Category Archives: Review

Facilitating Online Learning, Review, Teacher/Academic work

University of Melbourne online study

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Ongoing Progression of study modes at University of Melbourne…

Link to original Marketing Post 26 April, 2021

Note: I have copied sections of the original marketing post below, which appeared on my Facebook feed, and highlighted areas for further consideration. I have a lot of respect for David Seignior with whom I work in my teaching team, and I found that beyond the hype of such a marketing post, there are a number of points made here that warrant further thought and consideration in terms of working with technology for hybrid/online learning (#EDUC90970), and emphasising relational pedagogy and social/cultural considerations within teaching/facilitating learning and curriculum planning.

Online professional education at Melbourne was designed with an online environment in mind. This matters.

Pedagogy before technology

One key pillar is learning design. As Senior Learning Designer at the University of Melbourne, David Seignior says: “Probably the most important consideration when building an online learning platform is that effective curriculum design comes before the technology.”

Technologies to deliver remote learning might be abundant, but “you have to know how to use it effectively. Whether face-to-face or online, you need to look not just at what you are teaching but how you’re teaching it. The technology must serve the pedagogy not the other way around.”

“We always work back from what the learner needs to be able to know and do in that particular context, and then consider how that can be learnt and assessed in an engaging manner online,” says Seignior.

Learner-centric programs and best practice

Specific needs of the learner are addressed at this early stage too. Since post-professional learners are often time poor, this characteristic is built into the design. As Lead Learning Designer, David Hall, says:

“We need to help them learn and understand as quickly and clearly as possible: provide them only with material that helps them achieve the learning outcomes, make it authentic, and ensure there is variety.”

Another potential of good online learning is to develop a Community of Inquiry, that allows students to learn with, from and about each other, says Seignior. The Community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) has three key elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teacher presence to enable effective peer learning and student satisfaction. Some think online learning is set and forget, that it is purely about self-directed learning with minimal teacher presence post design. But teacher presence is a really important aspect of the online learning experience. The more the teacher is present – whether instructing in webinars, facilitating web tutorials or conversing in discussion boards and giving feedback– the more interactive and engaging the learning will be for the student and the more they will feel part of a learning cohort.”

Advanced technology

… things like virtual collaboration tools, which allow learners to work on real-world scenarios, and even access places that they otherwise couldn’t physically go. A development in teaching healthcare for example allows students to ‘walk through’ an operating theatre during surgery.

Discussion boards and activities such as interactive videos and case studies, simulations and games, are also used to support collaboration and connection between learners, peers and tutors. One example is the learning interactive, which sees nursing students compete to accurately identify heart rhythms in the fastest possible time. These collaborative activities are a real benefit of online learning, notes Seignior.

“It’s ironic that we compare online and face-to-face. To me, online is more face-to-face than face-to-face. In a lecture theatre, the only person you’re face to face with is the lecturer– all of your peers, you’re looking at the back of their heads. Done well, online is more of a tutorial type setting. It really allows genuine peer learning to take place.”

Referencing back to previous post… teacher academics & content generation (excerpts)

Returning to excerpts from Previous Post on this blog in reference to this article: Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so…

“So, we were told to “flip the classroom”. Why not edit those lecture recordings into 15-minute, bite-sized lessons […] Suddenly academics became video editors – mostly bad ones – and our students turned to YouTube, because on YouTube you can get a better explanation of the same thing (for free I might add). Universities turned from communities of learning and collaboration into B-grade content providers. This is the death march of higher education. Universities are not content providers.”

The philosopher John Dewey told us that an educational experience – what he called a community of inquiry – requires a cognitive presence (the learner), a social presence (the learning community) and a teaching presence (the professor).

Content can enable learning, but it cannot provide an education.

Education should be better than ever, as we are now able to point at myriad incredible resources, possibly on the web, perhaps in our library, where we act as content aggregator, not creator. Creation is done when we have our researcher hats on, not our teaching hats.

When we go online, when those classes are recorded then transformed into 15-minute snacks, the soul of education begins to die. The community of inquiry must be reinvented for the digital campus.

A quarter century ago, Noam further predicted that “the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community”.

We, as teachers in modern university settings, can think of ourselves as community figureheads and team leaders. The students are part of our community, our team, and we are there to manage them, coach them, guide them, to be mentors, to help teach them over a longer journey, and to corral them through this common goal of thought, understanding and mastery.”

