[ED 257A Week 10]: Assessment of Learning Outcomes; Adaptive Learning; Learning Analytics

Merging data science and education

This week's reading is based off of:
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Cheng, et al., 2013 “Reconsidering assessment in online/hybrid courses: Knowing versus learning” 

van der Kleij et al. (2012) "Effects of feedback in a computer-based assessment for learning" 
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Data science is a big field these days. Technology has enabled the ability to collect swathes of information on just about anything, from what you (will) shop for  to how long you spend on a particular webpage. But it can also apply to education, which is what we learned with the guest speaker of the last lecture of the course.

As a graduate student training to become a computational materials scientist, this is pretty fascinating. The idea of finding patterns and trends, and then using those to predict behavior resonates with many people across disciplines. In materials, high throughput computations are being used to accelerate the process of finding new materials. Similar skills are used wherever data science can be applied.

For those interested in getting their feet wet with data science in education, I recommend checking out Kaggle, a web platform where data scientists can gather to solve data science related problems that are proposed from various companies, organizations, and non-profits. What is great about Kaggle is that anyone can choose to take on the challenge; you are only measured based on how well your code meets the task requirements. Particularly relevant is a Kaggle competition challenge about the College Scorecard (screenshot below), a measurement system from the U.S. Department of Education to elucidate the relationship between future income and university attendance. Check it out!

 

ED 257A Week 9: Discovery/project-based learning; learning in virtual environments; game-based learning

Learning in Virtual Reality

This week's reading is based off of:
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Gonzalez-Gonzalez & Blanco-Izquierdo (2012) "Designing social videogames for educational uses" - Caitlin McDowell & Sahar Sajadieh

Vander Ark (2014) "Eight principles of productive gamification" - Caitlin McDowell & Sahar Sajadieh
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Week 9 class was conducted a little differently than usual. Instead of meeting in-person in the Education building, we all participated in a Zoom video conference to talk about the gamification in the classroom. In the Zoom interface, there is a gallery of participants, all of who can participate in the video and audio. Whenever someone speaks, their video screen is highlighted in green in gallery mode or becomes the largest screen in speaker mode. While I thought the Zoom interface and session itself went well, I still prefer the face-to-face in-class discussion we have on a regular basis. Often times, it was difficult to focus on the speaker because so much else was also happening on the screen. In contrast, I often physically turn towards whoever is speaking at the moment and very little enters my periphery. There was also an electronic chat that was happening simultaneously. Although it is a great way for people to contribute to the discussion (who may normally be reluctant to speak, like myself), I had to constantly switch between the video and the chat, which made the discussion more mentally taxing. I can see the value in Zoom being useful for at least establishing face-to-face time for teams where that is difficult (e.g., international collaboration, across large geographical distances). At the end of that day, I still find in-class time to be more valuable and organic. However, I'm glad we went through this experience with video conferencing. It was very informative, and I think I may use it in (not future classroom sessions but rather) future collaborations in my research.

 

Source: http://zoom.us/subscribe (top), https://maroonloon.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/zoom-presence.png (bottom)

We also discussed how gamification would fit into our education curriculum. The tutorial on Edorble given by founder Gabe Baker was particularly interesting. Edorble is a web platform to hold virtual classrooms. It is similar to Second Life in that you interact with a virtual world through a customizable avatar. Edorble is more specific to the classroom setting. There is a lecture space in which a video screen is shared among users and also additional space (e.g., to use for break-out discussions).

Source: http://www.edorble.com/

I found it interesting that both Zoom and Edorble aim to recreate human interaction, but do so differently. Zoom does so using a collection of video screens and audio. Unlike Zoom, each participant in Edorble has an avatar that can interact with other avatars and the environment. Yet both aim to facilitate face-to-face discussion and collaboration. Zoom trades off the idea of a discussion space for more direct dialogue between participants while Edorble trades off that direct dialogue to be mediated among avatars. It would be interesting to see and reflect how differently people (including myself) would act in each of these scenarios, and how that compares to the traditional face-to-face dialogue. I'm curious to see how Edorble will implement other features into their virtual classroom, and whether they plan on including the ability to write on virtual blackboards and whatnot.

Some final thoughts I have on virtual reality is more on the aspect of gamification. There are certainly many benefits that gamification can achieve if designed well. As enumerated by Vander Ark, gamification allows for productive failure, boosts persistence and intrinsic motivation, can lead to deeper learning but needs conceptual challenges and careful calibration. I tend to think more about learning in higher education, so a hesitation I have using gamification in the classroom is that it may detract from the core content of the lecture. Another is that the material that would be used in such lectures would need to be self-generated, since it is currently not common to use gamification to teach STEM subjects. Perhaps gamification can help make STEM subjects more accessible and less textbook dry or maybe could be a more subtle incorporation into the course. The classic is a game of Jeopardy or Bingo, but I would be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on the subject.

[ED257A] Week 8: Feedback: from instructors, from peers; Learner engagement

Assessment and Feedback in the Classroom

Source: http://businesssolutions.it/en/assessment-center-2/

This week's reading is based off of:
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M. Brady, H. Seli, J. Rosenthal. "Metacognition and the influence of polling systems: how do clickers compare with low technology systems." Education Tech Research Dev (2013) 61:885–902

F. Dochy , M. Segers & D. Sluijsmans (1999) "The use of self-, peer and coassessment in higher education: A review," Studies in Higher Education, 24:3, 331-350,
DOI: 10.1080/03075079912331379935
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This week in class we went over learner engagement and feedback in the classroom as part of assessment and feedback in the classroom. As one of the discussion leaders, I experimented with in-class polling technologies (namely PollEverywhere) and had a discussion of the merits of clicker technology. I think this was a useful experience personally given my previous experience with clickers when it was a more recent technology.

When I was taking introductory electromagnetism, the professors were experimenting with a new program on campus called TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning), in which clickers were a part of the curriculum and grade. We had the TurningPoint clickers that could take in alphanumeric inputs (shown below).

We had to bring these clickers every class session for attendance and participation. The inconvenience of these clickers were that they were pricey, really only used in this one course, the buttons mechanically wore out quickly, and if you forgot your clicker, you lost points for that day. Of course, for students who didn't want to show up to a lecture, they could just give their clicker to a friend for the day. Perhaps having clickers did help in the engagement of the material, but the last thing I remember from this experience is wondering how I could sell off my clicker and recover a decent amount of what I paid for it. 

