Where's the show-your-work-for-partial-credit button in MITx?

I stayed up late on Sunday trying to complete the second lab, which--how do I explain i?--involved building a circuit with a set of resistors that produced a certain maximum and minimum output voltage. At one point during the day, I had posted a question in the forum about a concept involved in the problem (the concept of superposition) and some nice people directed me the textbook to read more about it.

But I also came across an answer that included a link to another posting that, I assumed, discussed the concept in more depth. Well, it included a possible answer to the lab. This is another difficulty I have with MITx: avoiding posts that include explicit answers while I am looking for guidance on concepts. I can't unsee those answers, unfortunately.

The Honor Code forbids the posting of answers to graded assignments, but people still post these things. Sometimes people post equations that include every step for solving a problem and only leave out the answer. Really, as a participant in this class, I must keep my own honor code and be judicious when I consult the discussion forum for help with concepts. I phrase questions to make it clear that I just want help understanding a concept.

So my dilemma was whether to use the information I saw--which I would not have understood on my own--or go back to trying the lab by myself. After my poor wife stayed up trying to help me, I decided to give up and take the 0. They drop the two lowest lab scores anyway.

Still, this got me thinking about how MITx does not allow partial credit. I had tried out several different possible answers, and was able to get the correct minimum output voltage. Shouldn't that count for something? The circuit is either correct or incorrect. Perhaps this is a feature of large, free online courses: there aren't the teachers who can scan through thousands of answers to see if the answer deserves partial credit. But I can't help but wonder why it is helpful for students to get a perfect score on a lab or no points at all. Could the labs be broken into several steps in which students could receive credit for completing part of the system correctly?

Today, I looked up the answer to the lab and then posted a question in the discussion forum about the circuit diagram. In ten minutes, I had received two answers from people, and I think I understand my mistake now. And this is what I wanted all the time.

Week 2 in MITx: Feedback in the System

So homework 2 has proved to be quite a bit more difficult. There is no easy question like there was in the first homework. Now I must apply the Thevenin Method to solve a circuit with input and output voltages. Never did I think turning on the light could be so complicated (it actually is probably a simple circuit). Today, my iron broke and I briefly thought about trying to take it apart to find the problem. But I'll probably just get to Target for a new one.

What is the best kind of feedback that you can receive in a massive online course? Lately, I get the red "x" a ton as, there's no denying it, I have a harder time in the class. (Reminder: your answers are assessed immediately by the system: green check means yay!, red x means grr.) The red X propels me to keep studying…I try to think of it as x marks the spot you need to study more.

Feedback has been studied extensively--a significant meta-analysis of feedback was published in 2007 that indicated that cues had the highest effect size. Simple praise had a very small effect size. And feedback about a correct answer had a greater effect size than feedback about incorrect answer--this is particularly difficult feedback to get in a large online course in which I sometimes don't fully understand the answers I'm getting.

The research says to seek out cues, and I could use more cues in my work in MITx. I seem to be able to find them by consulting the discussion forum at just the right time, with a posting that does not give away the entire answer.

More thoughts about peer tutoring in MITx. I posted my first question (about how to identify parallel resistors) and shortly received several responses. In the system, I was able to choose the correct answer--and I was gratified to see that I could choose more than one correct answer. This system of allowing people to accept answers helps to close discussion threads that might continue even after they are useful to people. Being able to accept more than one answer shows that MITx values multiple perspectives and different ways of explaining a concept.

MITx Homework 1 and Lab 1 are finished. Whew.

his weekend I finished both the first homework and the first lab, and I received perfect scores on both. This was not without a lot of work, and several late nights while I scoured the textbook, scribbled circuits and formulas all over sheets of paper, and checked the discussion forum for hints on ways to solve the more difficult problems. Just an hour from the deadline, I am starting to see posts from people who want others to post answers in the discussion forum. In response, the staff or other users with enough karma points are closing those threads or reminding people that homework answers cannot be posted in the discussion forum.

