Windows Server 2012 R2, Exams of Engineering Science and Technology

Download Windows Server 2012 R2 and more Exams Engineering Science and Technology in PDF only on Docsity! The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU Volume 3 Spiraling Upwards: EMU Faculty Transform Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Article 8 2010 Chapter 4 - What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History R. D. Jones Ph. D. Eastern Michigan University, rjones@emich.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://commons.emich.edu/sotl This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Bruce K. Nelson Faculty Development Center at DigitalCommons@EMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@EMU. For more information, please contact lib-ir@emich.edu. Recommended Citation Jones, R. D. Ph. D. (2010) "Chapter 4 - What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History," The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU: Vol. 3 , Article 8. Available at: http://commons.emich.edu/sotl/vol3/iss1/8 1 8 WHAT RUNNING A CLASS WIKI TAUGHT ME ABOUT TEACHING HISTORY Russell D. Jones Department of History and Philosophy Eastern Michigan University SPIRALING UPWARDS Teaching is very much an iterative process. We learn our material, develop some lectures, and teach a class. And then, in the delivery we find that some lectures or projects worked and that others did not. We make changes, go again, and reflect again. Each step is a learning step, not only for students but for teachers as well. With each change, teachers improve. It is this cyclical process around planning, delivery, reflection, and reform that makes teaching and learning an upwards spiral. Within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), we take this cyclical reflective process as a core concept. Teaching and learning become our objects of study and our problems for investigation. SoTL has an investigative method: By observing our object of study we learn how it operates, how it changes. If the subject (our student’s learning) cannot be seen, then we have little evidence by which we can estimate learning and the effectiveness of our teaching. In the second volume of the Eastern Michigan University's SoTL seminar, efforts focused on "making learning visible." As Jeffrey Bernstein (2008) explained, showing that learning has occurred is a "key element in the evidence-based culture of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" (p.2). But Bernstein's point was to highlight two principal activities in academic research and teaching and to underscore how we as scholars tend to privilege one at the expense of the other. He and other scholars have noted that the problematizing of research tends to build "community" and "communities of scholars," whereas the problematizing of teaching tends to isolate teachers as few academics wish to acknowledge that they are finding “problems in their teaching” (aside from the universal complaint that teaching takes away time from one's "real" academic pursuits) (Bernstein, 2008; Shulman, 1993; Bass, 1999; Coppola, 2007). SoTL is powerful as a research field as it takes our core activities (teaching) as our research object. With the advent of new text-based technologies in the early twentieth century, teachers have opportunities as never before to “look under the hood” of student learning and see how students go about the process of constructing their knowledge about a particular topic. For me, the Web 2.0 application, the wiki, has enabled me to see the learning behaviors of my students "behind the scenes.". Then, using the knowledge thus gained, I can make changes to how I teach. As I used the wiki more and more in my courses, I began wondering about the meta-cognitive learning that was going on in students. I could see what content they were learning, but what core disciplinary notions were they learning about the subject? In what ways did their course assignment affect how students understood disciplinary skills, principles, and values? What disciplinary values and techniques were students learning through their participation in my course wiki? 1 Jones: What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History Published by DigitalCommons@EMU, 4 RUSSELL D. JONES examination. But, I struggled in efforts to address the second goal of my course, methods and practices. I had experimented previously with various course projects (Jones, 2007). Web 2.0 and social networking applications caught my imagination. While I was experimenting with my first wiki-writing project in 2008, I began asking how the wiki affected a student’s understanding of history discipline. In some regards, I understand the discipline in conventional ways: It is a set of research and interpretative practices involving primary and secondary sources. But, I also place a greater emphasis on the constructiveness of the historical discipline, explaining that the conclusions we reach are also a product of socially shaped fashions and conventions current in the profession. Thus I also wished to discover the suitability of the wiki project for teaching the idea that a discipline is also a social-knowledge project.5 CONTENT OR METHOD? Over the past decade or more, universities have started to focus more on core instruction which often goes by the name "General Education." At Eastern Michigan University, General Education courses in U.S. history are intended to teach a "Knowledge of the Disciplines." The U.S. History Survey "provides an introduction to a variety of social science methodologies while emphasizing history’s unique contribution to the social sciences." The expectation is that students, while learning about historical method, "will gain the foundational content knowledge needed to understand and interpret the major trends, people, ideas, and events that have shaped the United States" (Eastern Michigan University, 2006). If the mandate is to teach knowledge of the disciplinary practices of the subject and if an aim of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is to make learning visible, then