Meeting IAE Information Needs






 * "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." (Blaise Pascal, almost 400 years ago.)


 * "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." (Thomas H. Huxley; English writer; 1825–1895.)

Introduction
There is lots of information available on the Web. In addition, there are many other sources of information. For example, suppose that you want to know how to improve education. Just ask anybody—they will give their opinion on how to do this. Alternatively, browse current popular newspapers and magazines or search the Web for articles saying what is wrong with our educational system and what we need to do to improve it.

Such opinions and popular press/Web articles are important, but most do little to improve our informal and formal educational systems. We need to think and plan more deeply and carefully. We need to take into consideration things such as:


 * People's accumulated knowledge, experience, and teaching skills. In this IAE-pedia, every person is considered to be both a lifelong learner (a student) and a lifelong teacher, helping themselves and others to learn. The knowledge, skills, and mindsets of people as students and teachers strongly affects efforts to improve our educational systems.


 * The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This is also called the Science of Teaching and Learning. There is a huge and steadily growing accumulation of research and practitioner information about effective teaching and learning practices. Education can be improved through implementation of some of these research-based methods.


 * Our educational goals. The various stakeholder groups vary considerably on the goals they want our informal and formal educational systems to achieve. Often the goals of various groups are at cross purposes with each other.

The goal of Information Age Education is to help improve the quality of education being obtained by students of all ages and throughout the world. The underlying approach is to better empower both students and teachers. This IAE-pedia document explores some approaches to improving education through better meeting the information needs of students and teachers.

Is Shorter Better?
I often make reference to the Blaise Pascal quote given at the beginning of this document. Pascal made significant contributions to the field of mathematics and calculators. While the quote probably communicates well to mathematicians (who like short, concise, "beautiful" proofs) I think it is important to all authors.

Contrast "shorter is better" with a recent experiment I carried out. I am writing about information. I wonder what the Web says about that topic? My 8/24/2016 Google search of the expression information produced about 7.5 trillion results. Hmm. Perhaps Google thinks "more is better."

A reader typically reads with a purpose in mind. If an author knows the reader and the reader's purpose, the author can write to specifically and quickly meet the needs of the reader. The overall reading and learning process can be designed to take a minimal amount of time and effort.

In essence, this situation helps to explain the effectiveness of a student having a well-qualified individual tutor. The individualization helps the student to learn more, better, and faster. High quality, relevant, and immediate feedback all contribute to learning. Even a tutor's quizzical raised eyebrow at a critical point can be really valuable and timely feedback.

I believe that shorter tends to be better when the material presented "hits the nail on its head." Unfortunately, each learner is different. Each learner is constructing new knowledge and understanding based on current and past knowledge and understanding. The writer is not sitting there observing and interacting with the learner. Thus, the writer needs to provide information in a format that has a good chance of fitting the needs of a variety of learners. In addition, it means the learner needs to learn how to learn in less than the ideal of a highly qualified, one-on-one tutor situation.

Thus, quite often shorter is not better. However, there are certainly exceptions to this. I like to make use of pithy quotes in my writings. They are often quite short and convey important ideas and information. For example:


 * "If women are to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things." (Plato, 428-347 B.C.)

The statement itself is short, but makes its point clearly. Unfortunately, many people throughout the world still disagree with it. Notice that the statement comes from an important scholar writing about 2,400 years ago. Both the source and the person are important. Wisdom endures.

Writing Academic Books
I have written many academic books. For many years, I wrote books to cover the content of courses I was teaching or that I thought others should be teaching. In this type of writing, I organize a body of knowledge into a coherent "whole" that I believe will help others to learn the body of knowledge. This "whole" is designed to move the reader up an expertise scale within one or more components of a particular discipline.

Typically, my books starts with a Preface that discusses the intended audience, the purpose, and the prerequisites. It may contain a brief overview of the content and make suggestions to the teacher about how to use the book in a course. Many people think of such a Preface as being aimed just at the teacher, who selects books and other required reading to fit the intended purpose and the students.

