滷豬五花＋雞蛋＋油豆腐＋香菇
材料：
豬五花：兩條（約800g）
雞蛋：8顆
油豆腐：一盒（三角或方形皆可）
香菇：10朵
薑：10片
蔥：兩支
冰糖：兩大匙
醬油：米酒：水 = 1：1：2（依個人口味調整）
做法：
天使紅蝦番茄義大利麵（2人份）
材料：
義大利麵 200g
天使紅蝦 10隻
花椰菜 半顆（切段）
橄欖油 2大匙
洋蔥 半顆（切丁）
番茄 1顆（切丁）
蒜頭 6辦（切片）
薑泥 1大匙（可買現成）
檸檬汁或白酒 50cc
鹽巴 適量
做法：
Reading:
I learned a lot from this week’s assignments. I enjoyed reading G. K. Gabreilli and Robert K. Branson’s (2012) “Getting a job in business and industry,” which told me not only about the ways of getting a job, but also the attitudes when considering my career development. For the technical part, they taught me how to search for job information, how to construct a network, how to write a cover letter as well as CV or Resume, and how to cope with interviews. For the attitude part, they mentioned that today's workforce requires that people be trained and retrained frequently, so it is essential to be a self-directed, lifelong learner to thrive in our careers; they also remind me of that before applying for a career, research the company's strategic mission, vision, core values, and goals, then determine if my values match the company's values. The information above is practical and useful when considering about and looking for a position in the field of IST.
I also appreciate the lessons taught by Robert A. Reiser in his article “Getting an instructional design position: Lessons from a personal history” (Robert A. Reiser, 2012). Although he himself is mainly engaged in academic work, he is familiar with the entire industry of IST, and this unique status allows him to have a broad view of career development. He encouraged the IST graduates not only to strengthen professional knowledge and skills in the IST field, but also to develop a wide range of skills in areas such as business operations, management, and other areas of expertise. In addition, he impressed me with the reminder that “Apply for jobs that interest you, even if you don't have the exact qualifications advertised.” We sometimes constraint ourselves by being self-unconfident, but just remember that employers are always looking for someone who has the capabilities that amaze them, rather than someone who just possesses the skill set they are posting on hiring ads.
This week was an appropriate time for me to read the topic of career and professional development. It has been almost three months since I started the Instructional System Technology program at the end of August, and I have wondered what direction I can head toward in the future, as well as what knowledge, skills, or abilities I should improve next. This week’s assigned paper solved 90% of my questions. I really appreciated it. There are two directions I might try next semester.
Reading:
After reading this week’s papers, we find that IST is not absent from this trend of ethical reflection. In my opinion, this kind of reflection is more important in the IST field because people were used to putting more trust in educational field. For example, when we use Google for searching, we may not give 100% trust to the results; we might compare different search results and choose a better one. But when we take a Harvard online course, we are more likely to be persuaded by what we are being taught. Since we tend to believe that most education is based on a good purpose, there is no reason to lead us in a biased or wrong direction. However, as Banaji, Bazerman, and Chugh stated in their paper, “the bias emerges from unconscious beliefs,” and most of the time, the IST designers even didn’t perceive the bias they contain.
I am happy to see that the IST scholars have acknowledged this insufficiency and are trying to improve ethical awareness in the field. AECT has generated Ethical Codes, by which they expect their members to practice (Smaldino, et al, 2012). Banaji, et al suggested that managers can reduce unconscious bias by collecting data, shaping the environment, and broadening decision making (Banaji, et al, 2003). Amy Bradshaw called for a combination of IDT history and social context, to explore how important social issues affected the development of ISD, and how they formed the basis for social injustices within the field of education (Bradshaw, 2018). I hope I can dig deep into this research topic in the future.
Reading:
Compared to the general workplace, members in higher education institutions might be more willing to learn new things, but there are challenges when applying blended learning. Technology using habits has been one of the key problems of promoting blended learning. NTU built its own information system to serve as an online curriculum platform. The platform had been in use for more than ten years, and its interface and functions were outdated. To improve the quality of blended learning, three years ago the school incorporated Canvas, the most popular curriculum platform. But the initiative was not welcomed by some of the faculty because they were used to the old platform.
Why didn’t these faculty want to change their tool? The main reason was that they did not apply new instructions and materials, so they didn’t need the new functionality of the Canvas. This responds to a point in the article that one of the most noticeable barriers to blended learning is the lack of understanding of blended learning.