how does the instructor know whether or not learning about the discipline has occurred? The instructor needs to witness student practice in the discipline. If the discipline is defined as a core body of knowledge ("Content"), then simple examination is sufficient for determining the quality of learning that has occurred. Historians at EMU, however, have defined the historical discipline as more than a core set of facts. The discipline is also a set of historical skills and practices ("Method"): Students will learn the basic historical skills of sifting through source material and discovering patterns and repetitions that will often serve as the basis for their argument. The key social science methods focused upon will be close, critical readings of key primary sources to uncover cultural values, political beliefs, and social mores, and the use of quantitative data to determine economic, political, and social trends (Eastern Michigan University, 2006). 5 For social knowledge projects, see Larry Sanger’s (2007) inaugural talk for the IEA’s “Our Digital Futures” program. Alvin I. Goldman (1999) discusses today’s “social epistemology” in Knowledge in a Social World (pp. 3-4). Note that the term "social knowledge" has taken on a different caste over the last ten years. Previously when scholars spoke about "social knowledge" it was in the context of knowledge about society. Now it tends to imply a social constructivism of knowledge, knowledge created in social environments. Compare Thomas B. Farrell (1978) and Peter J. Taylor (2004). Psychologists continue to use the term in its original context: Roland Zahn (2010), "The Architecture of Social Knowledge," University of Manchester psychology research using MRI to map the areas of social knowledge in the brain. Psychologists at the University of Washington are now adding experimental data to this insight (Schwarz, 2009). 4 The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU, Vol. 3 [], Art. 8 http://commons.emich.edu/sotl/vol3/iss1/8 RUNNING A CLASS WIKI TAUGHT ME ABOUT TEACHING HISTORY 5 Thus the skills to be learned are the critical faculties of discerning patterns; discerning values, beliefs, and mores; establishing quantifiable facts through primary-source documents. Thus we see in this construction of the discipline emphasis on factual data, interpretation, and sources. The historical essay has traditionally been the means by which the teacher is to determine to what degree the learning of these practices and methods has occurred. The research essay is the place where knowledge of disciplinary practices is demonstrated and, as an individual research project, is often considered to the most apt assessment item. “In history,” writes Daniel D. Trifan (1997), “the student engages in a one- on-one relationship with the material” and that should form the basis of the student’s grade. So by the end of the semester, after lecture, discussion, and classroom exercises focusing on the methods, the student is to submit to the instructor an argumentative historical essay using primary sources. It is graded and returned and presumably and euphemistically "filed." So the goal of the teacher is two-fold: provide content as well as method; knowledge and practice and time-tested, if not honored, methods of assessing the learning have been reiterated. SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES OF DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE There is, however, another problem built into this program of teaching a disciplinary method. How does one "discern," in a practicable and concrete way, what a historical pattern is? How does the historian or student "identify" cultural values or political beliefs? How do the practitioners of the discipline establish "the facts?" These issues of knowledge creation have always intrigued me, and I want students to question, rather than just accept, the information often given to them. Since the 1970s, scientists and social scientists have been critically examining the foundations of their knowledge. They have found a collaborative component to knowledge-generation. Within my own history sub- field (history of science and technology) there has been on-going debate over disciplinary epistemology. The authors in this debate (David Bloor, Bruno Latour, Michael Callon, Harry Collins, Steven Woolgar, Steven Yearley and many others), while arguing over the degree to which social involvement and interaction affects knowledge production, have nonetheless advanced the notion that scientific knowledge production is indeed a very social process. In the discipline of history itself, Peter Novick (1988) in his pivotal That Noble Dream underscored also the social processes at work in the production of historical knowledge.6 The production of historical knowledge is the result of dialog among historians through journals, at conferences, and by correspondence. Historians are persuaded, sometimes by rational argument and sometimes by appeals to social convention, of what constitutes orthodox knowledge in the profession. The result of this line of inquiry has led professional historians to abandon the belief of historical knowledge as a "steadily accumulating edifice of unchallengeable knowledge" (Haskell, 2000, p. 147). On the other hand, history students in the classroom readily accept a history as "unchallengeable knowledge." They accept their textbook as established truth, verified, and ossified (Calder, 2006; Wineburg, 1991). There is an epistemological gap between what history professionals do in the production of their knowledge (conference papers, discussion, peer review, book reviews, historiography) and what history students do in the production of their own historical knowledge (acceptance of lecture or textbook). Robert Bain (2000) described the "epistemic gap" this way: History at the university was a discipline, a unique way of knowing the world that professionals shared. In the high school, history was a subject students took and teachers taught, differing from other subjects only in the facts covered. Students claimed that they did 6 See also Thomas Haskell (2000, p.150-151). 