Products and Services in Education

A team of U of Illinois educators spent part of this week with a business consultant, Andrew Neitlich, who provided guidance about ways to incorporate business strategies into our educational work. He has lots of good ideas, but one idea that I found especially powerful is this idea about linking products and services.

Most of education is an intensive service that requires us to teach the same material over and over again to new students. This is costly. Neitlich reminds us that along the way educators can create various products of these teaching activities-- lecture notes, teaching aids, curricula, textbooks, etc. that could be part of overall teaching enterprise that may be sold/marketed to students who are in the course or even to those who are not in the course, but who are just interested in learning about the topic.

Obviously, we already do this some with lecture notes and textbooks, but this could become a more central strategy to the overall educational enterprise such that it is more commonly and more easily done.

Personalized Learning

The National Academy of Engineering has identified the "grand engineering challenges" that face society and suggested some of the work that needs to be done to address these issues.

One of the areas they identify is personalized learning. The problem is described as follows:

Throughout the educational system, teaching has traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, with a single set of instructions provided identically to everybody in a given class, regardless of differences in aptitude or interest. Similar inflexibility has persisted in adult education programs that ignore differences in age, cultural background, occupation, and level of motivation.

They suggest that what we need are personalized learning systems that are more closely tailored to the needs and interests of the learner and suggest that "web-based expert systems could be designed to address this need. This has long been a dream of computer-based instruction, but the record on our ability to create these systems is dismal. This indeed makes this a "grand challenge" and one that continues to need our attention.

Learning versus Practicing a Profession

"The practice of a profession is not the same as learning to practice the profession" (p. 83).

This interesting quote appears in a article by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark, titled, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching (Educational Psychologist, 2006, 41(2), 75-86.

I know that this should not be an insight to me, but it is. In this article they review efforts to prepare medical and law students using problem-based methods of instruction and demonstrate effectively that these methods are not as effective as more direct techniques of learning the basics knowledge of medicine and law before attempting to apply these in practice settings. In general, studies have found that problem-based learning is not superior in terms of various outcomes such as clinical problem-solving skills.

The authors conclude that medical students like other students need to acquire basic knowledge and conceptual frameworks for organizing that knowledge prior to trying to put this information into practice through problem solving. They note that techniques such as a process worksheet can guide students that provide a description of the phases one should go through in solving a problem may be a more structured way of introducing effective problem-solving strategies.

Does Discovery learning work?

At least one of the reasons I have been attracted to the use of online instruction is because of the possibility of creating more authentic learning environments. In general, I have had a bias towards creating problem-based, discovery, constructivtist approaches to instruction.

In the past few weeks I have been doing my homework which means that I have been reading the literature on instruction and I am increasingly skeptical of my simple ideas about instruction. Here are a few highlights from an article by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark, titled, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching (Educational Psychologist, 2006, 41(2), 75-86.

The main point of this article problem-based learning makes too many demands on novice learners' working memory. In short, beginning learners are trying to identify the basic facts and issues related to the problem while also trying to employ novel problem-solving strategies using that information. The authors write,

"cognitive load theory suggests taht the free exploration of a highly complex environment may generate a heavy working memory load that is detrimental to learnning" (p. 80).

They also cite the work of other researchers who note,

"when students who learn science in classrooms with pure-discovery methods and minimal feedback, ... often become lost and frustrated, and their confusion can lead to misconceptions.... Other researchers found that "because false starts are common in such learning situations, unguided discovery is often inefficient" (p. 79).

So why do many of us resonate to the contructivist theories of teaching and learning? These researchers also offer us insight here. Just as novice learners benefit from direct instruction, expert learners seem to benefit from the contructivist, inquiry-based approaches. In other words, the point is not that all constructivist teaching is wrong or ineffective, it is developing teaching strategies that over the course of a students' experience shifts from much guidance to less and less guidance.

An Extension of Kevin Kelly's Qualities for Education

Here are some addtional thoughts I have had about Kevin Kelly's article, Better Than Free, about values of information when copies are free and lots of information is available.

At least in educational settings the quality of "interpretation" can be expanded to include the ideas of "guidance and explanation." The value of a good class is not the syllabus, the text or the classnotes, it is the value of the instructor. It is the opportunity to seek further clarification or to get to ask questions that link your current knowledge to some new idea.

