Chris Lam – Speculative Futures

Chris’ speculative futures are great!  The concept of the ocular implant is both terrifying and plausible – thinking of the ideas set forth in our readings on speculative futures, I do see a pathway to that.  I am resistant to the concept of implanted technology, so prefer to go with wearable tech (like glasses), but the implants probably make more sense and would be more convenient in many ways.

The second speculative was the one that really captured my interest.

I have been thinking about graphic design recently, due to some things that we are working on at my workplace, and the field is fascinating to me.  How do you distill a whole group of ideas into one image or picture?  Chris has done an excellent job of this, the image that he has created, with the few words on the surface, really do capture the essence of a story.  I love that it provides enough information that we can feel some of the emotion of the story it is conveying.  When I think of the concepts, it feels similar to the emoji activity, in that we are translating and interpreting with this, but there is a much richer palate used to paint the picture, and Chris was not just limited to a limited library of emojis to tell the story.  I think this is a good example of a ‘text’ that is not a full written story.

Norah Smith – Voice to Text

Norah’s voice to text stood out to me, not because of the somewhat disturbing story about summer camp, but because of how nicely written it was.  It looked like it was typed and I would never have guessed that it had been done with voice to text technology.

Norah mentions that she has experience working with voice to text technology and that clearly has an impact on the quality of the outcome.  Any tool requires practice and this is no exception.  Voice to text technology does not yet appear to be ready to pick up on our natural speech patterns, we need to adjust to allow the machine to understand us.  Oral storytelling is an art, and it would seem that voice to text storytelling is also an art.

Aaron Ko – Golden Record Curation

Aaron’s Golden Record curation stood out to me because the description of his criteria actually sounded quite similar to mine.  Many of the others that I reviewed seemed to have a very different way of approaching the selections.  Then I saw the screenshot of his spreadsheet.

I didn’t include my spreadsheet in my post, but that is also how I classified and organized the different songs based on the different groupings that I had determined to be relevant.  Although much of my interest and focus in connections is on people who think differently than I do, I have to admit it was cool to see a thought process that seemed so similar.

Brian Ham – Attention Economy

I am so impressed that Brian was able to complete the User Inyerface in 7 minutes!  Reading through Brian’s analysis, much of it was similar to my experience, with the exception of the password and email page.  I found the checkboxes, captcha and demographic information amusing and annoying, but not difficult if you paid attention.

Brian found the email and password page simple and that drives me crazy!  How did I get so caught up on that?  I agree with him that our age and familiarity with the evolution of websites and poor interfaces might make some of this easier for us, but how I wasn’t able to just try clicking on the button to proceed on the password screen now baffles me.  The way we interact with interfaces is an interesting thing to consider and the way in which we can be manipulated and tricked is a valuable lesson.

Well done.

Jeevan Pannun – Golden Record Network Assignment

It is always interesting to me to see how people approach the same activity in a completely different manner than I do.  Jeevun and I had several selections from the Golden Record curation assignment in common, and his network analysis summarizes the reasons behind each song, taking into consideration the selections and reasoning for each of our “group” members.

I worked with the network assignment in a completely different way and didn’t look at others’ motivations or lists at all.  I worked with the movable network, trying to create patterns and observe the visual connections, and only speculating on reasons.  With the visual network I also focused more on the popularity of the songs and grouping them than I did on the people who selected them.

Our differing approach to the network analysis was also evident within Jeevan’s summary of our reasons for selecting the individual songs.  It seems that in many cases we had quite different criteria for selection, although still came up with a relatively similar list.  This assignment and analysis provided insight into the different ways that many of us analyze a series of options and also in how we make connections and review information.

Ryan Dorey Task #4 Handwritten Assignment

This task moved me outside of my comfort zone, as someone who rarely uses handwriting.  I was not overly creative and certainly did not focus on the visual element of my work.  In contrast, Ryan chose to handwrite a poem for this task, and it was refreshing to experience his creative approach.

Ryan’s handwritten poem

His poem highlighted how visually artistic poetry can be, and how expressive handwriting can be.  I hadn’t considered any emotional connection or communication to the written letter I was forming, but upon reflection, I did realize that once may have been the case with my handwriting as well.

