I am privileged work in IT for a university that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion for all. This includes a rock-solid commitment to accessibility. Our campus IT group provides a variety of technology services to accommodate students, staff and faculty with different abilities and needs.
It is time, however, to kick it up a notch. As the head of the IT department, I’m preparing to challenge our group to come up with a campus IT strategy for Universal Design (UD) to address learning and working on our campus. We already employ UD principles in our work, but we’ve yet to collaborate with faculty and student leaders to publish a comprehensive strategy.
This is certainly a wicked problem. We work in an environment regulated by the state to ensure that everyone has equal access to our university. This is great, but regulations often lag behind new ideas For example, best practices in web accessibility are constantly changing for the better. Check Washington State’s DO-IT website for examples.
Technology is lagging too. Wouldn’t it be great to automatically caption every single video that comes through our campus lecture capture system? This would move us from a strategy of accommodation to UD. Further, it would support students with hearing disabilities along with ELL students and other learning needs. However, we’ve yet to find an automatic captioning system that’s accurate enough to do this at scale. YouTube offers pretty good auto-captioning, but it still requires human intervention to make it 100%. When it comes to complex academic topics with specific vocabularies, 100% is the minimum. This is just one example where we need to make smart technology choices, including choices about when to wait for improvements.
Finally, we’ll ground our UD strategy in redesigning our learning environments for active learning. Currently, most of our learning spaces are configured as traditional lecture classrooms. Practices such as flipped classes, problem-based learning, connected learning, community-engaged learning, etc. also invite learners with more diverse needs. This is certainly a design project. For the purposes of my CEP817 class at Michigan State, I may need to narrow the focus to just the part of the strategy that deals with classroom technology, or with faculty development. But for now, I’m very excited to start out with a broad challenge.
James Paul Gee’s The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning includes a wonderfully insightful and entertaining attack on human intelligence. In reflecting on this aspect of the book for my class at Michigan State, I find that I’m not as cynical as Gee about ways humans make sense of the world.
Gee makes a compelling case that humans have caused massive global problems that we are unable to address because we’re stupid (his term, too numerous to cite). He argues that faults in human memory, decision making, institutions, meaning-making and motivation often lead to terrible outcomes for complex global problems. Indeed, it’s hard to argue otherwise as we face a world (which we are rapidly melting) with record (and rising) inequality, instability, and violence. My optimism isn’t boundless, but I’m not so quick to condemn our human faults. Given knowledge of how we sapiens act en masse, might we not turn our faults to our advantage in creating momentum towards solutions?
I’m not all optimism. I wonder if human stupidity only explains part of the complex problems we face. I’ve written about emergent change in systems before. Great social and economic forces may exist beyond the purview of human agency. Even if countless, individually smart, human actions accrued to create a massive problem, I’m not convinced that human agency can un-create it, no matter how smart we are. Check out this book for a take on how economic systems dictate seemingly irrational human behavior:
Here’s a link to my essay for CEP812 on reflecting on Gee’s work.
Even in schools with dedicated resources for supporting English Language Learners (ELL), achievement gaps between students with Low English Proficiency (LEP) and native English speakers persist. Williams, Ernst and Kaui tell us that “…nearly half of the states graduated less than 60 percent of students with LEP in 2010-2011” (2015, p. 41). Instructors can help level the playing field for ELL students by integrating language instruction in academic subject courses, particularly in STEM fields with specialized English language vocabularies that are not often taught in dedicated ELL classrooms. While STEM instructors are not often trained as language instructors, free web tools like Poll Everywhere enable instructors to reinforce the acquisition of English language concepts.
https://www.polleverywhere.com
Integrating content and language instruction in STEM
STEM instructors may benefit from simple ways to provide language instruction, or at least reinforcement for language acquisition while teaching content. In their 2014 study, DelliCarpini and Alonso found that the integrating language and content in instruction improves outcomes for ELL students in STEM courses. Indeed, their findings suggest that regular STEM teachers should assess students on language driven objectives (p. 161). Crawford (2013) also found that ELL students were better served when language and content instruction are integrated (p. 251-252) and that the specialized vocabularies of STEM fields are seldom taught effectively in dedicated ELL classrooms. “In math classrooms where the language of instruction is not in the students’ home language, the teacher faces the additional demands of supporting the development of academic language” (Crawford, 2013, p. 253).
Poll Everywhere is a free web-based tool that allows instructors to create web-based quizzes or surveys. Students can respond to quizzes in real time online, with the Poll Everywhere Android/iOS app, or by SMS. Poll Everywhere also integrates with presentation software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Instructors in STEM courses can use this tool to reinforce language concepts for students will all levels of English proficiency. This sort of simple technology tool may help students with LEP participate more fully in meaning-making around concepts in science and math by removing linguistic barriers to entry. The responses may also be kept anonymous, but aggregated instantly on screen, providing instructors with real-time feedback about students’ grasp of the vocabulary. Instructors can also use Poll Everywhere to create quick online self-assessments for students to use as study aids outside of class. On an enterprise level, tools like Poll Everywhere can often be integrated with Learning Management (LMS) systems and/or lecture capture for use in asynchronous hybrid or online classes.