Link to original opinion article: Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so…

 And returning back to University of Melbourne online study (marketing promotion)

Notes/excerpts:

  • Effective curriculum design comes before the technology
  • look not just at what you are teaching but how you’re teaching it. The technology must serve the pedagogy not the other way around.
  • work back from what the learner needs to be able to know and do in that particular context, and then consider how that can be learnt and assessed in an engaging manner online,
  • “We need to help them learn and understand as quickly and clearly as possible: provide them only with material that helps them achieve the learning outcomes, make it authentic, and ensure there is variety.”
  • … develop a Community of Inquiry, that allows students to learn with, from and about each other, says Seignior. The Community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) has three key elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teacher presence to enable effective peer learning and student satisfaction.
  • Some think online learning is set and forget, that it is purely about self-directed learning with minimal teacher presence post design. But teacher presence is a really important aspect of the online learning experience. The more the teacher is present – whether instructing in webinars, facilitating web tutorials or conversing in discussion boards and giving feedback– the more interactive and engaging the learning will be for the student and the more they will feel part of a learning cohort.”

Online learning can be more interactive than face to face? Here is why! (Podcast 21:14)

THIS TEACHING LIFE

In this episode, David Seignior, senior learning designer from the University of Melbourne, explains in what ways online teaching allows teachers to actively engage with their students in learning, and how that can be achieved even with minimal technological interventions.

The value of online education and how teachers can boost an engaging student experience

(excerpts)

“…contemporary, well-designed online education moves well beyond these old models into an experience defined by:

  • Social presence: the idea of learning together
  • Cognitive presence: the knowledge you’re sharing
  • Teacher presence: where teachers curate content and facilitate engagement.

[…] Seignior emphasises that teachers who are new to online education shouldn’t feel intimidated by the technology. While the technology does provide enormous opportunities, the pedagogical perspective is always paramount.

“You need to put the pedagogy (or andragogy for adult learning) before the technology… good teaching practices in face-to-face teaching apply in an online context as well.”

He believes there are three essential elements to successful online teaching:

  1. You facilitate
  2. You encourage collaboration
  3. You curate.”

Final Comments

It is interesting to see similarities in each of the above content/articles in terms of teaching/learning, online platforms, the work and/or responsibilities of the different contributors and participants. Although there are some points of difference, I love that Dewey’s work (1938) on a community of inquiry – requires a cognitive presence (the learner), a social presence (the learning community) and a teaching presence (the professor) can still be used with confidence and as a continuing guiding aspiration.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32442058

This last article, from 10 Jun 2020, demonstrates how far we have come in such a short period of time.  Engaging with today’s wholly online Teaching and Learning Conference, 2021 with a series of presentations that focus on evidence-based approaches for enhancing and optimising student learning, considering the shift in the balance of blended teaching, learning and assessment towards online and to different forms of in-person education, reflecting the greater confidence and competence of teachers (and students) with digital methods. (from the About:  Transitioning to COVID-normal: Developing a new ecosystem for learning).

My experience of these sessions was of a far more knowledgeable and experienced teaching cohort who were able to share their experiences, research and techniques with a very interested audience of University of Melbourne staff.  As a participant, I hope this is not just my impression (I was interested and gained a lot from participating – including being inspired to write a few more posts for this blog!) and is not simply a ‘marketing/promotional spiel’, but a sign of positive change and improvements to teaching and learning in all its forms, including to adapting our practices to current challenges + opportunities, but retaining attention to the various perspectives I have outlined in this post.

References

Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Hold Rinehart and Winston

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 7-23.

Tanner, B. (2020, February 23). Evollution. Taking Initiative to Bring Back Adults.

Diversity, Facilitating Online Learning, Review

(comment & excerpts from…) Artificial intelligence research may have hit a dead end

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“Misfired” neurons might be a brain feature, not a bug — and that’s something AI research can’t take into account

By THOMAS NAIL
APRIL 30, 2021 10:00PM (UTC)

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/30/why-artificial-intelligence-research-might-be-going-down-a-dead-end/

[…]  artificial intelligence researchers and scientists are busy trying to design “intelligent” software programmed to do specific tasks. There is no time for daydreaming.

