voyeurism

Maker Motes, STEM and 21st century competencies and learning dispositions (21CC) - a student's perspective

following up from my post two weeks’ ago, which looked back at my team’s first year of collaboration with the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia and schools in Java, one of the students on the programme has kindly written his perspective on the learning journey so far :-)

"It was the first days of our science lessons in the school. We were surprised as our science teacher came into the class and showed us plastics boxes that look like bombs. The class were excited and curious with the boxes. We wanted to try straight away the equipment when our teacher explained that the boxes were weather sensors and that they could record the weather and send the data to the internet. We know we have wi-fi in our school but this one is different. “It is a cool box, it generates wi-fi”.

"We were busy working in our groups designing and making a cage for our cricket. We have a lot of fun during the lessons and we cannot wait to see how the cage and sensors work. We were amaze when we know that the sensors can record the sound of our cricket and send it right away to our mobile phone.

“Keren, tinggal masukkan PIN dan bunyi suara jangkrik langsung terekam. Kita bisa tahu berapa frequensinya. Kita tidak perlu ada di situ mencatatnya, bisa tercatat sendiri oleh alat dan besok tinggal membuka di website”.

[Cool, we just need to enter the PIN and the sound of our cricket was automatically recorded. We can know the volume of the sound. We do not need to be there to record the data, the equipment recorded them all and the next morning we just need to open the website and they are all there]

"There were a lot of data recorded in the website. Many of us were not interested in the data except the volume of the sound produces by our cricket. We know that at night our cricket produces high volume sound. When our teachers asked the class to analyse the data, we were actually busy talking about the equipment and what we can do with it.

“Kayaknya di masa yang akan datang ukurannya bisa dibuat lebih kecil, sekecil USB atau bahkan SIM card”.

[In the future the equipment should be made smaller, maybe as big as a USB card or even a SIM card]

“Bisa digunakan untuk mengetahui cuaca. Jadi kalau hari ini kita akan pergi ke luar, misalnya mau piknik kita bisa menggunakannya untuk mengetahui apakah hari ini akan hujan ataukah tidak. Jadi kita bisa memperkirakan cuaca”

[It can be used to see the weather. So if today we want to go out, like going for picnic, we can use the sensors to know if today is going to rain or not. So we can predict the weather]

“Buat menentukan suhu yang tepat untuk tanaman. Kan untuk menanam tanaman kita harus tahu suhunya”

[We can use it to know the best temperature for a plant. To grow plants we will need the best temperature for the plants]."

keynote at the N3 cluster ICT symposium this year :-)

this year’s ICT symposium for schools in Singapore’s N3 cluster will be held on the 29th of June.

i am very grateful to the organising committee of the symposium for kindly extending the opportunity to keynote to myself and Professor David Hung. together, Prof Hung and i will be co-delivering the address on Creating authentic learning environments and experiences.

my special thanks go to Cluster Superintendent Mdm Goh Mee Mee, and to the chairs of the planning committee Mdm Belinda Yong and Michel Saw, and to deputy chair Thomas Low.

i look forward to interacting with some of you and learning about the terrific work of the teachers in the cluster, that afternoon :-)

Maker Motes with schools in Java, Indonesia - taking stock of our first year

it’s been a year since my team’s collaboration with the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia around the use of Maker Motes started. i thought it might be worthwhile to describe highlights of our journey.

we worked with teachers from five middle schools in the Bandung / Lembang area in Java, Indonesia. Professional development workshops began in August, and covered topics such as ‘introducing the Maker Motes to teachers’, ‘integrating Maker Motes in to the school curriculum’, and ‘developing lesson plans’. In total, seven such workshops were conducted, primarily because teacher-reflection was seen as critical to their understanding of the affordances of the open-source environmental sensors with respect to their science curriculum. the teachers adopted a Lesson Study approach, as this was a strategy they were already familiar with. As it turned out, the continual opportunities for sharing and reflection among schools in the local area was a critical factor to confidence-building and diffusion of the innovation.

as is so often the case, the teachers were able to come up with a diversity of lesson ideas which exceeded anything the development team could come up with. Thus, for example, lesson ideas were developed for topics such as ‘adaptation’, ‘characteristics of living things’, scientific objects and observation’, ‘changes of matter’, and ‘photosynthesis’. the first round of lessons were conducted in September, and so far, two cycles of Lesson Study have been enacted. An example of one such lesson was when students - in their groups - were given a Maker Mote and assigned one of four outdoor locations within the school’s premises. following the premises of scientific inquiry, they hypothesised the possible relationships between the microclimate at different parts of the school, vis-a-vis the local adaptation and zonation of the naturally emergent flora.

