The impact of classroom architecture on teaching and learning

Award-winning professor Michael Wesch writes and speaks on the influence of classroom architecture on teaching and learning. I saw a striking example of the impact of classroom architecture when the projector failed in my classroom.

I was reminded of this topic recently when I substituted for a colleague, Larry Rosen, who teaches in a large, half-full auditorium. I was struck by the fact that, as you see here, the students chose to spread out uniformly when there is extra room:

Professor Rosen in a 60 Minutes segment

I can understand that -- I too like space between me and my neighbors and the people in the back row can quietly sneak out of the auditorium if the lecture gets boring -- but it impacts classroom interaction.

Like many others, I encourage student interaction -- with me and among themselves -- during a lecture. One technique I use is to throw out a question and ask them to discuss it or compare answers with their neighbors. The purpose is not to find the right answer but self-diagnosis -- to help them see whether or not they understand the concept I am talking about. That does not work well when the students are spread out as in the auditorium shown above.

For a quick summary of Wesch's view of the implicit messages of traditional classroom architecture, watch the following short (3:14) excerpt from a longer (1:06:12) talk:

Six features I want in an educational video player

The London Olympics were streamed by NBC in the US and the BBC in England. I watched both and blogged about the experience. After it was over, I gave my "gold medal" to the BBC -- they did a better job. One of things I liked about the BBC coverage was their video player, which was more interactive than NBC's -- it was designed for the Internet, not adapted from television.

Video players for teaching should also be interactive -- we need more than a timeline with VCR pause and play buttons. Let me suggest a few things I would like to see in a video player for my students.

1. Clickable chapter headings I currently make teaching videos using Camtasia, which lets me create clickable chapter headings on the left side of the screen as shown here:



The BBC Olympic player also had clickable chapter headings, and they are on my feature list.

2. Variable playback speed When I listen to podcasts, I speed up the playback. As shown here, Coursera's video player allows the student to do the same:



I applaud their innovation, but it has to be combined with clickable chapter headings. When the student changes the speed, the chapter entry points must be recalculated.

In addition to adjusting the chapter start points, the player should be instrumented to see what speeds students use and when they change speeds. This data could be correlated with comprehension and retention as well as the underlying concepts being covered when students speed or slow playback. (My hypothesis is that retention and comprehension would not be diminished by, say, a 15% speed increase).

3. A quick-replay button NBC made a simple, but handy addition to their video controls. They added a button that backed up 15 seconds every time in was clicked. Click it once and the video backed up 15 seconds, click it twice and it backed up 30 seconds, etc. That would be great if a student missed a word or point and wanted to hear it again.



4. Programmed pause points with click to continue This is very simple. As a teacher, I want to be able to insert breakpoints, causing the video to pause while the student thinks about or does something. He or she would simply click a resume button when ready to continue.

5. "Tell me more" button The BBC Olympic player allowed the user to display ancillary information -- record times, athlete's statistics, current standings, etc. as shown here:



A teacher would use tell me more to add context to or paraphrase the point being made in the current chapter, simulating what happens in a classroom when a student is confused and asks for clarification. The teacher does not simply repeat what they had originally said, but uses different words, examples, images, notation, etc.

The student would learn to click this button when he or she found the current chapter confusing.

6. Study-group support Michael Wesch has pointed out that the architecture of our classrooms and lecture halls discourages student interaction. They face forward, looking to the teacher for information. I bet small children relate to each other in school, but I find my university students reluctant to work with or talk to each other during class.



I want a player that lets groups of students study the same video together at the same time. Sharing a video during a Google Hangout would be a step in the right direction, but control of the video would have to be distributed among the students. It would also require a search to discover study partners who were online on the same lesson at the same time. Study-group support would require more thought and HCI design than my other suggestions, but it would be a terrific addition to the video player I would like for my students.

Well, those are my six suggestions. What would you like to see in a video player for education?

How a broken projector improved my class

I teach in the "smart" classroom shown here. The students sit at computers and the professor has a podium computer. I use the overhead display during every minute of every class -- for presentations and live demonstrations of all sorts of things.

Yesterday morning, I walked into the classroom and discovered that the overhead display was broken, so we had to improvise. I sat down at one of the student computers in the middle of a row (the one with the arrow) and the students crammed in behind me -- sitting on chairs, tables and standing. All of my teaching material is online, so I was able to use the exact same PowerPoint decks and do the exact same demonstrations as I would have used from the podium if the projector had been working. The material was 100% the same -- only the seating arrangement changed. I don't know whether you can picture the scene, but it was cramped and disorderly. (I wish I had taken a picture).

Why am I telling you this? I have been teaching on and off during my entire career, and it was one of the best class sessions I can remember.

I taught a second section of the same class yesterday evening in the same room. The projector worked fine for about half an hour, then broke again. We crammed in behind the student computer and continued. The class lit up. Students listened, spoke, answered questions I threw out, asked a lot of good questions, made relevant comments and wisecracked and teased. It was even better than the morning class.

I was able to do this because my classes are small. A few students were too far from my screen to see it comfortably, so they turned on a couple of computers in the same row and navigated along with me. (We could have automated that by starting up a Google Hangout and sharing screens).

The success of our re-arranged room would not have surprised Michael Wesch, an award winning professor of anthropology who has long noted the impact of room design on teaching. (For a taste of his thoughts on the topic, watch this 3m 46s excerpt I cut from a talk he gave upon receiving an outstanding teaching award).

