05/10/18
Today's lecture was split between @JamesHumbers and Masters student Rebecca Ly. James talked about disruptive technologies (disruptive being something that essentially changes the norm) - from mobile phones, the internet, facebook, and youtube. All of these have drastically changed the way people communicate with each other and gather information about the world. Not only is this important for education, it is important to understand and be aware of the implications of the way information is communicated in today's digital world in order to remain as informed and aware as possible.
After showing us both the incredible opportunities for learning and sharing that the internet provides, as well as the dangerous impacts technology has on the developing brain and the easy manipulation of information from sources like facebook, he hammers the term "enthusiastic skeptic". I think this is immensely important to encourage not only for ourselves as humans navigating our way through this ever-changing digital world, but also to our students.
Once again, we were reminded that we are not normal, a fact that is important to remember when going out into the classroom where we try to connect with every student we encounter (not just our own music-nerd types). This point linked well to Rebecca's talk.
Rebecca took us through a cool presentation (one she drew herself) about game theory. According to this, there are four types of gamers (and in the classroom, students): achievers, socialisers, explorers and killers. At the moment, the classroom is generally designed to cater to achievers (something most of us at the con would probably be, hence why we aren't normal). This excludes students who predominantly find joy in exploring, socialising and competing (again tying nicely into James' talk about the percentage of students who enrol in and complete tertiary education - it's depressingly low).
In terms of incorporating game theory and 'gamification' into the classroom, current perception/practice is just adding a reward onto the end, when this doesn't actually try to include the other 'types' of gamers/students. As well as this, by adding a superficial reward for completing a task, students are driven by extrinsic motivation instead of developing the intrinsic motivation that is vital for long-term and deep learning. There are many possibilities when you consider the different games out there, and encouraging educators to think about differentiation in this way may result in increased engagement of students and enjoyment in learning. This idea of the way we present ideas to students reinforced James' earlier point about instructional design (in summary, PowerPoints with lots of words aren't good - thanks cognitive load theory - and people read left to right then skim down).
The points discussed today relate to the ideas raised when exploring the specific ways we could use various technologies in the first four workshops, and the idea that keeps returning is encapsulated in Arthur C Clarke's statement:
"Any teacher that should be replaced by a computer ... should be"
or as James rephrased,
"Any teacher that should be replaced by youtube should be"
As we navigate our way through the technologies available to us, it is imperative that we constantly embrace and evaluate things that are presented to us, without being afraid to change or not change (James' term enthusiastic cynic really does sum it up).
While we didn't get to do much in the lecture, the discussion of these ideas is relevant and I think I'll try incorporating game theory into my CME assignment (scaffolding composition).