Mind Grapes

2009-12-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

The Expo, our last session;

Last Wednesday was our Expo where we got to demonstrate our prototypes to an audience comprising of teachers, students and people working in the non profit industry. It was a great experience for all of us being able to set up our workstations and show the attendees what we had been working on for the last few weeks.

We each did a one minute pitch about our project and the work we had been doing, which was transmitted using twitcam and twitter to people who could not attend the Expo in person, but wanted to see it remotely. It was fun to try and implement a bit of what we had been talking about all quarter by using web based technologies to reach a wider audience !

For my part, I had the opportunity to discuss my prototype with audience members, my classmates and also the SUSE IT team who were interviewing us. I really wish I had had the opportunity to work on it a little more using Flash, but since its a technology I don’t know well yet, I decided to experiment a little more with my prototype website, to show a map based network connecting a school which was at the center of my model to various other organizations distributed based on the work they did to help out schools, like infrastructure, health and nutrition, protection of children and child labor etc. I color coded them so as to make it easier for the audience to get a broader overview of what I was trying to do.

We all spent the next couple of hours talking to audience members. Expos are always a good exercise in understanding how to express the salient points of your product to your audience in a few words making sure you highlight the correct details. In hindsight, I think I should have made a brief poster explaining the idea, because especially for expo’s its a good idea to have a poster that incorporates the highlights of your problem and solution prototype. It was great to get some feedback from the audience about the ideas and existing prototypes I can look into for further work on mine.

For my prototype really to try and take it to the next step, I need to look into more of the technologies that I want to use to develop a mapping system, and a more comprehensive website with features that allow the different members in a network to connect to each other. There maybe an existing distribution system that I can use but it bears doing more research into. I envision something with a mapped network which makes it easier to locate where the members are and drill down into that to gather more information about them, which could include website address, contact details, any news articles and papers, videos and comments by others who have worked with them. In order to build a small working prototype for this it will require me to locate a primary government school in a local area, and speak with local and national level volunteer organizations and NGOs who would be willing to sign up to participate in this. Another thing that bears looking into is some kind of a management system for the school itself which can co-ordinate the details and make sure things are actually working. It is a fairly uphill task, but I am still pretty excited about the idea, so I would like to continue doing some research on it in my spare time and see how far things go.

Overall I was pretty happy with how we concluded our class with an in and out class Expo, giving each of us an opportunity to share our ideas with each other and an audience outside of class. The talks from industry folks working in the e-learning industry were also extremely helpful. And finally this is the first class really where I got introduced to some basic learning theories and mindmaps and other things that educators and curriculum designers use, so I was happy to have learned all that. In all it was a great quarter, and I am glad to have had the opportunity to work on some very cool projects.

2009-11-23T09:23:00.001-08:00

The world is open;

This week we had the opportunity to interact over video conference with Dr. Curtis Bonk who is a Professor at Indiana University. It was my first remote learning experience and so quite interesting. Tom at SUSE IT set us up with the Cisco Webex system, using which we could connect to Dr.Bonk. I wish there was a better way to split the screens between the slides and the person you are talking to so that you could see them more clearly. I think it might have been very interesting to use something like ViewXtreme to deliver the content and see how that went ! A couple of the other issues we faced was that the slides didn’t move by themselves so Katy had to do those by hand, and the microphone was too far away for most of us to speak with Dr. Bonk.

All the minor issues aside it was an interesting lecture. Dr. Bonk spoke to us about his new book “The World is Open” and we discussed the open learning world With the help of e-learning, Blogs, Wikis, Discussion forums, Webinars, Course websites, learning world has really opened up to all of us. We saw some examples of archaeology blogs, where in sitting here in the United States you could follow the exploits of archaeologists in Afghanistan. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA offers an interactive research map using which you can easily identify research projects, field programs and internships, and get more information on them. This is really similar to what I envision trying to make for the next iteration of my 391 project, so it was very cool to see an idea that I can build on top of. There are similar programs being run by Earthwatch and Greenpeace which allow you to visualize and follow happenings all around the world from your home.

We also looked up, how we all learn using using different educational websites, online schools, content delivery networks, streaming media etc. Some examples are “cable in the classroom” (, Mahalo, the human powered search and EdTV which guides to to online educational content streams. There is so much information out there, perhaps what we really need is an information processing tool that sorts this for us and gives us what we are looking for.

There is now a massive infusion of e-books on the market, giving us access to reading anytime and anywhere. With open source text books, e-libraries, google book search the global text project, we now have access to an enormous collection of works by different authors and devices that the Sony Reader and the Kindle have really opened up our world and made accessibility much quicker and cheaper. And the Kindle uses a revolutionary E Ink technology which brings us as close to the real world book reading experience as possible.

