Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Security Flaws in Digital Education Products

How much do you know about cyber security? How much have you thought about cyber security in digital education product?
Cyber Security (Graphics from http://northrupcorporation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/iStock_000028716526_Medium.jpg)
As recently reported on NY Times a software engineer, also a parent was dismayed to discover that, an educational site that his son uses for school assessment, has serious security problems : the site is not unencrypted, even the passwords are stored in plain text. These security weakness could potentially allow hackers to gain access to student's names, voice recordings and other information to could expose students to hacking, identify theft, etc. As the market is at its dawn, there are many younger companies and startups whose focuses have been building the product, but not that much on the level of privacy and security protections. 
Mayer - a digital expert discovered a security weakness on Coursera, which could have allowed instructors to gain access to the names and email addresses of millions of students registered Coursera. 
I attempted to use different passwords to different sites that I log in. However there would have to be duplicates. These are shocking news to me. If there isn't much we can do, on the technical end, other than reporting any suspicions to the websites, what would you advise your students to do, to protect themselves on the internet? How would you identify a trustworthy educational program/website? 

Sources:
Singer, Natasha, Uncovering Security Flaws in Digital Education Products for Schoolchildren, NYTimes, 2015 Feb, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/technology/uncovering-security-flaws-in-digital-education-products-for-schoolchildren.html?_r=0

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Learning from Digital Storytelling



Digital storytelling is a powerful yet simple way to encourage students to express their understanding, construct knowledge within the context of coherent narrative. Instead of their work being seen by teachers, they can now publish their work to gain feedback from other students, and global audience. This further adds to deeper engagement and motivation.
Graphic from http://digitalstorytellingsynthesis.pbworks.com
Orlando (2014) suggests the following steps to implement digital storytelling in the classroom:
First, to understand the pedagogical benefits and purposes of digital storytelling, in order to determine the exercise type and format. Next, to understand the steps involved in creating a digital storytelling lesson, and standards that are appropriate to it. Finally, to understand the different types of software or web services that are available for creating and hosting digital stories, and how students can use them to develop their own work.We all have some experience with digital storytelling (assignment 3). Do you think it is going to be an effective learning tool? How do you see digital storytelling fitting in the assessment infrastructure and student learning experience in your course? 

Sources:
Orlando, John, Heighten Learning through Digital Storytelling, Faculty Focus, Jan 2014, http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/heighten-learning-digital-storytelling/

Friday, February 13, 2015

Pecha Kucha Powerpoint - Chemistry Lab Safety

Pecha Kucha Powerpoint is a "20x20" PowerPoint presentation which uses 20 pictures, 1 picture on each slide with about 20 seconds of narration time. I create my first Pecha Kucha PowerPoint here:



Learning from creating a Pecha Kucha PowerPoint?
  • Creating the PowerPoint - This is the first time that I created a Pecha Kucha PowerPoint. In the past, my PowerPoint slides were usually crowded with text boxes, pictures, and animations. Pecha Kucha is an art of concise presentation. Creating a Pecha Kucha PowerPoint is a completely different learning experience where I focus more on the essential information that I want to convey and simplify the visual presentations.
  • Without texts, it is not easy to guide the audience through the slide show. It is then more important to keep the presentation simple and concise, and keep the materials organized in a logical sequence I decided to introduce chemistry lab safety in a way that assumes the audience is about to enter the lab, putting them into the scenario, and showing what should be done in chronological order. 
  • Audience usually don’t have a very strong attention span. This is what makes Pecha Kucha presentation more effective because the presenter makes effort to describe the topic in a limited amount of time and will only present the core information. 
  • The style of Pecha Kucha is very much like telling a story through pictures, if used in a classroom, it will allow students to think both literally and symbolically about the pictures 
  • I also learned how to use My Brainshark to create and modify a presentation. I like the feature of allowing users to modify on a slide-by-slide basis. So you can actually record for one slide at a time. This feature outperforms Camtasia which does not offer minor modification to each slide. 
  • Using Pecha Kucha in the classroom 
    • Pecha Kucha can be used as a learning tool in a classroom. It is a good way to assess content knowledge. Because if the students do not fully understand the knowledge, it will be difficult to tell a story just by visual triggers. 
    • Before using Pecha Kucha in the classroom, I have to think about the purpose of the presentation. Pecha Kucha may not be the best choice to mimic a typical professional presentation but a good format to initiate discussion, or to give a quick and informal but interactive presentation

Monday, February 9, 2015

Personalized Learning


Objective 
“The same three effects emerged (in education): the change of the market, a more personalized experience, and the creation of a single global market.” (Bowen, 2012)

