aMetopia

Comparison of Schoology(#1) with Canvas LMS(#2) and Ning(#3)

2011-10-06T01:17:00.005-05:00

Affordances	Description	#1	Description of Rating	#2	Description of Rating	#3	Description of Rating
Usability	Easy to use and navigate	3	The interface resembles Facebook, but the links and layout is a bit confusing in navigating between pages	3	Complex functions, even though well designed navigation hides information until necessary	3	Relatively easy to use and navigate between different pages, but interface could be cleaner and less clustered
Social Affordances	Profile page, blog, photo/music sharing, wall, messaging, groups	3	Limited profile page, limited communal sharing space, have album sharing	2	Very limited compared to other modern social networks, have chatting system, but on separate page, more inline with traditional LMS	5	Have basically all the social affordance seen in modern social network sites
Collaboration Tools	Video Conference, Document collaboration...	2	Google Docs Integration, but confusing interface	4	Third Party video Conference and google docs integration	2	No embed collaboration tools, except groups and chatting
Video/Photo/ Document management	Easy to upload and share and manage all these media	3	No video uploading directly from the browser	3	Same, but better document management interface	2	Basic file upload and management, but could embed third party tools like box.net
Assessment Tools	Quiz builder, Assignment tracking, Analytics, grade management...	4	Have easy to use Quiz builder and analytics tool	4	Very powerful set of quiz and grades tools, and customizable, but tracking and analytics tools lacking	1	None at all, it is not designed specifically for educators
Progress Control	Schedule lock/unlock of specific module	2	Limited to using page as syllabus	4	Very powerful and customizable schedule too that only unlock specific module when condition met	2	None, could use Note section
Permission Control	Manage students and permissions for TA or other	4	Allow parents to seat in, multiple admins, easy to use	3	More complex roles(TA, teacher, student, observer), but maybe not really necessary	2	No collaborating roles for instructors, while everybody are basically equal, limited admin permission management
Content Management	Pages, discussions, syllabus display and management	3	Basic	4	Powerful, customizable, e.g. the main page could display activity stream or assignment or customized page...	3	Could rearrange layout to present content, have forum, groups in the front page

As I was evaluating these LMS, I realized I really don’t care that much about all these “instructional affordances” like assessment tools, analytics tools, and permission management, but there were the differentiating factors for Schoology and Canvas LMS. And Schoology seems to be targeting K12 market with these “controlling tools”, while Canvas LMS is more positioning itself as the replacement for the traditional LMS like Moodle in higher education. And finally, I realized, for me, the social affordances provided by Ning is much more important than other affordances. In the other environments, learners seldom has the chance to connect with each other, the learner-to-learner interaction is only limited at some instructor controlled collaboration groups, while I imagine my perfect learning environment as a vibrant community of people with open discussion and self-initialized interaction in a communal space, which is pretty hard to imagine happening in all the other environments. But I also think for other instructors with different needs, they might choose other LMS as their default environment. And a lot of affordances could actually be brought into all these LMS from third party services or from just email.This is also related to instructors’ pedagogical philosophy. The lesson to learn is when I look to closely to this question and analyze variable by variable, I will miss the bigger question more easily. I decided to seat back, think about my big philosophy, and choose Ning as my LMS of choice.

Reflection on CI 5325 Online Distant Education

2011-09-21T02:04:00.001-05:00

Why do you want to become an online teacher?
What are your concerns about being an online teacher?
What impact do you believe online learning will have on education in the future?

Teaching online is challenging and could help me understanding how other people learn online and how to design better tools for online learning. The online environment provided different possibilities for teaching and learning just because it is so different from traditional classroom teaching. One example would be the emergence of some highly scalable online courses, like the recent Stanford AI class. What if learners around the world could access the equal amount of knowledge as average middle-class American? That will change the world as we knew it for sure. : )

One of the concerns that I have is how will my high expectations play out in face of the complex reality. I have little experience in teaching itself, even though I consider myself as an expert independent learner. Will my knowledge of independent learning help my student's learn independently? Or will I be in total lost when my role is changed to the facilitator of other learners? How do I know what they should learn next? And how should I know how should they learn?…

As I was answering the first question, I believe there will be disruptive changes happening in the next 20 years in online learning. If, in the future, the individual could access or be fed with a stream of personalized information, online learning will definitely be one big part of it. Not only that, if new technology could facilitate new ways of connecting like-minded people, if there is a recommendation system that could personalize the classmates that you will meet in face-to-face study groups, the institution of education will finally be disrupted for the first time in history. Let's be honest, the occupation of teaching is more or less the same as thousands years ago, while as other fields like farming and engineering has changed tremendously since industrial revolution because of technology. And we are not talking about only "online learning" here, it is more technology augmented blended learning. Or, put it more accurately, it is augmented social interaction and transmission of knowledge.

