Week 4: Response to a piece of selected scholarship: Storytelling In The Digital Media Age?

This Tech Trunch Article written by Dr. Carl Marci (Harvard neuropsychiatrist) discusses the changing landscape of storytelling specifically how advertisers can effectively impact viewers in the digital age. She starts by discussing the decreased attention span of millennials (younger people who have come of age with the internet). According to studies Millennials have a 60% shorter attention span than every generation that has come before. This is because they have gown up in the world of on demand entertainment. Television is a passive experience but online you are the producer and director of your entertainment experience.

She discuss how young people are more comfortable interacting with technology than with live people and having conversation is possibly a thing of the past. There is a fragmented nature to social media and the way young people communicate now. She discuss the multitude of option we have to satisfy our needs for emotional engagement. She found the people regulate their emotions though the use of social media not allowing them to become too high or too low. People are searching for the same feelings of empathy and connection that we would seek out in more traditional avenues in the past.

With the competition for attention online digital stories have abandoned the traditional linear story arc for a more fragmented approach over many different devices or timelines. An example of this Taylor Swifts launch of a new album that linked twitter, youtube and an American Express virtual tour backstage pass to allow the audience to have a more immersive experience of her new album.

This story got me thinking about how digital story telling has truly transformed narrative. It’s no longer from a single source but rather we gather fragments of many stories to create a complete narrative in our minds produced not by a director at the news agency but by us, we have taken a more active role in the crafting of stories.

It dismays me a little that my child will grow in a world where patience is no longer needed. Where all he ever needs is at his finger tips from movies, to meeting people, pornography and his social network. What has we lost in the age of the digital story? Have we locked ourselves in our own echo chambers hearing our own voice over and over unable to empathize with people who are different than us.

Week 4: Digital Story Critique: The School of Life (The Perfectionist Trap)

This week I’m writing about a youtube channel called the School of life and in particular a 4 minute animated video entitle The Perfectionist Trap. The Scool of life is a “he School of Life is a global organization devoted to emotional education.” I have been watching their videos for about 2 years now, they have over 1.4 million subscribers and generally follow a simple format.

Their stories focus on mental health and the philosophies around the human condition. They have a wonderful artist who paints animated scenes for each of the videos. In this particular video they discuss the problems with perfectionism.

The thesis on this story is that setting an unrealistic standard of quality based on other peoples work leads to disappointment and discourages us from engaging in the process of incremental improvement. The trap is that we are inspired by the masters but we ourselves are only capable of mediocrity. This is because the media edits out the millions of versions that were just average and we only see the final version of the most accomplished masters.

This story was a reminder to me the we should focus on the process and not the outcomes of our work. Similar to this class, I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of writing that was needed for the course but over time I understood that not every piece needs to be perfect; rather I must practice my writing on a daily basis to get better. We should acknowledge the effort all people take in achieving something great the amount of time and the revisions piece of work must undergo to it to be perfect or near perfect.

The “School of Life” is and wonderful place to hear the stories of many people who have found wisdom in the everyday aspects of our lives. It’s a reminder that happiness is more important than money or accolades. The digital story telling on this YouTube channel speaks to a generation of people stuck behind desks who contemplate the meaning of life in the age of post modernism.

Week 4: Daily Create: A Letter To You As A Child

This is a letter that I wish I could write to my 16 year old self who was suffering from low self-esteem and teenage depression.

Dear Travis,

I know that life seems really hard and confusing now but this is truly a temporary condition. You have seen so little of the world and have experienced so little of you life. You should not define your life by the failures that you have experienced rather have hope that you will soon leave embarrassment of High School and gloom of South SanFrancisco. I know you stay up a night wondering why people don’t like you why you are so unappealing to girls, it’s not you seriously, you’re not ugly. You are a fine person you are doing exactly what you should be doing getting all the shit and pain out of the way, better days are ahead trust me, I am you.