Just a reminder: in MITx, the homeworks are online. When you solve a problem, you type the answer into a box, press the "check" button, and--if you're correct--you see a green checkmark beside the field. Some problems are so hard that I do small dances whenever I can get that green checkmark to show up. Most of the time I get the red X, which means, "Try again." The problems have several parts, so you need to get that first answer correct so that it can be plugged into another equation and then your answers fall like dominoes (well, like slowly falling dominoes).

I am grateful, most of all, that the course (so far) has not required any math that is more complicated than algebra. If anything, the problems are hard because you develop a lot of independent equations for different variables (voltage, resistance, current) that you can solve for by a process of substitution. The homework took me a long time--at least 5-10 hours over several days, I think. A lot of my learning seems to happen in the constant process of trial and error--coming up with equations, solving for values, trying out the result.

I have learned that one weakness in the system is that I have gotten several answers by just changing the sign of the value I entered in the box. For this reason, I am still pretty weak on identifying whether currents associated with voltage sources are positive or negative. I have changed x to -x and gone from wrong to right, but I still don't know why I was wrong the first time.

I find that I do get many of the equations or heuristics for solving circuits from the lectures or reading, but the discussion forums contain nuggets of information that I need for solving questions. I look for posts that contain a possible way of thinking about a problem without actually solving the problem. That is hard because part of me just wants the answer.

I am holding my breath that I can continue to succeed despite not having the prereq--I fear that Coulomb's law and electric fields are stalking me in the magnetosphere. But the assumptions of the lumped matter discipline have created a "playground," as the professor calls it, that make things simple (though not easy).

When I checked my grade, I saw that I have earned 3% of the final grade. That 3% is going to be polished and put in a case.

Creating My Own ZPD?

How hard it is to not just look up answers! In the practice problems, there are links to the discussion forum where people put up the answers to people's questions. Today I was working on a problem involving Kirchhoff's laws, and I was unsure about the sign that should be applied to a specific voltage for different elements in the circuit. I thought I'd go to the forum and read about signs of voltages, but the page I landed on had the answer front and center. I tried to look away--was that the answer I saw? It was. I put it in and it helped me think about the rest of the problem--for which I needed to keep myself from looking at the rest of the answers.

I did see that one of the T.A.'s posted a response asking people not to post answers in the discussion forums. And by the way, there are some really smart people posting answers; I wonder how many people taking this class have already passed a similar course at another institution.

After seeing the answer I returned to the problem, and began trying out answers. Eventually, I went back to the textbook and read about how to assign the correct sign to a voltage when I am examining elements in a loop. This gave me the key I needed to answer the rest of the questions about how to solve for different elements in the circuit.

I know that some struggling is part of the learning--necessary for keeping that development moving along, to crudely paraphrase Vygotsky. But in MITx, I know that the answers are not far away. It's as easy for me to find the answer as it is to check e-mail. With some fortitude, I was able to figure out the rest of the answers. This makes me think about the zone of proximal development and how this zone is defined in activity when my "more knowledgeable peer" is the online textbook, or a post in a discussion forum. The particular difficulty I have is determining exactly what I don't know, or (in other words) my potential level of development and the right activities for developing a conception that is closer to my potential level. In MITx, I am painfully aware of my actual level of development and am grateful for the tips

How is my understanding of circuits changing--I am learning more about resistance and the different kind of elements within a lumped circuit. It really is simplified by Kirchoff's Laws that turn circuits into junior high math problems, provided you can figure out where to put the sign on currents and voltages, which I am learning to do, though very slowly.

Into the First Unit

It's amazing how far I can get by understanding basic relationships in equations. Such as, I have no idea what a linear resistor, but when I'm asked to identify a graph of current over voltage, I know that an independent current will only have one value on the y axis. I find that this kind of deduction is getting me by quite well so far. So far the equations I'm using are linear expressions, thankfully. One smart thing that MITx does: they demarcate the video lectures according to where there is a question that I'm supposed to spend time thinking about. For example, the professor has an empty graph and asks me what I think a relationship will look like. The video ends and I'm supposed to start the next one when I'm ready to go. Below each exercise is a link to a discussion forum where I may post questions or read answers to other questions. Please note: open these links in a new tab. These discussion forums are really helping me understand the concepts behind power entering a circuit. Did I also mention that I'm very aware of my point values, how many points I do or don't have? When the professor was recording his lecture, his dog was barking. I can't say why that makes me feel better about this class: if he has a dog, he probably tolerates people that make the same mistake over and over.

