Time and traffic lights at #lak12

John Fritz's video shows a perfect confirmation of one of the basic pieces of knowledge in learning psychology: if you spend more time on a learning task you'll do better (upto a certain maximum). Why is it so difficult to convince students of this obvious truth? Not so difficult: students choose between study and sport or the pub every day. Some students make wise choices, others succumb to temptations. What interests me most in this context is: how do we seduce students to spend more time? The classic solution was to use force: force them to sit in a classroom for hours, force them to hand in products or to do exams... We all agree that we would prefer not to use force; can force be replaced by a tool that allows students to inspect how much time they spend?
Possible..... It sounds too simple to me, but who knows? 
I think I have higher expectations of something like the traffic lights at Purdue, though, where teachers are involved in specifying what kind of behaviour and performance they expect from students in the course of there unit.

#lak12 OLA o yeah!?

I have enjoyed this week's talk by Simon Buckingham. It is refreshing to hear people talk optimistically about improving education, collaborating over borders, and -very important- empowering learners and teachers. None of that moaning of students are lazy and stupified by games, teachers aren't educated well enough and are only interested in lots of holidays, or there's no money for innovation anyway.....

Inspiring enthusiasm. Thanks!

Last night, awake in bed, I was thinking about using OLA communities to improve education. What is puzzling me is the role of local context.... My fundamental problem is that I just do not think that one way of learning or teaching is better than another, what works for us will not necessarily work for you and vice versa and there are many possible reasons: content, student population, capacity of teachers, available resources, you name it. We do PBL in Maastricht, but I would be the last to say that PBL is the best option everywhere. Taking that thought further I am wondering whether anyone can sensibly interpret an analysis of data without knowing the local context. One of the difficulties of educational research is that research articles almost never contain enough information about the context or concrete implementation of an educational design. Lack of space, but also lack of awareness, probably. Over the last 10 years I have heard quite a number of people trying to bridge that gap by developing educational ontologies.... As far as I know, they've all failed. We just can't get a grip on this. More and more I am inclined to think that it is qualitative research that we need to solve this and not quantitative... Not to say that no quantitative research can be useful, of course.

Will OLA also work for qualitative research data?