Implementation of Technology

Just as  Christina has pointed out in her blog, this week's reading is closely correlated with one of the articles we have for another class, "Why hasn't technology disrupted academics' teaching practices? Understanding resistance to change through the lens of activity theory" (Blin & Munro, 2007), whose discussion on current resistance and difficulty in technology implementation in education system resonates with different parts across all of the four articles. 

For instance, the third major finding in Breslow's (2007) article about the important relationships between the technologies and the learning environments in which they operate echoes with Blin & Munro’s (2007) discussion on semiotic vs. technological spaces, which states that the activity of designing educational technological tools can "be conceptualized as unfolding in two different yet interconnected spaces: the designer ‘semiotic’ space, which is the social and cultural context in which the design activity is taking place, and the technological space, which affords the actual realization of the object of the design activity", and then whoever is trying to implement the technology "enters two distinct, yet overlapping, communities, both shaped by a partially shared object, governed by their own rules and division of labor". Therefore, to look at technology implementation issue with such a perspective, we could easily see that, to have sufficient technological tools available for use is one thing, but how to make it work across communities and systems is a completely different story. When things do not turn out as we expect them, there must be reasons hidden within and between these two spaces. While issues within the technological space might be relatively easy to address with technology development and adequate training, what happens within the semiotic space as well as between these two spaces is much more complicated and challenging. In order to help teachers successfully go through different stages of technology adoption like those proposed by Hooper & Rieber (1995), a wide- scale systemic reform (Blumenfeld et al, 2000) is definitely needed to narrow down or even eliminate the distance between and among systems and planes where practitioners, technology developers, and researchers do their jobs, and to bring the potential of educational technology into full play. 

Field Trip

Today's field trip to the Four Eyes Lab in the Computer Science Department and the Media Arts and Technology Program was really an exciting and eye-opening experience. Through the presentation and demonstration of the professor and his research team, I got to know briefly about their current work on computer vision and imaging, perceptual interfaces, multimodal interaction, human-computer interaction, gesture recognition, and artificial intelligence. I felt both good and bad at the same time when I walked into the 3-story high chamber of the amazing AlloSphere and got captivated immediately like a kid in the Disneyland. In this spherical space providing fully immersive, interactive, stereoscopic, and virtual environments, I felt so good when I looked around with a pair of 3D glasses and tried to hold back my hand from reaching out and attempting to catch an "atom" flowing towards my face; and I felt bad for not knowing much about all these dazzling technologies and not even knowing about the existence of such incredible facilities on the very campus I came to almost every day.

Excited by the prospect these technologies would bring, I couldn't help but think about the language education issue I mostly concern about. Can we use videos or the computational photographing technique introduced today to take pictures of whatever place and country we are interested in to create a virtual 3D immersion environment in a place like the AlloSphere to help language learners practice language skills while experiencing the real life of another country without actually being there? 

Multiple Design Ideas

The presentation of educational challenges and brainstorming of solutions in today's ED256 class were really exciting. In light of the challenge I am most concerned about, motivating college students in China who study English as a foreign language to practice their communication skill orally, with reorganization and integration of some of the ideas provided by my classmates and my own thoughts, I have got several design ideas as follows:

1) a virtual environment with multiple preset scenes and contexts, as well as NPCs (non-player characters). Students are expected to finish certain tasks alone or in collaboration by orally communicating with each other and the NPCs and making themselves understood. It could be designed as a game in which players win by finishing tasks most quickly and effectively, then the winners would be rewarded with access to more complicated tasks which demands a higher level of oral proficiency. The scenes could be in the street asking for directions, at a theater trying to get tickets, at a restaurant placing orders, making phone calls and leaving messages, in a classroom participating in discussions, etc., which could be used separately or together in accordance with the objectives of the language class and the learners' level.

2) an online distance collaborative learning space in which students in China can work with English native speakers from another country by orally talking to each other and having tasks completed. For example, learning pairs or groups can exchange videos of real life scenes they have recorded in their home countries, have discussions orally, then write reports to share with other pairs and groups; or they can enter a contest in which one person orally tells a story, and his/ her partner on the other side reproduce the story, then the best matching wins.