a connectivist interpretation of an action research article

2011-03-29T00:54:00.000-05:00

a response for Crossing bridges of culture, color and language by Danise M. Hanson. A paper that was assigned to me:

I really like Hanson's article about her research, maybe mainly because it maps to my previous knowledge about connectivism. As if a soccer fan reading a story of his favorite player, the story immediate resonate and connect with his previous cognitive, conceptual and emotional networks about the player. I will thus give a connectivism interpretation of this research:
In a simple and elegant way, Hanson created this system where maximal connections could be formed between latino and mainstream students, mainstream students' current knowledge network and the rich culture knowledge that provided by TAs, the latino TAs and they school community, and latino TAs' current knowledge network and the learning provided by their teaching experiences.
The vast amount of sociological researches have indicated that social networks correlate immensely with vicinity and common interests, and people like to hang out with people that like themselves. Part of the reason is that the uncertainty and the insecurity implied by difference and diversity is intuitively disagreeable to people in general. That's why we have that segregation in cafeteria, and for that matter, in almost all schools and societies. One solution of course is communication and discovering the commonality between people, making connections will also increase the trust between people as demonstrated by SNA(social network analysis) studies. In Hanson's research, latino TAs are able to form connections with mainstream students because of their shared activities and spaces, in their designated roles, which also reduced the resistances of forming such connections.
The second level of connections is that Spanish learners could learn most effectively by forming maximal connections between what they learn with their own lives. That's why placing native spanish-speaking TAs helps so much in a pedagogical level. When interacting with native speakers, language learners will have access to a much broader knowledge network provided by the native speaker—from culture to geographical knowledge to personal relevancy or emotional authenticity. However, teachers sometimes would abandon the teaching of traditional syllabus like grammar and formal vocabulary, this is discouraged by connectivism because grammar, even though abstract and boring, might serve as the patterns for a chaotic natural language. It is like rules or theories that could be used to manage the uncertainty or complexity of the knowledge network, and could also help in acquiring new knowledge, for example, linguistic morphology might help the language learner acquiring new vocabulary by providing patterns and connections between the vast amount of words.
The third level of connections is how the TAs could be connected to the school community because of the social network they built inside the spanish classes. This is good, but not enough. Because there are only 6 TAs and have to be organized by a teacher. How could the educator built a self-sustained system that could facilitate this kind of connections? e.g.: traditional spanish culture/interests groups that invite both spanish students and mainstream students. From a connectivism perspectives, this kind of weak-ties between clusters of networks will often generate the most valuable connections to the system. That's why a lot of latest and greatest development in modern science happens in interdisciplinary researches.
The forth level of connections are similar with the second one. The TAs’ teaching provided a fertile cluster of network that could be used to form connections with other areas of their lives. The so-called small-world phenomenon—an established network tend to grown exponentially and form connections more easily than an isolated node.
In connectivism terminology, this is an ecology that will facilitate better learning to both latino TAs and mainstream students.

a fanboy’s justification of the theoretical value of connectivism

2011-03-27T21:52:00.009-05:00

Some to-be-expanded thoughts on the theoretic value on connectivism using the framework from Littlejohn for evaluate theories in his book Theories of Human Communication. I've wrote a previous post about theories and connectivism here. It's been almost 4 years and now a Google scholar search returns 1550 papers about connectivism VS only 237 in 2007. The exponential growth rate is about 160%. There will even be a special issue of it on IRRODL, which is super cool. Anyway, as a connectivism fanboy, I am excited that it is gaining momentum even I've really been pulling away from my previous focus on theories exactly because "determine what to learn is more important than how to learn sometimes", as suggested by connectivism. And for me, the power of theories had slowly worn off, and things like design and development is now the focus of my studies. I still need to learn from an even more diverse range of books and knowledge and interact with people, but I wish it won't be just theories about how the world works, but how to change the world directly.

But as it often goes in academia, I have been pulled back to theories constantly. Papers were assigned to me and I keep hearing about theories and frameworks on education, most of the time, these theories really are not that interesting and sometimes even irritatingly tedious and irrelevant. Last week, I was rereading connectivism and finally comes to a decision—I will pick up connectivism again and return to my fanbodom and take it as my theoretical foundation. This is good, firstly because connectivism actually have such a broad scope that it could even be used as a design framework, just as suggested in the 2004 connectivism paper(it could be used to “inform the design of learning environment”). Although personally I don’t believe that it will be of more help than general design principles and design patters and best practices in the field of interaction design. I feel I am bound to use more “educational” theories to explain what I am about to design. Connectivism is thus a perfect fit in this sense. Going back to where I started at the beginning of the post, I will map the framework from Littlejohn to the value of connectivism, although clearly my fanboyism is an aesthetical attachment before even going into reason.

