Just last week, after three months of work, I completed my very first knitting project: a frayed baby blanket that was a journey involving many stops and starts, a few more balls of yarn than anticipated, and a great reflection upon how I learn. As a beginning knitting student, learning to hold the needles was laborious and I was convinced there was something wrong with my dexterity, particularly since others encouraged me with "It will get easier!" I often found myself making comments to the knitting experts such as “You’re so fast!” and “How long did it take to do that?”—the very comments posed to me while teaching technology-based workshops. Although my "knitting as learning" metaphor may seem a bit clichéd, my experience as a vulnerable learner was profound and instilled in me a renewed sense of patience and inspiration. In fact, my overall experience in learning to knit—which ultimately did improve, albeit at a tortoise-like pace—exposed me to some key lessons applicable to any adult learning experience.

Lesson 1: Teach skills as they are needed.
Right now, I only know how to execute two knitting stitches and how to cast on in order to begin a project, but I’m okay with the skills I have acquired. I currently have no desire to learn the butterfly stitch, do a heel turn, or make a luxurious après-ski sweater for my cousin. I’m really happy when I’m simply knitting and watching Mad Men on television. I’m content learning a few skills, practicing them, and then moving on to the next skill when I’m good and ready. This leads me to question why, in our technology workshops, we often succumb to the temptation to include every doodad, gadget, and feature available. I think that, as instructional technologists, we know the material so well that it is sometimes hard to put ourselves in the position of the intended audience. We may be guilty of having an underlying impatience to hurry through material so we can get on to what we believe is more interesting and captivating. It’s so much more exciting to go over the glossy multimedia features of a tool rather than focus on the basics, but it is important to teach skills as they are needed.

Lesson 2: Informal learning is critical.
I have joined three different knitting groups and found that meeting like-minded people who are motivated by a common purpose makes the learning experience more exciting. One group was online, and although I was an infrequent guest to the community, it gave me an opportunity to see concepts come together as I built my skill base. Part of the excitement of learning something new is the thrill of making connections between what I already know and what I’m learning. Meeting other people who are going through the same experience helps make these linkages, whether the meeting occurs online or in person. I like the social learning or "guided study group" model of learning new skills and find that informal support systems mixed with formal ways of learning, such as workshops, are effective in learning environments.

Lesson 3: Accept the flaws.
One reason it took me three months to finish my first knitting project was that I had trouble accepting how flawed my knitting was. As I was knitting, I envisioned perfect rows of beautiful stitches; instead, I got loose, big stitches that were uneven, gaping, and frayed. How could I give this blanket to my niece? After a while, I got over this expectation of perfection and embraced my blanket and all of its weird stitches. Likewise, in educational technology, it’s often easy to get wrapped up in perfection and visions of perfectly crafted Edward Tufte-approved PowerPoint presentations. Rather than hide our mistakes, we should embrace them and share more of them. Wouldn’t it be a great learning opportunity to dissect teaching mistakes each quarter so that we might learn from them?

Lesson 4: Don’t be tempted to oblige when someone says, "Please fix this!"
The best part about participating in a knitting group was that, when I dropped four stitches, there was always someone there who could fix it for me. However, when I got home, I had absolutely no clue about how to pick up dropped stitches myself. Some of the mistakes I made drove me to seek out remedies in books and on YouTube. Some mistakes actually never got fixed. Yet a fundamental component of learning is knowing how to fix mistakes. I realize that this process is quite similar in academia. Faculty members want help and, as instructional technologists, we are naturally suited to assist them. However, we aren’t doing them a service by simply fixing things for them. It is actually selfish and might be easier for us because it takes less time than showing them how to do it themselves. Faculty members will appreciate the hands-on experience as well.

Lesson 5: Choices matter.
One of the best aspects of learning to knit is that, even as a beginner, I got to make so many choices based on my level of expertise, such as the types of yarn available to me, the patterns I could select on Ravelry, and the sequence of learning. As my skill level progressed, I was able to choose which stitches I wanted to learn next. Having several options is empowering and makes the learning process much more fun. Too frequently in technology training, faculty members have very few choices. They don’t get to decide what they’ll learn next or the pace at which they learn it. It would be empowering to offer them more selections, thereby providing more individualized training sessions and workshops.

My journey of learning to knit has highlighted various elements essential for an effective adult learning experience. We should provide adult learners with multiple opportunities to explore and try new things, including opportunities to fail and have fun. At DePaul, we’ll have plenty of these chances with our Desire2Learn transition. It will be fine if your course looks like my baby blanket. I just hope it won’t take you three months to complete!

Cross-posted on the CET blog

In the December 10th, 2007, issue of the New Yorker (it takes me a few months to catch up these days), Atul Gawande wrote an eye-opening piece, “The Checklist.” The article describes how the implementation of a simple medical checklist, developed by Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, slashed the rate of oftentimes-lethal intravenous catheter infections for patients in intensive care units in the state of Michigan. How? By including simple, no-brainer steps like “Step One: Doctors must wash their hands with soap” that doctors and hospital staff were skipping, thus causing easily preventable deaths and infections in their intensive care units.

It’s pretty mind boggling. If Dr. Pronovost could actually implement his checklist across the US (easier said than done), it would largely wipe out the multiplier effect of thousands of human error deaths from skipped steps across thousands of diagnostic and procedural combinations. The power of the Gawande article is that it underscores that some of the most basic tools are the most effective ones. The checklist is brilliant in its very simplicity, and I’m sure it can have dramatic applications across all sectors.