I'm no anthropologist, but these class sessions felt better than a small seminar around a conference table. The ad-hoc seating arrangement turned the classes into focused bull sessions by breaking down social barriers between the students and me and, more important, between themselves.

The success of this small, ad hoc arrangement is ironic, because it comes at a time when I have been writing about massive open online classes, MOOCS, and have proposed teaching one.

MOOCs have the potential to be extremely cost efficient, but my small class gathered around a PC was extremely costly -- the California taxpayers would not sustain it and the students would get tired of standing up after a while.

Could we capture some of the enthusiasm and interaction of the live class I had yesterday and share it with a mass audience taking a MOOC at the same time? Maybe.

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For more on Michael Wesch:

• A video excerpt from “A portal to media literacy” (3m 46s)
  
• A portal to media literacy (the entire talk 1:06:12)
  
• A vision of students today (4 m 45 s)
  
• About Michael Wesch
  
• A blog post on the characteristics of today’s students
  

The 2011 Campus Technology Conference

I recently attended the 2011 Campus Technology Conference in Boston. Since I teach using Web 2.0 tools, am an e-text developer and my school is interested in using iPads, I focused on those areas and had a great time and learned a lot. I'll tell you what I saw, and you can follow the links at the end of this report to see videos and slides from presentations I missed.

Keynote session

The conference was preceded by a day of workshops featuring in-depth presentations and hands-on exercises. Two that caught my eye were Mark Frydenberg on Web 2.0 tools for the college classroom and Jenna Linskens on the applications and uses of the iPad in education.

Linskens stated that there are over 12,500 educational applications for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch -- that can be a bit overwhelming. Experienced teachers like Linskens and Frydenberg organize applications and focus on those that they find useful. Linskens mentioned 102 applications in 13 categories, including four "must haves." (What would be your "must have" iPad applications)?  Similarly, Frydenberg showed dozens of applications in 14 categories.

Michael Wesch

The next day, the conference got underway with an inspirational, entertaining talk by award winning teacher Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Those familiar with Wesch and the videos he and his students have made documenting classroom atmosphere and engagement will find the first half of the presentation familiar. 

For example, over half of his students say they do not like school, but none dislikes learning and he expressed his disappointment in the kinds of questions students ask – for example "how long does the paper have to be" or "will that be on the exam?"

Wesch: required skills change over time

This presentation went beyond Wesch’s earlier work. He brought in his experience as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea and got a bit Mcluhaneque in talking about the idea that media are more than communication tools -- they mediate and change relationships. A family gathered around a TV set at dinner time is not the same as a post-TV family. Educational needs are also different. Students who grew up during the TV era need to learn critical thinking, while those in the post TV world need media literacy for creating, filtering, organizing, distributing and rating information.

There were two and a half days of concurrent session presentations. The session format stressed quality over quantity -- each presentation was a full hour, so there was time for formal talks, demos and discussion.

Jeff Borden

Being interested in e-text, the first session I attended was "eText is Here" by Rand Spiwak and John Ittelson. They are e-text enthusiasts, but stress that the format wars were far from settled. The turbulent nature of the format and device wars was further emphasized by Jeff Borden of Pearson Learning in his presentation "Emerging Technologies in Content Delivery: eBooks and eReader Devices." Borden listed 23 e-reading devices and 18 e-text formats.

Borden is an informative, entertaining speaker. He gave two presentations, and both were recorded. I recommend watching the videos. You might also be interested in his directory of 500 e-learning tools.

Borden: tools change over time

In addition to keynotes and technical sessions, there were extended conversations with executives from Google, Apple and Microsoft. These ran concurrently with the technical sessions, and provided an opportunity to hear a strategic presentation and have plenty of time for questions and discussion. I only had time to attend one of these conversations, but will watch the videos of the other two now that I am back from traveling.

The exhibit floor

Campus Technology is not a purely academic conference -- there was a mix of academic and professional presentations, a show floor with vendor booths and an area where vendors made scheduled presentations. The exhibit area was large enough to include many interesting vendors and small enough that I had time to visit all the booths with products I wanted to learn more about -- like the three bears, it was just right.

Videos: I've just scratched the surface. Videos of the keynote sessions, conversation sessions, and featured parallel presentations are online.

Slides: The workshop and presentation slides are also online. Even if there is no video of a session you are interested in, you can download the slides, get a feel for the presentation and contact the author.

Characteristics of today's students

We have discussed the Beloit College Mindset List, which characterizes today's incoming freshman class.

Michael Wesch's video Vision of Students Today is similar, but perhaps a bit darker. The video shows students in a large lecture hall holding up signs stating their characteristics.



Many of the characteristics it portrays have to do with the Internet and its implications and applications. For example:

• I spend 3 1/2 hours a day online.
• I will write 42 pages for class this semester ... and over 500 pages of email
• I will read 8 books this year ... and 2,300 Web pages and 1,281 FaceBook profiles.
• I buy $100 textbooks that I never open.
• I bring my laptop to class, but I'm not working on class stuff.
• I FaceBook through most of my classes.
• This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year.

The video was produced by Wesch and his cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University. Visit their Web site for more information.

Last, but not least, check out this Doonesbury cartoon.