Forum Statistics for OU Courses

One thing I like to do is track forum usage statistics, a primitive form of learning analytics. Since we changed to Moodle from FirstClass, I don’t find this very easy. In FirstClass, not only could you do standard types of search on message data, but the read history of each message was also searchable. Combine that with a built-in way to restrict the search to specific conferences, sort the output by conference, user, or date, and group by conference or user, and you could determine all kinds of things. Some of my favourites were:

• Total # of messages posted.
• Total # of unique posters.
• Total # of unique readers contrasted with enrolled students.
• Percentage of posts that were moderators/course news versus students.
• Top ten student posters and % of overall posts they contributed.
• A breakdown of posting activity by logical parts and subparts, e.g. “Block 1″ overall but also “Block 1: Software Support” and “Block 1: Discussion”.

The last one was useful to examine between different presentations when combined with knowledge of total number of students enrolled. It permitted me to see where students had the most problems and collect evidence if, when changes had been made for the following presentation, changes were having a positive effect. You could also see the trends in posting behaviour across cohorts.

Getting at the Data

In theory, some of this information is available in the Moodle logs. I just downloaded the log for one of my past courses I chaired and was surprised to note I could see “add reply” buried amongst the many “view forumng” entries. It’s downloadable as a CSV, so you’d have to roll your own data analysis tools to pull out the relevant bits. There are built-in statistics analysis facilities but they always seemed to be disabled on my courses, making download logs the only real option.

The problem is access to those logs isn’t always available. As a course chair on Moodle 1.x, if the course was “editable”, then the admin tools were visible and the logs could be accessed. My last presentation (2012B, ending May 2012) somehow got into LTS’s update loop and the status/workflow changed back to needing to request access, so the admin links aren’t visible. I was able to hack the URL based on access to another course and get at it but that’s a bit of a pain.

On my Moodle 2.x version course, I can see “Reports” but not a link to logs anywhere. I could edit the course site and back up the content, but perhaps I don’t have the permissions to access the logs. Certainly a typical moderator likely wouldn’t.

What I Do in Moodle

My approach generally in Moodle, regardless of the version, has therefore been very simplistic. I discovered that if I used Safari (but not Firefox) and copied the table listing the threads in a given forum and then pasted that into a spreadsheet, the HTML table’s columns were preserved. I could then have it sum the total number of messages per forum as one of the columns was number of thread posts. This isn’t very automated. I have to do it per forum and copy the totals into an appropriate place and most forums have multiple pages, each of which has to be handled separately.

To Automate Or Not

This is ripe for automation because certain actions are predictable, repeatable, and tedious. It’s the classic story though: do I spend the time trying to write something to automate it or just do it? Which will take less time? In the long run, if you do this yearly and across many courses, then automating it will save you time but there’s that up-front cost.

A tool would also need to have a settings file, probably listing the module’s base URL and containing a list of the forum ID numbers/URLs and names. These are required because every presentation has a different ID and every forum has its own unique ID used to access it. Most modules don’t maintain a page that solely lists only the forums and the number/structure of those forums would vary between different modules. I suggested including names—or at least names I’d like to use to refer to them in reports—because otherwise you have to scrape that off the forum pages too and I’d find shorter ones more useful than the full, formal names.

Another issue to contend with is authentication. I don’t already have code that can sign into the OU and maintain authentication for the session, although I know some people must. Before we had the “Dashboard”, one T320 AL wrote a tool to scrape metadata from the VLE and stored it in a local MySQL database. He then had an interface producing a dashboard for him that was something more than just a list of forums per course with an unread message indicator. I’ve recently heard, however, he gave up on his tool because VLE changes kept breaking it.

Conclusion

Here I am writing about what I should be doing rather than doing it, but the process of thinking about it is always useful. Perhaps someone’s already done some of or all of this? My bet would be on Tony Hirst, but LTS colleagues may have some tools and I just don’t know about them.

