Are they "glued to the internet or not"?

Would you like to know how digital our young generation is? Here is a short summary of the report from Atlanta: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2013/10/07/where-world-are-young-people-using-internet and for more information, check this out: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/publications/mis2013.aspx

The Finnish miracle

A couple of weeks ago I read an article from the Guardian weekly (issue: 19.07.2013) on the plane to Santiago. It was about the Finnish educational system and how a Scandinavian nation attains educational success without strains and competitions: no uniforms, no exams, no tests, no private tuition, and no inspectors. Wow, what a system!! It is extremely hard to envisage that children solely play until the time they start compulsory education at the age of 7, then they go to comprehensive schools, peruskoulu, which are free of charge and they are sorted into groups according to their abilities there. There are no exams at all until the age of 18 and they obviously do not spend more than half an hour for doing homework. I was still impressed to read more about it again after I first watched the documentary about the Finnish educational system on a US channel a year ago. I do not think it is even achievable for other nations who want to get that success reputation and also the highest ranking even they follow Finland step by step. They need to understand the basics of it. They need to bring a radical change in their systems. But why? Why is it so difficult to imagine and realize it? Because the existing systems are based on sorting students according to their scores in the exams rather than skills. They will be continuing doing so and getting the support of private institutions that mostly take the issue as money making. Without doubt, the aim of Finnish school system is not reaching the figures but the literacy in quality. Reading is a part of the culture outside schools and Plus, for such a nearly impossible educational model, teacher education needs to be considered crucial, highly qualified and valued. Pre-service education and in-service training is a real challenge and it takes some more years, patience and more importantly experience to get the diploma of teaching in Scandinavian systems. Additionally, Finland has a country profile with under 5% foreign-born citizen and the ratio of income between the richest %20 of the population and the poorest 20% is around four to one (against nine to one in Britain). Child poverty is low, social welfare policies for children work efficiently there.

The article also reminds us the fact that Finland has passed through several reforms such as mixed ability grouping, teacher education reforms, and abolishing the national curriculum and passing the administration to the local authorities until it reaches the excellency. Before the 1970s, 10% continued to their education until the age of 18 and the Finnish system was considerably influenced by British schooling. After the series of exams at the age of 11,  25%  in the top ranking went to private grammar schools. Then success came along with the reforms. Now %90 stay at school beyond 16 and they choose one of two tracks: general and vocational. General track is the academic one, they take a national exam which includes essay based tests in four subject matters.To study one particular subject, students need to take more exams done by the universities. Vocational one provides technical programs. Students in this track either directly go on a job hunting or go to polytechnics.

It seems to me that the Finnish system is an ideal one, definitely unique. What I like most about it is that there are mixed ability teaching, competitiveness for yourself not with others and the importance of literacy. The students in the Finnish system must know that it is tougher for them to get the result (endpoint) because the system is a challenge itself, not because the others do very well. They know that the system provides how they can do with their abilities and they do read! It will take way too long to see at least some of the nations will follow the Finnish miracle! 

Now watch this: http://youtu.be/dwHerTpwuvc

Measurement of cognitive load

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has been a remarkable instructional theory that facilitates learning for over three decades. The theory has its ground in the studies that have examined what happens in cognitive processes when working memory and long-term memory interact (Sweller, Ayres & Kalyuga, 2011). This interaction obviously affects learner's performance and learning as an outcome. Granted that too much cognitive load is created for some reasons such as complexity of material or poor or inefficient instructional design of the material, the outcome is jeopardized as insufficient working memory resources manage to carry out processes required to learn. CLT has successfully presented barriers to learning and proposed strategies like modality effect to deal with the difficulties (Sweller et al., 2011). When CLT was born, one of the basic concerns was how to measure the construct. Several measures such as error rates, time on task and dual task methods were applied until a self-rating measure was created by Paas (1992). This measure has been a hit in the field of cognitive psychology; however, after a while it received some criticism. It was basically designed to ask for learners' perceptions of their invested mental effort on a task while learning and taking tests. The criticism has been centred on the nature of the measure itself that it is a subjective measure and all three types of cognitive load cannot be measured by this single subjective measure. Additionally, it has been stated that there have been several variations in labels and items of the scale as well as administration time and frequency. Responding "timing and frequency" issue and meeting the criticism, Gog, Kirschner, Kester, and Paas (2012) have worked on the effects of timing and frequency on cognitive load measures. They collected invested mental effort ratings when each problem solving task in a set is done and compared them with the mental effort measured once at the end of the set. The findings confirm that the frequency affects the value of the mental effort and the accurate data can collected through repeated and consistently administered measures. This finding will likely help set up the conditions that can provide an accurate and reliable results.