However, the Preface is also quite useful to students. It is a good place to look for a match or mismatch between oneself and the content of the book. What does a student do if a book is required reading and there is a large mismatch between the student's background knowledge, skills, and interests from what the book and the course instructor assume? Both the student and the course instructor need to be involved in bridging this difference.

In the typical book that I write, the Preface is followed by an introductory chapter. The chapter reminds the reader of the importance of reading the Preface, and it helps to get all readers "on the same page." That is, it reviews key background materials and ideas that are assumed in the rest of the book. In educationalize, the introductory chapter serves as an advance organizer. It helps move the reader's mind in the direction of the book's content and way of dealing with the content.

Many courses make use of readings, or collections of readings. By and large, it is quite difficult to have a vertically oriented and well-integrated course based solely on readings. The authors of the various readings are each faced by the problem of attempting to interface with the individual readers. The authors typically write their papers without having read the other papers being used in the course. This may even be true when a collection of papers has been especially written for the book.

Thus, a book written for a specific course can have a significant advantage—both to students and their teacher—over a collection of readings. The book written for the course can plot and contain a clear path toward increasing expertise on the part of the students. I believe this is especially important in precollege and lower division college courses, where the course may well be a student's first in-depth study of a particular part of a discipline.

Articles and Snippets
The document you are currently reading can be considered to be an article. It is quite a bit shorter than a book, and it is quite a bit longer than a snippet. Indeed, it contains some snippets, e.g., the quotations from Pascal and Plato.

Articles vary tremendously in terms of their intention. For example, a research article destined for a leading research journal is intended to convey leading edge research information to a relatively limited number of people who have a high level of expertise in the field. They are intrinsically motivated to read and learn from the article. They may well use the information in their own research and teaching.


 * This is an aside. The last two sentences above convey a very important idea. People tend to read research articles because they want to make use of the information they are reading. The information may help them to solve a problem or accomplish a task that is personally important to them.


 * Contrast this with students taking a required course that is of relatively little interest to them. Their goal may to be to pass the course with minimal effort. They are not motivated by having an immediate, professional need to use the information they read for the course.

I read a lot of both print and online magazine articles as well as articles from scholarly publications. Many of the latter are much more like magazine articles than research journal publications. Wikipedia articles tend to lie somewhere between a magazine article and a research article. The Wikipedia contains millions of articles that provide an introduction to a specific topic. These articles assume that the reader can read and has an interest in spending a modest amount of time exploring a relatively specific topic.

The Wikipedia has articles on a huge range of topics, and I find many of them very helpful in my own writing. This means that it contains many articles that relate to my interests in education, teaching theory, learning theory, brain science, math education, computer education, and so on. Essentially, however, almost none of the articles are written specially for a person with my specific interests and background. As I use the Wikipedia, it is up to me to extract the information that I need, interpret it, construct knowledge that fits into what I already know, and then use it to meet my information needs.

The Wikipedia articles are not refereed. While they are screened carefully, they do not go through the type of (blind) peer review process that is used in research journals. Thus, it is up to me as a reader to do the screening and reviewing process, and to make decisions about what to read and whether to believe and build upon what I am reading.

This is a major challenge, and it points to one of the most important ideas in an Information Age education. As more and more information is made readily available to people, a modern education can help people to become proficient in retrieving and using information that will specifically help to meet their individual needs. I like to think in terms of three categories of needs:


 * A need for general knowledge and expertise building, such as can be provided by a course or a book.
 * A more specialized need for information to fit a somewhat specific and personal need, and that can be represented in a self-contained article. Such an article is not course-length oriented.
 * A snippet-oriented need for a small piece of information. This might be contained in a brief quote or a dictionary entry. It might be a fact buried in an article or a book.

Our formal educational system is built around the idea of a course with a book and other materials designed to make the teaching and learning of the course material relatively efficient. I see no signs that semester/quarter course-length units of teaching and learning are going away as we continue to move forward in the Information Age. There is, however, a significant movement toward having parts or all of a course presented via distance learning and/or computer-assisted learning. In all of these cases, the reading materials for a course may well be available in electronic format, perhaps accessible via the Web.