I appreciate Ryan’s engagement with the course and found that this task, in particular, showed his thoughtful interaction with the activities.  It is wonderful that we can see how our classmates tackle the different tasks in this course and it opens up different ideas and opportunities for all of us as we spend time reviewing each other’s work.

Cloud computing, file sharing, shared resources, collaborative writing, collaborative editing…  It’s not easy to pinpoint or name the specific technological change, but the ability to easily collaborate online with others within one shared document has had a significant impact on how we approach writing tasks and how we work with one another.  As we move into a new phase of education, these collaborative capabilities will help to shape and enhance the way students learn and interact with each other and their teachers.

The Context:  why do we need collaborative editing?

It has been known for many years that working together is a good way to learn, Vygotsky’s social constructivist theories of learning became popular in the 1960’s (John-Steiner & Mann 1996) and have been repeatedly researched and built upon since then.  An important aspect of constructivist learning theories is the co-construction of knowledge through social interaction with both peers and “experts” or those who have more experience in a given topic (Schrader 2015).  We learn more and we learn more effectively when we do it together.

Group projects are not just arbitrary tasks that teachers use to help students learn to get along, they have practical outcomes and larger implications for the future.  Collaborative writing is a common practice in the world beyond K-12 education.  Calvo et al (2011) point out that the majority of academic writing and professional or workplace writing is produced by teams, and therefore it seems natural and perhaps imperative that collaborative writing should be a skill that is developed and nurtured as a part of standard education.  

As educators, we also know that timely feedback is an important component of effective learning.  The often-cited Seven Principles for Good Practice (Chickering & Gamson 1987) includes prompt feedback, from teachers and peers, as one of the key principles of improving skills. 

Although we have been aware of all of these puzzle pieces of learning for many years, the practical application of them has sometimes been challenging.  The logistics of writing together and group projects have sometimes overshadowed the advantages.  The idea of timely feedback during the writing process has always been there, but actually being able to follow through with it has not always been simple:

• The students type or write draft copies, 
• print out drafts and hand them to the teacher,  
• teacher takes all of the draft copies home and reads them
• teacher provides meaningful written feedback to each of the students 
• student receives written feedback and returns to the draft copy to reflect

Although we know this might be the ideal scenario, and is or was the practice in some classrooms, the possibility of timely feedback depends on several physical steps that can seem somewhat “clunky” by today’s standards.

Group projects have progressed through different iterations over the years, with most of them dependent upon the group members being together in the same space, or working separately and piecing work together from different documents, or emailing countless versions of a document from one user to another.  Each of these has its complications and with the exception of sitting together in one space and writing together, most of them don’t necessarily lead to collaboration.  

Developing alongside this knowledge on optimal learning and the growing popularity of constructivist learning, we also have increased uptake and reliance on word processing and the use of technology for writing.  As technology has progressed and we have become more connected, there have been a series of changes that have enabled more efficient collaboration. 

The History and Development

In the mid to late 1990s, when assignments were still handed in on paper and students may have been passing around zip-drives in order to share files, or possibly emailing them if they weren’t too large, the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing became a reality.  The mainstream birth of file-sharing appears to have happened with the ability to compress files and the subsequent popularity of the music-sharing application, Napster (“File Sharing,” 2020).   

Fast forward a few years and enter Dropbox, along with other tools that enabled easier sharing of files.  The founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, explains that he created the code that would become Dropbox for his personal use, out of the frustration of forgetting his zip drive on a commute and wanting to be able to access his files on multiple devices (Smale 2018).  Dropbox was released in 2008 and provided users with the ability to share large files between different devices and with different users, simplifying people’s school and professional lives and further enabling the ability to collaborate on projects.

During this time period, Google was also acquiring and developing software to allow for easy access and sharing.  In 2006, Google acquired an online word processing tool called Writely (Muchmore, 2006), which would eventually become what we now know as Google Docs.  In 2010, Google released Google Apps for Education, providing free access to word processing tools, shared storage, email and document collaboration for educational institutions (Ferenstein 2010).  Following that up a few years later was Google Drive (Pichai 2012), which served to make file access and sharing even simpler for the general public.     

Building upon these shared technologies, the collaborative spaces continue to develop and there are a plethora of tools available to educators today.  From the Google tools already mentioned, to Microsoft 365 Education, to comprehensive learning platforms like Canvas and Blackboard, along with free or low-cost online tools like Flipgrid and Padlet, the options seem to be endless.  The tools that are used in classrooms have changed dramatically over the last 20 years and will continue to evolve with the technology.  Many of them are designed to facilitate increasingly seamless and simple collaboration with other users.    