However, the music industry has been forced to change. The talent was still scarce, but production and distribution were now abundant. As we know, artists can even easily self-publish and promote, taking that power out of the record industry’s grasping hands. Educational resources are now experiencing the same sort of revolution. It’s suddenly easy for content developers to share their content; it’s the age of abundance.

Weller listed several requisites for the pedagogy of abundance:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Social-based
• Network is valuable
• Crowdsourcing

Looking at that list, it’s very heavily influenced by principles of the Open Source movement and, consequently, the Open Educational Resources movement. That movement was given a huge boost in terms of available content, quality of content, and certainly profile by MIT’s large-scale OpenCourseWare project.

One problem, however, with this model is that, while the content is free to consumers, it’s not free to the producers. In a November 10th Guardian article, author Harriet Swain states that it costs MIT between $10,000 and $15,000 to put material for each course online. She also mentions that Utah State University recently had to freeze its own project after failing to raise an addition $120,000 US/year needed to fund their project. MIT’s project is being paid for—at least partially—with donations and corporate sponsors. I suspect some of that cost is rights clearance for materials and converting courses developed prior to the project to the OpenCourseWare format. If so, the cost should go down as authors are encouraged to make use of free materials and develop in a format appropriate for easy publication via OpenCourseWare. Still, it does demonstrate that producing and disseminating high-quality free content is in itself not necessarily free.

Nevertheless, several institutions, including the Open University, are still committed to producing this content, not to mention countless individuals. Free content that we can remix. reuse, and repurpose fits beautifully and naturally into several of Weller’s suggested models, like resource-based learning and problem-based learning. However, it can also fit into constructivism, communities of practice, and connectivism too, where we’re actively building a shared understanding of materials through exploration and collaboration.

With the glut of content available, it’s easy to drown. Backchannel discussion talked about the need for information filters and crap detection (see Howard Rheingold’s excellent article). With too much choice comes uncertainty and second-guessing, something Barry Schwartz has done some research on. Shared exploration and collaboration works well with the “guide on the side” metaphor, where you have subject expert mentors who help create “paths” through the sea of content, providing an intelligent information filter.

George Siemens mentioned that this was similar to Darken’s (1996) “wayfinder” metaphor from gaming, an apt linkage. This skill is necessary for both learners and mentors, because we’re both in a transition period between scarcity and abundance. The information filtering issue probably won’t be as pronounced or maybe even worth mentioning by subsequent generations. Does that render the pedagogy of abundance a meaningless discussion or concept? I don’t think so, because we’re still talking about ways to promote participatory learning and encourage connected constructivism, regardless of the strategies people use to locate the content needed to do that.

Weller’s presentation ends with three conclusions:

1. There’s nothing in a pedagogy of abundance.
2. There are sufficient theories already; they just need to be recast.
3. None of the existing theories adequately captures the technology and behaviour, so a new theory is required.

Initially, I tended towards two, although I commented during the presentation that many of the suggested pedagogies can be mixed and matched. If you’re mixing and matching, you could end up creating something new, which could potentially make it number three.

Resources and References:

• Darken, R.P. & Sibert, J.L. (1996) ‘Wayfinding Strategies and Behaviors in Large Virtual Worlds’, presented at Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Common Ground, Vancouver, Canada, April 13-18, ACM. pp:142-149.
• Rheingold, H. (2009) ‘Crap Detection 101’, SFGate, blog entry posted June 30, 2009. Accessed November 17, 2009.
• Schwartz, B. (2004) ‘The Tyranny of Choice’, Scientific American, April 2004.
• Schwartz, B (2006) A Paradox of Choice – TED talk by Barry Schwartz
• Swain, H. (2009) ‘Any Student, Any Subject, Anywhere’, The Guardian, News -> Education -> Access to University. Accessed November 10, 2009.
• Weller, M. (2009) A Pedagogy of Abundance slides at Slideshare (with audio track)

Elsheindra (me)

