Reflection on Online Courses

While I’m thinking about the two courses I’ve just finished, I want to reflect on one I finished five months ago: e-Learning and Digital Cultures.

The focus of this course was on what is meant by digital cultures and how are they affecting how we interact with our world. In actual fact, I found the course itself boring, I wasn’t really interested in exploring utopian/dystopian views of technology, what it means to be human, and how these ideas have relevance for education and learning.

What did interest me was the final project which asked us to bring together in some kind of digital artifact the ideas behind the course. Now that caught my attention – I gave it quite a bit of thought before one day sitting down and browsing the web for ten interesting ideas I could find. In the end I created a Pinterest Board on which I pinned these ten ideas. If you’re interested click here to view my artifact.

This was an example of a course which didn’t capture my interest but a final project which did.

End of Courses – II

I also came to the end of the MoMA course on Art and Inquiry. I didn’t complete this one – the final assignment was “to take the concepts we have explored each week and create a resource that you can incorporate into your teaching (to share with peers for their responses).” Since I’m not teaching I couldn’t summon interest in the project. In this class, it wasn’t the processes of “inquiry” that interested me, but the exploration of the art. I did get a chance to do that – to view many pieces in the MoMA collection, I perused the MoMA Learning Site, I engaged in some discussion about works of art. So I got out of the course what I wanted from it.

A classroom teacher or parent, I think, would find the course helpful for learning how to engage young people in conversation about all kinds of objects and artifacts (not just works of art). It would help them think about curriculum in more open-ended ways. They’d be able to consider using common everyday objects as jump off points for learning – take a candy bar wrapper – there’s lots of printed information on it about nutrition (what does all of that mean?), about the ingredients in the bar (where they are grown and what are the working conditions like for those growers), about where the bar was manufactured (how is the bar made?) – and there are also lots of questions about the wrapper itself as an object – about the paper, the printing process, the design of the layout, of the oblique messages in the design…

Our world is filled with objects/artifacts – any one of which represents a rich potential for all kinds of learning, provided we adults have an understanding of how to draw children’s attention to what’s around them.

End of Courses – I

Yesterday I managed to finish up the Learning Math Course. I kind of lost interest when the technical problem with the Stanford server wouldn’t allow me to respond to peer responses – that was after the fourth section. I continued working my way through the remaining sections, responding as asked, but I knew I wouldn’t get any feedback from anybody else because my content wasn’t getting through. I suspect, however, I may get a certificate of completion, anyway. We’ll see.

I was struck all the way through by contradiction between the content of the course – to help teachers/parents understand learning (math learning) as an iterative, open process where mistakes are a valued part of learning, where talk is essential for exploring and making sense (all values I was advocating as a literacy educator more than 25 years ago) – and the format of the course which kept telling us about those values and steering us to the “right” responses. rather than allowing us reach those understandings by engaging in the process the instructor was advocating. That’s not easy to accomplish – I certainly struggled with that contradiction myself all the years I was teaching, but it wasn’t clear to me that the instructor here understood the contradiction even existed.

Did I learn anything new? Not much, but I didn’t go into the course to learn math – I wanted to see what theoretical position Jo Boaler would take and how it would play out through the course content and process in a digital environment. I’d love to engage in conversation with her about the difficulty of putting into practice what you’re advocating teachers themselves do. I did write her – but I didn’t receive a reply (not that I expected to).

I partly resolved the contradiction in my own teaching as a literacy educator by asking some questions as we went along:

• What did we just do?
• How did that affect you as a learner?
• What questions does this experience raise for you?
• What do you know/think/understand at this point?
• How does that affect you as a reader and a writer?
• What one thing does it make you reconsider as a teacher?

What I was attempting to foster was a reflective practitioner stance – to enable teachers to both reflect-on-action and reflect-in-action (as the late Donald Schon described). I wanted teachers to learn to make the problematic in their teaching open to inquiry so they could learn from the situation, and from their students, how to teach those students.

Offering a course in a digital world (where you never come face-to-face with your students) presents a whole host of interesting obstacles, particularly when what you want people to develop is an inquiry driven stance. I’m sure it can be done – the tools are becoming more accommodating every day. The challenge is using the various tools in ways that are consistent with your philosophical underpinnings.

Salvadore Dali

Apparition of a Face and a Fruit Dish on a Beach

I remember seeing this painting at the Guggenheim in NYC – what – 40 years ago (at least). What’s not immediately obvious when you view the actual painting is the background – because the painting is so large, and I was quite close to it, I was focused on the “face” and “the bowl of fruit” – but when I stepped back (as far as the ramp would allow me) I gasped because the dog leapt out at me!

What I find amazing, is how Dali was able to paint in such exacting detail, something he would not be able to actually “see” even at arm’s length – the “dog” is only visible at a much longer distance.

There are several Dali paintings that have more than one obvious subject, but difficult to see them both at the same time – very like Necker cubes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necker_cube) where you can see only one orientation at a time.

Click here for a review of the painting.

Although I do understand that The Persistence of Memory was ground breaking because of its subject matter, I find Dali’s double image paintings more challenging and interesting.

