A textbook need for disruption

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 1 Comment

Nicholas Carr has an insightful piece on WSJ.com today, in which he points out that, with electronic books, the option to revise and update continues past the initial publication. One observation in particular struck me:

Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.
The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals, adding a few choice words here, trimming a chapter there, maybe giving a key character a quick makeover.

This is something I suggested back when I was reviewing electronic textbook platforms, which could benefit immensely from this kind of feedback. I had in mind that publishers could use the data for marketing to faculty who adopt books:

This pays off for the textbook companies in another way, I’m sure, which is that they can track how thoroughly I’ve reviewed one of their titles. I don’t know for sure whether CourseSmart is providing tracking data back to the publisher, but I’m sure they will soon. It just makes sense to collect this information and use it to improve your sales approach and/or to improve the textbook.

But I could imagine the publisher using these data to refine or improve the text to improve learning outcomes, especially if they were also providing a course management platform that provided assessment. Ideally, the book would learn how to communicate better by taking into account its own performance.

How likely is this scenario? It’s almost unimagineable. Textbook publishers make their money by selling new editions. What would be their incentive to improve a “book” after its publication but before they could charge for a new copy? In my experience, almost nothing changes between editions of the books I adopt, yet I cannot officially adopt a previous edition through the campus bookstore because they can’t source the copies needed.

The efforts of the publishers to make electronic textbooks all seem crafted to maintain a business model anchored in the past and centered around physical books. The “electronic” versions they have released are more or less a facsimilie of the paper book — unchanging, rooted in the concept of the edition so important for the profits of a paper world.

Finland’s Educational Excellence

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

In an eye-opening piece in The Atlantic, Anu Partanen describes the emphasis on equity in the Finnish education system, one of the best in the world:

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

To accomplish this, teachers are compensated well, their training is rigorous, and they are held in high regard. Cooperation, rather than competition, is emphasized. Next to no standardized testing is done, rather teachers design and implement their own assessments. Amazingly, each of these emphases stands in direct opposition to U.S. educational policy over the last 20+ years. When will it be time to try something new?

Poll Everywhere revisited

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 1 Comment

I’ve just finished my first semester experimenting with a classroom response system and thought this would be a good time to collect a few observations. You may recall that I opted not to implement a clicker system but rather adopted Poll Everywhere as the means to collect student responses. Using Poll Everywhere allowed students to respond via text message or the web, with most of my students choosing text messages most of the time. Because I had the students register on the site, I could attribute their responses with their names and have a record of their participation.

I found myself mainly using the response system to quiz students on a topic we had just covered, usually from the previous class meeting. As with all such teaching approaches, the system is only as good as the quality of the questions, and I found it challenging to write consistently useful questions. I can imagine that the longer I use this approach, the better question bank I will accumulate across all the topics we discuss. On a related note, I must confess that I found the question bank supplied by the textbook publisher mostly worthless. In preparation for a class I would typically scan over their file of questions, but almost never used anything from it, which was surprising. I also found certain topics to be difficult to approach with the response polling system and ended up just having students use more of the think-pair-share approach for some subjects because it seemed less constricting.

Although I had the students register, I found that I didn’t actually use the information from their registration all that much. I could probably get by without that step in the future, but I think the students took it more seriously knowing that I would be reviewing their activity. I did use the data in a broad way when assigning participation points, just not as much as I thought I would.

Throughout the semester, I kept being surprised at the teachable moments created by using this kind of approach. Time and again I stumbled upon misconceptions and misunderstandings that were exposed by the polling system. Although we would circle back on the topic as a class, when I challenged the students on a similar topic on the midterm, I often found students remained unclear, which was disappointing. I need to become better informed about how to remedy such misunderstandings in the moment.

All in all, using the Poll Everywhere system was well worth it in the classroom. It was easy to get going, easy to create new questions, and easy to implement during class time. In an exit survey, nearly every student agreed that the in-class polls were very helpful for understanding class material.

Religion and Well-being

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

Tom Rees has highlighted an interesting bit of social science research on his blog, Epiphenom:

The well-being of religious adherents follows a clear U-shape, with the least happy being those people with moderate faith.

Also included on the plot was the well-being of atheists, agnostics, and “no religion” (nihilists?) as measured in the study. It seems to me that the biggest take-home from this figure is that the individuals most certain in their beliefs were the happiest — either those with strong religious belief or atheism. Maybe it’s too simplistic to assume that atheists tend to be more certain or definitive in their worldview than others who follow no religion?

