Week 6 - Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)
Table of Contents
In this task you need to do retrospective analysis to your past learning experiences. What kind of tools you have used? How those tools have supported your learning activities?
Materials: All are available on Wakelet page: https://wakelet.com/wake/fchbc7cZFLzQpYYRyqHBq
A. INTRO
Read article “The 50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time”
B. READ & WATCH
I have collected some pdfs and videos for you.
SLIDES: Check my slides: “History of TEL”
VIDEO: Technology Enhanced Learning in Higher Education: Article Summary Kirkwood and Price “Technology Enhanced Learning and teaching in higher education) (Youtube video)
ARTICLE: Cognitive Tools and Mindtools by Kirschner and Erkens
C. THINK/REFLECT
Reflect your previous years as a student and/or teacher?
What have been most influental educational gadgets / software tools during your earlier studies. Why?
Continue your reflection by commenting Kirschner & Erkens article about cognitive tools and mindtools.
What kind of mindtools and cognitive tools you can recognize your years as a student or teacher?
Kirkwood & Price: Can you recognize activities/lessons where technology was used to: a) replicate existing teaching practises b) suplement existing teaching practises or c) transform existing teaching practises? Can you present some examples? How it was done?
Reflect your previous years as a student and/or teacher.
What have been most influential educational gadgets / software tools during your earlier studies. Why?
The game interface of version 2.0
In 2002, when I was 6 years old my father got me a series of CD-ROMs called Peris & Katia. They were a series of educational games with different themes, e.g school, sports, the Olympics, and they always featured two heroes, Peris (the dog) and Katia (the cat).
The games were very visually attractive to me as a child and they also included interactive elements such as animations, on-click sounds, narration and constructive feedback.
Looking back now, these games were very ahead of their time and had a high educational value for me.
By spending hours after school playing those games, I enhanced my fine motor skills by learning to be precise with the mouse, I learned basic computer functionality and how to handle devices such as the keyboard, I developed my creativity skills by engaging in coloring or designing activities inside the game,and problem-solving skills by dealing with puzzles, memory games and word-Hangman. Lastly, I also practiced basic discipline skills, such as mathematical operations. And all these whilst having a blast!
Even until this day, I have not had any other experiences with educational games that have shaped my learning at this extent.
Below I present a collection of pictures from some of the mini-games:
Following the correct line with the mouse
Change calculation game
Maze game with the use of computer arrows
Memory game
Multiplication table game
Guess the animal behind the fence
This seems like a very controversial answer, because Age of Empires is not an educational software, nor its creators had ever intended it to be used educationally, as the head designer mentioned in an interview here.
The main logic behind the Standard Game, was that each player started the game in a primitive state in their (ancient) civilization, and the goal was to develop their civilization's economy in the quickest/most efficient way to conquer the enemy (and avoid getting conquered in the process). The game had a graduated level of difficulty which made the opponent stronger and "smarter".
I used to play this game with my father in my primary school days and still continue playing it to this day.
I consider it as a very influential game that had an educational value for me, because I think that it helped me develop strategic thinking, adaptability and balance between tasks (and obstacles) in order to achieve a goal.
I specifically remember, as a child, repetitively losing the game and getting very frustrated because I could not grasp the tactics of the game, I was hyper-focusing on one aspect of my civilization, e.g fixing the buildings and not developing the others e.g gathering enough gold. I also could not foresee all the obstacles that were coming, so I wasn't properly prepared to meet them. After many loses, I had to rethink and adapt my strategies (maybe that was the beginning of my metacognition journey too!), I had to calculate my moves more carefully, identify my civilization's strengths and weaknesses and be more efficient. Lastly, I had the extrinsic motivation of beating my father in the game which assisted my learning!
*At this point, I will note that even though the main concept of the game is historical, I don't think that I learned history through the game, and it's no secret that the AoE series have been characterized many times as historically inaccurate. It does give though a very generic and overly simplified glimpse into ancient civilizations which did spark my interest into researching more about them.
However, as can be seen below, times are changing and AoE IV is now actually used in educational contexts!
