You can lead the horse to the water.... Role of curiosity in learning

I saw this report in Scientific American on the role of curiosity in learning.  In a small study, the researchers found how generating curiosity appears to prime the brain for learning.

This provides some evidence for how most educators develop their lesson plans.  One framework is Gagne's 9 events of instruction.  The first step is to "Gain Attention".

Linked to - http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/education/learning-materials/lesson-planning/lessonplanning080.html

Maybe we should relabel this to "Generate Curiosity"?

After all one can lead a horse to the water but we can't make it drink; unless we make it thirsty first!

Tools for Leveraging Open Education Resources

We are experiencing the democratization of education.  There are numerous free and open resources for learning on the Web:

• Khan Academy
• YouTube University
• TEDTalks 

While these sites have terrific videos, they have a limitation inherent to such content; they tend to be linear and difficult to change once published.  In order for them to be more useful to students, the teacher often may want some control over the content so she is not stuck with what the creator of the video created or intended.

• She may want to use only a part of the content of the video, and then link it to another part of another video
• She may want to add some questions or additional content to the video
• She may want her students to create a project that is like a collage - containing parts of videos they find and stitch together.

The good news is that there are now many services that are popping up to help

TedEd has a beta project called Lessons Worth Sharing that allows you to flip a YouTube video and add questions, resources and discussions.  Here is a screenshot of one of the most popular flipped videos

YouTube has a somewhat similar capability to ask questions that pop up during the video.  You can find more information here.

I just found out about Weavly which allows you to do online drag and drop editing and trimming of videos from YouTube and audio from SoundCloud.  You can interpose text to add questions and comments.  

Recently James Sousa of Phoenix College made his fabulous collection of mathematics videos available via Creative Commons by attribution license.  I have looked a some and they appear to be higher quality content than some of the Khan Academy videos with nice graphics, models and animations.  

Looking at one of the videos on Similar and Congruent triangles, I was struck by the questions I had above.  The content starts with basic concepts of congruent triangles and moves on to similar triangles and several numerical exercises.  It then comes to the application of using this to find the height of a building or a tree.  What if the teacher who wants to reuse the video in her class, wants to actually present the practical problem of finding the height of the tree first and then allow the students to think about which math concept would help them solve this?  And then present some clues and then allow them to view the basic concepts if they want?  

Well Weavly can help you do this.  Here is my 10 minute effort on flipping this video.  

You can try out Weavly here.  It is free and does not need a manual to get started.

As more Open Education Resources (OER) become available, educators will need to stay current not just with the OERs but also tools that can help them customize these for their own learners or create projects for learners to customize these for themselves and peers.

Add:

Since I posted this, I found out about Mozilla Popcorn Maker which appears to be a terrific tool.  Here is a clip of a flipped TEDTalk.

Coming full Circle in Google+!

Had an amazing journey today and made me realize how sometimes one can learn so much if you have the right people in your circles on Googe+ (or follow the right people on Twitter).

It started early morning when I saw this post by Dirk Stanley who is a physician and a Chief Medical Information Officer.

I followed the link to his excellent blog where he describes his thoughts on EHRs and alerts.  I 1+'ed is post and went on with my day.  Later I came across this post by Marcius Herbert who is a Computer Science Educator in the UK. The post was about using SMS to persuade learners - linking to an article in the British Journal of Education Technology.  This sounded fascinating as I was aware of the use of SMS in helping patients comply with physician instructions.  

At work I was able to get the full text of the article which used an instrument called MSLQ (motivated strategies for learning questionnaires) and referenced the work of B J Fogg who has done amazing work in the field of motivation or "Behavior Design" at Stanford. The article referenced his book "Persuasive Technology; Using Computers to Change What  We Think and Do"  I perused this and learned about the term he coined, "Captology" and his principles organized under

• Computers as Persuasive Tools
• Computers as Persuasive Media and 
• Computers as Persuasive Social Actors

This was fascinating stuff and I realized how this was so closely related to how we try to design Clinical Decision Support Systems and alerts in Electronic Health Records to try and change physician behavior if they are doing something inappropriate.  

My day had come a full circle!

Infographics: Can they make reading journals easier?

As we struggle with information overload and clinical overload, it is harder to keep up with updates in medical literature.  Several journals are trying to make it easier to scan articles and get the salient points quickly e.g. Annals of Internal Medicine provides a commentary summarizing the practical implications of a study.
My assumption is that most readers scan the abstracts of articles before deciding which ones to read in full.  Appropriate use of graphics can improve comprehension and possibly make this scanning process more efficient.  As the old saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words".  Clearly graphics are very popular as can be seen by the popularity of Infographics and Pinterest.
So I decided to try out a free infographic creation tool Piktochart to create a visual representation of the salient points of a study.

I chose this study from JAMA - because it was the first study that caught my eye in my Google Reader stream after I thought of this idea.  So this is what the abstract looks like:

As you can imagine it took me a few minutes to get the main message of the study.  What if I had seen this infographic instead?  I took all the information from the study abstract.  The only thing I added was the Number Needed to Treat (NNT) that I calculated myself.  

Infographic Created by Neil Mehta

So what do you think?  Does an Infographic make it easier to scan journal articles?  If so, should journals have data visualization experts on their editorial team to help create these?  Should there be standards for creating these e.g. Blue circles for control groups and yellow for intervention groups, etc?