This is a pretty interesting video. Here is the transcript of most of the video, Over the past 100 years, a lot of areas of life have been revolutionized. But education is not one of them. By and large students are still taught in groups by a single teacher and that is not what a revolution looks like. Some might blame this state of affairs on the inertia of our educational institutions. It is just too hard to get a huge bureaucracy to change. But I think the reason technology hasn’t revolutionized education is something else. Something that goes to the very heart of what education is. Let’s consider the process of learning. Say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood. Which learning aid do you think would be more effective, this animation with narration or this set of static pictures with text? Obviously the animation is better, I mean, for one thing it shows exactly what a heart does. For decades, educational research focused on questions like this. Does a video promote learning better than a book? Are live lectures more effective than televised lectures? Is animation better than static graphics? In all well controlled studies the result is no significant difference. That is, so long as the content is equivalent between two treatments the learning outcomes are the same with all different media. How is this possible? How can something which seems so powerful like animation be no more effective than static graphics? Well, for one thing, animations are fleeting so you might miss something as they go by. Plus, since the parts are animated for you, you don’t have to mentally envision how the parts are moving. And so you don’t have to invest as much mental effort which would make it more memorable. In fact, sometimes static graphics perform better than animations. And I think this points to a really fundamental aspect of education, which is it does not matter what happens around the learner. We are not limited by the experiences we can give to students. What limits learning is can what happen inside the students head. That is where the important part of learning takes place. No technology is inherently superior to any other. Researchers spent so much time investigating whether one medium or technology was more effective than another that they failed to investigate how to use the technology to promote meaningful thought processes. So the question really is, what experiences promote the kind of thinking that is required for learning. Recently, that research is being conducted and we are finding out some pretty important stuff. I know it may sound obvious but it turns out that learning with words and pictures together, whether they are animation and narration or they are static pictures and text works better than words alone. Also, we see that anything that extraneous needs to be eliminated from a lesson. For example, on screen text competes with visuals, so students perform better when it is omitted than when it is present. Now that we know how best to make educational videos and any experience can be simulated in the video setting, YouTube must be the platform that will revolutionize education. I mean the number of educational videos on YouTube is increasing every day. So why do we need teachers? If you think the fundamental job of a teacher is to transmit information from their head to their students then you are right, they are obsolete. You probably imagine a classroom this teacher is spewing out facts at a pace which is appropriate for one student, too fast for half and too slow for the rest. Luckily the fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information. It is to guide the social process of learning. The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. Yes they also do explain and demonstrate and show thing but fundamentally that is beside the point. The most important thing a teacher does is make every student feel like they are important, to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning. All of this is not to say that technology has had no impact on education. Students and teachers work and communicate via computers. Videos are used inside and outside of classrooms. But all of this is best characterized and an evolution not a revolution. The foundation of education is still based on the social interaction between teacher and students. For as transformative as each new technology seems to be, like motion pictures or computers or smart boards, what really matters is what happens inside the learner’s head. And making a learner think is best achieved within a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 03:35:57 +0000
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