We have the theory behind the ideas and have seen the progression of the developments.  Now the question is, are these collaborative tools helping education?  Are students developing important skills and learning more effectively?

The Application:  Does it make a difference?

Google Docs seems to be the most common tool referenced in the literature for collaborative writing although there are several tools available (Al-Samarraie & Saeed 2018).  There is evidence that working within shared documents and receiving feedback from peers and teachers can improve the quality of writing and facilitate more reflective learning among students (Al-Samarraie & Saeed 2018).

In a review of the literature on cloud computing, Blau and Caspi (2009) found that students perceived higher quality of output when collaborating with peers.  The findings support the idea that suggesting and commenting is more effective for learning than directly editing another student’s work.  The ability within word processing and spreadsheet applications to comment, message, and subsequently resolve or discuss, easily enables this feedback loop.  In a study of middle school students, it was observed that through feedback, “…both readers and writers exhibited deeper thinking regarding both the texts written by others and their own writing, as students constantly revised their work and provided feedback to others.” (Zheng et al 2015)

There may also be important implications for language learners.  The use of cloud computing for collaborative writing by English language learners was found to improve writing skills through the application of comments from peers and teachers (Alsubaie & Alshuraidah 2017).  Teacher comments and feedback seemed to have a higher impact, which supports the idea of timely feedback being an important tool for learning.

It is also relevant to place all of this discussion into the context of 2020, where the majority of students around the world have had to transition to online learning with the COVID-19 pandemic.  This has rattled education and forced many educators and students to pivot very quickly into a whole new learning style.  The common usage of online tools that were already in place in many schools has helped to support this unprecedented disruption.  It is difficult to picture the transition to wide-scale distance learning without the use of cloud-based computing.  For those who have access to devices and reliable internet and the fortunate students and schools who already had 1:1 technology implemented, the transition has been more smooth, although not without its many challenges.  It will be interesting to observe how this disruption affects education in the years to come.

Much of the research available on collaborative editing and cloud-based education is more focused on higher education, there does not seem to be as much research within K-12 education.  It does appear to be evident from the literature that collaborative working using cloud-based computing does facilitate learning and improved quality.  It would seem to be a safe jump, although it is a jump, to assume that this is also the case for K-12 education, especially in middle and high school.  As noted previously, collaborative editing and writing is a common practice in academia and the professional world, and therefore is a useful skill for grade-school students to develop organically, as a norm in learning rather than as an awkwardly forced assignment.  The cloud-based collaborative tools help to enable this seamless collaboration, which our students of today may learn to use naturally, providing and receiving feedback and working together with comfort and ease.

As education practices evolve, both driven and enabled by the developing technology, we are moving towards a new “learning framework 3.0” (Mareca 2019).   The role of students as both content creators and consumers, as well as the development of teamwork and collaboration skills, are becoming and will continue to become, increasingly important.  The pervasiveness of collaborative tools and the universal adoption of cloud computing has changed how we approach education and how we work together, hopefully resulting in the production of higher quality outcomes and more reflective students and educators.  

References

Al-Samarraie, H., & Saeed, N. (2018). A systematic review of cloud computing tools for collaborative learning: Opportunities and challenges to the blended-learning environment. Computers and Education, 124, 77-91. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.016

Alsubaie, J. & Ashuraidah, A. (2017). Exploring writing individually and collaboratively using Google Docs in EFL contexts. English Language Teaching, 10(10), 10-30. Retrieved from https://www-learntechlib-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/p/190510/.

Blau, I. & Caspi, A. (2009). Sharing and collaborating with Google Docs: The influence of psychological ownership, responsibility, and student’s attitudes on outcome quality. In T. Bastiaens, J. Dron & C. Xin (Eds.), Proceedings of E-Learn 2009–World conference on e-learning in corporate, government, healthcare, and higher education (pp. 3329-3335). Vancouver, Canada: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved from https://www-learntechlib-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/primary/p/32961/.

Calvo, R.,  O’Rourke, S., Jones, J., Yacef, K., and Reimann, P. (2011). Collaborative writing support tools on the cloud.  IEEE transactions on learning technologies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 88-97. doi: 10.1109/TLT.2010.43.