The existence of open source software and e-learning communities like Moodle and Sourceforge allow us to access, contribute to and customize a host of software and learning solutions out there for our needs. We can add information to websites like wikipedia, customize forums based on Sakai, use open learning initiative programs. And open source does not necessarily mean that the contributors are not making any profits. A lot of the open source projects are supported by larger companies and individual donors, who give them money, and developers who spend the time adding features and fixing bugs, and during the same time learning new skills.

Open courseware in universities like MIT and Yale allow us to access learning materials, online lectures and tutorials from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world. In addition the National Programme for Technology learning in India, NPTEL, started by the 7 IITs tries to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. Many more universities are gradually starting to open up the coursework and lectures to people outside the university and around the world.

As discussed above open source projects and developer APIs like the iPhone developer API allow users to contribute and create your own applications. Instant Messaging apps like google talk and skype allow you to communicate with people around the world. Websites like Wikipedia, Blogs and forums encourage collaboration, Learning repositories are created every day, Users can customize the information they get using RSS feeds, digg and delicious, Mobile data phones give us access to information instantly and anywhere in the world.

In all, we are moving towards open learning and social software enabling collaborative, real time learning and teaching, and allowing us to expand our boundaries of access immensely to the outside world.

2009-11-15T17:36:00.000-08:00

Digital Artifact 2;

It was Artifact Day this week, when we all got to show our digital artifacts for class.

A few of the ideas that stayed back in my head were Mike's "Flashcards" to help dyslexic children, Ashley's "Tune It Up", the website about learning English through stories, and Catherine's game with "Zoo Animals" to help children tackle issues with depression.

Again, it was really interesting to see how we expanded our ideas from Digital Artifact 1, to build something more concrete in a similar direction. Ricardo's visuals about creating a timeline to preserve information about the cultures that have existed through California, from when it was a part of Mexico, to becoming an independent state to a part of the United States was quite fascinating. Paul introduced us to his summer storytelling class, using collaborative storytelling. I looked this up online and an interesting prototype for this is a website called "Storybird" which uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families, and is a good base to build off on.

Jacob introduced us to a prototype of his new game to help middle school students understand and learn more about Biology. The visuals were fascinating, especially for me, because I always have had an inherent aversion to blood and internal organs, and it's amazing how beautifully made these games are, and how much more interactive they make learning because you are fully immersed in the environment.

Ashley's "Tune It Up" is a great idea for a website, to allow children in rural villages in India to practice their English writing using storytelling, and then scanning those stories and uploading them to a website for everyone to read. The stories can be organized by themes, and possibly ages? It’s a really low res way to put the stories out there for everyone to read, and give these children a medium of expressing their creativity and thoughts and learning at the same time. It would be great to have an option that would allow a publisher to buy one or more of these stories and compile them into a book, which could then be sold, and the proceeds sent to the children, to give them access to higher resolution tools to work with, and for the website to sustain.

Yaa spoke to us about Languages of Tanzania. I looked this up online, and found a language map listing about 114 languages in the country, of which Swahili and English are most widely spoken. Creating an archive of would be a wonderful way to preserve these languages and related cultural trappings, for generations to come. In India, there are libraries all across the country, which hold ancient documents and scrolls in forgotten cultures and languages, as a way of preserving them, but accessibility to them is very limited.

Christopher outlined the idea of a website to bring together resources to combat bullying, an extension of his first digital artifact. Keith similarly outlined a website to talk about creating employment opportunities for the homeless, and allowing them to build their resume by using the website to learn basic skills, which I thought was a great concept. Katy spoke about using movies to connect to children in the Lucille Packard children's wing who need this outlet to connect to the world. I would love to learn more about her concept, and see a little more detail about how this works with the children. Tony spoke about creating a website to bring together resources for creating a curriculum for and teaching Hip-Hop with some extremely cool apps that exist in the market.

Mike created a web based Flashcard system to teach alphabets to young children who have dyslexia, which was one of the ideas I really liked. It is such a clean simple interface that gives the dyslexic kids exactly what they need in terms of repetition and looking at an alphabet and listening to what it sounds like. There is also a system which allows the parent to rank the understanding of the child, to see how far they have progressed with learning the alphabet. Looking up online, it seems that most of the software that exists for helping people with dyslexia is targeted more towards reading out material to them, or making existing web pages and the computer easy to navigate through. Again, I really liked Mike's concept of helping the children through a flashcard system. It would be great to see an extension of the alphabets to maybe "2 alphabets" or "3 letter words", and perhaps an iPhone application which can be carried around.