Articles can be an important part of a course at any level. I think of two purposes in making use of articles in a course. First, it gives students practice in learning to retrieve and make use of article-length, relatively self-contained informative documents. This is an important part of a modern education. The "making use" aspect of this includes learning to do personal screening for validity and credibility, and also for relevance.

Articles also often have the characteristic that they are more up-to-date than books and book-length online documents, and often are available at less cost than complete books.

Snippets and Education
I find it very helpful to have a large number of snippets stored in my brain and quickly available for recall. For example, if I happen to be talking about the general topic of computer-assisted learning, it is helpful to recall "Kulik, 1994, meta meta study." This snippet of information serves as a starting point for retrieving additional information from my brain and from the Web. My 8/24/2016 Google search on this snippet produced more than 47 thousand hits.


 * This is an aside. Do you know what a meta study is? How about a meta meta study? One of the advantages of reading on the Web is the ease with which one can pose and answer questions that are personally and immediately relevant.

When I am writing, I take the mental "sounds" in my head and translate them into keystrokes on my word processor. I need to know how to spell the words in order to do this. I think of the spelling of a word as a snippet of information. I also need to be putting the words together into sentences that make sense. This requires knowledge and understanding at far above the spelling level.

That is, the snippets of spelling information are useful, but they are no substitute for the knowledge and understanding of words and meaningful collections of words formed into sentences, paragraphs, and articles. This presents an interesting challenge to our overall educational system and the education of each individual student. How much time and effort should the overall educational system and each individual student spend on learning to spell? How much emphasis should be placed on handwriting, as opposed to time spent in teaching fast keyboarding skills and using a word processor with a good spell checker? Looking toward the near future, should we use time to teach fast keyboarding even as the voice input systems are becoming better and better?

In the "good old days," many business executives had private secretaries who could take dictation and produce nicely formatted, correctly spelled, and grammatically correct documents. We now have quite good voice-input-to-computer systems. I long ago identified a major difficulty with such systems when I read computer transcriptions of speeches I had given. I find it somewhat embarrassing to read these talks today.

Suppose that you want to know the time, day of the week, date of the month, and month of the year. This is a snippet of data (which your brain translates into information) that is quickly retrieved from a digital wristwatch. Retrieval of the data requires reading, while understanding—translating it into useful information—requires considerable education and practice.

The "memorize versus look it up" educational problem varies with the memorizing capabilities, interests, and needs of the individual student. It also varies with the technology available. Thus, this overall problem of deciding what to memorize and what to "know how to look it up" will not go away. Rather, it will become a bigger and bigger challenge to our formal educational systems as information storage and retrieval technology continues its rapid improvement.

Summary

 * "The strongest memory is not as strong as the weakest ink." (Confucius, 551-479 B.C.)


 * "SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores." (Dave Barry, author of many entertaining and amusing books.)


 * "Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors." (Benjamin Franklin.)

The totality of data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and foresight in even just one discipline of study can overwhelm the learning capability of any student. Of course, some people learn more, better, and faster than others. However, even the best of learners cannot begin to learn all that is already known, and to keep up with the pace of accumulation of new data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Thus, every learner is faced with decisions as to what knowledge and skills to learn in advance of needing to actually use the knowledge and skills. Every learner needs to have "just in time" learning capabilities. We know that what constitutes a good educational system varies considerably from individual to individual, and it will continue to change with progress in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). One way to view our current educational system is that it creates a struggle between the individual learner and a system that decides what and how a student should learn, and how this learning should be assessed. It is a system in which the individual learner has relatively little power.

Our educational systems need to readdress this balance of power. One goal of education should be to help students gain a steadily increasing level of expertise in understanding themselves as learners and understanding their own learning needs. Students need to improve their abilities to make appropriate use of the wide range of available aids to storage, processing, retrieval, and use of information to meet their own needs as well as the needs of the society in which they live.

Suggested IAE Resources

 * Computational Thinking.
 * Empowering Learners and Teachers.
 * IAE Lists of Free Online Educational Resources.
 * Information Age.
 * Information Underload and Overload.
 * Minimalism in Education.
 * Quotations Collected by David Moursund.
 * Validity and Credibility of Information.

Author or Authors
The initial version of this document was written by David Moursund.