Jacob Klein's Blog

Week 10: Final reflections on presenting at the Expo

jacobtheklein — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:24:12 +0000

The last week of this course was very enjoyable; I loved seeing the incredibly diverse projects of my classmates and the possibility to give my presentation to a group and receive critical feedback. The size and quality of the crowd at the Expo exceeded my expectations, and I spoke at length with, among others, a venture capitalist, a game designer, an engineering professor, and a cognitive science student who poked and prodded into the feasibility and design of my game concept. I was challenged on a few points: firstly, the financial viability of building a game with top-level graphics. As the venture capitalist pointed out, budgets for blockbuster games rival those of Hollywood movies.

It’s very challenging to get a meeting at the major game makers, let alone approval for a new game. He suggested a more scaffolded approach, starting with a more modest web-based casual game, which, if successful, could be expanded into a console game. The engineering professor had a related concern. He rightly pointed out that all of my sample graphics are movies that take a supercomputer days to render – a far cry from real-time rendered game graphics! He pointed out that many new video games are rendered in the cloud. This is an interesting technical concern I look forward to exploring. Another possibility is to use an existing platform, such as LittleBigPlanet, to develop a high-level prototype for the game; in fact, this is exactly the structure for one half of the MacArthur Foundation-sponsored game contest recently announced by President Obama.

Another interesting point the engineering professor made regards the meaning of the scientific method. I pointed out a limitation of a science video game; namely, that true scientific understanding comes from creating knowledge with experimentation, as students do when participating in a science fair. The professor pointed out a compelling intermediate between passive gameplay and knowledge creation, namely hypothesis testing within an existing artificial world. By testing different game possibilities, a student could learn how to test assumptions and use the method of experimentation to verify knowledge. This seems quite achievable within a game context, and would nicely connect the game experience to the experience of actual scientists.

Overall, the audience was very enthusiastic about my proposal, which only adds to my passion to pursue it. The Expo felt like an excellent dry run for this summer’s Masters project presentations, and added to my feeling of urgency. I want to decide on my project as soon as possible and get cracking! Seven months will go by like

Lastly, the experience verified what I’ve learned in this class and at the dSchool this quarter: the importance of rapid prototyping and iteration. Only by having a visual model of my project was I able to elicit nuanced feedback from the audience, and I feel lucky that I didn’t spend more than a couple months on the project before I was able to present.

Week 7: “Just like Real Life”

jacobtheklein — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:14:40 +0000

I enjoyed this week’s presentation of the idea for View Xstreme Suite, an exciting video technology with a very compelling value proposition: “we can save your University thousands of dollars for every recorded class.” But Paul Frank’s comment echoed my own sentiments exactly: why limit yourself to “recreating the live experience of a classroom”? In some ways, no video experience over the internet will ever recreate the classroom: you’ll never be able eat the snacks, or shake the hand of the presenter. But video has many affordances that a live classroom doesn’t. Why not aim for something even better?

As I mentioned in class, the primitive form of many media is an attempt to mimic real life experiences. Early movies were essentially filmed plays; early recordings were recorded live performances with no post-production editing; post-Sgt Pepper’s, every good music producer works the post-production suite as another set of instruments.

The most ambitious vision of future video learning I’ve seen is in the recent Star Trek film, in which young Vulcans, including Spock receive scholastic training from an 360 immersive video screen, and Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise uses a wraparound, very tactile video display to scroll through reality.
While these may be decades away, current technology has many affordances that a live lecture class doesn’t:

The ability to zoom in on one part of the field of vision, which the View Xstreme technology brilliantly enables.
The ability to scroll through time and highlight specific sections of the video.
Note-taking within the application that is instantly connected by a link to its source timecode from the lecture
The ability to label sections of the video with text or visual or audio identifiers. As discussed in class, these “chapter markers” could be seeded by the instructor, and then developed through crowd-sourcing. If a classmate felt that one particular passage was useful, that could be shared with other viewers.
The ability to watch lectures at a fast speed. From personal experience watching long documentary interviews, most speakers can be understood at 150% or 125% speed. Many viewers who want an time-efficient way to hear material that they mostly already understand would probably enjoy this option.
Instant assessments, personalized for one’s learning ability, either in text or audio form, to test what one is comprehending from a lecture.
Audio-only mode.
Audio-mostly mode, which would allow you to listen to just the audio until the few parts of the lecture that require you to see some visuals. The video would alert you as to when, if at all, you need to look up.
Foreign language subtitles for English as a Second Language learners.

