Week 2: Mind Map of Learning Theories

Here is our mind map of learning theories.


Create your own mind maps at MindMeister
Link here for the full map.

Key reference:
Keesee G.S., Learning Theory and Instructional Design/Technology, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://teachinglearningresources.pbworks.com/w/page/19919565/Learning%20Theories

Module reflection

Please refer to the following link for our group reflection on MITE6024B module.

Link here.

(The content has been composed collaboratively by the members of the group)

Consider uses of mobile technology in your school or workplace.

Mobile technology has been widely used in school environment and workplace.

For the university which Janey studied in her first degree, Chinese made social media like Renren was being used by faculties as a main communication media between faculty and students. In between classmates, communication tools like Weixin, QQ and Whatsapp are very common tools for peer or even teachers’ communications. Group chat is now very common. In HKU, mobile APPs were created to facilitate teaching and learning. CEDARS has an APP to deliver important information to students via mobile devices so that students won’t miss any of them (e.g. career opportunity).
Mobile technology has also been widely used in workplace. For Abby’s internship as an account executive in an advertising company, QQ for mobile was being used for workgroup discussion, it became very useful as most of the team are working on fields. Another example is an APP for property agent. Abby also involved in an APP development project which is about property agency. The APP provides brief introduction of the property for sold or lease, the latest progress,the price and privilege of the property, etc. Her colleagues were all asked to experience the app and gave some feedback and advice.The mobile technology is used in  the commercial as an promoting tool.
Peter shares his experience in the school he worked before.Between the students and himself, he used to mobile version of Skype to keep in touch with them. He made a new account, just for teaching use (He didn’t want the students to have his personal account name!), and had his students add him as contacts. This way, the students could instantly voice chat with him, or send him text messages if they needed help with their homework. Additionally, they could take pictures of problems they were having. For example, if they couldn’t solve a math problem,Peter would ask them to take a picture of what work they had done so far and send it to him. Instead of just giving them the answer, Peter could show them where in their work they had made a mistake and help them find the correct answer for themselves. This way, Peter helped assure that more students brought their homework in on time than had before he started using Skype.

One of the characteristics of using mobile technology is its mobility. With the wide coverage of mobile and wi-fi network, people can access to information anywhere anytime. Communications for mobile is no longer limited in speaking, but rich media like text, video, and audio. Mobile learning can breakthrough the geographical constraints of learning. On the other hand, the ease of use of mobile provides unique advantages to mobile learning over other media. Traditional computers interface is often more complicate to use compare to mobile device. User interface of mobile device is usually more simple. On the other hand, mobile devices are more instant available, i.e. you don’t have to wait before you can use it. Also the power consumption of mobile devices is much less than traditional PC or notebook., which make it available all the time. As a result, mobile technology would still have a great potential to growth a lot further.

Learning Activity－Web 2.0 In Education

Here is our group's  presentation about learning activity：
http://themeefy.com/abby_114233/learning-activity-web-2-0-in-education-1/read/#/page/1


Here is a simple example of using Themeefy to support language learning.
http://themeefy.com/Janey_115204/theme-115241/read/#/page/1

Session 6.0 Research Activity

How IT can help to facilitate language learning

Background

Language teaching has been a very popular topic for hundreds of years. Learning learning as an academic subject has somehow become compulsory for students from young to elder. It is even common to learn a second language apart from the native language a person speak. For example, in Hong Kong English Language Learning is a core subject starting from Kindergarten to senior Secondary level. In recent years studying Putonghua becomes another compulsory subject in Hong Kong. In higher education there are even some other foreign language subjects available, e.g. French, Spanish, Japanese, etc.

However, ways of conducting language teaching did not change a lot for hundreds of years. The common practice of it is face-to-face teaching with an instructor / teacher talking to the class and students response. Until about 20 years ago with the evolution of technology some aiding materials became available to language teaching and learning. The most common tool should be audio tapes which have recorded some demo speeches for students to learn. As technology evolution continues the ways of conducting language learning is reaching some new horizons. There are still some other factors contributing the needs for using IT. For example, there is time constraint for a student to spare time attending classes. There could be geographic constraint to a person to learn how native people speak. People always say the best place to learn a foreign language is the place where native people speak that language, e.g. Japan for Japanese, Beijing for Putonghua, etc. On the other hand, the chance of practicing for the learning language is somehow limited within the classroom.

This research attempt to study how IT has been used to assist in language teaching. How people has been using IT to learning foreign language and whether there is still other constraints which are waiting to be addressed.

