Now that it is over...

ICET 2007 was a blast. Imagining more than a thousand people—teachers, researchers, IT people, business people—together in the same place for two days. I can imagine it to be a hot bed for information exchange between schools and businesses, MOE and businesses, schools and schools, and so on.

As for me, since I am only a trainee teacher with absolutely zilch contacts (plus I'm shy too), I spent most of the time sitting at the back of the hall with all my equipment balanced precariously on my lap and sometimes listening with a gaping mouth at the possibilities of the future.

The future is as exciting or as daunting as we make it out to be.

Now that it is over, what are you going to do?

Researcher Track 1D: Leishman

Wikis, Blogs, Aggregators and Office 2.0—Democratising the Student-Learning Process, by Mike Leishman



Mr Leishman showed us how wikis can be used in the classroom. I was first introduced to the use of wikis in the classroom by my ICT professor Dr Ashley Tan in NIE. We did practically everything on our class wiki page, and it worked really well. It includes an element of collaboration that blogs don't have.

I'm really curious about Scratch. It is a programming language that lets you create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share it online as well. I'm downloading it right now. :)

Check out the cool links below.

Links

wikis
pbwiki
wikispaces

programming language
scratch

blogs
tumblr
blogger

aggregators (great for tracking students' blogs)
pageflakes
newsgator
(I like protopage)

office 2.0
zoho
google docs

Researcher Track 1D: Manu

Productive Failure, by Dr Manu Kapur

Dr Manu's research is about persistence vs performance success. Is there a hidden efficacy in un-scaffolded, ill-structured problem-solving processes?

He studied two groups of students chatting on MSN—one discussing ill-structured and the other well-structured physics questions. He found that although the performance of groups working on ill-structured questions seemed chaotic and ineffective, these groups later outperformed their peers on individual well-structured questions. This shows that it is beneficial to have tasks that develop persistence through failure.

Therefore, an implication of this finding is that we need to question the default pedagogical rush to scaffold ill-structured problem solving!! He says that it is possible to go backwards from complex to simple, instead of what we have been taught, to scaffold from simple to complex! Whoa... Quite against the grain.

He did a study at Clementi Town Secondary School. They implemented two cycles: the productive-failure cycle (no homework) and the lecture-practice cycle. For the productive-failure cycle, students had high engagement but low confidence (the vast majority could not solve the problem at all). At the final test, the students in the productive-failure cycle outperformed students the lecture-practice cycle on both well-structured items (which is remarkable cos they had no homework or practice at all!), and the ill-structured items.

We assume that students are ready to make optimal use of the structure that we design for them, but that is not always true. His study showed that students who went through the productive-failure cycle were actually better equipped to make use of the scaffolding provided for them. It means that sometimes short-term inefficiency may lead to long-term performance.

Order is important, but how it comes about is more important. Top-down order is efficient; bottom-up is more flexible and adaptable, that is, IF it emerges. Ha! Singapore emphasizes an efficiency-dominated pedagogy. Dr Manu proposes that we should have an innovation-dominated paradigm, rather than an effeciency-dominated one.

Dr Manu's study is really intresting. I wonder if productive failure works for the learning of language?

Last teabreak of the Conference

I've become soft. I'm actually tired from sitting here and listening all day. I'm ready for some hands-on activities!

School Track 3C: Tampines JC

Wiki TP by Tampines JC

Take a look at how TPJC students collaborate with each other on GP topics in a blog: http://wikitp.blogspot.com/.

In addition to the benefits of collaboration, it also creates an online resource for the students to refer to.

What a lot of work! Well done. Although I wonder if a wiki platform would be easier to manage, something like pbwiki or wikispaces or something?

Links
Discovery Rewind 2006

School Track 3C: Jurong JC

Facilitating Mathematic Discourse Using the Guided Collaborative Critique Framework in a Quasi-Synchronous Chat Environment, by Wee Juan Dee

This kinda went over my head. I think it is because it has been so long since I've thought about JC Maths!

School Track 3C: Beatty

Engaged Learning Using Podcasts and Interactive Whiteboard
by Beatty Secondary School

I have never touched an interactive whiteboard in my life. Do you think the interactive whiteboard will replace the regular whiteboard the way the whiteboard has replaced the chalkboard?

I worry about information overload. Then again, I once had the not-easy task of touching up a really bad photo of a whiteboard with very important information in very light ink on it, and I don't really want to do that again.

Innovative things that Beatty is doing

• Podcasts play while a powerpoint is being shown. I wonder how this is done? Technically speaking that is.. Is it bundled together? Can someone enlighten me?

Links
Chem Alive

Interactive whiteboards

More interactive whiteboards I've seen in a single place at any time. Practically every booth had one. It costs somewhere in the region of $2700, the price of a projector.





Interesting snippets overheard
"target set already or not?"
"PSLE results today.."
"256? Not bad!"
"tomorrow must all teachers go back to school?"
"got KPI?"
"next year I have Sec Three"

Lunchbreak

The chocolate éclairs are divine. I'm actually not the last one out of the hall this time so I don't have to go hungry or eat fried rice with mango pudding (which goes quite well together actually.. tastes a bit like turkey and cranberry sauce). I would take a photo of the éclair but I ate it already. Yum...

Active Learning through Gaming: Khoo

Dr Angeline Khoo is my prof! She teaches me Educational Psychology at NIE. And she's a WOW gamer too.

WOW terms—instances, mobs, bosses, guilds, quests—roll off Khoo's tongue just as easily as pedagogical terms. We even got to follow Prof Khoo into WOW and talk to her guild about thanksgiving. Heh. World of Warcraft and thanksgiving? Talk about disconnect. We even interviewed her former guild leader in character. The virtual world seems like a place where age, race, class don't matter. Her guild leader is only 21 years old but Prof Khoo salutes him. She says: "He asks me to jump into the fire, I jump!"

