voyeurism

Learner-Generated Augmentation: profiled on the blog of the British Educational Research Association (BERA)

my team and i are deeply humbled that our work in a design we have termed Learner-Generated Augmentation has been profiled on the blog of the British Educational Research Association (BERA).

BERA has represented the forefront of educational research in the UK since 1974.

we are truly grateful for the privilege of sharing our approach to using Augmented Reality (AR) in learning, with the BERA readership.

to God be the glory.

Learner-Generated Augmentation: published in Proceedings of the 6th conference on Constructionism

four months' ago, i shared that a paper co-authored with Lok Jie Bin, Andrew Gunawan and Ryan Lim had been accepted for the 6th conference on Constructionism.

we titled the paper Representation of constructions of memory palaces with Learner-Generated Augmentation.

we are very excited to share that the paper has just been published in the conference proceedings :-)

the abstract reads:

This study describes an approach to History education which leverages Augmented Reality (AR). It supplements work reported in Lim & Lim (2020) and shares how the profiles of participants and their respective responses to the intervention might be represented in forms not previously reported, with a view to increasing intelligibility of the data. The intervention aimed to explore the affordances of AR in mediating learner-initiated construction of representations of their memory palaces / method of loci, using the Learner-Generated Augmentation approach described in Lim et al. (2018), as applied to the memorization of historical facts. In this activity, participants used a free AR mobile application - Just a Line - to sketch out memory palaces of key information from a prose passage. This activity was trialled on student-teachers who are majoring in History at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. The resulting dataset was relatively complex, not least because the constructions of the memory palaces were potentially in three dimensions and overlain on the local environments of each participant. A contribution of this paper is the proposal of a format for representing such datasets to facilitate analyses and subsequent scaling.

The SORBET Project at SL17B

June 19th sees the start of a three-week period of commemorative events (collectively known as SL17B) celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of Second Life :-)

just like in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013, i'll be part of the celebrations too :-)

i have always enjoyed the annual celebrations, and it's great to have the privilege of contributing a build to the community event again :-)

this year, i have chosen to feature the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Cognition (SORBET) Project.

here's a sneak preview of the exhibit, at SL17B Pizzazz.

a COVID-19 response: the SORBET Project video

a COVID-19 response: the SORBET Project featured in the Project Showcase of the conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)

last week, i introduced the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project.

it represents our team's first response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

today, we received the humbling news that the SORBET Project has been selected to be featured at the Project Showcase of this year's international conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), to be held online from the 21st to the 25th of June.

thanks be to God for this wonderful blessing.

a COVID-19 response: introducing the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project

over the past seven weeks, my team and i have been working closely with a Master Teacher from the Academy of Singapore Teachers, to co-design a response to learning in a time of COVID-19.

this work has been incredibly meaningful for us.

we call our design the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project.

we would like to give young learners a more embodied understanding (with a view to behaviour modification / the nurturing of values) of the importance of safe- / social-distancing.

we were prompted to work on the SORBET Project because while modelling of the diffusion of viruses through populations has been done, such resources tend to be in the form of animations of graphs, and this may come across as too abstract for young learners to grasp the gravity of.

we therefore designed a simple, open-source, immersive environment, in which learners interact with each other - through their avatars.

subsequent to this stage of interaction in the environment, teachers facilitate group discussions (online / remote-learning, or face-to-face) on the degree to which a ‘virus’ has diffused amongst themselves.

over time, the diffusion of the virus among the population can be charted (for post-activity discussion), after the students have first had their embodied interactions.

the discussion of the aggressiveness of the diffusion is thus grounded in their prior experiences of interaction.

the point of the SORBET Project is helping learners develop a greater appreciation of the need to practise social distancing.

essentially, the way i would frame the problem would be:

each day, we go about our daily interactions (to the extent to which we are ‘allowed’ outside), and, the next day, we get updates from our local authorities about what the case numbers from the previous day are.

there is a time lag between our action, and, the feedback to our action.

so, it is difficult for us to make the connection between our action, and the consequences thereof.

therefore, some of us might be less predisposed to develop the new habit of social distancing.

what SORBET tries to do is to provide learners with a mediatory bridging scaffold between action, and consequence.

second, SORBET also reduces the time lag between the two.

to elaborate on the first point: we all have to develop the new habit of keeping a certain distance apart.

but there is no practicable means to provide positive reinforcement to our behaviour, and also no practicable means for any form of personal augment which makes us continually aware of our respective personal radii of 'safe' operation.

in contrast, in a virtual environment we can have these practicable means.

until we as the human race develop the new habit of instinctual distancing, we need augments.

Jim Gee’s theory of Projective Identity speaks towards how virtual augments inform our 'Real Life' selves, decisions, and behaviours.

Nathanael Ng stepped up to the plate to script the SORBET Project.

to God be the glory!

Disciplinary Intuitions / Six Learnings / Maker Motes / Learner-Generated Augmentation offered as part of NTU's Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme 2020/21

are you an NTU undergraduate eligible for the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme 2020/21?

if so, please do consider applying for either

NIE20017 Exploring the potential roles that game-based worlds and immersive environments play in learning, or

NIE20018 Exploring the development of maker dispositions in learning through open-source hardware and software :-)

it would be my privilege to work alongside you :-)