This is why MIT can afford to give away its course content and still find students willing to buy the opportunity to be in the classroom with an instructor.

Somewhere is the qualities of "accessibility" and "findability" is the quality of organization. The value of an article in Wikipedia is more valuable than the same article that stands alone because the article embedded in the organizational structure of an encyclopedia can be easily linked to deeper information and related ideas. There is great value in this "organizational structure."

One of the commentators on this article also identified "community" as another possible quality that would be of value beyond the information itself. This again has lots of applicability in regards to education. We are still trying to figure out ways to replicate online the "community of scholars" aspect of F2F education. We don't yet have all the tools we need to create this experience online and one of the dangers of creating online graduate degrees in particular is this missing piece. The value of synchronous, spontaneous, or serendipitous conversations that can occur in a lab, classroom, hallway can easily be overlooked in the design of online education. The variety of educational experiences in traditional, campus-based education is still much richer than the online world.

Creating Educational Websites that Matter

By now everyone and every institution has a website and there is a lot of good information available. However, most of us probably have some sense that we haven't yet found very satisfactory ways of creating educational websites or online platforms that have the qualities for functions that seem to take full advantage of the Internet. In a recent article, Better Than Free, Kevin Kelly describes properties of the information on the Internet that have value beyond the content of the information itself. He provides a lot of interesting ideas about how to approach online education and what is often missing from our online educational enterprises.

Kelly's first point is that the cost of reproducing digital content has been reduced to almost nothing. He describes the Internet as a huge copying machine that can produce copies over and over, copies of text, video, sound, etc. So he asks the question, what can't be copied? He suggests these things that can't be copied may be the qualities that are valuable in a time cheap copies.

He identifies nine generative values or properties that he suggests have "intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free." I have tried to link these to aspects of education.

1. Trust of the source. Everyone can produce information about a topic, but people and institutions that have developed a long-standing reputation for providing information based on science or technical expertise have a special value. The value of "trust" reminds us why established schools and institutions have a huge advantage over newly created "online universities" that have to build a reputation. At the same time those established institutions who create a poor online presence will be damaged. Increasingly, many people will use an institution's online presence as a basis for judging their quality.
2. Immediacy. Getting what you want easily and without effort is worthwhile, perhaps especially in a time of infoglut; it is powerful to obtain information via email or feeds directly to you. Also, for people who have special interests in a topic, there can be attention to the most uptodate information. Our ability to communicate new scientific information beyond an almost exclusive scientific community is very limited. The Internet provides a much faster method of translating new scientific information to people than what we could do in F2F classrooms and textbooks.
   

1. Personalization. Most information on the web is very generic-- specific information or answers to your questions or your needs is valuable. One specific example is a newsletter tailored to the age of your child so that you get information about topics that are common at a particular time in a child's life. The closer that we can get to creating information a person needs the more value this will be. For example, two people may both need to learn geometry, but the odds are that we not be at exactly the same level. A good pre-test that more closely identifies the right place to start learning would be very valuable. There are huge opportunities to personalize learning. Students at any level don't necessarily need the same "dose" of a topic.
   
2. Interpretation, Guidance or Explanation. If reading the textbook were all it took to learn most subjects, there would have never been schools, but most of the time it is helpful to have someone around to answer questions, extend the meaning of the text or connect ideas together for more meaning. MIT can make it's lectures and course materials available for free, but if you want to get the guidance of a MIT instructor, you have to pay a hefty price.
   
3. Authenticity. This is related to trust. Certain people or institutions have a reputation of providing a certain quality of information.
   
4. Accessibility or Organization. Kelly describes the value of ease of access, but I also think that obtaining things in an organized structure or the ability to create various organized structures is valuable. The value of an encyclopedia or wikipedia is that it is organized in a way that you can easily understand how to navigate the information. There would also be value in tools that would allow you to assemble your own personal wikepedia. "Tagging" is great for anchoring various pieces of information, but creating your own structured resource would be even more valuable.
   
5. Embodiment. Here Kelly acknowledges that sometimes it is worth having a physical object like the actual DVD, CD or book. The National Academy of Sciences makes all their books available for free online and anyone can read these books on the Web, but if you want to get the physical book, you pay for it. They report that they have been selling more books since they have been making them freely accessible. Sometimes it is helpful to have the "whole thing" rather than just the parts.
   
