Learning

Learning

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.

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.

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.

AIMS Fails Learning 101

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The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) has just released its report about our public education system. On the local news, the Director of AIMS urged the New Brunswick Government to bring back standardized testing. The Minister, Kelly Lamrock, is supposed to reply this afternoon. We’ll see what stuff our politicians are made of.

So what does it matter that our local high school received a C+? About as much as the fact that I got a D in Grade 9 French class. I now speak French fluently. I also got an A in Grade 12 Algebra and my math is abysmal, even after two years of university level math. Face it; in the long run, there is no correlation between success in life and the grades you got.

Creating a lovely matrix filled with absolute numbers may look pretty and may get you some press time but it fails to inform us about the state of our education system. The time to measure is several years after graduation, when all of the short-term test results are irrelevant and what you really learned is what you have left.

Our neighbour to the South has been pushing standardized testing through its “No Child Left Behind” legislation, and look at the results, according to Monty Neil:

Key problems with the law include over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding or retaining in grade low-scoring children to boost test results; and inadequate funding. The law not only punishes schools, it damages educational quality, particularly for those the law purports to help – low income children, children of color, those with learning disabilities, and those who are just learning English.

Is this the direction that AIMS wants to take our system?

Standardized tests tell us little about learning, and report cards for schools only create “talk points” for partisan debate about education. Standardized tests, for students or for schools, are all about control. Yeats said that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Fire is much harder to control.

Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and The Case Against Standardized Testing, has this to say about grades:

Second, I’d been looking for an alternative to grades because research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades.

In another article, Kohn refers to a Journal of Educational Psychology study that examined just how actively students were engaged in learning while taking standarized tests:

To be sure, there are plenty of students who think deeply and score well on tests—and plenty of students who do neither. But, as a rule, it appears that standardized-test results are positively correlated with a shallow approach to learning.

Therefore, I will not grade the AIMS report, but rather examine it from a performance-based pass/fail perspective:

  • Does the report help policy makers to improve learning in the educational system? Fail
  • Does the report inform the general public about the core issues in public education? Fail
  • Does the report raise the public profile of AIMS? Pass

Grassroots Social Software

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Meredith Farkas has created Five Weeks to a Social Library, a site that includes many knowledge artifacts from a well-structured online course. The material is not just for librarians, with an outline that looks like this:

Introduction
Week 1: Blogs
Week 2: RSS & Social Bookmarking
Week 3: Wikis
Week 4: Social Networking, Flickr & MMOGs
Week 5: Selling Social Software
Final Project
Successful Completion List

The structure is similar to the informl learning unworkshops we conducted last year, but what I really like about this site are links to the participants, their blogs and their final projects, so you can follow the learning process. The site is built on Drupal, an excellent system for multi-user blogs and community resources.

Note that Week 1 covers blogs, which I have come to see as the primary building blocks for the social web. One reason that blogs are so persistent is because they are personal, and owners take pride in their maintenance.

Conversations

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Blogs are great for conversations, but often fall off the radar screen when they go beyond the first page and are left dangling.

One of the older conversations here is about Aliant’s connection speed. I had some woes with my ISP, which were finally addressed after a year of complaints and figuring out if anyone else had similar problems. My recent problems with Skype (last post) may be related to my ISP and it seeems that others have problems with Aliant’s service, namely that XBox live doesn’t work with their fastest service.

The homework question has garnered a lot of comments, as had earlier posts on homeschooling. Most of us have gone though the public education system and many have an opinion. I have come to believe that the core of the problem is an education system that was created for very different reasons than what we need today. Many “educational” activities are ineffective or counter-productive to learning, yet they continue based on tradition instead of sound science. If the evidence shows that an activity has little purpose, then we should abandon it. Homework is only one activity that lacks evidence to support its continuance. Subject-based curriculum, age-based cohorts and reliance on unsound models like Bloom’s Taxonomy to prescribe learning activities are other examples. This conversation on homework has been picked up in the community and we may even have a radio spot in the near future.

There also have been some comments to an older post on Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars. It’s great to see new discussion after several months of quiet, which is why I keep comments open.

This week there were some updates to the state of the NB elearning industry, thanks to Ben. Companies come and companies go, but many of us choose to stay. I’m on my third business card since I retired from the Army in 1998.

Finally, I’d like to quote Shawn, at Anecdote, on the importance of conversation, “… most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.“

CGI Informal Learning Case Study

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Jay Cross refers to the March Issue of CGI Technology Viewpoints, which covers this Canadian company’s experience in implementing informal learning practices. CGI is discussed in detail in Jay’s book.

This is a good reminder for the naysayers (it can’t be done here) to see what a large corporation can actuallly implement. Here is CGI’s “bottom line” on informal learning:

  1. When creating an environment that blends a rich mixture of available technologies to drive optimal collaboration, organizations don’t need to invent anything fundamentally new.
  2. Be creative, taking advantage of what’s already in place within the enterprise, and look at open source options as an inexpensive but viable way to build a robust collaboration infrastructure.
  3. Collaboration doesn’t require a large systems integration exercise when you leverage what’s already readily available and proven.

Jumping In

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Imagine walking into a cocktail party that has been going on for a few hours and jumping in to the conversation. Blogs are like that. They flow along and different people join in the conversation from time to time. I monitor about 150 blogs and even if I don’t read each post, I have a general idea of what’s flowing by, so that I can jump in when I feel like it.

Behind most blogs lies the story of the writer and the community.  Shawn, at Anecdote, has this to say about stories, “Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.”

To use blogs for learning effectively, you have to jump in and go with the flow for a while. Understanding what is behind the writing as well as the conversations around each post then gives the necessary context.  Learning with blogs isn’t just about finding a useful fact here or there, but more of engaging in multiple stories that flow by, sometimes mixing and other times diverging. Following these flows is an acquired skill. It’s a meta-learning skill for the internet age that just might be worth developing. Jumping in is the first step.