Wearing cat’s ears; you may amuse but don’t be misled by simplistic accounts of Neuroscience

Unsurprisingly, an image of Nicola Sturgeon (First minister for Scotland) wearing a pair of tartan cat’s ears at the launch of a hi-tech digital school was broadcast through both print and social media http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3222275/What-thinking-Sturgeon-tries-bizarre-brain-scanner-enormous-TARTAN-ears.html.

When used as a form of entertainment (or publicity) there is no harm done. However, this device is marketed as a way of augmenting the human body when communicating mood http://www.necomimi.com/WatchTheVideo.aspx and it has been suggested that it could be used by teachers to assess attention in class in real time; that the ears will ‘prick up’ when the wearer is paying attention. According to the instructions one sensor should be placed above the eyebrow and the other clipped to the ear so that the forehead sensor can ‘read’ the electrical impulses generated by neurons firing in the brain. It is claimed that by using this data to control the motor that positions the cat’s ears they can reflect your mental state.

Do the scientific claims for this device hold up? In medical contexts the EEG has been used as an investigative procedure for over 60 years with technical innovations such as solid-state amplifiers and digital methods of analysis being incorporated as they became available. The collection of the EEG record, and its subsequent interpretation, requires expertise based on years of training. You would be unlikely to find a practitioner who would support the claims made for this device. There is a strong likelihood that the electrical impulses that drive the motor are myogenic (originate in muscle) rather than neurally based. When the biosensors are placed as recommended the one above the eyebrow will pick up both eyeblinks and activity in the frontalis muscle (the muscle that you use to raise your eyebrows) while in noisy environments the ear clip will be susceptible to activity in the post auricular muscle as described here http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/1/19?ijkey=ecce332eef28da3f167b1373941635f7b915e274&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha and movements of the wearer’s own ears that are under voluntary control.

A single channel electro encephalogram (EEG) is the technical description for this device. There are other manufacturers of such devices which are marketed with suggestions for their use that range from managing a brain-training program to meditation. By contrast a neurophysiologist would expect to have access to at least 21 channels of EEG recorded concurrently from at least 21 biosensors positioned to sample electrical activity over the whole skull area. The neurophysiologist’s skill lies in the interpretation of the patterns of activity across all biosensors. Although the presence and/or amplitude of the alpha frequency is a valid indicator of alertness it is optimally recorded with biosensors placed at the back of the skull. Feel for the midline boney projection at the back of your skull, 5 cms above that would be a good placement. Encouraging a class to use such a device to critically investigate the underlying Neuroscience would have value. Suggesting to teachers and students that such devices are a valid method for monitoring attention and mood is misleading.

Teacherbot, useful tool or just another example of the allure of innovation

When I read the following article

Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching by Sian Bayne. Teaching in Higher Education. Published online 16 Apr 2015. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

I noted with interest that students had dropped the descriptor ‘teacher’ from the bot developed for the E-learning and digital cultures MOOC (University of Edinburgh).  Perhaps like me students could not discern any teacherly function of botty (the name that students adopted for teacherbot) that could not be otherwise achieved by providing a repository of curated resources and a frequently answered questions (FAQ) list.

Undoubtedly the agent that follows the MOOC hashtag (#edcmooc) and harvests student questions and comments is useful, but what did botty achieve? The behaviour of teacherbot (a rule based agent developed by the teachers to automate tweet responses) is problematic for me. Instead of making queries about the course (for example, about assessment procedure) available to all students in their collated form i.e. as a list of FAQs, botty responds to each student individually through twitter. Furthermore, although 60% of the enrolled students are postgraduates (as is the case for many MOOCs) with a professional interest in digital education botty pushes individual resources to individual students. Surely, for this demographic it is access to a curated resource repository that is valuable. 

Teacherbot is positioned as a research initiative that seeks new ways of understanding and developing automated teaching through adopting a critical posthumanist perspective.  While arguing for a critical posthumanist approach Bayne reviewed a previous initiative for automating teaching that was funded by the ESRC http://www.tel.ac.uk highlighting efficiency and productivity as the dominant discourse for that program. However, that section of the Bayne article mystified me. A closer look at the title of one of the targeted articles[1] offers a very different interpretation; higher quality and more effective learning are the outcomes that were envisioned. Nevertheless, Bayne develops a narrative that characterises the current conversation about automated teaching as dispute, with efficiency gains and teacher resistance oppositional views that need to be resolved. By response teacherbot is positioned as  ‘an assemblage of the human and non-human’ unhindered by humanistic assumption and efficiency agendas and thereby provides a new way of revisiting teacher automation.