6. Patronage. Kelly writes, "It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators." Maybe this is naive, but there is some truth here. It should remind us that we should always provide a means for our students/audience to contribute to the work.
   
7. Findability. When Kelly talks about this quality, he has Amazon in mind in regards to aggregating lots of books together and creating tools so that customers can find other similar books or can read reviews that provide guidance to potential buyers. This is another quality that also has potential applicability to educational enterprises. It is easy to find lots of information about almost any topic regarding children and families, but it is rare to have the opportunity to read other people's comments about those articles. These comments would provide others with more insight about the value about the particular article. Likewise, it is rare that one bit of information leads to more extended information in any logical or valuable way. If I am searching for what to do with a child that is biting, I might also be interested in other negative behaviors in young children, managing children in group settings, general topics related to young children, and so forth. Creating good paths and directions through the mass of information is more valuable than ever.
   

Good educational websites cannot simply be more information, they need attend these qualities and include tools that address these issues for their clients.

Open Science among plant science

Here is a good example of where we need to be heading in terms of creating open systems of scientific development. There has been alot of talk about Learning 2.0, perhaps we need to begin talking about Discovery 2.0. (or maybe we are still at 1.0). The point is that there are many new tools and strategies that can be employed by scientists, science educators and the interested public around research and discovery.

NSF just funded a major effort to bring together plant scientists to share data, work on common problems, etc. Here is a quote from iPlant about its mission:

"This is an exciting time for science education! A user-friendly cyberinfrastructure will mean that for the first time in history everyone can work with the same data using the same tools in the same timeframe as high-level researchers. The goal of our Education Outreach and Training (EOT) is to ensure that everyone – students, teachers and faculty, from middle school to graduate school – will have the access and training to use these data and participate in research in real time."

They note that there is even room for social and behavioral scientists in terms of their willingness to create opportunities for social and behavioral scientists who are interested in collaborative processes and other other aspects of people working with each other across time and distance. As we know from some limited work in this area, there are substantial questions in this area. Well here is a chance for others to take a first-hand look.

More thoughts about data and extending science

Some of the most expensive data that we collect is qualitative and/or observational data. Making these data available to other researchers so that they can ask other types of questions or re-analyze data seems like an especially good idea.

There is one good example of this at the U of Illinois that begins to open up these data. This project is called the "Ethnography of the University." Faculty and students have agreed to share their data, publications, etc. in a common space. This allows more students to have access to the data, extend the questions, develop new ideas and exchange information.

Students who are interested in various topics about student life among university students have the opportunity to view multiple perspectives on this topic. Students interested in learning more about how scientists create ethnographies can see science in action.

Scholarship in the Digital Age by C. Borgmann

In this book, Christine Borgmann writes about all the ways in which scholarship among academics is changing and is likely to change as a result of digital publication.

The parts of this book that are especially interesting to me are about the social side of this technological change. For example, she writes:

Collaboration, especially over distance, has high overhead costs. (p. 29)

Much remains to be learned about the factors that make collaboration more or less successful, and the circumstances under which it is most likely to be worth the effort (See Cummings and Kiesler for more examples of this problem). (p. 29)

datebases and scholarly communication

The primary way in which scholars have communicated new scientific knowledge and to the advancement of science has been through the publication of research findings. (this ignores theoretical contributions, but that matters also.)

It seems to me that the vast increase in the ability to store large amounts of information affords the opportunity to ask the question what other ways might scientific scholarship be advanced in addition to publishing findings.

One idea that intrigues me is the sharing of data sets with others and developing interactive data analytic tools to explore these databases. Here is one nice example. The KidsCount Data Center keeps track of over 100 child and family indicators of well-being. At the data center you can select indicators, create comparision's and compare data in a variety of other ways. By making the data available in this fashion, other researchers or even the public at-large can answer questions using this data. No one is going to make scientific breakthroughs with this data, but all of us can find answers to questions that may be of interest to us: Are the trends in teen pregnancy in my state above the average in the US? Are children's reading scores improving? What has happened to teen drinking in the US?

With more powerful tools it would be possible to look at correlations, compare whether differences between counties or states were statistically significant, and so forth.

