5 transferrable tips

Rexi Media founders Dr. Carmen Simon (formerly Carmen Taran) and Danielle Daly  are experts on the science of memorable presentations. They recently shared one of their presentation decks on Slideshare. It's an A to Z look at the subject.

I looked it over because I've attended online webinars that Dr. Simon has delivered and always find the helpful and enlightening. Since I may have to do a webinar someday, I thought I should take a look at what she has to say here. 

It occurred to me as I made my way through the slides, that though intended for people making in-person or webinar type presentations, there are some points that are relevant to online course content built with HTML as well. Here are a few...

"People remember content better if they contribute to it in some way."

Face-to-face or online, this point applies. So, how do you allow your students an opportunity to contribute to the content of your course? If you don't do that now, how might you?

"Present from where they are, not where you are." 

This is not a new concept from a teaching perspective. Check out Chapter 3 in How People Learn by Bransford, Brown and Cocking. You can read it online at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368. They point out the value of building new knowledge on what students already know and can relate to.

 

"The more you invite them to participate, the more memorable the content, because they will remember content over which they have ownership."

Simon makes this point she makes under the letter K, "Know-it-all," where she makes the point that "there are few absolute truths," so let your audience make contributions to your materials. Think about ways you might be able to do this in your course -- face to face or online.

"Attention drops significantly after the first 10 minutes… Vary the pace and format to re-set this starting point."

This is particularly relevant to instructors using video online. I've heard about some instructors who post an entire 2 hour lecture video online for students to watch. That's deadly. Even face to face, it's really hard to maintain a high level of attention to one person speaking without any variation for that long. Think about ways you can break up the information so that something surprising or out of the ordinary happens every 10 minutes or so. The surprise should relate to the content you're presenting and should enhance the learning point being made -- an interesting but little-known fact, for example, or the way a thing looks at a certain stage of development. If you use clickers in your classroom, a quick check for understanding could be the break you need. In a Collaborate session online, a quick survey can accomplish the same thing. The possibilities are endless.

"The audience will forgive you for sub-optimal design, if you offer relevant content that means something to them."

Before you can create content that is meaningful to students, you have to find out what that is. (Refer back up the page to the point about starting where your students are). What are some ways you find out this kind of information now? No doubt your approach with a small class of 20 people differs from what you would use for a large 150+ class. 

I've addressed only 5 of the 26 points made in the Slideshare. So check it out and see if it doesn't trigger some more ideas for you. 

Digital Handwriting

In the office, where I work, we have had several international graduate students. One of them had a story about when she first arrived; she had met with a group of other international students, a community meant to support each other in transitioning to a new culture. She wrote each of them a handwritten note after the meeting, thanking them and inviting them to keep touch and do more, but didn't get a reply.

At a later meeting, filled with the sort of positive camaraderie that made her curious at the lack of response to her note, she asked one of her more friendly acquaintances why he had never replied. The response? He couldn't read cursive handwriting. It turned out that almost no one in the group, international or local, could reliably read cursive.

To my knowledge, we haven't stopped teaching cursive - yet. But there's a certain atrophy that has developed from being accustomed to type-written words.

So I was intrigued by a question posed on The Fox Is Black design blog: "Would it be different to get an email from someone if it was in their own handwriting?"

One of the chief recurring complaints about the "digital world" is how cold and impersonal it can seem. Would it be any different if you used a font of your own handwriting? While there are numerous font creation services out there, one design group has taken this a step further. The group, Underware, developed a custom font for a client that has extensive glyph options depending on where a letter appears - just as someone actually writing would use a different "y" in the middle of a word than would be used at the end of a word.

This whole area is ripe for discussion, but let's focus first on questions suggested by The Fox Is Black website: Would email be different if written in the sender's own handwriting? Extending this question: How would it be different? Would it feel more personal? Would the age-range of the recipient make a difference?

Another angle: Are there any educational benefits to using cursive if it's accomplished by the computer? I can see an argument for a kinesthetic connection if one were actually writing (and we could assume that one must still learn to do this in order to construct one's individual font...), but when we're constructing a font to fit our writing it loses the rigor of an exercise where one writes material down to recall it better. Do the loops and whorls of someone else's (say, a professor's) handwriting serve as any sort of memory aid for you?

Technology will only become more sophisticated, and we already have at least one "intelligent" cursive type-face. This was done primarily as a design artifact, but it certainly could be more. Is this the sort of humanizing touch our digital lives need, or are we needlessly holding on to an obsolete artifact of the past?

New Studying Rules

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

Seems all the advice I got about studying when I was growing up was wrong. I guessed that way back then, but now someone else—with more credibility than I—has uncovered why. The cognitive scientists cited in a recent New York Times article ("Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," by Benedict Carey)  that for motivated students (ah, there's a caveat!) these findings will help children, traditional college students, and adult learners. In a nutshell, they say…

• Studying the same thing in different locations helps people remember the subject better.
• Moving from one aspect of a subject to another in a study session is a good thing. It appears that mixing it up makes it all stick better.
• Self-tests, or quizzes, make things stick better, too.
• Spacing study sessions, a little here, a little there, is more effective than one long session in the same place.

(Interesting side note: Tests may not be the best measurement tools, but they're terrific learning tools.)

Some of what these researchers have to say helps to explain why I never could remember anything I ever tried to study while sitting at a library table. The article is worth checking out. Neal Conan, host of the radio program "Talk of the Nation" held a great conversation with Carey, a colleague who went back to school mid-career, and some call-in listeners about all this. It's at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130728588&sc=nl&cc=es-20101031 if you'd like to listen. The whole program segment is about 30 minutes long. Good listening while you clean your desk next time.

The article also addresses the recently disparaged idea of "learning styles" which will no doubt be controversial in some circles. But that's a subject for another day.