But I think clicker technology has come a ways from model. We saw in class that new clickers of the TurningPoint type have improved design. One technology I thought was particularly promising was PollEverywhere. The main advantages of PollEverywhere are:

• you need very little extra hardware or software to use it. The poll creation, administration, and response collection are all mediated using their website or a plug-in (e.g., to Google slides). Students can submit responses either by visiting a unique url or by texting. 
• a variety of questions/responses are possible- multiple choice, clickable images, free-form text. It can also handle LaTeX notation (++ for doing equations). 
• the user interface is simple, clean, and easy to use. I found that I spent more time thinking of poll questions than figuring out how to use the tool. 

During the course of the class, I wanted to experiment with several things that were covered in the Brady, et al. paper. Brady, et al. did a study on undergraduate psychology students and compared clicker (high-tech) with paddles (low-tech). They postulated that having that in-class polling motivates students to reflect on their progress towards their learning goals by improving their metacognition (i.e., their awareness of what and how they are learning). Overall, they found clickers are useful for this, particularly for low- to mid-performing students. I found the comparison to low-tech technology to be interesting, because both methods provide the same instant feedback. However, clickers provide a way to accurately tally answers and keep record of it and avoid the group mentality of polling the class with paddles.

In the experiment, we compared the experience between PollEverywhere and using American Sign Language to answer what city had the largest population density (ans: Mumbai). We first started with American Sign Language where everyone signed the letter corresponding to the answer. Several interesting observations are worth noting. When the real-time tracking of answers was hidden, I noticed the majority of answers were answering Tokyo. When using sign language, it was harder to distinguish which was the majority answer. At the third time when real-time responses were displayed (shown below), there was less of a spread, and a clear winner of the possible answers. While we observed the clear influence of group mentality among the three trials, it was interesting when someone remarked that in seeing other people submit an answer they were thinking about made them more confident about their answer, even if it were incorrect.

PollEverywhere interface for in-class discussion and results the second round

There were several lessons I learned in doing this exercise:

• Always make time for technical glitches. The internet is not always reliable for these types of things. Conducting such an in-class poll for a large class may not be feasible with the current network infrastructure of the campus.
• Be sure not to give away the answer before revealing the answer. I accidentally slipped out a hint of the correct answer, and some picked up on it. 
• I think it would be interesting to have someone purposefully submit and incorrect answer to encourage people to choose the answer they would have originally chosen. This would be a great way to start a dialogue on why the answer is incorrect, or go over the thought processes that went into the choice.
• Polling on how confident people feel about their answer would also be a good learning experience, because it's telling of what and how they are thinking about the problem. 

Overall, despite the not-super-steller experience I had with clickers before, I would use an in-class polling technology like PollEverywhere in a future class. I like the possibilities that it offers to really engage students and become a tool to start a conversation about the material. If paired with a learning (and social) activity, such as think-pair-share, the full potential of in-class polling could be realized. 

[ED257A] Week 6: Flipped Classroom and Distance/Online Learning

The Flipped Classroom

Source: https://21centuryedtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/flipped.jpg

This week's reading is based off of:
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Miller, 2015 Ch. 9 "Putting it all together"

Min Kyu Kim, So Mi Kim, Otto Khera, Joan Getman. "The experience of three flipped classrooms in an urban university: an exploration of design principles." Internet and Higher Education 22 (2014) 37–50
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The flipped classroom introduces a new way of instruction in which the student partakes in lecture outside of the classroom and problem solving during class time, and the teacher's role is more facilitative. The surge in the flipped classroom concept has gained momentum with the burgeoning of online technologies like Khan Academy.

I personally am excited about this new model for education. The flipped classroom allows students to pace and personalize their learning. If there is a concept they are unfamiliar with, they can spend the time to understand it without worrying that the instructor has moved on to a new concept. Having the teacher become more of a facilitator of activities during classroom improves face-to-face interaction, as students are directly interacting with the instructor instead of (passively) absorbing information. Additionally, through the usage of digital technologies, the course content may be made available to anyone else with access to internet. I think this idea is particularly powerful. People in regions with fewer educational resources or privilege can freely access this information.

As a student, I appreciated the flipped classroom model. In my undergraduate studies, I took a course on electronic devices that borrowed from the flipped classroom. We watched lectures outside of classroom and submitted questions we had on the lecture. During class, our professor would address all of our questions and go over other interesting aspects about electronic devices. We had homework assignments outside of lecture as well. There were of course some tradeoffs. In exchange for more interactivity during lecture, we had less mathematical rigor in our learning of electronic devices. However, as an introductory class for learning the conceptual operation of electronic devices, I found the flipped classroom format to be well-suited to the task. Of course, the flipped classroom is not the panacea to all challenges in instruction. I think the traditional lecture style is still appropriate for certain subjects, such as those that are discussion based or math heavy. Nevertheless, the flipped classroom offers another tool with which to instruct.

The techniques and tools presented in Miller and Kim, et al. were applicable to both the flipped classroom and instruction in general. Kim, et al. list useful principles for designing a class, which are reiterated here, and paralleled with ideas I have had or discussed with others. Many are being implemented in the course I am currently helping to teach (MAT 188). To reiterate, MAT 188 is an overview course about materials science in the context of energy technologies. The goal of the course is to expose non-materials scientists to how materials scientists think about the world around them. Although MAT 188 is not structured to be a flipped class, I think many of the same design principles listed in Kim, et al. apply here. Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions!

