Synthesis: On The Way

In the most time of our lives, we are always on the way to somewhere, such as on the way home, on the way to work, or on the way to a place you are planning for a long time. In the journey to the end of life, we walk by many people, pass by many places and achieve many milestones. Studying the Master of Arts in Education Technology at Michigan State University is also one important milestone in my life.  Almost at the end of my study, there are a few numbers in my mind when I think back about my whole experience of this program: Thirteen (months); Thirty (credits); Ten (courses); Nine (websites). These numbers seem simple and make no sense, but they are the symbols of my whole learning. Of course, they are far from enough to represent what I did learned because knowledge and experience can't be described by a few numbers or 2000 words essay. What I can discuss is only a part of my learning that had a significant impact.

 

When I applied for the MAET, I had a few goals that might be different from most the students. Instead of learning more about technology, my goal was to know more about education and how technology could be used in education.  As a technology person who is working in the education field, I wanted to bring more of my technological knowledge into education. There is truly no end to learning. Theoretical study is equally important actual practice. I fully understand that I need to learn more about education if I want to develop better educational technologies or introduce more technologies into education. In this program, I had a chance to network and interact with more fellow educators and educational professionals. And I did get to know a wide range of technologies for education and prepare myself to take a greater leadership role in my educational setting.

 

During the past year, I took both virtual-online and face-to-face courses. All these courses were helpful and had a significant impact. The graduate experience of MAET led to substantial changes in my understanding of both education and technology. It’s impossible to recall all the details I had in class, but I would like to share my new understandings that I obtained in my learning about teamwork, creativity & theories,  and learn & fun.

 

               

                     Learn together, work together

 

 

The most excited experience was of course the first three courses I took in the 2012 MAET summer cohort: CEP 800, 815 and 822 taught by Dr Punya Mishra,  Laura Terry and David Goodrich, via which I learned a lot about learning, research, leadership and technology. I had a great exposure to learning and teaching theories, what the educators think, what role technology plays in the real classrooms, and what technologies educators wish to make use of in and out of the classrooms.

 

More than 2000 years ago, Confucius, the famous Chinese educationist, said “ If three of us are walking together, at least one of the other two has a forte which is worth me learning.”  Everyone is a learner as well as a teacher in some way who has something that we can teach each others. In my case, every educators in class, especially my group members Kris, Christine, Melanie and Tai in Group ΧΦΜ@MSU, are all my teachers that I was able to learn more knowledge of teaching from. On the other hand, technology was what I could teach or help others with. We learned together and worked together. I asked them about what technologies they need and what kind of issues they might encounter in their teaching. As Shulman pointed out in his article, What does learning look like when it doesn’t go well? “Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal”(Shulman, 1999), so I asked myself what role a technologist should play to make his professional knowledge public and communal in education. One of the leading problems of why teachers end up not using and benefiting from technology as much as they’d like to is that teachers’ roles are changed to integrate technology effectively instead of technologies themselves or technical experts.  I asked my group members, four teachers from different schools, about what their school technical staff were doing in the schools. The answers I got were mostly similar. They were helping with setting up computer, updating system and sometimes fixing technical issues. Nobody was trying to bring new technologies to classrooms besides teachers. It seems technology experts are hiding to use their knowledge, which is least useful and possibly hindering the cooperation between teachers and experts. They are both working in the educational environments, but not learning together or working together.

 

Graduate study in US was so different from my undergraduate study in China, not just because of the differences between two education systems, but also the way teaching and learning represent. Even in online courses, teamwork was one essential aspect of learning. Learning is never an individual task, and so is teaching. Teaching today can’t be practiced in isolation any more. We live in the age of information explosion that everyone should try hard to not be lost and drowned. Therefore, it’s so important to understand the magic of the PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network) that we learned in CEP 810: Teaching for Understanding with Technology instructed by Emily Stone. PLN is one access to people, information, ideas and solutions that enrich us as teachers and educational professionals. I was surprised by how broad my PLN was after it was mapped by Popplet in one activity of CEP 810.  In our PLNs, technologies such as Twitter, RSS have changed our way of professional learning, which makes it easier for us to learn and work together.

 

 

                      Be creative, be guided

 

 

Creativity is not just a simple word. It refers to the invention of origination of any new things in many disciplines: psychology, science, education, philosophy, technology, business and etc. What does it really mean to be creative? After my experience in CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching & Learning, taught by Dr. Punya Mishra, I realized that creativity is a skill that can change a person, education and technology. In the book used in this course, Spark of Genius: The 13 Thinking tools of World’s most Creative People, the authors presented a common set of thinking tools at the heart of creative understanding from the world’s most creative people. These 13 thinking tools in the course were combined to 7 key trans-disciplinary cognitive tools that encapsulated how creativity was applied across a range of domains and how creativity could be learnt and taught in education. They are: Perceiving, Patterning, Abstracting, Embodied thinking, Modeling, Playing & Synthesizing.

 

In the process of learning to be creative, I connected these tools to my own domain of education and technology, especially the topic about how computer programming and new technologies help people to develop creative skills.  When I recalled these 7 tools of creative thinking along with following the activities of developing personal creativity in class, I realized that learning is lifelong to everyone. As where these thinking tools come from, I advocate for applying these tools back to all the disciplines by more educators and technologists, because they are not just a common language for teaching and learning at school, but are also crossing all disciplines including technology development. By learning and applying these tools, learners will discover and unleash their hidden creative instincts and make big difference in their domain.

 

Creativity is not easy to teach or learn, but is easy to kill.  “If we fail to understand creative thinking, we cannot hope to have an education system that will produce creative individual” (Root-Bernstein, Michelle & Robert. 2011). The point of education should create whole people with creativity. As a skill, creativity in technology is as important as in education. The more important, to be creative can build the bridge between education and technology. By learning and applying them, educators and technologists are likely to better integrate and repurpose technologies into education.