Reference:
Paas, F. (1992). Training strategies for attaining transfer of problem-solving skill in statistics: A cognitive-load approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 429–434.
Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive load theory. New York: Springer.
Van Gog, T., Kirschner, F., Kester, L., & Paas, F. (2012). Timing and frequency of mental effort measurement: Evidence in favor of repeated measures. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 833–839.

Note to the readers: After a long vacation in the United States, Turkey, Cyprus and data collection procedures for my Ph.D thesis, I am back to my blogging, Yay! I have read a lot about Cognitive Load Theory and will be writing about it for a while.

YouTube and video-sharing technologies

Last week I read an article about online video sharing services, namely Youtube. It seems to me Youtube might attract the interest of educators, students and researchers since it has been a hit since 2005 and more than 2 billion views are said to be done per day. Snelson, Rice and Wyzard (2012) did a study to receive expert opinions about the areas that are most need of research in video sharing technology through Delphi technique.  The participants (experts) responded to a question "what should be the research priorities in video-sharing technologies over next 5 years?" and the categories were identified on the second round and then on the third round of discussion, the experts were asked to review the items and ranking based on the initial response to the question. To my surprise, the findings indicate that research priority category number one was users, groups and communities. The learning and teaching processes were ranked as the second. The third was social/political impact, the forth category was video creation and production and the fifth category was legal/ethical issues. The final two categories were media management and commercial interests. I regard this ranking as a step in doing research in education, and in my humble opinion, we need to look at the impact of video-sharing technologies on individuals and their use of video on their own learning. The users' profiles and preferences should be taken into consideration before designing research since I believe that it is the users' voice or preferences that has made the Youtube videos popular. Although the study is current and highlights the importance of users, groups and communities as a crucial category to research, it has some limitations. Firstly, there are no implications about how the categorization could be integrated into classroom-based research. Another limitation is that the most of the participants are from the field of education and their preferences for the categories might be related with how they regard the Youtube videos for education. There could have been much diversity in participants' profiles (maybe users themselves) to claim the key research areas about the video sharing service.

Reference:

Snelson, C., Rice, K., & Wyzard, C. (2012). Research priorities for YouTube and video-sharing technologies: A delphi study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(1), 119-129.

Technology and collaborative writing

Have you heard about Wiki? If no, let's watch this:

In a second language writing class, peer response and teacher correction have been main forms of feedback until the integration of technology in writing classes are welcomed. By the introduction of communication technologies in our lives, the concept of collaboration in writing classes has changed from a peer (an author) being a passive recipient of the peer response to a reconstructor who is constantly in active collaboration with others for the formation of a text. In a sociocultural perspective,  knowledge is created and re-created in the discourse of learning how to write through collaboration. Thus, a learner can make meaning of “own understanding through the constructive efforts while collaborating with the others. One of the tools that enables learners to create, transform, and edit their work with a certain accountability is Wiki, which allows teachers to facilitate and monitor the collaborative activities by checking what changes are made, by whom, when and how often they are made. Collaboration by the use of Wiki might help improvement of language accuracy (Lee, 2010). Students may benefit from the collaboration with peers, not by creating more content per each edit, but by revisiting the content already formed. As for the content, after revisions and peer feedback, students can maintain an organized flow with a certain structure. In conclusion,  Wiki can create learners' engagement and collaboration through meaningful tasks such as problem solving, making decisions, editing and so forth.

Reference: 

Lee, L. (2010). Exploring wiki-media collaborative writing: A Case Study in an Elementary Spanish Course. CALICO Journal, 27(2), 260-276. Retrieved from http://www.calico.org/

Integration of Technology: A utopia?