Lowering the stakes
Since Poll Everywhere can collect anonymous responses, ELL students may be more comfortable exposing their challenges with specialized English vocabulary. Crawford points out that computer aided learning tools can help ELL students master language challenges without embarrassment (2013, p. 250). Poll Everywhere also affords opportunity for sort of quick low-stakes formative assessments that Bransford, Brown, and Cocking describe to encourage more effective knowledge transfer (2000, p. 24). While tools like Poll Everywhere may particularly help ELL students, they are equally appropriate for students without ELL and do not emphasize language issues in the social context of a general classroom. This tool makes it easier for both students and instructors to integrate language learning objectives into any class.
Check out my screencast for a short demo and discussion about how Poll Everywhere can be used in the context of supporting ELL needs:
References
Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.), How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school (pp. 3-27). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.
Crawford, L. (2013). Effects of an Online Mathematics Curriculum for English Language Learners. Computers In The Schools, 30(3), 248-270. doi:10.1080/07380569.2013.805665
DelliCarpini, M., & Alonso, O. B. (2014). Teacher Education That Works: Preparing Secondary-Level Math and Science Teachers for Success with English Language Learners through Content-Based Instruction. Global Education Review, 1(4), 155-178.
Williams, J. O., Ernst, J. V., & Kaui, T. M. (2015). Special Populations At-Risk for Dropping Out of School: A Discipline-Based Analysis of STEM Educators. Journal Of STEM Education: Innovations & Research, 16(1), 41-45.
My most recent class for the MSU ed tech program, CEP811, has helped me evolve my practice in higher ed IT leadership at warp speed. I’m driving my team crazy now, because I just can’t help bringing principles of design, maker education, and 21st century learning into everything we do in IT.
Staff meetings have become project-based learning, classroom equipment upgrades have become design projects, and our eLearning programs are getting a healthy dose of maker-inspired support from IT. It isn’t the technology practice that’s made such a difference to me: it’s the solid underpinning in theories of learning. A the same time, CEP811 has helped bring “play” back into my work. I’ve summed up a few of our projects in a goofy montage, reminiscent of our first class project on remixing.
References (in the video)
Darroch, M. (Accessed 2015, July 2). Banjo-Kazooie’s opening song, 8-bit style [Audio file]. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/jayshadow_117/banjo-kazooie-opening-song-8
As a part of my ed tech class, I’ve been asked to reflect how I might assess for creative problem-solving during maker-lessons. I’m not a teacher, but my IT team certainly performs constant assessment and alignment activities. Eric Isselhardt described the Green Street Academy’s (GSA) transition from traditional instruction to project-based learning (PBL). I was amazed by the degree to which this story mirrors our IT strategic planning journey. IT work is, quite literally, project-based. But is it strategic? Are we doing the right things? These are the sorts of organizational-level assessment questions the GSA faculty asked themselves.
Prior to moving to PBL, Isselhardt observed that, “They were using directive instruction modes designed to impart information and learning within a specific topic area, often in isolation from other topic areas, and they were having inconsistent student achievement results” (Isselhardt 2013). This sounds like IT. We’ve got a bunch of very talented individuals working across campus to achieve individual results. GSA faculty were guided by Common Core Standards; my team is guided by our strategic plan. As with GSA, our efforts were achieving inconsistent results.
We wanted to answer a central question: how do we measure whether we are actually accomplishing the mission? Our team amassed a ton of work, but we found it difficult to measure how well the work accrued to institutional objectives. Typical IT metrics are things like “projects completed on time”, “service uptime”, or various measures of efficiency. None of these, however, tell us if our IT work somehow helps students learn. Grant Wiggins tells us, “We can and do measure anything: critical and creative thinking, wine quality, doctors, meals, athletic potential, etc.” (2012). Just today, Joshua Kim of Inside Higher Ed asked the question, “How do we measure judgement, honesty, bravery, integrity, and wisdom? The first step, I think, is to have an honest discussion about our goals…” (2015).
In keeping with Joshua Kim’s advice, we began by re-imaginging our objectives. GSA called it a “standards map”, and we called it our strategic objectives. Our old objectives were okay, but mirrored classic IT performance indicators of efficiency. We changed our objectives to map better to the campus mission: student achievement, diversity, affordability, and access. We mapped out the ways these objectives were overlapping and complimentary. With these in place, we developed our road-map (what GSA called “project route”). Our goal was to map the daily activities of the whole team to our lofty objectives.