Or is there? What if reason and logic are not the source of intelligence, but its product? What if the source of intelligence is more akin to dreaming and play?

Recent research into the “neuroscience of spontaneous fluctuations” points in this direction. If true, it would be a paradigm shift in our understanding of human consciousness. It would also mean that just about all artificial intelligence research is heading in the wrong direction.

Yet all approaches have one thing in common: they treat intelligence computationally, i.e., like a computer with an input and output of information. 

Narrow AI excels at accomplishing specific tasks in a closed system where all possibilities are known. It is not creative and typically breaks down when confronted with novel situations. On the other hand, researchers define “general AI” as the innovative transfer of knowledge from one problem to another.

Decades of neuroscience have experimentally proven that neurons can change their function and firing thresholds, unlike transistors or binary information. It’s called “neuroplasticity,” and computers do not have it.  

Spontaneous fluctuations are neuronal activities that occur in the brain even when no external stimulus or mental behavior correlates to them. These fluctuations make up an astounding 95% of brain activity while conscious thought occupies the remaining 5%. In this way, cognitive fluctuations are like the dark matter or “junk” DNA of the brain. They make up the biggest part of what’s happening but remain mysterious.   

Neuroscientists have known about these unpredictable fluctuations in electrical brain activity since the 1930s, but have not known what to make of them. Typically, scientists have preferred to focus on brain activity that responds to external stimuli and triggers a mental state or physical behavior. They “average out” the rest of the “noise” from the data.

This is why computer engineers, just like many neuroscientists, go to great lengths to filter out “background noise” and “stray” electrical fields from their binary signal. 

This is a big difference between computers and brains. For computers, spontaneous fluctuations create errors that crash the system, while for our brains, it’s a built-in feature.    

What if noise is the new signal? What if these anomalous fluctuations are at the heart of human intelligence, creativity, and consciousness? 

There is no such thing as matter-independent intelligence. Therefore, to have conscious intelligence, scientists would have to integrate AI in a material body that was sensitive and non-deterministically responsive to its anatomy and the world. Its intrinsic fluctuations would collide with those of the world like the diffracting ripples made by pebbles thrown in a pond. In this way, it could learn through experience like all other forms of intelligence without pre-programmed commands. 

In my view, there will be no progress toward human-level AI until researchers stop trying to design computational slaves for capitalism and start taking the genuine source of intelligence seriously: fluctuating electric sheep.

My comment/reflections…

Yes, I read this and excerpted elements that resonated particularly strongly with me. Whenever I hear discussions about AI, I have misgivings. This article helps me to articulate some of these.

Notions such as creativity, addressing ‘novel situations’, going beyond ‘what is known’, or programmed, to find novel solutions that may not have been already attempted. A “closed system where all possibilities are known” is simply a translation of human fallibility with all its potential biases and blind spots, into, as the author says, “computational slaves for capitalism”. One that works faster, cheaper, more efficiently, but without the potential for the fluctuations and ‘noise’ to get in the way.

Well this ‘noise’, to me, is the human condition and I believe it contributes to the wonders of diversity, of difference, of creativity and even what might be considered bohemian or eccentric responses and ways of being that provide the colours of our world.

In terms of the origins of the new technological and AI machinery, what would it mean in terms of the ethics, morals and understandings of ‘right and wrong’, good/bad, acceptability of ‘solutions’, if any nation, sect or belief system of the world was able to program and develop it? Any religion, any philosophy, any group or individual? We know who is ruling the development of AI right now, is that ok with you and me? With our neighbours, our extended families, our region or our place in the world? Have we thought about why this might be, or how it might feel different if our own belief systems were completely incompatible or in opposition?

Facilitating Online Learning, Review, Sites

ARticle review: This Researcher Says AI Is Neither Artificial nor Intelligent

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Kate Crawford, who holds positions at USC and Microsoft, says in a new book that even experts working on the technology misunderstand AI. 

TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES LIKE to portray artificial intelligence as a precise and powerful tool for good. Kate Crawford says that mythology is flawed. In her book Atlas of AI, she visits a lithium mine, an Amazon warehouse, and a 19th-century phrenological skull archive to illustrate the natural resources, human sweat, and bad science underpinning some versions of the technology.

book cover - Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford Link to book review.