• Provide an opportunity for students to gain first exposure prior to class
• HW questions to preview next week's lecture, going over the class syllabus, presenting a course map at the beginning of each lecture
• Provide an incentive for students to prepare for class
• extra credit on HW (e.g., choose 3 of the 4 questions to complete; the fourth problem is graded optionally for extra credit)
• Provide a mechanism to assess student understanding, e.g., low stakes quizzes
• weekly quizzes to gauge immediate comprehension of the lecture (e.g., main idea, muddiest point) and weekly HW, doing a lecture recap
• Provide clear connections between in-class and out-of-class activities
• present course objectives and agenda in syllabus, inviting guest lecturers to discuss a topic related to the course (e.g., their career path, current/active research field, where they envision the field going next, where the research is found in everyday applications)
• Provide clearly defined and well-structured guidance
• having a lecture outline at the beginning of each lecture, having a defined format of the lecture, offering extensive office hours
• Provide facilitation for building a learning community
• have the students be responsible for a topic for a final review session where it is presented small groups
• Provide enough time for students to carry out the assignments-
• introducing final projects weeks in advance (i.e., first heads-up, then more formal choice of group/topics, and periodic check-ups)
• Provide prompt/adaptive feedback on individual or group works
• mid-term evaluations, weekly quizzes for determining comprehension right after lecture
• Provide technologies familiar and easy to access
• currently not as applicable, as we mostly use video, powerpoint, and in-class demonstrations of technologies

I am particularly excited about the potential of Gauchocast, 

a tool for recording online lectures. Below is a screenshot for the Fall 2015 version of Quantum Mechanics II. Not shown are the note taking abilities (text-based only; eventually adding in equation editing, like based on the syntax of LaTeX, would be a cool addition). 

Gauchocast allows you to see the headshot of the instructor, a set of slides and the timing of each slide (which is done automatically, based on the title of each slide). Although a transcript option isn't available yet, there is still much potential in this tool. While this doesn't replace actual face-to-face interaction with the instructor, it still offers the ability to see instructor as s/he is speaking about the subject matter. My favorite part is the fact that you basically have a full record of the lecture and is text searchable later on. This makes studying more streamlined for students. But this also applies to instructors as well. A well-made video lecture would save much time in the future for preparing for lectures and would be easy to keep track of what was covered in previous years. I hope that more professors choose to use this tool in the coming years and see if it's a suitable course to what they are teaching. 

[ED257A] Week 5: Collaborative Learning with Digital Media

To Wiki or not to Wiki?

Source: http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/036/864/original/Internet-IPv6.jpg?1361298852

This week's reading is based off of:
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Ioannou, Brown, & Artino. "Wikis and forums for collaborative problem-based activity: A systematic comparison of learners' interactions" Internet and Higher Education 24 (2015) 35–45

Cacciamani, et al. "Influence of participation, facilitator styles, and metacognitive reflection on knowledge building in online university courses" Computers & Education 58 (2012) 874–884
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Technology has closed geographical, cultural, language distances and time with increased connectivity and in ubiquity of information. The complexity of the challenges we face as a society necessitates the ability to collaborate in a variety of settings. This week's discussion on using technology to facilitate collaboration in the students thus sets the stage for gaining that skill set. Of the technologies we discussed this week, I found wikis to be the most fascinating. Wikis are websites that allows its users to contribute to its content and structure, the most famous being Wikipedia.

Ioannou, et al found that wikis foster more collaborative (rather than cooperative) when compared to participants using MS Word attachments to accomplish the task. I found this to be an interesting result. Students discussed with each other parts of the wiki more so than that of the MS Word documents, which presumably entails exchange of ideas and feedback. However, as briefly discussed in class, the social dynamics of having to review a peer's work underly this kind of collaboration. For instance, for fear of offending or slighting the other, there is a tendency to not delete but rather to add or comment upon. Perhaps it is also a cultural thing- the generalization being that Americans tend to sugar coat things whereas foreigners do not. That is, collaboration is inherently a social activity. The major question is, do wikis facilitate easier collaboration and social interaction? Have you observed similarly or differently in your own experience when collaborating with others (e.g., using a wiki or other technology-based tool)?

This is indeed something I do myself. At times, I feel like the edits I make are easily interchangeable with the existing content, but is maybe more in line with how I interpreted the text; or that the wording the author chooses had a hidden intention not apparent to me as a reader; or the general habit that it's always good to keep previous versions of documents so that you can go back to them. I have personally been on both sides of the study that Ioannou, et al. use. In the course I am teaching this quarter, the structure of how my co-instructors and I have followed naturally lends itself to a wiki-like collaboration. All the material content we generate is hosted on Google drive. Each week we meet to discuss the following week's lecture, homework, and logistics so that at each step we exchange information and feedback. I have found this to be immensely useful as my co-instructors have varied experiences and insights. While there is not single aspect of the course that I could assign as being self-authored, I feel the style of wiki-like collaboration has been an extremely useful method towards forming a course.

At the same time, I have done the more cooperative-style of work in groups. I am currently organizing a conference symposium on diversity in STEM fields. One aspect of this organization was writing a blurb on what our symposium was about and why attendees to go to this symposium. My co-organizers and I first wrote blurbs independently and then merged the documents at the end. While there were sentences I wrote that I felt were well-written but left out, the final product overall was well polished and I was happy with it. This may be part of the negotiation, not only with your teammates but also with yourself, of what is presented as the final product and what is not. Perhaps the more wiki-styled collaboration would have done better, the same, or worse. Can you think of a situation in which both a collaboration and cooperative-style teamwork would do well?

Because you can track a wiki's history in detail, it lends itself to collaboration. Or maybe it doesn't, since everything you do is recorded, and so people may choose not to comment on certain things versus others.

Regardless, I think wikis have great potential, particularly in the STEM fields where the passing down of knowledge is critical (e.g., using wikis as an archive of techniques and useful knowledge in a lab group as students graduate from or join the research group). Wikis are also natural bridge between knowledge acquisition and knowledge building (see Cacciamani, et al.) in the summarization of knowledge from various sources into a digestible format. And because it can be published on the web, it has peer-review built in. Here, I am interested in the role of the teacher if one were to run a wiki-based project. I'm particularly interested in implementing this as a final project/review of sorts in my class MAT 188: Materials in Energy Technologies the next time it is offered. It's a direct application of what they have learned and it can benefit someone else interested in material science in energy technologies. How could instructor present themselves as supportive or oppositional in this context in your field? Through a guided formulation of the wiki? By constantly monitoring wiki activity and giving feedback? What are your thoughts?

[ED257A] Week 4: Social Constructivist and Sociocultural Theories of Learning

#LearningUsingSocialMedia

Adapted from: http://cristianaziraldo.altervista.org/debating-social-media/

This week's reading is based off of:
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Bennet, et al. 2012 "Implementing Web 2.0 technologies in higher education: a collective case study" Computers & Education 59 (2012) 524–534

Manca & Ranieri, "Is it a tool suitable for learning? A critical review of the literature on Facebook as a technology-enhanced learning environment." Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2013), 29, 487–504

Warschauer & Grimes "Audience, Authorship, and Artifact: The Emergent Semiotics of Web 2.0"
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2007) 27, 1–23.
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Our class discussion on the usage of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) in the classroom greatly highlighted the importance of understanding the appropriateness of a tool to a task.
We learned from Bennet, et al. that even using the same activity (e.g., posting photos on Flickr as a class exercise or writing a blog) can lead to varying degrees of success. The same can be said of other technologies that have emerged from the Web 2.0 with the rise of user-generated content. The theme of a "square peg into a round hole" appeared several times (i.e., forcing the usage of tool for a task it was not designed for), and highlights the need that as instructors, we need to critically think about how to use the plethora of technology now available.

Manca & Ranieri propose the possibility of Facebook as a technology-enhanced learning environment. My knee-jerk reaction upon reading this was that this was not a good idea. It would mix people's social and academic lives, and it would introduce so much uncertainty in the student-teacher relationship (e.g., do you friend the student or not?). As someone with more STEM leanings, I was also hard pressed to think of times at which Facebook would be appropriate. However, I thought the in-class example of using Facebook to facilitate intercultural learning between students was fantastic. Because Facebook facilitates more informal social networking, it was well-suited to facilitating a more natural interaction between students of different cultures. This was a great example to enforce that while you need to think critically about the appropriateness of a tool to a task, it is also important to keep an open mind.

Although this was not discussed in class, I was also intrigued by the article from Warschauer and Grimes about the underlying social context behind social media. For example, several studies found a correlation between cultures with high power differentials and low frequency of editing of Wikipedia. That is, if a hierarchy of authority was more ingrained in a culture, people tended to edit Wikipedia less. I thought this was a striking observation- it implies that in-class activities cannot be treated as closed systems between student and teacher, but that other complex, confounding variables are at play. I wonder, have you as the reader observed this to occur in your experience?

I was really excited about the emergence of Web 3.0. Web 1.0 was mostly focused on building the internet (e.g., building the protocols, interface, formatting) and generating content. Web 2.0 shifted towards user-generated content with the expansion of the internet to mobile devices. Now, it is predicted, the internet will evolve again into Web 3.0, a more adaptive and intelligent form of the the internet, which includes but is not limited to: semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents. These all (to varying degrees) stem from the manipulation of huge amounts of data and extracting useful information. While the technical details would be impossible to cover in the length of the class period, I found this upcoming stage of the web to be exciting. What do you think? How do you think it will affect the classroom? Will this redefine how we teach or what the role of the teacher is?

[ED 257A] Week 3: Cognitive Theories and Multimedia

Learning how to learn

Source: http://www.digitalistmag.com/files/2015/10/Prospect-Mortgage.jpg

This post is based off of the following readings:
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Miller, 2014, Ch. 7 "Incorporating multimedia effectively"

Ocepek, et al. 2013. "Exploring the relation between learning style models and preferred multimedia."
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This week was quite enlightening for myself as a student and instructor. We learned this past class of the different learning styles that have been proposed (I'm experimenting with media type 3 from Ocepek. Please let me know it's going :) ): 

• Kolb's learning style: 4 modes of learning, most commonly applied in e-learning, which can be combined into dominant modes
• 4 modes: abstract conceptualization (AC), concrete experience (CE), active experimentation (AE), and reflective observation (RO)
• combinations of dominant modes: assimilator (dominant modes AC and RO), converger (dominant modes AC and AE), accommodator (dominant modes CE and AE), and diverger (dominant modes CE and RO)
•  Rancourt’s learning styles model (RLS): 
• “a characteristic mode of way of manifesting cognitive and/or affective phenomena”
• rational (R), empirical (E), and noetic (N) style (subjective insights)
• Hemispheric dominance and learning styles (HLS)
• right-hemispheric (simulations, experiments, intuitive reasoning, creative thinking), left-hemispheric (facts, logical reasoning, working with numbers), and integrated learning style
• this is the left-brain, right-brain model
•  VAK learning style model (VLS) (reduced VARK, with reading)
• visual, audio, kinesthetic learning modes

I was most familiar with the VAK learning style model, and used to identify as a primarily kinesthetic learner. Because of this, I always wrote things down and did loads of practice problems in order to make up for the PowerPoint presentation heavy lectures (even for derivations!) in school. Perhaps this ended up being the self-fulfilling prophecy we discussed, in which if you believe you cannot do something, you won't. As the reader, have you ever found yourself in a similar position? Last week's class was a great clarification of what it means to learn, i.e., learning how to learn.

There were particular insights from our small group and class discussions that I think are worth mentioning. The first is the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of media in the classroom. Not only are there huge numbers of variable to control (e.g., time of measurement, demographic, finding a representative form of multimedia, discipline-specific challengest), but also confounding variables to account for (i.e., correlation, not causation). This is a common trait among all fields of research, but is a good reminder that just because the results say something, it does not necessarily reflect reality. That is, even if there is research that says one particular form of media is good or bad, this does not mean it is the panacea or poison of education. We always need to be vigilant of our results.

A second insight is to focus less on learning styles and more on learning preferences. I would like to add, perhaps it also makes sense to focus more on understanding the learning preferences each form of media enables. In other words, it is not necessary for a specific form of media (e.g., simulations) to fit in a specific learning style (e.g., right-hemispheric thinking). Of course, this complicates the picture, but it also opens some opportunities to think of forms of media in a new light (e.g., using simulations to go through a thought experiment, which requires logical thinking). Along the same vein is how to measure the successful implementation of media in the classroom. The biggest realization is the lack of congruence between teaching with media and testing without media. The example given in class I think illustrated this point well: for a foreign language class, changing the test to include more contextual and picture-based questions as practiced led to better retention. 