5 Jones: What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History Published by DigitalCommons@EMU, 6 RUSSELL D. JONES in history exactly what they did in other courses—used texts, memorized facts, did homework, and took tests. In the minds of adolescents, there is little unique about history (p. 331). Generally speaking, only four months (the summer) separate the students that Bain taught (high schoolers) and those who enter my U.S. history survey courses as first-year college students.7 Perhaps this epistemological gap exists as the space between the novice and disciplined professional, as I too will gladly accept what a particle physicist tells me is true (or "acceptable") about particle physics. I have little invested in a debate with a particle physicist besides pleasant conversation or the satisfaction of curiosity, and I am not about to attempt to duplicate his or her research. Alternatively, this gap could be generational. Today's college students have become exceptionally adept at sifting presentational material in order to arrive at a threshold of knowledge that meets their goals (general education requirements) and have little patience for their professors' exercises in "epistemic activity." Mark Bauerlein described today's generation's approach to their college experience as a “mercenary activity” “that really makes the academic experience organized around achievement" (test-taking and checking off the requirements towards the credential) (Bauerlein & Howe, 2008, 1:11:05). Neil Howe agreed that today's students, "millennials" as he and William Strauss have called them, have a certain level of frustration at their teachers, their teachers' multiplicity of viewpoints, and their teachers' admiration of Socratic questioning (Howe & Strauss, 2000). "I think a lot of millennials," Howe once remarked, "just say [to their professors], 'look, if you've already thought about this so much and you've thought about every possible way of interpreting it, just summarize it for me so I can move on'" (Bauerlein & Howe, 2008, 1:29:35).8 This same sort of impatience is representative of the gap between the skilled practitioner and the inquiring novice who admires efficiency: Why re-invent the wheel if the skilled practitioner has a working prototype; just give me the wheel so that I can start building cars. A physicist doesn't need to teach me the math behind elementary particle physics in order for me to understand that splitting the atom in a chain reaction releases a lot of energy. To close the gap, either disciplinary or generational, between the practitioner and the novice, the transmission model of learning (lecture, memorization, and textbook) has demonstrated its inadequacies. As Bain (2000) continues, "Though storytelling may help students develop models of historical narratives, lectures and textbooks do not seem to develop in them [the students] the historian's thinking skills" (p. 334). During the 1990s, "active learning" became a mantra for an alternative model of learning. By having students engaged in historical practice, for instance, working with documents and doing historical research, students would cross that gap and learn the historian's thinking skills. But as Bain (2000) points out, the shortcoming here is that active learning encourages mimicry and only addresses the epistemological gap tangentially; behaviors are copied which may or may not indicate an epistemological shift. And what we're seeking as teachers are those shifts in thinking and we may not have the patience to wait out students who fake it until they make it (Seixas, 1993; Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2004; Sowell, 1993).9 7 Bain (2000) also identified history as an "epistemic activity" (p. 332). 8 See also Mark Bauerlein’s (2009) The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30); Neil Howe’s and William Strauss’ (2000) Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, and Howe’s & Strauss’ (2003) Millennials Go to College: Strategies for a New Generation on Campus. 9 For serious criticisms of the short-comings and faddish nature of “active learning,” see Trifan (1997). In Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the classroom, Charles C. Bonwell and James A. Eison in various 6 The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU, Vol. 3 [], Art. 8 http://commons.emich.edu/sotl/vol3/iss1/8 RUNNING A CLASS WIKI TAUGHT ME ABOUT TEACHING HISTORY 9 the story" and showing the causes of conflict as a purpose of historical interpretation. Term paper writers ranked the causes of conflicts much lower. While I did not engage in rigorous research into the causes of these changes, I did ask for student reflections on their learning. Over three-quarters of the respondents in each group reported that their class project affected their perceptions of what the history discipline was. Thus it seems that the wiki project tended to reinforce history writing as an exercise in objectively explaining causation and resolution of conflicts where objective story-telling and individual agency is not emphasized. But conversely, for term-paper writers, history is not so much an objective story of the causes of events but an objective explanation of change in order to discern the meanings of events in which individuals made choices and affected outcomes. Also, many students who participated in the wiki project expressed skepticism at the notion of trying to create a social container for knowledge creation. Many expressed the thought that just because the wiki was an assignment, negated any valuable group debate or criticism towards the creation of an accurate or engaging story. Whereas professionals engage in debate and criticism in order to further the boundaries of the discipline, students, when compelled by an assignment expressed little incentive to do more than asked. What I think these surveys show is that the wiki project was much better than the term paper at having students focus on conflict, whether within the historical discipline, as an interpretative framework, or