Category: Tech (EDCI 336)

This week’s featured technology platform was Google Science Journal (soon to be Arduino Science Journal as of Dec 11, 2020).  I tried the “Getting Started with Science Journal” and “Getting Started with Light” tutorials. It looks like a very interesting setup, although the light sensor on my phone did not react as expected to moving my hand close or even covering the sensor altogether…probably because it can’t handle how pale I am #gingerproblems

In principle, I am very excited about the possibilities that this platform creates for students exploring how science works. I have often thought about how science is taught to kids in public schools, particularly as it relates to their adulthood needs. Unless they grow up to be a scientist specializing in a relevant area, they really don’t need to know how glucose is created in the Calvin Cycle, how far Saturn is from the sun, or the atomic mass of Cesium. However, being a good citizen of our society will require of them that they understand the principles of scientific experimentation and analysis enough to see through fraudulent pseudoscience claims and not buy into false theories based on faulty “evidence” they find online.

I am intrigued enough to continue experimenting with the Science Journal platform, and perhaps even trying out an experiment or two with my daughter, who is eight and a half but very precocious about this sort of thing.

This week we did a practice Edcamp, in which a small group of colleagues and I essentially brainstormed ways to engage students in cross-curricular learning. The idea that intrigued me most was the possibility of merging theatre, specifically Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, with virtually any other subject.

I have extensive experience with Theatre of the Oppressed as an actor. In this format, actors perform scenes in front of an audience of learners. In each scene, something goes significantly wrong. After performing it once, the actors repeat the scene, but with audience members having the option of yelling “STOP” to pause the scene, then replacing one of the actors and doin things differently to fix what went wrong. After that, the director leads a brief discussion of the person’s change to the scene and how it worked or didn’t, and they do the scene a few more times to allow other audience members to suggest other remedies.

As an example, I have created a Theatre of the Oppressed scene to teach about experimental design in science. See If you can come up with anything that could be done better!

In this class, we had a special guest speaker: Jeff Hopkins from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). PSII is an independent school located in downtown Victoria that uses an integrated approach to subjects and tries to help students create a more self-directed and customized educational path. In doing so, they often get students to pursue more hands-on projects and more interaction and partnership with the community than they would experience in a traditional public school.

What impresses me most about PSII is the goal of “making itself obsolete”, which Jeff has stated clearly and emphatically. His ultimate goal for the school would be to have the approach prove so successful that the philosophy and approach become mainstream and get adopted by the public school system. Also, the integrated, community-based project-heavy approach may work very well for certain outgoing, highly self-motivated students with the right attitude.

However, I do have a few concerns: one is that it requires a lot of energy an cooperation from families and community members. This could be a positive aspect, developing students’ connection to people, businesses and organizations within the community, but it may also create unfair advantage for students who come from less supportive backgrounds and, if implemented on a wider scale, exhaust intangible resources like engagement from local business. It also may very well be the case that not all students are equally well-suited to this approach, which ties into another concern: evaluation of its effectiveness. Even if you have data demonstrating a high level of post-graduation achievement for PSII students, that must be taken with a huge grain of salt, because there is an enormous selection bias for an independent school like this in favour of students who are well-suited to the model and have parents and families that are more engaged than average and probably less likely to have low incomes, low education levels, and other factors that often contribute to the trouble that some students have in the public system. Also, especially when you define learning in more intangible ways as PSII does, it can be hard to measure:

This week, we looked at multimedia learning theory, including the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition) Model. I found this model to be a very interesting framework for analyzing the ways that technology can serve functions in our classroom (or virtual classroom) settings. I particularly liked seeing these four components as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy: at first glance, for example, substitution may seem inferior to augmentation, but under the right circumstances it can be tremendously useful. For example, there may be a particular medium that is inaccessible for certain learners for whom other media, though not inherently functionally superior, may be far more effective.

We also learned a little about video and audio editing. This is something that I have a fair amount of background in, from making a student film in 2002 that was shown at the Capital 6 theatre as part of the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival, to helping with artist friends’ video projects today, I have enjoyed this type of task immensely and developed a great appreciation for how much the widely available technology has improved over the past few decades. I look forward to making use of this technology, and my experience with it, in my future pedagogy and lesson preparation.

This week, we explored what it means to be a good citizen online, including both how we treat others (e.g. obtaining consent before sharing information and images of others or avoiding/preventing bullying behaviour) and how we protect ourselves (e.g. safety, privacy and evaluating information through an appropriately critical lens). One of the issues that I am particularly passionate about sharing with my future students is how to navigate all of the misinformation of the information age: what is or is not good science, reliable sources, or legitimate journalism?

In terms of my own web presence and privacy, I have severely limited my options by life choices I started making a long time ago: I became a performer. After over two decades of being an actor, singer, and comedian, thousands of (mostly local; I’m not very famous) people I don’t know personally may know who I am or know certain things about me. I have some presence on hundreds of web pages, including video of me performing my own material:

I am still far from the most famous “Evan Roberts” on the internet (I didn’t actually start the Welsh Christian Revival of 1904; that was a different guy) but I certainly don’t have the option of being diligent about my own privacy anymore. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for that one time I got free Italian sodas for me and my then girlfriend because the bartender at Peacock Billiards recognized me as Prospero from The Tempest.

This week, we explored an assortment of online resources, including Trello, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Feedly, Diigo and Hypothesis. I have limited experience with Twitter, and no experience with any of the others. I am still very cognizant of the impact that Twitter has had on accountability for one’s beliefs and communication in our culture, due to numerous high profile controversies involving celebrities getting in trouble for old tweets. Teachers are vulnerable to the same phenomenon on a smaller scale, and should aspire to make sure they only post statements that they would be happy for anyone to see on a medium that anyone can see.

In addition to appropriateness and social acceptability of content, people posting content on the internet needs to be cognizant of intellectual property law. On that note, we watched a film called RiP! A Remix Manifesto. This documentary looked at copyright law and how it impacts new technologies for creating and distributing media. A great deal of the issues dealt with on this film are reminiscent of the economic concepts of value creation and value capture. The Internet has made value creation far easier and more efficient, particularly as it relates to the distribution of media. People now have far larger libraries of music than they did during the age of the physical album, usually at a much lower cost. However, tremendous legal issues have arisen regarding who should reap the benefits of these improvements, and how.

This week, we learned about starting and keeping blogs. This is something with which I had little prior experience, so I knew that getting into the habit of multiple weekly blog posts (for multiple classes) would be potentially difficult, especially while balancing single parenthood and my stage production for the first five weeks of the semester.

The video Most Likely to Succeed was about a school (High Tech High, a Charter School in San Diego, California) that was abandoning the traditional, didactic and academic approach to teaching in favour of a more hands-on, technology-heavy and project-based approach. Although the documentary did raise some interesting points about how potentially out of date traditional learning is, I really felt that promoting a charter school as an alternative to conventional public school should be viewed in context as a potential attempt to erode confidence in public education, thereby exacerbating the USA’s already huge class/income-based access disparity.

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/30/18076968/charter-schools

So far, I have been fairly impressed with both the quantity and quality of tech resources available for educators. As someone who graduated high school in a different millennium, I had a very different experience from what students have with technology today. When I was in school, technological enhancement of learning consisted of a video displayed on a VHS trolley that took the teacher an average of 7 minutes to figure out.  I look forward to learning more about all the tools I could have in my teacher’s toolkit!