Though checklists of all kinds (revising, editing, homework, behavior) can be found in elementary and secondary educational settings, it is harder to find individualized, purposeful use of checklists at the higher ed level. I don’t think the need for them has necessarily diminished. Though students in the online classroom aren’t dying of infections in intensive care units, they are spending unnecessary time getting lost and confused about when and where to submit assignments and are having difficulty managing their time in the absence of face-to-face accountability in the online environment. I hear professors complain about late assignments, ignored e-mails, and work submitted that is hardly reflective of critical thinking.

I think that a greater use of individualized checklists would improve communications between instructor and student and allow students to spend more time on substantive, creative work. In the online classroom, students need specific instructions on how to submit their work and how to participate in online discussions. They need assistance and they need writing papers and guideposts for completing assignments. Instructors provide all of these instructions, but typically in an elaborate course syllabus supplemented with lengthy e-mails in addition to whatever is posted in the course itself. Too frequently, instructors’ e-mail communications to students are lengthy documents that students may barely read all the way through. Professors aren’t joking when they say: “My students don’t read the syllabus,” or, “My students don’t read my e-mail.” They probably don’t. Why not provide students a more direct, simple path to success?

Checklists are simple and direct. They filter out extraneous details and give students a priority list of items to read and do. Checklists could be provided for specific parts of the syllabus. A “Welcome Checklist” supplementing a very brief welcome note from the instructor could replace the traditional long welcome letter from the instructor that tends to contain entirely too much information. Checklists could ensure that students edit and check their papers, properly reflecting on each step. I suspect that instructors would receive an elevated quality of writing, in response to clearer and cleaner communication to students.

I think professors have been reluctant to use checklists because they involve this simplification of language, and so to some extent, instructors may feel checklists would enable students. Instructors expect students taking online courses to be able to read lengthy e-mails and take large tasks (reading and analyzing a case study; writing a paper) and automatically divide and sequence them out into a series of tasks independently.

But I think part of using checklists is adjusting to a need for an entirely simplified way of writing when communicating guidelines and expectations in an online course. We need to give over to this need for simplicity, standardization, and predictability that is not necessarily the standard way of communicating in academia. I think most instructors might be uncomfortable with embracing this format because it involves thinking and writing in a largely different way. Like most instructors, I’ve established a routine that was created before the age of e-mail and Facebook and text messaging. I grew up writing letters by hand, relishing the pure art of correspondence for its own sake. A checklist, in contrast, seems cold, and hardly feels like responsible and full communication. But I believe there is a way we can integrate checklists judiciously. You can still impart tone and personality in your email and your communications with your students, yet not lose them in a sea of verbiage.

I’ll spend the next few weeks integrating a few checklists into the design of the online class, to showcase the checklist as being an important, very low tech tool. I am purposefully keeping fancy checklist/tasklist applications out of it for the moment, though I sometimes feel I have tested out every checklist/tasklist application that exists. This is more about the mindset than the technology. It’s captivatingly simple.

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) recently released its fourth annual research study on the role of technology in student life, which describes their findings of the ways college students use technology and the impact this may have on instruction. In case you don’t want to leaf through the 122-page PDF, you can read Andy Guess’s article in Inside Higher Education for an excellent analysis of the study. But the ECAR report is well worth reading. The tables and stats alone will come in handy for you to whip out at any cocktail party when the discussion turns to “these kids today”.

Researchers found that as suspected, college students are using technology like crazy.

Among the interesting statistics:

• 73% of students have laptops (although half don’t bring them to class)
• Average hours per week on the Internet: 18
• 81.6% of students use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace
• 74.7% have music/video devices
• 85.1% use instant messaging
• 43.1 % accessed a wiki every week
• Over 70% use the Internet (including library databases) for research

This study shows that student use of communication tools such as text messaging, IM, and social networking sites has increased significantly—up 11% since the last study in 2006. Students also make frequent use of Blackboard, email, and discussion boards in their academic work. But although this generation of college students has grown up immersed in these new technologies, they are not ready to abandon real-life human interaction quite yet. Researchers found “themes of skepticism and moderation alongside enthusiasm” among the students regarding the use of technology in courses, noting that 59 percent of students preferred a “moderate rather than extensive use of IT in courses.”

One theme that emerged from the study was that many students found that “the poor use (underuse/overuse/inappropriate use) of technology by faculty detracts from the learning experience.” Complaints included time wasted trying to make equipment work, poorly facilitated discussion boards, and poorly-trained faculty. It is good to know the youth of today are discerning customers. Students won’t buy into the use of technology unless a faculty member can use it well and integrate it meaningfully into the curriculum. Students know that technology alone is no substitute for good teaching practices.

Although student opinion seems to be a bit mixed about the use of technology in the classroom, the overall message of the report is clear: the times are changing and instructors must face the reality that this generation of “digital natives” has grown up with higher expectations for the skillful use of technology and has different ways of learning and accessing information. These new technologies aren’t going away and will just evolve into a Web 3.0 and 4.0 and so on. In the introduction, Harvard professor Chris Dede summarizes the entire state of affairs in one sentence: “Our ways of thinking and knowing, teaching and learning are undergoing a sea change and what is emerging is both rich and strange.” Dede recommends that educators work towards a pedagogical model that fuses the old methods and new, but as this is a bit easier said than done.

The Inside Higher Education article posed some interesting questions regarding the report that I’ve adapted a bit: “How can educators adapt their teaching methods to these emerging technologies? And should they? How are you dealing with this “sea change” and navigating through this ocean of wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, and all things Web 2.0?