Forget about popularity, those people don’t matter to you. Forget about the girls, they don’t want you now but they will. Just because you are Asian does not make you a nerd or unattractive, you will see, in college you will do fine in all of that. Continue to read and do your art, keep running. You know one day you will qualify for Boston and you will run faster at 30 than you did at 16.

You doing great, mom and dad are doing their best they can. They want what’s best for you but they are just people, you have to see that. At 36 you will become a father and you will see that life gets better every year. Understand that this, all this shit that you are feeling is fleeting that it will go away with time, If I could just change one thing about my teenage years it would be that I want you to feel just a little happier about your life. You’re going to be alright, try not to dwell on the past and worry too much about the future, do your best to just experience the now, you’ll be a lot happier for it.

Love,

M

Week 3: Assignment Bank: Visual Game of Thrones Sigil

Week 3: Read and Respond to Ch 4 - Visual Networks

Visual networks: Learning and photosharing by Guy Merchant expounds upon the value of a visual social networks. His article focuses on the photo sharing network Flickr and how people have used this site to communicate idea and communities in far more interactive ways than we had in the past using just printed photos. His article opens with a story about a graffiti event that took place in his hometown and how this community of street illegal artists lead him into the world I flickr and a lager social network of like-minded individuals.

I feel that if this article were written today it would have focused on Instagram the largest social network of photos and videos. Instagram has taken this the idea of Flickr and photosharing as a social network to the mobile platform. Cell phone cameras have also improved to the point where average photographers can take beautiful in focus pictures with high resolution. Instragram has taken it even further by allowing average users access to photo editing software that was only available to the most skilled Photoshop users. The social aspect of visual content has transformed photos and video forever. We hashtag photos and build communities around like-minded people based solely on the images that were take with their cell phones.

One of my dreams is to walk the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail and I’m just not able to do that given my time constraints but through Instagram I was able to follow 5 hikers this summer as they made their way north in the though hike of the PCT. There as a community of people encouraging each other, and I even left water on the trail where I thought they might be helping in their 2000 mile trek and I only knew them though this photo sharing site.

I believe that visual media and networks will over take more traditional networks such as Facebook because it is far less offensive. Images can be interpreted in many ways. When I see post on Facebook supporting Trump and calling for Mexican immigrants to be kicked out of America I automatically recoil. Do we really need to know the political beliefs of our friends, I’m just there for the pictures for they tell a much happier story than the written words of our friends.

Week 3: Digital Story Critique Slowing Down

Guy Raz from NPR who hosts a weekly podcast called the TED radio hour crafted a beautiful podcast about slowing down. In our busy lives where success and achievement often comes hand in hand with business and lack of free time, Raz cafts a compelling argument for slowing down using many stories from different industries to illustrate the value of a quiet and slow life.

I’m about to be a father and I’m working a demanding full time job, I’m a part time student and also an avid runner. I find it harder and harder to find time to just be alone and breathe and reflect on everything that is happening to me. I think so many adults feel the way I do. That time is moving so fast and the our main accomplishment on any given day is putting out small fires and we are filled with anxiety about what is coming on the horizon. Work deadline, school deadline, family issues, and maintaining relationships fill our days with little time to appreciate the small and important things in life.

Guy Raz starts his story by interviewing a filmmaker who has created a new genre of film called Norwegian slow TV. It is merely the world unfolding in real time such as a video camera filming out of a train window for 7 hours or a fire burning for hours. The filmmakers were not sure how it would be received but over 1.3 million Norwegians watched the movie; that is over one quarter of the entire population of Norway. There means there is an appetite for slow thoughtful entertainment in a world of click bait and twitter.

Raz continues his story with an artist who creates installation art pieces that film people in very slow motion, so a 2 second interaction takes 30 seconds to unfold. In order to see the piece in its entirety you must be there for 20 minutes. The artist incentive was to slow down the audience and really make them think. He was concerned that far too many people go to art museums snap a selfie with a piece of art and move on. His art was intended to make people pause and really reflect on existence.

