Next 25 years - Technology in education

After  reading Facer&Sandford (2010) article, I resonated with the following scenario:   

A world where relationships between people and the groups they belong to are managed by contracts, where rewards and benefits are achieved in response to contributions and where personal reputations are carefully managed within their employment/community/ religious groups associations. Individuals are required/ enabled to find their place within these groupings. In this environment, we see two education systems emerging: 
1 ‘Discovery’ – an education system that enables individuals to understand where they might most effectively contribute to particular social and economic associations, and to build reputations within those associations. 
2 ‘Diagnosis’ – an education system targeted at early identification of capacity and potential and the close alignment of individuals’ educational experiences with projected future economic roles.

I think it is pretty true that student should be more aware how and where they can contribute their skills and talents. 

I also did two additional predictions : 

Prediction #1

Advanced Artificial Intelligence tutor:

In the next 25 years, student could learn in a more flexible and personal way. A human-like program, a learning partner and tutor could study with the student from their pre-school. The program tracks student’s life-long learning data, and be able to react and talk to student, including understand the students facial and body languages. When student requests to learn certain subject, the machine would provide the optimal learning strategy based on the student’s learning data.

Prediction #2

Smart Classroom

Students would have more close connection with their instructors. Teachers could share with their students info, files and classes in an easier way. In school, classrooms would be equipped with cameras, which could record instructor’s teachings from different angles. When course is done, the recorded file will be sent to students. Students could review teachings at any time. They can also search key words in the content, and research results would show them when the key words was mentioned during the class.

Week 10 Research Progress

In the past week, I looked into my research field in a broader scale . Instead of focusing on social fitness apps, I changed it to social media in general, also change the impact on young people’s work out activates to impact on young people’s physical health.  I re-framed my research question to How social media affects young people’s physical health? I was hoping the existing researches could show the positive co-relation between social media use and health. However, a lot of research brought up the negative consequence on health of using social media.

To be brief, these researches approach the relationship between social media use and people’s health from the following angles.  

·         Social media reduces level of face to face contact, which can increase the risk of serious of health problem such as cancer, stokes. Etc. 

·         Social media traps people in self-criticism.

·         Social media doesn’t hold the authority; it may misguide people by wrong health information.

·         Long hours of using social media has negative impact of sedentary behaviors on physical health.

·         Blue light exposure affects sleep quality.
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html)

(http://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2683&context=honorstheses1990-2015 -  Social support)              

(http://greatist.com/health/social-media-affects-fitness)

Different approaches provide me a more comprehensive view on this issue and helped me outline the structure of my research. I am still working on finishing up my survey, hope it can be sent out by this weekend.

Week 9 Research Progress

In this past week, I changed my research filed and decided to focus on How social fitness apps impact young people's (21-30) workout activities. The reason why I changed my research to fitness apps is that I think the implication of the exploratory research is more related to everyone's life and health.

As people get more and more conscious about their health issue, apps and wearables have been developed for tracking workout data. When users get the data in a nice presentation, the idea of sharing them get generated organically. Just like sharing other kind of information, we want present our identity, value, self-fulfillment, etc. And one possible extra bonus, we can motivate other people to join us to workout. When we see other friends are all doing certain things, the extrinsic motivation triggers us to join them, and hopefully it can be transformed to be an intrinsic motivation and help people to build up the habit of doing exercise.

I think it would be very interesting to find out how exactly social fitness apps can impact our workout activities. Does them motivate us? How long does the positive effect can last? What kind of research has been done in this field? etc.

Response to critique questions

Q: You said the author should move from qualitative to quantitative measures. How do you anticipate studying motivation in a quantitative way?

A: I recommended the author to conduct the research in a more quantitative way and collected data by using scales, such as Likert scales. The author can create 1 to 5 or 1 to 7 scales and ask learners to measure their motivation (and other challenges) on the scale (1 being not motivated at all, the highest number being very strongly motivated), instead of just asking their subjective opinions. The scales enable statements of opinion to be directly translated into numerical data.

Q: What did the author find through qualitative insights?

A: Author carried rich and deep conversations with the learners. During that process; author got to know what are learners’ frustrations and challenges in their Mooc learning experience.  Since learners were being interviewed face to face with the researchers, it was easier for them to express their personal feelings, which may provide extra info that is more than researcher’s expected. This kind of interview is good for the beginning stage of the research, which help researchers  find the common and major challenges to the learners.

Q: How can we as designers address this “intrinsic motives/motivation” issue? I feel it would be a very subjective topic to discuss and address – there might be a need to be more objective in order to have a more valid study.

A: Learners lacking of self-motivation may be the biggest challenges in their Mooc learning. So when instructors design the course, they may need to consider from the following angles:

-       Design engaged class activities, which attract students’ attention and raise their interests and curiosities. This kind of activities can head them engage more deeply in the course and they may find more value that they have overlooked.

-       Setting a clear goal of the course (and each class and activity), if the students know explicitly about what they can get out from the course/activity and what they are working towards, they may have reasons to stick with the course.

-       Show relevance to students academic and professional lives. If the course address and emphasize on how the course content can help students with their academic achievement and their career development and use more real-life examples and applications, the learners would appreciate more about the course and sustain their motivation.