The framework of theoretic value:

Theoretical Scope
- Generality is the main concern of this criterion. Siemens pointed out the learning is the process of connection formation in three levels: neurological, conceptual, social(2008). Except being compatible with latest neurological and artificial intelligence research and sociological research while drawing connections from Vygotsky's social constructivism theory, all these connection formation naturally displays the attributes of networks, like small world phenomenon, strong and weak ties, emergence and etc. For example, one's political view would serve as a central cluster of neurological and conceptual networks, and thus influence one's further action and beliefs; even traditional behavioral stimulus and response could be explained by the connections of the activation of neural networks in neurological level and behavioral level.
- From my personal experience, connectivism could be especially informative in language learning, e.g.: vocabulary is best learned in real world because in real context, a new word will be maximally connected to the emotional, cognitive, behavior, social neural network while decontextualized word will only activate a small range of networks in our brain; if the learner is situated in an isolated area without a larger learning network to filter and feed-in information, the learner is less likely to have the information for optimal learning—this is the social level of connectivist learning; if the learner are interested at some subject while learning a new language, the transfer and retainment rate will likely be higher because the new information could be connected to this large knowledge network in her brain, this is why a basketball fan will have a much shorter time in remember a players name and team and the city of the team and the location of the city than an average learner who doesn’t have this kind of connections—this could also be explained by the schema theory in cognitive psychology, nevertheless, connectivism have a much broader scope than the schema theory, which only tries to explain the cognitive level of cognition.
- Connectivism could also serve as a design theory, curiously or arbitrarily, for my project, I want to design an interface that affords the learner the discoverability and interaction between interests groups, local events, open educational resources, and learners themselves. These design decisions all serve to provide the affordance for maximum chances of connectivity/interactivity between learners/knowledge/groups.
- The scope of the connectivism theory also enhances the value of the theory itself. For example, behaviorism focus to much on the behavioral level and it’s “black box” approach really discourages learners from looking at the learning process more holistically, and cognitivism and constructivism might also have the same kind of problem, in that cognitivism focuses only on cognitive level and constructivism generally ignores the cognitive or emotional level. For connectivist learning, missing the bigger picture or ignoring all these other information might result in missing the opportunities to identify key trends of what’s next and taking the optimal strategy when it comes to learning.

Appropriateness
- “Logical consistency between a theory and its assumptions”: some of its assumptions are the decreasing half-life of knowledge in general, the networked nature of knowledge, the dramatic different landscape of learning in the 21st century. If you think none of these are true: learning is as it always was, teaching should always be the industrial revolutionary model, connectivism might be too “post-modern” for you.

Heuristic Value
- Produce new ideas for research and additional theory? Connectivism is a hub of new ideas. That’s one reason why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable. Imagine what horsemen felt when the automobile first came out and it was slower than horse, powered by physical mechanics rather than good horsemanship. Educational research methodology courses might have to teach social network analysis, design theory, data-mining, what’s the opportunity cost of doing that? Why not stick to what’s already there which is proven better and keep exploit it rather than explore totally new paradigms? That is like ignore or even kill the old network of concepts and knowledge and start build a new network of knowledge from the scratch. Just like the more I read about complexity theory and its explanation of how evolution works, the harder it is for me to accept any forms of intelligent design theories.
- In connectivism words, it is a hub of weak-ties—bringing in neuroscience and AI research, network theory and complexity theory, looking at learning from a network perspective, a wide range of interdisciplinary researches could be made possible. And new strategies for optimal learning could also be suggested by these kind of researches.