Imagine if more specialized data collected by scientists were routinely available to other researchers and the general public, wouldn't this advance science all the more quickly?

A lesson from the BBC about elearning

In David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007) I have been struck by one particular example that I think we should heed as elearning educators. On page 112 he gives an example of the BBC's efforts to make their content available digitally. Weinberger writes,

" The BBC system standardizes over three hundred different attributes that may apply to recorded material, including subject, producers, language, length, type of media, even whether it has won any awards."

I am thinking that if radio and television requires 300 attributes to capture all the dimensions of this work, how many attributes do we need for learning materials. I am thinking that we have underestimated the extent of metadata that we need to add to text, images, etc. in order to make this material easily usable by other teachers. We have not understood the conceptual work that we need to do to make learning materials easily modular for use by others.

Weinberger also reports that Tom Coates and Matt Webb also have given much thought to how find programming, navigate it and use it. They ended up with a decision that the "the most useful object-- the one that accords best with how the audience thinks about programming-- was an episode, ..." Here is another lesson for elearning designers. Have we figured out the right "unit of teaching" or "unit of learning" for our audience? Is this different for teachers than students? It seems to me that rather than work on "microlearning" or "learning objects" we might be better off trying to figure out the "most useful object" for our audience.

What is microlearning and is it a useful idea?

I recently stumbled on to "microlearning.org" which has held several international meetings and produced a series of conference papers about this topic. On the one hand, I am pleased by some of the ideas that I have read in these papers, but I still think that we are using the term of "learning" in a much too loose fashion. Consider the following statements:

“The developments of computers, Internet and mobile phones in the last ten years have transformed our living, working and learning environments to such an extent that we are actually continuously engaged in microlearning” (p. 7). [emphasis mine]

“Microlearning” has become the most common everyday practice in the information society. It’s the way we breathe in information and exhale communication” (p. 7).

(Source: Bruck, P. A (2006). What is microlearning and why care about it? In T. Hug, M. Lindner, P.A. Bruck (Eds.), Micromedia and e-learning 2.0: Gaining the big picture (pp. 7-10). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press. http://www.microlearning.org/MicroConf_2006/Microlearning_06_final.pdf)

Are the above statements true? Are we really learning in these exchanges? This seems somewhat true to me, but how is this different to listening to television or the radio? Clearly, some learning is taking place, but this seems like at least an imcomplete notion of learning. Is exposure to ideas enough for learning? Shouldn't a person get feedback about their knowledge on a topic and doesn't this lead to more informed learning or knowledge?

On the Relationship between microcontent and learning objects

This chapter describes the relationship between microcontents and learning objects.

Definition of microcontent:

“A [very] small unit of digital information that is self-contained, individually referable/addressable, allowing use/re-use in different loosely structured macro-contexts and macro-containers” (p. 297).

“a microcontent piece with educational purpose plus metadata describing the piece itself and it educational usages may be considered as a regular learning object. However, the microcontent vision entrails those descriptions should come from subjective personal views of the world., e.g., those views offered by blog authors” (p. 296).

I am not sure about most of the middle of this article as it seems to focus on the engineering side of the problem of building repositories.

The concluding paragraph is telling about what remains to be done:

“ On the conceptual side, the main open problem is how to embed micro-pedagogies or micro-didatics into usable ontologies, so that software tools can be developed to aid humans in the setting of microlearning contexts—but for this, studies of learning theories must come before actual ontology engineering” (p. 302).

This captures one of the biggest problems in the use of terms like learning objects and microlearning—it is not at all clear how the “learning” part gets folded into the definitions. At present we do not have a metadata formulation that captures of the “learning” or “educational” dimensions of these data.

Source:

Sanchez-Alonso, S., Sicilia, M., Barriocanal, E., & Armas, T. (2006). In T. Hug, M. Lindner, P.A. Bruck (Eds.), Micromedia and e-Learning 2.0: Gaining the big picture (pp. 295- 303). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press.

Microcontent is Everywhere

Leene 2006 Microcontent is Everywhere

“MicroContent are self-contained indivisible structured pieces of content, which have a single focus and a unique address for (re-)findability” (p. 25).

He suggests there are five common characteristics of a unit of microcontent—focus, structure, self-contained, indivisible, and addressability.