My progress on MITx: Lab Tutorial

Today I worked on the lab tutorial in which you practice using a tool that lets you build and test circuits. It's a point-and-click interface in which you drag and drop things like voltage sources and resistors. The cool thing is that the system tests the circuit and displays the values of resistance. I don't really know much about circuits, but I was able to build the one based on the copy that the system provided. Currently, my conception of a circuit is that it is a device that supplies electrical current to a simple or complex machine, but I may be very wrong about that. I found the total resistance and the current flowing from the positive to negative.

The next few problems in the lab tutorial seem harder, and I will likely take a while to answer them. I have noticed that there is a lot of help in the discussion forums, if I can find the right answer to my question. I have gotten better at using the labels to find answers. (Although sometimes someone posts something weird, such as a question about why the Apple store is down. The moderators shut that one down pretty quick.)

On a side note, I recently received the badge of "Teacher" because I answered someone's question about the function of the check button. This seems more like a "Teaching Assistant" function, but I find myself pleased to have received this acknowledgement. Also, it is nice to help someone else who is working on the course.

While I'm doing this, I keep asking myself what I'm learning, and so far I think I'm learning more about how to operate the interface. Of course, this is very important.

Diss Progress

Today I met with co-researcher. Discussed codes and beginning of process went very well. He has 040129 and 040103's texts and will get the rest in two weeks.

Stats and Diss

Today am trying to analyze another writing center student's revision work. Got 97 on stats exam. Maybe I have a new calling?

NCPTW Fun

I enjoyed this conference immensely and went to several excellent presentations. One was a presentation about how peer tutors receive training from librarians in how to help students with research projects. The peer tutors conduct reference interviews and can work with students on the research and writing processes. Very cool stuff. I really think this model of peer tutoring is exceptional because it recognizes the interconnectedness of the research and writing processes and helps students get beyond thinking that one simply precedes the other.

A WC director and one of her tutors presented the results of a survey of faculty that indicated that although faculty value in student writing many of the same aspects that WC tutors value, they often don't consider the WC as a place to get help with those concerns (organization, development of ideas, thesis). It indicated that more communication needs to happen between the WC and faculty.

Throughout the conference there were discussions about the extent to which peer tutors serve as "informants" on the practices of certain instructors. Senior peer tutors know which professors want good thesis statements and which ones want particular fonts. Should peer tutors mediate instructors' expectations of students? Hmm...

The conference organizers chose the concept of leadership and many presenters emphasized how peer tutors can take leadership roles through activities such as developing tutor training programs. One peer tutor talked about how her WC uses recorded conferences to discuss ways to improve conferences.

I attended a good presentation by students and tutors who discussed L2 writers in the WC. A student presented about how she improved writing by working closely with a tutor and yet insisted to others that she will always "write with an accent." She realized that writing well did not mean making her "sound" like a native speaker. Tutors discussed the difficulties that are inherent in tutoring L2 writers and how to navigate them.

Inelegant Variation

A recent conversation reminded me of Fowler's concept of "elegant variation" that today is known as "inelegant variation"--the practice of substituting an awkward word or phrase to avoid repeating a word or phrase in a sentence. In Fowler's day, "elegant" was a pejorative term. Since the word now has a positive meaning, his concept has been renamed. See this headline from Austin American Statesman that Garner cites: "Victim's Family Can Witness Death of Loved One's Killer." The reader must stop to consider whether "Victim" and "Loved One" refer to the same person. (Garner recommends dropping "Victim's.")

Revisiting Vygotsky and the Forbidden Colors Task

It is fun to read the work of researchers who revisit studies conducted by big-name people in our field of learning theory. In this case someone as returned to study conducted by Leontiev that Vygotsky interpreted.

Recently I came across an article that challenges Vygotsky's conclusions about Leontiev's Forbidden Colors Task--conclusions that are included in Mind in Society. In the Forbidden Colors Task, children of different ages were asked 18 questions in four separate tasks. In the first task, the children were asked the questions; in the second, the children were told two color words that they could not use in their answers. The third task included the same constraint as the second task, but the children were also given nine colored cards to aid them. The fourth task was similar to the third.

