High-Tech Vs Higher Order Thinking

“We should not take the whole technology without any filtering. The technology that we may use in the education should be an appropriate technology”

Appropriate Technology is the most learning effective, cost effective technology "available" for illustrating and communicating, while stimulating curiosity, enthusiasm, creativity, innovation, and active student participation in the learning process.

When my friend, Mr. Richard was working as an education technologist overseas at a university during the day, he taught electronics to people working in the electronics industry in the evening. The learning technologies that he chose were based upon the learners past academic history (not grades) and their entry level understanding of the basic principles of electronics.

For instance, he found that using simple technologies for instance bottles with holes and water was the best technology for conveying understanding and clarifying issues like Voltage, Current and Resistance. Even though he had access to a wide range of higher technologies he found that basic technologies (which raise the learners curiosity and participation) where they learn through "discovery principles" were most effective in achieving true understanding and higher order thinking skill.

When he was teaching mathematics (in electronics he use a lot of math) he always came back to the whiteboard as the most effective technology for "developing understanding", because all students could participate easily and contribute to the development on the whiteboard without the need for specific skills in using the technology.

Often the students had not used math for several years and the more complex formulas sometimes posed difficulties so he would break them down into steps using basic math processes, during which the students could contribute and thus reinforce their confidence until they felt confident enough to utilize more complex formulas effectively. Again participation in the process he believes is critical (even for large groups of learners).

He could have used higher technologies but he believes that the whiteboard is one of the most effective tools because of its simplicity and the fact that it is always ready when we need it. The white/black board is still the most used learning medium globally (and it's always ON :-).

When he teaches now, he still rely upon simple technologies, even though he have 8 computers now (3 laptops and 5 desktops) because of the issues of student activity raised above, but also because he can conducts the lesson effectively anywhere without concerns for power failures and technical problems, and he still believes that they are the most effective for creating an active-learning environment even though in his technology profession he uses all the latest technologies.

Therefore, with his experience, we can see that higher order thinking skill should be our priority. However, it doesn’t mean that we discredited high-tech. Our brain (and imagination) is still the best technology for generating learner interest and stimulating the learning process.

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Mobile Learning, Is It Applicable?

“Mobile e-learning will go away. There is always the latest thing in e-learning that everyone must do. One of my least favorite of these is mobile e-learning. E-learning will not happen, at least not seriously, on mobile phones.

Why not? Because it takes time to learn something. You have to really understand a situation. You have to practice a skill. You have to consider alternatives. You have to create deliverables. At least you do for the e-learning that I build. This takes time—a lot of time. It was seriously suggested recently in a full year all day every day course I was building, that we needed to make it available on mobile phones. I don’t know about you, but staring at mobile phone for an hour makes my eyes hurt. Try doing it all day for a year. It makes no sense.

We don’t learn anything instantly. Real learning is not done on a train or a bus. The kinds of courses that can be delivered that way will be shown to not be particularly useful.“

That was a quote from Mr. Schank article about technology in education.

At the first we may think that he’s wrong, and that can be expected from me as I am someone who’s passionate about the subject of mLearning. But then I dissected his quote and realized that he’s right to say that mobile learning will not happen the same way it does with real eLearning. That’s true, and mLearning is not supposed to be like eLearning. Mobile devices are not the venue for deep, broad learning, at least not as a single source for that learning (i.e. they can be part of a deeper, longer process of learning, but they are not a great place for that type of learning by themselves).

Mobile learning is often best as an extension to that core knowledge that you learn in a classroom or a good eLearning course. Mobile learning also has the potential to allow someone to access the information from those courses at any time because of the ubiquitous nature and portability of mobile devices.

Mobile learning at its’ best conforms to the learner’s lifestyle in a way that traditional classroom learning and eLearning titles just can’t. So while a learner is building a base of knowledge in a traditional setting, mobile learning can act as an extension to that, allowing the learner to practice certain tasks and recall important concepts at the point of need or simply to brush up on skills.

