Tech 4 Learners – Final – Notes

Reading Notes

National Education Technology Plan

  • Focus on technology but need to use it for PD
  • Focus Areas:
    • Learning
    • Assessment
    • Teaching
    • Infrastructure
    • Productivity

Understanding by Design

  • Backwards design or backwards planning
  • Clear learning objectives
  • How could we incorporate game design practices into education?

Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

  • Ed Tech is not the silver bullet – must come with pedagogy and PD

In-Game, In-Room, In-World

  • Kids learn plenty from each other
  • Kidification of education

 The Perils and Promises of Praise

  • Growth mindset
  • Constructive praise – effort and process not ability itself (you’re so smart!)

Four-Phase Model of Interest Development

  • Model
    • Triggered Situational Interest
    • Maintained Situational Interest
    • Emerging Individual Interest
    • Well Developed Individual Interest
  • Teacher’s interest is probably best predictor of effective teaching
  • Teacher’s role is to provide:
    • Positive feelings
    • Generate curiosity
    • Provide opportunities
    • Guide on research

 The New Coviewing: Joint Media Engagement

  • Design Guide
    • Mutual engagement
    • Dialogue inquiry
    • Co-creation
    • Boundary crossing
    • Intention to develop
    • Focus on content, not control
  • Challenges
    • Parents too busy
    • Parents unaware of needs
    • Don’t enjoy the same content
    • Desired interactions not always triggered
    • Little continuity into other family activities
    • Distraction are always present
  • Design principles
    • Kid driven
    • Multiple plains of engagement
    • Differentiation of roles
    • Scaffolds to scaffold
    • Trans media storytelling
    • Co-creation
    • Fit
  • “What goes on between people around media can be as important as what is designed into the media”

Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect

  • Care more about pleasing others than oneself, so having someone you need to help enhances learning through teaching this person

 Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels

  • Tangible User Interfaces

 Horizon Reports

  • re-teaching our teachers how and what to teach

Paper Planning

Pedagogical Compass

North – what we teach

  • Content relevance
    • “focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know ” (NETP, 2010)
    • “It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning and to enable continuous and lifelong learning. ” (NETP, 2010)
    • “Build tools and experiences that revolve around a child’s existing interests, not just prescribed topics. To do so, producers need to design mechanisms that make children’s interests visible and can assist adults in responding to them. ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
    • “Joint media engagement can be a useful support for developing literacy, including basic reading ability, cultural literacy, scientific literacy, media literacy, and other 21st century skills.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • Assessment
    • “technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that, in aggregate, will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system. ” (NETP, 2010)
    • “This backward approach encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first think like an assessor before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine whether students have attained the desired understandings.” (Walters & Newman, 2008)
  • Teacher’s interest
    • Teacher’s interest is probably best predictor of effective teaching – Lucas

 South – how we teach

  • Teacher Professional Development
    • “Professional educators are a critical component of transforming our education systems, and therefore strengthening and elevating the teaching profession is as important as effective teaching and accountability. ” (NETP, 2010)
  • Curriculum construction
    • Backwards design or backwards planning – Clear learning objectives
      • “One starts with the end—the desired results (goals or standards)— and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform. ” (Walters & Newman, 2008)
  • Using technology wisely
    • “Assigning roles to participants so that tasks and content match up to individual maturity is another way of ensuring that everyone is suitably challenged and/or entertained.”  (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
    • “Parents, teachers, and other adults may wish to share educational resources with their children, but teaching with media and new technologies doesn’t always come naturally, not even for experienced instructors. Provide guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can help ensure that the intended benefits of the resource are realized. ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
    • “Mark Weiser’s seminal paper on Ubiquitous Computing [54] started with the following paragraph:
      “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
      I do believe that TUI is one of the promising paths to his vision of invisible interface. ” (Ishii, 2008)
    • “Combating technocentrism involves more than thinking about technology. It leads to fundamental re-examination of assumptions about the area of application of technology with which one is concerned: if we are interested in eliminating technocentrism from thinking about computers in education, we may find ourselves having to re-examine assumptions about education that were made long before the advent of computers. (One could even argue that the principal contribution to education made thus far by the computer presence has been to force us to think through issues that themselves have nothing to do with computers.) ” (Papert, 1987)
  • Student feedback
    • Praise effort and not ability:
      • “I think educators commonly hold two beliefs that do just that. Many believe that (1) praising students’ intelligence builds their confidence and motivation to learn, and (2) students’ inherent intelligence is the major cause of their achievement in school. Our research has shown that the first belief is false and that the second can be harmful—even for the most competent students. ” (Dweck, 2007)
      • “Maybe we have produced a generation of students who are more dependent, fragile, and entitled than previous generations. If so, it’s time for us to adopt a growth mind-set and learn from our mistakes. It’s time to deliver interventions that will truly boost students’ motivation, resilience, and learning. ” (Dweck, 2007)
  • Managing motivation and student interest
    • “In fact, teachers often think that students either have or do not have interest, and might not recognize that they could make a significant contribution to the development of students’ academic interest (Lipstein & Renninger, 2006)” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
    • “In general, findings from studies of interest suggest that educators can (a) help students sustain attention for tasks even when tasks are challenging—this could mean either providing support so that students can experience a triggered situational interest or feedback that allows them to sustain attention so that they can generate their own curiosity questions; (b) provide opportunities for students to ask curiosity questions; and (c) select or create resources that promote problem solving and strategy generation. ”  (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
    • “Understanding that interest can develop and that it is not likely to develop in isolation is essential. Further articulating the contribution of interest to student learning and its relation to other motivational variables has potentially powerful im- plications for both classroom practice and conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of interest. ” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
  • Trends (NMC Horizon Reports)
    • Blended Learning
    • Open Educational Resources
    • Digital Literacy
    • Integrating Technology in Teacher Education
    • Rethinking Roles of teacher