Catherine's webpage about teaching children about depression through an "Animal Zoo" game was very creative and inspirational. Catherine is a wonderful artist and her idea about having the child walk through the zoo, and understand the needs of each animal, and help solve them was something I could completely relate to. Each animal signified a specific issue that a child who has depression deals with, and by helping the animal understand and resolve their issue and make them happy, the child can work through their own depression issues. I kept thinking it would be so cool if the animals could actually talk to the child about how they feel, giving the child a deeper sense of connection and understanding!

We also heard from Janelle about her website to help a child with ADD track his or her day and how to get them through their tasks with encouragement and rewards from their parents and teachers throughout the process using "Cookies". Jaehi spoke to us about creating a user friendly phone for the elderly people, to give them information about their medical and health issues and to allow them to contact the provider in need. This was a great idea, and probably the only device idea that any of us had, which is why it stuck in my head. We finally wrapped up with Tanya and Coram's presentations. Coram spoke about creating a social network to bring the elderly and children in the foster network, two groups of people who really need a strong sense of community. And Tanya's was a cool comic book, about teaching basic first aid to Hispanic children who live on the Mexican side of the US/Mexican Border.

2009-11-05T23:40:00.000-08:00

Innovative ideas in e-learning;

In today’s class we had the opportunity to meet Aditya and Nemil, the creators of ViewXtreme, a distance learning solution for next generation classrooms. ViewXtreme is probably one of the most innovative distance learning solutions I have seen. As opposed to traditional distance learning which comprises of static video streams, which also requires much more control and management to shoot the videos, require expensive and multiple cameras and most importantly fails to replicate the classroom experience.

From my personal perspective, I think e-learning is a great medium that allows us to participate in classes and lectures held around the world, and learn things we never could otherwise, but the lack of the classroom discussion and interaction experience is what makes it difficult for me to choose an online class over an offline one. The way e-learning is today, it requires a lot of self-discipline from the student, and in addition needs them to participate in what is a technologically innovative environment, but which still lacks the social interaction we have in classrooms even today.

ViewXtreme uses just one HD video camera to record the lecture as the teacher is teaching the class and then delivers it as a high quality video which can then be streamed by remote users who want to view the lecture. In future, the software would like to take the feed directly from the camera and then transmit that to ViewXtreme.

ViewXtreme, allows the user to track the lecture, which is again quite groundbreaking. The lecture is divided into 6 - 8 parts which can be viewed in a thumbnail at the bottom of the video, and the user can either click on the thumbnail of the portion the user wants to move to, or just use the mouse to scroll over to the view of the lecture you want to look at. The movement tracking system tracks the movement of the lecturer and moves the lecture automatically to a different thumbnail corresponding to the movement. Currently the zoom and the movement operates using a functionality similar to google maps. Once you click on a thumbnail, you can also zoom in and have a clearer view of the slides or the blackboard in the lecture. Currently viewing powerpoint slides is not very clear and one alternative is to take the powerpoint slides directly from the computer and then overlay it on the slides in the lecture to give a clearer format, and also try to automatically detect slide changes.

Currently only the lecturer has a mic, from where you can hear the lecture. In future it might be nice to divide the classroom up into sections and place a mic in each section, so that the camera can also record any questions asked by students in the class. In future it may also be possible to have some multiple motion sensitive cameras to record both the lecturer and the students asking questions.

One of the topics we discussed in detail regarding the software apart from trying to increase interactivity amongst the students was a note taking feature. One of the alternatives discussed was to be able to copy and paste screen shots as the video is playing and then add a note or a question to the bottom of the screen shot. These questions can then be transferred to the lecturer, or a note section where the students can share notes with each other. One idea was to have subtitles on the lecture slides so that the screen capture could give you a little more information about the topic at hand. We also discussed having a table of contents and having a timeline for the video, so that the user could directly click on the section they wanted to watch or review without having

In future versions it may also be interesting to see more interaction amongst the students both remote and in class, and interaction between the students and the teacher. Perhaps a discussion forum for students which uses both audio and video. In a future, in an ideal system, there would be seamless interaction where the instructor can teach using their natural style and the students can interact with each other.

We also had the opportunity to hear from Veronica, who is currently a knight scholar at Stanford, and used to be the editor-in-chief of “Catalyst” magazine in Chicago. Veronica during her year at Stanford, is trying to work on designing a solution to bridge the gap for access to educational information about high schools in the city of Chicago.

Catalyst’s mission is “To improve the education of all children through authoritative journalism and leadership of a constructive dialogue among students, parents, educators, community leaders and policy makers”. During her time in working with Catalyst, and the students in the Chicago area, Veronica realized a very real need for students to get timely information about high school admission processes, their deadlines and requirements. And if a student does not get admission at a high school then for him or her to know what are the options they have left at that point so that they do not end up wasting their year or delaying going to school.