Chickering, A. W., Gamson, Z. F., & American Association for Higher Education, Washington, DC. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. AAHE Bulletin, 3.

File Sharing. (July 23, 2020). In Wikipedia.  Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing

Ferenstein, G. (2010, April 28).  Why schools are turning to Google Apps.  Mashable.  Retrieved from https://mashable.com/2010/04/28/schools-google-apps/

John-Steiner, V., & Mahn, H. (1996). Sociocultural approaches to learning and development: A Vygotskian framework. Educational Psychologist, 31(3-4), 191-206. doi:10.1080/00461520.1996.9653266

Mareca, M. P., & Bordel, B. (2019). The educative model is changing: Toward a student participative learning framework 3.0—editing wikipedia in the higher education. Universal Access in the Information Society, 18(3), 689-701. doi:10.1007/s10209-019-00687-6

Muchmore, Michael. (2006, September 8).  Writely:  Google’s online word processor.  ExtremeTech.  Retrieved from https://www.extremetech.com/computing/50680-writely-googles-online-word-processor

Pichai, S. (2012, April 24).  Introducing Google Drive…yes really [Web log post].  Retrieved from https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html

Schrader, D. E. (2015). Constructivism and learning in the age of social media: Changing minds and learning communities: Constructivism and learning in the age of social media. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2015(144), 23-35. doi:10.1002/tl.20160

Smale, W. (2018, July 16). How two strangers set up Dropbox and made millions. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44766487

Zheng, B., Zheng, B., Lawrence, J., Lawrence, J., Warschauer, M., Warschauer, M., Lin, C. (2015). Middle school students’ writing and feedback in a cloud-based classroom environment. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 20(2), 201-229. doi:10.1007/s10758-014-9239-z

Here is one speculative narrative with Sam and Max reading a novel

Below is a second speculative narrative:

It’s 8am on Monday, Jay’s friend sends a message, “Are you on your way to school?”

Jays’s digital assistant responds – “Jay is still in sleep mode, optimal sleep is not yet complete.  Jay will join the later session.”

When Jay wakes up, feeling well-rested after a good night’s sleep, he accesses his school dashboard to find out what is in store for the day.  The assistant has synced with the other class members and instructors and prepared Jay’s schedule.  “You will start with a lesson on media in the 20th century and then will do some research to prepare for your in-school session later this morning with the following 10 classmates …, since your more optimal math learning occurs in the afternoon, that lesson is scheduled for 2 pm.  You can do that lesson at school and then meet with Instructor Smith and the following 8 classmates to work through the practical applications.  After math work you’ll be ready for some physical activity and can participate in the afternoon session with Instructor Jones.”

Jay moves through his morning routines and gets ready to access his first lesson.  He likes the setup of the school schedule and that his assistant works with the school programming to create the optimal learning routines for him.  His older sibling, Sam, talks about the rigid schedule that high school used to have.  He can’t even imagine the school that his parents talk about, with the same schedule for all students, every day, even if they were early morning people or late sleepers.  Nobody cared about people’s optimal sleep rhythms, the schedule was set for the system and not the system for the individuals.  Sam doesn’t know what his friend Susie would do without her afternoon rest in the sleeping pods at school.

Jay does his lesson and research about media in the 20th century from home.  He puts on his glasses and travels through the network, following a series of links as he learns about the changes in media through the 1900s.  The school librarian mentions in the lesson that they have an old tool available at the school to look at preserved newspapers on microfilm.  He asks his assistant to remind him to go look at some old news stories when he gets to school.  

After his session is finished, Jay gets his things together, checks his list with his assistant to make sure he has everything he needs for the rest of the day and heads out to the bike path for his commute to school.

Success! If you can call it that.  What a frustrating and addictive task.  Although my time says 10 minutes, it should actually be multiple hours over multiple days, especially when you factor in the time spent thinking about what the correct password pattern might be.  

It was interesting reading about dark patterns and observing the tricks that may be employed to guide people into selecting things that they may not want, or to make it challenging to achieve the result that they are interested in.  Thankfully I’m a careful reader and don’t get stuck in those traps, right?  Maybe not.

