learning about e-learning

Class Projects

2009-11-14T10:08:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, we had our dry-run of our final projects. Many of the projects were extremely impressive, but what surprised me more than anything else was the wide range of topics that everyone chose to focus on. Not only were all of the project topics distinct from one another, but most were also in different forms of media. Of course this only lent the question of what were some of the remaining media formats that were not covered by the presentations given in class. In searching through Google, I found this interesting site that identified some of the different types of basic mediums for educational instruction:

Text

Out of all of the elements, text has the most impact on the quality of the multimedia interaction. Generally, text provides the important information. Text acts as the keystone tying all of the other media elements together. It is well written text that makes a multimedia communication wonderful.

Sound

Sound is used to provide emphasis or highlight a transition from one page to another. Sound synchronized to screen display, enables teachers to present lots of information at once. This approach is used in a variety of ways, all based on visual display of a complex image paired with a spoken explanation

Video

The representation of information by using the visualization capabilities of video can be immediate and powerful. While this is not in doubt, it is the ability to choose how we view, and interact, with the content of digital video that provides new and exciting possibilities for the use of digital video in education.

Animation

Animation is used to show changes in state over time, or to present information slowly to students so they have time to assimilate it in smaller chunks. Animations, when combined with user input, enable students to view different versions of change over time depending on different variables.

Graphics

Graphics provide the most creative possibilities for a learning session. They can be photographs, drawings, graphs from a spreadsheet, pictures from CD-ROM, or something pulled from the Internet. The reason for this is that images make use of a massive range of cortical skills: color, form, line, dimension, texture, visual rhythm, and especially imagination.

Interestingly enough, most of our projects integrated more than just one of these basic media formats and as many of the descriptions above indicate many of these are most effective when used in conjunction with another basic medium, as with audio and graphics.

Further research (which will certainly be done with completion of our final papers) will give more insight into the benefits of using one media format over another. I am completely excited about showcasing my project as well as understanding some of the shortcomings of why some of the projects were better teaching and learning tools.

Ideas Ideas Ideas

2009-11-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

During this week's class, we were able to provide feedback and brainstorm with two different "future" ventures: one of which was for-profit while the other was non-profit.

I was actually quite surprised by the fact that they both seemed to be struggling with relatively the same issues, namely idea generation. I understand that they were both in the very early phases of development and the for-profit venture already had a general idea of what their product or solution would be, but they were both still trying to gather feedback from users and hoping to generate new ideas to incorporate into the solution.

This “prototyping” of sorts only leads me to call on what I have learned during my time at the d.school here at Stanford. From my own work on projects, I’ve learned that generating viable ideas for solutions is a very tough thing to do. Part of the philosophy that I appreciate of the design methodology taught at the d.school is that of generating as many ideas as you can think of in a short amount of time. Many times this leads to completely out of the box ideas (some completely ridiculous!) but undoubtedly will in some way or another generate at least a jumping off point for a new idea.

Someone recently shared this quote from www.kottke.org, which I also think is a good summary of the d.school’s method of prototyping and ideation and really exemplifies the benefits that can arrive from working toward quantity over quality when ideating:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

I’m curious about what methodology both ventures that spoke to us during class had used to generate ideas. I suppose the non-profit venture was still in the very very early stages and was still scoping out what her venture would look like. The for-profit, however, seemed to have already generated several ideas about other features for their solution. Perhaps they also tried throwing out as many ideas as possible. Using us as a means for more ideas was also probably a smart idea ;-)

Sustainability in Non-Profit Online Ventures

2009-11-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

Among discussing a wide array of learning theories at the onset of class, we also got to dive deep into a few online ventures that Professor Kim thought would be great to discuss. The particular website that my team was focused on was http://teachaids.org/ which is a non-profit online venture that is focused on HIV/AIDS education through the production of video lessons.

While investigating how some of the theories that we have been learning in class could be applied to this particular website, my team and I determined that it seemed probable that the efforts by this non-profit were fairly sustainable. In my own opinion, I felt that this was the case particularly because of the ability to maintain funding. HIV/AIDS education in my opinion is something that will undoubtedly continue to receive large amounts of funding from large corporations because it is such a humanitarian effort and because to some degree it inhibits market growth in the disease stricken regions which is arguably a market that many corporations would like to tap into.

During class, however, there seemed to be some shared reservation about the possible sustainability of this particular organization. Beyond funding the reason for the skepticism in sustainability seemed to be lack of possible growth of content generation.

I decided to do a little Google searching to see how other non-profit organizations manage to maintain sustainability in content development as well as in funding. I found a quote from an individual from e-democracy.org that I felt was a good summary of what online non-profit ventures should strive for:

“The non-profit online services that work, understand that what they deliver is more important than who they are and their public interest philosophy and approach. I think our challenge is to find ways that build from public interest motivation in such a way that they truly build better and more cost effective forms of online content and interactivity.”

Relating this directly to http://teachaids.org/ I feel like this quote helps summarize what will need to be done to maintain their content sustainable through the upcoming years. The questions to ask is how they will design content that will build on the current public interest motivation while continuing innovation and cost effective strategies. I’d be curious to know what type of strategies the developers have been doing, as well as how in touch they are with the motivations of the communities that they are targeting.

While looking for other non-profit organizations that have won the sustainability game over the years, I ran across a ranking of the most successful non-profit brands. I couldn’t help but agree that the more powerful brand the non-profit has the least likely content sustainability will be such a huge problem. While not totally relevant I figured I would include this chart as I felt it was fairly compelling.

I can only hope that any non-profit work that I become involved in grows a brand as successful as some of these.

Online High Schools

2009-10-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-13T23:38:00.001-07:00

learning our ABCD's

2009-10-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

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:

Audience: The who. The objectives should say who will be addressed and any special characteristics about them.
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.
Condition:The objective should describe the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.
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...

2009-10-04T13:19:00.001-07:00

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!

first day of class...

2009-09-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of Web-based Technologies in Teaching and Learning. Part of the assignments for this course will be to create and maintain this very blog. So here we go...

Web-based Technologies in Teaching and Learning.... This has been a topic of interest to me for a long time now, so I am definitely interested in reading and learning more about the research in this area. There seems to be a lot of opinions on what works and what doesn't in e-learning, but as far as I know, the research in this area is not that extensive. That is to say, there are still lots of unanswered questions.

One topic that was addressed during class was that of understanding the culture of a community before attempting to implement a technology solution. There are plenty of examples where solutions are designed for communities that perhaps are not at the stage where that particular technology is even a viable option for them. This is a struggle that I feel many product designers have. The example given during class was that of the "One Child per Laptop" project, where the concept of designing a "connected" laptop for every child failed to be successful particularly because there was not a clear understanding of the communities that would be using these laptops. It is a sad thought that such a worthy project failed, yet a lesson learned in that understanding the social context of any technology project is pivotal for success. Hopefully I'll remember this later as I work to develop technology solutions of my own.

Other topics that I hope will be discussed in later classes include social e-learning and mobile technologies. Social software seems to exist everywhere these days and seems to have great potential as a means for learning, but I can also see some challenges. I'd be interested in knowing what types of social communities help promote learning best and which ones do not. As far as mobile technologies, there really seems to be very little literature in this area, but I would be curious to know the feasibility of implementing solutions in regards to cost and accessibility.

I'm very excited about this class and hope that there will be lots of key take-away's that I can use in my own work. The digital artifact projects also seem very cool and the specific focus of the class is extremely up my alley (i.e. education need for the most vulnerable, underprivileged and marginalized). Hopefully it will be a jumping off point for further research and possible ideas for the LDT Masters project.