We are now in the process now that GSA called, “preparation for success”. This means mapping daily tasks to the mission objectives. This work is ongoing, but is beginning to allow us to construct mission-mapped performance goals for individual team members, making our work more relevant. We’re able to build our professional development programs around this as well. Best of all, we are beginning to engage the rest of the institution in our assessment and planning process.
Notice that process steps overlap. For example, each spring we are adjusting the coming year’s plan based on state budget allocations, while broadly gathering information about campus needs for the academic year following. This creates a cycle of continuous strategic planning (which I’ve blogged about before) that includes constant campus feedback about performance relative to the teaching, learning and research missions. This will hopefully generate the sort of real-team feedback that James Paul Gee tells us makes game-based learning so effective (2010). Of course, executing a multi-year strategic plan is a very slow-moving game, so the meaning of real-time feedback is relative.
In relating our work in IT to the work of GSA, I’ve come to realize that high performing IT needs a standards-based, team-wide PBL approach, just like a school. Interestingly, I think the hard work for IT revolves around mapping to standards because we’ve got the team-based project thing down pat. For schools, it may well be the opposite: standards are well understood but team-based project work is a whole new ballgame.
References
Edutopia. (2010, July 20). James Paul Gee on Grading with Games [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU3pwCD-ey0
Kim, J., (2015, June 29). Learning Analytics in a Liberal Arts Context. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/learning-analytics-liberal-arts-context
Wiggins, G. (2012, February 3). On assessing for creativity: yes you can, and yes you should. [Web log comment]. Retrieved from http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/on-assessing-for-creativity-yes-you-can-and-yes-you-should/
It’s hard to offer high quality four-year STEM degrees online especially if your institution values an intimate teaching and learning experience. You want students to work together in labs with real instruments and materials. You want synchronous interaction with experts. What if you also want to reach underserved students in out-of-reach parts of your region?
Maker education may be one great answer. Sheridan et. al. describe a community Makerspace in Madison, WI that “…offers expensive technical equipment, including welders, a suite of woodworking tools, 3-D printers, commercial sewing machines, kilns, multiple oscilloscopes, facilities for iron pour, and a laser cutter” (p. 512, 2014). Toss in some computers, and this description could almost fit many university engineering and prototyping labs I’ve seen. Imagining Makespaces as community learning hubs also helps provide resources to economically disadvantaged zones where the digital divide continues to rob students of opportunity. Supporting community Maker-style labs as learning hubs for STEM degree attainment one important element of offering lab-based STEM degrees at a distance.
This model suggests that universities can provide common curriculum designed to teach the underlying principles of a given STEM discipline. Students consume the content at home, but visit local makerspaces to conduct the lab portions of the class. Lab projects vary greatly by community. For example, an electrical engineering program may teach principles of environmental science. A student in coastal community may set up a project to automatically measure ocean acidity while an inland student measures noise pollution from a nearby airstrip. Thus, a university may scale a common curriculum while students apply principles to their real-life local concepts. This encourages mastery by encouraging Bransford, Brown, and Cocking’s notion of transfer (2000) and exemplifies connected learning at it’s finest. Ito et. al. tell us that connected learning should provide “…a focus on the creation of social, cultural, and technological supports to enable a young person to link, integrate, and translate their interests across academic, civic, and career-relevant domains” (p. 82, 2013).
Offering STEM degrees that blend online learning with community making in underserved communities surfaces two additional challenges: finding resources to support teaching and learning in community Makerspaces and ensuring that K12 graduates in these communities are prepared to succeed in a challenging university STEM program. To address these issues, I’ve suggested pairing college-level STEM offerings with a companion high-school college-prep program in the same discipline. The prep programs could be designed as a cross-disciplinary efforts with a Schools of Education to build readiness and opportunity for underserved high-school students. Such prep programs may also benefit from grants and philanthropy. The prep programs help to shape a pipeline of students in the same communities for four-year tuition-bearing STEM degrees. The college STEM programs focus on service and community based learning, so the college students become the teaching and learning staff at the Makerspaces, earning their degrees by mentoring a new generation of high-school students.
References
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academies Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.
Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-Green, J., Watkins, S.C. (2013).
Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.
Sheridan, K. Halverson, E.R., Litts, B.K., Brahms, L, Jacobs-Priebe, L., & Owens, T. (2014) Learning in the making: A comparative case-study of three maker spaces. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 505-565.
This week’s CEP 811 challenge was to imagine redesigning a learning space for 21st century learning. I chose to re-imagine a basement classroom that was originally designed as a videoconferencing studio. It has since been converted into a standard classroom.
panorama: teaching station on the left, entrance to center
This is a very traditional classroom. There are rows of tables and a teaching station. There is definitely a “front”. As designed, this classroom represents what Ken Robinson description of “the factory model” of education fits this room well. “The classroom arrangements are people sitting facing the front where someone’s speaking to them.” (O’ Donnell et. al., 2010).