What were the results? In short, the elementary-aged children made the same number of errors with and without the cards. Older children (8-9 years) had fewer errors when they could use the cards. Vygotsky believed that the results showed three separate stages of development: in the preschool stage, the child could not organize the external tools (the colored cards) to help with the task. In other words, their answers were not mediated by the external tools. Older children were able to use the external tools to mediate their answers, and adults could use internal tools (psychological tools) to mediate their answers.

When van der Veer replicated the study, he added an instruction phase after the fourth task.
The instruction was in both how to use the cards and how to use verbal strategies in the tasks (such as giving "funny" answers, as in the sky is pink). The number of errors severely dropped for all children after the instruction phase, but a closer analysis showed that there was no relation between errors and card use. Thus, the verbal strategy played a an important role. Van der veer also concluded that it is probably wrong to assume that the older children exclusively relied on the external tools--they most certainly brought internal strategies to the task as well. So does this call into question the simplicity of the non-mediated - external tools - internal tools trajectory of development? It is possible that the children in Leontiev's study relied more on the cards because they weren't given instruction in verbal strategies, but Van der veer seems to believe that Leontiev's study was probably not a good one for studying internalization....

Language, without its outward garb...

is thought, according to Sapir. From Language: "thought is nothing but language denuded of its outward garb." (223)

And he defines language. (Who is bold enough to do that?) "Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols." (8)

More on Language

Talking about the language of the writing conference: a lot is said during a writing conference, but very little is done in terms of revision. Or perhaps I never noticed that talking about language changes requires a lot of, well, talking.

In the conference I am transcribing now (with 30) there is a lot talk about the lab procedures, the particular tasks they carried out and the correct way to report those results. The tutor is experienced and provides a lot of guidance about what the correct way to to this is. So much about a conference is correctness, the desire to bring things in line, not to push things out of line. At this stage, though, this is what they wanted. And the conversation is about how to bring ideas into alignment with what is expected of them.

I can't think of a time when they reject the advice, except for a time when an idea was expressed and the consultant was suggesting a different phrasing for that idea. Sometimes the consultant stays out of the process of re-phrasing and lets the students figure it out for themselves.

readings

After reading the William's article, I am interested more in examining the relationship between time, the tutorial, and the revision. Williams piece is wonderful and I think that my research study could build on it. However, she has a clear method for measuring revision and I don't have that. There are several things that I just have not been able to

Getting through the PhD

Things I learned at the panel on the last year of being a graduate student:

Take resume to WCogBeh for feedback.
Make sure you look at the calendar and carve out time for the professional conferences. The application will require three publications so make sure you have some good writing for your app. (You may include a cover letter to explain the contexts of the papers.)
Ask the question (at interview): What does a successful candidate for tenure look like?
Budget for the last year (lots of printing expenses).
The defense of the proposal is more important than the thesis defense.
Make sure you talk to everyone on your committee--not everyone needs to read things, but you should be willing to talk to people about what you are doing.
Finish the dissertation before you take the job--do not go in ABD unless you must.
Go to job talks here and learn about them.
You need to think about the letters that people will write about you when you choose people for your committee.

A break from academics...

I went to Hawaii for my cousin's wedding and had the opportunity to go snorkeling at Waikiki Beach where I saw many varieties of tropical fish, including surgeonfish, butterfly fish, Golden Butterfly Fish, Reef Triggerfish, Parrotfish, Cornet fish, and Unicorn fish.

What was really fantastic was how so many different kinds of fish were swimming together over the reefs. I regularly saw parrotfish with butterfly fish and triggerfish. For some reason, the triggerfish were often alone, swimming far away from other groups of fish.

Comps Preparation

I have been doing more reading about the teaching of composition since my syllabus will focus on teaching writing teachers. A daunting task, in some respects. What are all of the things that they need to practice doing so that they feel able and ready in the classroom. Surely, there are some skills: responding to student writing and creating assignments that facilitate student learning are two.

