voyeurism

Learner-Generated Augmentation, Collaborative Observation, and the Apple Vision Pro

In the course of a typical school day, members of the school community - staff and students alike - traverse the campus several times a day, sometimes being exposed directly to the elements, while at other times in the shade. the paths we take as we traverse our campus reflect our tacit responses to such exposure. Through our own bodily experience, we therefore develop over time a textured map of our respective school campuses which - in turn - influences our decision-making in subconscious ways. the mark of the skilful teacher is how to design for opportunities for such tacit knowledge to be made more explicit, in order for students to connect their everyday embodied lived experiences in authentic ways with the formal codified domain knowledge of the classroom.

In 2015, we published a paper in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) in which we described an intervention where we advanced a pedagogical strategy we termed Collaborative Observation, as part of our work on the Six Learnings curriculum design framework. In this paper, we addressed the problem of how teachers could effectively manage and scaffold the learning experiences of pupils in large classes (typically, forty pupils per class), particularly when the learners are operating as avatars in an immersive environment. In that paper, we compared three different conditions, namely learners in a 1:1 ratio with a computer, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer, and traditional didactic instruction; we successfully advanced the case for Collaborative Observation: namely, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer.

In 2020, we followed up with a second paper in BJET, this time describing the construct of what we term as Learner-Generated Augmentation. The latter describes activities in which the learners are given opportunities to augment (through Augmented Reality tools) their local environments, thereby giving teachers better insight in to which aspects of their local environments students find significant and meaningful. More often than not – the elements in their environments which novices might choose to annotate would be different from those which the teacher (as domain expert) might choose. In the hands of a skilled teacher, such differences represent rich opportunities for discussion and mutual learning. Learner-Generated Augmentation acknowledges where the learners are coming from, helps make their otherwise tacit conceptions more visible to the teacher, and has applications in the sciences as well as in the humanities.

When we published these two papers, the interventions we had designed to test them were founded on two very different - almost conceptually oppositional - premises and contexts. The effectiveness of Collaborative Observation as a pedagogical strategy was proven in the context of a virtual world, while that of Learner-Generated Augmentation was proven in the context of augmented reality.

Such are the affordances of the Apple Vision Pro that they permit the convergence of premise and context from 2015 and 2020. This is what is meant when Apple advances the paradigm of 'spatial computing'.

The body’s contribution to meaning-making is foregrounded in a creative experience. Engagement of different aspects of the body, namely the physical, and the psychological aspects, in a creative experience is key in meaning-making by students.

As a wearable, the Vision Pro lends itself naturally to the notion of embodiment, in that – in such cases – the learners’ auditory and visual sensory inputs are augmented by the affordances of whatever apps the learners are using, but also that the apps have a certain degree of geospatial permanence within the augmented world of the learner.

Thus, for example, it is perfectly possible for a scenario of a field-based lesson in which the learners are annotating their local environments as they explore their neighbourhood, leaving digital notes (such as text and sketches) at locations and sites that they themselves consider significant. In the context of a lesson unit, learners could be tasked to cast or to record their screens as they explore their environments and annotate them, for subsequent post-activity discussion in either small groups or as a class, as facilitated by the skilful teacher.

Beyond the Geography Discipline: Applying the Powerful Geography Approach in a College-Level Data Science Curriculum in Singapore

my students and i are very happy to share news of a contribution we have made in response to an invitation from Professor Michael Solem over at the Grosvenor Center for Geographic Education at Texas State. Professor Solem serves the American Association of Geographers as Senior Advisor for Geography Education and Co-Director of the National Center for Research in Geography Education.

we were thrilled when he invited us in June 2022 to contribute a chapter to Powerful Geography: International Perspectives and Applications which he has co-edited with Professor Richard Boehm and Dr Joann Zadrozny.

the book assembles case studies of Powerful Geography from Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Czechia, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Samuel, Estella and I contribute our work from Singapore.

the abstract of our chapter reads:

Powerful geography has established a renewed purpose in geography education, providing a broader and normative framework for school geography. This chapter extends the theoretical underpinnings of powerful geography beyond the geography discipline by applying its lens to examine a data science curriculum as enacted in a general elective hosted at an institute of higher learning (IHL) in Singapore. Students of the IHL module were interviewed about the efficacy of their learning after taking the module. The data analysis thoroughly reflects that powerful geography and knowledge are strong positive forces for student learning. The chapter concludes by making the case for powerful geography to be given more weight in curriculum design in disciplinary domains beyond geography, as understandings of the learning sciences continue to evolve.

