The Next 25 Years

The article written by Facer and Sandford(2010) is an very interesting and thought-provoking work for educators to think about what the future education would be like. Speaking of the viable prediction, from my own perspective, it's this one: "Distance matters less, but geography still counts".

As a matte of fact, I can there is a sign for this prediction to happen. The sign I refer to is the technological tool we use for learning, socializing and working. Let's talk about learning sign first. Because of the advancement of technology, students used to learn in a face-to-face setting; now they have other choice--to learn in distance courses. In other worse, they can go to their virtual classroom to learn at anywhere and any time. They don't really have to be physically present in a classroom. It seems that distance does matter less. And for socializing, in the past, we had to stay in touch with friends in other countries or families in different cities via postcard, mails or phone call.However, today, we can just make a Skype call, Facetime or even just use SNS like Facebook to connect with our friends and families. Even though we may be far away from our friends and family, we still can easily know how they are doing by doing a few clicking or swipes on Facebook. It appears that distance matters less, right? As for working, again, for some international companies, some of their employees probably do not reside in the same country as where the headquarter is. So they have to work in their home country. When it comes to reporting their work progress, they can just use video conferencing to host the meeting and still feel "social presence" in that case. This is another sign of distance matters less.

But Facer and Sandford (2010) also mentioned that "‘face to face’ is likely to retain its importance for specific interactions" (p.84) in this prediction. I agree with this statement as well. It's because there's still limitation for virtual world. For instance, the interaction in the virtual world or via video conferencing is still not as real and authentic as the interaction happens in a face-to-face setting. That's also why 'face to face' would still have its importance in the future. One is example is that if two companies want to cooperate and sign a very important contract, people from both sides would still want to physically meet each other and then sign the contract. It seems to be more formal and professional to have this big event happen in a face-to-face setting rather than simply finish it in a virtual environment. Additionally, the argument: geography still counts can also be seen in a company example. If a person wants to work for an international company remotely, s/he would still consider where the base of the company. Is it in a suburb or urban area? S/he would still think geography of the company location count because s/he one day might need to fly to the base for some important meetings. This situation can be also applied to a school setting as well. That's why geography counts even though today we have Internet, social media, video conferencing and other advanced technologies.

As for 2 other predictions of mine, the first one is widely application of augmented reality (AR) in class at an educational setting. I know it may sound unlikely to happen at first. But when I think about the application of iPad in today's schools, I can see the possibility of the application of AR in schools as well. People may argue that it's too expensive for schools to purchase devices and equipment for AR. It's true for recent years. However, after 25 years, there would be other new and advanced technologies which overshadow AR. At that time, the price of AR might not be as expensive as it is now. Moreover, probably students can use their personal smartphone to experience AR in the future as well. At that time, schools would be able to purchase devices and equipment for doing AR. Teachers can integrate AR in class to increase students' learning motivation and help them maintain their new learned knowledge via this kind of true-to-life experiences.

My second prediction is global classroom for elementary and secondary schools. Because of Internet and technologies, people are able to get access to news and people around the world. Global village is something that has been brought up since the Internet emerges. People have been talking about the importance of having broader views. Some teachers are trying to reaching out to teacher from other countries in order to have students from both sides to learn with each other. They want the kids to learn different culture and raise their learning motivation as well. This leads me to think of this prediction. Since technologies shorten distance among people but enhance chances for people to get to know more about the world, it's likely that schools would want to expose children to a global learning world. I predict that schools may have one session for doing a global class once or twice a week. In that session, students would present their projects to their counterparts in other country; or students learn and listen to their peers of other country to present their learning results. Even though it's just my prediction, I do hope that this kind of scenario can really happen in the future. In that way, I'm sure that students would be more motivated in participating in school learning.

Research Progress 3

In the past few days, I have been working on finding papers that discuss about the concept of social presence.

So far I have found one definition of social presence which was developed by Short, Williams and Christie in 1976. According to Short et al., social presence means "degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships".

I've read other papers have literature review on social presence. It seemed that there are other researchers' perspective on what social presence is and what effect it has on learners when they are learning in CMC settings.

