Category: edci337 assignment1

As a 21st century student, it is almost impossible for me to avoid multimedia education, if I ever get into any math trouble and I can not reach for my professor, I go on Youtube and search Khan Academy. And after the pandemic, I actually find that I enjoy online teaching more than in-class teaching. It is so much easier for me to sit on my bed and just log on to my computer to attend classes. Laziness aside, the actual reason why I prefer online teaching is that the materials of the courses are accessible anytime I needed to access them, I can repeat the learning material whenever I want and how much ever I want, that way I could almost(almost) confirm I gain the knowledge from the lectures. And the pandemic actually forces many instructors to improve their multimedia designing skills as they have to use multimedia for lecture purposes. Although online instructing does not share the advantages of face-to-face instructing, it is still showing us the potentials of online open learning, and the key of online open learning is multimedia. Multimedia plays an extremely important role in online open learning as most of the online open learning will be on the multimedia preform. Online open learning is almost unavoidable as its flexibility helps us achieve a more flexible timetable, and since nowadays people are getting busier, a flexible timetable will be more valuable for students. Therefore, I see multimedia as a major role in our future education.

Video games are one of the biggest entertainment choices for us to choose from nowadays. As a heavy gamer, I can spend an entire day playing video games and do nothing else. According to my own experiences, whether one can learn from a video game really depends on what perspective they use on playing them, sometimes when I play games only for fun, I just play to relax and learn nothing from it, and sometimes when I play games in my spare time, I read every dialogue of every character in the game, read every document in the game to have a better understanding of the background story. For example, I play League of Legends with my friends when I want to relax and have fun(honest suggestion, do not play this game if you want to relax, I am saying it here because I could find a better example). In Oxygen Not Included and SimCity, I learned an efficient way to manage the resource available. In Sims 4, I learned to use my time efficiently(not). and there are a ton of video games with epic stories that actually teach you a lesson if you play with your attention to the details, I am just listing the easy and more common examples for my readers to understand. And in my opinion, as a rising industry, video games are definitely going to take place in education, because I consider education as a system that will always adapt and improve with the trend in order to deliver a better learning experience to students and a good educator will always find the most efficient, fitting way to teach their students.

This week’s reading gives us a look at the SAMR model, as a 21st-century student, I strongly believe that multimedia is the key to our future learning trend, online open learning. The reason I strongly believe this is because of the flexibility it provides. During the pandemic, most of the courses are changed from face-to-face lectures to online lectures, these changes gave me a more flexible timetable and I can actually learn more with that timetable as I saved time from taking transport, and I can also access lectures recording anytime I need to. By understanding more about multimedia skills, I also gain more knowledge on online open learning. The SAMR model is a guideline for me to evaluate how many technologies are the best for me to study. For example, one of the presentations I made with my classmates during the pandemic is through google docs, in which we can give instant feedback and communicate instantly, the convenience it provides is helping us to use our time more efficiently, a convenient and efficient way of learning helps us to have better experiences on studying, how can we not embrace the redefinition stage of educational technology integration? It is the future trend of education, and I believe that we should be ready before it strikes us hard.

In modern days, educational videos are everywhere on the internet, the easiest way to find them is to go on Youtube and type whatever topic you want to learn. On Youtube, there are tons of videos about different topics. The most interesting videos I find on youtube are mostly relying on good storytelling skills. Most of the videos I watch satisfy the element of good storytelling. Here is one of the most interesting channels I found on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q

Although some might argue that some videos in this channel do not meet the definition of educational video, they still satisfy the requirements of good storytelling skills. And because of these videos, I started to imply my experiences when I was trying to make a point. In many of my blog posts, I use my personal experience to make my points more convincing to my readers. I find that using personal experience is often more convincing to my friends and parents when I was trying to convince them to do something. The thing I did not know is that only describing my personal experience with wording is not enough to convince my reader, this week’s reading help me to understand that wording is an entrance for readers to enter the story you are telling, leading them to explore your story with their imaginations. Therefore, videos are more educational compared to audio.