Guy Raz’s digital story spoke to me on many levels, most importantly his story reminded me to slow down and realize that the world around me is always going to hectic full of chaos and things out of my control, and it is up to all of us to make a choice on how we receive this world around us because we only have control over attitudes.

Story Critique of Lance Weiler Article

Howard Terpning - The Storyteller

For this week’s Digital Story Critique I chose to review an article written by Columbia University Faculty, Lance Weiler. His article entitled “How storytelling has changed in the digital age” investigates the relationships between story telling the medium of delivery. His main insight is that the new story telling is less linear and profit driven then the previous models such and TV and feature length films. He uses youtube and a prime example of the new digital story telling where people not only watch streaming video but people as young as six are authoring their own videos.

I really appreciated his example of why feature length movies are roughly 2 hours. He explained that in the past audiences interpreted length as a measure of quality and theater owners recognized this influenced Hollywood to produce longer movies to capitalize on the this opportunity. However movies got so long that they required an intermission leading directors such as Alfred Hitchcock to claim, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” In this example money drove the story telling medium (film) and the length of the story, which is about 1.5-2 hours in length.

Today with the affordability of editing software and the ubiquity of video camera the audience is now the storyteller.  He discussed the digital storyteller Joseph Garrett who has a YouTube channel where he builds a 3D digital environment in software called “Minecraft” and tells stories using the video game characters like actors. He makes over sic figures based advertising to his over 3.8 Million subscribers. This is an example of how people on very low budgets can tell their own stories to millions using nothing but a laptop.

According Weiler storytelling today is undergoing its most profound change in the last 100 years. As the audience is able to not only participate in the content by providing feedback directly to the author but they themselves can now participate in the storytelling process.

After reading this article I found myself wondering about what the future of storytelling will be. I plan to cancel my cable next year and only watch online video content for entertainment. It made me wonder is TV dead? Are movies and American tradition of a Friday night date movie also a thing of the past? Living in Hollywood many of my friends are in the industry and they too are grappling with how to adapt in the world of on demand entertainment. I watch a lot of YouTube and even I have a YouTube channel of my own, the quality of most Youtube video is rather poor in comparison with what Hollywood can do, but the voices and variety more than make up for the lack of production funds. I am hopeful that as technology improves and the accessibility of Hollywood production quality equipment comes to the masses storytelling itself will become more engaging than it’s ever been because everyone with a vision will be able to tell their story and it will no longer to cloistered to the Hollywood elites with a narrow vision driven by profit.

The New Literacy - Scholarship Review

Chapter 1of “Sampling ‘The New’ in New Literacies” by Lankshear & Knobel main thesis is defining the ‘New Literacy’ in the digital age from basic reading and writing to a more fluid and dynamic model writing and reading. The authors argue that in the modern age reading out of a book written by a specialist is changing to a more participatory model though the use of online technology. One clear example of this is the transition from the Encyclopedia Britannica that all older people can remember to the modern Wikipedia written not by specialist but by crowd sourcing, The quality was not diminished but rather improved by the intelligence of the masses.

My main take away from this reading was the idea that writing itself is undergoing and transformation because of the new “Technical Stuff” mainly the rise of the internet. But what really hit home was the new “Ethos Suff” that values user engagement with the content just as much as the content. I never really though about that before, I’ve always looked at writing as a one to many medium not an on going conversation that is rich and dynamic. I also thought about the tool Hypothsis and how the tool itself was so inline with what the authors were discussing as new literacy.

The authors introduced the ideas of primary and secondary discourse. Primary being the fist discourse that you learn as a child in the privacy of your home and the secondary discourse is the discourse that experience as you get older and experience the world of school, work and peer groups. This made me think about how minorities in this country must reach further from their primary discourse to their secondary discourse when engaging with school and work environments. We call it “code switching” when we attempt to communicate with people of the outside group. The better you are as a minority at code switching into the dominant White American discourse the more successful financially you will become. I starting thinking about this a lot as I have been interviewing people for a job and noticed that the minority candidates do not connect with my entirely white department as well. I could tell they were doing their very best to fit into the discourse of our workplace.

