Tempus Fugit

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Sara Bennett has posted a guest article that looks at how much discretionary time is available for homework in the average student’s day.

I’d like to build on this argument and look at the research behind it, because I think that it is about time that we demand that our public educational practices be based on solid research and understanding about learning and human health.

Looking at the 24 hours in each day, one begins with the need for sleep. It seems that school age children need between 8 and 10 hours of sleep, depending on age. The average of 9 hours stated in the article seems accurate. Does anyone dispute these figures?

Next, we need 2 hours for three meals. Is this too much? My own experience is 30 minutes for breakfast as well as lunch and one hour for supper, so it seems appropriate. Exercise time is one hour, which I think may be a bit low. In our case, swim practice is 1.5 hours and Tae Kwon Do is 1.5 hours. The American Heart Association recommends:

Schools should ensure that all children participate in at least 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity during the school day, with options for more activity in extracurricular and school-linked community programs.
School-based PE [physical education] programs should be evidence-based, should include moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 50% of PE class time, and should teach students the skills needed for lifelong physical activity.
PE programs should meet national standards, including 150 minutes per week for grades K through 8 and 225 minutes per week for grades 9 through 12.
Schools should promote walking and bicycling to school where possible, with routes made safe by the joint efforts of school leaders and local governments.

One hour of exercise per day, of which 30 minutes is rigorous, is the professional recommendation for cardio-vascular health. In our high school, physical education is only offered for 1/3 of the school year, so the time for exercise must be made available outside of school hours.

The research agrees with the conclusion that 12 hours per day of sleep are necessary for maintaining basic health, but this could be 13 hours for younger children and only 11 hours for older children. Research also shows that one size does not fit everyone and that perhaps we should re-think school start times for teenagers:

All students performed better in the afternoon than in the morning. Students in early morning classes reported being wearier, less alert and having to expend greater effort.Potential solutions to this problem could be solved by changing school start times and by giving standardized tests later in the day, the authors suggested.

We can now look at the time for school. In our case, school starts between 8:17 & 8:25 AM and finishes between 2:30 and 3:00 PM. This includes 30 to 60 minutes for lunch. Actual class time is 6 x 50 minutes in middle school (5 hours) and 5 x 103 minutes in high school (5.25 hours). Let’s use 5 hours instead of the six stated in the article (your mileage may vary).

Commute to school time is given as one hour. Our experience is one hour for our high school student and 30 minutes for middle school. I cannot find any data on average commute times, but each community should be able to determine a mean or a mode. After-school activities are listed as taking one hour and this seems appropriate, but I would assume that this does not include excercise, which has already been accounted for.

My calculations then show 12 hours for health maintenance, 5 hours for school, one hour each for commuting and after-school activities, for a total of 19 hours, as opposed to the article which says that there are 21 hours of non-discretionary time.

These additional five hours of time need to account for family activities and chores, personal hygiene, relaxing time and of course: homework. So what is a reasonable extra imposition of homework on those meagre five hours of discretionary time? The rule of thumb given by many educators (not based on any evidence at all) is 10 minutes per grade level, so that almost half of students’ discretionary time is taken up with homework at the senior levels.

A national survey, conducted in1989/90 showed that in Grade 10, 18% of boys and 35% of girls spent more than two hours per week night on homework. The same study showed that 23% of boys and 38% of girls in Grade 10 spent more than two hours per weekend day on homework. A 2001 Canadian study showed that, “Teens in households with Internet access spend eight hours a week doing homework – an increase of one hour over 1998”. That’s 1.6 hours per 5 day week. My estimate would be that the “average” for high school is about 1.5 hours today, but I don’t have conclusive data on this. I would conclude (for now) that about 30% of students’ discretionary time is spent on homework, though this varies widely.

Dr. Cathy Vatterott, professor of middle level education at the University of Missouri, sums up the research on homework:

Research shows there is a slight correlation between homework and achievement in middle school and high school, although we can’t prove that homework causes high achievement. In middle school, students doing between 15 minutes and one hour of homework a night do just as well as students spending one to two hours on homework. For high school students, achievement declines after more than two hours of homework a night.

There is zero correlation between the amount of homework given and achievement at the elementary level.

Youth is short-lived and time flies, so why waste it on ineffective homework? We have let homework encroach upon our daily lives, and watch it continue to increase. Spending a third or more of our discretionary time on homework may be causing us to miss out on opportunities to grow as families and communities. Because public education is a state-owned monopoly, it must be accountable for the time demands it makes. Homework doesn’t seem to be worth the time.

Net Neutrality, Copyright and You

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Monday, April 23rd, is World Book and Copyright Day, and according to the Director General of UNESCO:

Much has also been said about the book as the driving force behind a wide array of income-generating activities and about the role of the book within today’s knowledge economies as an instrument for learning, sharing and updating knowledge. Of course, the linguistic dimension of publishing, an instrument of expression that lives through language and within a language, has also been emphasized and remains a decisive factor.