Reflective
The proliferation of technology has resulted in revolutions in every aspect of teaching and learning. Given the fact that learning content can be delivered online, many lecture videos from world-class institutions are accessible from the internet, even many of the local university professors start to post their lectures online, what actually attracts students to your classroom, what exactly makes a real teacher special – compared to all that can be offered in a virtual world? The quote above gave me the answer – personalized learning experience.
When I was a student back in China, I was one of the two hundred sitting in the lecture hall, passively listening, working on the same homework, and receiving a right-or-wrong kind of feedback from the grader. With deep appreciations to PIDP program instructors, I have had completely different learning experience – a more personalized learning experience. Students get to choose from three directions, social media, digital media and low tech – which acknowledge individual’s background, existing knowledge, personal interest and future career paths. Students also have options of what topics are discussed in the forum, and topics to research about in the journals, and videos; based on these options, we also receive personalized and tailored feedback. In other words, learning content, assessment, and feedback – most components of our learning experience is personalized and we as learners, take the ownership to construct our own learning map. The outcomes are obvious. Being a passive, unmotivated learner in the past, I am now more engaged in my self-constructed learning experience, more motivated to put in time and effort to those that most interest me. The difference in my own learning experience convinces me the effectiveness of personalized learning. It also motivates me to research further on the meaning, values and implications of personalized learning.

Interpretative 
            We live in an era when personalizing learning experience is not just a possibility but almost becoming a natural expectation from learners. We read personalized news from Flipboard; we listen to personalized music playlist from Pandora; Amazon personalizes our recommendation list based on purchasing history; Google personalizes search results based on browsing history. In the midst of everything being customized, have we done enough to personalize learning for our students?
The term personalized learning often refers to “a diverse variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual students” (Personalized Learning, 2014). Personalization of learning is one of the most effective ways of improving the quality of learning. It includes thoughtful consideration of numerous factors such as learner’s profiles, learning materials, learning strategies, learning styles, cognitive styles, multiple intelligence and many more (Samah, Yahaya, & Ali, 2011). In a highly personalized learning environment, learner is responsible to organize, customize and shape the learning environment with instructor’s guidance. Attentions on individual difference was found to increase learner’s satisfaction, motivation and eventually academic performance significantly (Lim, Morris, & Yoon, 2006). One of the theoretical frameworks on personalized learning is intentional learning theory. This theory hypothesizes that, awareness of the individual’s intentions about learning (e.g. strategies, importance, timing, and personal learning goals) is the fundamental of how an individual effectively learns, interact, performs and engages in learning. (Martinez, 1999).
            A few strategies of personalized approach have been proposed (Gagne, Wager, Golas, & Keller, 2005)
·       Whole-person strategy: focuses on the cognitive, emotion, intention and social aspects of learners.
·       Name-recognized strategy: emphasizes the recognition of learners’ names, which is valued by most of people as being acknowledged as an individual
·       Self-described strategy: based on answers provided by learners
·       Cognitive-based strategy: is an approach that only refers to the cognitive process, strategy and ability of learners
Among these strategies, the whole-person strategy is the most comprehensive approach towards the most personalized learning environment that recognizes the most complete aspects of different learning profiles. However, due to time, technological and administrative constrains, other strategies can be implemented as a compromised solution. 
As the importance and effectiveness of personalized learning is increasingly recognized increasingly in the society in recent years, there also exist many issues and challenges in this field (Santos, Baldiris, & Boticario, 2011), which includes:
·       the need of support for adaptive learning scenarios
·       lack of frameworks for providing layered-based infrastructure covering the interoperability required to manage the whole range of standards
·       limited research and shortage of best practices

