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.

School Evaluation Summary

This week’s assignment had us look closely at our school’s level of technological innovation, through filters provided by Sipley and Kimball’s Maturity Model Benchmarks. This was a relatively useful task, in that it helped me to realize just how woefully lacking my school’s use of technology really is.

The benchmarks give a good idea of the potential of a school’s technological innovation, and provide a base line to analyze a school’s progress towards appropriate and effective use of technology for organizational and learning purposes. As such, they also gave me a pretty good view of the next steps to be taken by my institution in order to fulfill its potential.

The main drawback of the benchmarks is that they are sometimes quite vague. For example, in most circumstances, it is quite difficult to differentiate between WAN and internet access, and yet they are two separate benchmarks on the maturity model.

Here is the link to the survey of my school’s technological innovation, and here is the link to the summary/evaluation thereof.

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.

Annotated bibliography

This assignment took me a very long time because I got off to the wrong start. I had initially thought that blog posts could work as reference material, and had already completed the task when I learned that this was not the case.

I am now better at creating APA references now, but I doubt I’ll remember how to do this for long. I am perplexed by people’s ability to store this kind of information. I would love for there to be a tool that did the work for us. I tried using Google Scholar, but the results were sub-par: for each reference I had to go back and fix things, such that it became simpler to write the reference myself.

Of much greater benefit was the actual reading on my chosen subject, which was the use of PBL in technology-enabled EFL classrooms. I was actually inspired by a few of the studies I read. However, I also realized that there is some pretty shoddy research out there. Part of the reason this assignment took so long is that I didn’t want to include mediocre studies in my bibliography.

Here is the link to my annotated bibliography:

https://docs.google.com/a/u.boisestate.edu/document/d/1prXrS0zrP68tjhqEACeSYxgZqnaDxxc-fkPn3XI-Dt8/edit?usp=sharing

RSS Assignment

I first heard of RSS when translating a magazine on internet art from French into English. It was a term that kept coming back in almost every article I translated, and was often referred to as a revolutionary tool for web-users, but because I knew that RSS was the same term in English and in French, I never bothered to look it up. Just for the record, this is bad translating practice. Also for the record, I got away with it.

However, when I discovered, this week, what RSS really was, I regretted my professional laziness. I’ve often tried to organize my “favorites” in such a way that I could, and would, easily find sites that I am interested in. I’ve always failed at doing this. My “favorites” list inevitably gets too long, and too complicated to navigate, and I give up using them, except for “current projects” favorites, which are pages that I am currently using, for one reason or another.

RSS is the answer to my problems!

The lesson plan I put together using an RSS feed was a confusing affair, mainly because, for me, a lesson plan describes what goes on in the lesson, while an RSS feed is something I would see as useful for my students outside of the classroom. The lesson plan I wrote, therefore, is for the lesson in which I introduce the class to RSS, and to their assignment using RSS. I try to use loop input in the lesson in order to prepare students more actively for the assignment itself, which is often useful, if not necessary, when dealing with EFL students.

Digital Divide/ Digital Inequality

After some research, I have used Google Slides to prepare a presentation on the digital divide.

Digital Divide Presentation

This was my first experience making a slide presentation, and I enjoyed it a lot. Finding images that supported my message, without necessarily repeating my message, was fun and challenging. One of the things that surprised me, though, was how few images (relatively speaking) are available via creative commons. I used Google Images to find my images, using a non-commercial use creative commons filter. I wonder if there is a place to look for a wider selection of rights-free images.

The topic itself is one that I’ve thought about in the past, but doing the research helped me to insert it into a wider perspective. Technology is a horse with rotten teeth, which we have been trained not to look in the mouth, because we’re so happy to be able to get on and ride.

I’m not sure I can say what I plan to do with this knowledge, because the most important thing I learned is that technology issues, including the digital divide, are ethical questions. The only way to deal with ethical questions, I think, is to avoid setting rigid guidelines for yourself, but rather to make yourself into a generally more ethical person. By expanding one’s points of view, practicing compassion, and questioning oneself, one can become better skilled at making the right ethical choices. This is what I intend, and have long intended to do.

If I had more time, I would put images into one of the slides that currently doesn’t have any images in it at all. I skipped ahead when I got to that slide because I was stuck, and forgot about it, until I had almost finished recording my Voicethread. I think I would have had to start all over in order to modify that slide, and I was out of time at that point.

I would also find a way to connect my presentation to the AECT standards. I’m still confused about this requirement. The AECT doesn’t say anything at all worth mentioning about the digital divide. How can we link them together?

Code of Professional Ethics in Educational Technology

What I learned from this assignment

When I started working on this assignment, I didn’t have a view on professional ethics, and not much of a view on ethics at all. In fact, I consider myself, and other people, to be unethical beings. I believe our actions to be motivated by conditioning on the one hand, and by emotional aspirations on the other. Ethics is a normative language we use to condemn those that do not fit into society. As such, its primary usefulness is in maintaining order.

Reading Chapter 11 of Educational Technology: A Definition with Commentary didn’t change my view on professional ethics at all. However, other reading that I have done in order to do this assignment did, in particular Michael Davis’ Thinking Like an Engineer: The Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession. As I mentioned in my paper, this led me to see professional ethics as a kind of covenant of solidarity signed by the members of the association to prevent unfair competition from members who would sacrifice the welfare of society, the profession, or individuals to their own private interest.

Professional ethics can help to define my view of educational technology insofar as it makes me aware of the potential for good and harm that comes with being an educational technologist. It is indeed important, whenever learning to use a new tool, if not vital, to become aware of its dangers, temptations, and false charms. That being said, I personally cannot imagine a code helping me to figure out what is wrong or right, nor the pressure of a professional community having any impact on my own moral compass.

I also learned that as of now, I have a deep, bitter resentment towards the ALA reference style. It is unnecessarily complicated. Hopefully, I shall one day come to love it as I love all other things that are not doing me any harm.

Here is the link to the paper:

EdTech Ethics and the Challenge of a Globalized Society

Edtech 501: A definition of educational technology

Here is my graphic representation of the definition of educational technology. Like any field, education follows trends, and the current trend is towards individualism, in its broadest sense. The arrows point inwards towards the individual, starting with former principles (drilling and recipient-based learning, control, theoretical knowledge, obedience, foreign/imperialistic) towards the current trends (providing tools to manipulate once’s space, risk-taking and constructivism, ownership, locally appropriate practices). The arrows run through concentric circles of the profession and society before getting to the individual: ethically, the standards place the individual first, then the good of society, and finally the good of the profession. Reflexion and practice are the twin motors of research, while progress in the field is driven by technological developments and developments in learning theory, with the outcome being deeper, and deeper, learning.

I used LibreOffice Draw to create my graphic. It was time-consuming, but once I had decided on my concept, it was pretty straightforward.

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.