Reading:
Another article I read was “Technology and Knowledge Management,” written by Jingli Cheng, Su Jin Son, and Dr. Bonk. The authors clarified a fundamental shift in the field of knowledge management: from using technology to capture and codify knowledge to using technology to facilitate the creation, transfer, and exchange of knowledge. In response to this change, there have been multiple and innovative technologies that have appeared over the past decade. These new technologies have emphasized more interaction and communication with both internal and external sources, such as the Communities of Practice (CoPs), Web 2.0, and social software. Since the article was written 10 years ago, the technology we use today has improved a lot since then, and there is innovative technology that combines CoPs with social software - say, the most popular teamwork platform – Slack.
I also read about the case study of Premier Kayaks. The company lost a significant amount of revenue due to a communications error in multiple forms. To help the company deal with a lot of messages from different sources, the analysis pointed out that it needs a central platform to reserve, illustrate, and share this information. It remind me of a platform I designed for my previous school. I designed a collaborative advising platform called NTU aCARE, which provides a central place for the NTU faculty, consultants, and department staff to upload, edit, and share information regarding at-risk students. Via this system, all stakeholders can follow the students’ latest advising progress without asking from others. Based on my personal experience, communication and synchronization are the most important characteristics of this type of HPT product.
Reading:
I particularly like the discussion of new ways to think about educational technology from Mishra et. al In their article, the authors pointed out that besides having a deep knowledge of the content, the most important thing for teachers is “always seeking connections between these new technologies and their pedagogy.” They provided an Italian school physics class as a great example, demonstrating how a teacher used his/her creativity and leveraged the available resources, and created a fantastic teaching and learning experience. There are two exciting factors in this instructional design. First, there was no high barrier to technical knowledge in this instruction; what teachers need to do is to learn the tools and try to connect them with learning content. Second, all the materials and tools the Italian teacher applied to are free and accessible online, which means that it is not necessary to spend a large amount of money upgrading hardware and software for educational purposes. in the age of Web 2.0, instructional technology can be a low barrier, less expense, and more efficient.
Although it seems every teacher has more resources, choices, and opportunities to apply technology and media in their instructions, I acknowledge that not everyone now can properly combine pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge with technology knowledge. It takes some time and effort to form the ability. Nevertheless, it is a direction that is worth most instructors to have a try.
Reading:
This week I read about the development of instructional design and technology over a long period of time, and I am particularly interested in the history of instructional media, which can be viewed as a part of Science and Technology Studies. There are a variety of instructional media that have been thriving over the past 120 years, including school museums, visual media and instructional films, audiovisual and instructional radio, instructional television, and most importantly, computers. Some of them were assumed to possibly bring a revolutionary change in education, such as instructional film, instructional radio, and instructional television, but they did not make an enormous impact on the field. The real change occurred after the prevalence of personal computer, the Internet, and mobile device- these technologies facilitate the learning via multimedia, like online courses and social networking, and significantly change people’s learning habits.
Why did the real impact happen so late? Why didn’t those technologies such as film, radio, and TV change people’s main learning mode? I kept thinking about these interesting problems and finally figured out an answer. My answer is that even though film, radio, and TV occurred and changed people’s lives and the way they were entertained, these technologies did not change the way people communicate and interaction- communication and interaction is the core of education and learning. In contrast, when personal computers, the Internet, and mobile devices became pervasive and changed the communications and interactions among people, they also affected the mode of instruction and thus created revolutionary changes in the field.
Despite the wide prevalence and rapid changes in instructional technologies that have led to more flexible and efficient instruction, according to what Dr. Bonk mentioned in his article, they also cause some issues for the researchers in the instructional technology field. First, the researchers “have been scrambling to keep up with the pace of technological advances and associated pedagogical change.” Second, “such rapid changes in society and shifts in focus make useful research on emerging learning technologies difficult since the utility may be short-lived.” (Bonk & Wiley, 2020). These new technologies did help improve instructional practice, but also created some challenges for instructional research.
Reading:
Furthermore, the newest theory of connectivism, which has been inspired by Web 2.0 since the 2000s, seems to challenge the necessity of teacher. It claims that the most important thing is “not in the accumulation of more and more facts or memories, but (in) the ongoing development of a richer and richer neural tapestry.” Learning better is not about how you memorize as many things as possible, but how you connect them in an efficient way. It seems like the traditional teachers, those who were responsible for helping students perceive and memorize information from the outside world, are going to lose at least some of the contributions they once had.