Crawford, a professor at the University of Southern California and researcher at Microsoft, says many applications and side effects of AI are in urgent need of regulation.

Crawford recently discussed these issues with WIRED senior writer Tom Simonite. An edited [and further excerpted] transcript follows.

KATE CRAWFORD: It [AI] is presented as this ethereal and objective way of making decisions, something that we can plug into everything from teaching kids to deciding who gets bail. But the name is deceptive: AI is neither artificial nor intelligent.

You take on that myth by showing how AI is constructed. Like many industrial processes it turns out to be messy. Some machine learning systems are built with hastily collected data, which can cause problems like face recognition services more error prone on minorities.

We need to look at the nose to tail production of artificial intelligence. The seeds of the data problem were planted in the 1980s, when it became common to use data sets without close knowledge of what was inside, or concern for privacy. It was just “raw” material, reused across thousands of projects.

This evolved into an ideology of mass data extraction, but data isn’t an inert substance—it always brings a context and a politics. 

You trace the roots of emotion recognition software to dubious science funded by the Department of Defense in the 1960s. A recent review of more than 1,000 research papers found no evidence a person’s emotions can be reliably inferred from their face.

Emotion detection represents the fantasy that technology will finally answer questions that we have about human nature that are not technical questions at all. This idea that’s so contested in the field of psychology made the jump into machine learning because it is a simple theory that fits the tools. Recording people’s faces and correlating that to simple, predefined, emotional states works with machine learning—if you drop culture and context and that you might change the way you look and feel hundreds of times a day

We’ve seen research focused too narrowly on technical fixes and narrow mathematical approaches to bias, rather than a wider-lensed view of how these systems integrate with complex and high stakes social institutions like criminal justice, education, and health care. I would love to see research focus less on questions of ethics and more on questions of power. These systems are being used by powerful interests who already represent the most privileged in the world.

Is AI still useful?

Let’s be clear: Statistical prediction is incredibly useful; so is an Excel spreadsheet. But it comes with its own logic, its own politics, its own ideologies that people are rarely made aware of.

https://www.wired.com/story/researcher-says-ai-not-artificial-intelligent/

(My highlighting) Highlighted parts relate directly to my thinking in regards to how AI/technology can be used across a general (diverse) population, when it has been designed and programmed by fallible and inevitably biased humans? As fashions change, theory, perspectives, experiences, culture/s, languages and dialects, and effects of globalisation, first world power and dominance, disparities between the global ‘North and South’, the ‘East and West’, religious and political influence, AI is being built and programmed by who? As the author says in the final comment, AI “comes with its own logic, its own politics, its own ideologies that people are rarely made aware of” and this is one of my main concerns. How can this be mitigated? Should we (users/educators) be cognisant of these issues of power and bias when we chose our tools? Should we ensure we educate our learners to be critical, to always consider minority perspectives, to consider the tools they/we use for what might be missed, or not considered, or how they support and ensure the power (and knowledge) is wielded by those with conflicting interests?

A Leve Reflections: 1 May, 2021

Review, Sites, Teacher/Academic work

Referencing & citing online informal sources

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The Place of Blogs in Academic Writing

This author, Jenny Davis, sets out to tackle the complexities of whether or not academics should cite blog posts in their formal academic writing.  Davis discusses the pros and cons.  Pros include the speed of publication and free accessibility, is not limited to recognised or upcoming academics working within existing frameworks (compared to peer-refereed journals), and can therefore promote the potential for ‘open discursive boundaries’.  She notes:

[…] traditional journals rely on existing experts to decide what can/should be published. If an idea or methodology does not fit within an existing framework, its chances of acceptance diminish. Blogs are less susceptible this type of censorship, providing a wider breadth of theoretical building blocks and facilitating new theoretical directions.

(Davis, J., April 23, 2013)

Cons include the lack of peer review and its ‘standards’, creating a crowded discourse without a clear way to determine rigour.  Davis also notes the tendency for bloggers to write in a ‘piecemeal fashion’, and the impermanence of blog posts.

Davis then responds in detail to three orienting questions:

  1. When is it okay to cite blogs in a formal academic paper?
  2. Which blogs are okay to cite, and how do we know?
  3. Who can cite blogs?