These are only some of the possible extensions of a filmed classroom application. Most require more work on the content production side, but because video can scale so well, it might be worth that extra effort creating great video content so as to enroll more distance students.

Week 6: Encoding Specificity…

jacobtheklein — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:04:59 +0000

I really enjoyed last week’s class, a brief but valuable introduction into several learning theories.

A few observations: the theory of dual coding seems like it will necessarily run up against the limits of cognitive load, and I doubt there are any general principles that would guide a designer to know exactly where the line is between appropriately diverse multi-modal imprinting, and redundancy and overload. User testing is needed for each audience and content domain.

The theory of encoding specificity also grabbed my attention. It seems undoubtedly true; the more lifelike learning is, the more authentic the simulation, teaching environment, and curriculum, the more likely learning will transfer into “real life.” But of course, a teaching environment is almost always somewhat different from real life, otherwise you are just “learning-on-the-go,” which has its benefits, but doesn’t allow for low-risk mistakes and doesn’t allow for scaffolding. So the theory of encoding specificity really begs the question: in what way more lifelike? In other words, in what dimensions does a learning environment need to be lifelike, and in what dimensions is it better, or at least tolerable, for a learning environment to be simpler, lower-risk, or exaggerated, in contrast to the place where the skills and knowledge learned will eventually be applied?

A clear example of this appears in Piya Sorcar’s “Teach AIDS” work; she uses cartoon characters, instead of video or still images of real people, to depict patients and doctors having difficult discussions about AIDS, conversations learners are supposed to mimic.

The cartoon characters, and somewhat exaggerated voices, are less life-like than video-taped actors, but this brings the project two main affordances: people uncomfortable with the topic will probably be less uncomfortable watching cartoons, and the cartoons can be more readily reappropriated for other cultures, languages, etc. In fact, as Scott McCloud notes in his analytical work Understanding Comics, viewers are more likely to bond with a less specific representation than a nuanced, detailed representation, and this explains much of the popularity of cartoons, comics, avatars, anime, etc. Without surface details that allows us to categorize a person as a specific type, a simplified cartoon allows us to empathize and not get focused on minute facial details. So perhaps a distinction should be made between the form that learning media takes and the form that a learning practice or simulation takes. For example, in a blended curriculum using Teach AIDS, a teacher may want students to practice the conversational skills they’ve learned from cartoons in a highly realistic environment with a doctor’s office. Or, perhaps realism should scaffolded; students start enacting a highly structured, theatrical dialogue with cartoonish props, etc. and eventually make their way to a realistic imitation.

This also would seem to be the case with narrative; narratives simplify life and often provide causality to situations that are in fact much messier. Real life rarely structures itself into three acts with a climax and resolution. But by learning narrative, we are given a lens onto the world that structures events and lets us understand interpersonal dynamics, for example. “Oh, the tension is rising between these two people; what will be the climax of their conflict?” So it seems that the learning actually shapes our perception, and our experience of “real life.” I’m curious how much the theory of encoding specificity grapples with these complications.

Week 5: A Virtual High School

jacobtheklein — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:32:25 +0000

Last week’s visit by the team from Edison Learning was eye-opening. I thought Professor Kim’s rule that eLearning most helps those at the tails of achievement was particularly true for the virtual high school the team described; I think it would be a weak education for most students, but for special populations—teenage mothers, advanced athletes, and kids who live very far from schools, eLearning could be a savior, especially because of the modularity and personalization the Edison system allows.

Some other observations:
• At one point the curriculum director described a virtual game of sorting concepts into appropriate bins as an example of kinesthetic learning! That’s setting the bar pretty low; if that’s kinesthetic, then writing with a pencil is kinesthetic! I don’t know what the exact definition should be, but certainly it needs to be more full-body than clicking a mouse.

• It seemed that most of the assessments were pure recall, Bloom’s lowest form of learning. Papert’s idea of Constructionism (an extension of Constructivism) comes to mind: we learn through not only interaction with the world, but by making things. I’m not talking about drama, art, and music (though those would be good for students as well); I’m thinking of creative assessments for core classes, in which a student creates an object or experience that reflects newly learned material. The Edison team mentioned that for English, the students wrote essays, but where are the science projects, the historical timelines, the math visualizations, the social studies skits? If all a student does is digest and regurgitate information, I believe they are getting a false model of what true learning entails. A simple digital show and tell (using for example the Nokia cell cameras employed in East Palo Alto, or video Skype) could enable assessment of these more creative assignments.

