Sunday, May 17, 2015

[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.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

[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!


Monday, May 11, 2015

[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.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

[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.