Does teacherbot make a research contribution? The article is eloquently written and intriguing to read. However, the outcomes are mainly descriptive and anecdotal. As a teacher (and on occasion student) continuously and actively involved in online teaching and learning for more than two decades I have never considered the automation of teaching to be a threat.  Indeed, I can envisage how automation (for example, the collection and collation of learning analytics (LA) data) has promise and I would not object to it being considered as co-teaching provided that the automated information and myself were appropriately assembled so that LA information is monitored throughout.  However, I cannot discern any evidence to suggest that botty and the MOOC teaching team are entangled in a way that merits a claim of co-teaching or that this initiative has informed the scholarship of online teaching in any useful way. Furthermore,  the evidence presents botty as not very accomplished when it comes to recognising and responding to the socio-emotional needs of students – perhaps because it is not human.

1.         Laurillard, D., Productivity: Achieving higher quality and more effective learning in affrodable and acceptable ways. 2011.

http://www.tlrp.org/docs/ProdBeta.pdf.

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When myths about the lack of embodiment online get translated to conclusions about student science misconceptions

The Institute for effective evidence (IEE) http://www.york.ac.uk/iee

is an influential filter of educational research providing ‘rigorous evaluations of programmes and practices’. It is why it is disappointing that a recent report from them on this article (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21169/abstract

in the Journal of Science Teaching by Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw was notable for its lack of evaluation. The research had looked at learning outcomes (with a focus on student misconceptions about science) when instruction in class is followed by group work. The interpersonal interactions required for group work took place either face-to-face (control condition) or were enabled through computer mediated conferencing (CMC)  (the experimental condition). The researchers claim that using CMC for the group work compromised the quality of the learning outcomes; that misconceptions about science tended to persist for students who used this form of communication. The purpose of this blog post is to explain why I think that the discussion and conclusion sections of that research article are misleading.

Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw make several references to the lack of embodied communication, behaviours such as pointing, facial expression, as a factor might have influenced the learning outcomes of the students who used CMC for group work. However, it has been demonstrated repeatedly in the research literature that when participants use CMC for group work they adapt by using on a wide range of digital fluency practices for example; metaphor, typography and by appropriating the functionality of the technology for example, threading.  Provided that participants are digitally fluent, they are provided with appropriate facilities, and opportunity for discourse online, the quality of interpersonal interaction for learning should not be compromised by the absence of non-verbal cues.

The key to the success of CMC lies in the design for learning (as is the case for all forms of learning) and it is not a simple case of directly substituting one mode of communication (using CMC) for another (face-to-face). For the research critiqued in this blog entry group work online was presented so that all factors (other than mode of communication) were controlled. It has meant that scholarship of design for this form of learning was ignored and by consequence, professional development for online teaching appears to be lacking. The design did not take into account the constraints (more time is required) of CMC, or capitalize on the affordances. A great advantage of asynchronous discussion is that students can be given the opportunity to reflect and a full textual record of the discussion is available for them to refer to while doing so. The textual record is also available to the teacher whose feedback should be enhanced by access to a full verbal account of the discussion of all the groups involved.  The design did not capitalize on the pedagogic affordances of CMC and when evaluated in this context the conclusion, that CMC is an inferior form of communication for group work, is misleading. The IEE report will amplify the reach of these misleading conclusions and is likely to influence, negatively, the uptake of this form of communication for group work. This is unfortunate given the well-documented advantages that group work online can offer including the potential of Learning Analytics data (which are collected with more granularity and more easily online) for enhancing our understanding of student learning behaviours.

Group work as voodoo teaching: Fair appraisal or not?

In Teacher Proof, by Tom Bennett, group work is characterised as voodoo teaching:  an approach to learning advocated by armchair educationists, based on theory and evidenced by proxy measurements, while from a teacher perspective there are a considerable number of disadvantages for example, inactivity (disguised), unequal participation and too much social chat.

Don’t these behaviours occur whatever pedagogy a teacher uses for imparting knowledge?

