Online High Schools

This past week was focused on innovation: specifically, finding innovative ways to produce new learning content.

Given this topic of discussion, Professor Kim, brought in a few of the Edison Learning team members to talk to us about their innovative approach to online high schools. I was actually very surprised by what a solid product they seem to have. Among some of the most interesting things that they have done with this product includes building it in a very modular way, integrating games and visualizations, as well as integrating social contexts.

The modularity of the system is quite fascinating in that they can use only bits and pieces of their overall content and market it separately from the rest of the tool. So for example, if a client is only looking for classroom modules regarding Chemistry because they plan on taking the Chemistry SAT II test then, Edison Learning could potentially sell only those modules that are relevant for that upcoming test and not include every module available at the online high school. This seems to potentially be a very thriving line of business and something that is available to them in the future because they have taken these needs into account early in the design process. Such thriving business models however, leave me thinking that education is not necessarily core to the company culture. I would be curious about how large of a push there is to maintain high profits within their company and how strong of focus content really are.

The integration of games and visualizations, however, does speak to their general commitment to educational content and provides a different learning process for students enrolled in this online school. In other classes, we have begun discussing different modes of learning and visualization, games, and toys are among some that I feel are very powerful teaching aides. I was very excited to see that they had integrated these into their school and that they had even found ways to make these collaborative across different users.

Social contexts were also made available, and the application that was developed for this particular piece was very cool. Not only was it extremely modern in design, but it provided security and visualizations as well. Students could physically see a character that they represented move around a room and interact with other students. While this may provide an almost false sense of socialization, I felt that the way it was executed could certainly provide a medium for students to feel like they were socially engaging with others, which in my opinion is very important even if it not done in a more “real” manner. I am curious to know if they promote more socialization, by arranging face to face visits or outings, such as field trips to museums or other such events.

Overall I found this discussion quite fruitful and most definitely was impressed by the product that they presented. I would be interested in seeing more real examples of innovations and more guest speakers coming to the class.

mobile technologies and learning theories

Class this week was especially motivating as presentations were made that focused on a summary of innovative media sites, projects or products that are targeted towards some kind of underrepresented group of users.

Even though we had discussed this in class before, I was surprised by the amount of projects that focused on mobile technologies. Within my research of media that focused on disease prevention and education, I came across so many projects that were specifically using mobile technologies as the platform for information disbursement.

Because this seems to be such an important platform for learning I've been curious to know what type of learning theory mobile technologies support. I quickly looked up some information regarding learning theories:

Learning Theory	Activity Type
Behaviorist	Activities that promote learning as a change in learners’ observable actions
Constructivist	Activities in which learners actively construct new ideas or concepts based on both their previous and current knowledge
Situated	Activities that promote learning within an authentic context and culture
Collaborative	Activities that promote learning through social interaction
Informal and non-formal	Activities that support learning outside a dedicated learning environment and formal curriculum
Learning and teaching support	Activities that assist in the coordination of learners and resources for learning activities

It is fairly easy to see how mobile technologies could support many of these theories of learning. As an example, feedback from the mobile device provides reinforcement that supports the behaviorist theory. Mobile devices also support the collaborative learning theory by providing a different means of online collaboration. Online discussion boards, for example, can be a substitute for face-to-face discussions. Mobile learning also takes the learning outside the classroom and by default embeds the learning into students' everyday lives, thus emphasizing the value of mobile technologies as a means of supporting informal learning theories.

While my research in this area is far from extensive, mobile technologies seem to fit quite easily in the context of learning and are obviously a great way of transferring information as almost half of the worlds population currently owns some type of mobile device. The introduction of other mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone make mobile technologies an even more viable option for learning as individual developers can provide material that supports learning. Where institutions were the only medium for educational content before, now any individual can participate in developing content for these more open devices.

I am curious to see what other devices or mediums for mobile technologies emerge in the upcoming years that further transforms the way we see mobile learning.

learning our ABCD's

During class this past week, we had the opportunity to role-play in order to get a better understanding of a particular concept discussed during class. In particular, instructional objectives were the focus and A,B,C,D was the concept that was to be applied to a given situation.