Faculty perspective of studentStudent perspective of faculty
I decided to imagine a redesign for a flipped-classroom instructional model, where students watch lectures at home and use class time to collaborate on projects, assignments, and formative assessment. The flipped model encourages students to combine knowledge from multiple domains to construct their own meaning. This process reflects a high degree of transfer (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000). In an article examining space design at Pixar, IDEO, and Google, Melanie Kahl tells us that, “Such interdisciplinary work is supported by a thoughtful facility design that displays flexibility, ownership, transparency, and originality.” My redesign emphasizes open space, flexible furniture, and a variety of group presentation stations.
As Barrett et. al. point out, flexible and varied furniture provide for better collaboration.
Collaboration displays
“More zones can allow varied learning activities at the same time” (p. 681, 2012). In my conversations with faculty at my institution, I’ve heard a preference for the half-hex tables pictured above. These tables can be quickly configured for collaboration, presentation, or against walls to share technology. In addition to the hex tables, this room offers stand-up height desks for smaller (2-3 student) collaboration as well as a sectional sofa. All of the furnishings are wheeled, allowing flexible arrangement. Small mobile whiteboards throughout the room may also be used to configure small group study carrels.
This space is challenged by a lack of natural light. The third teacher tells us to “let the sunshine in” (2010) because natural light is important to an effective learning environment. This room, however, is buried in a basement. I’ve placed framed glass windows on the walls lined with natural light LEDs (like these) to cast simulated ambient daylight. The glass windows are also used as dry-erase boards. Barrett et. al. found that “more electrical lighting with higher quality can provide better visual environment” (p. 681, 2012).This redesign could be accomplished in my institution over a summer term with involvement from my IT group, representative faculty stakeholders, our fantastic Teaching and Learning Center, and our campus space-planning office. I’d suggest a start-up budget of around $20,000, mostly dedicated to the surprisingly expensive tables and chairs, as well as for increasing the number of wireless network access points to support the additional devices we anticipate. Since we support classroom technology, our IT department is very well situated to accomplish this task, especially for a single classroom. We’d suggest this design project as a showcase or proof-of-concept room that may provide a template for additional active learning spaces throughout the campus.
Finally, I’ll note that the physical re-design is the easiest part of the process. Indeed, we are not really trying to redesign a room; we are attempting to redesign teaching. In K12, a teacher usually controls a specific room. In higher ed, a single room hosts many different teachers and learners every term. New pedagogies represent a risk to faculty who depend on positive teaching evaluations for tenure. Redesigning this room will require faculty development for the flipped model, perhaps incentives to encourage faculty to volunteer to use the room, and support staff to help faculty manage the technology.
References
Barrett, Peter, Zhang, Yufan, Moffat, Joanne, & Kobbacy, Khairy. (2012). A holistic, multi-level analysis identifying the impact of classroom design on pupils’ learning. Building and Environment,59, 678-689.
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academies Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.
Kahl, M. (2011, November 22). What Schools Can Learn from Google, IDEO, and Pixar. Retrieved from http://www.creativitypost.com/education/what_schools_can_learn_from_google_ideo_and_pixar
O’Donnell Wicklund Pigozzi Peterson, Architects Inc, VS Furniture, & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher : 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching & learning. New York: Abrams.
The Third Teacher. (2010). TTT Ideas Flash Cards. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/v25rRA
High-performing IT teams rely heavily on agile project management methodologies. In traditional project management, sometimes called “waterfall”, every aspect of the project is planned ahead of time, before any work begins. In Agile, product features are developed and released to end-users iteratively while planning is ongoing. In higher education, Agile practices help improve any project, from software development to faculty development. This lesson plan applies problem-based learning (PBL) to a Maker project using Raspberry Pi to teach the basics of agile project management. Teams of learners will apply Agile practices create campus computer kiosks with Raspberry Pis and old surplus peripherals to solve a variety of potential campus problems.
Lesson Structure
This lesson is built around improving core IT competencies in project management. Since I’m not a classroom teacher, I’ve decided to design a lesson around this critical discipline for high-performing IT teams. Improving project management, particularly Agile Project Management, is prominent in our strategic plans and in our team-wide professional development plans.
This lesson is designed for a 12 person IT team, though it can be easily adjusted for different size teams. Since this lesson is built for IT professionals, it assumes the learners have computing expertise. This audience does not need instruction on how to use the linux operating system on the Raspberry Pi, for example. The lesson is intended to help competent technical people learn new project management techniques.