At first, I was convinced that the key might be somewhere in the terms & conditions and read through them multiple times.  The time warning was distracting and created a sense of tension initially, and then just became annoying, as did the help screen on the third and fourth pages.  

Ultimately, the time-waster for me came down to the error message for the password.  I caught the double negative in the warning and therefore thought that I had to make the password simpler, so I focused on using the word “password” for my password.  It was just random clicking today that led me to click on the seemingly disabled ‘next’ button when the error message was displayed.  Aaaaagh!

This exercise made me consider the patterns and expectations that we have of digital interactions.  Although I may not be considered a “digital native,” there are still norms that I am used to in the programming of a web page or application.  These are the things that we might talk about as being intuitive in a program.  For example, the appearance of an active button or link as opposed to an inactive button or link is part of standard programming and in this case, I didn’t even think about the grayed out “next” button because it didn’t appear to be available to me.  When there is a red message displayed, even when it is underhandedly affirming the security of my password, I simply assume that it is an error message and that I am not able to proceed.          

I wonder if someone who is not used to the conventions and norms of digital interactions would have as much trouble with that step?  If you’re not used to seeing a password error message, and not used to the convention that an active button is usually highlighted and not grayed out, then would you be more inclined to click “next”?  I was crippled (for an embarrassingly long time) by my assumptions and didn’t even realize it.

Some of the other aggravating and clever elements were on the “I’m not a robot” page.  The use of homonyms and homographs was both amusing and frustrating.  The orientation of the buttons for selecting the pictures seemed to be designed for confusion, as they were situated closer to the picture above rather than the picture they were attached to.  

This was a good exercise to continue to think about the content from this week.  In this game, the designers know how we will behave and the assumptions that we will make, which makes us easy prey for the subtle tricks that keep us from progressing.  This highlights how predictable humans can be, and how we can be easily persuaded or manipulated.  As Tristan Harris noted in his Ted Talk, it is important for us to acknowledge that we are persuadable.  

Initially, looking at all of the data from the class in Palladio, it seemed like it would be difficult to see any relationships.  I am more used to working with spreadsheets and pivot tables and working with information in that way.  Once I started trying to create order within the network by moving around the nodes, I found this a very useful way to visualize the data and find connections in a different way.  

After playing with several different methods of arranging the networks, I found that different arrangements enabled the visualisation of relationships depending upon the grouping selected.  Within the small groupings I found it best to move the curators to the outside and the tracks to the inside, trying to keep the curators with more links in common closer together, this only works with smaller groups of about four curators.  

With a higher number of curators, I found it more useful to move the tracks to the outside and keep the curators more in the middle.  I was curious to see what tracks were popular and which ones were less popular.  With the tracks to the outside it was easier to spot the volume of connections to each track, and with the option selected to view the weighted track nodes, it became even more obvious.  

Higher degree (more connections) tracks to the right, and lower degree to the left

From this visualization, we can see that Jaat Kahan Ho and Morning Star Devil Bird appear to be two of the more popular tracks.  String Quartet, Panpipes and Kinds of Flowers were the least selected tracks.  Why were some tracks selected more often and some selected less?  Although we don’t have each curator’s decision-making information available, it is possible to move around the nodes to help make some guesses.

Tracks to the outside grouped into different styles and regions

By trying to vaguely group the tracks into different styles and world regions, it could be observed that Jaat Kahan Ho, from India, stands somewhat alone as a musical representative from a very large country.  Likewise, Morning Star Devil Bird, a didgeridoo piece from Australia, is also somewhat alone in its style and regional representation.  Perhaps this was one of the reasons for these tracks having higher degrees than other tracks.

There were many western classical (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) tracks in the list, and they were all represented in the curators’ selections, however, with a narrowing to ten selections, they did not all need to be there.  Beethoven’s 5th Symphony was selected more than the others and String Quartet was least often selected.  It could be because the 5th Symphony is very recognizable and has a full symphonic sound, and there were other tracks of string music represented in the popular selections so that the string quartet didn’t offer anything unique to the selections.  

It’s very possible that there were other reasons for the popularity of items, as I applied my own ideas to the grouping and analysis of the data.  The exercise demonstrated how regrouping and working with adjacency information can provide insight into relationships in different ways than spreadsheets and pivot tables.  Being able to visualize and move the nodes is a more tangible way to work with the data and helps to explore relationships and trends in a new way.