I've been listening to Malcolm Gladwell read The Tipping Point—what I'm getting from it is that apparently trivial design changes can make a huge difference with respect to audience reception—it's not really predictable although we can make educated guesses. Important that we get better at interpreting and responding to learner feedback in our courses; keep tweaking until the response is as good as we want it to be, or better.

I had a formative moment early in my teaching career when I was running a masters class with about 40 students that was going wrong - the dynamics were shaky, and quite a few students were confused, frustrated and felt they were not learning enough. They made this known. And so, as a snap decision on my part, we spent a lesson talking about it, discussing ways to make it better. It was one of the best things I have ever done in my teaching career, though it was a bit traumatic for me at the time. Some students let rip with criticism that cut to the bone though, interestingly, at least as many others, who were actually very pleased with how things were going, kept quiet then but came to talk with me afterwards about how and why they disagreed with them. Good or bad, the most important thing was that we talked about it. By the end of the course, it was almost universally agreed that it was one of the best courses they had ever taken - I was pleased and so were they.

The interesting part is that the changes that occurred as a result were extremely small from a process point of view -  almost nothing in process terms altered apart from a little bit of summary at the end of each lesson and a small advanced organizer at the start. But it wasn't process that mattered here. I am almost certain that the success of the course was far more to do with that critical moment of discussion than with the deliberate actions taken afterwards, and about the ways our relationships changed as a result. In the first place, the students felt greater ownership and control, and so felt more motivated. More subtly, we all changed a little in the ways that we related to one another in ways that would have been hard to pin down and record but that made all the difference. We became closer, part of a shared team doing things together just a little differently than before, in attitude more than action. My teaching subtly altered, but not in any ways that could have been pinned down to a category on a form. Finally, in exposing myself to the class I had also revealed quite a bit about what I was doing and why - the metacognitive stuff that came out no doubt helped too, letting students see the bigger picture. It was a two-way thing.

After that I nearly always made space for a time on any course where we could deliberately do that. At first it would just be a single session half-way through where we would do a bit of mind mapping and use that as a centrepiece for conversation and reflection. Nowadays, I normally try to embed it throughout as a natural part of the process because this kind of reflection and discussion matters all the time, not just occasionally. But the principle is the same - talking makes all the difference, not analyzing numbers or dissecting feedback. Design of something that is essentially performance-oriented (and that is true even when we make static learning objects) is not made better by feedback - it's made better by conversation.

So does this say that all learners are capable of this learning efficiency, if the right conditions are applied? In the Fiorella and Mayer (2013) study, note taking may be one of those strategies that is part of organizing and focusing the thoughts, I am prone to do that myself. The act of note taking helps more than reading the notes taken. In this study, experiment 1, their learners were not experienced teachers, so wouldn't know the habits of teachers to focus on key concepts and organize the material, so I question that as a factor in the reasoning of their hypothesis. I think there might be something to the explanation theory as the learners were likely trying to make sure that they could answer questions or explain the key points in the passages. Different motivation?

Interesting! I'd be wary of any generalized claims that all learners would benefit from this in all circumstances. On the whole, teaching (or even the expectation of having to do so) does appear to improve learning, not just of memorized facts as presented here but in a broader sense, but it always depends on details of how it is done and the context it is done in. It's certainly not a magic bullet.

Pask's conversation theory, that focuses on ways knowledge is constructed, structured and transmitted, appears to be confirmed by these experiments, which makes me trust the findings a little and does imply that knowledge was structured differently in each case. However, I think there are also large effects on motivation as a result of believing others will care (basic self-determination theory), which in turn tends to lead to a lot more time on task as well as time actually concentrating on the task, which might account for a lot of the effect, however knowledge was actually constructed by the participants: it's the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It may be that the intent of note-taking affected the way it was done in this case in negative as well as positive ways, and relative lack of success might have been due to weaknesses in understanding effective learning strategies for tests too. Like all such experiments, the devil is in the detail. Interesting findings though, and a nicely nuanced experimental design.

Thanks for sharing that illuminating article!