The final section is headed … “And the Final Answer is:…” – you’ll just have to read the article to find out (and cite it of course!)  Note also, there are 27 interesting comments including further references on the topic.

Note too, there are many other posts, opinions and advice concerning this question so clearly students need to check with their advisors, and advisors (teachers/tutors etc), you need to make it clear to your students what is appropriate to their/your context!

APA 7th Edition Referencing

A very good and up-to-date guide to APA7 referencing from JCU (James Cook University) can be found here at https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/apa/socialmedia It covers the following:

(Lee, 2021)

Lee’s ‘better question’ relates to asking about the ‘reference type’, rather than the ‘retrieval method’.  The author explains that online and print references are treated largely the same, with each reference being broken down into its four components:  author, date, title and source.

This and other articles on the APA blog site are actually surprisingly interesting and informative!

Craig O (2021) https://www.topuniversities.com/blog/how-properly-cite-blog-your-essay

A brief guide covering examples of Harvard, MLA, Chicago and APA referencing for blogs. Note, the author calls himself “Craig O” – this could refer to either his first or last name being Craig, it could be his online name/moniker, but for someone writing a post about citing blogs online, he doesn’t seem to have noticed that his guide gives no reference to how his name/title might be cited*.

This alerted me to the fact that although this post came up on a google search for such topics, and it seemed fit for purpose at first glance, further investigation found it is linked to a site on pretty shaky grounds. The site is titled “Top Universities: Worldwide University Rankings, Guides and Events”. The logo is QS – at the bottom of the page we see the registered company: © QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited 1994 – 2021. All rights reserved. On their homepage, they say:

Home of the QS World University Rankings, TopUniversities.com is one of the leading sources of information for prospective students from around the world. Whether you’re hoping to learn more about a particular study destination, or want to compare the reputation of different universities, we can help you take the next step on your educational journey.

https://www.topuniversities.com/

Most of their linked posts carry a banner saying ‘sponsored’. (see my Afterword… at this end of this post – and don’t fall for every post or link that catches your attention!)

*Note, the above JCU guide does this explicitly for blog posts:

FormatAuthor, A. [Screen name if applicable]. (Date). Post title – not italicised. Blog name. http://www.xxxxx
NOTES: If the author’s full name is not listed, just use their screen name without brackets. If the author is a group or a company, do not us a full stop between the author’s name and the screen name
https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/apa/socialmedia

Conclusion

Overall however, it seems there is still disagreement on the ‘correct’ way to cite informal posts and other online material. APA7 now removes the necessity to include ‘date accessed’. Sites change, posts are updated, and this information is not always easily available. The main reason for references and citations being used are to give attribution to the the writer/producer. This information is not always available. Does this mean that these materials are then not appropriate as sources for academic work? Or does it mean that their ephemeral nature should be acknowledged, and a publicly accessible URL should be used at a minimum?

After trying to provide correctly cited references for this post, I think I am going to be even more forgiving to my students for their referencing. BTW, how to I format this with hanging indents – ie correct APA style? No idea!!!

Afterword…

One aspect I looked at in my PhD Thesis (Leve, 2011) was the matter of ‘grey literature’. In discussing the construction, marketing and mediation of international education as a highly valued commodity, ‘grey literature’ became the only available source of information (beyond anecdote) and I decided to make this a part of my thesis overall.

In terms of this study that involves texts from a broad range of sources, the differences in tone or ‘shades of grey’ are not always clear.  ‘Grey’ denotes an ‘in-between’ measure, not black or white but grey, somewhere in between good/bad, reliable/undependable, clear/obscured – in the case of this study, it is a type of text that lies somewhere in between promotional texts and conventionally published scholarly research, a distinction which will be further examined throughout this chapter.   However, in a cultural studies framework that highlights the meaning-making potential of any form of text, the credibility of these sources may be seen as less important than the exposure and ‘work’ they undertake in constructing and mediating understandings of the phenomenon in question.  

(Leve, A., 2011, p116)

It is only now that I see how this resonates with online and ‘informal’ sources, which have hugely grown in proliferation since I wrote this content. I ended up relying on this ‘grey literature’ for my data, because via a screen shot, it keeps on existing and cannot be changed. It is a reflection of a context – a time, a place, and probably, a message of and for that moment.

But, through this post, another one grows a seed – stay posted!