Lastly, as there can be no book development without copyright, the celebration of the Day has always been closely associated, from its inception and throughout all these years, with an awareness of the importance of the moral and heritage protection afforded to works of the human spirit and their creators.

Well, I think that the DG of UNESCO is way off the mark on the value of copyright and how much it protects the individual creator, especially in a digital, networked world. Organisations like Creative Commons are of even more value in the developing world than in the richer countries, helping individual artists reach their markets without going through the bottleneck of middlemen like publishers. Writers who publish books in the traditional way only receive a small amount of the end unit price, while direct to consumer models like Lulu give up to 80% of proceeds to the creator. When copyright outlives the actual creator, whose interests are being served?

At this time in the evolution of the industrial economy, copyright helps to entrench corporate incumbents and makes it difficult for innovative start-ups.

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The same goes for Internet access, where large corporations with their vested interests control the pipes. Jevon has put forth a good explanation on why Net Neutrality is an important issue for all of us:

Most large internet service providers come from incumbent industries such as Telecom or Cable TV. These large companies have been good and reasonably efficient at rolling out infrastructure, but they have also been birthed in the womb of government protection, artificial market dominance and a market segment that has an inelastic demand for their services.

Why does that matter? Well, it’s a fair bet that if it hasn’t already happened, high speed internet subscriber rates will soon start levelling off. As markets like Canada, the US and the UK see this peaking of subscribers, these incumbent companies will begin to look for ways to meet revenue growth projections. We’ve already seen what this can do here in Canada, it’s happened with our national cellular phone providers.

Get involved in the debate now, before it’s too late and our Big Brothers control not just our past culture but our ways of sharing information to create new culture.

I recently wrote about Packet Shaping and mentioned an organisation called NetNeutrality.ca. Today, this is all that is left of their website:

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.

Update: the Net Neutrality website is back up and running :-)

Google buys Marratech

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I knew that sooner or later Google would get into the synchronous web-conferencing business. They just announced the purchase of Marratech, which is in my opinion one of the best web conferencing products out there. And on top of that, it was built in Sweden, not Silicon Valley, and designed by a Canadian [félicitations, Serge].

I’ve used Marratech on several occasions over the past few years and for a while spent several hours a day collaborating with colleagues across the country on Marratech. It is just as good, if not better, than most of the other platforms that I’ve used, and at the time had the least restrictive licensing model and an excellent load distribution capability.

Now that Google owns Marratech we will see the commoditization of these platforms that have, up to now, been very expensive. We’ll also see some competition from open source, like DimDim, for those who want to host their own system. It’s pretty obvious that the days of selling six-figure web-conferencing license agreements will soon be over. I wouldn’t buy a new proprietary web-conferencing system at this time, until we see what Google does.

Via Geoffroi Garon

Freelancing

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Thinking about working for yourself? I made the move four years ago and don’t regret it, though working for yourself isn’t easy, it’s just a lot more free. Not as in free beer, but more like free to choose.

If you’re thinking about working on your own, my first recommendation is Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. Though it’s US-focused, it gives several perspectives on the ups and downs of free-agentry.

There are many blogs that you can start reading in order to check out life as an independent. If you are working in an office and want to get out of the rat race, check out Escape from Cubicle Nation. You may also want to consider Become a Consutant, if that’s where your inclinations lie. Finally, there’s a new blog from down under, Freelance Switch, that posted this comprehensive article on 101 Essential Freelancing Resources.

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PKM Notes

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Yesterday I gave a 90 minute online session to the Calgary eLearning Network, using Elluminate (a free “room” was provided by the company). This web presentation platform is quite robust and simple to learn if you’ve some experience with synchronous web tools. It’s based on a presentation model though, which means that it’s best for a lecture format, with one person doing most of the talking. It’s more difficult to get a conversation going, with only one person holding the microphone at any given time. The audio was good and I liked the polling function to get some quick feedback.

Here are links to what we discussed, in order of appearance:

Informal Learning Website and Jay’s book on Informal Learning

Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog on Web 2.0 (I used some of his excellent diagrams)

Hugh McLeod’s Gaping Void cartoons and commentary (may not be workplace safe)

Accenture Report on managers finding information on intranets

Dave Pollard on PKM

Will Richardson on Reading & Writing Online

Stock & Flow on the InternetTime Wiki

Leigh Blackall’s Networked Learning photo set

On the right navigation bar of this site are my External Links, including My Feed Aggregator and My Bookmarks. There are also several posts on PKM on this blog.

* You can test out Elluminate with their free vRoom offer.

