Blendkit week 4

Time to be a curmudgeon and summarize this week's reading

• Your online and in-class components should be well integrated.

• There are a number of different ways/technologies that will work.

Ok, class dismissed.

Seriously, that's about the entirety of the chapter.  I'm honestly unsure what I'm supposed to gain from it, other than the fun of actually seeing Second Life mentioned multiple times in a table from 2007 and getting to read sentences like "However, it is important to remember that it is the manner of implementation, rather than any affordance of the modality itself, that will bring about this perceived consistency."

This is one of my major annoyances about much of the educational literature: without really good ways to assess the results, it tends to degenerate into statements of the blindingly obvious, tables of activity types matched to somewhat nebulous learning types (often changing between various articles) and all of it covered up with florid writing.  Assessment is incredibly hard since you can't pry open someone's brain to see what they actually have learned, so very often you end up with feedback based on student evaluations, such as the comments from the Aycock et al. reference where the students complained that the online and F2F portions weren't integrated enough.  How so?  Reading the original article sheds little extra light, other than commenting that the instructors' inexperience was more of a problem than the blending.  Even given the students' complaints, do we know if they did any better in the poorly integrated blended class than previously?  Or did they do worse than in better integrated, later courses?  The article claims that the faculty saw that "Student interactivity increased", "Student performance improved" and "[students] could accomplish course goals that they couldn't in their traditional course".  Data for any of this?  If so, the article provides none of it- if I write a paper for a chemistry journal claiming my new synthesis improves yield and enantiomeric purity, I better have some numbers backing me up.

Ok, grumping over.  Given that I have nothing to add to actually *solving* the problem I can't hammer at those who are trying for very long.