Finalists for the Open Lab Anthology announced

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The finalists for the Open Lab Anthology 2011 have been announced. According Scientific American, these are some of the best science blog posts of the year and will be printed in an anthology some time in 2012. I’ve started working through the list, and the essays I’ve read thus far have been excellent. I’ve collected the links into a stack on delicious, in case that’s useful to anyone out there. Maybe I’ll post links and highlights of a few in the next few weeks.

The unlikely cheeseburger

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

Waldo Jaquith has posted a thought-provoking essay on preparing a cheeseburger from scratch. Not from scratch as in, buy the ground beef and make them into patties yourself, but as in, raise absolutely everything that is a part of the meal yourself. He comes to the surprising (at least for me) conclusion that this is actually impossible:

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.

His essay reminds me of a story about the Big Mac from a few years ago. This article and the research paper on which it is reporting focuses on the incredible diversity and global reach of a simple fast food meal. In this case, a #1 Combo meal at McD’s includes ingredients from 20 species of broad diversity across the tree of life:

We argue that the remarkable breadth of the human diet is the result of humans’ huge geographic range, diverse food-collection methods, and ability to process normally inedible items. Humans are thus generalist feeders in the broadest sense. Cross-cultural analyses of diversity in the plant diet of humans could represent a fascinating new field of research linking ecology, anthropology, history, and sociology.

Bringing biological insights to solar cells

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

Converting the energy from sunlight into a useful electric potential in order to charge a battery or power a lightbulb is almost always carried out by silicon solar panels. There are a lot of good reasons why silicon is used for light collection, but there is no reason this process must rely on this material. In fact, one reason to look at other possible materials is that nature itself has a number of materials that convert light energy into electrochemical gradients.

The capacity to harvest light energy and use it for powering the cell is ancient, having evolved on Earth at least 1 billion years ago. We find the results of this in all of the true plants today, as well as numerous algae and phytoplankton. But it’s also found in many more primitive organisms, and they may have some tricks for collecting light efficiently that could prove useful as a model to follow for solar technology. That’s exactly what a research group has been working on at the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center at Washington University.

Taking a page out of the way primitive photosynthetic cells harvest light, they have found a way to assemble the pigments needed to harvest light by studying a structure called the chlorosome, found in photosynthetic green bacteria. Unlike the high degree of structural specialization found in land plant chloroplasts, these bacteria lack any such specialization, instead relying on the chlorosome region to harvest light. It is the self-assembling nature of the pigments into the chlorosome that the researchers find to have potential application in the development of alternative solar technology. Seems obvious to look throughout nature to solve difficult problems like these, and to provide the funds in basic research to do so.

Bad economics and local food

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

Steve Sexton, writing on the Freakonomics blog, has an interesting post on the inefficiency of local food:

But implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.

He goes on to argue that, for most crops, a “return” to more localized production would spell disaster for the environment and food prices. The blog post is a summary of a longer piece he published in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, published by the University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics. Sexton takes the “locavore” movement to task for failing to appreciate the fundamental economic principles at work in modern agribusiness, including economies of scale and comparative advantage. In addition, his analysis concludes there would be a massive increase in land use for agriculture, fertilizer input, and carbon footprint.

However, his analysis makes the assumption that each state would grow their own share of commodity crops. By approaching the question this way, it seems to me that his analysis seeks to package the current production system into state-sized units, the result of which is to conclude that it would be better to keep it the way it is.

This is not at all what I think anybody means when they talk about local food. How many local food proponents have you heard arguing that the problem with high-fructose corn syrup is that the corn is grown in another state, and that it would be better if Ohioans drank soda with all-Ohio HFCS? Yet that is exactly the model he is testing. And that is obviously not the important or even relevant part of our food system. The problem is not that my HFCS is not local, the problem is that HFCS is super-cheap because of our current ag policy and replaces more nutrient-dense calories for too many kids and adults.

I also take exception to the way he compares yield from the days when farms raised more commodity crops to yields on large, monoculture farms today (in the full analysis). To even suggest that yields from the 1930s would be relevant today is misleading, even if he admits today’s yields would be far higher. Just the difference in yield brought about by hybrid cultivars developed in the 1960s make this comparison a nonstarter. In fact, I’m not even certain there would be any reduction in yield due to the scale of the farm with modern cultivars, I’m having trouble thinking why there would be.

Regardless of what the predictions are for the future of local food, a recent report from the USDA showed local farms accounted for $4.8 billion in sales in 2008, far beyond earlier estimates. I guess somebody should tell these farmers they’re wasting their time, local food won’t work. I wonder how much of the $4.8 billion was local dent corn?

