Cloud Sourced
Dropbox, Google Drive, and similar platforms enable students to share, teachers to listen.
By Chris Rogers
In my continued pursuit of diversity in student solutions in the classroom, I have found that the cloud becomes an invaluable tool for both project development and assessment. As teachers, we are trying to get a story—an understanding in our own head—into the heads of our students. That could be the story of how electricity flows, how Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or how to design a robot. We can do this in three ways. One, we can tell them our story. Two, we can show them our story. And three, we can listen to their stories and discuss until our stories align.
For parents who have had teenage kids, we know that simply telling is typically not too effective at getting them to understand our story. However, when teaching kids how to use the table saw, letting them explore on their own can lead to the loss of a finger or two, something that is usually deemed a bad thing. Good teaching is a balance of telling, showing, and listening—a balance that we often forget as teachers, even if, as parents, we learned it long ago. Many students consequently miss out on experiencing a high school or college science class where they are given a chance to have their own opinions and argue for the validity of their scientific thinking, especially if their thinking is counter to the accepted theory.
So where does the cloud step in? I can tell 20, 400, or 3 million people my thinking with equal ease. YouTube has an amazing array of talented teachers explaining their stories. Showing, which for me means including recipe-driven labs or online tutorials, can also scale in proportion to how well defined the steps are. Listening, however, does not scale well. How can someone listen to the thinking of all 3 million viewers? The issue is a problem of size. Obviously, we can no longer rely on the teacher doing all the listening and instead must delegate some of that listening to others. Peer-to-peer listening is one scalable solution that has been successfully employed everywhere from the physics classroom (for example, Eric Mazur’s work at Harvard) to online forums.
If I want students working on different solutions to the same problem, then there is no such thing as cheating. There is no one right answer, so getting students to share their work only improves the work and, by extension, the learning. Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive allow students to easily share work—both the journey and the finished product. Imagine asking your class to program a robot but not defining the programming language or the sensors used. Suddenly, the shared folder contains similar code, but in JavaScript, LabVIEW, MATLAB, and C. Students can go investigate how Carol used the camera to have the robot follow the line while Robert used a light sensor. They can compare the advantages and disadvantages of each sensor or each programming language, or, of course, each robot design. They can even use someone else’s design or code as the beginning of the next assignment, learning as much from each other as from the professor.
The cloud further promotes collaboration through shared online applications. Onshape (www.onshape.com) can have five students designing five different interlocking parts at the same time on the same model. Google Docs facilitates collaboration on lab write-ups, journal articles, and grant proposals. One of my favorite tricks is to use a Google Slides stack for student presentations. It allows us to go seamlessly from one speaker to the next without the need to switch out computers.
Finally, the cloud helps teachers rethink our curriculum. As we move more in the direction of promoting engineering learning for students of all cultural backgrounds and ages, we need to find new ways to make engineering accessible, to integrate it with other subjects, and to link it to different disciplines (see http://ceeo.tufts.edu/research/projectsMEIDC.htm). The cloud can help the instructors just as much as the students. Faculty sharing assessment methods, action research results, classroom activities, and failures and successes help us all improve the learning that is happening in our classrooms.
Today, the cloud can tell a story through a YouTube or Vimeo movie. It can show it with Instructables or online recipes. And it is just starting to listen through forums and shared folders. Companies like Prysm.com are already experimenting with sharing an entire computer desktop. Sharing and collaboration are spilling into the physical world with augmented reality. With the growth of machine learning, one could imagine an exciting (and slightly scary) future where the computer not only facilitates one person listening to another but also listens, questions, and discusses with the learner as well.
Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University. crogers@tufts.edu