Week 7 is officially done! Tonight in class we wrapped up the book, "A whole new mind" by Daniel Pink I believe. Each of the groups briefly discussed each chapter we're assigned to read and presented our findings in class. All teams did a great job on presenting their material and I have to confess that I did not finish the book; however, after tonight I have a peak interest in finishing the book, maybe not this semester, but I will try and finish it in the near future.
Final project will be assign soon and this semester has been going somewhat quick, which I like very much. Okay, don't want to make this blog too long, gotta write some more later.
Here is an example of an object that I thought has some flaws to it. This is a Yamaha electronic 88-keys keyboard.
From a visibility point of view, it has buttons that look like a button you can press, knobs that look like a knob you can turn, so in that perspective, it was fine.
The affordances was fine too given there are piano keys that I can afford to press with leisure.
Mappings were fine with the same reasons from visibility and affordances.
This keyboard looks like it can do a lot of things beside playing the keyboard like pressing the keys and make music. It looks like the keyboard was designed to do multitude of things; however, the only thing I know how to do is turn on the keyboard and play a song. I wanted to do more with it but it just have way too many buttons and functions that I don't have the time to learn it. As Dan Norman's book have mentioned, as functionality increases in an object, it also increases complexities and frustration.
In addition to that, there is a graphical interface in the center to tell me what instrument I am currently playing and etc, but the problem is that there is lack of feedback from the object. For example, when I press something that I cannot do, the interface does not tell me I am doing something wrong, it just doesn't do anything. I'm not sure that's a good thing in my case because I would like some sort of feedback.
The instructions on the panel tells me what types of instrument refers to what number; however, it does not tell me how I can select them.
In conclusion, I think this keyboard is finely built; however, I think they can improve upon their design just a little bit more. I have always been a Yamaha fans when it comes to piano and keyboards and still am.
Wow, I can't believe it, but week 6 is done, and 10 more weeks to go.
I can really feel the pressure now with 6 classes and working 40 hours. But I think it's all worth it if I can get my credential by the end of next semester.
So far, this class has been most interesting and the selection of text are easy read such as the text we are reading, "A Whole New Mind", which talks about how left-brained people are no longer enough, we need people to start using and appreciating the right-brain to suffice our life and work style.
Tonight, we discussed about the concept of storytelling where people tend to be more interested in stories than just raw facts. And also that most stories comes from the "Hero's Journey" template, where the hero goes through an initiation, challenge, and then the return of the hero.
Then we discussed about "Symphony", where we need people that can facilitate things such as the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker.
I don't want to make this blog too long, so for the time being, I will end this here.
This was something I came across and just wanted to show the class about how powerful and instant Web 2.0 is. In addition, how un-filter and raw it is. It allows us to see things as it is, but can the general public handle it? I know I can because that's life, but what about the rest of us? I would like to hear what you have to say. Take a look and you be your own judge.
Saw this article about foreign students in China celebrating the autumn festival through wearing Han-style clothes. I wish I can do that and see what it's like dressing up like a Han. Even though the article was short, it makes me long for my culture. I gotta go back to Hong Kong and lived there for a month or two if my Chinese is good enough. LOL!
Here's the article just in case anyone is interested in reading:
Have a Han-style Mid-Autumn Festival!
"The kinds of media to which kids have access make a difference. For example, lack of easy access to a particular medium by any particular social group may have important consequences... Kids who do not have computers are presumed to suffer. They have limited opportunity to develop computer literacy, to go online, to search the World Wide Web – in short, to become fully functioning members of the "information age."
When I went to high school, I remember my mom had to scrunge up enough money to buy me a computer, and I vividly remember it was $2000 for a desktop! I was fortunate enough to have a computer such that I learned how to type, use email, and the internet. Honestly though, besides that, I didn't really use my computer as a research tool, I used mainly as a word processor even though I have an internet connection.
Today, so much have changed, relating back to the quote mentioned above, if certain groups do not have access to certain technologies such as computers, it could have a huge effect to them when they get older. Especially now more than ever, operating a computer is almost an assumed knowledge in any jobs that you get even Micky D's!
Just finished reading "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds". This article is strictly a report, it provides unbiased facts, numbers, percentages, and etc. This article is not exactly a light article compared to last week's Stephen Downes piece.
Even though this article was informative, I find it very hard to absorb the content. There were a lot of percentages being reported, races such as Whites and Blacks were being mentioned in numerous places. If I was doing a research and this article pertains to what I do, perhaps then I would have a better context to it, but since we are just reading this as an assignment, I find it very difficult to get grounding on it.
I believe this article would have been more effective if the authors used less words and perhaps utilizing charts and graphs instead of just the mundane tables with percentages. Like the old saying goes, "Less is more".
Perhaps tomorrow, I will post up something about the article, I am just too burnt out by numbers currently.
" ... Valley High School student in Nevada was reprimanded for writing [blog], “Kill Alaina!” (a class-mate he found irritating) and for making a vulgar comment [in a blog] about a teacher. In another case, a student at St. Martin High School in Mississippi was suspended for three days after using her blog to call a teacher “perverted.” ... "
Okay, I know this topic is a very heated topic and at the same time I might be blacklisted and etc, but I have to talk about this because I think it is a very heated issue and everything is not exactly black and white here. In the above quote, I think that's stepping a little too far in terms of making a blog to kill someone or calling your teacher "perverted". But let's put things back into perspective for a sec.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that I dislike this class and I dislike my instructor and I blogged about it as an assignment perhaps for a class reflection or some sort. My classmates and instructor read my blog, should I be reprimanded for that?
Should I be reprimanded if my criticisms were constructive and respectful? Some people might argue that if we establish ground rules then this would not have happened. In my humble opinion (IMHO), if we establish ground rules on blogging, then we will only see only one side of the story and I think that defeats the purpose of education blogging. I would love to see what some of you think about this.
In addition, I love this class and the above mentioned is just AN EXAMPLE (notice the caps).
" ... Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Freesoftware approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.” And although Movable Type recanted, many bloggers moved to an open source blogging tool, WordPress (http://wordpress.org/).24 "
Although the article did not mention the word Web 2.0, but the article in itself is very Web 2.0 ish. Stephen brought an interesting point about proprietary Web 2.0 software where it might be free or very cheap in the beginning, eventually will raise their fees and prices for their services. One of the element that I think it drives Web 2.0 to the fore-front is the fact that it is FREE. I mean how cheap can it be? Everybody like things to be free right? Like my economic professor once said:
" There are no such thing as free lunch. "
Basically all these free Web 2.0 tools out there, somebody is paying for it. Though Stephen did not say it in his article, but I think he is hinting the fact that in the near future, some of these tools might not be free. That could have a detrimental effect to public education, especially schools who are using these technologies in under-funded school district.
Stephen also mentioned the fact that another alternative would be using open-source software such as WordPress, but that still has a price tag to it. Yes, open-source software by definition is free software, but somewhere down the chain, there are people who support the application, like writing patches, debugging, coding and etc. Still, it is not exactly free. If the developers one day stop supporting their open-source product, that could also have a negative effect in the community.
The reason why I am discussing about this is because Web 2.0 is a great period to witness but I think it is still very unstable because no one really knows where this is heading. Information in the web is growing at an astronomical rate, where users sometime have to filter a lot of misleading info to get to the factual one. Information overload anybody? Knowledge which takes decade to learn and comprehend now takes months to master and on the same token, knowledge that you knew a month ago might be irrelevant the next month. So what gives?
I really enjoyed reading this article because Stephen Downes really broke the topic down on Blogging and how he organized his information in a straight-forward easy to understand format.
In this post, I will just discuss on how I feel about this article in general terms and then I will post additional posts to discuss certain parts in a more granular detail.
Initially in the article, Stephan discussed about what blog is. This part I was not too excited about because it was a lot of information that I have learned/used so I thought it was going to be one of those boring articles about education. But about mid-way through it, Stephan really ties it down with issues that deals with blog, education, liability, interest and etc. When he brought that to the discussion, it was a lot more interesting! I breezed through it now knowing I arrived at the end of the article.
The part that most interested me was how moral or effective it is when we bring blogging to the education field. Stephan brought up many points from both sides and I really appreciate that he did that because it made his article neutral and informative in a way that he is not taking sides. In addition, he posted a question at the end! I thought that was a brilliant move! In a way, he wrote this article not because he wanted to take sides, he wanted us to generate opinions and discussions about this. All in all, great article and I could tell he probably sifted through a lot of information for this piece.
Tonight in class I was confronted with an interesting question, how do you embed quicktime movies in a webpage. Since in my department, nobody really knows my name, they often call me the "Web Guy", I guess I should be able to figure this out. So here it goes:
This is my first video. I saw this great Nunchaku master demonstrating his techniques, so I just wanted to share it with my colleagues. Enjoy!
