An Interview with Brian Doig
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Doig” refers to Brian Doig)
Inter:	I’m interviewing a lecturer Brian Doig a lecturer in Maths education in the faculty of education. Brian is going to be talking about some online components in his unit in particular using assessment as a strategic tool for learning. Can we start Brian by having you talk about your philosophical rationale for this approach and perhaps what influences has led you to do this.
Doig:	O.K. not so much philosophical rationale maybe perhaps pragmatic rationale is the students’ extreme focus on the assessment. If not being assessed, they’re not interested, this has got to be, if its on the exam paper, that type of thing, so what I wanted to do was to integrate the assessment in a way that meant that whatever the assessment was, what they did for assessment contributed to the tutorials, the lectures directly and not just run in sort of parallel to the end of semester. They did something and got a tick and graded or whatever along those lines. But actually work on things that were enhancing what was going on within the tutorials and lectures and the type of work we are doing in this unit, which is about young children’s learning and the development of their mathematics. I wanted them to come face to face with some young children and actually meet them, talk to them and find out about their mathematical development rather than just have it from books or video tapes.
Inter:	Why did you become involved in developing digital components in your unit?
Doig:	O.K. when I started last year at Deakin there had already been a history of students in this particular unit or similar units, going out and interviewing children in schools and then coming back and writing up some sort of essay on what they discovered or thought they had discovered in this interview process. And it struck me that if I interviewed two children or one child I get a snapshot of those 1 or 2 kids and that’s about it. To see notions of development, the range of differences across children you need to be able to view more than 1 or 2 children. So what I thought about was that since we have 170 odd 180 students, if somehow they all could contribute their interviews into some sort of pool where everyone could share the entire lets say, 600 interviews then we're in a position to look at variations across year levels, variations within year levels and so on and so forth. So I talked to my colleagues in the unit and we restructured the whole set of assessments in such a way that teams would contribute their own two interviews, so you had 8 interviews running across preps, 1’s, 2’s and 3’s so we had a longitudinal look if you like, at what happens over four years and the students would then have to present a combined report on what they discovered, in a format that all the other students could access. And so we proposed posters where we could actually share the other people’s deliberations and their data by reading posters and that makes it pretty immediate. But then we’ve got more assessment than was required, it used to be something tangential and I thought it might be useful if we used digital means to capture everyone’s interviews so they, the students, would type data into and I think a web site was the best way to go and then I used all those interviews and created four virtual classrooms, so I just randomly selected less say 28, 30 preps, their interviews, their data and made that a prep class. And the same for a year 1 year 2 year 3 and then all the students were able to access and select a prep or 1 or 2 or whatever class they fancied and then act as the teacher who’d interviewed all these children 28 or 30 of them, had the data and was now faced with making sense of a lot of the mathematical needs for these kids. This is my class what are we going to do? Now in reality they will be doing this except they won’t have the luxury of sitting back and having you know six weeks to do it in as an assignment, it will be a matter of they will have to interview and do the stuff on the run in a classroom with real children. So it puts them in the position of being in the professional position of a prep 1, 2 teacher, gives them practice at it and integrates what they have to think what are the kids needs. So they will look at the curriculum, they have to look at how children learn and so on and so forth and they get to see that within one class the variation might be greater than between classes and so on. So the key to doing this was to having the data entered electronically in a format that was easy for me to play around with and produce these virtual classrooms. The kids are real but the classroom is virtual obviously and then the students can pick this back up off electronically so they can then resort the data and check what’s happening in their virtual classroom.
Inter:	O.K. so that your students are looking at a virtual classroom.
Doig:	Hmmm.
Inter:	So can you just comment a little bit further on how you integrate the online stuff with the on campus classroom activities.