To give some insight, A,B,C,D represents Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree. From class discussion and some further online investigation I would say that the following represents what each of these mean:

1. Audience: The who. The objectives should say who will be addressed and any special characteristics about them.
2. Behavior: The objective should says what a learner is expected to be able to do. The objective sometimes describes the product or result of the doing.
3. Condition:The objective should describe the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.
4. Degree: The objective should describe the criteria of acceptable performance by describing how well the learner must perform in order to be considered acceptable. These should be measurable.

Given this, we grouped up and designed a learning curriculum for a particular situation. The outcome was a bit scattered in that some groups were able to describe in great detail each of the A,B,C,D's, while other groups weren't

Overall, I think this role-play experience worked out well. Before this, I had some kind of understand of what this concept was and envisioned how you might you this in designing educational media, but didn't have as clear of an understanding of its true relevance. Being able to role play gave me a better understanding of this. For example, I understand how important identifying the "Degree" piece really is. It is the evaluative piece that lets you understand whether your curriculum or instructional objectives are being met.

During class we also spoke a little bit about our digital artifacts and just briefly introduced who each of our potential audiences would be. It was rather interesting to see the varying communities that will be targeted and it made me quite interested in seeing the final projects (which are not due for quite a while).

The community that I have chosen to focus on is Texas-Mexico border children. From the Texas side, this region has the greatest percentage of children living in poverty and the greatest number without access to health care in the state of Texas. Statistics can be found here. From the Mexico side, however, the health and educational conditions are even far more tragic. Taking a look at this particular community is of particular interest to me as it where I myself grew up. It will be interesting to see if educational media is something feasible for this community and how it would be possible.

I've included some pictures of this community as it is near and dear to my heart:

Water truck being delivered in a small town in South Texas.

Homes in a "richer" colony in Matamoros, Mexico

Children helping mother at a garbage dump in Matamoros, Mexico.

motivating 2nd class...

Lecture this last week was quite motivating. The initial focus was on some of the leading research projects in the web-based and mobile technologies fields. Some examples included mobile applications that create concept maps (essentially an "e-portfolio" of sorts); mobile health education applications; LMS as an iPhone application as well other great projects. Professor Paul followed the discussion by showing where some of these leading research projects can meet the needs of some of the most marginalized communities.

Some of the most compelling research projects were a few that Professor Paul has been working on. For example, his storytelling competition project in Rwanda was exceptionally motivating especially because of the under-served community that is targeted by the project. His mobile application project in Oaxaca Mexico was also truly inspiring. Both of these examples are mobile technologies that promote learning and motivate children to use their creativity to think and learn both about themselves and their communities.

The idea of helping the under-served communities of this world is something that I'm sure is on the minds of many individuals, and yet is something that is still tremendously needed. How do you create something that can motivate someone to want to learn or something that will make individuals more inclined to change the way they live? What type of platform can be used to make the most impact yet be something that is sustainable in the long term? Contemplating some possible solutions takes me back to the discussion that took place in last week's class: in order to be effective, we need to have a clear understanding of all of the issues that are plaguing the particular communities we would want to focus on.

Much of the conversations during class were focused on how you enable children to learn, but I think my particular focus is more on how do you teach parents to allow children to learn. Parent education is something that I see being pivotal in the success of a community to excel. In my mind, parents are the single biggest influence in any child's education. Many times children are forced to work or marry because the parents mandate it. Teaching parents that learning and education is the key to success is something that I hope to focus on in future work.

As far as platforms, I found what Professor Paul said about mobile cell phones during lecture very fascinating. It seems like cell phones and other mobile devices are truly enabling much learning in developing countries. I quickly looked up some statistics about how cell phones are being used across the world and found a few interesting graphs from the ITU (International Telecommunications Union).

Seems like mobile telephone subscribers are still growing at a fairly rapid pace both in developing and developed countries. If you compare these numbers to those of the fixed lines it is quite impressing! Even as compared to internet users, mobile technologies are growing at much faster rate than internet usage. Perhaps mobile technology really is the platform to focus on!