We discussed that any web based solution will need to gather all the information about the schools and their application process and deadlines. They will also need to have some kind of a mapping system, in order to tell the students about the schools closest to their homes. In addition building a community support based forum would be useful. The community based tool will facilitate exchange of information within parents. It may also be possible to have a mobile solution for this problem which will provide instant information and feedback to the students and their families.

A few sample websites to look into which operate community based forums and operate based on crowd sourcing are Yelp, Craigslist, Yahoo and Google groups and various other discussion forums. This is a great need based project, and I hope that Catalyst is able to come up with a solution to this problem in a small scope and then expand it to a greater area with the help of school and community co-operation.

2009-11-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Looking at TeachAIDS;

This week we did a brief overview of many different learning principles, and then tried to apply our understanding of the learning principles, the 6 degrees and ABCD to the evaluation of a website.

Our team, Katy, Tanya, Jaehi and myself, took a look at TeachAIDS which is a non-profit organization that works towards improving HIV/AIDS awareness and teaching HIV/AIDS prevention strategies to younger children in a culturally appropriate manner.

When we looked at the website, there were two things we first noticed. One was the tutorial versions below for the different regions like general english, indian english and mandarin. The other was the news feed which highlighted the list of indian celebrities who support the program, and volunteer to help out the organization by spreading the word. This seems like great way to increase awareness about the program, and these endorsements will probably get their audience to pay closer attention to their product and message.

The Audience that TeachAIDS is primarily targeted towards are young learners in countries where the incidence of HIV/AIDS is high and where education about HIV/AIDS presents significant challenges because of the conservative social structures and the stigma attached to discussing sex education openly. The program is currently operating in South Africa, China, United States, Botswana, India, and the United States. TeachAIDS is hoping to increase the aware of HIV through the culturally appropriate learning materials they have created. On a closer look you can see that materials are also gender appropriate, which is very true of India where because of the conservative culture, these learning materials are usually shown in classrooms segregated by gender .

The situation they are dealing with is quite grim in nature. For example in India, currently 2.31 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. The socially conservative culture makes it very difficult to penetrate, and provide appropriate learning materials to children and adults, but much more so to children. Hence the use of interactive applications and animated agents in the video to convey the messages really helps to maximize comfort and efficacy amongst the audience. TeachAIDS also explains that they try to “Minimize stigma associated with discussing sexual practices by combining them with biological aspects of HIV/AIDS with cultural euphemisms."

The videos themselves are designed to induce meta-cognitive thinking in its viewers, to force them to take a closer look at the problem, and think about the disease, its causes and lack of cure. The videos make good use of multimedia principles, and are learner controlled. They allow the user to learn in informal settings which they themselves are comfortable with, use dual-coding. And finally the principle of cognitive apprenticeship can be applied to the videos since once someone in the audience has learned it, they can then transfer the knowledge and the videos themselves to other people.

The content does seems scalable in terms of being able to translate it into different languages and use the series of animations with culturally appropriate characters and stories for a regional context. It is however difficult to decipher if the audience also contains users who live in remote areas in these countries with less or no access to technology. TeachAIDS does offer a Creative Common License available to end user NGOs, but there isn’t much detail about these NGOs and the audiences they have reached using the TeachAIDS videos. In countries like India, there is also the issue of dealing with multiple regional languages. So that is another factor TeachAIDS seems to be currently working on in trying to get the videos dubbed in various languages. Fortunately, in India, they may be able to reuse the original videos and just dub them in different languages.

It wasn’t very clear from the website but it looks like TeachAIDS also has a model where in they get paid for use of some of the tutorials while the others are free. The website goes a little more into the research behind the product, the prototyping and character design process and the team, which is quite impressive.

We discussed a little more about access, sustainability and dealing with the audience who is already HIV/AIDS positive. There were some ideas about distributing the content in areas such as maybe turning the videos into a comic book, or a street play of sorts through NGO partnerships. How do they deal with young learners who are already HIV/AIDS positive ? Or is that dependent on the NGO partner ? It would have been great to see a little more detail about which audiences TeachAIDS has directly targeted and who their partners are and what audiences they have been dealing with. The product is great, and I hope it has the potential to survive in the long run by finding ways to self sustain themselves.

Overall for our team it was a great exercise at being able to look at a website and its associated products closely and apply the theories we have been discussing in class to it. It helped me better understand the considerations that should go into trying to design a learning medium for my audience in the future.

2009-10-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

Non-traditional school environments;

Over the last couple of weeks I had the opportunity to see, and learn about 2 very varying schools of thought about what a non-traditional school might look like, and also had the opportunity to read about the proponents and oppositions to the use of technology in schools. I would like to summarize some of my thoughts regarding those in this blog post.