This reading is highly academic and sited a lot of works. It was dense and at times I found myself rereading the passages. This writing to me was intended for an academic audience, ironically written in the traditional frame of the sage on the stage tell us, the reader what the new literacy was all about while not being in a format of the new literacy. What I did like was the new Hypothesis tool, because I was the fist to annotate it was unable to see the other students comments. But I will go back on Sunday and see what they have said about my annotations. I wish there was an up vote button in the annotations so we can have a way to see who was agreeing with me. I feel that this reading was not in the vane of the new literacy because it was not delivered on a platform that would allow for sharing and feedback. It was a static PDF that was not screen reader accessible. What made this part of the new literacy was the wrapper of Hypothesis.

I’m very curious to see what Lankshear & Knobel would make of the web 9 years after writing this paper. Since then at lot has changed, Twitter has taken over blogs, Snap Chat and Instagram are taking over the photography scene and mobile technology now out numbers desktop computers. Everything is served in bite sized packets designed to be digested while walking or waiting for he bus. How to the condensing of written content change the way we think can 140 characters tell a story? It can change a country in what we discovered with the Trump run from presidency.

I’ve watched a youtube video recently for a CS class I was building at University of California Riverside where they talk about computer code as “The New Literacy”. I wonder how that would fit into Lankshear & Knobel model of the new ethos. Is code something totally separate from the discourse that we are discussing or is code an extension of the open ethos that they expounded upon. When every student in China is learning code as a language that means one in 5 people on this earth will be writing in common language.

How To Go Backpacking for Less Than 200 Dollars

Intro

Napali Coast Hike March 2016

Many people have asked me how do I start backpacking? What do I need? This learning module is all about getting you started backpacking for less than 200 dollars. Backpacking can be a very expensive endeavor; I’ve probably spent over $2000 dollars on backpacking gear over the years. When I started I was not sure if this was a hobby that I would continue after my first trip into the woods I brought cheap and inappropriate gear and learned many lessons along the way. I still recommend that you start with a budget set up and buy more expensive gear as you discover what is working for you and what is not.

By the end of the this learning module you should be able to:

• Safely plan a trip into the woods according to your skill level
• Find a trail near your house
• Understand the importance of the Big 4
• Recognize the importance of weight while backpacking
• Know where to purchase backpacking gear
• Hit the trail with the appropriate amount of gear

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Planning your Trip

The first step in your backpacking adventure is planning your trip. A good place to start is asking your friends or a local gear outfitter where a nice beginner trail is located in your area. Depending on your fitness I would recommend anywhere between 3-10 miles per day on your first trip.

Things to consider:

• Are you going alone or with friends
• What are the expected temperatures/weather on the trip
• Is there water available along the trail
• How long are you going to be out
• What is the elevation gains and losses
• What is your fitness leve

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Buying Gear

This is something that far too many people get hung up on. The price of gear should not be a barrier to experiencing the outdoors. I realize that 200 dollars is a lot of money to spend on gear so you can also consider renting the gear from a local outfitter or borrowing gear from a friend. The gear that I’ve reviewed here is not the best quality to be sure but it will hold up for many trips.

Google Sheet with breakdown

Things to consider:

• What is your budget
• Weight, weight and weight that is the most important
• How many times do you think you will use the gear before replacing
• What time of the year do you like to go hiking
• What is the climate in your area
• You're not out there too look cool
• How much research have you done on your own

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Conclusion

Little Sur Campground Los Padres National Forest 2015

There is no better way to experience nature than backpacking, you walk into the woods and you sleep in the woods far from anyone and far from the roads. It can be a simple as an overnighter just a few miles from your house or it can take you 2000 miles along the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail. My hope is that after this learning module you will go out and try backpacking for yourself. Good luck out there! And remember "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."-Lao Tzu

You should now be able to:

• Safely go into the woods on a backpacking trip
• Buy budget friendly backpacking gear
• Understand the importance of each piece of gear

Vlog on Open Educational Resources

Poor Teenagers of the FB Generation

Photo by http://sickfacebook.com/

If you choose to go online and be a normal person not some lame Facebook lurker or luddite you are choosing to end your private life. I’m just so glad that I was born 15 years too early to have my entire life publicly displayed online. I cringe when I think of all the stupid, ignorant, hateful things that I said when I was a high school student. All of the wild hormone fueled thoughts I had as a teenager as safely kept in a paper bound journal never to be seen or read by anyone not even myself.

