Late Summer

Dansville Balloon Festival

The Purple People Eater was my favorite balloon at the Dansville NY Hot Air Balloon Festival when we visited recently.

Schemas and Adult Learning

Recently I had was telling some of my Facebook friends about my plans for school. Christine Pence, whom I met at a conference a few years ago, asked me this:

Clare Shappee Dygert Christine -- I'm hoping my thesis will be on using ASL as a schema to reduce cognitive load in asynchronous e-learning. Whatcha think?

August 23 at 7:47pm ·

Christine Pence Hmm..could you expand a little on this? Are you thinking about the approaches to learning ASL as in your blog article? http://dygertthinkingoutloud.blogspot.com/2010/08/asl-handshapes-and-schema-learning.html Or, are you thinking about generalizing the design of asynchronous learning content? Do you have a specific academic content environment in mind?

Once I got over the thrill that someone A) read my blog and B)actually thought about it and remembered I had written, I thought about Christine's question.

Schemas (or schemata), as they are discussed in the Memory and Mind chapter, by John P Clapper ("Category Learning as Schema Induction") that I mention in my ASL Hand Shapes and Schema Learning blog post are a little different than what I am considering for my research. They are related, though. Schemas, as John Clapper uses the term, refers to categories of information. Students learn the characteristics of the category and are able to sort new information, determining if the new information is in or out of the category. This corresponds to the "concept" type in my instructional design model. (You can read more than you probably want to know about my model here: http://dygertthinkingoutloud.blogspot.com/2010/01/instructional-design-model.html).

What I would like to investigate in my research is whether or not the structures and grammar of ASL  -- use of signing space, time line, for example -- can be utilized by the graphical presentation of content in asynchronous e-learning as a schema, and would using it as a schema reduce cognitive load and make learning difficult content easier for signing learners.

To get to that question, there are a lot of other questions that have to be answered. How should I measure cognitive load? There seems to be some controversy about that topic. What features of ASL would be most useful to be used as part of a schema? How would that schema translate to graphical presentation of content?

The Chair of the Psychology Department warned me that my research question is more like a dissertation than a thesis.  It does probably have a life-time of work in it. But I think that is a good thing, don't you? If, in the next two years,  I can get the questions listed and understand what work has already been done on this topic, and find an ASL linguist who is willing to work with me, then I will consider the next two years well spent.

Thoughts About Losing My Job

Last Wednesday, July 31, was my last day at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Because of budget reductions, NTID was forced to make budget reductions, and that meant that about half of my team was let go. I was sorry that the Institute decided that 7 of the 9 folks let go had to be from my department, but I wasn't consulted, and it doesn't matter now anyway. What's done is done. Now I will turn my thoughts and energy to the future.

By happy accident, I was just matriculated into a program at RIT -- Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology. What's that? Well, here's what they say on the website:

Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology is the application of psychological principles, knowledge, and research to improve the ability of humans to operate more effectively in a technological society. [Its] research focuses on people's interaction with or involvement with communication, decision making, and computer information systems, work places, energy and transportation systems, medical and health care settings, consumer product design, living environments, etc. The goal is safer, more effective, and more reliable systems through improved understanding of the user's requirements and performance capabilities'

 So, the good news is that, as part of my severance package, I get to go to school for a year on RIT's dime! So, I'm pretty thrilled about that that, as you can imagine. In addition, I can have $1000 for "retraining".  I'm mulling over a few choices. Should I take one of ASTD's certificate programs? And how to choose -- they have many yummy choices! Or should I get the training for PMI and take a shot at a project management certificate? Or maybe Lean Six Sigma? the choices are all tempting. Lucky for me, I get 4 months of career counseling from my friend Deb Koen. I'll be looking to her for some good advice on this choice.

My biggest concern is that I will loose my very hard won sign language skills. Hopefully, I'll be able to volunteer at the RIT American Sign Language and Deaf Culture Center.  I've volunteered, and now am waiting with fingers crossed to see what they might have for me to do.

I'm also looking forward to doing a little more work for the Amitabha Foundation, the non-profit that I serve. We'd like to grow our social media presence, and give more people the opportunity to interact with the good works the Foundation accomplishes. We also are very aware that there are a lot of people who'd like to practice with a Buddhist group, but are living in small towns or far from one of Ayang Rinpoche's practice groups. We'd like to give those folks a way to practice and benefit from teaching retreats. And I'm going to help make that happen.

So, while I would have never quit my job at NTID, and I deeply miss both my team and our clients, I'm excited and energized as I look to the future. I'm sure only good things are ahead, and I can't wait to see what they are!

   
 

How to Run a Terrrible Online Class

I'm taking an online class right now. I'll not mention the teacher, the title of the class, or the school in order to protect the guilty.

But Oh My Lord.

Here is my list of things to do if you want your online class to be completely ineffectual:

1. Ask students to post their opinions weekly, and don't provide any framework or conceptual structure. Their life experience is enough. Oh, and if the students are under 24 and really don't have any life experience, well, they can just say whatever they want.

