The Flipped Classroom: Exploiting the Best of F2F & Screens

The Flipped Classroom inverts the typical way teachers and learners engage: lectures are delivered via video podcast; class time is spent in collaborative problem solving.

As you watch this video overview, ask yourself two things:  1) why was the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration, not by one teacher alone?  2) How does it exploit the unique properties of F2F learning in the digital era?

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are high school chemistry teachers in Woodland Park, Colorado.  They create video podcasts of their lectures which students watch outside of class via laptops, mobile devices, tablets or DVDs.

This means that students can access the lectures on-demand.  They control the pace of information delivery, which they can't do F2F.  Crucial: screens allow MORE student participation in their knowledge acquisition, not less.  This is obvious to many of us working in the field, but remember that we are still a tiny subset of educators.  High school students in my local school district are FORBIDDEN to bring any screens the classroom: there's still a deep distrust of screens as portals to distraction or cheating, and the false but abiding sense that occasional distraction is inherently a bad thing.

In the Flipped Classroom, students come to class primed to do the applied problem solving, what we typically call the "homework." Instead of struggling in isolation, learners work the problems in small groups.  Peer-to-peer  engagement in quite natural in this setting.  The teacher, as master tutor, wanders around answering questions and sparking further engagement in the problem solving.

Maybe "homework" no longer means that "work you do at home," but "the work" you do IN CLASS that drives the concepts "home."

The takeaways for the superiority of hybrid learning environments are pretty obvious:

• Screens are better at conveying lecture-style information 
• Screens are ubiquitous and permit learners self-paced knowledge acquisition
• F2F is better for problem solving (more on this later, when I write about what I've learned, done and observed as a post-doc Fellow at the WSU's Mobile Technology Research Initiative)
• The social dimension of learning F2F doesn't suck time away from knowledge acquisition.  It doubles the learning.  Social in tandem with screen cements learning ways previously unavailable in the pre-digital era.  

Silent work in a F2F classroom punishes learners for their natural inclination to share and collaborate.  It mistakes the animation of collaboration and its occasional "distractions" as barriers to serious knowledge acquisition, rather than the bursts and rests of how we think/work in real time.  Ever get up from your screen to go make a cup of tea?  Even looking up from your screen and staring into the far distance for a minute can refresh your attention and enable greater focus and retention.

Thanks to the folks at DML Central for surfacing this today!  See this to join the Flipped Classroom social network. Here's a Colorado Springs TV news affiliate describing the Flipped Classroom: useful to be sent to local school district admins in your neighborhood.

Why do you think the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration?  Drop me a comment and I'll tell you what I think too!

Progress

Math Geeking Out: an autobiography

Code Apnea

This summer, I'm learning how to design and code mobile apps.  It's freakin awesome.

Awesome in the Kantian sense: standing on a precipice and looking down, gauging the likelihood that gravity will clutch your knees and yank you to a fast fall.

Yesterday I wrote my first computer program.  I copied the code as instructed in the iOS SDK.  Class was taught by our Xcode native guide Nick Hill.  I hit "Build and Run" in Interface Builder.  My program popped right up in the iOS simulator.  Hello, World!  I blinked a little.  I went back into the code and turned it yellow.  Blue.  Cyan.  I changed the font size and the x-position.

Then I realized that I'd been holding my breath for the better part of an hour.  Code apnea.  I sucked in a deep breath.

On the next exercise, I called the instructor over.  I'm doing this wrong, I said.

No you're not, he said.  I just haven't shown the class how to do that part yet.

Math Grrrrl

It's 1978.  I'm 10 and I'm working a couple of years ahead in math.  I had been hungry for math earlier in grade school.  Now I'm in a dark room next to a mimeograph machine, the purple smeary ink, the wet chemical smell of the paper. I'm doing "new math": pattern recognition.  I think I'm stupid because this is supposed to be harder but it's basically kindergarten shapes.  It can be done without thinking, without computing.

I put my pencil down, pull out a book and read.

It's 1980, the beginning of 7th grade.  The algebra teacher walks up to me in the hallway and asks why I'm not in his class.

Shrug.  I don't want to be in it, I say.

Why not?

I want to pass notes with Becky McAllister, I think silently. Becky was the sort of girl, in retrospect, who peaked in junior high.  To her credit nobody's hair feathered better and she wore purple mascara.

A couple of months later, the algebra teacher approaches me again.  I deflect him again.  My parents, who adopted me at birth and are among the kindest people on the planet, were middling-at-best students in school.  They are shocked and pleased by my grades, and never ask questions.

I buy a smoky blue mascara.

Where it leaves you.  How it comes back.

The little voice that wonders these things.

Learning to code for the first time at age 42, three decades after stopping my ears to all things mathematical, is like the blood returning to fingers so numb they are white stubs.  I have this frozen-finger condition, Raynaud's Phenomenon.  (Check out the lurid photos in the wikipedia link.)  Depending on the severity of the onset, it can take several minutes of warming (in hot water, wrapped around a latte, stuffed in my armpit) before my fingers swell and turn livid, then bright red, and return to normal.