As to commenting on student writing, the article that many people mention is the one by Nancy Sommers that paints the then-current situation in a negative light: teachers appropriate student writing, provide confusing comments that simultaneously ask students to fix local problems and make global revisions, and give advice that is vague and interchangeable with other student papers.

So these are things to avoid. Noted.

Who vs. Whom (or Why Yoda Would Want to Keep Whom)

Who vs. Whom (or Why Yoda Would Want to Keep Whom)

Edward Sapir tells us that we don’t “chafe” at using sentences like “Whom did you see?” “without reason.” We hesitate to use “whom” in an interrogative sentence. Other relative and interrogative pronouns (which, what, that) do not differentiate between objective and subjective forms. “Whom,” then, seems to hint at a pattern that is not shared by words it would appear to be related to. One solution is to get rid of whom because the who/whom relationship is not found in which/what/that. Got it? Well, remember the scene in The Princess Bride when Wesley is insulting Prince Humperdink and telling him all the horrible—oops, I mean horrific—acts of mutilation and torture that he will inflict on the Prince? Wesley goes on and on…much like I’m about to do here.

The other reason why “whom” feels wrong to us is because of its relationship to interrogative adverbs such as how, when, and where. These, too, are not inflected and always possess the same outer form. Sapir thought that the tendency in interrogatives was to be constant and uninflected. Another reason why we should banish the whom. But wait…there’s another reason for abandoning whom: the difference between the subjective and objective pronouns is directly related to differences in position. E.g., we say “I saw him” and “He saw me”, but we don’t say “Him he saw.” (Sapir argues that constructions like “Him told he” are archaic and poetic and “against the drift of the language.” And in the interrogative sense, we never say, “Him did you see?” (Unless you’re Yoda.) Again, Sapir: “It is only in sentences of the type ‘Whom did you see?’ that an inflected objective before the verb is used at all.” Whom is needed, though, because the interrogative pronoun must come at the beginning of the sentence—e.g., “Where did you go?” or “When will you be here?” Thus, the solution to this conundrum is to keep the interrogative at the beginning of the sentence and not inflect it so that it is more in step with the prevailing patterns of the language. Thus, Who did you see? is where the language is headed, and not without good reasons.

Sapir is awesome.

April 4

April 4, 2008
The first presentation I attended was about assessing writing centers, teaching information literacy in the writing center, and designing a writing program that covers about three years. I was introduced to Zotero, a FireFox extension that enables users to save sources. Stanford University has actually created their own browser toolbar that students can install. It lets them access the university catalog and databases (it is called FastJack). I think it's cool that the university has developed its own browser add-in that lets students always have access to materials.

One of the presenters discussed bigthink.com, which is trying to be the academic YouTube.

One of the best presentations I have been to was the one about using "This I Believe" radio essays to teach composition. The outreach director of "This I Believe" was at this presentation, and she talked about how the show was started. I guess the producer at NPR was also thinking about reviving "This I Believe" and approved the proposal soon after he received it. I also met Cole Bennett, who with a colleague developed a curriculum that is on the "This I Believe" website. Their curriculum is very popular and might be sold through iTunes. Bennett discussed the advantages of teaching students to compose radio essays, emphasizing that they teach students to establish ethos and make their private identities public by finding ways to appeal to an audience. Bennett said that they are going to be collaborating more with the communication department in the future.

More conference stuff...

Today several of the presenters discussed the need for more research that is replicable, aggregable, and data-driven. This means that compositionists are adopting more quantitative measures to analyze, for example, the effects of testing on student writers. One panel presented data that showed that ESL students perform less well on on timed writing exams than students whose native language is English. (This isn't really new. We've known for a while that minorities and students from economically disadvantaged households struggle with standardized tests.)

Other observations about technology at this conference. There is discussion about having students create multi-modal texts. One instructor had his students create a Facebook page for Saddam Hussein. I don’t why I think that that is really funny. One presenter discussed a student who resisted the assignments and could not understand the assignment’s relevance to his education. The presenter discussed ways of making these assignments relevant by discussing concepts such as audience. Clearly more and more junior faculty are talking about multimodal literacies and ways that we can teach students to examine the potential these technologies have for communication.