Not much progress on my Master’s project (LXD) but starting to talk more about a new idea James Leo and I had – a staffing agency combined with a bootcamp and mentorship for high-school students. Could be an interesting initiative.
At the moment I feel my project is more of a ‘nice-to-have’ performance tool that would have little impact in the world, expect for the few times it might be used by instructors… starting to feel like its purpose is dwindling… let’s see how this all pans out.
This week had 2 informational sessions on a future job, besides starting to send out my resume and apply for jobs online.
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.
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.
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
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.
This 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.
Ok class – talking about the readings and more about what Benchmark Tasks are and what a Cognitive task analysis entails. A little confusing as to how to translate this technique into my very ‘meta’ project but let’s do it 😉
Reading:
Ambrose, S. A. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Notes:
Chapter 4 – “How Do Students Develop Mastery?”
Chapter 5 – “What Kinds of Practice and Feedback Enhance Learning?”
This was a tough one… instructions and content were not very clear/cohesive.
Have been trying to focus on putting together an initial prototype for LXD.
Since the idea was to have a talking virtual character, I decided that it would be interesting for the instructor to talk back as well.
This sparked the notion that speach is a very effective way of ‘tangibilizing’ your thoughts in a spontaneous and maybe more authentic manner than writting down. Speaking is a way of exposing your internal schema, your knowledge, and your skillset. Hearing someone speak, instead of reading, adds nuances of tone, importance, cadence, and vigor that are challenging to replicate in writting.
With that I started looking at this particular interaction’s core loop:
Which evolved to this:
And this prototype – much work needed – first step towards tangibilizing the interface and focusing on the relevant functionality.
Prompt:
Quick reflection:
What have you learned in terms of new skills and as well as insights through your internship work? What questions has it raised?
Do you have any concerns you would like help with or triumphs to share?
Response:
The internship at VPTL is going well even though I am doing mostly content revision with the occasional multimedia task of creating explanatory diagrams, adding explanatory elements of photos, and doing minor edits on videos. To be fair, I have started to write some content that will go into the course and have been updating the OpenEdX platform itself giving me some interesting insights.
It has been very interesting to see the behind-the-scenes work and organization necessary to create an online course. I am satisfied to see that it was not only a personal perception that it is a daunting task – it really is an extremely labor intensive and meticulous job.
Since the content of the course I am working on is about creating online courses, the content material is of extreme interest. I feel I am killing two birds with one stone.