I think one thing that I try to deal with is that there is always something that worth reading in other papers. I always find that what I have read so far for a particular area might not be enough for my literature review. In other words, I don't know when I should stop digging information on one area and move on to another one. That's the hardest thing I have encountered so far. That's also why for so many weeks and I'm still stuck in finding more lit. review on social presence.

Research Progress 2

This week I read two papers. I found one of them to be interesting and the finding result is a little bit different from what I thought would be.

The paper is "A Case Study of Language Learner's Social Presence in Synchronous CMC". In this study, the researchers did the research in different learning modes which are face to face, CMC with webcam and headset, and CMC with headset. She had French language learners paired up with a partner whom they didn't know well in the beginning of the course and asked them to do conversation practice with their partner in different modes.

Interestingly, her result showed that students had higher score of social presence when they did the task in CMC with webcam and headset. This is totally different from what I thought before I read this study. I thought students should feel more social presence in the mode of face-to-face setting. But this is not the case in this study. According to the researcher, some factors affected students' social presence. One is the familiarity of their partner. Since they didn't know each other before doing the task, they felt uncomfortable in carrying out the task in a face-to-face setting where would made them feel more nervous and anxious. But in the mode of CMC with webcam and headset, they weren't as nervous as they were in the face-to-face setting; moreover, they could see more clearly about their peer's facial expression via webcam and the screen which made them feel that the interaction was much real to them. That's why the social presence score in the mode of CMC with webcam and headset had the highest score.

This different result gives me different perspective about how physical space might or might not affect students' language learning if some factors such as familiarity of their peers aren't carefully taken into consideration in the lesson planning.

Research Progress 1

Since my midterm research paper critique focused on blended learning, I would like to expand it a little bit further for my final project. So currently, my final project is about distance learning and my research question is as follows:
1. How does physical space closeness affect EFL (English as a Foreign Language) young learners' learning in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) which hosts a synchronous course?

2. What are the factors that make the effects?

Due to several reasons (e.g. data collection, time constraint, minor participant issues, etc.), I decided to do a literature review for finding possible answers for these questions.

So this week, I focused on finding papers that talk about "synchromodal learning environment". I found one paper that did a research which is quite close to the learning condition I am looking. In that research, students in a face-to-face setting have to log into VLE to learn with their online peers; meanwhile, their online peers also occupied a physical space in the face-to-face setting via technological devices (e.g. iPad). In this research, the researchers tried to find out the degree of social presence of the learners. But I was also hoping that I could know more about whether their feeling of social presence of their peers would have an impact on their learning or interaction. However, in that study, perhaps that was not their focus, so it did not mention anything about it.

So the problem I encountered this week is that I attempted to look for the impact of learning in synchromodal learning environment. Nonetheless, either I did not use the correct keywords or there is few studies on this topic (I think it is the latter reason that causes this problem). And when I searched for the keywords "synchromodal learning environment", there are just a few papers which were all done by the same researchers and published in the same year but published in different journals or symposiums. Hmm... I think I probably need to move on and start to look for papers in other areas.

Response to Questions from the Presentation

Just a quick recap of the paper I critiqued on my presentation. The study that I reviewed is "Interactions in a Blending Environment for English Language Learning" . The purpose of this study is to identify different kinds of interaction present in a virtual learning environment and face to face settings for English learning, and also to analyze the impact of various interactions on language learning.

1. What role does gender play in this research?

In fact, gender doesn't play any role and it's not even mentioned in this research. That's why I mentioned it in my critique because I feel like that gender to some extent would affect people's interaction. In this research, we can only see that there's a disproportion of gender in the English class. There were 11 female students and only 5 male students. I mentioned in my presentation that another study conducted by Caspi, Chajut, andSaporta (2008) showed results about interaction from the gender aspect. In that study, it showed that men tended to speak up more in face-to-face settings than in the virtual learning environment; women had the tendency to be more engaged in online posting than men. Since there were more women than men in this study, I was curious whether this disproportion of gender in class would also cause any differences regarding interaction for language learning in a blended learning environment. For instance, male students are too talkative in class which makes female students intimidated or discourages female students to have more interaction in class. Or probably female students don't feel like having online interaction (e.g. respond to male students' posts) due to their bad experiences in face-to-face settings (this may be one of the causes why there was no student-student interaction in the virtual learning environment in this study). That's also why I suggested in my presentation that the authors should also look into this factor while carrying out this research.