Hello, my name is Michelle Hoyle. By day, I’m a respectable Open University course author, associate lecturer, and course presentation chair. At night, I assume my secret identity: Elsheindra, night elf guild mistress of The One on a European World of Warcraft (WoW) server. You’re probably thinking that massively multiple online role playing games (MMORPGs), like WoW, are just for kids. In fact, according to research (Lenhart et al, 2008; Yee, 2008), only about 20% of WoW players are between the ages of 12 to 19. That means some 80% of players are solid, upstanding citizens of the world. They could be your tutors. They could be your next door neighbours. They could be that person you see walking down the street or buying beef at the butcher’s. World of Warcraft, as of May 2009, was holding steady at 11.5 million active subscribers (Blandeburgo, 2009; Chuang, 2009). That’s over 60% of the online gaming market. It’s the most successful personal computer game ever to be released.

What is it that compels these people to spend around 20 to 24 hours a week (Hagel and Brown, 2009; Yee, 2005) in a virtual world? Is it the killing? Is it the girls? Is it the beautiful scenery? Is it the fantastic fashions? People’s motivations vary, so I can’t give you a universal motivation, but I can reveal something about why I play. I play for three reasons: because I’m a community builder, because I’m a teacher, and because I love to help people. They’re all a bit related. I have spent my life bringing people together and helping them form cohesive, long-lasting communities. It started back in the 1980s with electronic bulletin boards and continues today with World of Warcraft. That’s why I run a guild and co-lead an alliance of guilds.

A guild in World of Warcraft is a collection of people who share things in common. The game gives them some tools for sharing, like a shared chat area, calendar, and a bank in which to store money or items for common use. They usually share a philosophy. My guild, for example, is a social guild with a philosophy of doing random acts of kindness. An allied guild is composed of people together for friendship or fun. When my guild members aren’t out being kind to the other 4000 people on the server, they have each other to group with on small tasks, called quests, like curing sick deer or ridding an area of nasty rabid bears. A guild is also a pool of people with which to go on longer adventures in groups of five for rewards like armour and gold in mazelike environments where there are obstacles to overcome and difficult, large monsters to kill—so-called dungeons. The alliance of guilds I help lead allows smaller social-minded guilds like mine to be able to participate in even larger, more complex adventures that require 10, 25, or 40 people at a time. It is very rewarding to be in a position to enable people to have fun, but at the same time promote learning of important social interaction and problem solving skills.

Where does the learning come from? The learning is, in fact, everywhere in the game. Those 5-person dungeon groups or the larger 25-person groups require leaders to decide on strategy and direct the other people with varied motivations. Some people go to these dungeons only to get better gear. That’s their motivation. Other people go for the feeling of accomplishment in participating in something difficult. When people are there for gear, there can be clashes over who should get it, which requires good interpersonal relationship skills and diplomacy on the part of the group leader. In our guild alliance, we’ve had leaders good at strategy and telling people what to do but with terrible interpersonal skills. That made their adventures not very fun, so people were reluctant to participate. Likewise, running a successful guild over a long period of time requires all manner of leadership and diplomacy skills. WoW is a safe, low-risk environment in which to learn these things and they can transfer into real-world rewards (Brown and Thomas, 2006).

Elsheindra as a healing tree

In order to contribute to a team effectively, people need to learn to play their characters well. Each character has specific abilities. Elsheindra, my character, is a druid healer. She cures people of diseases and poisons and heal their bodies of damage they have taken while fighting. I’ve specialized in being a healer for over four years. I’ve become really, really good at healing by dint of lots of practice and much analysis of how things work. I have pride in my abilities and I love being able to help people in the game in a non-violent fashion, because I was not much interested in hacking and slashing at things. Other people are extremely interested in effectively killing things and devote hours outside of the game to reading about their character’s role and how to improve on it, often in very tiny increments. I’m very willing to share my knowledge and experience with other people and often other very good players are too.