Last week we were visited by Raymond Rozycki, Bill Taylor and David Zeiler from Edison Learning, who gave us an overview of the organization and the products they offer for K-12 schools. Edison Learning's online program, tries to create an interactive online learning environment using technology in traditional, hybrid and virtual schools. While Edison has been working with e-learning in the higher education field for a while, they have over the last few years launched their online K-12 school models in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and now South Carolina.

Provost Academy, Edison's most recent online high school in SC is their model for expansion and innovation in the field of e-learning for schools. Students have access to either synchronous (live meetings or classes online) or asynchronous (non-live) learning environments or a mix of the two. They continue to work towards their high school diploma but from their home environment. They have access to a personalized learning curriculum which advances at their pace and a strong support system of teachers, advisors and tutors who interact with the students on a regular basis. Edison is also creating interactive online social environments for their students now.

Edison has created learning objects based on student goals, and currently have around 350,000 learning objects. The learning objects are modular, act independently and can be used to build custom curricula and hit multiple markets at the same time. These curricula are state and school based and the students can easily move from one learning object to another. In order to build extra engagement with the students, Edison currently explores interaction through audio, video and kinesthetics. There are 3D social spaces that the students can venture into, online libraries they can check books out of and educational games they can engage in to improve cognitive and motor skills.

Edison also provides synchronous tutoring to help students who need additional help with the curriculum. There are real time indicators that track what areas a student is weak in and then focus on that to help the student out. This hybrid model consisting of Synchronous and Asynchronous classes, Asynchronous grading and Synchronous online tutoring works well to ensure that the students are on track and working towards their high school diplomas.

Now on the opposite end of the spectrum, I had the opportunity to visit the Waldorf School which promotes a somewhat more philosophical and creative approach to education. Waldorf teaches its students to "to think, reason, examine and question" and the focus highly on stimulating creativity and imagination within the student community. They attempt to transform education in a way which engages the child fully in the process and balance their faculties. Waldorf teachers exhibit concern about media hampering the development of the child's own imagination and believe that the child's inherent creativity is fostered more when media is eliminated from the environment. Regarding the use of technology, it is not encouraged before high school. They feel that is is more important to the students to interact with their fellow classmates and teachers while exploring the "exploring the world of ideas, participating in the creative process, and developing their knowledge, skills, abilities, and inner qualities". They believe that older students quickly master the technologies and can go on to have successful careers and work in fields which use extensive technology.

Waldorf does not impose formal reading on its students, and as per their findings the child learns comparatively quickly when he or she is ready. The teachers at Waldorf promote a love for literature, so once the children start reading they become voracious readers and develop a long term love for reading. Formal mathematics and science is introduced in the 5th grade and homework in the 4th grade. Waldorf believes that the impact of homework on achievement increases as the child moves through the grades. The dress code of the students also is a part of the learning environment. They wear natural fibres, without any brand name clothing.

Both of these schools can be categorized as non-traditional forms of learning, and there is an amazing amount of differences and perhaps if we look very closely a couple of similarities between them. They both target different needs that students have in our society.

An online interactive learning academy is great for reaching a large number of students who come from very different backgrounds and places (remote areas being one). It is more financially viable for families, it allows the child to move through the curriculum at their own pace and get help with the work anytime they need it. Working in a web based and 3D technological environment also helps them learn the technology faster. Online learning is also probably the best medium to reach a large demographic and scale without too much difficulty.

In an offline non-traditional school environment, the interaction between the student community and the teachers is the key. It fosters a different form of learning and creativity, and allows the students to explore the world by finding the need within themselves. Being a part of a group and being able to interact face to face is a huge plus for those who can access these forms of education.

Both schools allow students to operate in an innovative environment and learn things their own way, and perhaps someday we will see something midway between the two, where you have the interactive technology, but also can find a means to foster strong social relationships between students.

2009-10-19T07:47:00.001-07:00

Artifact Day..

I really enjoyed the class this week because we all got to see each other’s presentations. It was a myriad of different experiences, where I was really impressed to see the breadth that we all cover collectively.

I believe that all of our works don’t necessarily fall into a specific category, its more about how we interpret them ourselves based on our interests and viewpoints. I wanted to go deeper into a few of those themes.

Ashley’s take on learning English as a second language in

India

is something I identify with. Using the mobile platform to teach English to the Indian population is a great option, and the applications she chose and her take on them were really pertinent to what is needed to learn English. “English Seekho” (seekho is the Hindi word for “learn”), is a great platform for Indians to learn English on the go, currently offered by Tata Indicom. My hope is that as the cell phones technology becomes cheaper and more interactive, it will allow organizations to scale their applications and increase audience accessibility at a cheaper price.