• I was disappointed that the video module used a (fairly poorly rendered) virtual character instead of a human being. These students spend many hours in front of a computer screen; why not give a more human presence to their lessons?

• The full scope of what they’ve created is impressive. Full content and assessment for dozens and dozens of high school classes; a live tutoring system; a technology delivery infrastructure. It’s a very complex enterprise.

• The team remarked that 90% of the Education World is against for-profit schools. I think that diversity is probably quite good for the school system in general; let a thousand flowers bloom, and then remove the weeds. However, it is a bit disconcerting that, left with say 100K in a regional budget, Edison would take that money and give it back to shareholders instead of spending it on student programs. Their profit motive encourages them to give only the bare acceptable minimum to students, not the absolute maximum that their budget will allow, as in public or even most private schools. That said, the team who presented seemed genuinely passionate about their product and about improving it for the students. I wouldn’t want my child to attend, but for many students, I’m sure it’s a lifeline back into education.

Week 4: Visuals and Passion on the web

jacobtheklein — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:57:02 +0000

Last week’s class was filled with student presentations, exploring web applications and sites that address an underserved population. Firstly, the diversity of sites was striking: homeless youth, Third World English learners, urban youth, rural communities, students with ADD – every presentation had a different community to explore. Also the style of presentations varied: there were videos, PowerPoints, a radio clip, demonstrations, and most striking in my view, an expanding visual concept map by Catherine Harrell on sites for depressed children. Catherine started with the words “Depressed Children” in the center of the screen and during her presentation filled in a circle of connected phrases and subcategories, all centered on the main topic. This had all the advantages of a concept map—it showed the relationships between the different parts of the presentation and kept the old information visible for integration and reconsideration—without the disadvantage of overwhelming the audience with lots of information at the beginning. Also, each word had a small icon next to it, which helped make the concepts (a child running away, a child who won’t eat) more concrete, as well as making the presentation more engaging and a bit suspenseful (what will the next icon be?). It’s a presentation technique I really enjoyed and will probably steal wholeheartedly soon…thanks Catherine!

The presentations also got me thinking about passion. Passion is an incredibly important part of teaching; I don’t understand it completely, but there seem to be several factors:

1. By expressing passion for the material, the teacher shows that the subject matter is important to learn, which is much more effective than saying “Class, this is important. Be sure to pay attention.”

2. The teacher raises the status of the audience, the learner(s), by implying that their time together in the classroom is important. One could be really passionate about fractals, for example, but think so lowly of your audience that you discuss fractals without any energy or commitment. By teaching passionately, you express respect and interest in your audience, showing that not just the content matter, but right now, this moment in the classroom, is important.

3. Teaching passionately models healthy behavior for students. Who doesn’t want to live a passionate life? Very frightened people perhaps, people who are scared by their own life, but even they, deep down, I believe, want to be enthusiastic about something. The teacher raises their own status—look, I’m a happy person with something I love—and that kicks in our motivation and natural ability to mimic positive behavior. Thanks mirror neurons!

4. Anything done passionately is more engaging to watch. Perhaps this is just a combination of the previous 3 factors, or other factors I have not identified.

Passion between people is a true mystery, as any songwriter wailing about love will attest, but I think passion for teaching may be just as strange and fickle. So how does one express passion on a flat web interface? How can the voice of a web application show what all of my favorite classroom teachers have shown in the movements of their arms and smiles and modulations of voice? Whatever prototype I develop for our next digital artifact, this is a parameter I want to explore.

