03-03-2008
Cognitive Science is FASCINATING
It never fails to amaze me how interesting I find the psychological/cognitive science aspect of education. I barely passed freshman psychology with a “D”.
Today, I stumbled upon this article on hyperlinks and how they effect learning. As I read, I took notes in a new blog post - there’s so much that applies to teaching government documents! Articles like these intrigue me. I know I’m eventually going back to school one of these days… maybe educational psychology will be the track I choose.
Anyway - here are my notes, a little more fleshed out than they were while I was reading.
Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre, Cognitive load in hypertext reading: A review, Computers in Human BehaviorVolume 23, Issue 3, , Including the Special Issue: Avoiding Simplicity, Confronting Complexity: Advances in Designing Powerful Electronic Learning Environments, May 2007, Pages 1616-1641. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDC-4H74M34-1/2/e37cd716e267888b1aa40400779d40f3)
Keywords: Hypertext; Working memory; Reading comprehension, Individual differences
When you’re following a bill through congress, using Lexis Nexis Congressional as your window, you end up following links to pages with more links with pages to even more links. Retaining any sort of notion of where you came from .. breadcrumbs back to the original document you were reading .. is difficult. You have to break your reading of one sequential document to follow links. Deep thinking is not as easy. Being constantly aware of how what you read on a page you arrived at following a link fits into what you were reading before you follow a link is taxing on memory. Mental load is overwhelmed, you drop some of the crumbs, forgetting how this fits into the grand scheme of things.
“Reading and navigating in hypertext are likely to place demands on working memory. Working memory is the set of mental resources that people use to encode, activate, store, and manipulate information while they perform cognitive tasks (Baddeley, 2003). Working memory theories provide a useful way of operationalizing the construct of cognitive load because a common assumption of working memory models is that a limited amount of information can be simultaneously processed (Baddeley and Logie, 1999, Miyake and Shah, 1999 and Sweller et al., 1990). This feature of working memory models corresponds well to the assumption that increases in mental load are associated with reduced performance in hypertext reading.”
On why it gets confusing:
Furthermore, every time a reader chooses to follow an embedded link, the text he or she encounters in node (n + 1) [the next page] potentially functions as an interruption of the ongoing comprehension process. Comprehension involves the development of situation models (described more fully in Section 2.3). Situation models are complex mental representations formed when readers integrate the statements in the text with their knowledge (Kintsch, 1988). To the extent that the text in node (n + 1) is related to and enhances the developing situation model, the interruption may have minimal effect on comprehension. To the extent that the text in a linked node is unrelated to the text in node (n) [the page of origin], disruption of the developing situation model may occur. Furthermore, because the reader will be faced with additional choices when he or she is processing the linked text, that is, to either return to node (n) or possibly to follow other embedded links, the disruption to developing comprehension may be severe.
Fairly straight forward. If the links go somewhere unrelated to what they were reading in the first place, it can be disorienting, and it will not help the reading understand how all of the texts they encounter fits together.
When following links in governmental documents, I feel disoriented. Disorientation experienced by students unused to the links available in congressional materials is explained:
This interference with the comprehension process may be a source of the disorientation that is a commonly reported problem in hypertext reading (Edwards and Hardman, 1989, Miall and Dobson, 2001 and Nielsen, 1990).
Here’s why undergrads are more succeptible:
A strong possibility is that hypertext is only beneficial for learning for some readers. According to the construction integration model, having prior knowledge helps because the reader can connect new information to a structure that already exists in long-term memory. Hence, hypertext readers with high prior knowledge may be better able to process fragments of text that are out of sequence because they can connect each fragment to existing knowledge whereas low-knowledge readers may have no existing structure to help them choose a reading sequence.
Lexis Nexis is hard to use for novice users. Sure, the interface could be part of the problem, but I really think it has to do with the massive amounts of links available. Experiences political scientists understand the way the government works. They appreciate all of the linking Lexis Nexis does to make related bills, votes, hearings and other documents immediately available via an embedded hyperlink. Novices, who may not know who these different documents are related, will only become confused if they follow an embedded link to a document they don’t know how to fit into their mental model of the text. Could we improve gov docs searching for novices by removing ‘related’ links? If the entry point was one specific bill, linking to hearings and votes directly related to that bill but not linking to ‘related’ parallel documents, it would be easier to manage?
These three studies suggest that low-knowledge students benefit from hypertext that transparently conveys the structure of the text content… Hierarchically structured hypertexts may have decreased extraneous cognitive load, producing benefits for the low-knowledge readers by illustrating text structure.
What might help links (hierarchical or not) from being interruptions in the learning / model making process is if they are labeled. Rolling over a link to a committee hearing could explain what a committee hearing is (”click here to read the transcripts of people who spoke about this bill in front of congress”).
The construction integration model can also be applied to conceptualize the role of links in reading. The model developed by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) predicts that the presence of unlabeled links will not aid reading comprehension. A link does not serve to develop the situation model: a link tells merely that more information is available, but not how the linked text is related to other elements of the situation model. The underlined text may be made more salient, but salience alone does not strengthen the relations that are expressed in the situation model. In contrast, the model predicts that labeled links, indicating what type of information is available, might support development of the situation model because labels could alert the reader that the destination information should be incorporated into the current situation model, or that the link leads to a new topic and thus requires the formation of a new situation model.
All in all, a very interesting article. I’m not experienced enough in educational psychology to provide any real criticism, but these studies should inform our library resources when we think about their utility for new users. How can we design our systems to provide links that help students learn how information fits together? How can we avoid providing links that are more distracting than helpful? How do we build tools that are helpful to both new users, experienced users, and everyone in between?