I liked it too. I have a fascination with how we reached the educational system we are in now, at least partly because so much of it seems arbitrary, contingent and path-dependent, and so little of it has to do with our purported purpose (the learning bit). It is particularly interesting that a university like ours, that doesn't have the same constraints as older place-based ones, follows the same kind of patterns.  Another favourite is Norton's Readings in the History of Education - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15005 and I am currently quite enjoying reading Rait's Life in the Medieval University - http://manybooks.net/titles/raitr2095820958-8.html

Thanks Richard, Apostolos!

@Apostolos - for sure, free services like Blogger or Wordpress.com leave you at the mercy of their owners (and I have been stung, e.g when Ning did a u-turn) but, if that bothers you, decent hosting that gives you one-click installations of all sorts of server software that is highly controllable is less than $5 a month and, if you don't like it or the company folds, you can very easily move the whole caboodle to another provider with hardly a blink in service. But the point is not so much that you have control and can move your stuff where you want it to be, but that it does not impinge on the liberty and privacy of others, which is what commercial social networks tend to do.

We've tried to avoid anything like that with the Landing though, now that I've had plenty of time to reflect, I understand that it is yet another social media silo, albeit benign, controllable and permeable. I would do it a little differently next time, making it more of a meeting point for distributed content, distributing the social interaction to anywhere and everywhere (especially within AU), and giving everyone their own space (something akin to Known) to control. All of those parts are there (or, in the case of distributed interaction, possible) using the Landing, at least to a very large extent, but it is mostly not being used that way and, because it can be and is used in so many other ways (e.g. its groups, uses for teaching, etc), those neat aspects are rather swamped.

Agreed Jon - seems like a strange step backward. Especially given how easy it is to syndicate to FB. It's more than privacy, it's control and ownership.

I love the idea of a space that aggregates distributed posts. I've actually been exploring how to pull posts from my blog into the Landing. I'm not wild about spreading the conversation b/w sites but I am interested in getting the content to the community.

Yes and yes!

We built an import tool for the Landing - you'll see an 'import RSS feed' button when looking at your blog, bookmarks or wikis that can be used for one-off or continual importing - with exactly that aggregation in mind.

I do worry a little about diffusing the conversation too. I import my own blog and bookmarks from here on the Landing into my personal site (http://jondron.ca) using a similar tool, and my blog on this site contains the result of a similar import which was itself the result of another... and so it goes on. At one point I accidentally created an endless circle, where two sites were importing from one another.  In the process, though, I have lost that thread of connection - none of the imports included the dialogue and comments around them, and other metadata were lost too (ratings, tags, etc) despite attempts to make tools that adhered to the right (though often too imprecise or too diverse) standards for such things. It dilutes the dialogue. 

But there is some advantage to that too: each different site is a different social context and addresses a different, though often overlapping, community. That seems very useful to me indeed. With that in mind, and although it still needs work as it seems most people make little use of it, we have put a lot of effort into context switching on this site, with not just discretionary access controls (of the sort Google+ later used in its circles) but also the ability to present entirely different facades with different information and presentation via profile tabs and other tools (smart widgets, pinboards, etc). Though I do make a point of making many posts public, different people on this site see quite different aspects of me depending on my relationship to them. We need to make this simpler and subtler, but I think it's a good way to go. Until everyone works this way (and figures ways to move things between them that preserve the social contexts) the next best alternative seems to use different sites for those different overlapping facades.

DRM... ugh.  Back when I was working on my MBA I found an eBook to be 2/3 of the price of the regular printed book.  Since the book was a new to the market (and therefore no used copies would be available) I bought the eBook instead.  The permissions were so tight that it made the book unusable.  I had to use the eBook on the device I downloaded it on, with the computer-user account I was logged in at the time I downloaded it (which happened to be root since I was working on something), and  I think I had to log into my Adobe DRM account in order to use it.  

I could print out unlimited copies, but doesn't that defeat an eBook?  I ended up printing a copy for myself because the eBook was problematic.  Then my hard drive crashed and the backup I had on CD would not work because the hard drive serial number (of my new hard drive) was different, and the user account ID number (once I reinstalled the OS) was different, so the hashnumber used to verify the "legitimacy" of the user was not the same.  That was $60 down the drain...

never again!