another great example of a lesson designed by the teachers was posed around the question of “how to make the cricket sing?”. in this lesson, students worked in their groups to test their hypotheses about which environmental factors encouraged crickets to sing. some of the variables they considered were sound, ambient light, and temperature.

what was also inspiring was that the structure of the Maker Motes as used in the schools in Indonesia, was different from how we conceptualised them for use in Singapore. The Indonesian motes were iterated to be robust with respect to irregular network connectivity, and had solar-arrays attached to them.

all in all, the past year has been an exciting learning experience for my team and i, and we really look forward to our continued collaboration with the teachers, the schools, and the faculty at the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia :-)

on enabling infrastructures, curriculum frameworks, and learning theories: reflections on technology in education 1998-2017

two weeks’ ago i had a very pleasant lunch at Picco’s in Boston, with my friend and mentor George Brackett.

three of my eight modules during my Masters were under George’s supervision, and it’s safe to say he made an indelible mark on my life and way of thinking. the late 1990s were an exciting time to be studying technology in education, and we were being mentored by the very best.

much has happened in my career since then, and God has taken my team and i in directions we could never have dreamt of. our work has grown organically, but a corollary has been that we’ve explored so many areas that lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about how to articulate our work clearly to those less familiar with it.

after much reflection and dialoguing among ourselves, through a process that has taken about one-and-a-half years, we have found that an effective way is to describe our work in terms of a foundational theory, a curriculum design framework, and enabling infrastructures.

if one thinks about these three parameters as defining a space of enaction, it is within this space that all the good work of the teachers with whom we have been working with over the years - since the early 2000s - has been taking place. In other words, the points within this space are particular examples of lesson units and learning activities, but in and of themselves the points in the space do not define the work of my team.

we have come to understand that our work is to define the operational parameters within which the magic of the work of the teachers can take place.

thinking about learning interventions in terms of these three parameters helps us to understand why some have succeeded while others have not. for example, one of the early projects i was involved with as an early post-doc in the mid-2000s was a citizenship education videogame. This game was bespoke and developed solely by a team of locally-hired developers, at great cost. Despite the heavy investment, the game did not gain traction. Using the three-dimensional framing, one can understand that while the game was strongly founded in theory (in this case, Bakhtin’s work on dialogism and heteroglossia), it was not accompanied by a framework through which teachers could think about curriculum design.

by way of contrast, teachers often have great ideas for learning interventions, framed through their own lenses of curriculum design, but have sometimes struggled to explain why their ideas work, for lack of a strong theoretical orientation in the learning sciences.

a third example might be interventions which have not found traction because they have not been supported by infrastructure which is open-source, scalable, and cost-effective.

by God’s grace, the work of my team since 2009 has been to steadily develop each of the three dimensions of enabling infrastructures, a curriculum framework, and a theory of learning, in turn. i would be the first to admit that this emerged through grace, and not because of any original design intent on our part. it is only after nearly twenty years since my Masters, that i have come to see how the pieces fit.

thus, in 2009, i conceptualised the Six Learnings curriculum design framework, which is intended to help teachers have a better understanding of the affordances for learning of immersive environments and game-based worlds. we have latterly applied the framework to non-digital learning environments.

the Six Learnings could not have been conceptualised in a vacuum, and - as already indicated in the preceding paragraph - it has its origins in the enabling infrastructure of the open-source version of Second Life - OpenSim.

in 2015, my team articulated Disciplinary Intuitions as the foundational theory of learning for the Six Learnings; this enabled our stakeholders to understand not only that the Six Learnings was being adopted by teachers as a curriculum design framework, but why it was working, as well. over the years, Disciplinary Intuitions and the Six Learnings framework has been scaled and translated from upper primary to college-level cohorts, across a variety of academic disciplines.

it was also in 2015 that my team demonstrated the viability of our system of leveraging open-source hardware such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi as an enabling infrastructure for inquiry-based learning in STEM - a system which we call ‘Maker Motes’.

most recently, early in 2017 we published an edited anthology of internationally-sourced chapters on various aspects of maker culture, as we continue our attempts at understanding and defining the space.

so that’s where we are today, and it’s been a thrilling adventure. we share our thoughts in case they help you to understand your own work - and the work of others - better.