Category: bim Page 1 of 8

I am planning to do some more work on BIM in preparation for using it in teaching this year, including finishing some analysis of how the blogging went in last year’s two offerings.

As luck would have it, I skimmed one of my feeds and came across Prestridge (2014). What follows is a summary and some thoughts. It’s nice to be reading an open access journal paper after a few very closed off articles.

Aside: I am wondering whether or not in the new world order being someone that reads feeds and has students blog is become somewhat old fashioned.

Abstract

The abstract for Prestridge (2014) is

Reflection is considered an inherent part of teacher practice. However, when used within professional development activity, it is fraught with issues associated with teacher confidence and skill in reflective action. Coupled with anxiety generally associated with technological competency and understanding the nature of blogging, constructive reflection is difficult for teachers. This paper focuses on the reflective quality of school teachers’ blogs. It describes teachers’ perceptions and engagement in reflective activity as part of an ICT professional development program. Reflective entries are drawn from a series of blogs that are analysed qualitatively using Hatton and Smith’s (1995) three levels of reflection-on-action. The findings suggest that each level of reflective action plays a different role in enabling teachers to transform their ICT pedagogical beliefs and practices. Each role is defined and illustrated suggesting the value of such activity within ICT professional development, consequently reshaping what constitutes effective professional development in ICT.

This appears to be relevant to what I do as the course I teach is titled “ICTs and Pedagogy” and reflection through blogging is a key foundation to the pedagogy in the course. Of course, this appears to be focused on in-service, rather than pre-service teachers.

Introduction

In the Australian education context various government policies illustrate that ICTs are important. There’s a move to 1-to-1 student/computer ratios. However, “success with regard to technology integration has been based on how extensive or prominent the use of it has been in schools rather than on whether the teacher has been able to utilize it for ‘new’, ‘better’, or more ‘relevant’ learning outcomes (Moyle, 2010)” (Prestridge, 2014). Suggests a need to “reconceptualise both the intentions and approaches to professional development” if there’s going to be an ROI on this government investment and if we’re to help teachers deal with this.

PD is “an instrument to support change in teacher practice”. Long held view that PD should move from “up-skilling in the latest software” to a deeper approach that focuses on pedagogy and context rather than technology; building teachers’ confidence in change; development of teachers’ metacognitive skills; and, as a philosophical/revisioning of ICT in learning (references attached to each of these). References work by Fisher et al (2006) as requesting “a cultural change in the teaching profession”, the principles of which need to be “activiated within ICT professional development if we are going to move from retooling teachers to enabling them to transform their practices”.

Note: I wonder how well this academic call for a cultural change matches the perceptions of teachers and the organisations that employ them? I have a feeling that some/many teachers are likely to be more pragmatic. As for the organisations and the folk that run them….

And now onto the importance/relevance of reflection to this. Schon gets a mention. As does the action research spiral, teacher-as-researcher, inquiry based professional development, reflective action, Dewey. Leading to research suggesting “that reflection brings automatic calls in the improvement of teaching” and other work suggesting there’s a lack of substantive evidence.

This paper aims to investigate “the role of written reflection as a central process in a ‘hearts and mind’ approach to ICT professional development.

Note: The mix of plural and singular in “hearts and mind” is interesting/a typo in this era of standardised outcomes/curriculum and increasing corporatisation.

Methods to framing the research

Background on a broader ARC funded project that aims to develop “a transformative model of teacher ICT professional development”. With “one or two teachers” volunteering from each school it would appear to suffer the problem of pioneers versus the rest. Teachers engaged in classroom inquiries, in particular the “implementation of an ICT application in regard their pedagogical practices and student learning outcomes”. Supported through a local school leader, outside expert, online discussion forum and personal blogging.

Has a table that lists the inquiry questions of the 8 teachers. Questions range from “How can students be supported when creating an electronic picture book using the theme ‘Program Achieve”?” to “What strategies need to be employed to promote effective/productive ICT practices that encourage intellectual demand and recognise difference and diversity?”

Teachers were encouraged to blog after teaching. Provided with a framework for reflecting after teaching (5R framework). Weekly blog mandatory. School leaders asked to encourage blogging.

This work focuses on

1. teachers’ perceived value of the reflective activity

   Data from teachers’ final interviews and reports analysed using constant comparative method

2. the role of written reflection in enabling change in pedagogy

   Blog posts analysed with Hatton and Smith’s (1995) three types of writing: descriptive reflection; dialogic reflection; and, critical reflection.

Results

• 1 teacher had consistent reflection of the year implementation
• 4 teachers had spasmodic entries, mostly at the beginning
• the other teachers writing could be seen as simply record keeping

Finds similar results in other use of reflective blogs and suggests that “teachers’ lack of understanding on how to reflect limits their reflective writing abilities”.

Note: Not a great result perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. Might get some idea of this from my students posts in 2013 later today.

Perceived value of reflective writing

Not surprisingly, the “consistent reflection” person liked blogging. Others didn’t.

A major theme on the value was “a lack of understanding on how to reflect”.

Note: I have a feeling this may be one factor for my students. Though I wonder how much pragmatism and especially how reflective blogging falls outside the realm of standard practice for many plays a role.

“What to write in the reflective blog and then what to do with these reflections were issues raised by the teachers”

Note: Raising the issue of BIM being better at providing “prompts” to students.

Ahh, a quote from a participant brings back the “realm of standard practice” issue

I think because this inquiry thing was such a different way of doing things I’ve ever done before, it took me a while to get fair dinkum about it. I still couldn’t get the blog…..that’s one positive that’s come out of it because if I were asked to do something like this again then I would do it much more readily.

Picks up on the idea of “reflection as description” through a number of quotes. An apparent lack of priority given to analysing on what had happened and going beyond description.

This is even though the teachers were given the 5R framework and a range of questions/prompts in project documentation and comments by the outside PD expert.

Note: Given this difficulty in understanding how to write reflectively, what impact does it have on the next part of the paper “examining the role of written reflections to identify how reflection supports teacher change in pedagogy”?

The role of reflective writing

The obvious “solution” is to focus on the 1 teacher who consistently blogged, generating the problem of a sample of 1.

The posts were analysed in chronological order. Emphasis on linking the type of reflection and the role it plays in “improving and or supporting teachers in transforming the beliefs and practices”

The most common type of reflection is descriptive, which really isn’t reflection. But this descriptive reflection “provides a leverage for dialogic reflection” which may or may not be pursued. As it turns out, generally not chosen. Only when a critical friend provides some additional prompting does it appear.

When it did occur, it helped shape the teacher’s pedagogical beliefs and practices. Descriptive reflection made conscious the connection between pedagogical beliefs and actual practice, but more as a justification.

Only spasmodic evidence of critical reflection.

Suggests that data supports the conclusion that there’s a developmental sequence to reflection. Start with descriptive and then the more demanding forms emerge.

The role played by each type of reflection in transforming pedagogical beliefs and practices

1. Descriptive reflection – a connector, making conscious the links between pedagogical beliefs, current teaching practices, and student learning outcomes.
2. Dialogical reflection – the shaper, where the connections were examined and explored, enabling transformation.
3. Critical reflection – a positioner. Placing the role of teacher in the broader context and critical evaluate the role.

Conclusion

If how to reflect in written form is understood, then “reflective action plays a significant part in enabling them to change their pedagogical beliefs and practices”. Each type of reflection plays a different role.

A lack of guidance and support were found to affect reflective action.

References

Prestridge, S. J. (2014). Reflective Blogging as part of ICT Professional Development to Support Pedagogical Change. The Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(2).

The following is a description of the kludge I put in place to mark the learning journals – see here for a description of initial thinking behind the journal – folk in the EDC3100 course this semester had to complete. It’s meant to record what I did, provide some food for further development and offer an opportunity for some initial reflection.

Final format

5% of each of the three course assignments contained a component titled the “learning journal”. In this, the students were expected for the relevant weeks of semester:

• complete all the activities on the course site; and,
• post a sequence of reflective posts on their personal blog.

As outlined in the ideas post the student’s mark was based on:

• what percentage of the activities they completed;
• how many posts per week (on average) they published;
• the word count of those posts;
• the number of posts that contained links; and,
• the number of posts that contained links to posts from other students in the course.

The intent was to encourage connections and serendipty and minimise students having to “reflect to order” in response to specific questions/criteria. Of course, that didn’t stop many from seeking to produce exactly what was required to obtain the mark they wanted to achieve. 100 words per average means exactly that and also a bit of judicious quoting etc. Something for further reflection.

Activity completion

Each week the course site had a number of Moodle activities and resources, all with activity completion turned on. This means that Moodle tracks who has fulfilled the necessary actions to complete e.g. read a page, post to a forum etc.

The reports of activity completion aren’t particular helpful as I need to get the data into a Perl script, so the process is

1. Download the CSV file Moodle can export of activity completion.

   The CSV file for the course I just downloaded was 1.7Mb in size.

2. Delete the columns for the activities that don’t belong to the required period.
3. Save it locally.

Blogs

I’ve written some Perl scripts that will parse the BIM database, evaluate the student posts and then combine that with the data from the activity completion CSV and produce the report. This report is circulated to the markers who manually copy and paste the students result into their assignment sheet. I’ve also got a version of the script that will email all the students a copy.

Of course, to get to this stage I’ve had to make sure that all of the students’ blogs are registered correctly with the version of BIM on my laptop. Then I need to

1. Run the BIM mirror process to ensure that BIM has the most recent student posts.

   Currently 335 students have registered blogs and there are 8550 posts mirrored. For an average of about 25 posts per student. In reality, there have been a number of students withdraw from the course for a number of reasons.

2. Dump the PHP BIM database and create a copy in the Perl database.

   Due to how I’ve got Perl and PHP installed they are using different MySQL database servers.

3. Run either script.

The end result

Is a report that summarises results. But beyond this it’s a lot of extra work in overcoming human error that would have been removed with a decent system. I’ve spent a fair chunk of the last week dealing with these errors that mostly arise from the absence of a system giving students immediate feedback of problems including

• Telling students they’ve registered a URL that is either not a URL or not a valid RSS feed.

  Earlier problems dealt with students making mistakes with registering their blog. BIM does this, but because BIM isn’t installed on the institutional servers I had to make do with the Moodle database activity and then manually fixing errors.

• Warning students that their RSS feed is set to “summary” and not “full”.

  To encourage visitors to the actual blog, some blog engines have an option to set the feed to “summary” mode. A mode where only the first couple of sentences of a post is shown in the feed. This is not useful for a system like BIM that assumes it’s getting the full post. Especially when “average word count” is part of the marking mechanism.

  I’ve spent a few hours this week and more this semester helping recover this situation. BIM needs to be modified to generate warnings of this so recovery can happen earlier.

• Students editing posts.

  Currently, once BIM gets a copy of a post it doesn’t change it. Even if the author makes a change. This caused problems because some students edited published posts to make last minute changes. This is okay but BIM’s assumptions broke the practice.

  BIM does provide students with a way to view BIM’s copy of their posts. I believe this feature helps the authors understand that the copy on BIM is different from the version on their blog. Reducing this error.

• Allowing students to see their progress.

  This week I’ve sent all students an email with their result. BIM does provide a way for students to see their progress/marks, but with no BIM the first the students knew of what the system knew of them was when their marked assignments were returned. BIM, properly modified for the approach I’ve used here, would allow the students to see their progress and do away with the need for the email. It would allow the nipping of problems in the bud. Reducing work for me and uncertainty for the students.

Was it a success?

I’ve been wondering over the recent weeks – especially when I’ve been in the midst of the extra work that arose from having to fix the above problems – whether it was worth it. Did I make a mistake deciding to go with the blog based assessment for this course in the absence of appropriate tool support. Even if the institution had installed BIM, BIM itself didn’t have all the tools to support the approach I’ve used this semester. BIM would have reduced the workload somewhat, but additional workload would have been there.

Was it worth it was a question I asked myself when it became obvious that at least some (perhaps many) students did “write for the marks”. I need to explore this a bit further. But it is obvious that some students made sure they wrote enough to meet the criteria. There was also some level of publishing the necessary posts in the day before the assignment was due. At least some of the students weren’t engaging in the true spirit of the assessment. But I don’t blame them, there were lots of issues with the implementation of this assessment.

Starting with the absence of BIM which created additional workload which in part contributing to less than appropriate scaffolding to help the students engage in the task more meaningfully. Especially in terms of better linkages to the weekly activities. I’m particularly interested, longer term, in how the assessment of the course and the work done by the markers can be changed from making submitted assignments to actively engaging with students blog posts.

On the plus side, there was some evidence of serendipity. The requirement for for students to link to others worked to create connections and at least some of them resulted in beneficial serendipity. There’s enough evidence to suggest that this is worthwhile continuing with. There does of course need to be some more formal evaluation and reflection about how to do this, including work on BIM to address some of the problems above.

I’ve also learnt that the activity completion report in Moodle is basically useless. With the number of students I had, the number of activities to complete, and apparently the browser I was using viewing the tabular data in the activity completion report in a meaningful way was almost useless. Downloading the CSV into Excel was only slightly more beneficial. In reality, the data needed to be manipulated into another format to make it useful. Not exactly a report located in “The Performance Zone” talked about at the end of this post. On the plus side, this is informing some further research.

This whole experience really does reinforce Rushkoff’s (p. 128) point about Digital Technology

Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code.

Without my background in programming, developing e-learning/web systems and in writing BIM none of the above would have been possible. The flip side of this point is that what is possible when it comes to e-learning within Universities is constrained by the ideas of the people who wrote the code within the various systems Universities have adopted. Importantly, this may well be at least as big a constraint on the quality of University e-learning as the intentions of the teaching staff to use the tools and the readiness of the students to adopt to changes.

References

Rushkoff, D. (2010). Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books.