Doig:	O.K. well in the first part; the first assessment if you like which is interviewing children and working as a team and working out what’s happened between prep and year 3 and presenting that as a poster. The only online aspect of that is the entry of the interview data onto a web site. And that’s sort of a hurdle requirement as part of the first assessment so the interview is much the same as it has been in other years except that we’re now working with teams of four, so they have to argue that my preps did this and your year one did this and let’s see what does that means over the four years of the early years in schools. And that brings them directly in contact with the literature and lecture/tutorial materials which is about children’s development over that period, so they're actually seeing it a longitudinal slice by combining their interviews. But once we’ve got or I’ve got the data online and tucked away, it then means that we can make these virtual classrooms which allows them to be very much in the teacher role, and they're faced with looking at the single year level and variations there. And of course this may seem a bit oblique but one of the things because they have been interviewing children they feel that they own this data, it might be virtual classrooms but it maybe that one of these interviews, one of the children is one of theirs, it’s a real ownership thing which I hadn’t planned on but the students get really quite possessive of their virtual classes. And I get complaints that I interviewed a year 1 and it’s not there, my interviews not there and I say well 90 others did it, it’s a random collection but they get, it’s interesting how they get engaged if you like, with the whole notion of this is their class, what are the children’s needs, and it really does drive the assessment in a sensible direction and the students see it being connected to real teaching, real life because this is what teachers are doing not in electronically, but certainly having to deal with kids, 30 kids with a range of experiences and backgrounds and it just seems to be a sensible thing if we’re going to be doing all this interviewing, why would you write up an essay on the two kids you have interviewed and then throw it away. It just seems sensible to be able to make use of this and the facilities that the electronic networks offer us.
Inter:	You use the web form and the spreadsheet in some way, can you just explain how you do that.
Doig:	O.K. the web forms for the data entries, its pretty standard, you have all the questions on the interview, and text entry sections where the students type in whatever the responses the children that they interview, their responses, and then that is taken off the data base, I think usually as a csv file but I mean it’s immaterial put it into Excel, sort it a bit to check, some children don’t cooperate terribly well, maybe answer 6 questions out of 50 so delete some of those just to get it down to a sensible collection of data. So the students don’t have to work too hard at making sense of what’s going on. And then I say well o.k. 14 boys, 16 girls, that 30 kids that’s enough, change names if necessary, if the name is unique the possibility of identification, if someone becomes a Maryanne or something a bit more trivial. But apart from that, the rest of the data is as is and the students then have to deal with that, I provide for them in Excel, which is very revealing, they all claim that they’ve been there done that, but the range of experience and expertise is from very very novice through to quite expert. It’s really quite interesting, you would not want to make assumptions, they can use Excel. Students seem in the main to find the engagement, comments like; this is the best assignment I've ever done, but it was really bad because I spent more time working on this than; you know it was a lot harder, took more time, but it’s like being a teacher, we're doing real stuff.
Inter:	You’ve touched on some of the experiences you’ve had and some that the students have had. Could you elaborate a little bit on that and also talk about what impact you think this approach has had on students learning?
Doig:	It’s a bit difficult for me to say in some senses because I've run this twice now and I haven’t had these students in this sort of situation for about 14 years, you know 14 years ago students were very different to our current cohorts, much more engaged, much more professional, and much more I don’t want to say smart, but a much keener group. I think cohort is a higher slice of the VCE, some really thoughtful students, who are already thinking about 4 years’ time, 5 years’ time when they graduate in first year, this sort of thing. And that was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, pretty unusual, but there are always students like that, but there seems to be more of them and I think we're going to provide them with tasks if you like assessment or otherwise, that actually provide them with a virtual professional experience, if I can put it like that. Fits in better with the student’s view of what they should be doing. Now its not 100% that way, I mean I had one student who was very very good, wanted to know why didn’t we just do activities, so she had a big collection of activities to use in the classroom, which was very disappointing. I mean you could understand that you really wanted them to develop professionally not just do activities, but there’s still a long way to go, but I think if we can just manage more virtual teacher type things. I think this sort of helps and certainly the students who have being doing this interviewing, the posters and then the virtual classes. Their follow up semester, second semester for them, we have them do a similar thing, instead of giving them an interview, they have to devise the questions. So they have to think about how do I find out about the students understanding of decimals, they look it up at school, so decimals or vulgar fractions, or addition, or whatever it happens to be. Again I get them to work in a team because it’s a hard ask for an individual, you know a student, so we work on what are good questions around that area. They go and try that on children and come back and have to work out well that didn’t work too well because of this and that and the other, so what modifications might I have to make. So again it’s pulling the support out a bit. They have to come up with the questions, but the interview process they have already been through in the previous semester, so they're developing skills and attitudes but also understanding it’s not any question will do. Some questions work well, other questions just don’t tell you very much, so it’s sort of continuing across the semesters, it’s certainly the technological bit gives them a really good kick start. I now need to work out ways of doing similar, well not similar in analogous things in some sense in other semesters.