2. Why do you think interactions in virtual environments is important for students?

In this study, it's more than just learning in a virtual environment. It's also about the connection of learning in both face-to-face settings and the virtual learning environment. According to the literature review, it is said that there should be some overlap of the lessons taught in face-to-face settings and in the virtual learning environment because it helps students reinforce the knowledge they acquire from one place (e.g. in class) in another place (online platform). So in this case, it's important for students to have interactions in the virtual environment because it will help them practice their target learning language. It provides them another platform for them to use the target language outside of the classroom as well. We know that in a EFL (English as a foreign language) country, students usually don't have many chances to use the language outside the classroom. It means that once they leave the classroom, they have little exposure to the target language and probably they also won't review what they have learned in class until they go to class next time. By offering them this virtual learning environment, students would be able to expose themselves to the target language outside of the classroom, literally anytime and anywhere. This not only enables the students to practice the target language, but also increase their interest in learning the language for they actually get a place to really use the language and put what they have learned into practice.

But in order to keep students stay in that online community to learn and practice the language, interaction is one of the key factors to keep them there. This is because people would be more engaged in that virtual learning environment if someone responds to them or ask them questions. Either it's in written form or verbal form, this kind of interaction, again, allows the students to practice the language which reaches one of the students' goals of learning the language: being able to use the target language to communicate with others. Aside from that, through the interaction, people would also feel being valued by others and contributing more to the online community. In that sense, if more people participate in that online community, more knowledge would be contributed there. So they are constructing a knowledge base on the Internet for their online community members to learn about. That is to say, learning no longer just resides in classrooms; learning can happen beyond the classroom walls. It happens in the virtual learning environment at any time and anywhere!

Still another point I want to make is that I think there's a correlation between the interaction in class and in a virtual learning environment. If people in the virtual learning environment build up this friendly online community which makes all the members want to participate in, freely express and respond to each other's post, this kind of sense of online community belongingness could possibly be transcended into face-to-face settings. People who are used to be shy or hesitant in speaking up or interacting with people in classroom would be more comfortable now in delivering a speech in front of the class or having a discussion with their classmates there. So the above reasons are why I think interaction is important for students in a virtual learning environment, particularly in a blended learning context in this study!

A Virtual Second Self & Digital Courtesy

In this article Can You Hear Me Now, the author mentioned that many people have the opportunity to experience a virtual second self due to computers since later 1990s; people can do whatever they want to do in their virtual world. This statement made me think of the comments brought up in last week's discussion. Some female classmates talked about having two avatars that are in different genders while playing the game. They said that they can act completely different when being a male avatar like being a jerk or mean to others online. This is a very interesting psychological change in a person's state of mind when doing something like this in online game. I used to play online games but never had an experience like that. I always picked a female avatar, but my behavior of creating and presenting my female avatar in the real world maybe a little be similar to my classmates'. That is, I usually would dress her up in a completely different way which I would not wear things like that in my real life like fancy gown, really high-heels, mini-skirt, heavy make-up,etc. And my female avatar would act completely like a lady who comes from a high-class family which does not resemble me or my background in my real life. So I guess this is what the author of the article has been talking about--a virtual second self. Since I won't be able to experience those things in my real life, I just wanna to see how it goes or feels like in my virtual second life. Hmm~ it also makes me wonder how I would act when I present myself as a male avatar. Maybe next time when I play an online game, I'll give it a try to see how it goes!


Another interesting point that drew my attention in this article is that it talked about how people "try to" show some "digital courtesy" such as occasionally stopped using the laptop or giving the speaker some attention during a conference. Indeed, this kind of stuff happens a lot in today's world, especially after the emergence of iPad and laptop, and not to mention "smartphone". This comment quickly reminded me of two experiences I had in the past few months. I took one course in TC which the instructor of that course was super nice and flexible; the structure of the course was basically lecture-based. So after a few weeks, I saw some of the classmates starting to use their laptop to do other things like doing online shopping, using online communicative tool to chat with their friends, doing an assignment for another course, etc. Another incident that I had happened in this summer. I helped out as a teaching assistant at an international summer college for students from overseas to take courses. My friend also helped out as a TA for a math course. One day she showed me this picture. You have to take a closer look to understand what happened at that moment.