I can’t help but think that there has been a self-learning trend that has arisen alongside a lot of online learning platforms in recent years. The best example of this is programming learning. Under the idea of open source, many learning resources are available online and are totally free. As a newbie in programming, you can easily access a large amount of learning materials and well-edited instructions via websites such as W3Schools Online Web Tutorials and Codecademy; you can also solve almost all problems by asking on online forums like Stack Overflow. In the Web 2.0 age, if a learner is good at searching and connecting online resources, s/he can access most of the knowledge they want without the teaching and explanation from a real person. For example, if students want to understand the influences of World War II, they might check Wikipedia rather than asking their history teacher or reading a modern history book. Online learning is having a huge impact on traditional forms of education, and I look forward to seeing more discussion on this topic.
Reading:
This week I focused on the topic of the AECT Legends and Legacies Project. The project is to build a digital archive for those who have contributed to the advancement of the field of instructional design and technology (IDT). The features of this platform include using interview video to record the scholars’ thoughts, characters, and lives, applying search functions like searching by name, by research area, or by interview question, and incorporating YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics for future data analysis. Honestly speaking, the technology of the website may not be the most advanced, but the idea of creating a digital archive for the experts in the IDT field is worth supporting.
As digital archives have become a trend in recent years, especially in the field of library and information science, the collections are abundant and varied, and the topics could be multiple as well. For example, two years ago, I joined a team that was engaged in building a scholar’s online archive, which I believe is a great way to preserve academic researchers’ works and records. Since the online archive project I participated in was built for a historian, the contents of this archive included biography, chronology, handwritten notes, historical material collections, journal offprints, personal photos, and other personal documents. We did not shoot his video, that’s a pity. Based on my experience, if AECT Legends and Legacies Project wants to increase its scale and influence, it should expand its content and collections, making the website become a database of IDT scholars. This might be one of the directions that the AECT Legends and Legacies Project can take in the next step.
This week I read articles about cognitivism and constructivism. I am interested in cognitivism because unlike behaviorism, which sees the human mind as a "black box," cognitivism tries to explore how human minds operate during the learning process. I think the most attractive thing about cognitivism is its simple and concrete way of interpreting abstract mind operations. According to Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno’s research, the cognitive learning process is as follows: Learners use their ears and eyes to select words and images from outside multimedia, organize the words and images and integrate them with the prior knowledge, form a working memory, and in the end store them in long-term memory. The whole process seems very familiar – just like computer processing.
This reminds me of a book, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, written by Sherry Turkle in the late 1980s. As an influential sociology and psychology scholar, Turkle stated that the invention of computers stimulated people's thoughts about how the human mind operates, how it reserves memory, and so on. If the human mind is just like a computer, and, as Mayer said, that the capacity for mentally holding and manipulating information in working memory is limited, I have some questions about cognitivism, for example, are we born with a certain amount of available cognitive capacity? Can we expand our cognitive capacities by training our brains?
The other theory I have reviewed is constructivism. Constructivism has been viewed as the dominant educational philosophy since the 1990s. According to Brent Wilson’s research, it has reached such prominence due to the following potential benefits: First, it corresponds to how people really learn; this effectiveness is based on the findings from persuasive, solid evidence such as neuroscience, anthropology, and education. Second, it focuses on higher-order learning outcomes, which are closer to the demands of expertise in the real world. Third, it better integrates with affect and emotion; the instruction becomes more than academic, and aligned with the real experience of the individual. Fourth, it is more relevant to job and out-of-the-classroom needs because of its emphasis on solving authentic problems. In my view, the scientific basis and the realistic inclinations of constructivism have allowed it to thrive over the last 20 plus years.
Constructivism could be a great way to integrate abstract knowledge with real-world problems, but it requires more time, resources, and effort to get involved. Wilson also mentioned that if “the situation requires short time frames with limited time and resources to devote to teaching and the preparation of materials,” constructivist strategy may not be a good idea. This reminds me of a trend of Flipped Learning over the past 10 years in Taiwan. While the school administration promoted the constructivist strategy with enthusiasm, I have heard a lot of complaints from teachers at the middle school. They said that since the schools promoted Flipped Learning, they had to do extra work, producing teaching videos and using unfamiliar technologies while preparing traditional test oriented instructional materials. They also argued that students have more loading because the Flipped Learning requires students to watch videos before classes. When both teachers and students are limited in time and outside support, it is not easy to implement constructivist strategies in classrooms.