I’ve told you a lot about what kinds of things I do in World of Warcraft and my initial motivations. What I haven’t told you are the things I’ve gained: love, acceptance, friendship, and a Ph.D. project, in order of importance. I’m currently researching what elements in games like WoW contribute to motivation and whether or not that can be transferred effectively into distance learning (Hoyle, 2009a; 2009b). Both feature activities that are a lot of work and, let’s face it, aren’t fun. In World of Warcraft, though, people persist with these difficult, not-fun tasks. I know I’ve persisted in some things because of the friends I’ve made. Those friendships have even transcended the virtual world, with people helping me move from apartment to apartment multiple times, even though they live in a different city.

Basil, my partner

The alliance of guilds I co-run just had a real-life adventure at Bletchley Park and a BBQ at my house afterwards, one of several such successful large-scale events over the years. It’s also not uncommon for some of my guild mates to just come and visit from other parts of the UK or from other countries. One of my guild mates even came along from Denmark to Canada for the summer. Are we just strange misfits? That’s a common perception of gamers. I don’t fit in lots of places but in WoW there’s a place for me, as there is for them, and it’s not just because “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. Finally, “Basil”, my real-life partner, is someone I met in WoW because he was helping me co-lead the alliance of guilds. We’ve been together for over two and a half years. We still play WoW together on a regular basis, although not 20 some hours a week. There’s nothing like a romantic date night with your beloved and 23 other friends.

WoW is like a fairy tale: magic, dragons, true love, fashion, elves, and orcs; but it’s also what I’ve made of it: a place to be myself and to do the things I love to do.

References

Blandeburgo, B. (2009) ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2006) ‘You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!’ Wired, 14.04 [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Chuang, T. (2009) ‘WoW Stuck at 11.5 Million Subscribers; Blizz Focused on StarCraft, Diablo’, OCRegister Blizzard Blog, blog entry posted May 7, 2009. Available from: http://gaming.freedomblogging.com/2009/05/07/wow-stuck-at-115-million-subscribers-blizz-focused-on-starcraft-diablo/2201/ (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hagel, J. & Brown, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [Online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M.A. (2009a) ‘Levelling Lifelong Learning: Annual Progress Review’, E1n1verse, blog entry posted June 7, 2009. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/archives/2009/06/levelling_lifel.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M. (2009b) WoW! Roberts & Susans Game Learning, [online] Slide presentation. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/wow-roberts-and-susans-game-learning-a-look-at-world-of-warcraft-higher-education-learning-and-motivation (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Lenhart, A. et al. (2008) Teens, Video Games, and Civics, Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available from: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted January 11, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

What Do I Know?

A Reflection on Influences

Activity 3 (The Open University n.d.) mentions research by Peter Knight revealing that our experiences as students can significantly influence our teaching practices. This is very reminiscent of the commonly held belief that, try as people might, they often end up behaving like their parents did when they have families of their own. Considering both ideas, they are obviously generalizations that do not always hold true. Anecdotes abound of cases where a student or a child exposed to some very extreme practices rebelled by going to the other end of the extreme. Exposure to negative or adverse practices can make us better people and better teachers, as can exposure to good practices.

Table 1: Practices learned as a student and their effects.

While enumerating my positive or negative teaching practice influences, I realized that adversity has made me a stronger person and I did l learn some important things about teaching while a student (see

Table 1). For example, reading from slides or teaching directly to the book does not add any value to the learning experience because students can do that for themselves; and a lack of enthusiasm from the instructor is clearly communicated to students, resulting in a dismissive, disinterested attitude to the material. The latter might not technically be classified as a “teaching practice”, but its effect is just as important, if not more so, than teaching practice. Enthusiasm and passion can overcome defects in materials and teaching experience, just as learning by doing can.

Table 2: Practices learned as from the Faculty of Technology at the Open University

These are not the strongest influences on my teaching practices, though. Practices at the Open University, which I joined in 2000, have very significantly affected the way I view and practice teaching, even though I had considerable experience and more responsibility at bricks-and-mortar institutions previously. The Faculty of Technology—now the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology— first introduced me to the closely related trio of: monitoring, reflection, and mentoring (see

Table 2). Mentoring is where an associate lecturer is given a more experienced colleague to give advice on practices and culture at the Open University. Monitoring is where another colleague—staff tutor, experienced associate lecturer, or course team member—double marks some of your assignments and provides feedback on how closely you are adhering to the marking guidelines and on the quality of your correspondence tuition. Reflection helps tie these two other practices together. If you think about what you have done and how it has worked or has not worked and you take into account advice and feedback you are being given, you can actively plan ways to improve your practice.