Jacob’s presentation on the Israeli - Palestinian conflict is a long standing issue which seems to have no resolution in sight. I remember spending most of my time watching live updates on the Gaza war in 2008 while trying to finish my application to Stanford. The relentless bombing campaign by

Israel

in the first 48 hours left nearly 400 people dead, and far more injured. People in Gaza lost their children, were severely injured and left disabled for life. My belief is that war breeds terrorism, its really difficult to stand by and remain unaffected when you know you have lost your child because of someone else, and at that point when you have not much to live for, the hatred just grows. The conflict is something where I honestly do not see a resolution in sight, but it is heart warming to see how technology is taking on the challenge to bridge the gap between the citizens of these two nations. In particular I was quite impressed by PeaceMaker, which allows players to play the role of political leader and try to make decisions on conflict resolution. It would be wonderful to publish these stories online to see how people from both sides of the border perceived the possible solutions.

We also saw a movie Yaa made about Street children in east Africa. “The United Nations has defined the term ‘street children’ to include “any boy or girl… for whom the street in the widest sense of the word … has become his or her habitual abode and/or source of livelihood, and who is inadequately protected, supervised, or directed by responsible adults.” “. Organizations like Mkombozi are trying to use education outreach programs amongst other things to try and reach these children and enabling communities to value and protect them. Street kids' international is a ground breaking organization which works to develop locally relevant, innovative trainings that engage youth about entrepreneurship, sexual health, and drug use through interactive activities and animated videos. The “Karate Kid: Mario Gets Sick” is a wonderful video that shows us how HIV/AIDS impacts the lives of street children in Africa, and helps both us and the street children understand the seriousness of the situation and the need to find help.

Interactive 3d learning objects presented by Mike is an innovative research paradigm that delves into the use of virtual reality with learning objects to create solutions. A three year project, which ended in 2009, saw the Naledi3d Factory partnering with World Links Zimbabwe (WLZ) to address issues around water and soil conservation, sorghum, pests and bee-keeping. The i3dlo’s developed are being used at five World Links Community centers, and the local VR committees, established as part of the project, continue to hold their own workshops and field days, some attracting upwards of 200 people. It is one of the most unique methodologies I have seen to help users address their basic need by creating the tools and objects that will help them the most.

Finally I want to address both Janelle and Catherine’s presentations on fighting ADD and Childhood depression. Growing up in a country where the focus is primarily on studying and meeting your basic needs, the psychological issues that affect children is not something which is yet widely studied or vocally addressed in what is a more socially conservative society. As a result, my own knowledge about both these issues is very minor to say the least. For a child dealing with either one is an uphill battle, both in terms of trying to explain to them what the issue really is, and garnering a support system which will stand by them as they learn to deal with these. Both are medical conditions which can be possibly treated with drugs, but I am not really a proponent of giving psychotropic drugs to young children, when their minds are still developing not knowing how it will affect them. It was really great to hear both Janelle and Catherine advocate alternative methods of treatment and go into detail about the causes and means to identify and combat these issues.

There is so much more I want to go into, but in conclusion, the whole presentation was an enlightening event! I learned so much from everyone, and it was wonderful to see the different ways in which we all presented our ideas.

2009-10-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Bloom's Taxonomy and Mind Maps;

We covered quite a few things in class again last Wednesday, and performed a really interesting group exercise with Mind Maps.

I would like to go into a bit more of detail about Bloom's Taxonomy as an exercise to help myself understand it better. Probably not a fun blog read !

Bloom's Taxonomy, identifies three domains of educational activities. The domains can be thought of as goals of the learning process. That is at the end of your learning, you should have acquired new knowledge, new skills and possibly a new attitude.

Cognitive Domain: mental skills (Knowledge) comprise of

Knowledge; which is understanding of facts, ways and means of dealing with facts and understanding the universal principles and abstractions in a field.
Comprehension; which is understanding the meaning of the facts by translation, interpretation and extrapolation.
Application; solving problems in a new manner using previously acquired knowledge.
Analysis; examining and breaking down the information into parts to identify motives and causes.
Synthesis; combining elements of previously acquired knowledge in different ways to create alternative solutions.
Evaluation; Based on certain criteria judge the validity of ideas or information.

Affective Domain: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude) comprise of

Receiving; The lowest level; comprises of the learner paying attention and absorbing the knowledge; without this no further progress can occur.
Responding; the learner actively participates in the learning process at this level.
Valuing; the learner attaches value or worth to a particular object, phenomenon or behavior. This can range from simple acceptance to a complex state of commitment.
Organizing; at this level, the learner can organize the differences between values, by contrasting and resolving conflicts between them.
Characterizing; or internalizing values; the learner has a value system which controls their behavior at this level, such that it becomes a characteristic.

