As a course designer (I’ve had the pleasure of writing every course I’ve taught), I’ve used PBA’s a lot – both before I knew that there was such a term/acronym, and before my involvement with MET. A quick sampling: In Aboriginal art history, my students produce photo essays of Aboriginal and Aboriginal-inspired art in Vancouver. […]
Continue reading PBA’s, learning objectives, and academic anxiety Posted in: Week 10: Product-Based Assessments
A TOWN WITHOUT BOOKS, WHERE NASA PRACTISED MOON LANDINGS My father grew up in a mining town with no trees and, as he claims, no books. He left as soon as he was able and found work cleaning telephones. By the time he retired, he was advising executives and working with professors from Harvard. […]
Continue reading eBooks could be cheating done right! Posted in: Week 06: eBooks
Hi David,
There’s obviously much in this essay to consider and respond to, but I’ll keep it to my top 4…
1) I read your take as being very strongly pragmatic (read what we need in order to solve the particular task at hand). I can’t help but think of the contrasting issue to the execs you discuss who want to synopsis rather than reading the book – that is, the huge value some people place on displaying how well read they are – or how well read they want people to think they are. I think this is significant for our discussion of e-books this week because the materiality of hard copy books is not only personally but socially significant for many. In the museum studies course I teach, we talk a lot about how, as students, our bookshelves at home can be considered curated collections – and how we are using them to make visible, to ourselves and others, our identities and ambitions.
2) Your comments on shearing down content reminded me of something significant a mentor once shared with me – it’s not what you know, it’s knowing where to find out what you need to know.
3) The idea of social annotations sounds really interesting – but as with knowing where to look, I’d want to be picky about whose metadata (annotations and highlighted passages) I’d be using. I say this because most of my experience with metadata in the form of marginalia and highlights comes from academic library books – and at least in the UBC social science books, ‘outrage marginalia’ seems to be a hot genre! As for finding the socially sanctioned good stuff – at least in academic texts – I love the Web of Science search engine, as it tells you which pages of a given text are most often cited in peer-reviewed publications. Interestingly, and a bit hilariously, it’s often the first page!
4) re: modular content. I’ve recently worked on a very large book composed of 30 distinct, and independently authored, chapters. From what I’ve learned from that experience, curation (careful selection, editing, and ordering) is paramount to ensure that the volume as a whole is cohesive. Something about applying the content management approach to publishing that concerns me is that the emphasis may land too heavily on the individual piece of content rather than on its relationships to other pieces in the broader work.
Wow, thank-you for sharing some great points.
1. Good point about people “wearing” their books as a symbol of their erudition. I was just talking to someone about the over-valuing of symbols (judgments based on the wearing of a hijab, or a skirt that is too short) rather than the character of the person as demonstrated through their actions. My father amassed a huge library in his basement which obviously had a huge symbolic value. I actually felt a tremendous sensation of freedom when I downsized my home prior to moving to a new city. I gave away 100s of books. I’m happy with a growing set of summaries I can share and use. To me, books are intellectual consumables.
2. “Knowing where to find vs. knowing”. Hm… I’m on both sides of this concept. On the one hand knowing where to look is important. On the other, having some judgment about the value of different sources means knowing some content. That’s why I prefer the notion of focusing on core concepts and defining mental models of those concepts in the form of job aids. The summaries, which could be analogized to hockey cards or baseball cards, I suppose, provide an easy way of trading in ideas and not getting too blinded by a particular expression of an idea in a particular book.
3. You’re right that annotations will have different value based on who provides them. In one sense, Wikipedia shows the power of curated crowd-sourcing. That’s a definite possibility. Simply going with trend in highlights and comments is another path. A third way would be to tap into particular minds: how would Steve Jobs annotate a business book? How would that compare to Bill Gates?
4. I take your point about the value of curating. I suppose I would say that your value as a curator is to consider the modules and work on the connective tissue that sequences them and teases out the patterns in them. The fact that you can work with modules actually gives you a lot more power in editing. Instead of facing a monolithic work, you can re-arrange modules for purposes of comparison, contrast, etc. One of my goals for my writing students is to make better use of outlines… breaking ideas down into chunks and playing with those chunks like a curator, using the outline as a simulation of the final work.
I strongly believe that anxiety over reading and thinking comes from feeling overwhelmed by a perceived complexity. Cognitive load theory suggests we use chunking to assemble patterns and hierarchies for easier processing.
Very interesting point, David, about the circumstances in which your father lived and became an educated reader, just as executives and professors went the other way with their reading: less is more. I agree with Allie first point, in fact heard very similar ideas in the CBC podcast Doug posted, people like to show what they know (therefore more is more, one would assume).
Thanks to Google and their scanning of a billion or so books, nobody has to read anything ever again, as we now have n-grams to tell us what can be found in decades’ worth of reading material: here’s the link: Google Ngrams Viewer. Gives us more time to get that perfect score on Angry Birds ;-P
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Everton Walker 8:38 am on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Allie,
Great post! Do you see where your courses will one day omit exams in their totality? Is there a possibility that exams will one day be a thing of the past?
Everton
Doug Smith 9:32 am on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
That’s a very interesting observation Allie. Typically I think of high-stakes testing as being a part of anxiety, but I can see how a new or different way of assessment (and therefore learning) can cause anxiety. As you say though, the hope is that the end of the process ties back towards the learning process, and here again I think we are seeing the importance of reflection.
My next question that comes to me is I wonder if there is an EVM (product or service) which can help educators or learners ease through this process of anxiety?
cheers
Doug
andrea 7:27 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Allie, someone in another post mentioned that sometimes PBA-style assignments take us outside our comfort zone, and you’ve really reinforced what that looks like here. Once we’re in the habit of writing papers or exams for every course, for some people it’s unsettling when they’re asked to do something different. We know how much time it takes to study, or to research and write a paper. A project that involves something more authentic is intimidating both because it requires *real* skills and because it’s an *unknown*. Thanks for describing your experience on the teaching side of this so clearly!
Andrea