 

The creativity inspires the concepts behind the ideas.  The theory is how we use our creativity to communicate those concepts. The TPACK framework introduced by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler was taught in several courses of MAET program.It stands for Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge, which “attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge” (Misha, P. & Koehler, M.J 2009). It’s able to guide both teachers and people who work with technology, to repurpose technologies to fit into the teaching.  To make technologies not constructed for educational purposes into educational technologies “require creative input from the teacher to redesign or even subvert the original intentions of the software programmer” (Misha, P. & Koehler, M.J 2009). As an original programmer, I believe technology experts who have a deep, complex, fluid, and flexible knowledge of technology should also take this role, rather than teachers, most of who are novice to various technologies.

 

In CEP 810, we did an interesting cooking activity that seemed nothing to do with TPACK, we learned the main ideas of TPACK: to innovate and repurpose. It was easy to repurpose some tools making a fruit salad, but it would never be easy to repurpose technologies because technologies are more complicated than using tools from the kitchen. Therefore, it needs to be creative and guided. The framework of TPACK is definitely able to support and guide this process of repurposing in teaching and learning.

 

 

                  Learn and Play

 

 

One sentence in Daniel Willingham's book used in MAET summer cohort, Why Students Don’t like School, that really stuck with me was “if your writing is not interesting, why should anyone read it”. For me, it became something more like this: if your game is not interesting, why should anyone play it.  More than 5 years experience in educational game development makes me think a lot about game design and education.  I believe game developers should endow the game with more symbolic meanings rather than simply entertainment, as well as make something like learning more interesting. However, it’s not such an easy thing to integrate playing and learning. Like an important philosophy in ancient China, Yin and Yang, which is a concept of Taoism, creating a harmony between them is the central idea but not easy to realize. How to integrate playing and learning while keeping a perfect balance between both has been an important research topic. As the iImage I created, learning is like bright light and playing like the dark,  and to keep the balance between learning and playing is always the goal to educational game developers.

 

Besides the courses of MAET program, I also had a chance to take 3-course Certificate in Serious Games in conjunction with my MAET degree via Telecommunication Department.  The two courses, TC 831 Theories of Games and Interaction for Design taught by Dr. Wei Peng and TC  830 Foundations of Serious Games taught by Dr. Carrie Heeter, exposed us to examples of the current state of the art in the different strands of serious game, distribution, and industry structure, theories to inform serious game design, and research methods for developing games and understanding users. Before theoretically learning about Serious Games, I was always asking myself about how to define a good video game or a good educational game. However, I changed my mind a little bit after I understood that “good video games represent a technology that illuminates how human mind works” as well as “incorporate good learning principles and have a great deal to teach us about learning in and out of schools, whether or not a video game is part of this learning” (Gee, 2007).  It’s obvious that serious games are different from video games for entertainment purpose, but it’s interesting that good video games for entertainment may act like the human mind, and are a good place to study human thinking and learning. Good video games designed with the primary purpose of entertainment have a great deal to teach us about learning because they can demonstrably motivate users to engage with them with unparalleled intensity and duration. It’s wrong that we are trying to separate games and learning “when we think of games we think of fun, and when we think of learning we think of work” (Gee, 2007). Good video games already use many of learning principles to teach us about learning. We can learn to design for gameful experiences in serious games, or other non-game context, by studying “gamified” system from these good video games.

 

To serious or educational game developers, it’s not easy to make a game fun with learning content and purposes well-delivered. Some may think that we should focus on the serious ideas, not the entertainment. But if the game is not interesting, nobody is going to play it and the serious purposes would be failed to achieve. Serious games are not textbook or business software, but games designed for a purpose other than entertainment. Beyond entertainment doesn’t mean that serious games will exclude entertainment. Game playing is intended to be fun. It’s the root of a video game, without it, a serious game can only be called as serious software. Therefore, to learn and play are both the most important goals of an educational game. In addition, educators should also make learning and teaching interesting and motivating. The school should not the place that students don’t like.

 

Conclusion

 

After one year study, I feel more confident for the thoughtful use and development of technologies to support teaching and learning in a range of educational environments. As what I learned in my undergraduate study, it is not important to master all the knowledge during my study, instead, what needs to master is how to study these skills and knowledge. We are all on the way heading somewhere. Therefore, what we need is to know how to eliminate the roadblocks we encounter on the way.

 

I was also inspired to take more leadership role in my field based on what I learned in class and experiences of educational software and game development work during last few years. New technologies not only have the potential of changing what and how students learn, but also altering the task of teaching in significant ways. Through the activities, assignments and teamwork experiences in MAET program, I have learned about professional development strategies, project planning, evaluation, along with the ethical and social implications of technology to understand how to be responsible for managing relationships between technology and education rather than software project management, which will help qualify me to become a project manager of educational technology projects  in the future.

 

As a whole, I feel it was the right decision to enroll in the MAET program. It was great pleasure working with educators from real classrooms, and through them I learned about their work and saw how eager the educators were to embrace new technologies and incorporate everything that comes with it into their teaching. It was not a long time study, but I got a lot of valuable knowledge that could be used in my work and shared with others.  I am on the way and in the right direction to become an excellent technologist and leader by combining the technological and educational knowledge to offer high-quality and services.

 

Reference:

• Shulman, L. (1999). What is learning and what does it look like when it doesn’t go well. Change, 31(4), 10-17.

• Root-Bernstein, Michelle and Robert. 2011. Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People.

• Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for School? No Way!Learning & Leading with Technology, (36)7. 14-18.

• Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York: Peter Lang