February 2019 – Siyuan's World

Web 2.0 Podcast Interview

szl279 on February 27, 2019

Introduction of Interviewee

Yuchen Qiu is one of my colleague and friend at Learning Design and Technology program who come from Taiwan. She is in her first year of doctoral study. She taught 12-14 years old students Social Studies in an international school at Shanghai after she graduated from graduate school. She achieved her master degree in International Educational Development from U Penn. During she working for the international school at Shanghai, she took some hands on experience of using social media and Web 2.0 tools to support her students learning.

Reflection on interview process

When I preparing the interview, I had informed that I may use the Garageband as the tool to record the interview. However, after I downloaded it on my cell phone and tried to use it before the interview, I found it not easy for a novice. I didn’t figure out how to save the file. So, I decided to use the simplest audio recording app which come with my iPhone defaultly. At the beginning of the interview, I didn’t have any interaction with Yuchen and only asked my questions. Along with the interview progress, I have some verbal and expressional interactions with her. I felt the interview atmosphere becoming more relax, comfortable, and open. It also encouraged she thinking more and speak them out.

Social media and Web 2.0 tools can be shiny but challenging

In Yuchen’s words, I found some useful and interest facets. In her experience, she found she can use Kahoot!, Quitlez, and other similar function apps to help her students who use English as second language memory the key terms in English. I had never imagine use those kind of tools to support English learning. It is the truth when most of Chinese international student learning in the U.S.’s classes, they were facing a big challenge which is convert the terms from English to Chinese. We didn’t learn the English words to express those key terms when we learning them in most of public schools in China. Although in the private international school like Yuchen worked for, the students still need to overcome some difficult time to learn key terms in both two languages. So, Yuchen’s idea really inspired me.

Additionally, Yuchen’s suggest to make a well-designed lesson plan and set clear learning goals before pick up technology tools are important. In past, before I realized this point, I had been driven by those fancy technology tools for a period. I liked to find out some newest and very fancy social media and Web 2.0 tools and then generate and modify my design. Yes, the design outcome maybe very cool, but it may not deliver all my goals to learners in proper way. Using the most fit tools in our plan should be one most important guideline when we make a lesson plan and set learning goals. shouldn’t let tools driving teachers’ mind.

Web 2.0 and media literacy

szl279 on February 16, 2019

Like traditional literacy, the media literacy is crucial in Internet era. As the definition of National Association for Media Literacy Education, media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. In my opinion, media literacy is a necessary ability to survive from countless information on the Internet and multiple media platforms. In educational perspective, the media literacy is the core factor to determine what knowledge learning outcome, social values, and world views a young student can achieve from internet based self-learning. Among the abilities of media literacy, I think the access, analysis, and evaluation are three most important parts.

We always discuss the equal access to the learning sources are significant to education and human rights. However, after enter the Internet era and the digital technologies developed explosively, the unequal equality started to going worse. As Buckingham’s (2007) states, “middle-class children at a significant advantage here, not just because they may have greater access to technology and newer software applications, but also because of the greater cultural capital at their disposal. In addition, I think maybe the higher social class parents will allow their children have more accesses to the nature of our society, sources of knowledge, and wider horizon. Those all can help their children have stronger media literacy and more possibility to distinguish the effective information on the Internet. So, as educators and policy makers, how to increase the non-dominant family students’ access of technology, nature of society, and knowledge, or let them have similar ability with the dominant family students to catch effective information, is the challenge.

In the report of Camila Domonoske, she elaborated the Stanford University’s study that shows more than 80 percent of middle school students, more than 80 percent of high school students, and most Stanford students in their example pool have trouble with distinguish the “sponsored content” article and real news story, authenticity pictures and post-edited photos, and mainstream and fringe source. Although young people and even our generation (age 25 to 35) believe we are the native of Internet, it still difficult to survive from incredible number of fake and trash information. In order to remit the issue, maybe an information session or workshop or any other forms education to help audiences increase their ability to analyze and evaluate the Internet contents can be conducted continuously during each school semester. It not only faces to students, but also the teachers and parents.

In addition to those three parts I feel most important abilities of media literacy, the social justice and law (more global more helpful) should be more strict to the Internet. In the article “Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world”, the author uses the “Holocaust was fake” event, and haters and racists control the Google search result recommendation phenomenon revealing how the most reachable search engine been leveraged to spread fake and twisty truth. Parents cannot control and prevent their children touch those information once their eyes off the screen for seconds even they sitting behind their children while they using Internet-connected devices. In other words, maybe we can say our society also needs media literacy.

References:

David Buckingham (2007) Media education goes digital: an introduction, Learning, Media and Technology, 32:2, 111-119, DOI: 10.1080/17439880701343006.

Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real

Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google-frames-shapes-and-distorts-how-we-see-world

The Networked Learner

szl279 on February 3, 2019

In the internet era, young learners have two school system to acquire knowledge. In the “Games and Education Scholar James Paul Gee on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy” video, Mr. Gee mentioned there is the school system for 21st century in popular culture at where people are thinking about complex systems and learn and producing their own knowledge based on their interests. And there is another school system in traditional way that give you the basics of numeracy and literacy. Similarly, Mimi Ito also stated in the video named “Connected learning, children, and digital media” that the traditional schooling education is still incredible important in education and cannot be replaced by new learning mode – connected learning – because it gives kids access across the board to a baseline set of standards literacies expectations about what they need to participate in the contemporary society to be reflective and also take opportunity of the fact that have kids and adults in a shared space that safe and sanction. I agree with above two experts and believe the traditional school learning system is irreplaceable, at least now and a near future. Inspired by the report of “Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom” (2014), I see the innovation of our traditional schooling education is reforming by the new learning system – connected learning. Not only students can connect with other like minds, but also teachers, designers, and educators can share their issues, potential solutions, ideas, and practical experiences with the community that also share the same interest. For sure, this community is much larger than the previous community before the Web 2.0 era that teachers used old school method to accomplish the cutting edge creations.

However, even though I can observe so many benefits that connected learning bring to both students side and educators side, I still have the same worry appearing in the “Connected Learning Report”. In the report, authors were anxious about the digital media threaten to exacerbate growing inequities in education (2013). Combine with the view of “Teaching in Connected Learning Classroom”, the inequity not only on students, it also over the educators’ heads. Compare between the urban area and rural area, the inequity is commonly. But within the one urban area, the inequity is still existing. In Beijing, one of the most wealthy city in China, each school can not receive equal funding to employee same level technologies for students and teachers. Generally, schools have greater amount of top students will receive better financial support from district’s government. The lesser will be given lesser. Then, the lesser top students school will have smaller chance to foster growing number top students. I think the similar phenomenon might happens in the United States as well. In the past, the learning opportunities and resources were not expanded by the internet, the inequity in the urban area is not easy to increasing. But after learners and teachers in a connected environment, this problem might be placed under an amplifier. Possibly, maybe this worry of mine is just excessively.

References:

Video Games, Learning, and Literacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI

Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuV7zcXigAI

Ito, Mizuko, Kris Gutiérrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, S. Craig Watkins. 2013. Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Garcia, Antero, ed., 2014. Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Introduction of Interviewee

Reflection on interview process

Social media and Web 2.0 tools can be shiny but challenging

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