3) a collaborative learning program which allows one student to describe what happens in an animation he/ she is watching, and his/her partner to manipulate drawings or puppets on a separate screen to reconstruct the animation only with the help of the oral description given.

4) a "talking" second-life in which avatars could pick whatever major cities in the world they want to go to, then orally interact with each other or "Siris" while living their life in the city. 

About Feedback

This week's reading for ED256, the article "Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy" (Dow et al, 2010) discusses about the importance of proper timing of feedback for novice designers. By using technological devices and measurement such as computers, internet, and click-through data, etc, the authors argue that, based on their deliberate manipulation of the frequency and time of giving feedback for people designing graphic Web advertisements, people receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel have higher self-efficacy and more innovation and diversity shown both through their creation process and in their final design product compared with people with serial feedback.

This article is really interesting and informative to read. Besides the research findings, it demonstrates in a fairly detailed way about the process of research design, implementation, analysis, and discussion of the results. More importantly, it shows another example of utilizing modern technology not only to motivate learners to test their talent and share it with others, but also to effectively evaluate public acceptance and appreciation of the learners' work. However, what resonates most with my research interest in second/ foreign language education is the theme of this article: feedback and its timing.

The role of feedback, more commonly known as "error correction" and "positive comments", has been one of the most controversial topics in the history of foreign language teaching as well as second language acquisition research. Though feedback is considered in general a fundamental principle of learning, the pedagogical pendulum has swung back and forth between positive and negative perceptions about the need and effect of feedback (Brandl, 2008, p143). As making errors is part of any learning process, and teachers are constantly facing with the dilemma and decision about how to deal with errors and how and when to provide feedback, more concrete evidence is thus much needed to help answer these questions. Therefore, I think this article about feedback in prototyping sheds new light on the feedback issue in language education and gives me the hope of finding more comparable, convincing, and hence valuable data to support teachers' decision-making in language classrooms as well as the design of any related language education programs provided in either real or virtual world. 

A New Form of Inequality

I want to talk about  a new form of inequality coming along with the rapid development of technology. These days, I am so excited to learn and witness the state-of-the-art  facilities made available by modern technologies and the prospect they promise; however, I am at the same time feel sad and worried about the huge number of people, children in particular, who still spend their days worrying where their next meal would come from. When we played with the "littleBits" the other day in class, while thrilled and impressed by its creativity, I wished every child, including my own daughter, would be able to have one, until I realized that it was so unlikely to happen with the current price it was sold at. I felt disappointed. Why couldn't they make it more affordable?

It reminded me of another thing I recently read from the news. Going back home to their families for the Chinese New Year is such a big deal for most Chinese people. However, train tickets were sold out within minutes or even seconds once they were made  available online, leaving tens of thousands of labor workers' hours of waiting in queue in front of ticket windows in vain. For these people, who had worked so hard all over the country throughout the whole year and been living on the hope of going back home for the most important festival and reuniting with their family, they didn't even know who they should blame for the depriving their equal opportunities of getting a train ticket. For them, Internet and all those fancy technologies are so far away and inaccessible, and some of them don't even have cell phones. And the same thing happens to millions of children who live and go to school in under-developed areas. 

In my opinion, in terms of the development of modern technology, how we could make it more affordable and accessible for everyone in the world should be the most pressing issue and biggest challenge not only for the government, but also for corporations which should share equal social responsibilities. Otherwise, the ever-increasing gap and inequality would make "no child is left behind" stay only as a dream. 

Some thoughts about teacher's role in the future

(The following is a post I have created for the discussion forum of another course, and I would like to share it here as well.)

It was kind of troubling to hear that, at the very beginning of another course I am taking this quarter (Technology and Education), there is no teaching but learning. Although it makes some sense, considering the reciprocal relationship between teaching and learning, it makes me worried and forces me to think about a teacher's role in the future. Now with the unprecedented development of technology, students seem to be able to get whatever they want to learn from the internet and there are so many software packages and websites out there to help with their self-study process. Would the word "teacher" become obsolete soon?  What's the future of teachers? Are we all going to lose our jobs as teachers? What role a teacher could take in this frantically changing world?