References

(Trying out the advice above!)

Craig O, (March 16, 2021), How to Properly Cite a Blog In Your Essay, QS Top Universities.com, https://www.topuniversities.com/blog/how-properly-cite-blog-your-essay

Davis, J. (April 23, 2013), The Place of Blogs in Academic Writing, Cyborgology, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/04/23/citing-blogs-in-formal-academic-writing/

James Cook University, (updated Apr 23, 2021) Social Media, APA (7th Edition) Referencing Guide, https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/apa/socialmedia

Lee, C., (Mar 8, 2021), “I found it online”:  Citing online works in APA Style, APA Style Blog, https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/citing-online-works

Leve, A (2011), Constructing the ‘Study in Australia experience’ Full fee paying overseas students in state government schools ~a small but integral player~ [PhD Thesis, Monash University] https://www.academia.edu/757410/Constructing_the_Study_in_Australia_experience_Full_fee_paying_overseas_students_in_state_government_schools_a_small_but_integral_player_

Diversity, Facilitating Online Learning, Review, Teacher/Academic work

module 7: immersive reality – pre and post reflections

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In #COM000848 – Facilitating Online Learning this week, “we explore Immersive Reality as an EOR to support online learning that supports learner exploration and authentic online learning environments”.

Pre-Reflection

The question I have relates to education/learning that is about actual interaction with humans in all their diversity and about respecting the strengths, needs, values, beliefs and experiences of people from diverse backgrounds. How do we teach/learn about responding effectively to situations that do not (and should not) be categorised or generalised, or responded to in a way that dismisses context (including sensory, emotionally, dis/comfort, familiarity, implicit/unconscious bias, tone, status…) and incorporates cultural sensitivity, understanding of appropriateness in terms of neuro- and gender diversity, and the above mentioned aspects of diversity?

How can virtual reality provide opportunities to truly experience these diverse and often unexpected or ungeneralisable ‘realities’, let alone test or measure the appropriateness of student responses? It is the unknown and unexpected ‘human’ response variations that concern me here. How can virtual/immersive reality prepare one for such events?

I work in the Faculty of Education (MSGE and across various other institutions) with pre-service teachers. I can fully understand the benefits of Immersive /Virtual Reality in terms of methods (ie teaching areas, or disciplines), particularly since COVID where experiential access is now far greater and so many new opportunities to ‘experience’ locations, information, ideas and become ‘immersed’ exist.

However, my area of interest and expertise relates more to education issues in general – in terms of diversity/difference, pedagogy in terms of relationships, in issues that relate less to the ‘disciplines’ and content (the what) and more about the who, the how and the why.

AITSL (The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) has instituted a number of Standards (APSTs – Australian Professional Standards for Teachers) that include the following:

Of particular relevance are those detailed under Standard 1 :

1.1 Physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students
1.2 Understand how students learn
1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds
1.4 Strategies for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students
1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities
1.6 Strategies to support full participation of students with disability

https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

So again, I reiterate my question, can these pedagogical considerations be achieved or improved or be better implemented through augmented reality technology?

Post Seminar Reflections

Two guest presenters were brought in to present their overviews and experiences with Immersive Reality – Stephen Aiello (Links to an external site.) and Claudio Aguayo (Links to an external site.).

In the module content, design principles were introduced, each of which still seem to bypass the human/relational ‘authenticity’ question that relates to my concerns outlined above (and in our presentation on ‘Authentic Learning’).

Design Principle 1: Rather than Perfectly Duplicate, Replicate where Possible and Innovate where Necessary 

Design Principle 2: The Collaboration that Is Essential to Instantiating Authentic Tasks-Based Learning Strategies Online Is a New Experience for Most Learners and Must Be Carefully Nurtured 

Design Principle 3: The Fidelity of the Simulated Experiential Learning Environment Does Not Have to Be Exceptionally High as Long as it Enables Learners to Suspend Disbelief and Feel that What they Are Experiencing Is Real.

Kartoğlu, Ü., Siagian, R. C., & Reeves, T. C. (2020).

