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Job Search

This week had 2 informational sessions on a future job, besides starting to send out my resume and apply for jobs online.

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The first informational session was on Tuesday with Udemy. Spoke to one of their employees about the company’s management style, corporate culture, compensations, benefits and so on. Sounds like a great place to work. Now I have to keep my eye open for open positions.

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The second one was with IXL, a company that creates online content for K-12. This was a group informational session. Interesting company and sounds like it’s very profitable and doing well.

 

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LDT Seminar – Master's Project – Candace Thille

Met with Candace to talk about my Master’s project. Amazing feedback.

What I’m trying to build seems more like a performance tool than a learning tool – which I already knew but phrased this way makes it more precise. Have to think about what am I trying to teach the user; what will they be able to do after they interact with the learning experience that I create?

Another important point she made was that the interaction I was designing where you iterate through speaking and editing the transcription, involves several cognitive tasks and domain shifts that may not be advantageous for learning or for the purpose of the project. Preferably, the cognitive load has to be small and the domain shifts kept to a minimum.

Finally, she suggested that I focus on a specific task of the Understanding by Design framework, such as “creating learning objectives”, or creating assessment strategies for a specific learning goal. This was I’d be able to focus on the learning rather than the entire system of creating a smart-feedback/advice system.

Zoom out… rethink… zoom in again… test… talk to more people

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Lytics Seminar – Week 5 – Class Notes

This week we kept on advancing on the Machine Learning, more specifically about textual analysis. We went over the “bag of words” technique of trying to make predictions about the type of annotation created with Laguna Stories.

Seems a little counterintuitive that by simply analyzing the word count in the comments would generate any viable conclusion, yet it seems like it could. Not to say that this is magic, but very detailed work in coding the information, training the algorithm with enough data, and then iterating through the process of adjusting the parameters, groupings, and sometimes even going back to coding the data.

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Brazilian Education – Week 5 – Class Notes

paulo_blikstein-010-croppedThis week Paulo Blikstein presented on the topic of equity in education and how technology could potentially help reduce it – with a warning that it might actually increase the gap between the privileged and the less privileged.

An interesting point was the distinction between Instructional and Constructionist technologies where the former talks about direct instruction while the latter, about engaging with the content and building knowledge from that interaction.