Focus refers to the idea that the content focuses on a single thing, a single idea, a single topic. He gives the examples of a blog post on one topic, a review of a single book, a music track, etc.

(I don’t think this works very well. Is a book on microlearning a document that focuses on one topic? And is a review of two related books in the same article disqualify it as a piece of microcontent? He is trying to provide a definition of “small” but this is very difficult, because small depends on the context. A book is small in the context of a library, but it is large compared to a paragraph.

Structure is an interesting idea. This is an attempt at specifying the appropriate metadata that should accompany microcontent. He lists the following basic elements for a structure:

Title

Description

Tags (keywords)

Author

Creation date/time

Change date/time

Geotags

I also have some trouble with notions of self-contained and indivisible. These are interesting ideas, but they depend a lot on context.

For teaching and learning I am still troubled by the lack of any information or metadata that captures the information needed for learning—level of difficulty, reading level, etc.

I also wonder how we construct the “difficulty” or “complexity” path through information. This is what teaching is about. I still think the part we haven’t done is to add the metadata about learning to our content.

In this article I am most disappointed in the discussion of microcontent types. The “types” seem to be based on information technology formats, eg., text used in blog posts is different than text used in a recipe because they have different data formats. This leads to an infinite number of types of microcontent formats. Maybe this is okay, but I am not sure.

This also causes me to wonder about a format for “learning content.” This is roughly what people were trying to do with “learning objects” but again we got stuck in the technical specification that had little to do with the context of learning.

Again I find myself wondering if what is wrong with our efforts in this area is that we still don’t have the right metadata descriptions attached to text, images, etc.

I also find myself asking whether we need to develop a "learning content" standard? Is that what people were trying to do with learning objects?

Maybe the problem with learning objects is that we don't have the right metadata description attached to text, images, etc.

Education Needs to Embrace Miscellany?

I am about half-way through David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007). In this book Weinberger suggests that order can emerge out of the miscellaneous disorder of the web.

In short, he suggests that when people are not restricted to the order of the physical realm or even the order of simple physical forms of metadata systems (e.g., the Dewey decimal system or the index in the back of a book), then people can create many new orders (he calls them "third orders") that reflect a particular individual.

These ideas have many implications. I have been thinking about the problems of learning objects and the sharing of teaching materials in general. Most of us expected that as teaching materials were converted from classroom lectures and textbooks to online modes, then there would be much more sharing and construction of courses from web-based teaching materials. Well, mostly this hasn't happened. There are probably lots of reasons, but I have begun to think that we have never gotten the model right for sharing teaching materials. If you look at most of the stuff that we share in repositories like Merlot, you find that we share whole courses, or lectures or web-based laboratory exercises. These are all nice, but they aren't easily adapted to another course or another teaching activity. In short, we don't have a third-order system for sharing teaching stuff. We haven't invented the Amazon or Wikipedia for teaching and learning. Maybe the model is out there, but it is not readily apparent.

Status of Learning Objects

On the one hand, writing about learning objects as the solution to better online education has been decreasing, but there is still some discussion of this idea. David Wiley wrote the following:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations [learning objects are dead] since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not.

Almost everyone cites his original definition of learning objects so it is interesting that he has come to this conclusion.

In another article, Michael Feldstein writes that there is no such thing as a learning object and goes on to say

I believe the term "learning object" has become harmful. It hides the same old, bad lecture model behind a sexy buzz phrase.

I think we may be giving up on the idea of learning objects too soon. I think Wiley is correct in saying that the current way of thinking about learning objects is dead or perhaps a deadend. I also think Feldstein is correct in saying that "learning objects" got a lot of buzz, but maybe there wasn't that much there.

Perhaps the most telling is that Wikipedia has a note in May 2007 on the "learning objects" page that says this article maybe confusing or unclear for some readers.

If even the Wikipedians can't figure out how to talk about "learning objects" we are really in trouble.

I think what has discouraged a lot of people is that efforts to develop learning objects and repositories has proven to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. Teaching and learning is complex and has many dimensions. We were naive to think that we could easily create online learning that would overcome all the complexity that exist.

However, I think we should still work on the ideas of sharing learning materials and the idea of reusing existiing materials. This time we need to do the hard work that it will take to make this happen.