Blue Vase with Nasturtiums

Last week’s assignment for the MoMA course
was:

Browse through MoMA’s online Collection and choose an image. Research some information about the work of art using MoMA.org and/or other online sources. Please upload a thumbnail image of your selected artwork. For your forum post respond to these questions: What drew you to this work of art? What information were you able to find out about this work?
If you were to teach with this work, what aspects would you like to introduce to your students?

I spent quite a bit of time browsing the collection – saved a number of images but in the end chose this one: Blue Vase with Nasturtiums – Judy Pfaff 1987

What’s not obvious in the image of this piece is how three dimensional it is – I came across another photo of it which made the 3D aspect of the sculpture evident. I love the vivid colour, the many round objects juxtaposed – the closest I come to something like this in my home is the jug on my kitchen counter full of colourful kitchen utensils.

I wasn’t able to find out a lot about the piece except the following:

“One of the most revealing details of the new installation of post-World War II painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art is the placement of Judy Pfaff’s “Blue Vase With Nasturtiums” near the escalator on the third floor. This 1987 painting-sculpture is very much a Pfaff work: exuberant, even antic, multicolored, turning the history of art on its ear in an upbeat, good-natured way.”

With it’s placement near the escalator – you’d certainly see the 3D of the piece either coming or going! It’s a happy piece, it’s full of life. playful. I’d want to encourage students (of any age) to think about the objects in their lives that they could use to create something (a collage, a sculpture) that evokes a feeling as strongly as this piece does for me – I just want to smile when I see it.

This apparently is a large object: Date: 1987, Medium: Enamel on steel and plastic laminate on wood, Dimensions: 9′ 7″ x 8′ 6 1/2″ x 66″ (292.1 x 260.3 x 167.7 cm) (variable) – I love that descriptor “variable” – has to do with the fact that the parts move, I imagine, so the dimensions aren’t completely fixed.

Here is another photo I found online that gives an indication of the “depth” of the sculpture – it’s substantial. I’d love to see the actual piece sometime.In case the photos aren’t showing, here’s a link to the image on the MoMA site: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81109

PS – I didn’t know Judy Pfaff’s work – this is the first image of one I’ve seen. I just looked her up: her work is certainly exuberant: http://www.judypfaffstudio.com

The Pfaff sculpture has me thinking about another bouquet – the one on my kitchen counter:

My Evolving Strategies and Algebra

I’m back at the math course this morning. The first thing I want to comment on is how my “course-taking” strategies have evolved in this situation. I’ve learned to keep my text editor open beside the workspace on the course webpage – I work out an answer on a scrap of paper (if it’s a math problem to solve), type it into the text box provided for my response, then copy and paste my response into the text editor where I can keep track of all my answers in one place! I’ve also stopped trying to take notes during the video excerpts, instead, I select and copy the complete transcript and paste it into a new text editor page to save. That way I can just highlight the “main ideas” I know I’m going to be asked for later. I’ve also realized I can stop the video at any point and take screen shots of something interesting on the screen – which has saved me trying to memorize all this stuff. I’m finding I’m being pushed into a “memorize” kind of mentality by the way the course unfolds – something I’m continually trying to resist since there’s no point in remembering the small stuff – for me the point is to understand the argument; but it’s tough fighting the pressure to take notes to remember the “main points.” Then I ask myself, if I didn’t already share Jo Boaler’s underlying assumptions about learning, I’m not sure how much my actual teaching would change just because I’d participated in this experience.

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This week’s work is about algebra – it’s about thinking about algebra

• as a problem solving tool,
• as a sense-making experience; and
• to express a generalization.

The process – again a version of a Math Talk – the problem: How many coloured cubes are there?

There are lots of ways of solving this problem – we see the teacher engage the students in the following way:

1. (She asks class for answer because it’s clear they’ve got it),  then she discusses incorrect answers first, asks for reasoning;
2. Elicits different methods of reasoning, asking kids to show on overhead – brings out 5 different ways of thinking about this;
   (10 x 4) -4
   10 + (9 x 2) + 8
   4 x 9
   10 + 10 + 8 + 8
   (10 x 10) – (8 x 8)
3. Asks for backward reasoning with a 6th possible way of thinking about the problem and asks kids for the reasoning involved in the solution: (4 x 8) + 4
   This strategy generated lots of animated talk!
4. Discusses the six different methods asking kids to compare similarities and differences among the methods;
5. Asks kids to visualize a 6 x 6 array and try the problem mentally using one of the methods;
6. Says she’s not interested in the answer as the reasoning: What would Charlene (one of the students’ solutions for the 10×10 array) have done to find the number of squares in the border of the 6×6 array?

The focus here is primarily on algebra as a sense making experience.

But we were engaged in other problems where the interest is in creating a generalization:

How do you see this shape growing? Can you find the number of squares in case 100? Or in case n?

Here are three possible solutions, showing the generalization. I worked it out using the second version – seeing 3 “legs” growing.

The interesting part of all of this is to be able to think about how many different ways I can think about this problem. The invitation to the students is then to adapt this problem to make it into a new problem.