Psychomotor Domain: manual or physical skills (Skills)

Bloom's committee did not produce a description for the psychomotor domain, but Simpson (1972) described it in more detail. Psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination and use of the motor skills.

Perception; using your sensory responses to guide motor activities.
Set; the readiness to act, which includes physical, mental and emotional sets.
Guided Response; the early stages of learning a complex skill which requires imitation and trial and error.
Mechanism; intermediate stage in learning a complex skill, e.g. driving a car.
Complex Overt Response; a skillful performance of motor arts that involves complex movement patterns, for e.g. parallel parking the car you learned to drive.
Adaptation; the learners skills are developed enough that they can modify movement patterns for special cases.
Origination; create new movement patterns to fit a particular problem.

We also touched briefly on constructivism, a theory of knowledge that believes we as individuals construct new knowledge through the process of accommodation and assimilation. This can be separated into

Cognitive constructivism; which explores how the individual learner understands things.
Social constructivism; which puts an emphasis on how social encounters lead to growth of learning.

A part of the constructivist theory, is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), proposed by Lev Vygotsky. Think of ZPD as a form of scaffolding. The child can reach the lower level by themselves. But in order to scaffold to the higher level, they need assistance from an adult or more skilled children. Thus, the ZPD can capture the cognitive skills of the child which are in the process of maturing.

We also talked about traditional vs non-traditional learning spaces, that is a traditional university vs an online university, or charter school or high school. I would like to spend a little more time researching the statistics and the software used for online programs, and hopefully address it in detail in another blog post.

For now I would like to move onto our exercise in trying to devise ABCD for a learning objective, and then expand on the evaluation techniques to test the learning objectives and create a mind map for it.

Catherine, Tanya, Deonne and I got to work on trying to build an online learning environment for Dr.Lucerno, who had always taught in a traditional learning environment. It was a great exercise, and we went quite in depth into trying to understand the needs of the students from different backgrounds and schools, and also those of Dr.Lucerno, who was completely unfamiliar with instructing using technology.

After defining ABCD for the problem, we decided to go ahead and work on defining the evaluation methods. During this we realized that all of our ideas did not necessarily fit into evaluation, but were still necessary for the success of the online program, and so we created two new categories "Course Structure" and "Course Materials" based on our understanding of what we wanted the online program and Dr.Lucerno to have. Here is our final mind map created on mindmeister.

While we did have pretty good material, I think our presentation skills could still use a bit of work :). Ricardo, Paul, Jaehi and Mike did a great job with that. So here's to better presentation skills for the next round !

2009-10-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

Mobile technologies, storytelling and learning objectives;

Mobile technology is being rapidly adopted and is consistently on the growth in developing countries around the world. According to Moco News there are currently 4.1 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a global penetration rate of 61.1%; It is an important factor assisting in the growth in economies and communication in emerging nations like India (India Mobility Trends) and Kenya (Mobile in Africa). Furthermore, as computation moves to the cloud, cell phones will be able to transfer more of the heavy computing away from the device allowing it to offer more functionality to the end user.

Mobile technology is hence, a great way to create new learning spaces that can be given to children in developing nations. One way this has been accomplished is by loading short stories for children in a small town in Baja, Mexico, who can listen to and learn from these stories. The mobile devices are small and can be hand cranked, so the children can carry them as their families move in search of work. There have been proposals on how best to crank up the mobile devices, perhaps using a bike or a toy, or alternatives like solar or wind, but this still has some ways to go.

Moving away slightly, we learned that storytelling is a great way to get children to participate and motivate them to learn. It doesn't require the child to have access to books, or a formal school or technology, but allows them to draw on their creativity. According to Dr.Kim's working paper "Stories to tell and 1001 more days to live: Exploring the Micro Creative Economy as a Means to Fund and Promote Literacy Development in Underserved Areas", one of the most important things to learn about education in developing nations is that it should be sustainable, and we need to provide incentives to children who are still struggling with the basic necessities in life, making literacy secondary to their other needs. The "1001 Stories Project" allows the child to explore their creativity, contributes to their literacy and lets their voice be heard at a global level. The goal is to spread this to other nations and also organize drawing and singing competitions to empower children through their creativity.

Children also rapidly learn how to use mobile technology and the web to teach themselves new things. It was observed in a school in Ahmedabad, India, that given a set of mobile devices with mathematical problems, it took barely an hour for some groups of children to learn how to use them effectively. Collaborative learning between children helps build collective intelligence and hopefully motivates them to catch up with their peers and learn more new things. Technology is probably most effective on the under and over performing brackets, but it will likely make some kind of an impact across the graph.

