We were supposed to discuss the readings in Friday’s meeting, but we got distracted by other things and never got to it. I made a bunch of notes when I was reading, so I will inflict them on you now to get the conversation started. Please join in with a comment or a blog post of your own!
The readings were:
- The Bigger Issues in Learning to Code: Culture and Pedagogy
- MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works
- Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program? (PDF)<hr width=40% />
I don’t have much to say about “Why Is It So Hard” apart from I am surprised that the ACM teaching associations are so new. I’m now less surprised that I didn’t learn anything in university…
It’s interesting that people are capable of specifying a complicated process for another person, but can’t make the leap to correctly specifying the process to a computer. Media Computation seems to provide the context which makes it possible for people to learn how to program, but Guzdial doesn’t connect the dots (probably because we don’t know) as to what changes in learners’ thought processes when they’re taking Media Computation as opposed to a traditional CS1 course. Intuitively it seems obvious that if you can get learners to associate an abstract idea to a concrete concept that they already understand (pixels in an image, snippets of audio) then they will be able to learn it better.<hr width=40% />
Regarding “MOOCs are a fundamental misperception”, I wonder how many of the people who think MOOCs can replace university courses had a university experience that followed the MOOC model: lectures, assignments, exams, results, with very little one-on-one teaching or interaction. I know that’s what my university experience was like; I’m fairly sure I didn’t make any kind of impact on any professor, and I was bewildered by the few undergrads I knew who managed to establish relationships with profs.
On the question of motivation, Guzdial says “Our society depends on teachers who motivate students to persevere and learn”. But doesn’t signing up for a course mean that you’re motivated? If that motivation flags, is it the responsibility of the teacher to revive it, or the student? Isn’t the most we can ask of a teacher that they not destroy motivation?<hr width=40% />
I found the Pedagogy part of “The Bigger Issues” a little disheartening; that such a tiny difference in the way material was presented could make such a big difference in learner success! And the difference was not only tiny but not intuitively obvious. I mean, sure, subgoal labels are nice and all, but who would guess that they would make such a big difference? It’s disheartening because it seems like it would be impossible to be an “intuitively good” teacher — you couldn’t just think of something like this and know for sure that it would be so helpful. Maybe you could try something new every time you teach a course, but if you’re not a researcher you won’t have anything except one set of marks and your own gut to tell you if it worked.
(At least I think so — maybe to an experienced teacher it is intuitively obvious that something like subgoal labelling would work.)