This led me to rethink the class on Materials in Energy Technologies course I'm helping to teach this quarter. Our goal in this course was to make materials science accessible to the non-materials scientist and to make connections of energy-related technologies with concepts of materials scientist. In order to do so, we've included many interactive activities (e.g., think-pair-share) to encourage our students to think about how materials science impact their everyday lives (e.g., how does understanding materials in extreme environments impact our ability to provide the electricity you use everyday? ans: it lets the turbines work at the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to transform the mechanical rotating energy from pushing steam into electrical energy). We've also included many guest lectures to show that all the theory we talk about in class has real-life applications and are still open-research questions. However, we still have a final at the end of the course planned. I feel we could very easily fall into same trap of testing in a different mode than our teaching.  Do you have recommendations/suggestions? Have you had a similar experience where the test and teaching methods didn't match up? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

[ED 257A] Week 2: Learning Theories

The Art of Presentation is...

Source: 99% Invisible Podcast

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This week's reading is based off of:

Chris Dede. "Theoretical Perspective Influencing the Use of Information Technology in Teaching and Learning" International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education, 43–62. Springer Science.

Atkinson & Mayer (2004) "Five ways to reduce the PowerPoint overload"

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Design and storyboarding is a fascinating topic (especially hidden design of everyday objects; see 99% Invisible podcast). Good design is undetectable and is intuitive for the user but is painstakingly difficult to achieve. What makes a good presentation is all the decisions and thinking the audience doesn't see, but will appreciate. I would like to share a few things I've learned in my side-quests to find the ultimate presentation techniques in hopes that they may help someone. And please, feel free to add your own tips! A quick disclaimer though- I come from the STEM side of things, but I would be curious to know if similar concepts could be applied in the HFA and SS fields.

I'm sure we've all seen the pitfalls of PowerPoint: cluttered slides, tiny fonts, blurry images, outrageous animations, terrible animations, content that is skipped over without explanation. However, these can all be avoided through two things- planning and practice. Planning is perhaps the biggest factor for what makes a good presentation. One of the most helpful things I learned was from a seminar from Jean-luc Doumont, an engineering PhD turned instructor and invited speaker on all-things related to designing clean and clear presentations. (Side note: He occasionally comes to the UCSB campus to give such seminars.) Basically, plan the story of the presentation outside the medium of the presentation. This could be on a piece of paper, using sticky-notes, or using a storyboard but the point is to move away from the implicit constrains of thinking slide-by-slide and to think more big picture. Having a big picture makes sure every slide, every image, every word has a purpose (does it build the big picture?). The hope is that the speaker does not fall into being an accessory to the presentation, but rather the presentation is a tool for the speaker. From personal experience, this has changed the way I approach presentations and I feel it has really helped me hone in what is relevant and what is not relevant in a presentation. But I'd like to know your thoughts as well! Would this be a useful technique for you to build presentations?

The second tip is practice, practice, practice. The first run is never that great, the second run is better, and by the third run, you have a rhythm. I attended a workshop offered by Grad Div that aimed to teach theatre techniques to graduate students in STEM. At first, I'll admit I was a bit skeptical, but towards the end it was really fun. We re-enacted an excerpt from (I think) Henry V and added interpretive movements. I think the exercise really connected what you're thinking of next to say with your body and voice, and connecting these three are what truly makes an engaging speaker. This naturally requires forethought and, most importantly, practice. While I won't be doing dramatic pauses or fake-sword-fighting gestures in my own presentations, I think the lessons of unifying all types of visual and audio media (including yourself) are important. What are your thoughts?

And unrelated but highly enjoyable to watch, to help prep for speaking:
From whence the "Wonder Woman" pose for confidence came. 

Your body language shapes who you are

  

[ED 257A] Week 1: ICT Literacies

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This week's reading is based off of:

Kennedy & Judd, 2011 "Beyond Google and the 'satisficing' searching of digital natives"

Lai & Hong, 2015 "Technology use and learning characteristics of students in higher education: Do generational differences exist?"

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We started our first week with a brainstorming session on desired characteristics of instruction and instructional materials followed by a discussion of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and course management sites.

Kennedy & Judd highlight a growing trend in the current generation of students (dubbed "Digital natives" or the "Google generation") of "satisficing" their studies through cursory online searches are just sufficient to complete the task. This I thought was an apt observation of how students today approach their studies, regardless of field, in light of the emergence of the Internet and ubiquity of information. Indeed, we saw this trend in our own class demographic when polling for digital learning characteristics of ourselves and the undergraduate population we teach. The poll is taken on a scale of from 1= Strongly Agree to 5 = Strongly Disagree. For example, many of us are comfortable with a several forms of technology.

Perhaps because of our digital literacy, we are also guilty of "satisficing" in expecting to find an answer to our question quickly. Often times this is through a Google search, or nowadays, Wikipedia.

 In being digital literate in so many technologies, we have adopted the mindset that multitasking is the way to accomplish and learn. However, research has suggested we don't truly multitask, just switch between tasks quickly and that switching process could be cognitively costly. Certainly food for thought.

While the ubiquity of information is certainly powerful, it can hinder good habits. I observe this in my own field. A current trend in materials science is high-throughput computing (for example, the Materials Genome Initiative). The idea is because we now have powerful supercomputers, we can now do massive number of calculations on arbitrarily complex systems to identify new materials. We have all this data now, but the question is, can we reasonably screen our data without error? Are we losing information by throwing it away based on some pre-determined criteria? Before the advent of big data, much of research in condensed matter physics was driven by physical intuition and the ability understand general physical concepts. While high-throughput computing affords us a great tool, I believe it is important to understand the limitations of a tool. The same applies to using the Internet for educational purposes. It is important to be critical of what lies in front you.

We also covered the tools in course management sites, such as our own Gauchospace. In starting to teach my own course MAT 188, Gauchospace has been an extremely important tool to communicate the course and provide supporting material. It was enlightening to learn about all the effort that goes into Gauchospace. From my own experience in graduate classes in the engineering and sciences, Gauchospace is underutilized. It was not until I took courses in the Education department and had to build MAT 188 that I was made aware of all the features that Gauchospace has. Perhaps this is a manifestation of what Lai and Hong alluded to in their study of whether generational differences exist in the usage of technology in higher education. That is, the technology divide occurs not so much across generations but rather across fields of study (and gender). What are your thoughts on why this occurs? Offering courses that graduate students from all disciplines can participate and exchange perspectives is a great avenue to lessen this divide, and I'm excited to partake such a course this quarter.