Yes, this did happen in class. The student was watching a cartoon Crayon Shin-Chan by using his laptop. This seemed to be very ridiculous to me because they spent around 400 USD on for the credits, but this student should choose to be like this in class. It also seemed to be disrespectful to the professor who was teaching the class then. Because of things like this happen in class, no wonder many teachers would ban students from using cellphones or laptops in class in order to make sure that students are really learning at that moment or prevent students from being distracted or lured by the laptops to do something irrelevant to the course. And this kind of phenomena (use the technological tools in a wrong way in class) is universal. I believe that schools around the world all have this kind of problem and try to find solutions to deal with it. This brings me the questions of how do we regulate students' use of the technological tools like laptop for the right purpose, and how do we strike a balance between regulation and the freedom of using them?

Social Life on the Internet

(1) What are your thoughts about virtual environments and "life on line?"

I like to play games that allows me to do some things in a virtual environment. For instance, the app game that I used to play is called "Home Design". It's a game that allows player to decorate their own home and design the way they want it to be. In this game, there's also the avatar of the player. This avatar can go to other users' houses to visit and socialize with other avatars. But the avatar can't talk with each other. Users can only socialize with other players by leaving comments in others' comment wall. I guess the way the design the game to be like this is because the game designer want its users to fully focus on "designing home" rather than socializing with their neighbors which might become another second life game. I kinda like this idea of just directing players' attention to design itself.

Speaking of this kind of virtual environment, what I like about it is that it allows me to do what I cannot do in my real life. In the real world, I am not a home designer and of course I am not that artistic in creating a beautiful home. However, it's always my dream to design my own comfy house. By playing around in this virtual environment, I get the chance to fulfill my designing dream. I can have a magnificent house with splendid furniture like chandelier or fancy bed or a big backyard with a Japanese style pond over there. Even if I buy some ugly furniture or wallpaper there or even mess up with my design, I could tear them down within a few clicks without losing my actual money. In that virtual environment, I feel that I'm powerful and talented in perfecting my house. And within a few clicks,I can also go to my neighbors' houses to check out their home design and maybe imitate some of their design style. This--randomly walk into a neighbor's or a stranger's house just to check out their home design--is what I won't be able to do in my real life. But again, this virtual environment grants me this opportunity to achieve what I cannot do in my real world. I guess that's one of the reasons why so many people are so obsessed with playing around in virtual worlds in order to escape from their real life and feel empowered to do things in their virtual environment.

While spending some time getting away from the real world won't be a bad thing, users still have to be cautious about not being too indulged in that environment. Otherwise, they might end up spending too much time online and losing themselves in the virtual reality and might even have a hard time going back to the real world or socializing with others in their real life.

My another thought related to this question is about the reading "Second Thoughts About Second Life". In that article, the author mentioned that we overlooked the violence, sexual harassment and other misbehavior happen in virtual environment. Those are something we have to take into account and think about seriously while we are playing the games in virtual reality. I've never thought about the impact those misbehavior could bring to a player until I read this article. As it said, the avatar is like the representation of oneself. It represents the player's wishes, aspirations, virtues, etc. It's very authentic and just like "the other you". I think about it and realize that it's quite true that a player would definitely have emotional impact when its avatar is attacked or sexually harassed. S/he would have the feeling that s/he is the one being offended even though s/he isn't being physically assaulted. That kind of experience can still make people feel emotionally uncomfortable! So it's for sure that more laws should consider this kind of problem and have more action on how to deal with it.  

The app game : Home Design 

(2) Do you feel there is a correlation between life online and academic achievement, for better or worse?

For me, it depends on how you use the internet. Some people would make good use of the Internet and manage it well even if they have an active life online. I have a personal experience about how I make good use of Facebook to make it both a place for socializing with my friends and learning. A few years ago, I had to take official exams to compete with other teachers to be admitted to teach in a public school. To prepare for the exams, I had to do lots of test questions from previous years. After I was done with those test questions, what I would usually did is to organize the questions which I did wrong and vocabulary which I didn't know and put them on my "personal Facebook club". So every time I went through Facebook to go for a rest and reading through my friends posts, I would also go to my personal study club on Facebook to go over my notes. During that time, eventually I found out that I spent more time browsing through my notes of my own Facebook club rather than socializing out there with my friends! Luckily, that year I was fortunate enough to be admitted to teach in a public school after competing in that fierce exams. I certainly would give some credits to my Facebook club. I didn't lost myself there; on the contrary, it helped to attain my goal in the end.