I don’t think mobile learning will or should ever come in the form of large multi-hour courses. But I do think that mobile learning has its’ place and I do think that Mobile Learning is gaining strength not because it’s another learning technology trend, but because it has real promise and shows real potential to help learners. 

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ICT for Child, Is It Always Effective?

“Provide children with ICT device in their home will support their academic performance. Is it, an absolute statement? ”

Results circulation of what is being termed the largest study yet of what happens to academic performance when you give a kid a computer began recently by The National Bureau of Economic Research. The news is not good. The study, conducted by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, examined extensive data on all middle school students in North Carolina public schools between 2000 and 2005. Those years, as the researchers point out, were a time when home computer use and broadband access were both expanding rapidly.

The study found that giving students home PCs led to small but significant declines in academic performance as measured by math and reading test scores. In addition, the researchers reported, the “introduction of high-speed internet service is similarly associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades.” Worse yet, “the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.” Vigdor and Ladd’s sobering conclusion: “For school administrators interested in maximizing achievement test scores, or reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, all evidence suggests that a program of broadening home computer access would be counter-productive.”

Given the excitement that surrounds efforts to close the “digital divide” by subsidizing computer purchases for disadvantaged students and schools, these findings may seem surprising. But they shouldn’t be. An earlier study that examined the effects of giving Romanian students access to computers resulted in similar findings. It discovered that while home computers may improve students’ computer skills, the devices appear to result in an erosion of math and reading skills.

Educators often take an idealized view of new information technologies. They focus on the potential of the technologies to improve academic performance, weaving enticingly optimistic scenarios of how the tools will be used. But the reality of the way the technologies come to be used rarely matches the idealized view. Kids do not, for example, see computers, mobile phones, and the Internet as essentially educational tools. They see them as tools for entertainment and communication. As Vigdor and Ladd suggest, the computer becomes an instrument of distraction, interrupting study rather than deepening it.

Earlier research into the educational consequences of hypertext and multimedia pointed to similar conclusions. Thirty years ago, when personal computers were first coming into schools, it was often assumed that taking in information on screens, with lots of textual links between documents and supporting audio and video presentations, would lead to deeper comprehension and stronger learning than was provided by traditional textbooks. In reality, hyperlinks and multimedia were found to divide students’ attention, leading to reduced comprehension and learning. To put it into psychological terms, computer use often leads to “cognitive overload,” impeding the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and hence short-circuiting the development of rich conceptual knowledge and critical thinking skills.

It is interesting and revealing to compare the impact of giving students access to computers and the Internet with the impact of giving them access to printed books. One recent study, published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, revealed a strong connection between the number of books in a student’s home and the number of years of education the student completes. “What’s surprising,” wrote the Chronicle of Higher Education in reporting on the research, “is just how strong the correlation is between a child’s academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It’s even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.”

Of course computers and the Internet have an important role to play in education, not least because computer skills are increasingly important to economic opportunity and achievement. But it is a mistake to assume that modern technology is an educational panacea, particularly when it comes to helping poor kids close gaps in learning and achievement. Investing precious dollars in teachers, books, and classrooms—in the traditional foundations of education—may well produce greater returns than investing them in computer hardware and software.

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Wikipedia: Reliability in Collaboration

“Remember, since you’re doing an academic writing especially on research, you are not allowed to use Wikipedia as one of your citation or references!” Have you ever heard those sentences? Yes! I guarantee that if you’re a scholars or learners that sentence is familiar. Then , what’s wrong with Wikipedia? Why it is restricted or discredited?

     Long time ago, BW (Before Wikipedia), most people either went to the library or collected expensive hardbound copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Walles and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia officially. The two were working on an online encyclopedia using only expert-written articles called Nupedia, and found the process to be extremely slow. One of the employees on the encyclopedia suggested using the new wiki technology to create a “feeder” of information to the project. Soon the wiki articles overtook the Nupedia work. Then, Wales and Sanger decided to create Wikipedia to distinguish between the expert-written Nupedia and the open sourced, public driven, collaborative edited Wikipedia. Since its inception, the question of whether the site is a reliable resource or not has been debated. Therefore, since it is debatable, some of college and university choose to warn students not to use Wikipedia as a reference or citation.