It isn't comfortable getting the blood to flow where it hasn't been.

That's why I'm grateful for the gentle code teachers who never make me feel stupid for asking questions Will Luers, Nick Hill, Nick Schiller, Jeanette Altman, John and Dene, Margarete and Hunter, and especially Michael Sasser, whose canny analogies translate entailed concepts into terms I can grok.  Example: the difference between object-related code and procedural code.  Procedure is the highway, object-related is the vehicles.  Working with mobile apps, I'm thinking a lot about the touch modality.  I'm thinking about the design and feel of objects in my hands, like the rounded edges and M&M-like candy coating encasing my white 3GS iPhone.  Like the Legos scattered in our loft.  I turn them over in my palm.  I teach our 6YO procedural logic as we build.  I'm alive to the sensory qualities of building.

I am now almost exactly 6 months into learning code.  When I started, I knew nothing more than how to modify text to be bold or italic.  I know much more now, but am still very slow to execute.  I haven't yet made anything really pretty (but the mobile app I began coding today is already head-and-shoulders above a project I worked on 1 month ago).

How lucky I am to live in a cultural moment when near-pervasive access to tools, free instruction, and generous communities of practice make it possible to build beautiful things in HTML5 and CSS3.  Wrap it in Phonegap and you're good to go.  WYSIWYG programs like Interface Builder and TextWrangler lower barriers to entry.

Coda

My husband and I are in the living room reading when our 10YO night owl pops downstairs.  We look up from our devices.  The three of us banter.  Our daughter declares to my husband, "You are a geek.  And you," she says, turning to me, "are a popular wannabe."

"No, dear," my husband intones.  "That's what she looks like on the outside.  Down deep she is a geek."

My husband urges the girl upstairs.

I insert earbuds, go back to my screen.

["Mascara" image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoliee/]

Experiments in Hybridity: F2F and Mobile Learning

This fall I'm piloting at the University of Southern California a class that explores the unique properties of face-to-face [f2f] and online [OL] learning environments.  35% of the term I'll meet with students f2f in Los Angeles; 65% of the term we'll meet OL, synchronously during regularly scheduled classes (Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:50) and asynchronously on various social media platforms.

I should add that the f2f sessions extend beyond regular classroom meetings.  Students will also go on evening field trips once a month: to the LA Co. Museum of Art, to play with QR-linked locative narrative in LA Flood, to view street art through the VR app Layar.  The Annenberg School of Communications, which is generously sponsoring this pilot, will send along a videographer on our excursions to capture [some of the] learning dynamic as we wander peripetatically through the city.  This idea was born for me from Baudelaire and the notion of the digital flaneur.  Students will drop digital files in the city in real time as we also collect assets we'll build into other digital artifacts for course assignments and collaboration.

Stay tuned to hear about the sister class I'll teach next fall at Washington State University/Vancouver at the Creative Media and Digital Culture program, an advanced social media class that will meet 65% f2f and 35% OL while I'm in L.A.

These experiments in classroom hybridity--f2f, OL, the combination--emanate from my sense that the physical contexts for learning create unique avenues into learning that previously were invisible: f2f was simply the de facto mode of learning "delivery."  Now that learning can be more expressly collaborative and mobile, it behooves us to determine their unique affordances so that, among other things, we can thickly describe the c21 mobile classroom to stakeholders (higher ed administrators, students, parents, government officials, business leaders) who influence the shape and funding of classrooms.

As I said recently in a talk at USC's Teaching With Technology Conference, if universities mimic the RIAA and lock down mobile and digital access to learning, they will suffer the similar fate of becoming irrelevant. Joi Ito, co-founder of Creative Commons and entrepreneur, was recently appointed Director of MIT's Media Lab.  Ito sits atop this prestigious lab even though he lacks a B.A., let alone the Ph.D. that is ordinarily a prerequisite for such a position. 

If increasingly the question is not "where did you get your degree" but "what can you do," then residential universities must integrate digital media into their learning environments or risk becoming antiquated--like cds or "Must-See TV" that required viewers to park in front of their sets at designated times.  But that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath water.  F2F remains a crucial modality.  It's up to us to figure out exactly how and why.

#Urban Outfitters Twitter FAIL

Urban Outfitters sat on their hands yesterday while their brand equity hemorrhaged cool. In three hours, UO lost 17,000 followers on Twitter; #urbanoutfitters and #thieves became a trending topic. The tweet that started it all:

Urban Outfitter’s meager response--this one tweet posted a few minutes after Karnes'--was insufficient to staunch the blood that kept spilling all day:

The @amberkarnes tweet became a “Top Tweet,” and was quickly dispatched to another nearly 1.3 MILLION followers. Boing Boing, The Consumerist and Huffington Post picked up the story. Even Miley Cyrus got in on the act and shared with her one-million-plus followers.