Objectives
After completing this lesson, our IT team members should all be able to:
Describe and perform four basic Agile roles
Create a prioritized project backlog to address problem statements (user stories)
Estimate tasks and plan a sprint
Complete a sprint to release a product
Materials
2 Raspberry Pi units formatted and loaded with Raspian OS
Cart of surplus computing equipment and peripherals:
USB keyboards, mice, webcams, speakers
Various adaptors
Monitors
Printer/scanner
Card swipe readers
Barcode scanners
Wifi adaptors
Ethernet cables
Projectors
Agile Role Cards
Plan
20 Minutes – 1st Sprint – Set up teams, define roles, and set up the Raspberry Pi.
This phase introduces teams, roles, and provides scaffolding for the agile sprint process with a pre-created agile sprint plan. This prepares the teams to create their own sprint plans later in the lesson. In addition, the teams get the Raspberry Pi and basic computing equipment set up quickly. It should be a fun phase during which the teams dive into the old computing components, such as monitors and keyboards, and race to get their Raspberry Pis set up.
Trello.com is incredibly intuitive. You can quickly enter tasks in any column and drag tasks around to track work. For this lesson, create Trello boards for each team in advance with the following columns: Stories, Backlog, In Progress, and Done.
Create 2 teams of 6 people.
Have team members draw role cards to see what roles they play and read about role functions on the card
Scrum Lead
Craftsperson (there will be 2 of these)
Product Owner
Stakeholder
Direct Scrum leads to Trello board for pre-planned sprint to set up the Raspberry Pi kiosk.
Stakeholders join instructor to develop user stories on a Trello boards for each team to use in the next lesson phase.
Note on generating user stories: The “stakeholders” are playing the role of customers or end-users of the kiosks the teams will build. Give the stakeholders a link to a blank Trello board for each team. The stakeholders will develop as many problem statements as they can in the time remaining for their teams. Some of the stories will be workflow problems, student needs, or features of the kiosk. For example, “I want to swipe my student ID to log in” might be a user story. It’s fine for them to brainstorm together and to share stories that may be used by both teams.
User story examples
10 minutes – Create backlog – Prioritize user stories and prioritize
This phase begins the collaborative problem-based learning process by introducing the user stories to the project teams. Each story, or problem, becomes a feature of the kiosk the teams are building. There’s no way to build a single kiosk with all these features in the time allowed, so the Product Owners lead the teams to organize these features into a “backlog” in priority order. The teams learn how to use the product owner role and and how to use an agile approach to organizing information for PBL.
Give each team the URL to the Trello board for their teams. These boards have been pre-populated with user stories.
Direct the product owners to take over leadership of the team to prioritize the stories. The product owner must draw on the teams expertise to prioritize based on what is most important to the “stakeholder”, feasibility, and which stories fit together well.
Provide scaffolding during this phase working with each team for a few minutes. Focus on asking questions rather than providing answers. Questions like, “Where on campus will this kiosk be deployed?” are very helpful. If it is in a public hallway, they might prioritize different features than if it is in a private office suite.
15 minutes – Sprint Planning – Convert stories to tasks, estimate, and assign
This process generates authentic tasks (O’Donnell, 2012) for the remainder of the lesson. This phase focuses on teaching the team the role of Scrum Lead and task estimation. The teams will plan a quick sprint to deliver on one high-priority user story with their kiosk. Since this is a quick lesson, it is best to focus only on the a single user story. If a team believes they can build out more than one user story, they are welcome to try. The directions for this section should be printed and given to the teams to help them recall how to perform each step.
Let the teams know that they will plan a 30 minute sprint to deliver a product release (their kiosk) in customer-ready form. They only need to deliver on one high-prioirity user story. In agile, additional features can be delivered later.
Direct the Scrum Lead to take over leadership of teams. Instruct the Scrum Lead to get the Craftspeople on their teams to attach specific tasks to to the highest priority user story.
Instruct Craftspeople to estimate tasks by assigning points to each task.
Note on estimating tasks with points: In agile, teams figure out how much can be accomplished in a sprint by assigning points to tasks. For scaffolding, this exercise uses a simplified model for assigning points. The craftspeople are the ones who actually perform the tasks. For this lesson, 3 points represents the total amount of work a single craftsperson can accomplish during the 30 minute sprint. Thus, a craftsperson may accomplish 1 task that is worth 3 points, or 3 tasks worth 1 point each.
Once the craftspeople estimate points for all the tasks, the Scrum Lead knows how many points each task takes and how many points may be assigned. Each craftsperson can accomplish up to 3 points in 30 minutes. If the team has 2 craftspeople, then the Scrum Lead may only assign up to 6 points worth of tasks. If the tasks to deliver the user story require more points than available, then the Scrum Lead consults with the Product Owner and Stakeholder to reduce requirements until the tasks fit within available points. This is a key feature of agile: the end-users are involved in planning the work and cutting features when necessary.
The Scrum Lead enters the tasks into the Trello backlog column, notes the points required for each task, and assigns craftspeople to each task based on the points available.
