Tech 4 Learners – Week 10 – 2 Min Video Assignment

Working on a 2 minute video presentation of our prototype for ‘A’ at OMS.

https://youtu.be/Q0PdrKxJVHc

Narration: 

Meet Achu.

Achu is twelve years old, full of smiles, and loves art, basketball and HotWheels videos.

Achu’s vocabulary is plenty big, but he doesn’t always use it, instead choosing to repeat the words of others instead of what he really thinks.

Our goal for this work was to support Achu in sharing more of his own thoughts. Let’s call this “spontaneous language creation.”

We believe that if we can help Achu to generate more spontaneous language, over time, he might find it easier to express himself and share his perspectives with the people around him.

So we set out to design a tool that would allow him to do that.

For the first prototype we decided to draw on Achu’s interests and build a system where he could watch and engage in basketball or HotWheels video.

Narrate it when thoughts came to mind or when he was prompted.

Then replayed the video with his recorded narration to show him the value of his words.

Their entertainment value, usefulness.

Even their coolness.

And we found…

Achu was engaged!

He started using more new words!

Car, Fell Down, Score.

And he enjoyed hearing his voice in the replay of the video.

But we still thought we could do better.

We wanted to see if we could increase his level of engagement and the complexity of his spoken ideas by drawing more on his strengths and core motivations.

Knowing that Achu is kind and caring, our new hypothesis was that he would be more engaged and motivated, if he had to help someone else.

Playing off the idea that people are more motivated to work hard when someone else depends on their teaching.

It’s called the protege effect.

Meet Tom, the blind, talking cat.

He introduces himself.

Becomes your friend, then asks for your help,

It worked!

All of a sudden, there was something at stake, a character that needed help.

By chunking the video and having Achu explain what happens in each video chunk to Tom the Cat, we tapped into Achu’s strength of empathy and he was motivated to take on the challenge of spontaneous language creation.

We saw engagement, positive affect, and complex explanations.

Thanks Achu, for helping!

 

Tech 4 Learners – Week 10 – Assignment Lessons Learned

Assignment

Response

Team SAL: Soren, Alex, Lucas 

Lessons Learned

  • Time with the intended user and rigorous user testing are critical to success. Every interaction our team had with our OMS student yielded more ideas and insights.
  • It can be challenging to figure out whether an idea is not good or whether its implementation was the issue. It’s quite possible that a user will not engage well with a prototype even though the basis of the prototype is a worthwhile idea. Consequently, it is important to identify the critical learning mechanism to be tested and give the learner different ways to engage with it.
  • What would be motivating to us is not necessarily as motivating to other learners. For example, while our team might be excited to narrate videos, our OMS learner was much more motivated to help a blind cat understand the video.
  • It is important to use a learner’s strength to help him improve upon his weakness. With our OMS learner, we found greater success when we played off of his strength (caring for others) to motivate him to talk.
  • The Wizard of Oz technique enabled our team to rapidly test, change, and evolve our prototype. The freedom to build just part of our prototype and simulate the rest of the prototype experience also allowed us to test several backup ideas, which helped us gather additional insight on our learner’s motivations and interests. 
  • We realized how important it is to record and review testing sessions. By closely analyzing when our learner showed engagement, we were able to pinpoint the specific mechanisms through which our prototype encourages participation and positive affect. 
  • The “protege effect” – or more broadly the task of teaching someone else – is a powerful motivator. Our strongest prototype turned our learner into a teacher that would explain videos to a blind cat who couldn’t see them. Our learner was quite responsive as he saw real purpose in generating words to help the needy creature.

Qualitative Research – Week 10 – Group Meeting

Met with Ana and James at the Starbucks in down town Palo Alto to talk about our propositions and main hypothesis of what we observed in terms of Tech Adoption and iHub.