Table 3: Aspects of the Open University that Promote Good Practice

Possibly surprisingly, the biggest personal benefit I derived from mentoring and monitoring was not from receiving it myself but in providing it to others. One of the aspects of the Open University that hinders good practice is the geographical distance between associate lecturers in the same faculty or even on the same course. While the faculty does try to encourage good practice by holding staff development conference (see

Table 3), these are few and far between. Prior to the recent explosion of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk¹, associate lecturers tended to be fairly isolated. The Open University tried to overcome that by having various FirstClass discussion forums, but the opportunity to directly observe the practices of others was non-existent for most associate lecturers due to the digital divide². Seeing and reflecting on the practice of others as a monitor and as a mentor has been extremely rewarding. I highly recommend volunteering to mentor or monitor if you have the opportunity. You can learn as much by teaching others as others learn from your teaching in some cases.

Being in an institution that actively research into good practice is also extremely beneficial. The Open University’s Institute for Educational Technology (IET) is comprised of many individuals who are passionately interested in exploring what makes for good teaching in an online world and how our pedagogical practices can be leveraged through the use of educational technology. That research and expertise eventually makes its way into postgraduate courses that the Open University offers, such as their latest course H810: Accessible Online Learning³. Many of their courses can be taken free of charge by Open University staff to help further their personal development either via a fee waiver or through a staff grant⁴. These are excellent opportunities to explore recent advances or to acquire a firmer pedagogical grounding for existing practice.

Table 4: Aspects of the Open University that Hinder Good Practice

Although the Open University has been very good about encouraging professional development of associate lecturers, in my position as a course chair and content developer I have been exposed to the negative sides of Open University practices (see

Table 4). For example, even on courses delivered completely online, like H812 or TT281, course authors are strongly encouraged to have all the material developed or updated months in advance of the course’s start date. Furthermore, once the course has begun, there is very little opportunity to change any material. That means it cannot be adapted to the needs of the current cohort easily if need be. It is what it is. The production schedule does help ensure quality content but it sacrifices flexibility and situation adaptation as the course unfolds.

Closely related to the lack of flexibility is a factor that Will Swann, Director of Students at the Open University, commented on a year or so ago⁵: course teams tend to be divorced from the learners. Typically a course team develops the content but the learning process is overseen by associate lecturers who, in the current corporate ethos, are not seen as teaching but as supporting learners. Who is teaching the learners then? Nobody! The students, in this model, have no interaction with the course team who developed the content and therefore no contact with any “teachers.” The reality is actually quite different, with many associate lecturers engaging in traditional “teaching” activities. However, perception of the associate lecturer role, while a negative factor, is tangential to the other important issues listed in

Table 4.

Table 5: Other Influences on My Practices

I have not relied solely on the Open University and my own educational experiences to shape my teaching practices. I am also influenced by a community of educational technologists around the world and my own experiences with information processing and learners.

Table 5

outlines some of the other factors I have drawn upon. The first three —forum facilitation, organization, and presentations—have been crucial in molding my approaches to higher online education and content delivery and they are based solely upon active reflection of my own experiences and attempts. The last three reflect my interest in community building and the power of social knowledge. These are the topics underpinning the phenomenal success of a Web 2.0 world with Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia. Like John Seely Brown, I believe there is great potential there for learning and teaching outside the very staid “sage on the stage” model so much in favour still in higher education, which is why I have chosen to work in this area for my D.Phil. research. This is also a topic of interest at the Open University. Martin Weller and Simon Buckingham Shum are involved with the SocialLearn project⁷, which is looking at developing tools to facilitate social learning online.