Validity
- Value? The theory obvious have value in explaining a wide range of learning. From organizational to personal, even though it is a learning theory that’s not focused on classroom learning. It is anti-teaching in some sense. Teacher is reduced to a node in the network.
  Correspondence—can be observed? If you did notice the phenomenal of decreasing half-life of knowledge, large organized knowledge groups like aircraft building or software building all exists in networks of people, it is observable. If you still are only looking at learning in a K12 classroom teaching mindset, not that it’s not important, connectivism might not serve you better than any other learning theory.
  Generalizability--same as theoretical scope

Parsimony
- Logical simplicity: connectivism is very simple in a sense—all learning is connection formation; knowledge exists in networks.
- "Might overly simple and may leave out many important factors": Behaviorism and cognitivism are simple enough despite numerous micro theory within them. From my understanding, constructivism is different, might be messy and harder to explain what it is. When people talk about behaviorism in education, they would normally talk about stimulus and response and reinforcement; when they talk about cognitivism, the computer processing model comes into mind, despite the attractiveness of other models such as connectionism, but constructivism might take a while to explain to people despite its heuristic value. In the end, all theories are abstractions and serve to reduce the entropy of one’s cognitive world, so that we can predict the future with absolutely minimal mind power and maneuver in it afterwards. All these theories are of value depending on which level of analysis we are looking at. Connectivism might not be as valuable in predicting behaviors among elementary students than behaviorism in this sense.

Openness
- Connectivism is very open in that it invites diversity and feedback. it "acknowledges its incompleteness". This is also why I am posting this incomplete post which will definitely expose my incomplete understanding of what I’m writing here. It will become very apparent by now that I am highly biased and most of the time don’t have any clue what I’m writing about and have little understanding about these traditional learning theories and their broadness—not to mention bad grammar. :-) But I am still willing to take the stance and hopefully feedbacks will lead me back closer to the right track. Connectivism directly suggests why open learning/teaching and open discussion are important, as is also suggested by Scott E. Page who studies diversity and complexity theory with computer models and simulations(weird yet powerful combination BTW). In his book about diversity, he proposed this toolbox intelligence model, according to this model, every theory is a tool in one’s cognitive toolbox to make sense of the world, a diverse set of tools are better than a specific category of tools like a set of screwdrivers of different sizes. But from a connectivism fanboy perspective and in danger of oversimplify things, connectivism might be the “swiss knife” of learning theories. :-)

Did a tour of un grand central wall st and Chinatown. Missed the wine class. Its cloudy in NYC. Supreme court.

2010-07-14T22:17:00.001-05:00

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Play me I'm yours in the NYC. Great idea as the key to the city idea

2010-07-11T21:26:00.001-05:00

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View from google NYC to manhattan

2010-06-29T23:02:00.001-05:00

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Court sq. Building modernism

2010-06-26T06:46:00.001-05:00

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Worked in my cousins liquor store yesterday. Tired.

2010-06-21T21:51:00.001-05:00

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A/B testing and reductionism

2010-06-20T00:24:00.002-05:00

A/B testing, a term in information design resembles the reductionism methodology in science, tweaking one variable at a time seems a good and "reasonable" idea to start making things better. All the people who believe in research or so-called scientific evidence will buy that. But I tend to like other more random and irrational ways of doing things. Just as this article suggested, by tweaking one variable at a time and improve it incrementally, you might get stuck in a local optimum. This is the exact theory suggested by complexity science. Missing the bigger picture while doing things incrementally might be perfectly suitable in a calm environment but it won't be if the environment alters dynamically. That's why traditional film camera makers are losing the market to digital camera makers, that's why traditional phone company is quickly loosing to Apple...Apple like to proud itself as a company that walks between humanity and engineering. They ARE. They don't only make workable products. They design beautiful product, intuitive UI, and constantly rethink what the user experience should be. They are definitely using their instincts, rather than just researches. I can't imagine traditional phone makers doing A/B design to compete with Apple. I might even argue that Amazon, who pioneered using A/B testing in their site is inferior to it's Chinese counterpart in terms of its user experience just for that reason. Ebay also lost it in terms of their UX compared to their fresh started and constantly redesigned Chinese counterpart Taobao, among many other things. That's why lots of big guys lost it to the small ones. Because their small counterparts will start anew below a higher peak, and they will eventually settle on a higher ground.

As a personal note for myself, if I only see my current surrounding while binding my intuition and never take risk to start again randomly in some new area which might have the potential to new possibilities—and greater personal actualization. Anyway, stay random, stay hungry.

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Spring

2010-04-29T13:06:00.001-05:00

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Road to coachella

2010-04-15T03:37:00.002-05:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Screen, flow and language

2010-02-20T01:56:00.002-06:00

Brilliant video:

The form should never take the attention away from the content.
For UI designer, every stage of the user experience process(flow) should be carefully smoothed, language clarified(nature language prefered), and:

decide what matters
makes that pop out
make everything else fade back

Because of this video, I've read the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. In which he write the cycles of graphical revision should be:

"Above all else show the data.

Maximize the data-ink ratio.

Erase non-data-ink.

Erase redundant data-ink.