as a means of testing for evidentiary veracity. Their histories tended towards interpreting the causes and resolutions of conflict. The higher emphasis that wiki writers placed on objectivity also seemed to support their awareness of conflict because part of objectivity is to resolve conflicting viewpoints. The term paper seems to be a better tool to help students focus on the agency of historical actors in a national setting and how people's actions are meaningful for us today. Throughout, term paper writers believed that they focused more on the individual: primary sources as individual witness, a source's veracity identifiable by internal consistency, and the purpose of historical interpretation is to make meaningful individual expressions of agency. What these student surveys also seemed to suggest was that the term paper as an assignment tended to reinforce a vision of the discipline as an individualistic endeavor that focuses on individual and discrete events, people, sources, and choices. This is probably because writing a term paper itself is an individualistic endeavor. Whereas the wiki project as a collaborative and communitarian assignment (however limited that may be) tended to reinforce a different vision of the discipline: one that focuses on the origins and resolutions of conflict in order to arrive at an objective version of the past. Not surprisingly, both assignments seem to accurately reflect certain aspects of the profession itself. This notion that the structure of an assignment can itself be the teaching tool gives us more tools towards meeting student learning objectives, when we wish to impart the values, methods, and principles of the discipline. Historians have noted that class projects can “recreate what historians do in colloquia and at conferences.” Thus, the assignment can teach the norms and techniques of the discipline: Where we wish to teach social and collaborative strengths of the discipline, a collaborative project seems appropriate. When we want to stress research method, a term paper might be better. Teachers’ goals should indicate a particular pedagogical tool (Grant, 2003).11 11 See also Samuel Wineburg and Suzanne M. Wilson (1991) in “Subject Matter Knowledge in the Teaching of History” pages 305-347, where they show that the teacher’s instructional practices reinforce the pedagogical aim of the lesson. 9 Jones: What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History Published by DigitalCommons@EMU, 10 RUSSELL D. JONES THE NEXT STEP UP THE SPIRAL For teaching a knowledge of the history discipline, the wiki-application adds another tool to the teacher's shop. It is a tool that seems to impart communitarian values and focuses on history as a story of conflict and resolution. The term-paper has its strengths in its emphasis on sources, agency, and meaning. Just as this project demonstrated to me that different assignments teach different skills, this project also showed that class time is extremely valuable in building the classroom community and that sense of community transfers to the online wiki-writing project. 10 The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at EMU, Vol. 3 [], Art. 8 http://commons.emich.edu/sotl/vol3/iss1/8 RUNNING A CLASS WIKI TAUGHT ME ABOUT TEACHING HISTORY 11 REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London: Verso. Bain, R. B. (2000). Into the breach: Using research and theory to shape history instruction. In P. Stearns, P. Seixas, & S. Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, teaching, and learning history: National and international perspectives (pp. 331-353). New York: New York University Press. Bass, R. (1999, February). The scholarship of teaching and learning: What's the problem? Inventio: Creative Thinking about Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 1-10. Bauerlein, M., & Howe, N. (2008, September 29). The millennials: The dumbest generation or the next great generation? [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.c-span.org/video/?281855-1/millennial-generation Bauerlein, M. (2009). The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (Or, don't trust anyone under 30). New York: Penguin Group. Bernstein, J. L. (2008). Making learning visible: The scholarship of teaching and learning at EMU. Ypsilanti, MI: Eastern Michigan University Bruce K. Nelson Faculty Development Center. Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report (Report No. 1). Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development. Britt, M. A., Rouet J. F., Georgi M. A., & Perfetti, C. A. (1994). Learning from history texts: From causal analysis to argument models. In G. Leinhardt, I. L. Beck, & C. Stainton (Eds.), Teaching and learning in history (pp. 47-84). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Calder, L. (2006, March). Uncoverage: Toward a signature pedagogy for the history survey. Journal of American History, 92(4), 1358-1370. https://doi.org/10.2307/4485896 Carretero, M., Jacott, L., Limón, M., López-Manjón, A., & León, J. A. (1994). Historical knowledge: Cognitive and instructional implications. In M. Carretero & J. F. Voss (Eds.), Cognitive and instructional processes in history and the social sciences (pp. 357-374). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Carroll, L. A. (2002). Rehearsing new roles: How college students develop as writers. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Coppola, B. P. (2007, December). The most beautiful theories, Journal of Chemical Education, 84(12), 1902- 1911. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed084p1902 Cunningham, W. (2005). Correspondence on the etymology of wiki. Portland, OR: Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. Retrieved from http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html Eastern Michigan University. (2006, October). Request for inclusion of a course in the general education program: History 123 [Vetting Document]. Published by the Department of History and Philosophy, 11 Jones: What Running a Class Wiki Taught Me About Teaching History Published by DigitalCommons@EMU,