So where do we go from here? Should we be belittling academics at universities for their poor teaching practices? With the exception of the Open University, which is not a university using a traditional teaching style, it is difficult to be critical of lecturers in higher education, because the vast majority of them, unless they are in a department involved in the teaching of educational principles, have received no training in how to teach. Their practices are the result of what they have been exposed to. The other issue is that universities are also driven by different demands at different times. At the moment, many universities seem driven to improve their research so as to get more research money; as a result, teaching tends to get short-shrifted. There also previously was very little incentive to be good at teaching, at least from the institutions themselves. Even students were fairly resigned to the endless, boring lectures. With the advent of HEFCE monitoring of the “student experience” plus the change to students paying fees, I am hopeful we might see a resurgence of institutionally-supported professional development and accreditation for lecturers in higher education. I recognize that I am lucky to be situated where I am in the Open University, with a wealth of resources and opportunities for improvement and practice available to me.

Footnotes:

1. Twitter and Plurk are so-called “microblogging” sites where you have friends and fans who follow your postings. Postings are extremely short, limited to 140 characters. Facebook is perhaps more well-known, sometimes negatively as people post compromising pictures of themselves that result in lost jobs or denial to universities. Used in a positive way, though, these sites can reduce isolation caused by working in a digital world. Twitter:

http://twitter.com/. Plurk:

/http://www.plurk.com/. FaceBook:

http://www.facebook.com/.

2. The Wikipedia quick and dirty definition of “digital divide” is “the gap between those people with effective access to digital and information technology and those without.” (Wikipedia, 2008). The term originates, as far as I can tell, in a paper reporting the findings from a national survey done in 1996 by James Katz (Katz & Aspden, 1997) contrasting those who have computer and Internet access and those who do not.

Although the Faculty of Technology did not have this problem, I am aware that other faculties at the Open University have been slow to embrace initiatives like the eTMA system, TutorHome, etc., due to a lack of comfort with computers or lack of access in their own personal lives. The OU branch of the UCU (University and College Union) was just recently (October, 2008) conducting a survey of ALs about workload and computer-related conditions and expenses, as I think hard data that is accessible is in short supply.

3. H810: Accessible Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students is currently in its pilot presentation. More information is available from

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

4. Information on course fee waivers is available from

http://www.open.ac.uk/tutors/development/staff-fee-waivers.php. Information on the Associate Lecturer Development Fund can be found at

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

5. Unfortunately, I don’t have a reference to this on hand. I believe I read about it summarized in

Sesame

or another OU publication aimed at staff.

6. The Drupal-based Social Media Classroom is now available for download and use by other educators. It is also being used to build a community of practice, led by Howard Rheingold, around the use of social media in education.

(Accessed October 26, 2008) for more information.

7. The SocialLearn platform is a collection of tools with the intention of making the education system adapt to the learner by leveraging the values and principles found in new social web technologies.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

References:

Brown, John Seely, and Richard P. Adler. 2008. “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.” Educause Review 43(1) :16-32. Available from

(Accessed August 22, 2008).

Katz, James, and Philip Aspden. 1997. “Motivations for and Barriers to Internet Usage: Results of a National Public Opinion Survey.” Internet Research 7(3) :170-188.

The Open University (n.d.) H812-08J: Activity 3:

What Do You Know?

The Open University. Web page.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

Wikipedia (2008.) Digital Divide. Web page.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

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I think this is some interesting research, but obviously not applicable to every learning situation. Physical processes, like volcanos, weather, chemical reactions, etc. are very appropriate for model building. Or maybe I just need to change my understanding of what constitutes a model? For example, I’m teaching students how to program in JavaScript. In a way, a program is sort of like a model and we give students programming projects where they model some kind of answer to a stated problem to demonstrate their understanding of the process. Most students do not implement the solution correctly intially, so they need to refine their understanding of the problem and its solution over several iterations. Failure is forcing them into a state of conceptual change and as they repair their assumptions and their “model” code, they are learning valuable lessons about what works and the process of both developing and fixing. I guess, in fact, I’ve been doing this all along; I just didn’t have a name for it!