30 minutes – Sprint! – The teams create the kiosks based on the sprint plan
This phase emphasizes the craftsperson role and requires real-time collaborative problem-solving for the teams to succeed.
Each craftsperson independently completes assigned tasks, moving them to the appropriate columns on the Trello board for tracking.
The Scrum Lead tracks progress and checks to be sure that completed tasks accomplish the priorities set by the Product Owner.
The Product Owner, in turn, may demo functions in progress for the stakeholder while work is ongoing (if possible).
If tasks turn out to take different effort than estimated, the Scrum Lead works with the Product Owner and stakeholder to re-adjust in real time so that some form of finished product may still be released on time.
15 minutes – Review – The teams reflect on their learning and self-assess
The review phase serves two purposes: review is a critical component of Agile as well as the lesson plan itself. In many ways, Agile practices are learning practices as well. This phase helps the instructor to assess learning outcomes while teaching the teams to review an Agile sprint.
Dissolve the teams and people move to sit together with those playing the same roles (Scrum Leads together, Stakeholders together, etc.).
Ask each group to work together to complete a written assessment based on prompts such as:
Why are each of the four agile roles critical to the process?
How well did you perform in your specific role? What would you do better in that role in the future?
How could project estimation be improved? What worked well about estimating projects?
What worked/didn’t work during the sprint?
if you were planning another sprint for to release a 2.0 version of the kiosks, what would you change about the process?
Allow a few minutes for quick report-outs at the end. Ask a representative from each for the 4 role-base groups to report out on one or two highlights from their reviews.
The review phase also serves as the instructor’s primary mechanism for assessment. Have the students gone beyond memorizing the role descriptions to understand why the roles are important? Are the collaborating effectively on the assessment itself?
Finally, if you want to dig deeper into Agile Project Management for this or future lessons, I recommended sources like Agile Project Management for Dummies or resources and certifications from PMI (Project Management Institute).
Rationale
This lesson takes a constructivist approach to teaching Agile Project Management by modeling TPACK integration, collaborative problem-based learning, and emphasizing authentic tasks. I discussed theories of collaborative problem-based learning and maker education in my previous blog post. While instructors often find it difficult to apply TPACK and PBL in practice (So and Kim, 2009), maker projects naturally encourage both frameworks. This lesson plan is intended to demonstrate this idea by building a learning experience around a maker project using Raspberry Pi.
This lesson models TPACK integration to accomplish learning objectives by using maker technology (Raspberry Pi and repurposed computing components), a PBL pedagogical approach, and the content of Agile Project Management practices. The content is used as a project methodology to accomplish a technology task. This helps to combat the tendency bemoaned by Richard Culatta in his 2013 TEDx talk to merely “…digitize traditional learning practices.”
In Agile (the content), “user stories” serve as the central problems in for a PBL approach. Effective PBL lessons are based around central problems and and the learning is directed by student teams (Davidson and Major, 2014). One of the learning objectives of this lesson is to teach students four fundamental Agile roles. These roles also help students form teams (another essential feature of PBL) to complete the assignment, which in turn supports the lesson objective around learning the roles.
This lesson emphasizes authentic tasks (O’Donnell 2012) to help student construct meaning from the content. Designed for IT professionals, this lesson isn’t just an exercise: the learners may produce innovative and low-cost kiosks using maker technology that may be deployed in reality. This approach combines an exercise in professional development with actual IT work, thus making content doubly valuable for the learners. Finally, a personal observation: in my practice, I’ve observed that our team wants to see how new project management practices really add value before they fully subscribe. Focusing on applying the content to authentic tasks will help demonstrate the value that Agile Project Management Practices may bring to their work.
References
Davidson, N., & Major, C. H. (2014). Boundary crossings: Cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3), 49. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1651854557?accountid=14784
O’Donnell, A. (2012). Constructivism. In APA Educational Psychology Handbook: Vol. 1. Theories, Constructs, and Critical Issues. K. R. Harris, S. Graham, and T. Urdan (Editors-in-Chief). Washgington, DC: American Psychological Association. DOI: 10.1037/13273-003.
So, H., & Kim, B. (2009). Learning about problem based learning: Student teachers integrating technology, pedagogy and content knowledge. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), 101-116. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61863160?accountid=14784
TEDx Talks. (2013, January 10). Reimagining Learning: Richard Culatta at TEDxBeaconStreet [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0uAuonMXrg
Richard Culattacalled for a digital revolution in US education in his 2013 TEDx talk. He highlighted the effectiveness of teaching based on collaborative problem solving. His examples demonstrate how effective technology integration creates “authentic tasks” (O’Donnell 2012) by giving students agency. Collaborative problem solving, or other forms of problem based learning (PBL) promote Bransford, Brown, and Cocking’s notion of expert-style learning (2000) by encouraging the transfer existing knowledge to new problems. However, designing TPACK lessons for collaborative problem solving is difficult in practice.
