Global health is a planetary phenomenon that can be scary if we think about it in terms of mindless resource consumption, structural inequalities, human experimentation, military biological programs and so on (Crawford, 2021; Sweeney, 2022). Based on numerous definitions (Beaglehole & Bonita, 2010; Koplan et al., 2009), I would define global health as an art and science of solving health issues beyond the national borders. Global health has ties with modern technologies in questions of their impact on people’s health and planet as a whole. Global health is connected with education and economy as it is essential for any society to get a healthy graduate.

Let us look at the interconnectedness of technologies, education, and global health through the lens of a recent massive health crisis. When asked about types of health, people usually remember three sides of a triangle: physical health, mental health, and social health. The pandemic revealed the significance of all three of them. Specifically, COVID-19 period had differential effects on multiple education players, for example, kids from kindergarten to Grade 12 re-evaluated friendship, feeling connected, and participating in extracurricular activities (Bennett, 2020); unsuspecting parents were found worthy to complement math, physics, history and reading learning of their children (Burgess & Sievertsen, 2020; Kuhfeld et al, 2020); everyone realized how important physical and social developments are for the young learners; adult high achievers in colleges and universities barely noticed the educational medium change etc.

I am glad that questions of equality, building character, resilience, and relational skills (Boys, 2021; Primer, 2020), the foundations of mental and social health of learners, are highlighted by the pandemic researchers. However, I cannot agree with some conclusions drawn from the COVID experiences, for example, placing elected politicians in a God’s position (Primer, 2020, p. 5), or thinking that traditional teaching is somehow flawed (Primer, 2020, p. 5), and simplification of education is due.

In reality, modern kids will easily acquire the computational and digital skills because children get digital devices first and foremost as their parents’ attention substitute. With those high-tech toys parents usually buy some of their life back. At the same time, “large quantities of traditional data in the established sciences, literature, history, mathematics, and physics” that the Primer’s (2020) authors criticize on Page 5 for no particular reason will provide an excellent background for “sound analysis and decision-making” that they strive for on Page 6.

In my opinion, we should not allow overly enthusiastic and inexperienced policy makers to use this health crisis for further destabilization of education. Any serious innovations have to be suggested only after the COVID-19 occurrence is thoroughly analyzed, not to imbalance the educational system more with the unreasonable reforms.

In general, as any big social event, the COVID-19 pandemic 2020-2022 had its positive and negative outcomes: in nature, pollution diminished, and flora and fauna flourished; consequently, many reported seeing the Himalayas for the first time in decades since the smog had disappeared. In medicine, lack of medical practitioners surfaced. In education, online delivery and educational technologies grabbed everyone’s attention. In a society overall, occupations that deemed fashionable lost their glamour, and simple and kind people’s attention and relationships became priceless, to mention some changes.

I could not help touching upon one more aspect of today’s world health where the topics of this course naturally merge. According to Koplan et al. (2009), migrant-worker health is also a part of global health (p. 1994), and it is obvious that Ukrainians moving to Canada are bringing a lot of pain with them which they subconsciously redirect toward people around.

It can take different forms: Ukrainian Canadian social workers point out excessive demands from the newcomers; host Canadian families – inactivity; my Ukrainian Canadian friend who recently visited an in-person welcome meeting for Ukrainians – arrogance etc. I reckon all those stress manifestations, from overcompensation through stupor to depression, signal the painful struggles that the new migrants are dealing with in the process of adaptation to a very different society.

I do not think that displaced Ukrainians are ready for a Canadian education as the best way to adjust unless they were students at home, but I am certain that social media can help them ruminate over what they lived through and relieve some inner tension since it is not common in Ukraine to visit a psychotherapist.

As we know, media functions include information, a public forum, an outlet for escapism and creativity, entertainment, a watchdog for government and other institutions, and education (Understanding Media and Culture, 2010). This specific environment where “information is shared and processed by algorithms which shape the kinds of information human actors are exposed to and the kinds of interactions they can have in real time” (Jones, 2020, p. 19) together with an international virtual audience can be quite supportive, helpful and understanding; online posts and commentaries, individual or in groups, will serve as a non-discriminating and soothing diary; and as a result, it will be possible for many Ukrainians to draw some conclusions and make peace with themselves. This mental health improvement of one national group will contribute to general health enhancement for humanity.

To sum up, everything is connected on Earth, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted medicine, education, government, economy, business, industry, technology, and social life worldwide (Canadian Commission for UNESCO, 2020). To move on, we should carefully examine the COVID-19 disaster and its consequences, use what positive we still have, and avoid exacerbating current situation with technology, education, and global health. I would like to underline that global health depends on a lot of factors, and the best we can do to keep it sustainable is to take care of our individual mental, physical, and social state because “we are all one body moving through time and space together” (Waganese, 2013).

