Envision Center

Envision Center

We had chances to learn Virtual Reality Theater, Haptics, and Motion Capture. I enjoyed a lot. I thought there are vast potentials for Educational Technology research to play important roles in what they do in the center.

As Dr. Schaffer points out, their Haptics study seems to be similar to what we see in some Educational Technology studies. They did not find differences in learners’ performances between the use of normal visuals and the use of Haptics visuals. In Educational Technology, we have seen no difference between face-to-face learning and distance learning. But, this Haptics (as well as other devices in the center) appeals to learner personalities that normal visuals would appeal to. Also, I think retention study might be very interesting. Learners can show longer retention.

“A whole bunch of numbers and formulas” are shown in a form of tube between the Earth and the Moon in V R Theater. That was impressive.

Additionally, I think our learning in the center can be translated to a type of museum learning. The informal learning really “sparked my interest” (Perry 2002).


Reference:
Perry, D. L. (2002). Profound learning: Stories from museums. Educational Technology.

Shigetake

Dr. Kim's Presentation

I learned a lot about scaffolding today. Because I am planning on doing a case study for my MS thesis, her study with a case study design was very interesting. Her study was an explanatory case study with specific research questions derived from literature in the field. And it's a hot topic too. I thought her conclusions about scaffolding would also be understood in terms of hard and soft scaffolding idea. I think her result and finding would suggest that hard scaffolding that had been "built-in" to the instructional tool will have to be implemented in a holistic way; meaning that peer- and teacher-scaffolding happening together with technology-enhanced scaffolding will have to be considered to understand the scaffolding as a whole.

I was also interested in her methodology. I think I should ask her about Camtasia some time. I was planning to use camtasia to capture all my participant's activities on the screen with sound, but if this software will crutially slow down their web-based activities within my thesis project, then my thesis plan will have to be modified.

I appreciate I had a chance to attend Dr. Kim's presentation today.
Shigetake

Dr . Johanneaus Strobel

His presentation's title was "Interaction design: Integrating scaffolding into an interactive game for children."

I was wondering about the future of the project. Is this a really awesome project that is to be adopted by many countries quickly? I was not sure about the “online community” part, which is not completed yet. Considering the large body of discussions on constructivism, collaboration, social cognition, and online community involving children would be very important topics. Their plan of assessment of children’s cognitive development seems to be tentative. Without a concrete plan of evaluation, I cannot tell if this project is interested in collecting information for improvement of the field of child cognitive development or educational technology. Also, I could not find a specialist in child development in the people who contributed in the creation of the program. To me, SMEs seem to be missing there.

However, it was a very intriguing project. The number of countries (140) that the project had to consider to create this educational interactive program was so large. The UNESCO’s involvement as a client seems to add a lot of value to this project. I really liked the literature discussion regarding the difference between modeling, coaching and scaffolding; hard and soft scaffolding; and how they integrated those ideas into their project.

Shigetake