Decisional 
Despite having talked about personalized learning for many years, most of educational professionals, including myself, have been slow to implement personalized. At least, on the content level, we can help student to create their own learning experience yet still meet the expectations of the general curriculum. This is actually being experimented in many classrooms. At Hunterdon Central Regional Central High School in New Jersey, students have started creating their own personalized learning plans with teacher’s help (Richardson, 2012).
Here is what I decided to do in my future practice to implement more of the personalized learning features -
Mindset Change - First of all, this means a change of skillset, and also a mindset. I have to be comfortable with the diverse routes that students choose, which may mean, a surprisingly variety of student’s questions, reflections, activities, and plans. It is both risk and reward, requiring lots of adjusting. The mindset change also involves a different view of my role. I am in the classroom to help our students connect course goals with their own passion. In some cases, students have real difficulties finding their passions. My challenge is to probe targeted questions, to steer students to multiple resources that may spark interests, and at the end, encourage students to collect and share what they enjoy in their learning, and to help students see the connections.
Offering Flexibility in Learning - Secondly, in order to personalize student’s learning experience, I am going to offer some flexibilities in at least some of the assessments. Many Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer personalization of the interface for individual students and student groups. Although I have used Blackboard Learn for quite a while, I haven’t given my students enough opportunities to personalize their online environment. In the future, I will enable customization features, and demonstrate students how to customize their page and their group page, encourage them to add built-in tools, incorporate online forum and journal writing into the curriculum so that my students can add content, construct and monitor their own learning. Technological tools, such as ALEKS (an assessment-based learning aid which designs learning topics based on student’s assessment results) can also be involved to help personalized learning experience. At the end, I should realize that, learning occurs within a specific didactical setting and with the aid of appropriate tools, therefore, learners should be provided possibilities but not too many to be overwhelmed.
Giving Personalized and Adaptive Feedback – Feedback is especially critical in personalized learning. The feedback should not only address on the content level – what students have understood, and what corrections they should make, but also consider the affective and motivational factors. I think a personalized learning experience should also emphasize on the affection domain and this might be something that technological tool cannot replace from a real and considerable teacher (Kim, 2012). Cultivating positive emotions and reducing negative emotions can benefit learning process and outcomes. Including individual and personalized support for positive affective experiences is one of the central concerns for personalized learning. To implement this idea in my feedback, I decide to write at least one personal message to each student, recognizing their academic improvement, stimulating curiosity, promoting student’s perception of task value based on their majors and personal goals in the long term. In all other formative assessment feedback, I will always address their names at the very beginning, and point out what they have achieved, and offer personalized advice of future learning strategies.
Preparing Self-Directed Learners – I believe the ultimate goal of personalized learning is to let learners decide what to learn, to identify a problem that requires learning to rectify; to let learners plan and acquire resources and carry out this learning plan; to implement the learning plan and evaluate learning outcomes, and decide when to end the learning cycle when learning is complete. Guiding our students to personalize learning experience is also to cultivate life-long learning skills, and eventually help our learners become a self-directed learner.  

Bibliography

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Teaching Naked: Howe Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom will Improve Student Learning (1st Edition ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Gagne, R. M., Wager, W. W., Golas, K. C., & Keller, J. M. (2005). Introduction to Instructional Design (5th ed.). Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, Cengage.
Kim, C.-M. (2012). The role of affective and motivational factors in designing personalized learning environments. Education Tech Research Dev, 563.
Lim, D. H., Morris, M. L., & Yoon, S. W. (2006). Combined Effect of Instructional. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 5(3), 255.
Martinez, M. (1999). Intentional Learning in an Intentional World: New Perspectives on Audience Analysis and Instructional System Design. Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Conference on Systems Documentation, 211. Retrieved from http://ikit.org/fulltext/1989intentional.pdf
Personalized Learning. (2014). Retrieved from The Glossary of Education Reform: http://edglossary.org/personalized-learning/
Richardson, W. (2012). Preparing Students to Learn Without Us. For Each to Excel, 22.
Samah, N. A., Yahaya, N., & Ali, M. B. (2011). Individual differences in online personalized learning environment. Educational Research and Reviews, 6(7), 516.
Santos, O. C., Baldiris, S., & Boticario, J. G. (2011). Open Issues in Personalized Inclusive Learning Scenarios. International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE 2011), (p. 54). Girona, Spain.

The Difference between Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement


Plagiarism is complex and emotive issue, perhaps because of so, many people including myself, are confused about the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. The paleontologist Mike Taylor has put together the differences between plagiarism and copyright infringement, and posted "Plagiarism is nothing to do with copyright"
“First, plagiarism is a violation of academic norms but not illegal; copyright violation is illegal, but in truth pretty ubiquitous in academia. Second, plagiarism is an offence against the author, while copyright violation is an offence against the copyright holder.Third, plagiarism applies when ideas are copied, whereas copyright violation occurs only when a specific fixed expression (e.g. sequence of words) is copied. Fourth, avoiding plagiarism is about properly apportioning intellectual credit, whereas copyright is about maintaining revenue streams."  He concluded that, plagiarism is about the failure to properly attribute the authorship of copied material, eg. ideas, text or images; Copyright violation is about failure to pay for the use of the materials. Which of the two issues that we care more, will depend on whether we are in a situation where intellectual credit or money is being more important. 
Do you agree with his opinions here? Where do you see the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement?