501 Reflection on Learning

Eyes Open

This course has been eye-opening for me, both personally and professionally. At times it has been challenging as well, which is to be expected, after all, when striking out on a new discipline.

A Small World with a Lot of Things

Due to both the assignments I had to complete, and from reading my classmates’ assignments, I have become far more aware of the sheer quantity and variety of resources available to teachers online. This has been tremendously encouraging, on the one hand. I’ve felt empowered by the fact that I had so many tools at my fingertips. However, it’s also been daunting to realize that what I’m learning to do here isn’t that special, and that in fact, this course, and this entire Masters program is only the beginning. Tools and technology evolve so fast that I will have to spend the rest of my career trying to keep up. There’s definitely something exhilarating about being part of such a vast movement. It feels like we’re riding the crest of a huge wave,towards an ever-receding shore.

Acknowledging the Community

Among the most challenging aspects of this course has been correctly using APA format citations on my assignments. I’ve always had a hard time being motivated by rules, as opposed to curiosity or the desire to help others. And yet, on an intellectual level, I’m aware that correct citation isn’t just a matter of obeying random rules. All researchers are a part of a community: there is literally no way we could do our work alone. We need each other in both a mundane and profound way. Mundane, because the work we cite is the very basis of our research, and profound, because the researchers who come before us make it easier for us to overcome social and conceptual obstacles that we face as people and researchers. Correct citation is how we give proper recognition to other members of the community.

For the time being, however, this awareness has remained strictly intellectual. I don’t feel viscerally that I am part of a community. This may have something to do with the fact that it is a virtual community: I have only interacted with fellow researchers online, and I have never been able to build an emotional connection with someone that I haven’t had physical contact with of some sort. Also likely is that it takes time to feel like you are part of a community, more than the three months or so that I have been studying educational technology.

The stated, or official reason behind citation is to allow other people to be able to find the sources you used to come to your conclusions. For the time being, this, too, seems extremely abstract, probably for the same reasons. Hopefully, as time goes by, I will come to feel closer to the educational technology community, and citing my fellow researchers will come to be less tedious, and more meaningful.

The Craft of MOORPGs

My favorite artifact from this course is my Trends in Technology research assignment, where I analyzed a MMORPG, called Evoke, that was designed and organized by the World Bank. While I don’t agree with the individualistic, capitalistic ideology behind the game, I was inspired by the game’s ability to reach such a large number of youth from poorer nations. The use of a strong narrative, I think, was key, as well, of course, as the vast resources brought to bear by the World Bank. Looking closely at the game taught me that, as with the cinema, the theater, and comics, the online game genre is based on a craft with a limited number of very useful rules that help to channel the designer’s creativity. As such, this research helped to demystify game design, which is an important first step towards learning the rules and designing my own games.

Implementation

The biggest immediate impact on my professional practice, as a result of this course, will be on the types of tools and web sites I will be using in class and for presentations. Thanks to the work of my colleagues, I now have a small list of presentation tools, and a long list of web sites that I am planning to investigate and experiment with over the coming months.

Tech Trends: Adapting Evoke to the EFL Classroom

For this project, I investigated and evaluated the usefulness of an online tool, the World Bank’s Urgent:Evoke alternate reality game for EFL learners in Morocco. I wrote a paper (using APA referencing format) which ended up being much longer than I had anticipated, but consequently also more thorough, and I posted it as a Google doc.

This was an opportunity for me to do a lot of reading on the use of digital games in the classroom, and in particular the use of alternate reality and MMORPGs. While I’m not in phase with the ideological basis of the World Bank’s game, I found the format, and parts of the message, both empowering and potentially effective in EFL settings, particularly those in Africa.

 

 

Gamification and language learning

Here is the link to my Google doc, which does little more than summarize the approach I’m going to take while studying this over the coming week.

RSS in Education

You can copy and paste directly to your post page, embed an Evernote or Google Doc or any number of ways to display your artifact. Include a reflection for each artifact, along with assigning the proper AECT Standard.

As you can see in this post, the AECT Standards, “3.1 Media Utilization” and “4.4 Information Management” have been assigned to this post.

You will want to include a discussion of how the AECT Standard aligns with your artifact, why it is important, and probably revisit this artifact later in the program to identify how the artifact connects practice to theory.

You will need to decide which artifacts to use for your final portfolio for the M.E.T. program. You can easily “hide” artifacts from view by changing their status from “published” to “draft.”  That way, you will always have the artifact in your website.

Category Widget

Can you also see how the Categories widget shows the AECT Standard assigned to this post? Think about how handy this will be as you continue to post your artifacts to your learning log, assigning the AECT Standards. All you will need to do is click one of the standards in the widget and all of your posts will appear for you to review. This will come in very handy at the end of the program.