Why hasn't educational technology made teaching more efficient?

The advent of the Internet was supposed to make the work of teaching and learning more efficient. If you read what many of us wrote over the past ten years you will find continuous reference to the idea that computers and the Internet would transform education into a much more efficient process. Few people who have built course websites and been involved with various course management systems (e.g., Web CT, Blackboard, etc.) would say that their work has gotten more efficient.

There have been important efforts to create teaching resource warehouses to store teaching materials-- the most extensive is Merlot which seeks to store a wide range of teaching materials.

Despite some significant strides in this area I think we are still only at the beginning and I think that we have several things wrong with our basic elearning educational model.

Here are my major criticisms of our efforts so far:

1. We haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler states, "The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module" (The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 4, 2006, p. 101). I would suggest that whole courses, whole lectures, etc. are too big to include very many participants. Also, materials of this magnitude serve as useful resources if you are teaching similar material, but they are rarely designed in such a way that another teacher can easily incorporate the material into their own teaching/course, etc. This lowers the actual usage of such materials.

2. We haven't opened the doors to full participation in our business of teaching and learning. Few teachers are prepared to let our students help write the curriculum and few of us are willing to invite people outside of education into the work of teaching and learning. Most of us are not willing to trust that anyone but other credentialed experts can contribute meaningfully to teaching and learning in our classrooms.

3. We haven't gotten the basic unit of learning right. We continue to try to teaching online in the same ways that we teach F2F or we try to adapt previous teaching tools to the web (for example, books). Mostly this stuff doesn't work very well. I would suggest that the basic unit of learning is questions and answers. The basic learning exchange is a student asking a question and a teaching giving an answer or a teacher asking a question or being given a problem and asking a student to solve it.

4. We haven't really created learning objects. There has been much talk about developing learning objects and repositories like Merlot make a point of suggesting that they are collecting learning objects, but they are really teaching objects. In other words, they are resources for teachers to use to help students learn, they are not resources that a student can engage with independently to learn something. Both types of materials are needed, but we need to call them by the right names and make this distinction.

5. We haven't really utilized computers, the Internet and web to create really interactive learning situations. There are some interesting new ideas about using games, virtual worlds and the like to create some interactive learning environments, but the level of technical expertise needed to develop these types of resources is very high. Rather than continue to develop another course management system we need an interactive platform to develop learning experiences that can be used by a wide range of educators.

Participatory Education in Universities

"Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations....We make a mistake, though, if we understand such efforts purely in terms of distance learning or community outreach, as if all expertise resides within universities and needs simply to be transmitted to the world. Rather we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors equally committed to mapping and mastering the current media change" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 16, 2007, p. b9-b10)

This quote is how Henry Jenkins describes the evolution of the ways in which universities should begin thinking about how to engage the world in a more participatory fashion.

He goes on to say, "

The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways."

Students and the use of technology for learning

Here is a good example of the fact that how students use computers may have no connection to their learning. In this New York Times article, they report that some schools who provided laptops to all their students are abandoning this practice because there is no connection between the computers and learning. Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

Now one important caution about this article is asking what else happens in classrooms and schools that has nothing to do with learning. And what we missing about schools that does have a connection to learning, but we often overlook it? For example, there is emerging evidence that extra curricula activities improve learning outcomes for students. (See the research by Dr. Christy Lleras at the University of Illinois We don't know exactly how this works, but these findings should make us more thoughtful about how learning occurs and what happens in schools outside of the classroom that may be important to learning.

Communicating with Today's Undergraduates

I remain skeptical about the various talk about "digital natives" and other terms to use about today's young people. I know that they use various forms of technology to communicate, but I am not sure they use technology to "learn" or at least they don't use it in the ways that I think about learning.

Nevertheless, I am sure that they are using technology to find out information about which colleges to attend and what programs are being offered by various schools. In short, I suspect that most students narrow down their choices of potential schools based on what they learn from the web. But how does this connect with their choice of a major? For example, the well-known majors are probably introduced by a variety of people, but for students interested in psychology and sociology, how would be they find "human development" or "family studies" or "community development?" I don't know and I don't think anyone else knows other than to say that they either know someone or they accidental stumble across this information.

All this leads me to think about how those of us in more invisible majors connect with high school students and how this might be done through technology.