Last but not least, the computer has been the most influential gadget for me without a doubt. I have been an active user since primary school, but it became a part of my daily life around the 1st grade of lower secondary school when I had my first laptop (my sibling's old laptop). I remember discovering the world of forums and of science fiction stories, which were my interest at the time. Since then I've been using my laptop for all sorts of things, from searching information to creating content, to expressing myself, to communicating. It has supported mainly my informal learning in many different aspects, but also my formal learning as I got older, especially in the years of my bachelor's studies.
My first laptop, a HP Pavilion dv7-2185dx
Picture found on Ebay
Think about article by Kirschner & Erkens. What mindtools and/or cognitive tools that you have used? Can you remember any? How those tools did support your learning activities? If you have been teacher, what kind of mindtools/cognitive tools you have used as teacher?
I have used Scratch both as a learner and as a teacher. I consider it as a cognitive tool because I think that it enhances computational thinking as well as creativity.
When I was teaching Robotics & Coding to primary students, I used it in lessons both as a main tool but also in combination with robot construction.
Some examples of the latter are shown on the right.
1) The students first constructed a steering wheel with the Lego WeDo 2.0 educational package using instructions, and then they created a car racing game in Scratch where they had to program the robot's tilt sensor, so that when they turned the wheel with their hands, the car in the game would change direction. I had pre-created some features of the game and urged them to experiment with different programming blocks. The goal of this process was to support their learning of the tilt sensor as well as to introduce them to variables.
2) I had set a theme for the lesson about creating art with robots, so the students first constructed a spinning machine, again with Lego WeDo 2.0 and instructions. Then, they programmed it using Scratch. Many students experimented further with Scratch and tried to create a game where the character painted circles simultaneously with the robot.
Steering Wheel with Lego WeDo 2.0 & Coding with Scratch - Game idea by Mì 2 Tôm channel (Youtube)
Robot Spinner with Lego WeDo 2.0 & Coding with Scratch
Video of the Spin Art Machine
As a learner, I used it during the Pedagogic and Teaching Competence when we were practicing using Scratch in multidisciplinary senarios, and I created the game that can be seen on the left.
The instructions to play the game are below.
I used MATLAB App Designer in my bachelor studies, specifically in a course that we had called Image Processing.
In that project, I had thought of this idea of applying image processing functions to turn images into pieces of art, specifically Pointillism art. (It is the movement in which artworks are comprised of very small paintbrush dots).
This tool really supported my learning in the subject and it's one of the most memorable tools that I used during my whole degree, because it helped me visualize the process of turning an image into a piece of art, it helped me simplify very complex mathematical & machine learning procedures (e.g K-means clustering), and think of the topic from different perspectives. Thinking of the user perspective, for example, in order to create a user-friendly interface I had to decompose the process into phases and simplify the steps to create this graphical interface format.
Finally, Google Docs & Slides, even though they are also productivity tools, have both been very useful for me in collaborative brainstorming and problem-solving, especially because in most of the group projects that I have done, collaboration has happened remotely, so a shared doc or presentation really facilitated this process. What I have observed is that the simultaneous editing of a doc or presentation has helped me in the past to stay focused, visualize the goal that I want to reach better, and also figure out the order of things that must be done, prioritize information and split it in a way that makes sense. Also, sharing ideas has been a major part of the learning process using these tools as well.
Created with Napkin.ai
Can you recognize activities/lessons where technology was used to: a) replicate existing teaching practices b) supplement existing teaching practices or c) transform existing teaching practices? Can you present some examples? How it was done?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2011-365-120_Technology_Enhanced_Learning_This_Way_(5677006195).jpg
An example of a lecture on Delos multimedia repository.
As a learner, during my time in school our interaction with technology in general was very minimal to non-existent, so I don't have any relevant experiences.
In my bachelor's studies I mostly experienced the first two types of technology interventions. We had a multimedia repository in the University called Delos (https://delos.uoa.gr/opendelos/), where recordings of selected lectures were kept (this depended on the course instructor). It was mainly meant to facilitate students who couldn't be present in the lectures, but it was also for re-watching lectures when needed. This falls into the first category, because technology was only used for replicating what had already been done in the lecture.
Another example I can think of, was the use of the smart pen along with the projector by the professors in the lectures. This falls into the second category, because it was used to supplement the traditional chalkboard writing or whiteboards. Besides that, the use of presentation slides instead of books or a plain lecture is another intervention of this type that I have experienced.