Based on my own experience, I would say that it really depends on how you manage your life online. If you can manage yourself and time well, you can have an active online life and also use the Internet correctly for learning purpose which might also lead to better academic achievement like I did.

Part of my personal learning club on Facebook

PowerPoint -- Pro or Against & Week 3 readings

In our last week class discussion, the professor mentioned that some people think that PowerPoint shouldn't be used when people are presenting important information. They think PowerPoint could cause people to make bad decisions and even lead to horrible consequences. 

In the beginning, I thought those people are just too extreme about hating PowerPoint and didn't think that PPT could cause harm. However, after the professor gave the example of NASA's Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster and I read the PPT(6 provocations for big data) of this week, I rethink about the impact and effect that PPT could bring to the audience.

On reading that PPT, I had the feeling that some information need to be illustrated more rather than just had a few bullet points listed there. Because of the succinct bullet points, I am not sure whether I fully know what the presenters want to present. I understand why the presenter did so because s/he wanted to make the PPT simple and readable. But this also means that some important detailed information would be left out in this PPT; audience must fully concentrate during the lecture or they would miss those points and probably jump to wrong conclusion just like the decision makers in that Columbia space shuttle disaster case. Like what the professor stated in class, some data can not be completely presented on the slides. Sometimes, this important and detailed information need to be presented in paper so that full elaboration and information can be shown there. And experts can make better decision based on the comprehensive information. 

Speaking of being pro or against the use of PowerPoint, I have a neutral stance. Sometimes, I do feel that PPT works for both the presenter and the audience. As a more visual person, I would prefer the presenter to show me some PPTs instead of doing all the talk the whole time. Visualization helps me grasp the concept or the content of the talk better. However, this benefit would cause some problems for me from time to time. For instance, I might rely too much on the PPT and so concentrated on reading the words from the slides which I turn off my ears. In this case, I would miss some information which isn't listed on the slides but explained by the presenter. But if you ask me whether I'm still for using PPT after hearing the example of NASA's tragedy, I would still say yes because it's friendly for both presenter and audience. But to avoid tragedies like NASA's, I would say that probably it would be best for presenters to prepare both slides and paper which could be referred to after the presentation. 

One more thing on my mind is that we talked about some alternatives for PPTs like Prezi. Personally, I am not a fan of Prezi. In fact, I kind of dislike it. When I first used it, I thought it's kinda cool and more dynamic compared to PPT. Prezi allows your slides to move around, zoom in and zoom out. As a presenter, I like this animation. But as an audience, I really don't like it because the movement of the slides makes me feel dizzy and uncomfortable. If the presenter keeps moving on his slides and zooming in and out, I think I might pass out very soon. And some people say that PPT presents information in a linear way. However, in my opinion, presenters can add some links to the PPTs (link one ppt to another) or add some other special animation effects to make it more dynamic and interactive!

I found out an website that is totally "Anti-PowerPoint". It's called Anti-PowerPoint Party. I don't even know there's such thing until I goolged some related info and found it. It's quite interesting to see what these advocates have to say about PPT.


*** Week 3 reading
I found the reading "The Reader-to-Leader Framework" pretty interesting.
It talked about that social participation can be categorized as "reading, contributing, collaborating and leading". When I looked back on my online social participation pattern, it's pretty much like it. I still remembered that when I was in 5th grade, there was a trend of creating "online clubs" which were a kind of online community supported by Yahoo in Taiwan. In the beginning, I joined different clubs like western music club, English learning club, etc. People would post pop music in the club or share related information about the singers. At that time, I just read through the information and listened to music recommended by other online members of the group. But after a few weeks, I had the thought that I wanted to create my own club and be the chief of the club who is in charge of the online community. So I did create my own online music club. I started to post stuff there and organize people's postings in my forum. 