I remember when I was a child, I was studying in a city named Macau. It is a city that is heavily influenced by the Asian style of education. The Asian style of education I mentioned is something extremely similar to behaviourism where you get rewarded when achieving a good studying result, get punished when achieving a bad studying result. This form of studying style heavily influenced my childhood. And one of my worst studying experiences happened when I was in 6th grade. It was a Chinese class where we studied the explanation of Chinese words. In that class, my teacher asked me up and asked me to explain the definition of the word she wrote on the blackboard. I was trying to use my understanding to explain the word in a different way, different but has a similar meaning (at least that was what I thought). My teacher, an actually very nice teacher, told me that I should explain that exactly the same as it was written in the textbook, I was upset because I could not get a reward answering that question. And since then, I only memorized definitions of words as exactly as the textbook describes. To rethink it, it is not very bad that my teacher asked my classmates and me to do everything the same as the textbook describe, after all, it was a very large class, and it would be easier for teachers to manage in that way. But it was still very frustrating to me, and it took me a very long time to move on from that studying method. And to rethink it, it may be because my unique explanation interrupt my teacher’s teaching plan, which was why she asked me to follow the textbook so that the whole class could stay on track with her teaching plan. To me, now it is understandable after all they only had a very short period of time to teach us an overload of lectures, and it actually gave me a unique perspective to see education.

The first thing that comes to our mind when we talk about presentations is often to be PowerPoint, at least it is to me. Whether you like it or not, PowerPoint presentation is one of the most common media we see in education, almost every class I go to, I see instructors using PowerPoint to present their lectures. From this one fact, we can tell how useful PowerPoint is when it is about sharing knowledge. Therefore, many of the assignments I have done are done with PowerPoint. And before, when I did my PowerPoint presentation, I just put all of the content I wanted to talk about on my presentation with a huge load of wording and confusing image structure. The reason I did that is mostly because I am lazy and do not want to memorize the content I try to present. I did not put readers’ experiences into my consideration, and I expected my readers to read the words in my PowerPoint, I gave the responsibility of understanding my material to my readers, which I should not have done. However, because most of my classmates are friendly, so I did not receive enough comments that help me to improve my presentation skill. Therefore, this week’s reading helps me a lot to improve my presentation design skill, and I hope we will see my improvement in my assignment 2 blog post.

What is digital accessibility?

To me, accessibility is always the first thing to consider when browsing resources. Contents mean nothing if there is no accessibility to those resources. But honestly, I did not really care about accessibility as I was not really a content creator on the internet. I did not even write posts on Facebook. However, by the time when I needed to create a presentation at a university course, I started to realize the importance of accessibility of my content, I needed to import more pictures to support my presentation in case, my classmates, from the back of the class could not see the wording on my PowerPoint clearly, and also I have to deliver my presentation with my loud and clear voice. It was at that moment, I understand the importance of accessibility. Nowadays, digital media have become more and more common in our everyday life, it is almost impossible to avoid them if we want to be in touch with this society. Having easy accessibility helps many people with different disabilities to have access to many resources available online. It helps not only the content creators to share their content easier with their audience, but it also helps their audiences to have a better experience and also learning outcomes from browsing their content. In order to achieve such an accessible environment, we need to follow the basic principles of digital accessibility:

The POUR principles are basically the checklist for content creators to check if their works are available for readers with different disabilities. It is a concept I did not really consider deeply before, because as I mentioned at the top of this post. I do not create interesting content on the internet. Now, I understand that even though the content I created is not interesting, I still need to make them accessible to my readers. I know it is weird that I do not apply all of those principles when writing this blog, but…the only matter is that I now understand the importance of accessibility and I think, I will apply these principles I learned to improve my content. Therefore, this week’s content is really helpful for my future creation, I believe.

When talking about learning theories, the first thing that comes to my mind is almost always behaviourism. The reason why behaviourism is deep in my deep is because of the environment of my early life and an unforgettable moment that I had when I was just a 5 years old boy. As we learned in EDCI 337, we understand that behaviorism believes that learning results are decided by feedback from others, for instance, punishments(Crozier, 2021). Using my experience as an example, when I was 5, I once learned how to swear curse words when watching a soccer game with my father, the way I learned it is by observing my father’s behavior, my father cursed every time when his favourite team was behind. As a 5-year-old child, I decided to do what my father was doing, which is cursing along with him, it didn’t matter to me which team was winning, I just cursed throughout the game. As a result, my mother stopped me with a method I couldn’t recall, my guess on that method is that it wasn’t pretty. It is a very strong memory to me as I could still remember the lesson I learned from it. Therefore, I believe that behaviorism is an effective method for us when it is about learning. However, we often ignore the possible negative outcome of this learning method, for example, people who learned from this method might not able to understand their purpose of learning, their motivations are often to be the winning prize of their learning or, to avoid the losing punishment. To me, this is not a very healthy learning method as we could be blinded by the outcome of learning, and forget why we want to learn.

Reference:

N. Crozier, EDCI 337: Interactive and Multimedia Learning (2021).