Now a little about learning objectives; Kapp's notes, is a blog post that goes briefly over ABCD, the basics of creating an effective learning objective, which we discussed in class.

In programming if ABCD were arguments to a function, A and C are your inputs, and B and D are the return values expected after the function finishes processing.

A is your Audience, an input field, which is the group of individuals who are being targeted for the instruction. It also addresses their prior knowledge, if any is needed as a foundation before participating in the learning.

B is behavior, an output field, which is the desired outcome of your learning method. It's what you want the Audience to be able to do as a result of your training. Behavior should be defined in a concrete manner and it's really important to define it because your tutorial may go off track if you haven't clearly stated what is expected at its completion.

C is condition, another input field, which describes the circumstances or the conditions under which the learning takes place.

D is degree, an output field, which is a measurable component that tries to assess the level of learning attained by the person. For instance after completing flight lessons, a pilot should have a success rate of 99% or higher.

I think it's important that we define ABCD, not to create boundaries, but to set broader learning objectives and allow the learners to experiment to some extent.

We also touched briefly on the topics of cognition "knowing" and meta-cognition "knowing about knowing". For me, coming from a non-educational background, the words initially seemed like ancient greek, but now I've had a chance to study them a bit more closely, they make more sense. I hope to be able to go more in depth into these in a future blog post to improve my own understanding of them and the theories that surround them.

2009-09-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

Creating learning environments and addressing educational needs of culturally diverse societies and people.

There were a couple of really interesting discussions in the class which stood out in my mind, one was the talk about learning reform in Saudi Arabia, and the other was the discussion about the impact of OLPC in Peru.

The following article on Slate by Kelly McEvers titled "Changing the Way Saudis Learn" is in three parts and discusses education reform in Saudi Arabia. The first part titled "Reforming Saudi Education" at is a great introduction to some of the underlying causes and worries in Saudi Arabia, and the reason why King Abdullah launched "Tatweer" a education development program, which seems to be primarily aimed at how the younger generation is taught, helping them broaden their horizons and really change how they themselves perceive the modern world and its values. With most of Saudi Arabia's population comprised of a much younger demographic, especially in these uncertain economies, it is essential that they get the education they need to grow up and be a part of the global workforce.

The next part of the article "Changing the way Saudis Learn" discusses, how the "Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA)" and their education system is perceived after the 9/11 attacks revealed that most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Its an interesting read that touches upon how the school located in Alexandria, Virginia, has a mix of teachers from different religions, and a system that being in the U.S. allows its students to be more open and discuss issues with their teachers. The final installment "Angry Teachers and Empty Libraries", in part discusses how a majority of teachers in Saudi Arabia feel that the changes to their education system and the reforms are being dictated by the west, which in turn removes sensitive topics which they feel should be discussed with their students.

In conclusion, I feel that this is probably one of the most complex educational reform projects ever. When you are trying to reform a system, it is not feasible to expect things to change by just making changes to the curriculum and provide them with the technical resources they need. At the core of it all, it's really about understanding the teachers and the students in the system, their ideologies, and talking to the teachers about what the younger generation needs, and finding some common ground based on which the system and its ideologies can change. It seems most likely a reform issue that will take years to execute from the ground level up, but will hopefully result in a more global system for the children there, which will help them understand how to best use the new tools they are now provided with.

There was also a brief discussion in class about OLPC and about whether it's truly a technical or an educational tool. Researching online, you see both points of view. The following e School News article "Laptop project enlivens Peruvian hamlet" talks about how life has profoundly changed for students using the XO in the town of Arahuay, Peru. But looking further at the blog article by James O'Hagan "Fluff Piece in Peru OLPC", you have to think further about whether the XO is truly a learning tool which is improving the educational foundations and understanding of children, or if it's just a cool new device for them to explore and play with. Would it be useful to dig deeper into the culture and the environment and see what their specific needs are in order to build tools targeted towards them, or is it possible to create something generic which can be applied to children in different countries to strengthen their foundations in basic subjects ?

Now onto some lighter topics! The first class was great. I wasn't sure what I would expect going into it, but the idea of being able to create a tutorial and writing up a research paper that addresses a social need, already has my mind trying to think up what I could do. We had the opportunity to study some past projects and videos from students who had taken the class earlier, which was very helpful.

I got to know Christopher and Jason, my classmates, who are from completely different backgrounds, which opens up new learning opportunities. Chris has a great memory (more so because mine can be quite terrible), since he remembered everything about Jason without having to write down a single word. Jason, who is in the MBA/MA program, is working on an online professional learning system for teachers, which is a great need based project.

As the quarter progresses, I look forward to being able to explore some more topics related to need based learning and write about them.