Month: March 2015

The Dialectic of Educational Technology_9

Georg Simmel observed that there is an inherent contradiction in human nature. Human beings have creative power to produce things (including structure and system) that can transcend human limits. Meanwhile, the transcendental things, more often than not, seem to acquire “life” to live on their own and gradually control their creators in turn.  This bizarre reciprocity may be the most difficult obstacle for human emancipation. This paradox is also apparent in the educational use of technologies.

For instance, one of the purpose of instructional technologies is to individualize learning. Individualization literally means that every student can learn at their own pace. Also, different learning styles can thrive in the technology-enhanced classrooms. However, the current reality is that every student has to learn through technology (e.g., Carmen) regardless of one’s preferences and will. The problem gets worse when educational technology is closely linked with certain learning ideology.

Nowadays, educational technologies seem to serve collaborative or constructivist learning. Technologies are misused if they do not promote interactivity, inquiry, high-order thinking, or problem-solving skills, to name a few. This trend ensures that those who once thrived in the traditional classrooms now have to adapt their learning styles to this dominant technological pedagogy. Instead of individualizing learning, technology-enhanced classrooms, no different from lecture-based ones, homogenize the learning differences.

This contradiction also applies to teaching. Instead of respecting teaching autonomy, current teachers have to use certain degree of technology in classrooms for fear that their instruction may look archaic and ineffective.

As Max Weber once pointed out, human beings are trapped in the iron cage of rationality. There is no way out.

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Contextualizing Learning Theories and Instructional Design_8

I still remember that when I did my mater thesis on game-based learning and financial literacy, I was strongly opposed to the behaviorist perspective of learning. I even argued that game-based learning would not be authentic game-based learning if it was used to promote rote learning and memorization. I mocked those financial literacy games which used punishment-and-reward mechanism to deposit factual knowledge of financial concepts into players’ mind (e.g., Financial Football). All players needed to do was to get correct answers from a series of multiple choice questions and move the yards. Through this mechanistic learning process, it was expected that players could quickly get grip of financial concepts.

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Honestly, I despised this game design and learning process. Instead, I chose Kolb’s experiential learning model as a blueprint for designing financial literacy digital games. I argued that a good financial literacy game had to be designed in a way that allowed players to go through four stages of learning: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. I believed that an experiential financial literacy game is more able to transfer what players learned in the game world to the real world.

On the defense day, I eloquently and energetically defend my thesis, and I passed, but the one thing I came to realize and learned from my committee members was that there is no good or bad learning theory; rather, the purpose of a learning task determines the appropriateness of adopting certain learning theory. Therefore, as Ertmer and Newby (1993) commented on the importance of learning theories to instructional design:

Learning theories and research often provide information about relationship among instructional components and the design of instruction, indicating how specific techniques/strategies might best fit within a given context and with specific learners. (p. 51)

From this perspective, an instructional designer should have not only knowledge of learning theories, TPACK, and instructional system, but also a high level of contextual awareness.

Research Purpose and Research Methods_7

The ideological war between different methodology paradigms has never lost its fever during the tea time in academia. The “beef” between a quantitative researcher and a qualitative one, sometimes, is far more interesting than what their research findings are. Individual researcher’s eagerness for superior research status exemplifies Nietzsche’s observation of human beings’ will to power. Hiding behind a lofty research flag, there might be a research politician.

Despite the apparent incongruity between different methodology parties, a common thread does connect these differences. Generally speaking, most educational researchers are interested in why individuals (e.g., psychology)/groups or systems (e.g., sociology) act the way they (have) act(ed) (e.g., history) and/or interested in how to maintain or change the action. This similar tendency reveals a potential and exciting collective effort to uncover the unknown by using a variety of tools. That is, different research methods serve different functions, and adding up these functions allows individuals to stand at a vantage point to see, to infer, and to reconsider.

This diversified view of research paradigms is to treat different methods as complementary rather than contrasting. To investigate the impact of a certain technology-enhanced instruction such as flipped classrooms, there is a primary need to describe the phenomena of interest in the classroom first. Then, the association between variables may be explored. For instance, is teachers’ certain kind of technology use correlated with students’ motivation and achievement? Last, there is a need to conduct a series of experimental studies to investigate the causal relationship between the association observed previously. However, experimental studies usually can only demonstrate an overarching pattern and trend. If we want to obtain more in-depth information about the occurrence of the causal relationship, one still needs to return to the descriptive investigation. This cycle of investigation is what Rosenshine and Furst (1973) called a descriptive-correlational-experimental loop.

This loop affirms the value of different kinds of research methods and points out the direction of finding things out through collective efforts. It is research purposes that determine the appropriateness of research methods.

Proposal for Final Project

Tentative Title:

From Unplugged to Plugged: Interactive Whiteboards in K-12 Classrooms

Introduction:

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs), also known as electronic whiteboards, were introduced into classrooms to replace traditional chalkboards for the reason of being more interactive and assistive to teaching and learning. Governmental organizations in UK and USA invested a large amount of money to initiate comprehensive plans for a wide implementation of IWBs in K-12 classroom. For the past few decades, IWBs have been utilized in different grades and subject matters. It seems that this educational tool has received positive feedback from teachers and students. The purpose of this paper is to document the history of the transition from blackboards to interactive whiteboards in K-12 setting. The rationale behind the replacement will also be explored in this paper.

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Research Questions:

1. When, how, and why were interactive whiteboards introduced into K-12 classrooms?

2. How interactive whiteboards have been implemented in different subject matters and perceived by teachers and students in K-12 setting?

Resources:

Primary resources for this project would be: JSTOR and the ERIC database

Secondary resources would be: Google and Wikipedia. These secondary resources will only serve as a quick way to gather general ideas about IWBs.

Standards Now and then Tests Later?_6

Teachers are super-human considering the complexity of working environment they are embedded in and the various, even conflicting at times, expectations asked from them.  A classroom of 20 students contains 20 different needs and learning styles. Teachers are required to differentiate instruction to cater to all of, not merely some of, the learning needs, but, at the same time, they cannot differentiate too much for fear of being partial. Teachers are required to teach to standards and held accountable for the testing outcomes, but, at the same time, strive to motivate the same students whose motivation has been dampened by the same testing procedure. Teaching is not only difficult but contradictory in nature.

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Learning standards are never in short supply, but now technology standards want to jump on the burden. One may wonder that now that there are technology standards, is there any need for accountability and testing tomorrow? The answer is not clear but the history of education has taught us one thing: Standards always pave the road for the upcoming testing mania, and standards, more often than not, are misused to monitor and constrain teachers rather than used to help teachers to teach better. Standards seem not the end but the means to control. Never underestimate those authority’s will to test.