     Moreover, as Wikipedia uses a collaborative editing process, questions of the sites reliability will be raised. Nonetheless, the site continues to grow. Again, according to their own website, Wikipedia has now more than “15 million freely useable articles in over two hundred languages worldwide, and content from a million registered user accounts and countless anonymous contributors.” As of the date of the publication of this article, Wikipedia has now more than 3.333 million English language articles. And as the site grows, attitudes toward the reliable and usefulness of the encyclopedia has changed. In 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article written by Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Duke University, in which she asserts that Wikipedia should be used to teach students about the concepts of reliability and credibility.

     It could be argued that by Wikipedia highlighting the above articles they are guilty of self-referencing. Nonetheless, there is a general consensus forming on to how one should use Wikipedia as a resource. Most educators agree, Wikipedia can be an extremely useful tool. However, when reading Wikipedia, one should always check the sources cited in the article. Wikipedia articles are useful in providing general background on the subject you are studying. Moreover, as you can see when you’re looking for some information in the search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing, you’ll find that Wikipedia is positioned in the first line, on the top of the search result, for almost every kind of information! Wikipedia is affordable resources.

     And so, in regards to Wikipedia’s reliability, it can be argued that the site is reliable in providing researchers and students a guiding light, or a “starting point,” into the subject. But, because of its collaborative editing process, Wikipedia should not be considered a carefully vetted source, unless you are writing about the Wikipedia (organization) itself. Then, directly quoting the site and its founders just might be appropriate. After all, who would know the history of Wikipedia better than Wikipedia? :D

Is There Any Power in The Powerpoint?

"Please make a group of three and pick one of the topic in the module. Tomorrow, we'll have a group presentation..." 

    Have you ever heard those sentences? Of course, that are a saying that we often heard in our classroom in every subject. Even it become a 'favourite proverb' of all lecturer nowadays, don't you agree? Then, when we heard the word presentation, we always assume that it is a 'powerpoint' presentation. While in fact, presentation could be in a poster or even a piece of a4 paper. The issue of technology integration create a presentation stereotyping as a powerpoint presentation.

    We cannot said that powerpoint is useless or ineffective since there are a lot of evidences that support powerpoint as an effective and interactive teaching aid. It makes the teaching learning easier, because the teacher just only click the mouse or remote in their hand and the students who is 'anti-writing' could easily copy the slide after the session. Powerpoint also help the learning process since the powerpoint may provide animation and music.

    All of those things above are something that we already know even well-known in the some of our subject such as Multimedia Production, Technology Language Learning etc. Now, let's put off that usual 'hat' and now let's put a new hat which is a 'critical hat'. Have you ever yawned while your lecturer give their material in powerpoint presentation? Or have you think that it's better to have an activity in spite of sit and look at the powerpoint slide? I think almost all of us feel that both of those question are facts. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. Moreover, based on my 'mini oral research' that i conducted about the most boring event in their university is seminar which is presented by powerpoint presentation by someone that known as a great people called 'professors'.

    Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, José A. Bowen, challenge his teacher to 'teach naked' which means teaching without computer. He said that he wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. He also contends that class time should be reserved for discussion. "Now the students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web." 

    It doesn't mean that we have to be anti-technology! As a intellectual students, we've to think of the solution isn't it? Ok, now we have find out the weaknesses of powerpoint. Then, when we are think it deeply, we'll find out that the matter in here is not the powerpoint but the presenter/teacher/lecturer itself! The students are bored because of the presenter only read the slide without give any creative activity to encourage the learner motivation. Therefore the most important things are the presenter itself. Too much relying on the powerpoint is not recommended. Thus, Iam personally as prospective english teacher would like to say that instead of become the old-fashioned powerpoint user, let's become the advanced powerpointer to enhance the teaching learning process!

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