Week 3: Selling Learning Theories, and a Testing Idea

jacobtheklein — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:37:02 +0000

After last week’s class I’m very excited to read more Bloom and Vygotsky, and even more excited to apply them: to ideate dozens and dozens of learning programs and then use Bloom’s taxonomy and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development to improve the most promising. Last class we also worked on mock team presentations to create eLearning programs for a corporate and academic client. I enjoyed listening to the presentations, and especially all the features my classmates considered: whether to test groups or individuals, how to pace the learning, how to be culturally considerate, and how to structure diverse learning goals. Still, I felt fairly incapable of critically assessing these programs, and that is exactly that’s the reason I came to grad school. There are so many ways to sell a product, to shuck and jive, wow your audience, create a killer presentation, find a juicy anecdote, or, with my particular skills, jazz up a flashy, smooth video presentation with a clean narrative structure and slick music underneath. And those are important skills. But I think what academia offers over the corporate world is a chance to really assess critically, both theoretically, and empirically. Is this learning program structured logically? Now, we’re not dealing with chemistry or even biology, it’s very fuzzy social science, so there will never be definitive proof of one learning program’s superiority over another. But I’m still thirsting for more case studies, more shining examples, to show what avenues of learning are fruitful to explore. With the multiplicity of cognitive strategies (see very useful intro here), it is easy to find a theory that justifies almost any design or curriculum choice, especially when some of them are as contradictory as the “Redundancy Principle”: redundant information can enhance or distract learning (!) Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language that, “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.” Similarly, I believe that correct principles should choose the design. Now design is not always deductive; it often comes from experimental tinkering and brainstorming; but I’d like to know what I’m selling before I sell it. So far, Professor Kim’s study on the strength of concept mapping, and Song and Agogino’s work on the importance of generating many ideas at the beginning of ideation (exactly what they’re teaching in my designSchool bootcamp class) are the only pieces of heavy duty research-backed pedagogy I’ve seen. Want…more….proof…..Need….more….evidence…..

Very excited to meet Edison School, who will be visiting our class, and to read more about University of Phoenix—what a fascinating company. Even though the dropout rate is 40%, they are obviously doing a lot right, and I hope the snobbery that I’ve heard against eLearning goes away. I wonder how much Phoenix experiments with curriculum, testing, and web design.

Lastly, an idea about testing:
Most standardized tests encourage test-takers to either guess, even if you don’t know the answer, or to be very cautious and rarely guess. Why not encourage meta-cognition and awareness about one’s one confidence by letting test-takers answer with a selection on a slider, such as:

That way test-takers get feedback both on their knowledge, and on their own confidence of their knowledge.

Excited to see my classmates presentations this week–what social issues websites have they found?

Walking Tours, Refugees, and Learning English With Your Ears

jacobtheklein — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:58:38 +0000

In last week’s class we discussed the future of mobile learning applications…wow. Exciting. What happens when you can access the entire library of human knowledge + powerful cloud computation power from anywhere in the world? There’s many discoveries to be made in this space. One example: I always love a good walking tour, be it in nature or in the city. I love to see the world from an expert’s eyes, I like the exercise, and was it not the mobile applications developer Nietzsche himself who said “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”?

So: I would like my mobile device to know what I currently want to learn and use the world around me to teach me. To take an easy example, I want to know the names of trees and plants (especially edible ones.) If my iPhone could know when I’m near an edible plant and tell me its name, family, and King Phillip Good Spaghetti, I’d be quite happy. Perhaps so happy I wouldn’t consider spiking it into the pavement when my AT&T phone service drops out twice per conversation.

We also learned about 1,001 Stories, Professor Kim’s storywriting contest for Ugandan youth. I was inspired but also concerned: how do we know what happens to the prize money? How do we know that literacy skills are useful in this specific culture and economy? How do we know what they need? With a few day’s perspective I think my worries were mostly based in the fear of confronting such a depressing situation as a refugee camp. It seems irredeemably bad, and it’s easier to be paralyzed into doubt than to try something and risk some unintended consequences. However, education is a fundamental right, and a fundamental good: more education is good in and of itself and often leads to better economies, democracies, families, and more fulfilling lives. I’m interested to see how the contest unfolds. I do wonder how using a Western audience to judge the stories will perhaps pressure Ugandan youths to self-present in a certain way so as to impress far off audiences they will never meet. Perhaps there is a way to structure the contest with runoffs, and a local tournaments, or a separate “local prize” to encourage students to write not only for a Western audience, but also for their peers.

Item! I think I may want to create my project on teaching foreigners how to “speak the English.” Why?

It’s useful to essentially everyone worldwide.
I’m an expert in English (e.g. “Hello, Officer. I would like to call my lawyer.”)
I have a hunch most people are learning English in an inefficient way because of my personal experience with the revelatory Pimsleur Language Learning System which I used 4 years ago to achieve a very limited, but useful and comprehensible Chinese vocabulary.

Basically, I walked around Central Park in NYC listening to a CD, talking to myself out loud for a few days a week for about a month, mimicking the sounds, and answering questions in Chinese. I swear I learned more Chinese in that month than the Spanish I learned in an entire year of traditional instruction back in high school. Unlike its competitor Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur uses no visual aids, under the logic that writing and reading are secondary skills that we did not evolve to employ, whereas we have a natural aural language learning instinct. The system also uses graduated interval recall (similar to the spaced repetition program Anki repeating new words often and gradually increasing the amount of time between testing.