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02-18-2008
MS Word for Dissertations / Publications
When I worked at UM, my responsibilities included doing technology consultations at the Knowledge Navigation Center. When I begin there, I used to dread faculty members or dissertation-writers with horribly messed up Word Documents. Usually they’d come in with obscure publisher requirements or the Rackham Dissertation Formatting Guidelines - they’d need to get their already horribly messed up document into shape.
By the time I left, I loved these patrons - I’ve become so savvy with all the little bugs and issues in Microsoft Word that I can bend it to do my will no matter how messed up a document is when I get it. I enjoyed taking frazzled, frantic patrons and showing them “how Word thinks” so they could not only fix their document, but also use it correctly the next time they wrote a longer document.
We also offered a workshop called “Using Word Effectively for your Dissertation” and a similar one for publication (aimed at faculty). Invariably, people would leave the workshop exclaiming about how much easier it was going to be for them to write their document and get it formatted for their final editing deadlines.
I’m about to teach the same class here at UT Arlington. After checking with the Office of Information Technology (who has their own set of technology workshops, including Word I and Word II) and the Graduate School, there is a need for this technology instruction on campus aimed at writers of dissertations and books.
There’s been a lot of talk about libraries and their role in the scholarly publishing process. UM hired two copyright specialists to talk to faculty about their rights when they publish. Librarians applaud and sometimes lead the charge in developing open access publishing models. Institutional repositories are more often than not initiated from and housed at the library.
Teaching the technical aspects of writing aren’t out of a library’s responsibilities. Just as we are the ones that end up teaching classes on bibliographic management software, so to should we be the ones teaching the technology that enable scholarship.
What kinds of classes could this entail? Adobe Illustrator? I know plenty of history faculty struggle making custom maps for the books they are writing. Digitizing images? How many times has a faculty member struggled to get their digital images into the right resolution and size for their next writing project? Let’s teach them Photoshop!
I also think providing our scholars and researchers with classes that immediately empower them to do new things will be rewarding for not only the scholars themselves, but for the library. Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise your stakeholders with capabilities they don’t expect from the traditional library?
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02-13-2008
Politics 2.0
Part of my new job’s responsibilities include liaisoning with the Political Science department here at UT Arlington. While so many people have gone head first into Politics 2.0, I’m somewhat of a newcomer. In the coming weeks, I’m going to start collecting YouTube videos, blog feeds, … anything I can find that provides an example of political participation with Web 2.0 tools in action.
Being new at this, my first order of business is to see who else has done the same. Anyone out there reading this have a web-bibliography of web 2.0 political sites? I don’t want to provide any political commentary - just a resource list for those researching online political participation.
What an exciting time to become a political science librarian!
Posted by frierson in Politics 2.0 | 1 Comment »
02-12-2008
Lesson Study in (smaller) Libraries
I’m starting a Lesson Study group here at UT Arlington Library. UT Arlington is very, very different than the University of Michigan. Unlike UM, UTA only has 1 main library, 2 branch libraries, and 2 ‘electronic’ libraries - essentially banks of computers with a librarian on hand to assist with research. UM has too many libraries to count, several of them bigger than our own main library here.
The staff is significantly smaller too. At UM, we typically had a group of 8 - 10 regular attendees at our Lesson Study events. Though 24 or 25 people were on the mailing list, time conflicts and attrition of interest kept the group size down to those core 10. That was a good number, though, I think - not too many cooks in the kitchen, and everyone hand a chance to contribute.
Here, I’ve managed to get 13 of us on the mailing list - that’s promising. Our charge will be to make a lesson plan that will help us teach students how to critically evaluate resources. This was chosen over ‘finding journal articles’ and ‘incorporating LibGuides into instruction sessions’. Oddly enough, that topic was the one being done at UM when I left. I remember the discussions we had in finding a focus for our lesson plan - we had trouble nailing down exactly what it was we wanted to teach.
For that reason, I’m glad I get a chance to do it here. I’m interested to see what kinds of perspectives come from our group at UTA. People from all over the libraries have joined our group - those from Information Resources (collection development librarians), Access Services (circulation/interlibrary loan), Information Literacy (instruction librarians who focus on undergrads), and Information Services (my group - the liaison librarians) are all part of it, along with our library assistants.
Many people have already e-mailed me and said ‘I don’t want to teach - I’m not comfortable with that just yet - but I want to help develop it.’ Here’s where we really test our claim that Lesson Study is a way to encourage nervous teachers to give it a shot.
It, hopefully, will also foster a community approach to instruction. UTA is particularly good about this already, I’ve found - it’s really easy to find people here who are willing to let you come watch them teach. It’s encouraged.
Posted by frierson in Lesson Study | 2 Comments »
02-11-2008
From Innovation to Implementation
I recently watched an introductory lecture to a course offered at MIT called “How to Develop ‘Breakthrough’ Products and Services.” It’s offered through MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The professor, Eric von Hippel, spoke about the origin of breakthrough ideas. They don’t come from ideating sessions in darkened conference rooms; they don’t come from company designers explicitly trying to think of something new. They come from users who encounter real-world problems and develop tools to solve those problems.
He goes on to explain that successful companies don’t come up with great innovation themselves; instead, they are good at finding and identifying user-generated innovations and putting them into production.
A good example of innovation is in the products made by the people at the Center for History and New Media. I have heard more history faculty gush about the usefulness of Scribe, and now Zotero (a bibliographic management tool with added note-taking functionality), than you can shake a stick at. I wonder how they developed their ideas for these tools.
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