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FOMO

“Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – common feeling amongst students since there are SO many things going on at the same time and you fear you’re going to miss out on something really interesting.”

Fact is, you ARE going to miss out on MOST things simply because you can only watch one thing at a time and there are SEVERAL events happening at any given time…

Yesterday – was not able to see a talk by Elon Musk about future technologies… today I’m not going to be able to see Elisa Villanueva Beard, the CEO of Teach For America talk about her experiences…

Just wish I had more time here!! kkk

It is mind boggling:

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LDT Seminar – Week 3 – Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

“In preparation for the expert interview, write at least three short posts, each one identifying one “learning problem” you might want to solve in about one paragraph. Include: WHO needs to learn WHAT and WHY it is important. For each, name three people who could help you learn more about this challenge.  Post each “problem” here as a post on this discussion (not on a google doc as I showed in seminar).”

Response 1:
Bruno is going to teach a course on iOS development at a training center. He is a skilled programmer but has never taught before. The center has general guidelines as to what topics he must cover over the course of the next 8 weeks. There is no course material (slides, videos or written material) to support his lessons. He has no idea where to start or how to structure his lessons. He needs to learn some basic strategies, techniques and teaching methods to be able to start preparing his lesson plan and teaching materials.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Sarah Wischnia – professor – Introduction to Teaching
  2. Paul Hegarty – professor – iOS Development
  3. Denise Pope – professor – Curriculum Construction
Response 2:
Alex is a motivated young developer who is fascinated with the new AppleTV OS that recently came out. He learned how to create apps for it and it was quite tricky, even though he has experience with iOS Apps already. He understands  this is valuable content he’s acquired and knows that he can make some money out of this (and he needs it). He now has to decide which platform(s) to use to distribute his content. To address this challenge he needs to find out what are the available platforms out there, their market share, revenue sharing business models as well as usability, feature sets and appear. In order to do so he must research the topic online, talk to other users and subject matter expert for some guidelines and pointers.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Karin Forssell – subject matter expert – LDT
  2. John Mitchell – subject matter expert – Vice Provost for Online Learning
  3. Soren Rosier – subject matter expert – former SRI researcher
Response 3:
Luciana is the manager of a software development center which teaches mobile development to software engineers as well as complete programming novices. She needs to insure that the novices are actually learning the basics in the introductory courses before she can move them on to the regular courses intended for those who already know how to code. In the regular classes the novices have a hard time keeping up with the pace. This results in them either giving up on the course, retaking the course, hindering the progress of the class and/or feeling the school has not taught him properly. She needs to be able to assess the novice’s progress early on in this 2 week long course to be able to talk to the teacher to pay more attention to that student or schedule extra help sessions. She also needs to assess students who claim they are at a sufficient level to take the course. In order to so, Luciana needs to learn about assessment methods commonly used in programming courses, how to implement and track them effectively.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Dan Schwartz – subject matter expert – Dean – Graduate School of Education
  2. Jean-Paul Schmetz – Chief Scientist – https://codility.com – Software Developer testing platform

  3. Nate Hardison – Professor Computer Science

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SAM – Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program

Went to an introductory meeting of the Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program – have to tap into all these incredible resources!

Vision:
For over a decade the Stanford Alumni Mentoring (SAM) program has been catalyzing relationships between students here on the Farm and alumni who were once in their shoes.

Mission:
We have a database of over 3,000 Stanford alumni and connect hundreds of students and alumni in mentoring relationships throughout the year. With a foundation of such incredible alumni and students our mission is as follows:

  1. Create mentorship opportunities that allow students to more organically connect with alumni.
  2. Assure quality interactions through stressing the importance of openness, sincerity, and appreciation in every mentorship situation so that both students and mentors understand the true spirit of mentorship.
  3. Provide support and guidance through the ups and downs of the mentorship experience and serve as a bridge for both mentors and mentees.

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Qualitative Research – Week 3 – Group Work

Met today with my group (James Leo & Ana Cuellar) to decide upon the technology setting we want to observe. Great conversation, easy going group, direct and efficient. We came up with the following for now… 

How does the adoption of technology impact the learning experiences of students with disruptive tendencies and/or lower academic achievement?

To answer this question, we are interested either in A) observing the impact of a education technology specifically designed to improve student behavior or B) observing whether a learning technology changes student behavior despite not being created for that purpose.

We sent our Professor (Denise Clark Pope) and T.A. Petr Johanes an email with some questions and got responses from both in less than 3 hours! So good to work this way…

Our questions:

“We are hoping you can give us some feedback on this progress before we reach out to potential interviewees. 

We are also curious about the order of the observation and interviews – can we interview a teacher pre-technology use, then observe the class upon tech adoption, then conduct the final interview after the observation? Or are we tied to the observation-interview-interview order?” 

Their responses I will maintain to our group. The result of the feedback will come later 🙂 Can’t spill all the beans right?

 

After we met, we walked around the School of Engineering’s Future Day and ran into a company we were actually talking about during the meeting: Little Bits!! Talked to Joe, the local representative, teacher, enthusiast and parent about possibly taping into his school to observe the use of this technology in action! Awesome coincidence.

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