Here are some of the updates:

Abstract (Ana):

Problem statement:

  • How do third party organizations facilitate productive technology adoption practices between schools and education technology companies?
  • How does iHub facilitate education technology innovation?
  • How does iHub facilitate collaboration between educators and entrepreneurs to promote education technology innovation?

Propositions:

  1. (Lucas): iHub’s activities revolve mainly around teachers
    1. iHub’s emphasis is on supporting teachers
    2. iHub focuses mainly on supporting teachers
    3. iHub primarily focuses on supporting teachers more so than other stakeholders
    4. iHub focuses on supporting teachers rather than entrepreneurs
  2. (James): Having a focus on teachers grants organizations access into schools
    1. Fostering relationships with teachers facilitates technology innovation
    2. iHub’s relationships with teachers facilitate startups’ access to schools
    3. iHub’s relationships with teachers grant startups classroom access
  3. (Ana): iHub feels they have to do more than #1 and #2 room for improvement

 

Context (Lucas):

  • What are SVEF and iHub?

Methods (James):

  • No literature review/research of topic
  • 1-hour observation
  • Field notes
  • Interview guide peer-reviewed by classmates
  • Two 1-hour interviews
    • Together with observation = methodology triangulation
  • Transcriptions
  • Coding and propositions

Limitations (Lucas):

  • Interview and observations had little correlation
  • Limited previous knowledge of what the company did
  • Findings (everyone):

Conclusion:

iHub successfully brings together educators and entrepreneurs, but we don’t know if this is actually having a positive impact on ______

HCI 547 – Week 9 – Class Notes

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Good talk by Lorrie Cranor from Carnegie Mellon University entitled “Conducting Usable Privacy and Security Studies: It’s Complicated”

Main take-away: warning messages are mostly ignored and are starting to be designed differently. They must stand out over system messages in the case of browser vulnerability and other risks that are related to the person’s identity and privacy.

LDT Seminar – Week 9 – Class Notes

Who Am I? Talk this week:

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Second half, Stanford’s Dr. Bruce McCandiss, PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, talks about a new field of Educational Neuroscience that can do three important things:  

  1. providing a new view on understanding how experts are wired up,  
  2. a new view on how children come to a new learning challenge (i.e. reading) with a diverse set of resources and individual differences that matter, and
  3. a way of understanding the mechanisms by which learning experiences can drive changes in mental abilities and brain connections.  

Response:

With ever-evolging realtime, detailed 3D moving images of the brain working, we start to see where learning happens and most importantly, how it happens. Going off the far end first: will we be able to record learning and then play it back to other learners? What will be the ethical issues of cloning thought processes? Will it be possible to create human drones controlled by a central brain?

On a more practical level, being able to see absence of learning is one major potential application. Imagine if we could assess if a student has learned about a subject or not – without actually testing them – just by talking about the subject. With that, we can then look at their learning profile and attempt to teach about the subject in a way that is more adapted that brain. Formative assessment based on brain visualizations. Just another skill teachers will have to cope with 🙂

The question that remains for me is: how does an adult brain look like when it is learning? How much brain plasticity still remains? How can we improve it? Is the brain really like a muscle that when exercised, it has potential for making more connections?

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Oh yes – while we were responding to the lecture, Collin sung a little for us in class:

https://youtu.be/B4VM-L7E4Bk

Qualitative Research – Week 9 – Class Notes

Did a Fishbowl group activity where we were presented with two ethical dilemmas.

  1. You are running a study with students about cheating. One child talks to their parents about it. The parent calls the dean concerned about ‘cheating’. The dean asks you to provide all the research notes  or else the parent will remove their child from the study. What do you do? Surrender the notes? Talk to the parent about it? Group: remove student from study. not surrender notes.
  2. You are running a study on how students fall behind in the college application process. During an interview, a student clearly is going to miss the deadline since they are not aware of it. Do you tell them about the upcoming deadlines and interfere in the quality of the data of your research?

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We also talked about our final papers as well as our propositions. Got our feedback from Denise the day after.

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