectures” (The National Teaching and Learning Forum, 1996, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 1-5), a refresher of tricks to make large lectures more engaging.  Perhaps you’ve seen it.

My favorite quote from the article is this:

One explanation for the lapses in students’ attention is that the “information transfer” model of the traditional lecture does not match what current cognitive science research tells us of how humans learn. Research tells us that the brain does not record information like a videocassette recorder.

The full text of the article is on the web: ntlf.com/html/pi/9601/article1.htm

In the original printed version there is also this sidebar of tricks: ntlf.com/html/pi/9601/article4.htm

Tricks include the well-known “think-pair-share.” Have you ever tried the so-called “kisses and crackers”?