Revise and edit"

Tufte believes the data itself would present all the beauty of the design. That might be especially true when talking about data visualization.

outside of the box

2010-02-10T14:21:00.001-06:00

Earlier this month, Dr. Curt Bonk showed up in our class and I asked him about why doesn't he think connectivism is a theory, when my professor Dr. Miller asked him about whether pedagogy is playing catch up with technology, which is also a very interesting question.

What's interesting is Curt's comment about this academia rituals-that in a field like educational psychology, which is considered as the basis of the majority of other field related to education, having a Ph.D and publish in educational psychology journals and connect within that field is very important.

These are all very true and candid comments, considering Dr. Bonk has been an educational psychologist and now an instructional technologist and used to be a CPA, and now writer of the book The World is Open, which he courteously signed and send it to me-my first signed book from a writer (BTW I loved the book except it is a little too detailed in accumulating all the stories). He teaches a course about participatory learning and put connectivism in a pretty important section of the syllabus.

Yes, every field has its rituals, journals are the trusted way of gathering information for the academicians and rightly so. Credential system serve as a relatively efficient way of filtering incompetent knowledge provider, even though it is failing more and more frequently. Was Dr. Albert Einstein a Ph.D when he published his famous paper on relativity? As Educational theories could also be more well-received if it is relevant to power and control considering the structure of the current educational system.

But I feel there are something wrong with the presumption that the best way to look at education is through the lens of psychology, as if all the other ways of looking at education, like economics, communication studies, sociology, anthropology is not the valid or relevant way of looking at education. But from my own special experience of studying independently in an knowledge-deficient environment, I feel sometimes the theories in communication studies about different media and how information flow in society could provide me with more strategies or toolboxes about how to learn than psychology, the theories in economics could offer me more insight about how to allocate my time...

That's why I feel connectivism as a theory say much more about how I learn in a digital age than any other current educational theories, at least for me. But apparently, teachers in today's school care much more about how to teach knowledge than how to learn, and that's not a bad thing in itself, of course that's teachers' responsibility. But I feel there must be a time in some context this theory is very relevant, as was in my case. And this time is approaching and maybe arrived for some people, this is a bottom-up theory, not a top-down theory. But sometimes the society do not need theories to evolve, it only need theories to explain how has it evolved. But from a personal level, learners equipped with good theories could out-pace the society.

But, what do I care about all these theories? I transferred my major from educational psychology to learning technology. I will be a designer, a creator, an architect, not a theoretical physicist anymore. Cheers~

P.S.: The title is kinda related to this interview about Scott Page who wrote the book about diversity and collective intelligence.

a different perspective of looking at intelligence

2010-02-10T12:34:00.001-06:00

The traditional view of intelligence as a measure stick do has its merits in condensing all the information of the complex phenomenal of human intelligence to a single number. But it also reinforces the misconception that IQ score is the intelligence itself.
Even Binet himself cautioned:

The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.
—Binet, 1905

and

Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral support to these deplorable verdicts by affirming that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. —Binet

The book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies has provided exactly the "demonstration" and "foundation" that Binet requested.

It answered a lot of questions that could not be answered adequately by traditional view of intelligence: How does cognitive diversity benefit the collective intelligence of groups and society? How is our training and experiences related to our ability to solve problems? How do we explain wisdom of the crowd? How do we enhance our ability to solving problems? How could the organizations and companies harness the benefit of diversity?

It is a book about diversity, but it is also established on this toolbox framework of intelligence. When we look at people's intelligence as a collection of tools. Specifically, when we understand different people have different perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, and predictive models, when we understand a diverse group of people also have different preferences, we could comfort our friends with lower IQ by saying more confidently: "You are not less intelligent. You are just different."

It is always a pleasure to read a book that provide me with totally different perspectives. I feel like I am diversify my own perspectives, and am becoming more intelligent as a result!

Minimalism

2009-12-09T10:59:00.001-06:00

Starting from the basic, build upon it, I found that's the Zen of minimalism. Of course, minimalism is not perfect. It might miss a lot. But if you start from the minimal, you are more likely on your way to perfection.
There are millions of layers in every field, from designing a website to learning to cook. Calmly starting from the basic layer, don't be pressured to do everything right at the first time. Nature would be on your side when you take off and fly.
Trying to control and do everything "good enough" is no better than doing a few things "great". Because sometimes the thing we are about to accomplish is too complicated to be build on one cycle. Information overload, too much to care about at the same time...why don't we start from the most essential parts? Why don't we understand that GREAT things need to be built through a long process. Windows Vista comes into mind, Google Chrome comes into mind.

devolution of a reading mind

2009-12-06T00:06:00.001-06:00

I am never a person who "loves" to read, and it is getting worse.