References

Beaglehole, R. & Bonita, R. (2010). What is global health? Global Health Action, 3, 5142. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852240/

Bennette, P. W. (2020, July 20). The educational experience has been substandard for students during COVID-19. Policy Options Politique. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/july-2020/the-educational-experience-has-been-substandard-for-students-during-covid-19/

Boys, J. (2021). Exploring inequalities in the social, spatial and material practices of teaching and learning in pandemic times. Postdigital Science and Education, 4, 13-32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00267-z

Burgess, S., & Sievertsen, H. H. (2020, April 1). Schools, skills, and learning: The impact of COVID-19 on education. VoxEU. https://voxeu.org/article/impact-covid-19-education

Canadian Commission for UNESCO (2020, April 20). COVID-19 is creating a world crisis in education. UNESCO. https://en.ccunesco.ca/blog/2020/4/online-educational-resources-covid19

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300252392

Jones, R. H. (2020). The rise of the pragmatic web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction. In C. Tagg & M. Evans (Eds.), Message and Medium (pp. 17-37). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110670837-003

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E., & Lewis, K. (2020, December 3). How is COVID-19 affecting student learning? Brown Center Chalkboard.

Koplan, J. P., Bond, T. C., Merson, M. H., Reddy, K. S., Rodriguez, M. H., Sewankambo, N. K., & Wasserheit, J. N. (2009). Towards a common definition of global health. Lancet, 373, 1993–1995. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60332-9

Primer: The COVIDEA universe at a glance. (2020). Covid Education Alliance (COVIDEA).

Sweeney, S. (2022, June 14). After months of denial, U.S. admits to running Ukraine biolabs. People’s World. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/after-months-of-denial-u-s-admits-to-running-ukraine-biolabs/

Understanding media and culture: An introduction to mass communication. (2010). The University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/

Wagamese, R. (2013, June 11). Wagamese: ‘All my relations’ about respect. Kamloops Daily News. https://kamloopsnews.ca/kdn-opinion-columnists/wagamese-all-my-relations-about-respect/

Content prioritization is a way to organize things. Humans prioritize all the time whatever we do. An ESL teacher prioritizes a course content at the beginning of the semester after studying students’ diagnostic test results, and then the educator does that every day with the material for studies, according to the students present in class and their particular needs. Applied to algorithms, content prioritization means records “presented in a ranking order” (Noble, 2018, p. 123).

Algorithms are a sequence of actions to do to solve a problem or complete a task. There are several types of them: randomised, recursive, backtracking, basic graph, greedy ones etc. (Erickson, 2019). Similar to a prioritization technique, algorithms are here to make our life more organized too, and they analyze massive amount of information for that. We have to remember though that these helpful and expensive algorithms act with “ruthless pragmatism” (Crawford, 2021, p. 95), for the benefit of someone else as well.

Exploring search engines as modern algorithms, Noble (2018) warns us that “search is a mirror of users’ beliefs” (p. 15) and in today’s flawed, prejudiced and unfair society search results are pampered too. She points out that “results are then normalized as believable and often presented as factual” (p. 25). O’Neil (2017) develops on that stating that “many poisonous assumptions are camouflaged by math and go largely untested and unquestioned” (p. 7) and calls algorithms “opinions embedded in mathematics” (p. 21). She believes that algorithms disadvantage poor people and minorities because algorithms, people who use them, and society in general are not perfect. In this regard, Noble (2018) particularly worries about Google’s “considerable control over personal identity” and what can circulate online or be forgotten (p. 123).

Indeed, modern algorithmic bias is so obvious sometimes it looks absurd. If one tries to google “best movie of … (any recent year)”, they will be surprised with the very diverse results from different online resources. Assuming that those numerous rankings were made to attract a potential watcher, contradicting outcomes actually have the opposite effect – they turn people away from those unreliable recommendations.

Still, despite everything turning into content (Taylor, 2021), and algorithms urging people to pay attention to this and that, it is a person who makes a final decision, a conscious choice. For instance, Facebook posts in my news feed nudge me toward certain political, economical or cultural views every day. Moreover, my humane acquaintances who support Ukraine, Russia, Europe, or independent republics in what is going on in Ukraine want me to back up their position exclusively. But since 2014 I have learned how to navigate those contradictory demands safely.

I think algorithms impact my professional life positively: I like how they assist me in finding any specific information – Google’s ranking algorithm PageRank being exceptionally good at that, and I appreciate their personalization efforts even though I do not share much about myself online. I am glad that Canadian children learn coding and programming in school. Of course, those computational skills – decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithmic (i.e., logical) thinking – are nothing new for the psychologists. Still, it is good to know that mathematics is popular again.

That established Afro-American hairdresser from Noble’s (2018) negative algorithm example relied on Yelp too much for her business, in my opinion. She could have printed her own advertisements – with her photo and years of professional experience – and put them on every physical advertising site in her community. I am sure that owners of small businesses around would have gladly assisted her by positioning her messages near their entrances as a neighbour-to-neighbour favour.

If we accept that algorithms are valuable to us while they can also be for-profit, politicized and biased, it will make it easier to put up with their negative features and enjoy positive ones. Let us take YouTube’s business as an example. They play commercials with free videos and then suggest people should pay to avoid wasting time. Well, in these circumstances, my young yet already wise adult ESL students used to say, “Advertisement is an exercise in English listening too”, so we were not really bothered with those merchandising interruptions in class.

Or I get Canadian and world news from Yahoo.ca daily, mixed with barely hidden advertisements. If at first it felt unpleasant, currently I just skip any irrelevant information without thinking. I deal with other unwanted algorithmic recommendations pretty much the same way. I try not to impact PageRank or any other ranking systems by guarding my online presence. If I had a site I wanted to make more prominent though, I would write much on the topics that I am familiar with to create original and high quality content, would use keywords and hyperlinks, and make my pages internally linked for beginning.