Welcome again!

Welcome again to my technology in education blog. This Fall 2015 quarter, we'll continue the discussion of the usage of technology in the classroom with ED 257A: Teaching and Learning with Digital Media, here at UCSB.

This quarter I'm particularly excited since I will be simultaneously helping to teaching an undergraduate course MAT 188: Materials in Energy Technology. The objective of MAT 188 is to give participants an overview of how materials science impacts energy technologies, such as batteries and solar cells. It is a course that is organized by enthusiastic graduate students, and I am happy to be a part of the effort. Stay tuned!

[ED 256: Final Project] Science(or)Fiction

After a quarter that has flown by, below is a link to download the culmination of the final project that Marta and I have worked on. Enjoy!

Final Presentation *.pptx

[ED 256 Week 8] Technology in higher education

The following is a reflection on week 8 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on technology in higher education.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

L. Breslow. "Lessons Learned: Findings from MIT Initiatives in Educational Technology (2000-2005)." J. of Science Education and Tech. Vol. 16, No. 4, August 2007

S. Hooper and L.P. Rieber. "Teaching with Technology." Teaching: Theory into practice. pp. 154-170. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
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This week's reading focuses on various technology-based tools used in higher education institutions. Hooper and Rieber outline the process and paths in which technology is integrated into the education system. These are familiarization, utilization, integration, reorientation, and evolution. They propose that traditional education is limited to the first three phases and that only when reaching reorientation and evolution does a change in teaching philosophy occur. Reorientation is when the "learner becomes subject rather than object of education" and evolution is when an actual change in the classroom occurs. Interestingly, Hooper and Rieber define that such an evolution occurs under the philosophy of constructionism, in which the learner is active and is the focus. They propose that

1) effective learning consists of selection, organization, and integration,
2) effective learners actively process lesson content,
3) presenting information from multiple perspectives increases durability of instruction, and
4) effective instruction builds on students knowledge and experiences.

This is indeed the case, given recent research on the process of learning, so they are valid points. Several examples of possible implementations are given by Breslow, who describes initiatives at MIT. Their major findings are that

1) successful technology must meet the unmet or poorly met needs compared to traditional methods,
2) too much technology or bad technology is detrimental, and
3) there is an important relationship between technology and the learning environment.

I appreciated the balance of perspectives offered in this paper of several technology-based tools in several of the engineering classes offered at MIT, such as an online posting forum and online lectures. In many cases, the success of the technology depended on the audience. For instance, whereas alumni valued the online forums, undergraduates found them cumbersome. It is idea that "media are not neutral conveyances-" they are biased, limited, and application dependent.

Indeed, I can speak to one particular example known as TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning), which was implemented in all introductory physics classes when I was a freshman. TEAL is based on the usage of clickers, in which students submit answers electronically to some questions (most often on a powerpoint slide). The paper lists several successes of TEAL in 8.02T (a course on electromagnetism. MIT associates numbers with classes, so 8.02 means it is a course in the physics department, i.e., course 8). While I can see the intention of the TEAL program to encourage interactive and engaged learning, my memories of it were more aligned with the criticisms of TEAL. Often times students forgot the clickers, didn't bother to click, or tried to game the system. In the particular class I took, the presence of clicker questions fell off after the first few lectures of class, after I had to spend a good $40 on the clicker itself. In many cases, the questions that were asked were not actually helpful for learning; they were simple, by nature of being multiple-choice. What was actually more useful was going through problems in groups and practicing problems from different textbooks to get different perspectives on the same concept.

I think Breslow makes several good points about bot the limits and potential of technology in higher education. Namely, there are limits and that one must carefully consider if technology is the appropriate medium. One example of this are the online lectures from past classes. In several cases, I have used online lectures from past semesters of professors that I heard were exceptionally compelling at lecturing but were now retired or no longer teaching that particular class. From the technologies that have been successful, it seems the common theme are the tools that  encourage the flow of information among students and instructors spatially and temporally. This is where I believe technology has a great potential in higher education.

Science Communication: Merchants of Doubt

"lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities- yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats"

This past Thursday was the Sustainable Science Communication Conference held at UCSB. The conference started off with a showing of the film Merchants of Doubt, based off of the book of the same title by Erik M. Conway, a historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech, and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science now at Harvard University. In short, this was a fascinating film about a very different kind of science communication.

The film begins with the magician Jamy Ian Swiss, who talks about how audiences willfully and knowingly participate in being deceived by the magician and the stark contrast of the deception purported by these merchants of doubt. Indeed, although this film is meant to be satirical of the brutish yet manipulative tactics of these pundits-for-hire, it is also horrifying. The film makers interview several of these pundits who see nothing wrong with spreading doubt in order to stymy legislation that could cut profits for the company. What is even more astonishing is it is often the same people who are posing as these "third party experts" that are hired across several industries to surreptitiously advance their objectives. The film shows that this has happened with the health risks of tobacco and  fire retardants, and more recently pharmaceuticals, the food industry, and (most relevant to this conference) climate change. In fact the campaigns run for Big Tobacco were so successful, that the same strategies are being used in issues we face today.

That is, the main goal of these pundits-for-hire is to turn the focus away from the science and on the politics of regulation by casting doubt, by personally attacking the scientists, and by manipulating the perception the public. I found this movie to be entertaining but also elucidating on the nature of manipulation in communication. I hope you will consider watching the film, and also think twice about what you see on media.

[ED 256: Week 7 Reading] Playful Learning

The following is a reflection on week 7 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on playful learning.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

M. Resnik. "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten." Creativity & Cognition conference. June 2007.

M. Resnik, J. Maloney, A Monroy-Hernandez, et al.  "Scratch: Programming for All." Communications of the ACM. Vol. 52, No. 11. November 2009.

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This week we have feature articles from the MIT media lab. The main concept is to highlight the kindergarten way of learning, in which the learner is constantly "designing, creating, experimenting, and exploring." Resnik outlines several keys feedback processes for an effective learning process in which the user sets the pace of the learning environment. These are imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. This philosophy is implemented in the online community surrounding Scratch, an interactive platform that uses the idea of Legos to teach concepts of programming. Since starting in 2003, the Scratch community has expanded to thousands of users who create stories, games, animations, and simulations.