My little cousin was not as fortunate, she was born in the age of FB and we happened to be friends. I shutter when I think of her posts fighting with her boyfriend, her sexualized images posted as just a 15 years old. I cannot help but feel sorry for her online archive of her adolescent blunders in love and life.  There is an entire generation of young folks learning this difficult lesson; it is unfair that they must be the test subjects for this public spectacle experiment.

Young women just blossoming into their sexuality are exposed to non-stop pressure by peers to expose their bodies online or through snap chat. Just as Danah Boyd stated in her Youtube talk The Future of Privacy in Social Media, “What scales and gains popularity is vulgar, sexual, humiliating grotesque or sexual”. The average teenager in America spends 9 hours a day online. The pressure for virtual popularity and being in the know though social media has never been so fierce. When young women see that the easiest way to get Internet points and up votes is by exposing their bodies it is no wonder that they do so. Social Media superstars like the Kardashians have made millions off the internet by manipulating the public into looking at them and whether in disgust or lust we generate clicks. This is the world we live in.

The problem is as Eric Schmitt said in his NPR interview with All Things Considered, “There is no Delete button on the internet.” Once it is out there people can take screen shots and once it is viral it will live forever online.

We as parents and educators must be cognizant of these issues around online privacy and protect and educate the young people on the consequences of posting online. We must find the balance between being and engaged net citizen contributing positively to on going dialog of virtual humanity and the gray area that can lead into the vulgar and hurtful. One of the greatest tests of this young generation will be how to groom a responsible online image.

I’m Addicted to the Internet and It Feels OK

I remember when internet went down at work, suddenly all my coworkers heads went up from their machines and we stared at each other for a moment. I let out a sigh. A few minutes passed and the network guy came over and said that it would be down for a while. The workday was over and we all went home. In the profession of building online courseware without the internet we cannot work, it’s that simple. How did people live and work with filing cabinets and phone calls? 

Let's not miss these moments looking at an iPhone (ironically taken on iPhone 5S)

That is just the professional part of my life, the other part of my life is also online, I watch streaming movies and when I’m not in front of my computer I’m usually found looking down at my iPhone, checking my Facebook and emails. I can say that a majority of my waking hours I’m on the internet, I might be able to say that a majority of my waking life has been spent on the internet.

This is even truer for young people, all they know is the internet. Their consciousness is the internet or rather entwined with the internet and internet points and the identities that they carefully groom for the world to see online. I recently read that the average teenager spends 9 hours a day using the internet in this country. That is more time than they spend in school. 

Now I have to ask myself is this a problem? I’m just not sure, I can say that I’m not bored most of the time, I remember before he internet there was a lot of boredom, even when I’m at a restaurant and my wife goes to the bathroom I try really hard not to look down at my phone and after 30 seconds I start feeling antsy or bored, I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove, am I trying to show the rest of the world that I don't have to look down at my phone, or maybe prove to myself that I don’t need to, but as soon as I do it feel normal and good.

This is a complicated subject that I can spend hours and pages contemplating. I just know that once in a while we need to unplug. It’s that simple, for me it’s my hour and a half running and hitting the gym and days spent backpacking in the woods. The world of the internet is real, those are real people and feel feelings flowing though the screen. I’m not going out on a limb for saying this, but there is real value in knowing when to unplug. It does not have to happen for a year like Paul Miller had done but it needs to happen on a regular basis to find that balance that all humans desire.

I Found My Tribe and So Can You

Me with my backpacking Tribe in the Sierra Pelona

Human are tribal animals. We are designed to live in small communities about of about 150 individuals according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar and his research. We seek out like-minded individuals that share a common belief system. Technology has made finding people with specific interests easier than ever.

I recently found a tribe for myself. People who like to make their own ultra light backpacking gear. It’s a rather small community of bloggers, Youtubers and forum folks. With out the internet I never would have found them, and they changed my life. At least my backpacking life, I went from a 45-pound pack to a 25-pound pack by reading and communicating with these backpacking nerds.

The most important aspect of tribes is not defining what we believe but rather people being interested in what other people have to say. I can scream from the mountaintops about the importance of using a Tyvek ground sheet purchased at Home Depot but no one will care and no one will listen. But when I get on a forum or message board with other backpackers they want to hear about the newest DIY ground sheet. That is the amazing part of tribes, it's about people listening to you, and actually enjoying it.

In a educational context this means that researchers can collaborate a much more easily though the creation of a tribe of individuals who are enthusiastic and passionate about a particular topic. I belong to a couple tribes of people from around the country who are actively looking at ways to improve online education for student with disabilities.  With out the internet I would just meeting with my one other colleague at UCLA getting nowhere fast.

Phot by Charles Rex Arbogast

This is not to say that tribes are all looking to make the world a more tolerant place with lightweight hiking gear. Think about the tribe that has brought Donald Trump to power. Trump did not create the disenfranchised white working class who are fearful of immigration, he merely brought this tribe together and gave them a voice. The internet has allowed for people to self segregate by the sites they visit and the media they consume creating an echo chamber of your own thoughts and ideals. Tribal thinking can bring out some of the best in people but also some of the worst.  We as educators can use our tribes to help advance our ideas and build spaces where people can feel safe to share concepts.

The Use of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Art By Yomao

Open Educational Resources (OER) have become a legitimate threat to traditional textbooks in higher education. My graduate course I’m currently enrolled in does not have a textbook or reader; rather every week reading assignments are links to open sourced articles, such as Youtube videos and TED Talks. These OERs are having a profound impact on education, both financially and on the quality and timeliness of the content.

A student once told me that she often looks at the textbook price before registering for a class; if the book fees were over 300 dollars she would choose a different class. This was both shocking and disappointing. Today’s college students are financial stretched and textbooks are often a prohibitive cost to taking needed courses. OERs are one way that schools can promote diversity both racially and socio-economically, relieve financial strapped students, and democratize access to information and learning.

By using OERs, faculty and teachers can use timely articles with content from recent studies that better reflect the ever-changing nature of data in the digital age. The faculty can also grab a wide variety of articles written by many different scholars, helping diversify the writer’s voices and opinions. Students I interviewed said that OERs are more interesting than textbooks because they are always changing from week to week.

The downsides of OERs might be the vetting of the information by the faculty, whereas a textbook has been peer-reviewed and likely read a few times by the teacher. The faculty needs to put extra thought and effort in using OERs over the use of textbooks, but the financial and pedagogical benefits far outweigh the tired standards of textbook.

Equal Access to SAT Prep Made Possible Online Education

ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR

The New SAT is now out for high school students. The change has been in the works since 2005 now, but this year is the first year of the new test implementation. The New SAT is supposedly designed to better reflect what students learned in high school and what they will learn in college. Over 300,000 students took the test this past weekend; they were the inaugural class for this new SAT. The test has changed in many ways including the elimination of the vocabulary section, making the essay optional, and not penalizing students for guessing.

With all that said I’m going to wrap this into an eLearning frame. In the past, students would be better prepared for the exam if they took expensive preparation courses. My parents knew the importance of this exam and paid a great sum of money for a private tutor who prepared me for the exam and taught me the skills on how to beat the test.  My scores went up dramatically, compared to scores previous to the tutoring.

Not all high school students have the opportunity to have SAT prep courses. This created a type of economic/racial discrimination against those student whose parents could not afford to pay for the test prep. Online education to the rescue - the Kahn Academy offers free high quality SAT prep courses to high school students. David Coleman, president and CEO of the College Board, had this to say:

“Never in my career have I seen a launch of technology at this scale that has broken down the racial divisions that so haunt this nation — never. More students, whatever their level of income, are preparing for the SAT with Khan Academy than with all commercial test prep combined — at every level of income.”

Online education is democratizing access to valuable SAT prep material. This issue of access to prep material is more important than ever as college admissions become more competitive.  This is a great start to achieving equal access to education and college, but much work remains to be done in public education. Online education and resources cannot change the culture of discrimination and lack of funding in public schools, but it can help some self-driven students.

Learning Theories: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and Connectivism

Today I’m blogging about learning theories. This does not come up at work very often, and I find these theories to be generally sequestered by the school of education and possibly psychology. When I meet with a faculty to build a course, often times they are subject matter experts in their particular field, and have not studied pedagogy and all these different learning theories. Still, inn the end, their learning product is generally sound and the students leave the course knowing what they intended to know.

With that said, I do believe that a sound foundation in learning theory leads to better learning outcomes. I was taught by my mentor to follow Blooms Taxonomy and the ADDIE development model. I thought that was all I really needed to know to get started as an instructional designer (ID). I took a very pragmatic approach to design, where I would rarely interfere with the teacher’s ideas and was more a tool that executed their vision.  I feel that for the most part that is the ID’s job, to make the client happy, and for me that’s worked out pretty well. As I learn more in grad school I hope to interject more of the ideas from connectivsm into my courses. I will be working on a course about art and technology next quarter, and I will encourage the TAs to promote the use of blogs and connecting many students together online to form a learning community or network that can link to the outside world of art and technology.

Behaviorism

Art by funderstanding.com

People learn through repetition. Learner is a passive blank slate shaped by environmental stimuli, both positive and negative reinforcement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cognitivism

This is a learning theory that was in response to behaviorism. Psychologist who promoted this idea claimed that behaviorism failed to explain cognition. In this theory, mind is an information processor. It emphasizes understanding the concept as a whole instead of just the pieces.

Art by Yannick Petitclerc

This is the learning theory that I was taught in developing online education using Blooms Taxonomy. Examples of cognitivist strategies for learning higher-level thinking are starting a lesson with a hook to create interest, a review quiz to promotes prior learning, using learning outcomes, chunking content into organized bite-sized pieces, using graphic organizers, and the student takes on an active role on learning. The teacher gives lots of encouragement and positive feedback.

Constructivism

Photo by Mauro Fermariello

Students learn new things through experience. They build knowledge through experiences and interactions. In cognitive learning, the students are taught to do something in constructivism. The students are encouraged to discover something on their own; this is known as self-directed learning. The major difference is that cognitive learning is about building on prior knowledge, and constructivism is about building new ideas and concepts based on your own discoveries.

 

 

 

Connectivism

Connectivism is a learning theory developed by George Siemens and Steven Downs. It stresses the connections and combinatorial creativity. All the knowledge is out there - it’s a matter of making the connections. 

Siemens (2004) states, “A community is the clustering of similar areas of interest that allows for interaction, sharing, dialoguing, and thinking together.”

Art by Penn State University Blog

For example, if a learner is trying to learn how Donald Trump has risen to power, they may start on a Facebook post that a friend made, which could then take them to an article, but the text is dense and confusing, so instead the student scrolls down to the comments sections and finds another link to a blog, and from the blog there is an embedded Youtube video that they watch to more fully understand the issue. That student has used various forms of gathering information using the Internet, and has gleaned the most salient information by using many different modes to more fully understand the issue.