Aguayo, C., Eames, C., & Cochrane, T. (2020, 03/09) offer a framework for complementary mixed reality (XR) and free-choice learning education. Content from Table 1. Pedagogy/heutagogy (teaching and learning principles) is copied below (my highlighting).

i.          Focus should be placed in self-determined (heutagogical) learning, where the learning is guided by learners’ motivations and needs.

ii.         The placement of the outside-the-classroom visit within a teaching unit is pedagogically important.

iii.        The structure of  the outside-the-classroom visit is pedagogically and logistically important.

iv.        Pre-visit resources can help to sensitise learners and initiate connections to place (the visit site).

v.         Use of  the mobile learning resources (virtual/immersive environments) should be designed to complement and not detract from sensory (embodied/haptic) experiences in the real environment.

vi.        The visit should allow freedom to experience but also have some focus to scaffold learning, and to promote interactions between learners (social learning).

vii.       Opportunities for learners to interact with both real and virtual/immersive learning environments increase learner autonomy and engagement.

viii.      Learning needs to be reinforced post-visit to deepen knowledge, clarify attitudes and support next learning steps

Whilst this is an excellent list of ways to set up and use mixed reality learning opportunities most effectively, particularly for adult learning, it does not address the types of skills that may be required from instructors (or school teachers) in relation to diversity in terms of i) needs/motivations; iv) sensitisation and initiating connections; v) sensory experiences (or responses); vi) interactions; or viii) attitudes.

After the two presentations, I had the opportunity to ask my question directly to the presenters. Claudio Aguayo (Links to an external site.) outlined a number of projects utilising XR such as “Explora XR Chile” and “Cultural Heritage – Virtual Maroe” that looks at ways of interacting with places of cultural and geographical significance. “Rethinking the future of Maori community health with digital media and warm data” provoked particular interest in terms of the possibilities of utilising qualitative data that centres on “interrelationships that integrate elements of a complex system” – potentially inclusive of cultural and other types of diversity.

Stephen Aiello however, shared the following project with us, that seems to finally acknowledge my recognition and suspicions relating to ‘authenticity’ and diverse relational human dilemmas. He said that my concerns were important ones, and that little research seems to exist on how this might be effectively incorporated into XR simulation.

In the link below, he directly talks about the issues that always concern me – the necessity for cultural competence to be considered and taught; the necessity for us all to examine our own biases, which he associates with “attitudes, assumptions, stereotypes and personal characteristics” and how we need to develop the appropriate skills and knowledge to provide culturally safe and contextually relevant practices and treatments (and in my case, pedagogy).

Developing culturally responsive practice using mixed reality (XR) simulation in Paramedicine Education (adobe.com)

I am happy now to see some hope in ways that XR simulation/Virtual Reality can be developed and potentially utilised in ways that are able to consider how we can all develop our cultural competence and tackle some of the many issues around how we respond to and get to know other perspectives and beliefs, and ways of understanding the ‘real’ world(s).

References:

Aguayo, C., Eames, C., & Cochrane, T. (2020, 03/09). A Framework for Mixed Reality Free-Choice, Self-Determined Learning [Journal]. Research in Learning Technology, 28(Mobile Mixed Reality – Themed Collection). https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2347

Kartoğlu, Ü., Siagian, R. C., & Reeves, T. C. (2020). Creating a “Good Clinical Practices Inspection” Authentic Online Learning Environment through Educational Design Research. TechTrends : for leaders in education & training, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00509-0

Leve, A & Sayers, R (2021) Authentic Learning https://spark.adobe.com/page/Mc1Uj5DRZPjkK/

Facilitating Online Learning, Review, Social Media

Who uses facebook? a new blog ‘review’ in progress…

2 Comments 
In writing this for my Edublog, I was very conscious of the greying of notions of in/formality that seems appropriate for a blog, and ‘academic prose’ with formal academic language/structure/grammar and formatting.  I like my blogs with a more informal ‘chatty’ and conversational tone, shorter blocks of text, and the occasional sideline or rethink, or self talk/reflection.  Can blogs then be taken seriously, as offering anything substantial to academia?  Does a review or a critique written as a blog have any sway or influence?  Does it need to?  … (sideline… Do I care?)

Reading 1:  Ryan, T., & Xenos, S. (2011, 2011/09/01/). Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage.