Scratch user interface

Scratch website frontpage

The idea of representing code as pieces that fit together in an intuitive way is appealing, including myself who has had some training in programming. I think the idea of using modularity that can be configured in any which way but adhere to certain rules is the perfect balance for which something can be learned and still flexible enough to be personalized. Indeed, MIT is a key locus for experimenting with the vanguard of education. In addition to what has come out of the Media Lab, there is OpenCourseWare that provides access to past lectures and class materials and newly started MITx offers free classes with certifications of many engineering courses. 

Even within individual departments (and individuals who graduated from MIT; see Khan Academy), there are several initiatives to make knowledge more accessible to anyone with the desire to learn. For example, in my undergrad Materials Science and Engineering department, I took a course in which the classroom was flipped. That is, we watched lectures outside of class and had more interactive discussions in-class. This class was particularly well-suited for this endeavor since it was a higher-level course on electronic devices, so much of the basic physics was covered in earlier semesters. Having such a format affords much flexibility and control of learning on the part of the student while still preserving face-to-face communication with the instructor. I feel lucky to have experienced something that people are talking about in papers!

[ED 256 Week 7] Storyboard for Science Communication

This week we present our storyboard concept for using technology as a means of communicating science and science policy to the general public.

We focus the scope of our project around climate change. In the past few years, the debate surrounding climate change has evolved from determining the extent of anthropogenic contributions to what can be done on a policy level.

However, the science that underlies any debate on climate change is complex, often too distilled or distorted in media. As shown in the example article, the top three news coverages channels have varying degrees of accuracy on reporting. This is indeed worrisome as this is a major outlet a huge portion of the US population is exposed to anything related to climate change.

In keep with our theme of technology, we have chosen to construct a website that displays and filters information taken from the web, and is ranked based on reviews of scientists and the general public.


What's the story?

Suppose you come a series of articles on climate change, and you see the following...

What is fact and what is fiction? It's hard to tell with the volume of information and complexity that surrounds climate change.

Our website Science(or)Fiction hopes to address this. The layout and motivation of the website is presented as follows.

We have a generic search bar. If brought to fruition, we hope to include other hot-topics surrounding science technology, such as nanotechnology and GMOs.

This is the overall layout of the website as it might appear in your browser.

A key feature of our website is the presence of interactive (info)graphs. That is, graphs taken from scientific papers and contextualized. An example shown here is a plot of global temperature anomalies and carbon dioxide emission levels since 1900. The user would be able to point to a spot on the graph, and relevant historic information would pop up. The motivation is to make information dynamic and interactive.

An important part of forming a community around this website would be to connect the user to a greater forum. Here, the user can submit a question. Initially, based on an internal key word search, the website can output possible answers. If the user is not satisfied, s/he would then be connected to a scientific community member.

A featured question or one that is related to a user submitted question would appear here. We think an interesting way to present the information (in addition to text-based answers) is a Wordle, in which words of a certain frequency are proportionally sizes and arranged. Much like a cascading Wikipedia search, we hope it will give a brief overview of the common words used to answer the user's question and spur further curiosity into the topic.

Perhaps the most important feature is the community-based voting of the validity and reliability of a particular source. We include the categories of newspaper, scientist, politician as a filter for ranking.

There would be a spectrum of icons to represent the overall ranking of a particular source, with some examples shown to the left.

How these sources will receive a ranking is an important issue. Our current idea is as follows. There are separate repositories of users- scientists, legislators, and the general public. All repositories require login to vote and rank. The first two require authentication of affiliation (e.g., an email associated with an official organization and other credentials). In order to vote, the user must login, provide credentials, and provide a short justification of their ranking if very low or very high.

In total there are three different rankings for each repository and an overall ranking.




The major idea is to aggregate information and have a community-based method of ranking the perceived validity and reliability of a source. Although a large amount of distillation of information occurs, it is our hope that having a simple ranking system spurs people to think twice about the media they encounter.

[ED 256 (Week 5)]: Augmented Reality in the Classroom

The following is a reflection on week 5 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on augmented reality.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

H-K Wu, S. Lee, H-Y Chang, J-C Liang. "Current status, opportunities and challenges of augmented reality in education." Computers & Education 62 (2013) 41-49.

 F. Liarokapis, N. Mourkoussis, M. White, J. Darcy, M. Sifniotis, P. Petridis, A. Basu, P. F. Lister. "Web3D and Augmented Reality to support Engineering Education."  World Transactions on Engineering and Technology Education© 2004 UICEE Vol.3, No.1, 2004.

E. Klopfer and K. Squire. "Environmental Detectives—the development of an augmented reality platform for environmental simulations." Education Tech Research Dev.  (2008) 56:203–228 DOI 10.1007/s11423-007-9037-6 

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This week we discuss the merits, implications, and challenges surrounding augmented reality (AR) in the classroom. Wu, et al. adopt the definition of AR as "augmenting natural feedback to the operator with simulate cues" and conceive AR as a concept rather than being grounded in technology itself. They discuss several features and affordances AR provides including

• learning content in 3D
• ubiquitous, collaborative, situated learning 
• presence, immediacy, and immersion,
• visualizing the invisible, and,
• bridging formal and informal learning.

The largest advantage of AR is indeed immersive learning that allows the students to connect classroom concepts with real-life contexts, which may prove to be a motivation for further developing collaborative and inquiry-based skills. Indeed there have been many studies that have shown that students across all ages can gain additional enthusiasm and insight into issues in their environment.

The one affordance that struck my attention was bridging the formal and informal learning. I find this link to be less explored than the others.More specifically, the ability to go back to formal learning. While it is more apparent how to incorporate collaboration through roles, context and immediacy through location, and visualization, it is difficult to connect it back to formal learning. The current paradigm of formal learning includes lectures, textbook reading, and in-class demonstrations. I feel this is an important aspect to consider when designing AR media. That is, the ability to breakdown the dense text in textbooks. There is a surprising amount of knowledge and intuition in older textbooks that will be lost if future generations do not take the time to decipher them. It is also a skill that takes patience and persistence, and was not something I started learning until reaching graduate school. 