Algorithms are a product of today’s world; they will be here with us for some time, and it is better for them, their creators and society to co-exist peacefully. Noble (2018) believes that search engines are “corralling and controlling the ever-growing sea of information” and to get accurate and neutral information one has to be more algorithmic literate (p. 25). It seems to me that sound scepticism and a bit of common-sense help see through any evil intentions too.

If we are cautious, use common sense and diversify, algorithms will stay friends.

References

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300252392

Erickson, J. (2019). Algorithms.  https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/book/Algorithms-JeffE.pdf

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown Publishing Group.

Taylor, A. (2021, February 2021). Are streaming algorithms really damaging film? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56085924

During the first two decades of the 21^st century, innovations have flourished worldwide: internet entering education, smartphones substituting laptops, electronic dictionaries replacing paper ones etc.

I witnessed how education without internet was giving space to education with internet in two European universities – Charles university in Prague, Czech Republic, and the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University in Ukraine – in 2007/09. I was a visiting scholar in the former and had been working since 1998 in the latter.

Internet was costly those days in both countries, and while both universities were actively using it in their administrative, research, and international activities, in education it was being done to a different extent.

For example, for ERASMUS students of Charles university in Prague, education with internet first and foremost meant reaching their schedule, administrative staff and professors, and submitting their assignments in the most convenient way. Yet internet was only an additional service for them as everything still existed in the material form too – a schedule on the wall, the translated textbooks in paper, administrative and professors’ offices etc. Students physically visited their lectures in the morning and libraries in the evening as huge funds of the university library had not been digitalized yet. Secondly, internet was a way to keep in touch with relatives and friends, and thirdly, internet provided entertainment. In this, ERASMUS students did not differ much from the general population of the Czech Republic who used internet mostly for reading news, looking for a job, and buying stuff then (Lupáč & Sládek, 2008).

At the same time, for full-time and part-time students of the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University of Ukraine, education with internet meant another educational tool that their professor might implement during their organized communication to make it more diverse. There were several computer classrooms, but no free wi-fi or cable Internet available to students on the university premises yet.

As modernization of higher education was a part of common European agenda (Commission of the European Communities, 2008), and the Czech government financed universities well (OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic, 2009), in addition to internet in its classrooms and dormitories, Charles university in Prague owned computer laboratories in its several campuses all over the capital city in 2007/08. Those laboratories were places for individual studies and entertainment in a free time. They had computers, cable and wi-fi internet available and were open from early morning till late at night – for students, professors, staff, and visiting scholars. I can assume that those laboratories assisted people with work and studying as well as distracted them from libraries, theatres, excursions, night clubs, in-person communication and shopping etc.

Higher education modernization was considered important in Ukraine too, but the concept was not supported by a state budget. As a result, education with internet got most attention at the institutional level, for instance, in 2007/08 the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University had several computer classrooms equipped with private university resources, and no computer laboratories with free internet for studies. In 2008/09, when smartphones became more wide-spread, the initiative moved to the individual level of professors to make internet more frequent in education and thus replace computers, CD players, some exercise books etc.

I cannot say that education with internet changed the well-known pedagogical approaches much. There is no doubt that it greatly supported individual studies in various disciplines. Internet was an extremely popular method of education in 2007/09, an additional tool that enjoyed everyone’s (polyphonic, in Citton’s terms) attention and was considered safe, time and resource saving. Despite any misconceptions about internet in that period of transition, it was clear that education with internet would not go away because it was exciting and convenient to every side involved – students, professors, university administrators, ministries of education, ministries of immigration, students’ parents etc. Citton (2016) described that innovative time best: “the materiality of the devices that will condition our attention tomorrow depends on the way in which our attention today selects certain properties offered by the devices produced yesterday” (p. 190). Indeed, computers without internet were useful things from yesterday in 2007/08. United in a global network, those computers became something much better and bigger that I as a teacher wanted to explore and pass to younger generations.

The pace and volume of the shift from education without internet to education with internet depended at first on state funding for computerization, and later, with appearance of smartphones and better availability of internet, – on attention of professors mostly.

To sum up, the example of both universities clearly demonstrates that a technology cannot emerge instantly and everywhere at the same time. It demands collective, joint, and individual attention, and good financing to displace the previous routine.

References

Citton, Y. (2016). The ecology of attention. Oxford: Polity.

Commission of the European Communities (2008, December 16). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: New skills for new jobs. Anticipating and matching labour market and skills needs. Commission of the European Communities Publishing. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0868:FIN:EN:PDF

Lupáč, P., & Sládek, J. (2008). The deepening of the digital divide in the Czech Republic. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2(1). https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4210/3251

OECD (2009). OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic 2009. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264049079-en

This project provides me with an opportunity of looking at the learning process as a designer. In this new-old setting, teachers and students become users, a process of studying resources contributes to information architecture, a student-centered approach backs up the human-centered design, an educational method turns into a digital product, and the organized learning with digital tools turns into the human-centered design process that is supposed to be cycled, tested and measured repeatedly.

While those and other elements and characteristics of education remain the same no matter how they are labelled, a designer’s angle feels less personal, objective, and mathematical, though as a teacher and researcher I dealt with numbers, not humans, quite often. In the role of a designer, I will try to unite this pragmatism and new terminology with my pedagogical and technological knowledges and experiences to get something unique – attractive, understandable, operable, effective and efficient, useful and usable etc. method of studying English, most suitable for my users.

The goal is to create a system of English Facebook – mature ESL students’ interaction activities in two steps: (1). studying recent academic resources on Facebook and on teaching English as a second language (ESL) to mature students, and (2). combining current pedagogical, technological, sociological, psychological, economical, and linguistic findings with my own ideas and personal experiences as a teacher, researcher, and a Facebook user.

According to Issa and Isaias (2015), a modern human-computer interaction should be involving, diverse in knowledge and expertise, and iterative (p. 25); efficient, effective and safe (p. 24). They recommend a designer to work with the user since the very beginning of a tool development “to make the system more successful” (p. 38). In my case, I communicated with the users before I started developing a system of online activities for them.

I chose a specific contingent – older Canadian immigrants who do not know English very well. Being settled down, these people seem stuck with their low level of English: they already built their own non-English circle of communication, they cannot make new English-speaking friends easily and have no time or energy to start studying English properly. I intent to change their English language situation for the better at their leisure time.

I am centering on older people because they seem underrepresented in pedagogy and methodology of teaching foreign languages. Academic works on mature students are rare and not up-to-date (Martin-Lynch, Merrill, Laming, Parr) despite the growing numbers of these students in the universities and colleges worldwide. Meanwhile, most contemporary books and articles about Facebook focus on problems of privacy, democracy and addiction (Andrews, Fietkiewicz, Hartman, Lins, Rife, Wanner, Wittig). Exposing social dangers of Facebook is important, but in this study, I would like to highlight the benefits of Facebook. There are several modern resources on Facebook in the ESL high school and college classroom available (Dorji, Rajagopal, Shah), with some authors even doubting usability of Facebook for older people (Saeed et al., 2014), but I am pretty optimistic about the positive outcomes.

For now, my project users’ will participate in this project indirectly – through me as the representative of mature ESL students in Canada. If I can, I will engage real people to take part in this pedagogical-technological experiment.

My users’ requirements are simple – they want to learn English quickly and easily. While I cannot help them with “quickly”, I expect advance with “easily”.

I do not believe that English Facebook will help mature international learners much with English grammar or pronunciation. I see Facebook first of all as a practice field for English conversational phrases and sentences, reading and writing. Topics like “Greeting”, “Leavetaking”, “Dis/Approval”, “Compliment”, “Dis/Agreement”, “Dis/Like”, “Gratitude”, “Surprise” etc. seem ideal for fast utilization there. However, I can be mistaken in my assumptions as Facebook is full of audio content too, and therefore, can be beneficial for English listening and speaking as well. I am not sure of the role Facebook plays in transferring new culture either and therefore, would love to consult with my colleagues on the topic of Facebook usability.

I expect the following difficulties and limitations of the project: not every elder person uses Facebook; those who use this social network quite often do not consider it an appropriate place for learning; not everything can be studied through organized Facebook-user interaction; no one is checking factual and linguistic accuracy of a Facebook content; older people are curious, but inflexible in their habits, and if they try a new approach, it will take time for them to change their Facebook routine etc.

I suppose that the following factors might contribute to the project’s success: a great number of older people on Facebook; easiness of use of the suggested method; my very high professional status in the non-English speaking community.

Regarding the way to evaluate the project, in the end I expect my mature ESL learners to spend more time on English Facebook communicating with their peers. I believe this criterion – time on English Facebook – will be telling in terms of users’ preference and performance.

As I consider the universal usability of Facebook as an ESL tool and environment, I remember older people from Ukraine who recently travelled to Canada for protection. So far, 141,694 Ukrainian applications for Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel have been approved (Government of Canada, 2022). In the popular Ukrainian Facebook groups “Ukrainians in Toronto Group”, “Ukrainian Moms in Toronto”, “Українці допомагають з роботою / Канада” etc. those travellers are asking for free offline English courses in Canada. Little do they know about a possibility of studying English on Facebook individually, and I do not blame them as the concept of online learning in a free time has come to me only recently. I hope the final result of the project will be applicable to those displaced Ukrainians too, so putative user identities will be more diverse. All in all, I expect this project to have a great social value and importance.

Reference

Andrews, L. (2020). Facebook, the media and democracy: Big tech, small state? Routledge.

Dorji, J. (2021). Facebook: An online environment for learning English for ESL students. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 18(2), 608-616. http://dx.doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2021.18.2.14.608

Fietkiewicz, K. J., & Lins, E. (2016). New media and new territories for European law: Competition in the market for social networking services. In K. Knautz, & K. S. Baran (Eds), Facets of Facebook: Use and users (pp.285-324). De Gruyter.

Hartmann, S., & Wanner, B. (2016). Does Facebook cause addiction? An analysis of German Facebook users. In K. Knautz, & K. S. Baran (Eds), Facets of Facebook: Use and users (pp.72-91). De Gruyter.

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Sustainable design: Hci, usability and environmental concerns. Springer. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4471-6753-2.pdf

Laming, M. M., Morris, A., & Martin-Lynch, P. (2019). Mature-age male students in higher education: Experiences, motivations and aspirations. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24478-1

Merrill, B. (2018). Gender, change, and identity: Mature women students in universities. (2^nd Ed.). Routledge.

Molina, O. E., Fuentes-Cancell, D. R., & Garcia-Hernandez, A. (2022). Evaluating usability in educational technology: A systematic review from the teaching of mathematics. LUMAT General Issue, 10(1), 65-88. https://doi.org/10.31129/
LUMAT.10.1.1686

Parr, J. (2019). Identity and education: The links for mature women students. (2^nd ed). Routledge.

Saeed, R., Khan, Z., Naqui, K., Iqbal, S., & Aftab, F. (2014). Usability issues on Facebook for older adults. Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 22(7), 1109-1113. https://doi.org/10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2014.22.07.21962

Rajagopal, K., & Shah, P. M. (2021). Students’ Perceptions of using Facebook in ESL
Classroom. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 11(11), 1327 –1349. http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v11-i11/11088

Rife, S. C. (2019). Recruiting participants through Facebook. SAGE. https://dx.doi.org/9781529748710

Wittig, K. (2016). Privacy in social networks after the global surveillance disclosures. In K. Knautz, & K. S. Baran (Eds), Facets of Facebook: Use and users (pp. 146-171). De Gruyter.

1. As far as I understood Issa and Isaias (2015), usability determines the value of technology and shows its ability to do the task it has been developed for quickly and with minimum efforts. Woolgar (1990) added a “versatility” to this description, and I would amount “reinvention” because of recuring nature of teaching English to international students and fast-changing technology. I will illustrate it with the YouTube video which primarily aim was English speaking; however, I successfully used its content to review Simple tenses and non-action verbs, i.e., grammar, as well as vocabulary (Learn English with Rebecca – engVid, 2014).
2. Issa and Isaias (2015) treat technology as a business product that a designer first gives to the supposed users for testing. It is a seller-buyer relationship for the writers, and it is not like that in school, even in online classes. The teacher can be a designer, or they can use a technological product created by someone else (a movie, an application, an electronic dictionary etc.). Whether education is student-centred or participatory, the teacher is always a user who constantly experiments and decides what works with certain students. Educational usability therefore, is a characteristic of an educational tool, its ability to suit the evolving learning needs of a teacher and students. For the classroom, the teacher decides what is currently usable and what can be usable in the future, not a product designer or student.
3. The aim of the final experiment described by Woolgar (1990) was to evaluate the documentation accompanying the product by setting the participants to read and follow those manuals’ instructions. I believe “configuring users” meant turning this quasi-experiment into less controlled product-testing by providing assistance that participants were not supposed to get in their natural environment. I liked how quickly a complicated diagram was redrew after getting informal feedback (p. 76), or how Woolgar himself was hesitant to buy the product because he knew its strengths and weaknesses all too well (p. 78). The innovators seemed to do their best, and I kept remembering a “Halt and Catch Fire” TV series while reading the resource. I have been teaching English and creating exercises since mid-90s, and I am quite confident in my ability to set and reach the academic goals. I look at usability from the educator’s point of view, and a computer is a tool for me, “a thing that gets us to the thing” (Cantwell & Rogers, 2014-2017). I am also very interested in students’ position on effective educational tools.
4. Two citations in general are about different stages of a product creation. In particular, the first one describes its trial or “usability evaluation stage” (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 29) of the software development. It focuses more on the product. I can relate to this stage of the development process in this way: when the ESL students and I are using the new educational technique that I created, I can see if it is effective and efficient, whether it helps me reach our short-term and long-term goals, and what can be done to make it better (to shorten the text, add a visual, change the mode of the activity or order of exercises etc.). I also keep in mind that with other students this same set of exercises might have a different outcome, so numerous trials will bring more trustworthy results. The second citation is about earlier stages of development, its planning and pre-production. As Issa and Isaias (2015) put it, a designer should consider “future users’ needs, values, and supportable tasks” (p. 21), so it centres less on a product and more on its target audience. In the educational context, it is also applicable to the content of an academic program. Educators “arrange” both students and the program (with its methods of delivery) at the beginning of the semester, applying the diagnostic tests, discussing their results with the students and reaching a consensus with them regarding future studies. If students can be divided into groups based on their level of proficiency, it will be even better. Those Woolgar’s constraints turn into an educational range then – who will study what and how. In a way, I configure students every day, for example, when I forbid them using non-action verbs in Progressive or their smartphones during a test. Outside the classroom, students can do whatever they want with their English and gadgets, but during the lessons we follow the rules. 

 References

Cantwell, Ch., & Rogers, Ch. (Producers). (2014-2017). Halt and Catch Fire [Television series]. AMC. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

Issa, T. & Isaias, P. (2015). Sustainable design: Hci, usability and environmental concerns. Springer. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4471-6753-2.pdf

Learn English with Rebecca – engVid. (2014, Feb. 3). Speaking English – 8 ways to be positive & encourage others. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xz7C7TRRbo&t=76s

Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38(1_suppl), 58-99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03349.x

My introduction to Indigenous culture was probably unconventional – across the ocean and through ideology and literature. I grew up in Eastern Europe, and the earliest acquaintance with First Nations was made through transformative art – relatives telling me fascinating stories about freedom-loving Indians that they knew from the books and movies of the Soviet Union era. Later, I took up reading and discovered the translated books about a war between the French and the British forces in North America, in particular, at the Great Lakes area.

Therefore, the most applicable Ontario educational history-related resources that unite the past and present for me in the most comfortable way will be the Leatherstoking Tales by J. F. Cooper as well as any truthful readings on internationalism and socialism. I would say that Wikipedia entries will do to refresh the memories and systematize everything anew.

So, back in the day, James Fenimore Cooper, an American writer hugely popular in the Soviet Union, told me the stories about First Nations of 18^th century: their way of life, places they traveled, their friends and enemies, their morale, their love for life, courage, perseverance, children and Ontario.

I realize that Cooper’s books, so called historical romances, were fictional works as opposed to impartial chronicles. But I consider the author’s style quite objective because he described Indigenous people the way any nation can be described – with decent and rotten folks mixed together, the same man being good and bad at the different stages of his life or while interacting with different people etc.

I am glad to know that Wikipedia similarly points out that James Fenimore Cooper “published numerous social, political, and historical works of fiction and non-fiction with the objective of countering European prejudices and nurturing an original American art and culture” (“James Fenimore Cooper,” 2022).

I also understand that everyone who was poor and socially oppressed through their own history was hailed a hero in the Soviet Union, and because of that only books favourable to First Nations would be published there. Accordingly, I was raised pro-Indian, internationalist, with vivid pictures of rich Ontario nature and deep respect for minorities and the underrepresented in general. Now I hold a PhD and Post-PhD in Education with my research focusing on modern Ukrainian higher education and West European universities.

This European and Soviet Union background and the fact that I currently live in Canada bring me to an interesting question about immigrants to the Western world and “white guilt”.  For example, I am a first-generation immigrant to Canada. I come from predominantly white Ukraine that had neither colonies, nor Aboriginal people on its territory. I am aware that I have nothing to apologize for, and I feel great dealing with people of all races and walks of life here in Canada. As a human being, I am terrified that so many young and innocent lives were lost in those residential schools of the past.

But after I live in Canada longer and feel more Canadian than Ukrainian, will I start experiencing this fathom guilt too? And if I have kids here, will they bear this collective responsibility because their mother is white? If yes, where does this guilty feeling come from? Is it territorial, to be inherited together with the place of birth or living? Does it mean that any land has this mystical connection with people dwelling on it, or is it just an economical tool to explore?

It is mind-blowing how everything is intertwined on this planet – history, literature, ideology, ethics, religion, sociology, biology, pedagogy, psychology etc. I will be happy to read the responses on land acknowledgement from other Ontarians too, especially from the immigrants. Will there be an option for the group members to exchange their Indigenous experiences?

Regarding the terminology, I used the terms “Indian”, “Aboriginal” and “Native” in my native languages. The words “Indigenous” and “First Nations” were less common in Ukraine.

As for this course and my aims in it, I tried to start my UBC studies with ETEC 511 because it is logical to begin with the foundations. Unfortunately, registration for this course proved to be tricky, but I am here finally and look forward to learning theory and practice of everything digital. Another aim, not any less important, is to improve my English. Writing is considered the most difficult of basic language skills, and I will be happy to practice it as much as possible.

References

James Fenimore Cooper (2022, May 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Fenimore_Cooper&action=history

NAME AND REASON FOR LINKING:

1) Chris – developing my guessing skills with emojis

I admit it was fun and a pure pleasure for me to check out Chris’s choice of the TV show and actually recognize it. I also understood this Linking task better after I saw how Chris interpreted it.

An Emoji Story

My comment: Dear Chris, Thank you for choosing this show! I really loved it though it is not new, and that is why I recognized it just looking at the title. The plot is a fairy tale with the brightest colours possible. There is a lot of platonic love there and a happy dog Digby. I won’t give its name here for someone else to think it over. Again, I really appreciate your choice. Come and try to guess my show, will you? It’s quite modern. With best regards, Anna

2) Elizabeth – pointing out my technical weaknesses (networks of curation)

Pedagogy is easy for me – I have two degrees in Education, after all – PhD and Post-PhD. But anything technical makes me feel at awe. And though MET is not a technical training program, and they basically do not teach you how to use any particular application, here and there, from the teacher or the groupmates, you can get some technical advice to broaden your mind and improve your confidence.

Elizabeth’s post is teaching to me both in form and content. I frankly have no idea how to make my blog so complicated, with citations and pictures all skillfully integrated into a text. I have recently changed the background of my site to tender green and was proud of that for several days. So, some things are just not for tomorrow. At the same time, the analytics presented in the text is also worth considering. I probably haven’t studied what Elizabeth studied, and that is why it was hard for me to understand her logic. I am planning to return to her post in the future too if it is possible. So, I chose this post of Elizabeth because it is challenging for me.

Networks of Golden Record Curations

My comment: Thank you so much, Elizabeth! This is the most thoughtful network interpretation I have come across so far. And this mixture of theory and practical application is truly impressive. Congratulations on a very nice and useful blog! Best regards, Anna

3) Lexie – making me bolder (mode-bending)

I really liked her relaxed way of recording videos and some technical advice shared. She is finishing MET, so her video felt like a Good-luck! from someone more experienced. I actually felt encouraged. Thank you so much, Lexie, for your kindness!

My comment: Dear Lexie, I checked out your video, and it was absolutely amazing! I liked both form and content of it. First of all, YouTube?!!! I wouldn’t dare to post my vid there for sure. Very courageous of you, my fearless classmate! And of course, I noticed your lovely and telling t-shirt! It suits you! Secondly, thank you for recommending TikTok; it’s actually wise to use the apps that are available. I just employed Zoom because I taught ESL with the help of it, but I should definitely broaden my horizons after your video. I think you were lucky to have this course at the end, Lexie. I’m in the middle of my MET road, and “Text Technologies” is the best that has happened to me so far. It is very modern, informative, and eye-opening. I wish there were more courses like this one. Whenever I did the practical part, I was like, “Constructivism, sweet constructivism!” I am really good with all those pedagogical theories, but I seldom enjoyed them as much as in this course. So, thank you very much for getting in touch, Lexie! I wish you all the best in your professional activities and life in general and remain, Sincerely yours, Anna from Toronto

4) Nataliia – redirecting my attention to the text and linguistics (voice-to-text)

Nataliia got in touch with me first and left a thought-provoking comment under my post about Dr. Bandura. When I reached her blog for this linking assignment, I was amazed by her productivity, easiness of writing and a lot of methodological and linguistic ideas in the texts. I am really sorry that her Twine story did not open. Again, Nataliia is an example for me how to combine knowledges from different courses and life experiences into one writing task. Way to go, Nataliia!

Task 3: Voice to Text

My comment: I commend you on a very nice analysis, Nataliia! Not bad from the point of view of linguistics and methods for teaching English. I am also impressed by your resources. I am not familiar with the secondary schools here in Canada, but in modern colleges they seem to ignore writing almost completely. And I once helped a student to prepare for his IELTS exam while this student was actually a Canadian university graduate. Yet he knew nothing about writing essays or any syntactic features he was supposed to demonstrate during the language test. He told me that his professors routinely utilized multiple-choice tests as a convenient assessment tool.
It felt a bit surreal to me, but I guess it’s life in all its diversity. I hope that your students will never have problems with writing though. I was secretly worried myself that as a MET student I would not write enough, and I am happy that it is not the case.
Again, thank you for the detailed review, Nataliia! It was a pleasure to read. Best regards, Anna

5) Richard – showing me how to use a Twine properly (Twine story)

Richard was the first classmate to create a Twine story for real. I enjoyed it a lot.

Task 5: Twine Task

My comment: Fantastic! Richard, you’re the first person I have come across who actually created a Twine story. I myself took an alternative path while several Twine stories of our classmates cannot be opened. And your casual tone of writing is warm and welcoming! I also have to say that from my experience, for some students “no choice” is the best option possible. So, you didn’t create an illusion, you truly helped someone there. And I won’t even start on your successful integration of images and audio files into Twine – it is still a rocket science for me. Again, very well done and explained! Thank you very much, Richard!

6) Jacob – showing me different ways of mode-bending

I am grateful to Jacob for showing me how to be creative with just an audio tape. What we hear can produce images as impressive, colourful and detailed as any visual pictures.

Task 7 – Mode Changing

My comment: Dear Jacob, I really like the way you changed the mode of your self-presentation. It’s funny, informative and meaningful at the same time. I wish I were as creative as you, but I just made a video instead of a photo. Again, kudos to your imagination! Best regards, Anna

Well, this course definitely influenced my position on communication, literacy, and writing.
At its beginning, I asked a question in hopes to understand a popular university term “medium”. I first thought it stood for a part, a component. Now it seems to me that medium can mean a mode, a form, or a transition phase depending on the context.
According to Wikipedia, “infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly” (“Infographics,” n.d.). My first acquaintance with this approach happened before “Text Technologies”, when some worried parents of a Torontonian high schooler called and asked for my help with infographic. I googled the thing and together with those enthusiastic and a bit desperate people we created something to satisfy their high school teacher. So, it seems safe to say that infographic is quite popular in modern secondary schools.
Then I considered the technique funny, but later I changed my mind. Infographic can help a kid and an adult remember the important information better: to learn how to find the essential pieces of any text and make only them noticeable by changing their original mode of presentation.
Of course, it takes time to do that, and that is why it is advisable to use this method only with something truly valuable – thick classic books, for example, which brief content can be read in Wikipedia to save time and memorized in a short-term memory. But if this plot summary is changed into a sequence of pictures afterwards, a reader will not be able to forget the content any time soon.
After all, it works according to the laws of language acquisition which follow the laws of physics – the longer you manipulate the word (or the plot of a story), the better you remember it.
Besides literature, infographic might be good for history – to remember the events and their dates, for psychology, medicine, and even sports – anywhere where it is necessary to memorize the sequence of different actions.
As an English teacher for international students, I am thinking about using it for literature first of all. Not many English courses consist of this literature part, but something of a small genre can be easily inserted into a curriculum for reading purposes.
When it comes to literature, there is always a question of content – what to consider worth of studying?
Most of my international students come from India – motherland of Upanishads, Vedas and Ramayana. We can potentially give them best literary works of Western culture to deal with, but again, this stuff should not be too big lest it overloads the ESL curriculum.
I have been thinking about something truly Canadian and simple, to practice this mode-bending first. What if we have some narratives to work with? They can be described with 3-5 pictures from Internet and bring a lot of fun.
After this “creation” stage it is possible to make students work in pairs to try to understand the plot of the narrative – was there a happy end or a sad end? Who was the main hero of the story? Which problem was he trying to solve? Who helped him (if applicable).
Basically, this activity will teach them how to generalize a small story, ask and answer questions, and make predictions, but these techniques are also transferrable and appropriate for the bigger literary forms too.
To practice it, I remembered the author who wrote a lot about Canadian nature – Ernest Thompson Seton, a pioneer of animal fiction whose stories I adored in my childhood. This writer was born in Great Britain, raised in Canada, and spent the rest of his life in the States.
I tried to find his works online and was lucky to come across Fadepage.com where Seton’s book “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898) was “in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it”. I sincerely liked those encouraging words and the book itself, and I am sure that students will appreciate those texts about Canada too in spite of them being written more than a hundred years ago.
Below there will be my infographic of “Domino” or “Biography of a Silver Fox” written by Seton in 1909 as an example. I used just 5 pictures found on Internet to introduce the story.
I am sorry that I cannot create a poster, Ernesto. I am not a designer and couldn’t become one in three months. I can copy pictures from Internet, save and edit them a bit. I am still not able to make up a really nice collage. But I am doing my best, and I am really proud of my UBC blog now that it became more colourful and, hopefully, thoughtful.
I am an educator instead, and I am going to try infographic with my ESL students in the different creative ways that I have already mentioned above:
1) Reading.
2) Generalization.
3) 3-5 key pictures.
4) Discussion / Guessing game / Writing an essay etc.
Infographic should not be overused though, not to lose its attraction. Again, it takes a lot of time, and it demands some editorial skills, but at the same time the technique is refreshing, good for relaxation and remembering something well. It is definitely worth a try!