I think it is common to think of gaming, especially immersive role-play types, as a problem rather than an aide to education. We hear about "addicted" students who spend too much time playing games and never do any homework. But if we can take away our prejudices and look at gaming objectively, we realise that gaming does teach many real-life skills—problem-solving, decision-making, collaborating, etc.

Keynote 4: Emerging Trends and Impact on Education

Emerging Trends in Interactive Digital Media and their Impact on Education
By Leong Mun Kew



Wah, the real-time simulation of how fast a virus will spread in Singapore is cool. Leong showed a map with black dots in the central part of Singapore that spreads outwards. In 10 mins, 60% of access points will be affected. All based on real info IDA gathered through driving around Singapore and checking out whose wireless network has no security in place!

Check out the links below. Some of the participants in my row had their mouths half open when Leong showed the Minority Report Screen.. And the iBar! And the Wii!

Links
Twitter
Second Life
Home (PlayStation 3)
Tabula Rasa
Perceptive Pixel (Minority Report! Impressive..)
iBar (an interactive bar-counter!! See ouc on left; watch a video)
Wii
Robotcub

Sponsor Track 2B: Stubbs

Collaborative Learning, by Phil Stubbs

Collaboration between People, Communities, and Tools. Stubbs is giving really amazing examples of collaboration. Surprisingly, they don't look that difficult to do...

___Older students collaborate with younger students

• 8 year olds design a book for 4 year olds.
• They surveyed the 4 year olds on what books they like
• Authentic audience, authentic problem, authentic solution!
  
  Students collaborate with parents and grandparents
  
  
• Survey grandparents and parents on where they have been in the world (show world map)
• They collect pictures from grandparents, parents and their own photos so that they can see how the world has changed over time.
  
  Collaboration between students across schools
  
  
• Project on the holocaust project. Different schools on a single platform with separate forum groups. Wow.
• Teachers get a trail of everything a student posts. Possible to plot the student's learning journey.
  
  Outside experts
  
  
• Parents who are experts, for example a marine engineer.
  
• Real-life professionals such as architects and designers to be consultants to the students.
  
  Global collaborations
  
  
• Six year olds in Hong Kong collaborating with Inuit kids!
  
• Kids all over the world writing a nonsense poem together in a forum.

A flat world...

Links
British Council Climate Cool
Students from HK, UK, and elsewhere learn about climate change together. There is even a joint essay writing exercise that gets forwarded to the South China Morning Post.

Towards the Olympics
Students from HK, UK, and China talk about issues relating to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games through to London 2012.

UniServity

Sponsor Track 2B: Playware Studios

Learning the Fun Way, by Victor Goh, Playware Studios

Teenagers are different today. They are parallel processors who think nothing about chatting with seven people concurrently. They prefer graphics and animations over texts. They are active, not passive, and expect payoff for efforts. More interestingly, teenagers see play as work and work as play, and expect fantasy and reality in equal measure. Technology is viewed as life, not as a separate entity.

How do we reach out to teenagers? This is where games come in. Games appeal to teenagers because they are a form of fun, a form of play, have rules, and have goals. For games to be effective, they need to have a healthy balance of entertainment and content. If a game gets too heavy on content, it becomes overbearing and tedious.

What do you think about games in the classroom? Do you have any effective and fun games to share?

[By the way, the Immersive Augmented Environment is pretty exiciting. It is a multisensory experience called 4Di. Not 3D but 4D, ok! Don't play play...]

Links
Playware Studios

Researcher Track 2A: Zuiker

Gaming Boundaries Through and For Learning, by Dr Steven Zuiker

"The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education." (Economist)

Hmm... do you agree?

Zuiker brings up really interesting ideas about place and space. He talks about how we are moving from a place-based world to a space-based world where places and spaces are increasingly blended together. I am real; I am virtual; I am real again. Space is a Muslim woman visiting a synagogue in Second Life; it is a Dutch teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture in Habbo Hotel. Stealing virtual furniture! That would be inconceivable just three years ago.

Zuiker also warns about disembodied knowledge. He says that teacher cannot simply give content or rich experiences. Instead, teachers must embed content into context into rich experiences. And this is where virtual spaces come in. It helps provide context and experience. An example of such a virtual space is Quest Alantis.

Very interesting stuff.

Links
Kindle
Quest Alantis
Habbo Hotel

Researcher Track 2A: McLoughlin

Engaging Students in 21st Century Learning with Innovative, Interactive Digital Technologies, by Dr Catherine McLoughlin

Am sitting here waiting for the video issues to be sorted out. IT is such a flakey thing. Haven't we all experienced it? The day before a big event, all the computers work fine, then on the big day, it konks out in a major way. I feel quite sorry for her, but she has enough old-school teacher skills to pull it off without the video.

Which only reminds me how important old-school teacher skills are.

As Bruce Dixon said, the more powerful IT becomes, the more pedagogy we need!

Links
educause
Engage me or Enrage me

Yes, You. You control the Information Age.
Welcome to your world.

Programme: Day 1

Some quick facts about ICET 2007

What does ICET stand for?
International Conference on Educational Technology

When is ICET 2007 taking place?
21- 22 November 2007

Where?
Republic Polytechnic (Venue Info)

What is the theme for this Conference?
Rethinking Pedagogies: Creating Possibilities Through Digital and Interactive Media

Who should attend?
Teachers, Researchers, Educational Providers, Game Developers, Hardware and Software Solution providers

Is this the first time such a Conference is being held?
Nope. This is the fourth time. The first Conference was held in 2003.

Why should you be interested in this event?
Because this conference is not just about cutting-edge technology, it is about harnessing the power of cutting-edge technology in the classroom. Now, that is exciting stuff...