From abstract:  The results [from a self selected sample of 1324 Australian Internet users] showed that Facebook users tend to be more extraverted and narcissistic, but less conscientious and socially lonely, than nonusers. Furthermore, frequency of Facebook use and preferences for specific features were also shown to vary as a result of certain characteristics, such as neuroticism, loneliness, shyness and narcissism. It is hoped that research in this area continues, and leads to the development of theory regarding the implications and gratifications of Facebook use. [my highlighting] © 2011

I am already on edge – the date of the article, the premises suggested by the title, the shifts in global social media usage and availability over the last 10+ years, and the discipline area of behaviour and personality characteristics through a psychological lens.  But I persist reading, with trepidation…

Apparently, (Ryan & Xenos, 2001 p.1659) “[r]ather than looking at the relationship between Internet use and specific traits, the majority of research in this area has been based on broad models of personality. The Five-Factor Model, otherwise known as the Big Five (Goldberg, 1990), [… which] is based on the theory that an individual’s personality can be evaluated by determining how they rank on five bipolar factors: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience (McCrae & John, 1992)”… Ok, I’m not sure I can read any more.  The idea of ‘evaluating an individual’s personality’ based on these factors is just not agreeable for a sociology inclined thinker that I am. 

After skipping through the rest of the article (we call it ‘skimming’ for a general picture, or ‘scanning’ for something worthwhile to spend more time on – see https://library.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1924140/Reading_Skills.pdf), the most notable ‘finding’ seemed to be that “Facebook gratifies its users in different ways depending on their individual characteristics” (p.1663).  One of the sections was based on ‘specific gratifications of Facebook users’, and another on ‘Frequency of Facebook use’.  These and specific purposes or motivations for using Facebook I think would be quite different now (in 2021) than they might have been then, for a multitude of reasons. 

However, after reading, I have been prompted to think about what sort of questions I have, that I would like considered through research, particularly those relating to communication, FB (vs other social media) in less developed countries, and whether it is simply a ‘distraction from’ education, or a ‘potential tool for’ education.

Reading 2:  The effects of personality traits, self-esteem, loneliness, and narcissism on Facebook use among university students (2012, Skues et al), from the same journal.  Again it appears centred on university students as users, to be focussed on ‘personality traits’, and to be from almost 10 years ago.

Admittedly another skim read, and the feeling I need to look elsewhere for the type of research I would prefer to engage with.

Extract from Abstract:  “Interestingly, students with higher levels of loneliness reported having more Facebook friends. Extraversion, neuroticism, self-esteem and narcissism did not have significant associations with Facebook use. It was concluded that students who are high in openness use Facebook to connect with others in order to discuss a wide range of interests, whereas students who are high in loneliness use the site to compensate for their lack of offline relationships. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]”.

Again, trepidation – and a bit of self analysis, hmmm, do each of these ‘traits’ exist in isolation from others?  Pick a time of day/week/year, consider context, and I can perform all or any of the above according to psychometrics.  You can probably tell that I’m not really a fan of, or believer in psychological categorisations!

Some interesting aspects in the discussion caught my eye.  Notions such as ‘Impression management’; Facebook ‘as a means of taking a break or as a distraction from study’, ‘connect[ing] with others who share similar interest[s]’; ‘students turn[ing] to Facebook to avoid academic tasks’; and the final recommendation, ‘future research should consider whether Facebook promotes social engagement in a manner that might increase academic engagement, or whether it operates as a distraction’ (Skues et al, 2012 p. 2418). 

However, as a regular Facebook user myself, I am really not so sure that any of these ‘interesting aspects’, are really so helpful.  Facebook (and other social media sites) have a multitude of uses and purposes which are interesting and variable, but how do these findings help us in ‘facilitating online learning’?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bam_rXmoOs4

The final article I will look at, that I have chosen myself to hopefully obtain some information that is useful for my work as an online educator, is …

Marketing           Psychology         Personality        

(Sideline/note/addendum – I went searching, post 2018, there are hundreds of thousands of articles published about FB/education/online learning …  so I’ll save the next instalment for later.  This is about it for me – and I still need to check my FB before I can go to bed … until next time 😊)

References (for now…)

Skues, J. L., Williams, B., & Wise, L. (2012). The effects of personality traits, self-esteem, loneliness, and narcissism on Facebook use among university students. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6), 2414-2419. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.07.012

Ryan, T., & Xenos, S. (2011, 2011/09/01/). Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(5), 1658-1664. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.02.004