Methodology

Research will be carried out in both qualitative and quantitative directions. Qualitative research includes focus groups, interviews and observation where quantitative research includes online survey. Groups of teachers and students from related disciplines will be selected and invited for collecting ideas about how they have been using IT for language teaching and learning, how they found it useful and what are the constraints they have come across. Class observations will be followed to compare the collected results against our own observations. With the collected information, a survey questionnaire will be prepared and conducted for further analysis.

Plan procedure

A list of literatures in related topics have been identified and selected for reading. They will be reviewed to identify the common issues of IT in language learning, i.e. difficulties of current way of language learning, current IT that is being used in language learning, and identify unaddressed issues. It will be followed by confirmation of designed research methods to tie up with our intended research outcome. Research procedure planning is to be followed. After that a timetime of the research will be scheduled and the actual research will be carried out. The collected information will be analyzed for the final research report preparation.

Reference

HKU research guide, retrieved November, 30, 2012, http://lib.hku.hk/general/research/index.html

Writing a research paper, retreived November 30, 2012, http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/report/reportform.html

Robson C. How to do a Research Project, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/researchproject/weblinks.asp

Basic steps in the Research Process, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://www.crlsresearchguide.org/


Literatures review
Wang, SUPPORTING SYNCHRONOUS DISTANCE LANGUAGE LEARNING
WITH DESKTOP VIDEOCONFERENCING, 2004, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.2099&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Hampel and Mirjam Hauck, TOWARDS AN EFFECTIVE USE OF AUDIO CONFERENCING IN DISTANCE LANGUAGE COURSES, 2004, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.14&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Chinnery, Emerging Technologies - Going to the MALL: Mobile Assisted Language Learning, 2006, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num1/pdf/emerging.pdf

Murray and Mcpherson, Using the web to support language learning, 2004, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://www.ameprc.mq.edu.au/docs/research_reports/twnt_series/Using_the_Web.pdf

Ruschoff, Language Learning and Information Technology State of the Art, 1993, retrieved November 30, 2012, https://calico.org/memberBrowse.php?action=article&id=552

En101 Learning Japanese, retrieved November 30, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHlTQvFt-4

Language learning - Skype, retrieve November 30, 2012, http://community.skype.com/t5/Language-learning/bd-p/Languages

Cloud Computing Solution: Amazon Kindle

Source: Amazon Cloud Reader

Kindle Cloud Reader is an application for Amazon subscribers to access to their ebook online. Every user is provided with an account. All of their purchase is being stored in a cloud environment provided by Amazon. Once they login, they can access to their ebooks stored in the cloud. If they want to read it offline, they can download the book into their devices on hand for further reading. The device could be Kindle, ipad, or other device with the said application installed. With the cloud environment people do not have to worry about losing their ebook due to hardware failure or some other reasons. The Amazon cloud provides a high availability solution for users. Also the reading would not be limited on a single device.

However, unlike other cloud solutions available for education context. A key element is not in their blueprint of Kindle Cloud Reader, i.e. sharing. The cloud reader is designed to allow only a single account to access to a single book. It is most likely a business concern instead of a technology constraint. Allow sharing of a book means the sales would drop dramatically. In fact intellectual property is one of the major concern of publishers move for digital. They are afraid their sales would drop and at the same time, serious the privacy issue. In fact there are some other problems behind the scene, authors would lose their royalty, again reduce their revenue. It is a chain which affect a lot of people. As a result, it is expect that there would be a lot of tools developed with sharing functions. However, when it comes to anything related to sales or intellectual property, we don’t see any possibility of the said functions to be developed in the near future.

On the other hand, another major concern of cloud computing would be its data security. It is no doubt that cloud service providers would spend a fortune in IT development to ensure the data is safe. However, organizations are worry about whether they information, clientbase, financial information would be leaked for whatever reason. For example, would it be leaked due to political reason, i.e. would you expect Chinese government to put anything confidential into an American based company? Definitely not! Still it doesn’t mean Cloud computing would not success. It is only a matter of what to put in, and for what purpose. For reading purpose like Amazon Cloud Reader, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. The same apply to Google Drive and Docs which web 2.0 elements are even stronger. It is expected that people won’t put something confidential onto Google Docs neither. But as a students like us to put our work there, it is an excellent tool.

Interactive Map: Lamma Island Tourism

Here, we have created a tourism map of Lamma Island. You can click on the icons to see what they represent, or look at the full list of features on the left sidebar.

See the map here!

(Created collaboratively by our group)