Siemens, G. (2008).  Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers

Accessibility in Online Education

Photo by UCB Admissions

Last week I gave a presentation to the people working in instructional technology at UCLA. This was a group consisting of instructional designers (ID), IT professionals, library technologist, and administrators. UCLA and the UC system as a whole has been grappling with accessibility and the costs involved with creating accessible online courses. This can often be a very touchy subject since there are very serious ramifications if 508 and ADA compliance are broken. There have been lawsuits at many universities including CAL, University of Colorado and MIT, just to name few. The Department of Justice often times has to step in and protect the rights of these disabled students.

I work on a University of California sub-committee called the Electronic Accessibility Leadership Team (EALT); our charge is to promote accessibility awareness throughout the UC system. We do not often get push backs, but there is very little movement to make improvement to website’s accessibility - especially once they are robustly developed. The costs are often too prohibitive, though I would argue that the costs of doing nothing are just as costly as making the improvements to the sites.

In 2013 the University of California was investigated by the by the Department of Justice for using text documents that are not Optical Character Recognition (OCR), meaning they cannot be used with a screen reader. These are relatively easy fixes that faculty and designers often over look.

I decided to record my presentation on accessibility and post it on Youtube and on internal site for other instructional designers who work at the University of California to view. I’m in the process for getting them captioned, so please don't judge me on that. 

PART 1 INTRO To ACCESSIBILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY LAWS

Part one of the accessibility presentation reviews the need for accessibility in online education and the laws around accessibility including ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), Section 508 and Section 504 Accessibility Laws. I also cover Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG); this sections reviews at the high level the guiding principles for accessibility.  I also cover statistics about disabled people in this country, and on college students with disabilities, and the numbers may surprise you. This presentation is intended for instructional designers, web developers, and people who work with students and technology.  

 

 

PART 2 ACCESSIBILITY BEST PRACTICES AND TOOLS

Part two of the accessibility presentation covers best practices for web designers and instructional designers to build accessible online content. This section also explores the tools that are available to instructional designers to help them make better design decisions. I also stress the importance of communicating to disabled students their options and accommodations available to them at the office of students with disabilities. It is also worth noting that disabled students do not have to self-identify to the faculty or the school. I concluded with a section on how building accessible online content help many types of learners, not just students with disabilities.

Too Old for SnapChat

Snapchat is a social networking tool for pictures and captions. The power of the tool is the ephemeral nature of the post, each post only lasts until you view it. After that the image is erased from the Snapchat servers. People use it to send pictures, sexting and short videos. The application's main demographic consists of users between 13 and 23 years old.

Art by Pando.com

I have a friend whose job is to market to young people, college kids and people in there 20s. He sells them all sorts of things but mainly entertainment. He told me there is a divide between the young and the old, and that divide is Snapchat. If you and your friends use Snapchat, you are young. Their relationship to technology is different than ours.

“What do you mean they are different than us?” I pressed, and he told me if you have to ask, you don’t get it. I said I didn’t feel that old - I’m only 35, and I’m still with it - at least I think I’m still with it. I go on Reddit everyday, I read Huff Po, have Instagram and Facebook. Well, I guess that’s not the difference maker.

So I signed up for Snapchat hoping to discover something. I work with college students everyday, and they are nonstop on Snapchat. I can see them putting silly hats on their friends' pictures and putting on comical filters. I thought it was going to be a blast. I installed the program on my iPhone and logged in. And I guess what he said was right: I have no friends on this. None of the people on my address book were on Snapchat. Finally, I found one coworker on Snapchat, and I send her a picture of me at the library studying. She seemed confused. I guess I’m not doing this right.

Snapchat, like all social networks, can be an exclusive environment, based on your friendship groups and age group. I can see how this can be a fun and powerful tool in an age where everything lasts forever; you can make a stupid post on Facebook and that can follow you around for years, whereas Snapchat relieves some of the pressure that young people must feel when posting pictures and videos since in the Snapchat application it just disappears after a few moments.

I really want to “get” Snapchat. I’m going to ask my student workers tomorrow how to make friends on it. This is a technology that is a divider, and if I can bridge this divide, I will better understand the young people I’m trying to educate.