Domino or Biography of the Silver Fox

“An article from the planetary online news show, September 23d, 2043 reads:

No Childhood

Year 2043 turned out to be triumphant for neuroscience, education, learning technologies, and global politics on the Earth. The united terrestrial government celebrated the first year of completion of its revolutionary “No Childhood” program – a new concept in evolution of humankind.

It had been known for a while that people’s brain has a limited capacity of absorbing and processing information. It takes a common person almost 30 years to become truly knowledgeable in one, seldom more, professional sphere. Desire to accelerate these slow biological processes was on educators’ mind for centuries.

Finally, a new way of educating newly born members of society had been created and approved for testing – educational programming while sleeping and growing. True, it doesn’t allow youngsters to enjoy their childhood, communication with family members and peers, grow emotionally in the usual way etc. Despite any drawbacks, “No Childhood” shortens time of relative social unproductivity in half – by the age of 15 people are fully grown physically and experienced in their occupations.

First 35 experiment participants are cautious, even-tempered and reserved, their emotions artificially suppressed. If they are for any reason not happy with their set of assigned skills, the choice being made by their guardians first, they can be easily reprogrammed.

Their brain is at its best, and exchange of its content components doesn’t really influence anything – thus the ability to paint can be replaced by the ability to write poems or make drawings of the buildings etc.

During the first year of their socialization, it became obvious that these 35 new people are useful members of the planet’s professional community. Are they satisfied with their accelerated life? How do they interact with their colleagues? Are they planning to have families of their own? Will they choose to teach their kids the same way? Will the Earth’s population accept this method of teaching its next generation? This is to be seen.”

STORY #2. A UTOPIAN FANFICTION – SUMMARY

“The Jump

Summary. In the long-forgotten year of 2055, the group of brightest tellurian scientists secretly started a cult – growing new people, half humans and half machines, to protect the mankind from space. Currently, in 13315, when the Sun is suddenly cooling down, it is up to the augments to save the unsuspecting humanity from the catastrophe. Their plan is clean and clear – to discretely move the Earth from the Solar system to another friendly star … “

MY COMMENTARY

As an undergraduate student studying languages and literature at the uni, I read tons of classic speculative fiction in my youth – of different genres, ages, and origin. After all, can’t we call John Milton a writer of speculative fiction? How about Jules Verne, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift? And what about fairy tales? For sure, they’re of speculative nature too!

Personally, I always preferred a genre of fantasy – some magic, witchcraft, comic and heroic situations, injustice and a happy end help me to unwind every time.

But when I started seriously thinking about our close future for this task, none of the utopian, dystopian, apocalyptic, alternative, supernatural, horror, or scientific fictions came to my mind. I remembered Physics instead, my high school major and favourite subject. Basic law of Physics tells me that if I want to gain something, I should sacrifice something else. If we want future education to be better, we must be ready to say good bye to something that we currently enjoy.

This Anthony Dunne’s resource is not bad at exposing the modern world with its problems, but I failed to find there any sound solutions suggested by the authors.

So, while fantasy can lull me into a dreamy world for a while, reality is always based on fundamental knowledge – formal and natural sciences. Life is about balance, and my first fanfictions – No Childhood and The Jump – are small, open-ended and, hopefully, optimistic.

Is this world fair or not? From what I gather, justice is a fickle thing.

In that simulation I could lean on the potential crime’s description, opinion of the prosecution, the algorithm, and the defendant’s plea. If the algorithm is unreliable, and many Module’s resources state that it is not, then it is only prosecution and my own gut’s feeling to trust which is practically nothing.

I also felt that the simulation in its turn was eager to make a participant regret his/her decision, so the exercise was biased and unfair even from the educational (organizational) point of view.

In general, it was a very unpleasant experience which tells me not to deal with the judicial system if I can avoid it.

In other words, avoid committing crimes at all cost, Anna!