Amber Karnes’ full blog post has all kinds of smart things to say about how her Tribe of 1000 followers turned this into an assault on an incredibly powerful brand.

The big story for brand marketers: every second of delayed response to an accusation creates
space for a tsunami of ill will that can wreak havoc with even the most carefully manicured brands.

The indie-cool vibe that Urban Outfitters diligently built by hiring independent designers to craft the in-store brick-and-mortar displays and creating an entire lifestyle from its products--from clothes to furniture to soaps and drawer pulls--is now jeopardized. In less than 24 hours. A slew of “me too” posts on other blogs such as this one about other wronged artists is lending credence to Karnes’ claim that Urban Outfitters is a serial indie art thief.

Whether or not angry tweeters make good on their promise to boycott Urban Outfitters, the brand tsunami wreckage is there for all to see: still flowing in via #urbanoutfitters.

Special thanks to co-author @SixSevenStudios who brought this to my attention yesterday! Check him out on Twitter!

Joi Ito's interview w/Fast Co. Design

Excerpts from Linda Tischler's Fast Co. Design interview with JOI ITO, the recently-appointed Director of MIT Media Lab.

Read the full interview.

"My whole life has been about connecting things that aren't connected."

Obviously there were a few raised eyebrows when MIT found out that I didn’t have a [bachelor's] degree. The Media Lab people felt like it was a badge of honor because they don’t like to conform. But after I met the administrators and they got that I don’t disrespect academia, it’s just that I have never fit into any of their patterns.

Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is a friend of mine. We talk a lot about careers. The whole idea that you figure out what you want to be, then plan your course and execute on it doesn’t work anymore. Now, you want to find the things that you’re good at, be able to pivot when you need to, and have the network you need to support that.

Why f2f is crucial in Ito's reinvention of the MIT Media Lab:

Brand is important, but we need to make ourselves less intimidating. And part of that is showing up everywhere. That’s what I did with Creative Commons. And I’d go to Syria and say, “Hey, anybody want to work with us?” Or to Ramallah, and say, “Hey, can we set up a Palestinian network here?” Then I’d go to Israel. Once you start going to places you see that face-to-face is really important.

How Social Media Influenced School Closure Decisions

On April 25th, my local school board voted to close just one elementary school, Palisades, in Sept. 2011.

This decision surprised the 250 people crowded in the high school library, where board members, seated behind a long table, faced them and publicly voted. It surprised us because in the 90 minutes leading up to the vote, board members laid out the rationale for closing 3 schools and moving 6th graders from elementary school to middle school. Further, the cuts and reconfiguration were strongly endorsed by both of the official parental-input groups, Site Council and the Committee on Reconfiguration.

The Board slowed the process: closure of the other two elementaries and 6th grade reconfiguration is slated to happen Sept. 2012.

You can read my live Tweets here. To increase the size of my Tweets, hit the command key and the +. Or, in your browser's dropdown menu, select View-->Zoom In. The first post is the one at the bottom; read up to experience them in order.

Next-day, traditional media coverage of the vote can be viewed in the Lake Oswego Review and Oregonian.

Twitter informed the community about the meeting's result IRT [in real time]. It changed how we build consensus. District Superintendent Bill Korach customarily builds consensus by convening a lot of face-to-face meetings. He works hard to allow many people to participate in decision making process. I salute him for that! But social media can open the door wider, and it opens on demand.

The LO United site, created and maintained by a small band of local parents amassed facts. Its members, including me, left digital traces of conversations across platforms (most notably Facebook and the comments stream of our local newspaper, the LO Review).

Social media also made clear that our actions as a community were viewable by people who live beyond it.

To get a sense of just how pervasive even a droplet in social media can be, consider this anecdote from USC Annenberg librarian Avril Cunningham, who shared how a Tweet she sent to her 150 followers got retweeted and was seen within 24 hours by up to 5000 people on Twitter. Cunningham presented this case at last week's USC 2011 Teaching With Technology Conference. Avril's is one tiny example of how social media can spread information beyond where we might intend it to go. Our school closure debate, with its many passionate participants, probably sent its social media tendrils out to the tens of thousands. Some people in my Twitter community passed along to their followers URLs to the videos I shot.

Why does social media matter in this example of local politics?

It is still a new thing for us to conceive ourselves as being "always online"; but that's exactly what smartphones enable. Being "always on" doesn't mean being exclusively online, as we are when we're focused on a specific task at our computers. It means we're always aware that we could be online at any moment: snap a photo and post it to Flickr or FB; consult an app to find a restaurant or play a game; Tweet a URL; access a map to figure out where you are or where you want to go; drop a pin so it's faster to find next time. Always on. The gadgets and platforms are so seamlessly integrated that we're no longer aware of being "on," as we were when we had to do everything at a desktop. Our collective mindset is catching up with the actual practice of being Always On.  It's changing how we make collective decisions.