Is Pimsleur effective? He’s often cited in language acquisition literature, but I haven’t yet found a good study that tests his curriculum. I will say this: the unusual approach and purportedly scientific method excited me and made me more confident that I was learning the material. I was never good at language classes in primary and middle school and this method made me feel liberated from my past constraints. Merely the appearance of high-status expertise aided the system’s effectiveness.

A challenge for employing this system on the Pocket School platform: Pimsleur is completely audio-based, and therefore un-transmittable over SMS….

Perhaps this is not the right exact program, but my own experience shows that one does not need a traditional classroom, or even a teacher, to learn the basics of a language. There’s much instruction we can do on mobile devices.

Web-based Technologies in Education…Week 1

jacobtheklein — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:17:38 +0000

This past year, working in various positions in seven different states for the Obama campaign, I had several experiences empowering non-technologically savvy citizens with web tools. Last January, volunteering in NYC, I noticed there were no volunteer events on an upcoming Saturday, so I used the my.barackobama.com website to create and publicize a voter contact event in Union Square. I was worried I’d be standing out there holding my Obama sign alone, but over 10 other volunteers read about my event and joined me with only a day’s notice. I had an instant connection with one woman at the event, a very inspired Brooklyn mother named Chude, and at the end of the day she asked me how to create her own event. I told her it was quite simple—it had taken me 5 minutes—but she was very intimidated, so that night I spoke to her on the phone and slowly walked her through the steps to posting. She squealed with delight when her event posted online, and she soon regularly led a biweekly event talking to voters at her local subway station. Chude was very grateful to me for showing her how to communicate through the campaign website, and it remains one my favorite experiences of my year working on the campaign, a vivid example of the civic renewal that came as a by-product of winning the Presidency. I hope to use this class to create a similarly empowering experience for an underserved population.

I’m also very interested in interface and multimedia theory, so this week I jumped into one of the suggested readings: Professor Kim’s recent paper “The effects of a concept map-based information display in an electronic portfolio system on information processing and retention” which showed a significant improvement in speed and content retention of a 5^th grade science curriculum with the use of a concept map interface. However, even with that (remarkable and encouraging) positive result,

“the current study’s findings do not pinpoint what combination of attributions of the concept-mapping display can best aid the learner and optimize cognitive load.”

Indeed—has this kind of micro-interface research been done? Can content maps become more visually useful? A cursory web search shows that most concept maps may serve as an interface to multimedia (as in the study) but the maps themselves are only visual in their layout, featuring boxed noun text connected to each other with arrows featuring verb text, as in the study’s example:

How much additional visualization and use of symbols is helpful? For example, in the study example, what if the phrase “Layers of gas” was replaced with a visual content-map such as:

Because the layers of Earth’s atmosphere literally sit on top of each other, it seems like a natural for an iconic representation. I’m curious if having this diagram serve as the top-level interface itself would aid retention or reduce access time.

“Cognitive load-reduction options can better accommodate individual learning preferences based on verbal, visual or spatial abilities.”

How distinct are these abilities, or are they really just flavors of g? A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has me skeptical of Gardner’s entire multiple intelligence conceit. Secondly, would giving the power of “Cognitive load-reduction” to the student, for example with a complexity control lever at the bottom of the content-map interface, aid students feeling of control? Or would such an additional control only increase cognitive load, as Wallen, Plass and Brünken (2005) found to be the case with additional forms of electronic annotation? Do any learning products customize interfaces based on a cognitive/aesthetic intake questionnaire?

A final thought: so many learning sites are, well, ugly. They look very institutional and second-rate, especially when compared to the glossy detailed graphics that many students are used to in video games and the simple web interfaces of popular sites such as Facebook. I think complex learning sites should be beautiful and somewhat mysterious, both to give users a pleasurable experience, but also to suggest something about epistemology: that we have no certain scientific knowledge, only shades of truth that are always shifting with new research. I loathed science experiments in school as a kid because they didn’t seem like experiments! Nothing was at risk—the teacher knew exactly what was going to happen, and my role was not that of an explorer, but rather an obedient and neat secretary of the unsurprising unfolding events. Learning sites should at the very least hint, or perhaps even actively encourage, critical epistemology. So many students graduate having memorizing reams of scientific data and charts, but with little grasp of perhaps the world’s greatest tool for critical thinking: the scientific method! An interface that aided critical questioning would be a great interface indeed.