Due to the student-centered teaching models, performance-based instruction and assessment, and national standards modified to meet the needs of students of the millennium, today's language teachers have encountered the fact that teaching and learning a second/foreign language through technology is a common practice to introduce, facilitate, reinforce, assess, and remediate student mastery of language learning. Therefore, language teachers are expected to know how to use a variety of new technologies and applications in classroom environments in order to meet the needs of students with different learning styles (Otto & Pusack, 1996), and apply the technical pedagogical knowledge in language teaching.

Although there is a high expectation for language teachers to gain technological pedagogical knowledge in emerging technologies that enable the application of technology in classes, there is still a way to succeed in integrating technology in language classes. First of all, the conceptualization of technology is difficult to schematize. Bauer and Kenton (2005) conducted a study on the barriers of technology integration in class and found that teachers think anything they do with technological devices such as using a projector to show a Word document to students or downloading an audio file and making students listen to the file can be samples for the integration of technology in classes. Stolle (2008), in the same vein, pointed out that there is uncertainty about the integration of technology into instructions in classes. The uncertainty is likely due to the fact that most of the teachers regard the integration of technology as a technical capacity rather than a means to master the language skill. For example, they might think the use of PowerPoint to deliver a lecture is integrating technology in class; in reality, it is not the case because there is little space for students’ active participation in learning through technology. For integration to be successful, it is necessary for it to be high-level integration, which is associated with student-centered and constructivist practices (Becker, 1994). Moreover, although there are technical facilities that make the integration feasible, language teachers may not be willing to use it in their class. Marcinkiewicz (1993) stated that “[f]ull integration of computers into the educational system is a distant goal unless there is reconciliation between teachers and computers. To understand how to achieve integration, we need to study teachers.” (p. 23). Teachers’ unwillingness apparently stems from two sources: their belief about its efficiency (intrinsic) and a lack of time and practice (extrinsic). According to the implication of the study by Ansell and Park (2003), teachers are unlikely to try innovation or to put much time and effort into technology integration. Fabry and Higgs (1997) also concluded that the teachers’ unwillingness is a key barrier to integration of technology in the classroom. Elmore, Peterson, and McCarthey (1996) explained the reason for the unwillingness of technology use in classes with the lack of practice stating that “… teachers’ practices are unlikely to change without some exposure to what teaching actually looks like when it’s being done differently” (p. 241). Last but not least, the barrier for technology integration in language classes might be due to the external constraints such as lack of equipment and technical help to teachers when they need it (Beggs, 2000; Cuban, 2001). These internal and external reasons prevent teachers from partaking in experiences of integrating technologies in classroom environments.

There are two possible ways to avoid the aforementioned barriers of technology integration in language classes. Firstly teacher training for language teachers, especially public school teachers, is necessary and can be realized in three ways: macro, micro and personal. In a macro way, there should be a nationwide training scheme for language teachers to encourage them to conceptualize technology and apply it in facilitating learning. In Turkey, there has been an attempt, known as Dyned, to promote the use of technology in language classes by requiring the K-12 teachers’ participation in the online training platform so as to provide time and place flexibility of training language teachers (Ministry of Turkish Primary Education, 2007). However, if there isn’t a good training structure so as to tailor the needs of teachers with different backgrounds and proficiencies of computer literacy, the training might fail. Tilfarlioglu (2011) discussed the reasons for the ‘failure’ of Dyned and concluded that it is time-consuming to complete the assigned tasks and it is compulsory rather than voluntary for a language teacher to register for this training and complete all the tasks. For the nationwide training, voluntary participation, practicality and transferability of the training program to the learning environment must be taken into consideration.  In addition to the macro initiatives, there should be micro level initiations for teachers to encourage and increase their use of technology in language classes. The initiation could be arranged by the institutions or specific centers such as a lifelong learning center. These centers could promote the use of innovative technologies and classroom practices, and provide technical and pedagogical help when the teachers need it. As the teachers are involved in institution based training, they will likely gain practice and encouragement in transferring the skills or experiences into their teaching. Moreover, they will probably be more convinced to see the tangible results of using technology in their language classes. The initiation could be also at personal level and its efficiency depends on how language teachers are willing to cooperate and work on the participatory action research to discuss teaching successes and challenges through technology. They get together, describe and address the problematic issues of technology integration in language classes, then they take action, collect and analyze the data in their immediate environment and finally reflect upon the findings and the whole process of research.