When the aim is to improve teaching and learning oppositional conversations are not helpful. If teachers could be convinced of the value of group work then the disadvantages might morph into barriers to be overcome. However, two misconceptions need to be dismissed at the outset. Firstly, learning is not about accumulating factual knowledge and being able to recall it; understanding the knowledge and making conceptual connections are the key indicators of knowledge acquisition. Secondly, the idea of group work is not that students teach each other. The value of inter student interaction lies in the process od developing their  learning of a topic through verbalising their current level of  understanding while communicating it to other members of the group, and by assessing and/or developing the ideas of their peers. With a 1/30 teacher/student ratio it would not be possible for the teacher to undertake this process with every student.  However, the teacher’s expert knowledge is not wasted, she/he can correct any misunderstandings that persist at group level. 

Hard to learn stuff is cognitively and emotionally painful so there is value in easing the emotional strain.  In the UK we have just witnessed the annual duel between the Oxford and Cambridge university boat crews. Although both Oxford teams won easily (for the first time female crews competed on the same course on the same day, albeit not at the same time) it hasn’t always been the case. The media spend a great deal of time describing the commitment and explaining the endurance required by rowers. In 2007 when the Oxford male crew were not doing so well research was carried out that involved comparing threshold for pain when elite rowers trained individually compared with training together in a virtual boat when the physical effort involved was done collectively [1].  Physical effort is known to stimulate endorphin (opioid) release and it has been shown in other studies that high opiate activity is specific to the areas of the brain associated with mood. Could this finding be translated to a group learning context? Does working on a task collectively provide a more conducive emotional climate for the learning? Is the mood of students enhanced in a way that helps them to tackle the painful business of learning? The unknown is whether collective action without physical exertion is sufficient to achieve a positive effect on mood. I propose that it is a sufficiently important area of inquiry for encouraging further research and encouraging teachers to persevere with group work.

Teachers’ experience of group work in practice is that it can lead to a loss of control and increased disruption. Provided that a school has the technological infrastructure to support forums group work could be done online i.e. mediated by a digital device and associated software. Students would know that the teacher could be monitoring their interactions without being physically co-present in either time or space and that a persistent record of their conversations is available. That should wrest some control back to the teacher.

1.         Cohen, E.E.A., et al., Rowers' high: behavioral synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology letters, 2009. Evolutionary biology.

Pitching for the VLE : the distance student voice

Neil Selwyn is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash and worth following if, like me, you get disturbed by ‘technology for education’ hype.  From reading some of Selwyn’s previous research I have constructed him as a defender of democracy in Education. For December reading 2014 he has posted up an article on his academia site https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn titled ‘minding our language’ in which he draws a contrast between the ‘complex realities’ of Education and by implication, what it means to be a student, and the ‘ restricted ‘ language of ‘Ed-Tech Speak (he provides a list of 50 ED-Tech Speak terms in the appendix).

So far so very good (and that is largely my overall conclusion). However, I am going to challenge one of his  suggestions; that it would be more appropriate to refer to ‘virtual learning environments’ (VLE) as ‘teaching management systems’. I make this challenge in the context of one genre, the distance student, by drawing from experience as both a distance student and a distance teacher.  For distance students at the Open University UK (OUUK), its VLE means much more than a ‘teaching management system’. For these students it is their campus, a place where they can get access to other students and all those other intellectual assets that are a significant aspect of being a student in Higher Education. For many the VLE is their University substantiated, a place where they can feel that they belong.  Previously that ‘sense of belonging’ to a University was only fleetingly and marginally achieved. By the  way - 'belonging' is another term that Selwyn is suspicious about when used by Ed_Tech )  

Distance learning, as pioneered by the Open Universities of the world, has democratised education for many and when technology is harnessed appropriately it can make the sense of being a student ‘real’.  A well crafted VLE, i.e. one  that is much more than a teaching management system, is the key component. So while I totally agree with Selwyn’s appraisal of Ed-Tech Speak as a ‘powerful means of advancing the interests and agendas of some social groups over others‘  (Selwyn, 2014, p.2) I wanted to speak up on behalf of the the VLE, as situated in the history of Open and Distance Learning.

Selwyn, N. (2014). Minding_our_Language. https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn.