Social Bookmarking

by Susan Codone

Social bookmarking is a Web 2.0 phenomenon that is growing site by site, with explosive growth in the last couple of years.  Most of us began bookmarking by designating sites we liked as "Favorites" in Internet Explorer.  With social bookmarking, instead of saving your favorite web addresses on your computer, you save them at a social bookmarking website, thus giving you access to them from any computer with Internet access.  This allows you to share, organize, search, and manage your web resources and look at those of others.

The key to this is in the word "social".  John Thompson, writing in the June 2008 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, (Technology: Don't Be Afraid to Explore Web 2.0) says that social bookmarking gives you greater capabilities than the original means of bookmarking -- you decide if you want others to have access to your links.  Peter Godwin, in New Review of Information Networking (2007), says that by "tagging", or assigning keywords to your links, you help link ideas and share resources with others (Information Literacy Meets Web 2.0: How the New Tools Affect Our Own Training and Our Teaching).  Thompson also says that the result of shared tagging is a "tag cloud", or a shared group of tags of different sizes representing different topics.  The size of a tag cloud can indicate its topical popularity.  Godwin says that this can strengthen searching power and increase understanding of topics.  In fact, the social bookmarking site http://www.delicious.com (formerly www.del.icio.us.com) tells users to tag bookmarks and "let collections emerge."

Digg

There are many social bookmarking sites, but let's look at the top three as currently positioned by their Alexa rankings (http://www.alexa.org).  Digg, or http://www.digg.com, is a social bookmarking site where people can discover and share content from anywhere on the web.  According to their about us page, Digg allows users to vote on content, letting the best content surface to the top by popularity -- in other words, users collectively determine the value of content.  With ten million users, Digg is "democratizing digital media".

StumbleUpon


The social bookmarking site StumbleUpon offers "stumblers" the chance to discover and share websites, with matches delivered based on personal preferences.  Pages are recommended by users with up/down ratings, and rather than using a traditional search engine, members (or stumblers) are taken directly to websites that match their personal interests and preferences.  StumbleUpon describes themselves as a combination of human opinion and machine learning.  With eight million users, StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com) offers current collaborative opinions on website quality for their users.

Squidoo

Squidoo is an interesting website that allows you to gather your perspectives on topics into something they call "lenses" and publish them on the site.  Lenses are pages or overview articles that pull together everything you know about a topic and bring it to the attention to others.  Squidoo calls itself a publishing platform and a community of users and says they help you share your interests, build an online identity, and connect with other readers.  With more than 1,400,000 published lenses,  Squidoo is establishing itself quickly as a major web presence.  You can also make money from lenses; if you create a lens that gets lots of traffic, you can place Google ads on it and earn money.  Some Squidoo users are earning thousands of dollars monthly.

Social bookmarking sites offer many collaborative services for users to not only bookmark web services, but also share and manage their favorite sites with others.  The idea of creating a tag cloud and having popular topics emerge through user input is another factor unique to these sites.  Clearly, they are having an impact on the Internet based on their popularity, and it's certain that they will continue to grow.

Self-Regulated Learning

by Susan Codone

As professors, we’ve all seen the problem of underperforming students in our classes -- students who could do well cognitively and behaviorally but do not for a variety of reasons. We know the phenomenon of high D/W/F courses, especially those in math and science, where large numbers of students fail to meet requirements. In a 2009 article on concept mapping, Kyo You Lim, Hyeon Woo Lee, and Barbara Grabowski (British Journal of Educational Technology), say that college students are required to process a great deal of information, but simple access to this information doesn’t guarantee the creation of knowledge. Barry Zimmerman, who has written widely on self-regulated learning, wrote in 2002 in Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview (Theory in Practice) that few teachers actually prepare students to learn on their own.

Self-Regulated Learning

One solution to this age-old problem is Zimmerman’s work on self-regulated learning (SRL). Anthony Artino and Jason Stephens, writing in an article about adaptive and self-regulated learning in the summer of 2009 issue of the Journal of Advanced Academics, say that theories of SRL are used by educators and educational psychologists to better understand how successful students work and how they improve their learning. These authors call SRL “Academic Self Regulated Learning”, saying that self-regulated learners are active participants who efficiently control thoughts, feelings, and actions to improve learning.

Zimmerman (2002) states that SRL is self-generated thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are oriented to attaining goals. SRL involves more than knowledge of a skill; it involves self-awareness, self-motivation, and behavioral skills to implement learning appropriately. Joanna Garner of Penn State University, writing in a 2009 issue of the Journal of Psychology, compared executive functions of planning, impulse control, goal setting, self-monitoring, and motivational drive and found that when intact, these executive functions predicted cognitive strategy use, metacognition, and academic effort regulation – all tenets of SRL (Conceptualizing the Relations Between Executive Functions and Self-Regulated Learning). Garner visually described SRL this way:

Garner believed that self-regulation consisted of metacognitive strategies that lead to academic effort, and more affective elements that lead to motivation and volition to succeed.  Yet Zimmerman (2002) says that SRL is not a mental ability or an academic skill; instead it is a self-directive process by which learners transform their mental abilities into academic skills. Zimmerman lists three phases of SRL:

1. Forethought phase – where our interests lie
2. Performance control – where we apply cognitive and learning strategies
3. Self-Reflective – where we assign cause and effect to our actions

Zimmerman believes that these phases are what we all go through as we identify our interests, manage our cognitive efforts to learn, and identify causes for our actions.

Applying SRL In the Classroom

Theories are sometimes hard to apply in the classroom. Zimmerman and colleagues conducted an experiment in 2010 to investigate a semester-long classroom intervention designed to enhance SRL processes in at-risk math undergraduate students ((Zimmerman, Moylan, Hudesman, & Flugman, Overcoming self-regulatory deficits of at-risk math students at an urban technical college: A self-regulated learning intervention. Presented at the 2010 Research Conference of the Institute of Education Sciences). After the intervention, significantly more students in the SRL treatment groups passed the math course than did those in the control groups. Three interventions were used:

1. Instructor modeling of error correction

2. Guided self-reflection opportunities as part of formative assessment

3. Incentive system to reward subsequent attempts at learning

Here’s how Zimmerman and his colleagues implemented SRL processes in the at-risk students. First, the teachers purposely made errors in their content presentation and then modeled techniques to solve problems. Students were encouraged to come to the board and talk aloud their solutions – verbalizing the problems, their detection of the errors, and the way to solve them.

Every 3-4 days the students took a 4-5 question quiz. Before answering each question, students estimated their confidence (their self-efficacy) in solving the problem.. They solved the problem, then estimated their confidence that they had solved it correctly (their self judgement).

The quizzes were returned along with a self-reflection form; on it, students could explain what they did wrong and needed to do to solve the problem correctly; then if they solved a similar problem correctly, they were given partial credit for the quiz (called incentive points). They also compared their self-efficacy and self-judgement scores on the basis of how they solved the problem. Questions were discussed in groups, and students practiced describing math strategies and procedures.The experiment was successful in proving that equipping students with SRL processes will help them succeed.

Not all of us can go to the depth of intervention that Zimmerman's experiment did, but we can implement methods to better equip students with SRL processes.  We can expand the amount of reflection that students do; we can let them estimate their readiness for tests and other academic challenges, and we can use class time to collaboratively explore areas that are difficult.  We can remind students to plan, organize, and manage their study efforts; we can explicitly model learning strategies that will help them succeed, and we can allow them to redouble their efforts to understand why they failed to succeed.  Self-regulated learning may not be a single skill, but it is teachable, and it is worth trying.

Video and Teaching

by Susan Codone

From the interactive videodisc series Jasper Woodbury by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt toYouTube today, the availability of video for instruction has grown exponentially.  Elliott Masie wrote on March 2, 2010 that "the introduction of video into almost every aspect of our learning and work tasks is profound and disrupting."  He goes on to say that "Rising bandwidth, lowered equipment costs, ease of editing and growing expectations of learners will make video a profound component of our learning efforts going forward."

Sloane Burke and Shonna Snyder, writing in the International Electronic Journal of Health Education (2008) say that Internet-based resources like YouTube integrate relevant content and help students reflect on how to apply what they've learned.  In their article YouTube: an Innovative Learning Resource for College Health Education Courses, they say that as a teaching supplement, YouTube videos inspire and engage learners and "...support their digital learning style."

Ashley Falzetti, writing in Feminist Collections (2008) says that she seasons required texts with YouTube videos to provide content for denser theoretical readings (Reading YouTube, Contextualizing Theory).  Using YouTube for educational videos has proven to be more popular.  Martyn Poliakoff and Brady Haran created the Periodic Table of Videos, with a video for each of the 118 elements.  Since launching they have attracted millions of hits and won a 2008 award for excellence and education (Teaching Chemical Engineering, Feb 2009).  Even something as staid as pathology has found a home at YouTube, with the University of St. Andrews (UK) identifying YouTube as an informative and accurate source of histopathology learning (Medical Teacher, 2009).

Theory and Pedagogy

Theoretically speaking,  social learning theory by Albert Bandura
best describes what happens when we learn from video.  The Theory In Practice (TIP) Database states that Bandura's theory emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of other people.  The most common use of social learning theory is through commercials; we watch them, learn from them, and often model their behavior by purchasing the intended products.  In much the same way, students can watch educational video and model the attitudes and behaviors they see.

Pedagogically speaking, the theoretical foundation for learning through video is constructivism and active learning.  Wikipedia says that active learning is really an umbrella term that refers to instruction that focuses the responsibility of learning on the students.  Since videos can be an extension of a one-way teaching method, the student is still a passive learner and in danger of cognitive overload due to dense video content (Lee and Sharma, 2008).  Active learning can compensate for these problems by engaging the student and promoting cognitive activity.  Group work and student discussion are important components of active learning.  Lee and Sharma recommend showing videos in short segments, with time in between for students to participate in group activities and discussions about what they have seen, and what they predict might be next.  Just allowing students to watch video without breaks for reflection and discussion keeps learners in a passive mode and inhibits knowledge transfer.

Personal Example

In my classroom, I teach engineering students about engineering ethics.  I have learned that a thorough study of past engineering disasters often results in learning about what ethical decisions should have been made.  One such example is the 1996 ValuJet 592 airplane crash in the Florida Everglades.  Flammable cargo was loaded before flight, breaking ethical and official airline regulations.  A documentary video exists on YouTube that is broken into five 15 minute segments.  These are ideal for viewing, followed by reflection, group discussion, and even debate on the ethical issues after each segment.

Other YouTube video segments I have used in class include the Bhopal chemical plant disaster, the Challenger and Columbia accidents, Three Mile Island, and the Kansas City Hotel Walkway Collapse among others.  Each time I use video in the classroom student engagement and attention are high, and I believe that learning occurs at a greater rate than if I were just to describe the tragedy or have the students only read about it.  The videos help the experience come alive for students who weren't yet born when the Challenger exploded.

Elliott Masie said that videos are becoming a large part of our learning process.  In the classrooms, videos can be used to bring life to experiences and help students engage -- as long as they are used well, with plenty of time for student reflection.  YouTube and other video-sharing sites make finding videos easy, and most professors are equipped with classrooms able to show video.  Videos make a great supplements to lessons; I encourage you to use them with your students today!

Cousins of YouTube

by Susan Codone

YouTube is the preeminent video collection on the Internet, especially with its 2006 acquisition by Google.  According to Wikipedia, YouTube is the 3rd most visited site on the Internet behind Google and FaceBook and in 2007 it is estimated to have consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.  In May 2010, 14 billion videos were viewed.  Many videos on YouTube are educational in nature and can be used by professors as supplements to lessons.

But did you know that there are several other websites devoted to educational video, especially for higher education?  Marilyn Gilroy, writing in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education (2009), suggests there are other sites who seek to find a better way to collect and highlight educational video content.  In her article Higher Education Migrates to YouTube and Social Networks, Gilroy describes YouTubeEDU, BigThink,  Academic Earth, FORA.tv, and iTunesU.  Another site, TeacherTube, also offers educational video for the secondary and postsecondary markets.  Finally, Gary Marchionini of the Open Video project describes an open source digital video library that can be used by researchers, teachers, students, and the public.

YouTubeEDU seems to be a loose collection of educational video posted by professors and other education professionals from around the world.  YouTubeEDU doesn't appear as a component of the YouTube menu, but a search yields educational videos titled YouTubeEDU.  Gilroy states that YouTubeEDU features lectures and other materials from many colleges and universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.

Big Think is a "global forum connecting people and ideas."  This site offers videos from leading professors, with special series such as the Top 10 Videos of the First Half of 2010, Life in 2050, and Sustainability, among others.  Broad video topical areas include Arts & Culture, Belief, Business and Economics, the Environment, the Future, Health and Medicine, History, and Science and Technology among many others.  According to their About Us page, Big Think says "We believe that not all information is equal. We believe that expertise is invaluable and should be shared."

Academic Earth offers online degrees and video courses from leading universities.  Its mission is to "give everyone on earth access to a world-class education."  Academic Earth most popular social science courses include game theory, communication and conflict in couples and families, introduction to psychology, financial markets, and the geography of U.S. elections.  According to their About Us page, Academic Earth is "building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable."

According to Gilroy (2009), FORA.tv, or "The Smart Network", offers unedited videos from events at universities, think tanks, and conferences. On their About Us page, they say, "We gather the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share --when, where, and how they want." Current video topics on FORA.tv include the 2010 Wired Business Conference, choosing judges, the Supreme Court, the iPad, and Afghanistan.

Then, says Gilroy, iTunesU, with more than 150,000 lectures, presentations, videos, readings, and podcasts available for download dwarfs most other educational media sites. iTunesU offers institutions a single home for distribution of information to students and faculty. In fact, iTunesU offers content distribution, a custom site for institutions, public access to educational media, and internal access for institutions wanting more security. This is more than a learning management system -- this is a learning media system.

TeacherTube's About Us page says that "We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill." Teacher Tube offers videos, documents, audio files, photos, channels, communities, and blogs. The site appears to market more toward the secondary market, especially the home school community.

The Open Video Project is an effort to develop an open source digital video library for educators and students.  Gary Marchionini, in his article Video and Learning Redux: New Capabilities for Practical Use, describes it as a way to create and study an open source repository of digital video, using it as a testbed for research. The project came from the Baltimore Learning Community and representations the use of a digital library as a "sharium" for collaboration and contribution of materials and expertise.  The About Us page says that "The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries."

Clearly, YouTube is not the only player in the educational video and media market.  Other sites worth mentioning are SchoolTube, Discovery Education, Yahoo Video, and Google Video.  As we can see, there are many options available for educators, who must choose the one best suited to reach their educational and institutional mission.  Making that choice depends on the needs of students and faculty and upon the content to be taught.

Stay tuned for my next article on using video in the classroom!

Short Answer Questions: A Great Middle Ground

by Susan Codone

Short answer questions, no matter how well-formulated, cannot measure divergent thinking and subjective or imaginative thought.

Allan Ornstein, The ClearingHouse, 1992

Did he really say that?  Did Allan Ornstein really just savage a staple of the test arsenals of many college professors, the short answer question?  Stronger than multiple choice, yet not quite as revealing (or time consuming to grade) as the essay question, the short answer question offers professors a great middle ground – the chance to measure a student’s brief composition of facts, concepts, and attitudes in a paragraph or less.  In spite of what Allan Ornstein says, the short answer question is indeed capable of measuring divergent thinking and both subjective and imaginative thought and is used widely by many professors.

Leave it to Wikipedia to offer a pithy definition of the short answer question – couching it as an “extended-response question with more than one right answer” or “more than one way of expressing the right answer."  The University of Wisconsin Teaching Academy calls short answer questions “constructed response”, or “open-ended questions that require students to create an answer.”   The Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign says that short answer questions allow students to present an original answer.  Going further, Karen Scouller of the University of Sydney, in an 1997 Advancing International Perspectives article, says that the greatest difference between multiple choice and short answer or essay questions is the measurement of surface vs. deep learning, indicating that longer-response questions tend to assess learning that is deeper and more tightly held in long-term memory.

Elizabeth Badger and Brenda Thomas, writing in Open-ended Questions in Reading, Practical Assessment: Research and Evaluation (1992), claim that a gradual change has resulted in teaching, with professors moving from teaching content alone to instead helping their students learn the ability to use and interpret knowledge critically and thoughtfully.  They recommend that assessment measure not just the product of learning (the content), but also the process students go through to acquire information.  Alexander Maxwell, a history professor from New Zealand, states in a 2010 article that methodological diversity in assessment is helpful, and says that in history, at least, the short answer question is very valuable (Assessment Strategies for a History Exam, or Why Short Answer Questions are better than In-Class Essays, The History Teacher).  The short answer question is well-positioned to capture both subjective and imaginative thought that occurs as students learn, as well as provide professors with a glimpse into the writing skills and idea expression of students.

Like all assessment items, a short answer question should clearly assess a specific learning objective.  It should ask students to select relevant facts and concepts and integrate them into a coherent written response. Question 1, below, is a typical example of a short answer question requiring such a constructed response.

This question, while a little long, sets up a scenario with an expert role, a community history, and an environmental problem and asks the students to use a specific problem-solving strategy -- the 4 A's (attain facts, alternatives, assessment, action) to frame a response, which can most likely be completed in 4-6 sentences, or one paragraph.

Question 2, below, is slightly more problematic because of a very common error in constructing short answer questions.

This question, while well-intended, actually asks two questions.  This likely will leave the student confused as to which question is more important.  Additionally, the student will have to write a longer response to answer both questions, leading this particular test question more toward an essay response than a short answer.  Short answer questions should always ask one clear question, rather than confusing the issue with multiple queries.

Finally, one strategy many professors use is to post a rubric or scoring guide in the test so that students will know how points will be distributed based on their answer.  Question 3, below, both shows such a rubric and demonstrates another common problem in short answer question development.

Note in this question, a scoring distribution is provided to the students -- not only do they know the question is worth six points, but they also know immediately that three points will be awarded for fully answering the question and two points for legibility, with the final point for spelling and grammar.  This tells them that not only do they need to answer the question completely -- they must also be neat and watch spelling and grammar.  Question 3 also demonstrates another common error -- writing questions that close off the extent of a student's potential answer.  Notice the second sentence -- "Do you think that two accidents..." -- what might the student's answer be?  Yes or No?  This is not the answer for which the professor is looking, but it might be the one given.  A better question would ask "How might two accidents be an acceptable level of risk...", in order to promote a more meaningful answer.

Ornstein (1992), who was more a proponent of essay questions than short answer in his article Essay Tests: Use, Development, and Grading, delineated a hierarchy of question verbs, as follows:

Type 1: Open  -- Why, How, Predict
Type 2: Directed -- Explain, Discuss, Examine
Type 3: Closed -- Identify, Compare, Contrast

According to Ornstein, Type 1 questions result in more meaningful answers, while Type 3 generate more specific, less creative responses.  So, whenever possible, even short answer questions should begin with an open verb, inviting students to be thoughtful and deliberative in their answers.

Short answer questions are a great middle ground for professors.  They are easier to develop than multiple choice and generate a more in depth answer as well.  Because of their brevity, they are easier to grade and they encourage student to integrate information into a coherent written answer, revealing much about what the student knows and how they express responses.  They can measure many types of knowledge when phrased correctly -- even divergent thinking and subjective and imaginative thought. Best of all, they can provide professors with a open window into student learning -- the real purpose of assessment.

Real College Teaching

by Susan Codone


Everyone has a favorite teacher.  I had two in college.  Both professors were always prepared, passionate about what they taught, and eminently practical.  Both were a great model of what a teacher should be and I adored them.  In fact, I've patterned much of my current teaching philosophy on their styles.  After I graduated, I sent one of my favorite professors this quote from John Dewey -- I felt it really captured his approach to teaching and I wanted to remind him of his importance to the world as a teacher.  During my college preparation, he was always engaged; he was always dignified; and I believe that he, and all of us who teach, is a prophet, bringing in the kingdom of God in the lives of whom we teach.

Maybe you’ll agree with Stanford Ericksen of the University of Michigan, who wrote that the public stereotype of a good teacher is a charismatic spellbinder who arouses listeners.  In his 1983 article Private Measures of Good Teaching in Teaching of Psychology, he says the other extreme is the mental disciplinarian who requires hard study and rote memorization for success.  I had professors of both stereotypes in college, but I remember little about them or what they taught me.

In 1993 another professor, Philip Tate, of Boston University, described two "worlds" of teaching that exist in our educational system.  The first world is made up of college professors and the second of elementary and secondary teachers.  Both approach teaching so differently that Tate assigned each a separate "world" of practice.  Tate, in The Two Worlds of Teaching (Journal of Education) describes professors as disciplinary specialists with a top-down instructional style whose only instructional mode is the direct transmission of knowledge.  He believed that knowledge was made up of large ideas held outside the mind.  In contrast, Tate says that secondary teachers work within an ethic of caring that rises above intellectual concerns.  They place their relationship with students just above teaching, which involves a very practical approach using a varied repertoire of instructional methods that they switch between easily. 

Tate contrasts professors with secondary teachers by saying that the latter are more "teachery" in nature.  Should college professors be more teachery – more instructionally varied?  More caring? Tate goes on to say that no one, college professor or high school teacher, who teaches without thought for how the students are learning will be successful, despite how teachery they are.

Much study has been devoted to effective teaching, especially at the college level, and organizations like the American Association of Higher Education and Accreditation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching exist to further improve the field.  In 1987, Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson published seven principles of good practice in higher education -- a landmark list that has been studied and cited repeatedly by authors writing about good teaching.

Furthermore, in 1989 Kenneth Feldman published a meta-analysis of studies on student ratings of teacher quality in Research in Higher Education and identified 17 dimensions of teacher behavior that rated highly with student achievement.  Clearly, instructional behaviors and skills lead to effective teaching.  So, in short, there is research, lists of techniques, best practices, evaluation instruments, meta-analyses of research, and recommendations for good teaching that are readily available.  With all this research, what do we know about what makes a good teacher?  What defines a real teacher?  Why aren't there more really good teachers?  Why do most of us remember only one, or maybe two?

Peter Seldin, from Pace University, says the following in Improving College Teaching:

“…the argument has been raised by some that we still lack the final answer to the question of what constitutes effective teaching.  That may well be true, but the key ingredients of effective teaching are increasingly known.  We have no reason to ignore hundreds of studies that are in general agreement on these characteristics.”

As Seldin says, are all our questions answered?  Do we really know what makes good teaching?  In my experience, one issue is still unresolved.  Parker Palmer, in Good Talk about Good Teaching  (Change, 1993) talks about the privatization of teaching and says this:

"No surgeon can do her work without being observed by others who know what she is doing, without participating in grand-round discussions of the patients she and her colleagues are treating.  No trial lawyer can litigate without being observed and challenged by people who know the law.  But professors conduct their practice as teachers in private.  We walk into the classroom and close the door -- figuratively and literally -- on the daunting task of teaching.  When we emerge, we rarely talk with each other about what we have done, or need to do.  After all, what would we talk about?"

Technique, skills, motivation, relationships with students, content mastery, teaching skill repetoires -- all matter and are important because they prescribe effective teaching.  But we have to admit – we are a private profession, which can sometimes negatively affect our instructional effectiveness. 

What do I remember about my two favorite teachers?  I remember openness. They taught with the doors open, and their office doors were always open.  They were open and reflective with us on their teaching, and they knew when we were learning -- and when we were not, they changed course.  Their openness led to personal relationships with many of us, and the ability to observe them not just as professors, but people, and to remember what made them great.  I hope that I remain open as a professor, and that one day my students may remember me.

Instigators of Academic Student Engagement

By Susan Codone

If you are a typical professor, you probably try different pedagogical techniques to try and activate and maintain student engagement.  Engagement is known by many descriptors.  This article focuses on academic student engagement -- that state of being that students reach when they are fully involved in an  academic task, rather than student engagement outside the classroom, as often talked about by college administrators and measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).

Let’s be clear; we’ve all seen engagement, and  we know it when we see it.  Anyone who has watched a teenager play videogames or a college student post a new status to Facebook has seen some indicators of engagement – total attention, a suspension of time, an immersion into the event.  For professors, the difficulty lies in getting those students who are so easily engaged in other environments to engage in the classroom.

Some see engagement as the integration of intense pedagogical techniques designed to coach students to lose themselves in a task.  Some writers link student engagement directly to active learning, like Jo Williams and Susan Chinn, writing in 2009 in the Journal of Information Systems Education.  In their article, Using Web 2.0 to Support the Active Learning Experience, these authors say that teachers are paying more attention to the crucial relationship between engagement and active learning in the classroom and are rolling out a variety of pedagogical methods, including technology, to stimulate engagement. 

There are so many definitions and descriptors of student engagement that it would be difficult to catalog them all.  The graphic on the right lists descriptors pulled from multiple sources that describe academic student engagement.

To cut through those descriptors, focus instead on three major instigators of student engagement that appear ubiquitously in the literature:  intense pedagogical techniques, deep learning, and social media and networking technologies.

Intense Pedagogical Techniques

Chen, Lattuca, and Hamilton (2008) say the apex of engagement is full and unbroken immersion in demanding activities.  What kind of activities cause such immersion?  Many professors rely on active learning and other cognitive techniques to spur students into engaging with course content.  Techniques such as reading, writing, discussing, metacognition, solving problems, systems thinking, constructivist thought, meaning-making, engaging in higher order thinking, and working in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development all can influence engagement.

But by themselves, not one of these pedagogical techniques instigates engagement automatically.  There must be a mental toggle into a state of immersion, and acceptance on the part of the student to think differently about the content.  Colin Bryson and Len Hand, in their article The Role of Engagement in Inspiring Teaching and Learning (2007) in Innovations in Education and Teaching International, say that the perception of the student regarding the teacher and the content is a precursor to any form of engagement.  They also say that a positive disposition in the teacher makes an enormous difference in students' ability to engage.

Higher order thinking, deep information processing,  active learning,  proximal development, systems thinking, constructivist thought, meaning-making and other cognitive factors are all important in getting students engaged – but ultimately, students must agree to buy into the academic task in order to become engaged.  How else can we get them to do that?


Deep Learning With Technology and Social Media

One way is to use the drawing power of technology to pull students in and make them lose themselves in the learning process.  Van B. Weigel, in his book Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education, makes a push for a radical infusion of technology into the classroom.  Written in 2001, Weigel’s book predates such tools as sophisticated learning management systems (LMS's), easily-created websites, and social knowledge and social media.  His argument, though, is that technology can be used to create communities of inquiry in which conditionalized knowledge and metacognition can develop – which is his definition of deep learning, and thus, engagement.

Building on Weigel, the website Learning and Teaching Info goes further to differentiate deep learning from surface learning, describing deep learning as

•          linking prior knowledge to new knowledge
•          focusing on significance
•      relating information across courses
•          relating theory to everyday experiences
•          organizing and structuring content
•          emphasizing the internal learner

But again, like pedagogical techniques, these deep learning strategies will only encourage “deep learning” or student engagement if the student accepts the task and builds internal motivation to accept it. Is deep learning a precursor to engagement, or a result of engagement?  Or both?  How else can technology be used to engage students?

Social Networking Technologies

The recent phenomenon of social networking is lauded for its universal appeal, ability to draw young people in and allow them to openly display their lives, and its supreme networking service that even reminds you of your friends’ birthdays.  Are college students engaged when on FaceBook?  Miikka Salavuo, writing in the Journal of Music, Technology, and Education (2008), notes that social media is an excellent platform for learning. In Social Media as an Opportunity for Pedagogical Change in Music Education, she recommends that social networking platforms like FaceBook, Elgg, MySpace, and Ning be used as an alternate to LMS's because they offer increased participation, presence, and ownership, as well as the ability for students to use the expertise of others, create lasting connections, and network widely.  For example, Sarah Palin's Facebook page is noted as an example of a social media content repository; using the FaceBook Notes feature, Palin writes political articles and posts them on her page for her Facebook fans.  In the same way, professors could generate written course content and use Facebook Notes to post this content for students to read  and comment on -- while they're already in Facebook perusing other pages.

Then, of course, there is the excellent means of social networking provided by FaceBook and other applications that can allow students and professors to create online communities of practice, with regular dialogue, posted material, and other media such as video and photographs.  While the technology and tools recommended in Weigel's Deep Learning will likely continue to change regularly, the era of social media is on us, and will evolve but probably not be totally replaced. The evidence is in; we know that students can become engaged using technology like social media applications; why not use it in and outside of the classroom?


In a June 14, 2010 email correspondence with Dr. David Jonassen, Distinguished Professor of Education, Director for the Center for the Study of Problem Solving, and eminent cognitive science researcher at the University of Missouri Columbia, he responded to these questions.

"What happens cognitively when students engage in the classroom? What are the indicators? What are the precedents?"

His answer:

"That’s a complex question. Neurologically, the cerebral cortex lights up, especially the caudate nucleus. Motivationally, students engage and persist on task. Why do students engage? Personal relevance, necessity, curiosity, etc. There are no really valid measures. Only behavioral.

While we may indeed need more research on which neurological switch to throw to instigate engagement, in the meantime we know we have tools.  Intense pedagogical techniques, deep learning with technology, and social networking encourage students to engage.  All are complementary tools.  All can be used simultaneously or as single powerful tools.  All require professors to step out of their traditional pedagogical training and teach differently.  All, ultimately, depend on the student's intrinsic motivation for success.  Finally, all can encourage engagement, making it less elusive and much closer to reality in our classrooms.