Another solution could be a partnership with the businesses and schools for the development of 21st century education in schools. For example, schools can start a dialogue with businesses for the excellence in teaching, thus convincing them to sponsor for international and national paid training programs for language teachers, donation of mobile devices or computer labs and opening up lifelong learning centers or innovation centers. For example, the Center for Instructional Innovation at Georgia State University encourages and promotes the use of new technologies in classes by providing training, grants and electronic devices like iPads to the academic staff and seminars. This initiation could set an example how a learning center might contribute to the acquisition of knowledge and classroom practice of teachers.

These solutions might not be effective in the short term due to a lack of human resources, current incentives, and high cost; however, it might be effective in the long run. As Tilfarlioglu (2011) indicated, to gain the technical pedagogical skill for a language learner in the new millennium takes time, yet it is unavoidable. The effectiveness of training apparently depends on the frequent practices of technology in language classes. Yildirim (2000), and Zhao and Bryant (2006) indicated the importance of periodic training and expressed a need for more follow-up training or one-to-one mentoring practice in order to support teachers’ integration of technology. As an English teacher, I believe that if there are opportunities for teachers to have experiences in designing language classes by using technology, they will be more motivated to use technology in class. I took a course where I created my own podcast, movie clips and online-corpus data, which empowered my teaching skill. Depending on my own experience, I can state that the most crucial solution to the barrier of technology integration is perhaps giving the feeling of being empowered in teaching through technology. With the critical planning and design of training and sponsorships from businesses, the integration could be easily optimized.

Technology has revolutionized education in the 21st century and apparently the way language instruction is taught and delivered. Teachers feel more obliged to acquire computer literacy and use technology in their classes. Although there are problems in the realization of this integration, when critically planned, technology integration in language classes will no longer be a utopia but a classroom routine in the 21st century education.

References:

Bauer, J. & Kenton, J. (2005). Toward technology integration in the schools: Why it isn’t happening. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 13(4), 519-546. Norfolk, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/4728.

Becker, H. J. (1994). How exemplary computer-using teachers differ from other teachers: Implications for realizing the potential of computers in schools. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 26, 291-321.

Beggs, T. A. (2000). Influences and barriers to the adoption of instructional technology. In proceedings of the mid-south instructional tech-nology conference. Retrieved from http://frank.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed00/beggs/beggs.htm.

Computing in Education, 32(4), 479-495.

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Elmore, R. F., Peterson, P. L. & McCarthey, S. J. (1996). Restructuring in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and School Organization. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Fabry, D. L., & Higgs, J. R. (1997). Barriers to the effective use of technology in education: Current status. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 17(4), 385-395.

Lee, S. T., & Chang, H. M. (2007). Technology integration in a foreign language class: Successful strategies and challenges. In R. Carlsen et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2007 (pp. 2882-2887). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Marcinkiewicz, H. R. (1993). Computers and teachers: Factors influencing computer use in the classroom. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 26, 220-237.

Ministry of Turkish Primary Education (2007). Dyned Ingilizce Dil Egitim Sistemleri. Retrieved from http://mebides.meb.gov.tr/.

Otto, S. K., & Pusack, J. P. (1996). Technological choices to meet the challenges. In Foreign language for all (pp. 141-186). Northeastern conference reports. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Stolle, E. (2008). Teachers, literacy, & technology: Tensions, complexities,

teachers: A discussion and analysis of attitudes and use.

Tilfarlioğlu, F. Y. (2011). An international dimension of the student’s attitudes towards the use of English in Web 2.0 technology. The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10(3), 63-68.

Warschauer, M. & Meskill, C. (2000) Technology and second language teaching and learning. In J. Rosenthal (Ed.), Handbook of Undergraduate Second Language Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Yildirim, S. (2000). Effects of an educational computing course on pre-service and in-service

teachers: A discussion and analysis of attitudes and use. Journal of Research on

Computing in Education, 32(4), 479-495.

Young, C. A., & Bush, J. (2004). Teaching the English language arts with technology: A critical approach and pedagogical framework. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 4(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol4/iss1/languagearts/article1.cfm

Zhao, Y. & Bryant, F. L. B. (2006). Can teacher technology integration training alone lead to high levels of technology integration? A qualitative look at teachers’ technology integration after State mandated technology training. Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education, Vol. 5. Retrieved from http://ejite.isu.edu/Volume5/Zhao.pdf.