Welcome to this blog where I document my reflections through the semester for ETEC511 – New Foundations of Educational Technology kead by Prof. Keri Ewart.
Learning Objectives
- Demonstrate advanced academic literacy: graduate level reading and writing abilities
- Have a broader perspective on the complex, multifaceted causes and conditions of technological change
- Acquire foundational knowledge of origins and development of AI
- Acquire foundational knowledge about how algorithms work and where and how they fail
- Explain principles of usability and how these principles are undermined in practice
- Apply usability principles to design and prototype digital tools/resources
- Understand how labor has been/is being transformed and how the transformations parallel pre-modern forms of worker exploitation
- Understand direct and indirect relationships between local mobilization of advanced learning technologies and global-scale environmental costs
Course Reflection
The main takeaway from this course was the consideration of users, uses and usability of educational tools and how that “configures” the users. I think these core concepts provides a strong framework to evaluate the affordances of educational tools, and reframes how tools control and condition us, as well as how we control the tools we use.
As this is a core course, I think I would have benefitted from this course earlier on in my MET journey, as I believe the usability framework would have been a useful foundational concept to have in my toolkit early on, as it is highly applicable to many of the other classes that I have taken, especially when it comes to evaluation of tools and technology.
Having taken ETEC565H: Artificial Intelligence in Education concurrently with this course, there was quite an overlap in the topics we have discussed, specifically artificial intelligence, algorithms, and attention. Some new topics that I found particularly engaging was on digital labor and media convergence.
One challenge throughout the course, was creating artifacts for the Intellectual Productions. Some of them were written assignments, other required multimedia elements. Though I understand that the different formats is to encourage the use of multimedia and content-creating tools, I wished that the grades could reflect the amount of effort needed to produce a written paper vs a multimedia project. I think having an explanation of why certain multimedia tools were selected for certain topics could be helpful, as sometimes it felt like there was a gap between the pedagogy, course content and the application of tools, making the assignments feel a little disjointed.
Overall, Keri was super helpful and detailed when providing support on our weekly Intellectual Productions, as well as for our Final Group Project as well, and I felt like I was able to apply my knowledge and improve throughout the course.