 East- how we learn

  • Access to education
    • “The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.” (NETP, 2010)
  • Growth mindset
    • “Other students believe that their intellectual ability is something they can develop through effort and education. They don’t necessarily believe that anyone can become an Einstein or a Mozart, but they do understand that even Einstein and Mozart had to put in years of effort to become who they were.” (Dweck, 2007)
  • Learn from culture
    • “For these reasons, we do not appeal to the games-are-highly-motivating explanation, but we do see a reason that young people play games and get them tangled up with the rest of their lives, and this reason is cultural. The phrase that best helps us explain it comes from one of our participants, Mikey, who in talking about games said, “It’s what we do.” The “we” he was referring to was kids these days, the young people of his generation.” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)
  • Four-phase model of interest development
    • Triggered Situational Interest
    • Maintained Situational Interest
    • Emerging Individual Interest
    • Well Developed Individual Interest
  • Learn by teaching – protégé effect
    • “We then introduce TAs, which combine properties of agents and avatars. This sets the stage for two studies that demonstrate what we term the protégé effect: students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do for themselves. ” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)
    • “Given our hypothesis that the protégé effect is due to social motivations, we would expect students in the programming condition to be less inclined to acknowledge ” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)

 West – who we learn from

  • Technocentric views
  • Learn from peers
    • “The variety of ways that we saw young people arrange themselves to play games surprised us, especially since most of these ways were interpersonally and emergently organized by the young people themselves. ” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)
    • “In fact, shared attentional focus on media in real time is a powerful interactional resource not found in most contemporary asynchronous social media, and researchers across a range of disciplines highlight the importance of joint attention for learning and meaning- making (e.g., Barron, 2000, 2003; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008; Bruner, 1983, 1995; Goodwin, 2000; Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Tomasello, 1999, 2003). ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
    • “Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy’s (2008) naturalistic studies of siblings and friends playing video games together at home examined the spontaneous instances of teaching and learning that players set up among themselves during gaming sessions, as well as how their in-room interactions connect with what’s going on inside the game and in their lives outside the home (e.g., school). ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • Learn from teachers who’s roles are to provide: (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
    • Positive feelings
    • Generate curiosity
    • Provide opportunities
    • Guide on research
  • Parents (coviewing)
    • “To get families to use a new platform with any regularity, it should easily slot into existing routines, parent work schedules, and classroom practices. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day to accommodate new practices.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
    • “What children learn and do with media depends a lot on the content of the media, but they depend perhaps as much on the context in which they are used or viewed, and with whom they are used or viewed.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • Society

Pedagogical Compass Planning

Act 1 – Why should you read this paper?

Want to become a learning tool designer? Care about learner? Care about teachers? Care about reducing the digital literacy gap?

Who are you? Teacher? Policy maker? School leader? Designer? Engineer? Developer?

The compass:

– North – what we teach

– South – how we teach

– East – how we learn

– West – who we learn from

 Act 2 – Evidence

How is LX design similar and different from:

UX designer – consider:

– User

– Usability

– Task at hand

Game Designer

– Learning the game – onboarding instructions

– Engagement – motivation, interest, reward systems, core loop

– Game mechanics

Learning Experience Designer

– Learning objectives

– Differentiation

– Cognitive developmental stages

– Cultural context

– Joint media engagement and co-viewing

– Learning from peers – protégé effect, learn by teaching

Act 3 – Conclusion

LX is probably the most complex type of design there is. Have to consider:

– The learner

– The teacher

– The environment

– The peers

– The cultural context

– Assessment

– Learning objectives

– Policy

– Costs

– Implementation

– Scalability