Fortunately, Vygotsky's cultural psychology theory about cognitive development seems to be helpful in my quest of answers to the above questions. According to Vygotsky, interaction with peers and adults, as well as instruction, are essential for cognitive development. In addition, his theory of the Zone of Proximal Develop proposes that, although children might develop some concepts on their own through everyday experience, they would not develop purely abstract modes of thought without instruction in abstract sign system. The  child's ZPD is achievable only with the help and support of an adult through interaction with peers and people with more experience. ZPD can be defined as the difference between what a child can achieve unaided in problem solving and what can be achieved with the help of adults or with the peer group, and the child's own knowledge develops through experience of adults guiding the child towards a more sophisticated solution to a task (Butterworth and Harris, 1994, p.22). 

I think the role a teacher might take today or maybe in the future is as someone who is highly resourceful in certain area, sufficiently sensitive to each learner's, including his/ her own, individual aptitude, stage of development, social surroundings, and interest, and is able to provide prompt and efficient guidance to each individual learner for moving forward in his/her own pursuit of knowledge and development by engaging him/her in collaboration and interaction with people having similar interest and needs.

The brain of a human being is so far undeniably the most sophisticated machine in the world. As a human being, a capable teacher's ability of understanding and differentiating  each student from emotional, psychological, social-demographical, intellectual, and developmental aspects, synthesizing them all-together through in-depth investigation, detailed observation, and everyday interaction and communication with the learner, guiding him/her along the path by helping him/her discover what he/she can achieve next, what options are out there, and how to bring his/her own capacity into full play, is not going to be overtaken by any form of machine or software. In this sense, teachers would still be much needed and important for every child in today's world and in the future no matter how technology is going to evolve. 

Constructionism vs. Constructivism

The two articles I have read this week are " Small Group Collaboration in Peer-Led Electronic Discourse: An Analysis of Group Dynamics and Interactions Involving Preservice and Inservice Teachers"( Ikpeze,  2007) and "Mad City Mystery: Developing Scientific Argumentation Skills with a Place-based Augmented Reality Game on Handheld Computers" (Squire & Jan, 2007). Besides the interesting researches on computer-and-network-aided science education and teacher education, the theoretical mechanism underlying these researches also attracts my attention. Just like Seymour Papert's chapter "Situating Constructionism" in the book Constructionism from last week's reading, they both mention constructivism, and one of them explicitly refers to it as its theoretical framework of analysis. Thinking back, constructivism does seem to serve as the most  mature theoretical foundation for the new technology-aided and learner-oriented shift which is taking place in schools worldwide, and the discussion about it.

Baffled by these two terms, constructionism and constructivism, I tried to find an explanation about their similarities and differences by taking a closer look at them. According to Vygotsky (1978), social constructivism posits that knowledge is constructed by people, in context, based upon interpretation of experience and knowledge. In other words, learning involves both a personal construction of meaning and a socially negotiated meaning. Compared to Papert's simple definition of constructionism as "learning-by-making", the basic tenet of social constructivism is that knowledge is constructed through social interaction  and collaboration with others, generated, established, and maintained by a community of knowledgeable peers (McDonald & Gibson, 1998). Therefore, I agree that constructionism is more of an educational method which is based on the constructivist learning theory (Guzdial, 1997), and according to my understanding, constructivism looks at the general process of knowledge formation and the environment  in which it takes place, while constructionism places more emphasis on how each individual learn, what factors are involved, and how he/she could be facilitated. Constructivist learning theory focuses on the interaction and construction process of learners, and constructionists look at the crucial determining function of each learner's characteristics, participation, and commitment in this process. In this sense, these two terms are interrelated, and any exploration of pedagogical significance of new technology embedded in a constructivism background cannot go without a discussion from the constructionist point of view.