Lastly, during the Pedagogic and Teaching competence course in my bachelor's, we had practiced using an LMS called Edmodo (it was shut down on 2022). I think this is an example of technology that transformed existing teaching practices because it enabled teachers to share materials, it also facilitated communication between students, between the teacher and the students, and lots of other features.
Aim of this task is to watch materials from the Naples Network and discuss/reflect/co-create ideas about how technology can support learning in the (near) future.
We had a lengthy discussion about how we view the existing situation with technology in education and how we imagine the near future.
The team was comprised by me, Sophie Platt, Aaisha Faazel and Jinrui Hou.
At first, we could mostly think of barriers and concerns around technology in education.
The first mention of AI didn't come much later, and we expressed that there is a huge barrier in using this technology from the teachers themselves because of AI Literacy issues, Sophie talked about how in her country teachers need a lot of support in using technology in general and some of them even refuse to get acquainted with new technologies because they are scared of them. We came back
We also agreed that the general public use of AR/VR technologies is still very far away because of cost-related issues. We connected it with the need of developing cost-effective tools that can be widely distributed in educational environments.
Jin expressed that she can't really imagine how a future with technology actually looks like, and that there are so many technologies but she can't figure out how to use them to actually promote student's learning. We talked about
We also talked about collaborative learning and the role of technology in that. Aaisha talked about VR/AR and how avatars could possibly help with enhancing the collaboration among students because they would experience. I talked about how students might just hide behind a persona and act like someone else.
Jin mentioned accessibility issues in everything we were talking about. We questioned if emerging technology will end up excluding people with disablilities even more from the educational process.
The product of our discussion can be seen below in the form of a mindmap.
The Mind Map
Zoom in (+)
Description:
In this section, your task is to look to the future - together.
STEP 1. Introduction
Each of you will independently go through steps 2-3, after which it is up to you to discuss together and produce a vision for the future. What will technology-enhanced learning look like in the future?
STEP 2. Roadmap for Education Technology (2010) (READ)
A good way to see into the future is to understand today's trends and futuristic outlooks. Start by familiarising yourself with how the future was seen in 2010.
Reference: Woolf, B. P. (2010). A roadmap for education technology. Computing Research Association. Retrieved from: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00588291/document (accessed May 25, 2019).
STEP 3. NAPLES topic "Teacher Learning and Technology" (READ)
Emerging networked and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for the practice of teaching. They can also place new demands on teachers. Teachers must learn how to use these new technologies, acquiring fundamental ‘technology literacy’. They must also learn to productively integrate them into their existing teaching practices. For example, a science teacher might need to learn how to integrate a powerful weather simulation that includes several manipulable variables within an existing science lesson.
NAPLES TOPIC: https://www.isls.org/research-topics/technology-and-teacher-learning/
Step 4. Choose ONE Naples research topic for further exploration (DISCUSS AND CREATE)
Together, create a vision for the future using your chosen NAPLES material and other sources.
Use a collaborative working platform of your choice.
Be transparent and discuss _all_ in the discussion below here on teams.
Publish the result of your collaborative work in the discussion below here on teams, visible enough to be distinguished without glasses.
ALL NAPLES TOPICS: https://www.isls.org/research-topics/
We discussed a range of ideas – including going on a tangent about the positives, negatives and some ethical concerns regarding the use of technology within education. We also considered some more fantasy-style ideas that we have seen from movies to see if this could give us some inspiration, as often ideas from movies can inspire real life progression with technologies.
Out of the ideas we discussed we chose to use the AR aspect to create an AI generated image of a futuristic classroom.
We discussed the use of AR within learning in the future and how it can be used to promote learning of different concepts. We used AI to generate an image to show what a classroom of the future might look like – incorporating AR technology to show different scientific or mathematical problems on a large board for learners to interact with. It could incorporate hologram style graphics for learners to actively interact with, saving the need for multiple resources to be purchased or ordered with the possibility of running out of the materials or having dangerous moments if using chemicals or electrical equipment.
This also links back to the Augmented Reality in the Learning Sciences thinking on the NAPLeS website here:
Link: https://www.isls.org/research-topics/augmented-reality-learning-sciences/