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?