Maybe McLuhan is right. The new literacy is the new media. I do not need the old literacy of reading. But new media means short message, short attention span, high entertainment level, and low knowledge density. I feel like I am walking on a path I've walked before. I am heading to information overload, and at some point the marginal happiness of an extra information would turn negative and I will start the fast for information sometime again.

Unless the book is NOT textbook that is assigned to me, my reading speed is about 2 pages every 10 minutes. Because my mind wonders away whenever I stumble upon some words that might fire up some of my random thought. This feels like when I am on the net, random desires for seeking information would come up constantly and be satisfied only to fire up again. But when I am reading a textbook, random thoughts come up, and my eyes went blank and the information coming through from my vision system is no longer being processed and I started my thought experiment just like I started to google on the net.

That is not good. I need to be biliteral at least. The web is NOT making me a dumb reader.

Of course, I could still read-as long as the book is interesting for me. But I seems lost the ability to read less interesting text. But as I am a grad student. One part of my responsibility is to read boring text. I want it back. I want my attention span be longer.

Random thinking about random knowledge

2009-11-20T02:14:00.001-06:00

Where I born, what're my parents like, the hobbies do I have, the friends I make might be randomness that's beyond of my control, it's like Jesus's parable of seeds. When I was watching a video from Santa Fe Institute about complexity theory on iTunes today, I realized that information is constrained by locality--I am sure this is not new, but still, to me, it is a refreshing perspective.

Richard Florida have this idea of creative people like to concentrate on few cities. Looking it the other way around, I could also say the knowledge and the information attract people to the cities. In other words, information and knowledge is constrained by locality, like I said, no surprising here.

But when looking into it, knowledge is also constrained by organizations, universities, academic societies, journals, languages, special interests groups, like SFI or TED conference... I started to think about there must be some place/context/networks where knowledge is more abundant and valuable. Then it seems rational for one to swim to this kind of context to receive more valuable information.

By simply be in some university, you are more likely to learn new knowledge. By randomly born in a country, you are less likely to get a Nobel Prize in physics -- because you can't read Einstein in English when you are 10 even you want to.

It must be interesting to see where are all the knowledge reside. The Internet is helping deliver high value knowledge to average people- at least I can listen to the most brilliant mind from TED or SFI. Randomness might not play such a big role as it used to be, because I know have more choices.

But people is also governed by their emotions and preferences. People won't do things that's not enjoyable to themselves automatically, sometimes because they don't understand the power of knowledge, even they know, they might still not invest time and energy to learn the knowledge. Yes, we don't have infinite rationality and intelligence. Even we have infinite rationality but not infinite intelligence, we might still constrained by the amount of knowledge we invented/collected and making mistakes "rationally". If we have both, we are all gods or we might commit mass suicide. :)

Exploitation vs. exploration in learning and education

2009-10-25T12:53:00.001-05:00

Why did Sony lose it's lead in video game market to Nintendo and Microsoft is losing in its OS, browser, handheld devices, and many other markets? This article about innovation and change has a lot to say about the change and strategies used by companies to adapt to change.

In both the above cases, the companies are facing an exploitation vs. exploration choice. The optimal strategy of both company would be using old design principles or even old products(in Microsoft's case) to make maximum profit-provided the market is stable. But the environment is destined to be unstable and is constantly changing: disruptive change came into being(Wii remote, ipod, iphone), new competition entered(leopard, firefox, google chrome). So the old way of exploitation isn't the optimal strategy anymore and the companies have to explore for the optimal ways of doing things as a result.

There is a simple yet complex problem related to this dilemma: "Multi-armed bandit" problem. Although there might be a few suggested optimal solutions for this kind of problem. When it comes to real world, the problem is becoming so complex that it's almost impossible to find the optimal solution-especially as human beings, with limited information processing power, limited working memory, limited experience and time...For example, we might face the delayed vs. immediate reward problem: should we delay the pleasure of hanging out before the exam and study or should we have fun and dismiss the exam(apparently, this strategy was more appropriate in Mark Zukerberg's case)? Should we be optimistic about the future and never stop trying new cooking recipes or should we just learn the recipes passed down from the family and make it better? Should we make the decision early to find the "perfect" way of remembering vocabulary in our second language learning or should we try out every strategies and use every tools that we could find? Back to the bandit dilemma: why don't we just watch other people play first? And jump in at the optimal time?