The Onion does a great job explaining the difference between calling for something in a TED talk and actually doing it:
It’s easy to add some group work or technology to a lesson, but Culatta critiqued this as merely using “…technology to digitize traditional learning practices.” Maker education provides one way for educators to move from digital translation to digital transformation. When grounded in specific PBL practices, Maker education can provide a platform to help instructors build lessons that authentically produce collaborative problem-based strategies among learners.
Understanding TPACK is a far cry from doing it. I learned this first-hand in designing my first-ever lesson plan. So and Kim explored the gulf between understanding and practice in their 2009 study of pre-service teachers. Their subjects demonstrated knowledge of TPACK and constructivist practices. However, the teachers in the study struggled to design lesson plans that effectively applied their knowledge.
“…Student teachers were able to understand the pedagogical approaches of PBL and what technology integration meant to them for teaching and learning (espoused TPCK), but had difficulties applying their beliefs and knowledge into designing pedagogically-sound technology-integrated lessons (in use TPCK)” (p. 112).
Their findings evoke Culatta’s “digital divide”. The student teachers’ lesson plans centered on overly simple problem statements and technology seemed to be added as an afterthought (p. 109). The subjects were only digitizing existing practice. They lacked unifying and authentic problems around which to construct their lessons. These teachers needed to find problems with lots of solutions, that automatically integrate technology, and that inspire collaboration. As I learned in my first Raspberry Pi assignment, these features are inherent to Maker projects.
Maker projects won’t transform teaching unless rooted in intentional choices around the various constructivist instructional practices. Culotta provides many examples of collaborative problem solving in the classroom, but what do instructors need to know to invent such lessons themselves? O’Donnell’s 2012 work on constructivism provides a layout of various constructivist frameworks, but doesn’t specifically focus on collaborative problem solving. Davidson and Major (2014) provide some much-needed insight about specific instructional approaches to group learning. They explored three constructivist pedagogical practices: cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning. Davidson and Major argue the need for instructors to better understand the distinctions among these techniques because they have “…become so entangled that it is difficult to distinguish between them, and there are unclear and even muddled messages in the literature” (p. 8). These three group learning approaches differ in ways that aren’t necessarily complimentary. Maker education may indeed help instructors answer Culatta’s call to action, if they can ground lessons in a specific practice.
I suggest that PBL is often the best approach for Maker lessons. PBL emphasizes lessons where features such as critical thinking, communication, and content knowledge all occur as the natural result of the central problem (p. 26). In a Maker project, the problem of creating something innovative requires learners to leverage pre-existing knowledge while critically evaluating solutions and resources. “In problem-based learning, it is the problem that drives the learning” (Davidson and Major, 2014, p. 25). The apparent simplicity of this statement belies a critical affordance of PBL: learning isn’t manufactured by the instructor, rather, learning becomes the authentic outcome of a real-life process. A Maker project becomes the central problem for students in problem-based learning.
Richard Culatta called for a transformation. However, educators often find it difficult to implement transformative educational practices. Lessons built around Maker projects may be one great answer. As Culatta said, “technology creates creators” (2013). When grounded in a PBL approach to group learning, Maker technology projects provide a vehicle to help instructors design for authentic collaborative problem solving.
References
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academies Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.
Davidson, N., & Major, C. H. (2014). Boundary crossings: Cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3), 49. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1651854557?accountid=14784
O’Donnell, A. (2012). Constructivism. In APA Educational Psychology Handbook: Vol. 1. Theories, Constructs, and Critical Issues. K. R. Harris, S. Graham, and T. Urdan (Editors-in-Chief). Washgington, DC: American Psychological Association. DOI: 10.1037/13273-003.
So, H., & Kim, B. (2009). Learning about problem based learning: Student teachers integrating technology, pedagogy and content knowledge. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), 101-116. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61863160?accountid=14784
TEDx Talks. (2013, January 10). Reimagining Learning: Richard Culatta at TEDxBeaconStreet [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0uAuonMXrg
Our challenge was to repurpose thrift-store items using our maker technologies. I chose to use the Raspberry Pi. I have a tiny bit of linux experience, and the Pi is just a tiny linux computer.
But the remix project baffled me. How do I hook a computer up to something at a thrift store? Before I got started, I realized that learning to use the Pi itself was more complicated than I anticipated. First, you need a monitor, keyboard and mouse, just like any computer. Since this is a thrifting project, I bought these items at my local GoodWill. The monitor was a problem. The Pi uses HDMI for video, and the cruddy old monitors at Goodwill were all used old VGA connections. Luckily, I also found a VGA/HDMI adaptor at GoodWill. That adaptor, however, proved to be faulty. Most people just connect the Pi to their TV.