My own experience of social participation wasn't exactly following the linear pattern. But it got all the elements there. I first did the reading and then contributing, collaborating and leading happened altogether. I felt motivated to manage my own online club because I want to have this "ownership"--that something I own it, not other people who own the online club. And the reason why I kept posting things in my club is because I received good comments or responses from my club members. It's very motivating whenever you see that your hard work pay off just by reading a few positive lines made by other online members.

It's a pity that Yahoo online club grew out of favor as time goes by. When I went to junior high, that stuff was no longer popular. In the end, Taiwan Yahoo decided to take out that stuff. Many years later, blogging became popular in Taiwan, too. And that's another story for me. 

Cool Online Community & 2 Questions

In Thursday's class, some classmates shared a few interesting online communities such as Quora. I have one to share here and it's called "VoiceTube". Basically, it's a website for English language learners to learn and practice their listening and speaking skills. There are thousands of videos imported from Youtube; staff of VoiceTube would translate English into Mandarin and make both subtitles for those videos.

But what surprises me the most is the nice atmosphere created by this "Pronunciation Challenge". It's a place where one staff of VoiceTube would record a short audio clip containing pronunciation of target sentences and explanation of the sentences for ELLs to practice the pronunciation. What ELLs would do is to record their own practice and upload it to the web. At first, I thought people would just upload their practice to the page and nothing more. However, it's not like that and not that boring at all. In fact, people not only upload their recordings but also type some other messages to share how they feel about the today's pronunciation challenge. They talk about the problems they have, compliment on others' good pronunciation or even give advice to other ELLs on how to improve their pronunciation.

An example of how ELLs interacted with others in the online community.

Moreover, I thought people would also just record their pronunciation of their target sentences. But there were several times that I heard more than those things. Sometimes people also record their own viewpoints of the target sentences in their clip. The most interesting one I've ever heard so far is that a young kid recorded his own singing at the end of his practice recording; lots of people responded to his pronunciation and singing and encouraged him to keep his good work! 

This is one of the examples that the kid recorded his pronunciation practice and sang a song at the end of his recording.

I think that's the beauty of this kind of online learning community! Users would be able to help out and encourage each other in learning even though they are totally strangers. And the more interaction they receive via the online community, the more motivated they become in terms of learning the target language. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised to see that this pronunciation challenge works so well without the staff further being in charge of its discussion board. I thought they need to have the host who posts daily pronunciation challenge to respond to the audience/ELLs so as to facilitate the learning atmosphere there. It turned out that the staff and the host don't have to step in and things work quite well!



*** 2 Questions:
From the reading "Technology as Social Practice", Bertram mentioned that in educational settings the question that educators should ask is not why the tool is employed or what is lost by using it; on the contrary, teachers ought to focus on the question how to make the best of the technological tool during the class.


This is a very thought-provoking viewpoint. Looking back on my own teaching journey, I was like that kind of teacher who constantly think about "what kind of technological tools" ought to be used during my teaching. However, I forget to look at the aspect of effectiveness of the use of the tool which I think is a very important question to think about! After all, students are the main focus of learning. I feel that I am being too subjective in terms of choosing what technological tool to be used. I think what "might be useful and helpful" for them to learn from my own perspective. I ought to switch my role to students when it comes to learning with the technological tool! Therefore, the question that I am interested in exploring more is how to choose an appropriate technological tool for students to learn with and how to make it effective in terms of learning.  



Another question that I am interested in knowing more stemmed from our first class discussion. During that time, we talked about "self-identity" in the cyber world. A classmate talked about having different Facebook accounts for different groups of people. Another classmate shared her experience of having different social media platforms for different groups of people. These got me think about how I presented myself in the cyber world. Take my Facebook for example. Some of my friends use their real name as their Facebook account. But for me, I don't do that. I don't feel comfortable in using my Mandarin names out there. Thus, I put my English name up there. For me, it's just like a nickname or an alias. I do so because I don't feel like expose my real name in the cyber world. This probably has something to do with keep my privacy. But the conflicting thing here is that I sometimes post my life on my Facebook wall. So it's quite interesting for me to think about my viewpoint and my behavior on this! So the question that I would like to explore more is how do people construct their self-identity in the cyber world and the factors that affect the whole process.