Apparently, none of these questions has simple universal answers. Nonetheless, all of these problems have a lot of implications for our thinking about exploitation vs. exploration. We could now say that sticking to the same strategy is seldom the optimal strategy, especially when the environment is changing faster and faster. We know that a company should deploy some of it's resources to research-not only practical research with specific purpose, but also far-reaching research might be used in the future-the more unstable market, the more resources should be deployed on exploration. And we could definitely say that diversity of strategy and perspective is always better than uniform homogeneous perspectives.

The implication for myself? I decided not stick too much about traditional educational psychology theories-which is getting boring to me anyway, and continue my search and learning about new things. The marginal benefit of exploitation is always declining, but so is the exploration-I don't want to try out every field and every trade. I better start some deep learning at the same time.

Stumble upon peacefulness

2009-10-24T23:16:00.001-05:00

I found that there are a million people who are constantly trying to distract my attention, worst of all, the biggest conspirator is myself.

Few days ago, I found that my favorite browser -Google Chrome have beautiful themes. I browsed through its gallery and was intrigued by these themes designed by these artists. Then I found my "past favorite browser"-firefox actually have this same function even earlier, called Persona-way more beautiful than its old skins and customizations. So I was again browsing through the Persona gallery and installing and trying out new themes. Perfect! Now I have perfect beautiful browsers that represent my taste and styles, and I also have my perfectly beautiful desktop images that I collected during the years. Ironically, I didn't create any of these objects that's gonna represent my identity.

OK, now my computer looks beautiful, and I could actually stare into it-my desktop pictures and my browser themes for hours-which of course in Internet time is just minutes.

Then I realized that I need my computer to do real things. For example, I need to read webpages, extract information from the web, process it, maybe create something in my mind or publish it back to the web. The desktop just happen to be the place where all these process happens.

Let's focus on the desktop issue first: what is the perfect desktop? We like beautiful things as human beings. So a desktop has the perfect reason to be beautiful.

Let's then focus on the email problem: what is the perfect email? We like to know what's next as human beings. So an email notifier would be the perfect answer.

If considering these problems one by one in isolation, we could make each of these little things perfect. Yet sadly enough, we missed the ultimate goal of all these things summed up.

What is the ultimate goal then? I don't know. Maybe just process information more efficiently?

But the other annoying thing which also happens a lot is that there is another million people who is doing such a bad job of making things. Like designing a system as ugly as IE. Sometimes, these ugly things also disturb our attention and waste our energy.

Anyways, I've stopped trying out browser themes, hid my dock, and changed my desktop to pure color-which might be changed back few days later. May peace be with me for a while.

Diversity, complexity, faith

2009-10-18T22:05:00.001-05:00

This article seems relate to connectivism theory of diversity of networks. I am also taking his course on complexity theory, which is also great. It is interesting to notice that I tend to pick up this kind of information that relates to my prior knowledge and interests. And I found that I am more and more disturbed by the idea that educational psychology, which is my major, tend to study complex system in a simple paradigm. This makes me somewhat uneasy.

(the complexity of life)

I am also taking a bible studies in the hope of finding myself a faith. I found the knowledge in this bible lesson hard to reconcile with my prior knowledge. It seems explainable after some understanding of complex system. Knowledge in our brain exist interdependently-that's why clustering occur and why there is the difference between liberal and conservative.

All my knowledge about complex system, self-organize system, evolution, and positive psychology has been building a small world in my neuron network. I found it hard to accept many of the bible teaching right now. But I will keep on trying to reconcile faith/passion and science.

My excuse of not being a good reader and multitask

2009-10-18T12:16:00.002-05:00

Why do I get tired so easily reading a book? Why do I multitask? Why can't I read anymore? This NYtimes article has provoked my thinking about books and reading. I was always more awake when in front of a computer screen, since I got my first computer.

Yes, computer screen is always packed with distractions: the random and persistent pop-ups on some website, the ads designed by these specialist who is specialized in distracting people, the dancing chatting window that need your immediate response, the email notifier that setup by yourself to distract you whenever it wants, the multiple application running in the background that might need your attendance once for a while, the sidebars, the gadgets, the millions of choices that you have when connected-you can realize almost every desire that float into your consciousness to seek information...

Many people might ask: how did some people evolved into these beings obsessed with multitasking and never read? Here might be the reason: the information environment changed. As computer and most of the web is designed to present as much information as it could, not to focus your attention to specific information, our attention is naturally constantly changing and turning around on the computer screen. As long as someone would come up and distract us almost every few minutes, why don't we just admit the constant existence of distraction and be prepared be distracted by others and ourselves? Fragmented attention and knowledge might be the result, but provided the reality of constant distraction, we have to multitasking.