Session 5 Reading Reflection

The talk from Sherry is striking and inspiring. It provokes us to think about if we have been using the technology in the right way. Are we still trying to achieve the initial goals we set when we started - connecting more people? Or have we been lost in the technology mess and gone to the opposite direction?

When technologies are doing us many favors, we need to stop and think about is there something we paid off to trade for convenience, efficiency and connection.

As Sherry mentioned in her talk, We short-change ourselves, and over time, we seem to forget this and stop caring. We sacrificed the face to face communication for more connections, the connection with people we can only meet online.

Technology doesn’t add more hours to the 24 hours we have in a day, but take the hours we suppose to spend with our family and friends away from us. We are always busy, busy to built the “network” on the virtual world, which we think it can make us feel safe. For most of the cases, the quick and shallow communication doesn’t really go anywhere, besides exchanging of some interests and simple companionship. We should use the Internet as an extension, to deepen and maintain our relationship in the real life, not replace it. We should use the internet to develop meaningful friendships, not just show off the “number of friends” we have on social media. We should use the Internet to make our friends feel being closer, not alienated.

Another interesting point she touched upon is that: can machine really cares about us? Can its pretend empathy really helps us release our anxiety and feel not lonely? If we are proud of developing a toy seal to companion the seniors and the sicks; then it is a time we should feel sad and sorry about our society. If we are too busy with developing tools to provide humanity but not act friendly to people around us, then we will need to think seriously about if the technology is necessary and serves us for the right purpose. Just like Sherry mentioned we expect more from the technology and less from each other.

I hope this reading reflection can resonate with you and inspire you to develop a more self-aware relationship with technology, with each other and with ourselves.

Session 4 blog assignment

(1) What are your thoughts about virtual environments and "life online?"

The virtual environment is a new hit of today's technology world. The combination of virtual machine monitor and hardware platform creates a 3D space which makes users feel that they are situating in the real environment. The immersive experience can be utilized as a unique simulator system, which can be used in training, such as astronaut and pilot training. It also upgrades gaming interaction to another level. More virtual reality applications will be developed in entertainment as well. Besides gaming, movie, traveling, just name a few, VR will change the way people consume entertainment.

At the current stage, virtual reality didn't emphasize too much on its social aspect, which is a big component of people's life online. After I dug a little bit further, I found out that social virtual reality would take place in the near future. A few companies are working diligently to make it happen faster (Facebook is one of them). Just imagine, you and your family and friends can be together inside another world, which will allow much richer communication to happen between each other. By then, you will not miss the time chatting with each other by typing or talking to a flat screen.  

2) Do you feel there is a correlation between life online and academic achievement, for better or worse?

I am not sure if there is a fixed formula for the correlation between life online and academic achievement. The Internet really is a double-edged sword, how much it will affect the academic achievement heavily depends on how people use it in the academic settings.

Nobody will neglect the fact that the Internet brings the world at our feet. You can almost find any information within a few clicks. But at the same time, the overwhelmed information and platforms also serve as big distractors.  It is hard to stay abreast with how many choices people have for social media, even each one just provides a little bit different functionality with one another. People thought they can multitask and migrate well between studying and chatting online, but multiple studies have been showed that almost everyone is terrible at multitasking. The more people try and do the worse they perform on every task. I think institutions should help students be aware of their social life online and encourage them to use the Internet wisely.

Session 2 Recap

At the week 2 class,  professor held an interesting debate:  In the content of technology determinism, are we a hard believer or soft believer? In another word, do we believe in that technology drives the social development or human drives the social development. Majority of people stand as hard believers, they think technology empowers people to do a lot of things they can not do without. In the future, more and more tasks/duties will be done by some type of technology....
On the opposite site of the spectrum, people emphasize on that technology is programmed by human. Technology is create based on our needs. People have to place orders to make technology work.

The debate reminds me about another interesting discussion in another class. We talked about does our mind work like a computer. Is that possible to create a 100% human like computer/robot in the future. Although the discussion didn't lead to any conclusion, just imagine,  if one day computer can do everything that people do, who will drive the development. I am afraid that the answer is technology. Hopefully by that time, people can still use technology wisely, not be slaved by it.  

Session 3 Reading Reaction

What role are you playing in the Internet community?

This week reading discussed the system structure of Technology-mediated social participation. Author categorized all the users into four parts: readers, contributors, collaborators and leaders. The number of people decreases as the level of authority increases. The author also listed explicitly for each category what motivates them to choose the role they play and the value they create for the Internet community as a whole. 

It is very interesting to see that in a virtual world, humanity is still the main driver for us when we make our decision. Intrigued by our own curiosity or encouraged by friends, we browse and read content that is relevant to us.  The desire of standing out and being recognized triggers us to write or upload content. A sense of empathy and altruism play as a big factor that pushes us to develop a welcoming and trusty atmosphere. Finally, the higher visibility and mentorship make certain people natural leaders, who synthesize discussions and arguments, solve problems, and deal with conflicts between contributors.

You may not be aware of the role you play or you play multiple roles across different online platforms, but as long as it is a social environment, other roles are needed to maintain it as a healthy community.