True, reading a math textbook is dry and soporific, but the ability to traverse between abstract and concrete is an important skill and is a common theme in science and math. In fact, something that is not apparent early in education or in general public and not emphasized enough is that a large part of science and math is the ability abstract a concrete problem and establish assumptions (or conjectures, axioms, etc. in mathematics). That is, identifying and defining the problem may be said to be more important than the solution itself because it frames the types of solutions that arise. Furthermore, the ability to establish to assumptions is critical because it can simplify a problem and clarify the thinking process. Nearly everything in science begins with a complex problem distilled into a simple model with a set of assumptions that are gradually relaxed. Although I am not sure how viable this would be in an AR environment, I think it an aspect worth investigating.

The importance of old knowledge also holds true in the research world. There are a number of examples in which what is supposed to be cutting-edge research in high-end journals has actually been fleshed out with greater physical intuition a few decades ago.  This is partially because not as much technology was available, so one had to to choose carefully how to approach a problem while considering the physics. In other words, the lack of technology and other resources spurred creative and carefully thought out hypotheses.

This is made difficult through the shear volume of information that gets generated now. The analysis of the implementation of AR in the classroom described that Klopfer and Squire present provides useful insight into possible challenges and solutions to overcome them. In addition to listing numerous existing classroom software for AR learning, they listed several challenges on all levels of development for a environmental based game. These included technical problems with the accuracy of the GPS and the solution-driven instead of inquiry-based work of several student groups. Klopfer and Squire offer insightful solutions such as allowing the usage of Google, setting a time limit, having a time-dependence on the non-player characters, and cascading events. I think this is working in the correct direction to foster the ability to sift through constantly changing and generated information, and critically think about their validity with peers. This is indeed something that is lost on the textbook level where often only well-established knowledge passes.

A final thought on AR mentioned by Klopfer and Squire is the importance of the learning culture and teacher in the classroom. That is, one must keep in mind that AR is an additional tool and the full potential of AR depends on how the teacher presents the material. Klopfer and Squire note that the how the teacher frames the collaboration or competition greatly affects the depth to which students evaluate their solutions. And this is perhaps the most important and most difficult challenge: How does the teacher understand and perceive the classroom material? How does this translate into student learning? While developing classroom tools for students is important, there must also be emphasis on the teachers. Perhaps AR can offer an opportunity in this area for training teachers.

[ED 256] Parallel Prototyping, Part II

As part of the design challenge, Marta and I brainstormed some ideas and sketched them out. We have decided to combine our two challenges as communication of science in energy policy.
Here are the ideas we have so far!
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A website based off of Rotten Tomatoes, in which opinions on topics such as climate change get a rating of "truthfulness" based on the user base in much the same a wiki is regulated. There will also be interactive infographics and videos to display the same kind of knowledge in different ways. It is our hope to give a balanced and expansive view of an issue.

Alternatively, we could focus on the brevity found in advertising, possibly integrating with green movement already occurring in industry to both advertise a product and be informative. The above example is from a foreign advertisement run by Toyota, in which it is suggested the emissions of a Prius are less than that of a sheep. Although in principle, the types of gases that are emitted between a car and a sheep are different, it is a clever way to introduce a concept in a humorous and succinct way.

Finally, another idea would be to propose a national holiday that the U.S. federal government would formally recognize (and take part in, in an optimistic scenario) in a similar way that e.g., President's Day is. The website We the People would make such a petition relatively easy to start with. It's a little farfetched, but maybe it might work!

[ED 256 (Week 3 & 4)]: Ideating and Parallel Prototyping

The following is a reflection on week 4 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on parallel prototyping.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

S.P. Dow, A. Glassco, J. Kass, M. Schwarz, D.L. Schwarz, S.R. Klemmer. "Parallel Prototyping Leads to Better Design Results, More Divergence, and Increased Efficacy." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 17, No. 4, Article 18. December 2010
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In week 3 of class, we ideated as a group possible solutions to the challenges brought forth in each of the projects. Projects varied from integration of theory and practice in theater to retention of Latin American students in higher education to how to best teach Chinese writing. A variety of ideas were brought up, including:

• Digital visual/interactive media (e.g., photo frame, e-books)
• App-based technology (e.g., solving a problem to unlock phone, 
• Web content inspired by existing websites (e.g., rating-based websites, wikis)
• Augmented reality (e.g., Google glasses, video games)
• Museum exhibits
• Traveling content (e.g., traveling libraries, traveling art)
• Immersive experiences (e.g., constructionist-based education, neurological implants)

For the challenge concerning science policy and communication, the following ideas were generated:

• Jargon translator
• App for fact checking politicians' speeches/movie content
• Web-inspired: Rotten Tomatoes for science issues, Snopes (urban legends), Twitter (confidence meter of science issues), Urban Dictionary equivalent, Wiki version
• Expanding Linked'in- badges of some sort
• Open-source publishing platform- including infographics with publishing
• Classroom partnerships- Skype, mentoring network
• Pop science media (without filtering of journalism)
• Big Bang Theory spin-off

I would like to add the following (not-as-technical) solutions:

• Science demonstrations (on Capitol Hill)
• Advertising campaign- billboard, TV, web-ad
• National holiday (like in India)

An exciting update, a fellow classmate Marta Grotheim will be joining this project!

As we continue to develop the scope of how to address the challenge of communication in science policy and to the general public, a few things about ideating to keep in mind. Dow, et al. highlight their findings of parallel versus series prototyping for a school Web banner cover. They find that parallel prototyping offers several advantages over series prototyping. Parallel prototyping:

• leads to feedback comparison and higher quality designs
• results in more divergent ideas
• encourages investment in the creative process rather than a particular idea
• lead to an increase in design task-specific self-efficacy

In all, parallel prototyping lead to better performance and higher confidence of the participants in the prototyping process. 

As one who has been through the prototyping process, I can attest to this personally. The ability to generate diverse ideas is a creative skill. The continuous generation of (good or not-so-good) ideas encourages the proverbial "thinking outside the box" paradigm. This is especially true for not-so-good ideas. Ideating without judgement to the value of the idea externalizes the prototyping process, which organizes and clarifies the thinking process. In many instances, not-so-good ideas spur creative ideas or the hybridization of ideas, and writing them down serves as a visual cue. 

I am excited to start working on this project!