(Multitask Queen.)

Go back to my reading problem, since I got my first computer, my brain is been conditioned with positive emotion towards computer screen-it was filled with so many interesting information, and I was living in such a boring small town and studying such dull textbooks everyday for 12 hours in school. I might tasted the joy of reading a REAL book once for a while in the class when the teacher is not noticing(always reading something interesting in a guilty and hiding state:P), but all in all, the negative conditioning related to reading a real book outbalanced its positive affects. As a result, once I started to read some thing in the book, my brain slowly turns down and shut up eventually, unless it's a topic that really interests me.

This process really could be traced back to evolutionary psychology. The brain is constantly seeking novel and interesting information, while you might commend your mind to take something seriously, your brain would still look for new and interesting information. Emotion plays a important role here. As someone said, emotion is the gate keeper of learning. And we used this mechanism to survive in a complex world back thousands years ago-as new and interesting information is always higher valued as old, dull information.

In conclusion, I might not blame myself of not being a good reader. I hope I succeed in providing my self with the excuse. But I have to admit that there are still so much more knowledge in the real books than on the web. The nonlinear way of learning is never the best way to learn some serious deep knowledge. The linear way of learning: immersed for hours, forget everything except the learning itself, finding joy in the doing of one thing and one thing only... might be more practical in learning in most context.

I wish user-experience designer might come up with more ideas to help us stay focused in front of screen as we were reading a book. I shall restrain my urges to seek information sometimes, and I have hid my dock and closed my email notifier.

Hello again, world!

2009-10-17T01:08:00.001-05:00

Since my last post, my identity has shifted from an English teacher in China to a grad student in the U.S. Months passed. I was once away from the web and networked learning. I was basically the being feed by the information from the net while minding my own business in real life. As I started to follow the CCK09 course again and read more blogs and articles about various topics, I felt like I have to write something. Maybe I will be fed up again with information overload and decided to stop feed myself with homogeneous information about specific topic. But I decided to try again. This time, I want to dig deeper. I will try to regulate my attention to the deeper thoughts and ideas, rather than superficial buzz words and trends which is fleeting and decaying. I should also be systematic in manage my learning, rather than wondering around on the net for hours without purpose. I should be more active in applying what I learned in real life. I want to enter the FLOW state while not ignore the reality that's happening around me. Hope I could make more connections meanwhile.

enhancing learner's motivation

2009-01-06T00:07:00.000-06:00

Last night I was chatting with my friend about my students. She asked me about how do I enjoy my teaching. I told her that I found my students too unmotivated to learn. This makes me realize that I am starting to give up or less motivated as I started. I thought I tried everything: I told them why to learn, how to learn, and what to learn. But when given them the freedom to learn by themselves, they seldom learn anything. Actually, I found one of my students is actually less motivated than I first came here. After reading this article about adolescence's brain, I felt that maybe their brain is simply not full-developed. I too have the experience of knowing the reasons to do something perfectly well, or you could say I am fully-motivated, yet I am at the same time totally-inactive. Maybe it's because the part of brain about reasoning and acting is separate. Even learners know perfectly well what they should do, they won't necessarily do it actually. This deterministic view has been hovering over my head for weeks until last night's chat with my friend.

I told myself: Maybe I am not working hard enough. I should continue raising their motivation about learning. As a cheerleader, I can't be defeated first.

And today I read about this article by Csikszentmihalyi, who is cited many times by Tal Ben-Shahar in his Positive Psychology and Psychology in Leadership courses, which I enjoyed a lot recently. The article just confirmed with my thinking. Csikszentmihalyi suggested two ways of enhancing learner's motivation:

realistic reassessment of the extrinsic rewards attendant to education.
make children aware of how much fun learning can be.

The first is essentially to lead the students to see the future, to guide them to see more broadly; the second is to lead them to taste the present, to guide them see more clearly. If people are doing what they do by evaluating the benefits between future and now, then motivation must relate alot to this evaluation. I have been using stories and student's imagination. But I fail to find many stories to tell and may ways to employ their imagination. And I should also make the stories and imagination relate to their own goals and desires as Csikszentmihalyi suggested. That should be my next step.

roadmap

2008-12-18T10:57:00.001-06:00

As a teacher, I don't like to "teach". If I had to teach, I'd rather teach my students how to learn. So the first step is teach them why to learn. Why to learn here and now? Then I want teach them what to learn. What not to learn? And then, in the end: how to learn. It's my roadmap. I will ask a lot of questions. Both to the learners and myself.