Inter:	What would you say your experiences have been thus far in using DSO and what have you learnt about designing and working effectively online?
Doig:	The first thing is you needed to have six months before you actually need it because there’s always more wrinkles to iron out that you can think of, and trust no one, no I don’t mean trust no one, trust no one’s work, I mean I always test everything, play the dumb student run it through, so you then go back to whoever set up the web site, it’s really nice but for example the first time I…
Inter:	You mean do a lot of usability testing.
Doig:	You have to, you have to. We have this web site and I was testing it and I looked at the interviews that were coming off, very odd the first 20 characters were there and then it was chopped, there was a default accept only 20 text characters, and the students were asking questions like and what do you know about numbers and the child could go on for days about this. So we needed some what larger capture and what I had was things like, ‘This child thinks that….’ full stop. There’s nothing else, so you can’t trust anyone or anything in that sense. But time is the big killer, you know getting in their early and preparation and just organising it. I think the second round this year was better than last year’s not because of the people doing it but they were much more aware of what the traps were, so you can prevent some of the problems.
Inter:	Have you given thought as to how you might further develop this sort of approach.
Doig:	I had or have.
Inter:	Any other online learning materials.
Doig:	Well I sort of have been trying to push colleagues as well as students if you like to get away from these mountains of print material we tend to use which are a bit fixed. I mean once you’ve gone to the trouble of producing “the reader” it then becomes the reader for the next ten years or six years. So the same group for whom I did the virtual classrooms all the readings are electronic in the library there available, keep on adding to them during the semester, you can notify them through DSO, have a look they're more readings there. For things which are not worth the effort for putting sensibly into the library into the e-reserve type thing, I put into the resources folder onto DSO for students to tell them there’s more stuff there, have a look, don’t print it, save it, print it only if your desperate or you absolutely have to, you know, save a tree a day that sort of thing. It’s just a lot more flexible, if something pops up in the newspaper or journal. This would be useful bang, you can put it in. Whereas with the reade, if it’s not already there in 98 then you don’t see it, it just won’t be there. You can recommend to the students you can go and have a look at such and such, but there’s one copy of the journal in the library, once that’s moved off the shelf then. It’s just so much easier for them and the other thing with DSO is providing materials for tutorials. Last year we did a lot of scaling, scale work, I took some patterns and reduced them in size, simple patterns for basic teddy bears and just put those or the pattern up onto DSO and the students could pull them off there and rescale them to a particular size and then make the teddy bear, obviously, there’s no point in not making it. And we made a model of Deakin, you know a scale model of university buildings, well a couple of the buildings anyway and stuff like this but it allows you to give everyone a copy of the bits that they need, they all get the same size, its electronic they can try and rescale it virtually if you like and print full size, or they can do it offers lots of possibilities, in that sort of communicative sense anyway. Obviously there is a lot more you can do, I’ve been looking at web quests and other people are putting stuff up. There are some problems with the University’s fire wall approach; you know the Berlin wall around things. We wrote lesson plans last year or pretend lesson plans if you like, and I had talked to a colleague in the US and his students do the same thing except its for a different curriculum and we access their stuff because its available, but we couldn’t do that from Deakin because you have to be registered to get into the DSO etcetera, so that sort of fell over. But I mean there’s a lot of possibilities there because there’s people all over the joint with the same sort of students doing the same, pretty similar courses, you know primary, maths 1, where we look at numbers in the early years, you know, so if we do something why wouldn’t you want to share it?
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