Application of DIY Electrodermal Activity Wristband in Detecting Stress and Affective Responses of Students

my team and i are very happy to share news of our third publication in the field of the Science of Learning, with specific reference to neuroergonomics :-) following our first and second publications, our paper is published in the section on Biosignal Processing in the journal Bioengineering, in a special issue themed on 'Electronic Wearable Solutions for Sport and Health'.

since April 2021, we have been working hard on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project), in which we aim to afford learners opportunities to learn about their own learning, while they are learning, from a citizen science perspective.

with the help of Assistant Professor Posada-Quintero in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, we report our work in Volume 11 Issue 3 of the journal, as Application of DIY Electrodermal Activity wristband in detecting stress and affective responses of students.

the abstract of our paper reads:

This paper describes the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Taking a multidisciplinary, citizen science and maker-centric approach, low-cost, bespoken wearables, such as a mini weather station and biometric wristband, were built. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, the instruments were first validated against research grade devices. Following this, a research experiment was created and conducted in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Data from this experiment were used to train machine learning models, which were then applied to interpret the relationships between the environment, health, and stress. It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. The results suggest that temperature and air quality play an important role in students’ physiological well-being, thus demonstrating the feasibility of understanding the extent of the effects of various microclimatic factors. This highlights the importance of thermal comfort and air ventilation in real-life applications to improve students’ well-being. We envision our work making a significant impact by showcasing the effectiveness and feasibility of inexpensive, self-designed wearable devices for tracking microclimate and electrodermal activity (EDA). The affordability of these wearables holds promising implications for scalability and encourages crowd-sourced citizen science in the relatively unexplored domain of microclimate’s influence on well-being. Embracing citizen science can then democratize learning and expedite rapid research advancements.

The preservation of heritage in a school campus with Augmented Reality (AR) and game-based learning

we are very excited to share that our paper on The preservation of heritage in a school campus with Augmented Reality (AR) and game-based learning will be shared at the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Education, as part of the Workshop on Extended Reality and Serious Games for Education in Cultural Heritage and Arts.

this year, the conference will be held in Angers, France from the 2nd to the 4th of May. my co-authors are Vu Pham Bao Anh and Ying Qinyi and our paper is scheduled to be read on the 4th of May.

the abstract reads:

Serious games have showcased tremendous potential in transforming the way we teach and learn. This paper explores the potential affordances of Augmented Reality (AR) game-based learning, specifically in the context of preserving school heritage. The AR game-based learning experience is proposed to increase students’ knowledge of their school’s heritage. By incorporating digital technology and story-telling, the game is also proposed to make the subject of school heritage more tangible for the enhancement of learning. The study involves 10 students playing an AR adventure role-playing game (RPG) which uses device location within the campus of [blinded for peer review] to trigger in-game events. To assess the effectiveness of the AR game-based experience as a medium for learning, a general survey is used to collect feedback about the gameplay experience, while a Situational Interest survey collects data about participants’ situational interest, which emerges in response to the learning environment created, using the Situational Interest Scale (Chen et al., 1999). Results confirmed a positive correlation between players’ situational interest and absorption of information, shed light on the significance of game design elements in influencing the gameplay experience, and pointed to specific rooms for improvement for future AR game-based learning environments. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an understanding of the wider effectiveness of game-based learning environments in educational contexts.

student sharing on the Digital Humanities

i am very pleased to have received an invitation from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore to contribute to a workshop themed on the Digital Humanities, which the college is organising on the 11th of March.

what is even more exciting to me is that the facilitation of the invited session will be helmed by my student - Daniel K Handoyo. Daniel is a Year 2 undergraduate pursuing a double major in History and Linguistics at NTU School of Humanities (SoH). He has titled his session Digital humanities: deriving insights from Singapore historical data with computational text analysis. Its abstract reads:

This presentation focuses on an ongoing research study which adopts a hands-on approach to applying digital humanities to historical inquiry, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance the analysis of Singapore's historical data. We focus our inquiry on the recorded speeches and debates of Singapore’s early parliament, offering a window into the legislative priorities that shaped the nation’s policy landscape. In this study, we employ topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique for discovering latent themes in a collection of documents, through the use of BERTopic, a cutting-edge framework that leverages transformer-based language models. This approach enables us to derive meaningful patterns and trends from parliamentary discourse, such as determining correlations between individual Members of Parliament (MPs) and the topics they frequently engaged with. This research illustrates how computational methods can be integrated with traditional historical analysis, underscoring the transformative potential of digital tools in supporting scholarly research within the humanities.