Grading with a rubric in Numbers for iOS

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 1 Comment

One of the best ways I’ve found to keep my sanity with grading is to use a rubric whenever possible. This means that, for each student, I would print a rubric and fill it in with comments and notes, and that is not in keeping with my desire to move away from paper as much as possible. Besides, this information is so ephemeral that it hardly rises to the importance of archiving on paper. No, this is definitely a job for electrons, and that puts it in the realm of the iPad.

I started by looking for grading rubric apps in the App Store, but didn’t find anything that struck me as useful for my particular purposes. I thought about making a PDF of the rubric and annotating it for each student on the iPad, but I would end up with a file to manage on the iPad for each student and would still have to enter scores into my grade sheet. So I decided to use Numbers to create a simple rubric. I made each column a different criterion, and entered student names in rows by copy/paste from my grade sheet.

Magic Stepper

After I entered a few scores this way, I didn’t like how I had to enter a number for each criterion — I just wanted to select a number that fit the student’s performance on that criterion. That’s when I noticed the cell format called ‘Stepper’:

The stepper format allows you to define a minimum and maximum value and an increment. Once set up, you can just tap an ‘up’ or ‘down’ arrow next to the cell to assign points, and you don’t fill half the screen with the on-screen keyboard. Nice.

After I scored all the lab reports, I needed a way to distribute them electronically to the students. I decided to merge the students’ scores onto a copy of the rubric, so I set up a Pages document on my Mac with the Numbers spreadsheet linked as the merge source and ran the Mail Merge. Then I sent each student a PDF of their scoresheet.

Conclusions

This has become my primary system for scoring papers with a rubric. I really like the ease with which I can enter a score for each category with a few taps, it allows me to keep focus on the paper. For a large rubric, it’s essential to freeze the header row and column so I can continue to see the criteria and student name, but this introduced a gotcha when I tried to configure merge fields, because a header column cannot be a data source. I got around this easily by copying the names into a non-header column, but it was one more step than I expected. While grading one student’s work, I recognized I had been recording the scores in another student’s row, but a couple taps on the ‘Undo’ button recovered the lost values. The last comment is that it was a real pain to send each student a PDF attachment, manually, by email. For now though, the alternative of using our LMS is an even worse prospect!

Losing science majors

~ Chris Wolverton ~ Leave a comment

Plenty of students come to college planning to major in a science, but not many finish that major. This is a particular problem when national leaders have been championing the need for more science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM) training in recent years, including during this year’s State of the Union Address. Where do we stand now as compared to recent years in terms of numbers of majors with this training? What will it take to increase the numbers?

As for where we stand now, there was an interesting post by Alex Tabarrok over on Marginal Revolution comparing numbers of majors in various disciplines over the past 25 years. He shows that while the total number of college students has increased 50% over that time, the STEM fields are still graduating the same number of students as 1984. No growth. All of these additional students have gone into non-STEM fields. As a faculty member at a liberal arts college, I do not agree with the conclusions of his article overall, but the data he presents is important to consider.

How can we improve the situation, though? Christopher Drew, writing for the NY Times, highlights a few potential solutions in an article last week.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.

The article points to one obvious reason for this: these subjects are hard and require a lot of work, usually resulting in a significantly lower GPA than non-STEM friends. While this may seem like a cop-out, we shouldn’t downplay the work. Consider a student majoring in chemistry or genetics, whose roommates are not. Our major probably spends twice the hours in classes and labs every week, and that’s not taking into account the out-of-class study time. It’s hard to see your friends making memories without you. I’m not advocating any change here, just that we become aware of this social pressure. This may support the idea, though, that providing things like science student living situations may be worth considering.

Where the article really strikes me, though, is the suggestion that students have to slog away at mastering the basics before they get to do the “fun stuff”, by which they mean something involving an application. At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be any way around this, because of course students need to walk before they run, right? I’m starting to wonder if that’s necessarily true, or whether we as faculty members are sticking to the familiar paths and failing to imagine ways to incorporate the “fun stuff” even at the earliest levels. That’s one reason I’m excited about some of our initiatives here at OWU to grab students and lead them to some interesting questions that intersect with that introductory material. Could a program like Course Connections be part of the solution? Maybe, we’ll have to see where that goes.

I also want to suggest that there is a major problem at work behind the scenes, though, having to do with students’ expectations for their careers and their perceptions about what their options are. But that will have to wait for another post.