In my case, however, the family uses the TV for movie night precisely so I can do homework. So the TV was out. In the end, I learned to use SSH to log into the Pi from my MacBook to control the Pi with text commands and set up a VNC server on the Pi, so that I could remote into it from any computer or tablet. The toughest part about setting up the VNC server was modifying the Pi’s startup protocols to automatically launch VNC whenever the Pi booted up. For some reason, the Pi kept crashing on reboot every time I tried it, until I wiped it clean and tried again. Once it worked though, it was beautiful. I can donate that mouse, keyboard, and monitor right back to GoodWill!
I combed the web for project ideas. Many involved attaching the Pi to other high components, like this pico projector. The Pi has 20 or so I/O pins that you can wire up to servos or motors and control with programming languages like Python. After staying up to the wee hours trying to learn to program in Python, I admitted that programming and the necessary electronics knowledge was beyond what I could learn in the five days before the deadline.
I was also concerned with how to connect the project to my educational context. I’m in higher education IT management. I don’t have a classroom and my work revolves technology, planning, and communication. I decided to restrict myself to thrift store items that could plug into computers in the first place. This both made it easier to prototype different things and aligned the project better with my work. I found a bunch of old components we haven’t used since moving away from wired desktop computing: an old printer, webcam, and speakers. In the end, I did two projects.
Old printer, new life
First, I decided to use the Pi to set up a wireless print server that supporting Apple’s AirPrint, so we could print from our iPhones. I followed tutorials to first set up a print server and then to add software to enable AirPrint. There were four basic steps to making this work:
Use a program called samba to connect your printer.
Use a program called CUPS to install and manage your print server.
Modify the Raspberry Pi so that it never goes to sleep and keeps it’s wireless network turned on all the time (at this point, you have a basic wireless printer).
Install software to simulate AirPrint.
To my everlasting shock, it worked on the first try. This project connects directly my work in IT. We work on ways to promote active learning in both formal and informal teaching spaces (say, offices) by untethering instructors from technology. We also work in a budget-constrained public institution. We need to get as much life as possible from things like old printers. Learning how to configure a lo-fi solution that turns an old printer into an up-to-date untethered AirPrint device meets both objectives. As I sorted through the software and configuration tasks to make this work, I also came to appreciate the complexity of the task: it required a lot of software and configuration changes and I don’t think it’ll work reliably without ongoing tinkering. As an IT leader, this sort of hands-on learning is incredibly critical to helping me understand the work involved behind seemingly easy IT requests.
I wasn’t satisfied with this project, though. It did use a thrift store item (the printer) to do something new, but it wasn’t “NEW”. It was effective and whole, but not novel enough (Koehler and Mishra, 2008). It’s an old printer…and I just made it print in new ways.
Hello, IT
Inspired by another great thrifting project, I played around the software for voice recognition on the Pi. I really learned the value of playing. At first, I wasn’t going for a specific project, I just thought it was amazing that I might be able to build a computer I could talk to. That would have been science fiction only a short time ago. Now, somebody with no computer science skills (me) could do this in an evening for around $9 (old speakers and a webcam). Around the same time, our IT team started planning new customer service curricula for our help desk team. We often joke that, in our industry, those most able to help our faculty and students technologically aren’t necessarily those with people skills. Wouldn’t it be great to prototype a robot help desk technician? I could program the Pi to answer basic IT questions. I could use it as a bad example, even, without embarrassing any human staff!
First though, I had to get voice recognition working, and this was more difficult than I imagined. I settled some custom-created software that repurposes Google Voice to make your Pi listen and talk. I followed this guide to install the software.
Arduino
But when I tried to change the voice commands, I found I didn’t have permission to edit the file. I fought this problem for two days. I searched web forums, gave myself elevated privileges to the file, called my geeky brother for help. By midweek, I’d panicked and ordered an Arduino from Amazon. I was just going to switch maker kits. At least the Arduino is set up to motorize stuff. It would be MUCH better for repurposing objects than a little computer. At around 1am, while giving the Pi one last try, I figured out my problem:
There were TWO voice command configuration files with the same name, in different directories. I was killing myself trying to modify the wrong one. I called my geeky brother back, even though it was late. I think he laughed at me for a full minute.
After that, it was back to the thrift store to give my help desk technician a body!
A note on using multi-model elements
Multi-model elements helped explain my projects to readers who may not be familiar with the technology. The process for documenting the projects with pictures, sounds and video was also valuable in itself. I was forced to reflect along the way and provide evidence for my work.
References
Koehler, M. and Mishra, P. (2008). Teaching Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Content and Pedagogy [Video file]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/39539571
I am privileged work in IT for a university that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion for all. This includes a rock-solid commitment to accessibility. Our campus IT group provides a variety of technology services to accommodate students, staff and faculty with different abilities and needs.
I combed the web for project ideas. Many involved attaching the Pi to other high components, like 