2. Require everyone to make a certain number of responses. Require that these responses be "substantive." But don't publish any guidelines about what that means.

3. And for heaven's sake do NOT post anything yourself so students would have some sort of a model.

4. When grading homework, do NOT give smart feedback. Simply saying you "don't like" the answer given is more than enough.

5. Likewise, don't publish an answer key for quizzes and tests. Saying responses are right or wrong is more than enough.

6. Don't feel that you should write your own homework assignments. Cutting and pasting from the Web is fine. Intellectual honesty doesn't apply to you.

7. It's not necessary to actually ever teach. No need to waste your time with any webinars or anything. Just writing up the syllabus is enough!

8. Who needs objectives? Even a skills-based course can be evaluated with multiple choice and true/false questions.

Up to now I have not tried to teach any courses as an adjunct, because I had the mistaken notion that I might not be able to do a good job. One thing I've learned in this course is that I am *more* than qualified to teach as an adjunct. So thank you, Professor, at least for that much!

I'm In!

I got it in writing!

Yesterday I got the very exciting news that I've been accepted to the MS program in Applied Experimental Psychology and Engineering at RIT. I am absolutely thrilled. Here's what I said in my Personal Statement:

I’m currently working at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf as the department chair for the Educational Design Resources department. Part of my job is to develop new and novel instructional assets to support the education of deaf students. One project that I’ve been working on is the development of asynchronous e-learning for deaf students.

I am interested in figuring out how to use the features of ASL to inform the graphical presentation of asynchronous e-learning. I think that certain features of ASL will perform as a schema that will reduce cognitive load, and increase retention and knowledge transfer for signing students.

The sad fact is that much of the way instruction is presented is not effective. In order to increase effectiveness of my instruction, from the beginning of my career, I’ve turned to research. And happily, there is a lot of research out there. But it’s about hearing students, not deaf.   So to answer my specific questions, I am going to have to do this research myself.  My hope is that this program will equip me with the tools and venue to discover the answers to my questions so that I can apply what I discover in my instruction.

I am joyful and passionate about my work. I believe that what I am doing will make a material difference in the lives of our students.  It probably sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I really feel that this work will be my legacy in the world – that it will improve how instruction for deaf students is developed.

My work style is flexible and collaborative.  At work I see my primary role as connection maker and obstacle remover. And it’s the same outside of work.

I’ve worked as an instructional designer for fourteen years, developing a wide variety of content for both web and instructor-led instruction. I have thought and written on instructional design topics and cognition. Joining this program is an extension of the work I’ve done up to this point.

The program specifically at RIT is a good fit for several reasons. First, I’m interested in deaf cognition, and NTID is the place to be for that. Second, this is program has a focus on application. I actually want to apply what the results of research to my work. And I’m working here, so the convenience of the location and support of my Chair are indeed factors.

Rhizomatic vs Aborescent

 One of the things I find completely thrilling about being alive is that I learn new things all the time -- concepts that I had absolutely no idea about before, that I didn't know even existed. Recently I heard the term "rhizomatic". I know what a rhizome is in the garden -- it's a way plants propagate. A darn good way to propagate, too. Some of the most difficult plants to wipe out -- mint, false indigo, obedient plant, to name three -- propagate that way. They send out shoots in all directions that start plants that send out shoots in all directions that start plants.

But that's not what this "rhizomatic" means. In this case, it was using the term to describe organization of knowledge. It can be contrasted with an "aborescent" scheme. You know what aborescent means -- it means "tree shaped" and you probably use it to organize things all the time. An aborescent scheme depends on binary decisions and dualistic categories. It is linear.

A rhizomatic scheme is non-hierarchical and is said to be planar. I'm not sure what this looks like yet, but I'm working on it. I think it means that there isn't a single starting point, but there could be unlimited points of entry or exit to content. Does it mean there isn't some sort of a "founding" concept? Is there no status that is associated with being that founding concept? In a tree structure, there is status conferred, either because the first item is oldest and the "father" of all the others, or because of the dualistic nature of the structure, where things are going to devolve to good and bad, right or wrong, eventually.

I am very interested in thinking about rhizomatic structure as it applies to linguistics and language. Spoken English is said to be very linear, but American Sign Language is not. Can ASL be described as rhizomatic in structure? Could it be diagrammed by describing different parts of a particular sign as existing on different planes? Does anyone describe it this way now?

My brain is so accustomed to thinking in a linear, binary way. Even the title of this posting is binary. As a Buddhist, I recognize the limitations of dualistic thought (although just to make that that statement compares dualistic with non-dualistic thought and is dualistic!) Up until now (now, not now) I've had no model (model, no model) to see phenomena (see, not see) as non-dualistic (non-dualistic, dualistic). How can I practice seeing things from a rhizomatic view point?


I'll let you know what I find out! :-)