Web-Learning Skills

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With my upcoming online presentation on personal knowledge management (PKM) to the Calgary eLearning Network tomorrow, I’m going through some collected files on the subject. I’ve also noticed that “personal learning” was a topic for a panel discussion at the recent eLearning Guild conference. Tony O’Driscoll has remarked that:

This is also one of the coolest things about Web 2.0 that we talked about on the panel. First and foremost Steven made the point that your approach as an educator should not be “OK let me figure out what blogs, wikis, social tagging, You Tube, Second Life and Moodle mean for my learning strategy or my learners.” Instead Steven suggests you start in the most obvious place -Where might that be? you ask – Why YOU and your own learning of course – Steven [Stephen Downes] says.

Learning has always been a personal thing, even when it happens in formal training. It’s also social, in that our learning is affected by our social context, whether it be in conversation or observation. What’s relatively new is that the Web lets us do some of our personal and social learning in a much easier way. We can connect, reflect, dispute and research with the click of the mouse.

My experience in helping trainers and educators with learning on the Web reinforces Stephen Downe’s advice to start with YOU. Those who are using the Web for their own learning have an easier transition in using it in training & education.

I guess it would be similar to asking someone to be a trainer in the pre-Web era. Could they be a good trainer if they lacked presentation, speaking, writing, or organisation skills? Today, you need web-learning skills.

For further digging, here are some articles I’ve tagged with PKM. Here are a bunch more tagged PKM on del.icio.us.

To train or not to train

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I’ve been in the training business for most of my life, in one role or another. Training, when it’s needed and done well, can be a most effective intervention.

Training is really effective when you can clearly measure the end performance. My own experience of good training was with helicopter pilots. As the training specialist I was able to observe instructor pilots and watch the junior pilots develop their skills in the aircraft or on the flight simulator. The program was proficiency-based, meaning that once a skill was mastered, the pilot could move on, without repeating the same thing. Avoiding unnecessary training meant significant cost savings as well.

I was reminded of the down side of training in Michele Martin’s post on 5 Reasons You Don’t Need Training, where she shows that inappropriate uses of training include:

  • To make up for poorly designed work processes
  • As a replacement for corrective action
  • To satisfy a “Requirement” for professional development
  • When performance expectations have not been properly developed
  • When you don’t have management understanding and buy-in

I’ve experienced all of these, from inside the organisation and as an outside consultant. I’ve also learned to stay away from “training” projects that really aren’t about training. I’ve discussed this before in, Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT, but it bears repeating because training is costly, in both resources and in time (trainers & trainees).

I learned early in my career as a training development officer that training should be the last option, after all other performance improvement measures have been proven inadequate. It’s a good rule of thumb.

Three Conflicting Pillars – Synthesized

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I took some time to re-read Kieran Egan’s book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. I’ve referred to his premises in Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars. These three premises are:

  • education as socialization
  • education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  • education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

The same topic was later revisited with a good discussion between Brian Alger, Rory McGreal, and Terry Wassall, and myself.

Later, I then went back to Egan’s website and came across a shorter article that summarizes the main premises of the book, Why Education is So Difficult and Contentious:

“… educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas – that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students’ potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.”

Egan’s suggestions for a curriculum based on process, not content, has made sense for me ever since I read The Educated Mind and some of his other writings in 1997. The book includes a Planning Framework that still makes more sense to me than any other curriculum framework that I have seen to date. You have to read the book to understand how to implement it, though.

After ten years, Egan’s ideas remain fresh and workable for the Internet Age and I strongly recommend this book.

Making A Difference

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Do all of the small environmental actions of individuals make any significant difference to climate change? According to an article in In These Times, not really:

One barrier standing in the way of meaningful action is fuzzy-headed thinking on the part of those truly concerned about global warming. So worried are these activists, that their solution to the climate change problem is to marshal legions of Americans to change light bulbs, buy a Prius, or do any other number of helpful, but, in the big picture, not too significant feel-good actions.

Some of my work over the past decade has been in performance improvement, and I’ve tried to focus on the real causes of organisational problems, and not just the symptoms. Having everyone “do their part” may not be enough to reverse global warming and a more concentrated effort to address the root causes may be needed . The article goes on to make this comparison with the civil rights movement:

Take the Civil Rights movement. Yes, personal reflection and individual change had its place, but can you imagine Martin Luther King telling people to “ask” their school boards to integrate the public schools, or “encourage” corporations not to discriminate, or “tell” their elected leaders to “push” legislatures in the South to do away with Jim Crow laws?

One answer may be to act green in our decisions that can actually make a difference. For instance:

  • When voting, choose the most environmentally responsible candidate or party.
  • Don’t settle for half-measures from any elected official and let them know it.
  • Refuse to be sold short-term economic benefits in place of environmental sustainability.
  • Lobby to get rid of the worst offenders amongst our elected officials.