Week 7 – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies

Week 7 Discussion

mwill5 — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 18:54:19 +0000

“While MOOCs, high-quality educational materials developed by elite universities, are used to reinforce the advantage of privileged adults, the opposite appeared to be true for socio-economically disadvantaged youth, who might be spending significant amounts of time on leisure- oriented websites like coolmath-games that have little evidence for the potential in advancing their social and human capital.” (Zhang, 11)

At some point, I’d love to have a discussion about biases that come up in the context of academic writing and/or experiment construction. The sentence above is is a deprivation stand model of thinking: the socio-economically disadvantaged youth are broken and need to advance, but they’re only interested in leisure activities. Intervention is needed, and quickly. How do we avoid that kind of language and framing? Are there resources for researchers before they get to the peer-review processes?

Week 7: Role of technology in simple interventions

mjiang2 — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 04:49:15 +0000

What I got out of the readings is that interventions can be really simple and don’t have to involve high technology. Interventions like talking kids through math problems and solutions, and supervising on which websites to go to, can make a huge difference. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor, who told me that simply asking kids to predict how much everything in the shopping cart costs would greatly foster math learning.

Since these interventions are so easy to do but usually ignored, how can technologies play a role transforming them into habit? I am thinking of using text messages daily or weekly to give parents guidance on what to do. It’d be helpful for the content of the messages to be determined by the location parents are in.

Week 7 Discussion – Juan G

juang7 — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 03:35:30 +0000

I was surprised when I read that educational research had not taken advantage of the popularity of coolmath-games. By collaborating with a popular site such as coolmath, we can gather data that could help designers use this information to work on creating games that are not just popular, but also effective in improving student performance.

I have mixed feelings about Neopets. The site is obviously exploiting the users data, but they are also providing the kids and adolescents with important skills (eg. financial education). Although I am not sure of all the intentions of Neopets, I think it is important that educational organizations can find ways to make profits. Unfortunately, money is required to run any organization and if organizations can find ways to get additional resources, they will be motivated to continue to improve their services. They can also attract competition, which can improve the products and services offered to the children.

DQC week 7 – neopets incentives

thuygon — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:16:23 +0000

Grimes & Shade, 2005-

It doesn’t surprise me that Neopets is built on immersive advertising. Although children are more vulnerable to being exploited by commercial interests, this is not limited to the online media world. Product placement surrounds them in all aspects of their lives- everything around them at home, at school, through interactions with family, teachers, friends- both adults and peers. Media exposure appears to be a new force that is just competing with the existing forces. Willis (2001) did propose that children have the ability to extract individual use value from commodities–using them as tools for self-expression, for articulating social relationships, and for understanding the world around them. At the end of the day, Neopets do allow children to “adopt participatory roles in the creation of online content and contribute in meaningful ways to online environments, including games and communities.” It is a platform in which they can grow socially and cognitively. There are clear benefits and harms from engaging in the Neopets community. Even though Neopets exploit the best interests of young users—we do live in a world where our interests are exploited by the media. What incentives do Neopets have for creating something that is less profitable?

Week 7 Discussion

mfaulk — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 23:34:23 +0000

The Zhang reading indirectly highlighted a very fascinating issue about how the Internet facilitates the achievement gap. Zhang states, “highly educated adults were more likely to use the Internet for personal development, while adults with lower education levels more often were online for gaming and social interaction” (11). As a result, “the digital divide in Internet use could occur at a very early stage of the educational trajectory, suggesting that the Internet can be a potential accelerator for the digital divide and achievement gap” (11). I had not recognized the power that the search index has in shaping the content that drives the achievement gap. How can we transition this power for good? Would it be constructive to have website rankings based on educational value for audiences with lower education levels to decelerate this digital divide?

Week 7 Discussion

myupa — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:40:06 +0000

In Using Games to Break the Symbol Barrier, Keith Devlin provides Wuzzit as an example of an educational math game that uses a game’s visual affordances to convey math concepts without abstract math symbols in the way. I found Devlin’s concept of the “symbol barrier” to be accurate and compelling, and perhaps a leading cause for the math anxiety that Berkowitz et al describe. Moreover, I believe Wuzzit is an excellent example of educational technology that actually uses the affordances of technology to do away with a barrier in traditional math classrooms. This increases accessibility to people who are fully capable of mastering Everyday Math without having to master mathematical notation first.

Wuzzit provides a good contrast to coolmath-games.com, which I actually researched for my technology redesign project. A lot of the points made in Understanding the Relationships Between Interest In Online Math Games and Academic Performance by Berkowitz et al about the credibility of math content in CoolMath’s games came up in my analysis as well. The website has a few math related games, but a lot more games just geared towards entertainment that do not provide learners with the opportunity to “process mathematical content actively” (Zhang 255). Thus, I feel that the website does not capitalize on the affordances of technology to provide meaningful learning experiences for its users. From an equity standpoint, and especially because this website has a lot of traffic from minority/lower socioeconomic background students, should standards or regulations exist for products that claim to be educational?

Week 7 response

marcc — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:00:06 +0000

This week’s readings emphasized the important difference between thoughtful, well-designed learning games and ineffective games. I figured that Zhang was talking about Coolmath before she even named it because of that site’s reputation for shallow math games. I hope that Zhang’s study is not understood to mean that math games are ineffective. Berkowitz et al and the Devlin video both show how well-constructed games can measurably improve performance. The latter portions of Zhang, where she discussed how students in lower-performing states played more Coolmath, conjured the possibility in my mind that teachers and parents in those states might be directing their kids to Coolmath by a simplistic assumption that those math games will mechanistically boost math scores, and using the games as a replacement for more rigorous lessons.

Parents and teachers should be able to distinguish between good games and ineffective ones, as well as how to properly integrate such games as a part of their students’ academic diet. It is not enough for some ed-tech designers to know good practices for educational games. If those quality games are indistinguishable in the app store from lower-quality games, this barely helps the student population writ large. Perhaps there could be some sort of certification board, like the ESRB or MPAA, that could review and certify research-backed educational games?

Week 7: The Importance of Clear Representation

hajhasan — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 22:44:19 +0000

The fact that tablets allow for more efficient representation of math seems to be nothing short of revolutionary. I really liked how the speaker built his argument by showing us how math was done before the printing press, it was able to make the contrast between what we grew up learning and the potential of teaching and learning math in the future.
This made me think of how efficiency of representation is a driving force in learning. Is it fair to say that the more “loaded” an informational representation of content, the better it will be for the learner (assuming the representation is logical and not overwhelming)? I can’t help but think of infographics when it comes to learning something, and how effective they can be for representing a large amount of information at once. Bottom line: representation matters for learning.
On a personal note, I realized that I HAVE to write down notes by hand and HAVE to do it in color using erasable and neat pens. This is so important to me that I am almost unable to learn if I don’t do this. I realized after this talk that by organizing this representation, I am effectively organizing the information in my brain.

Week 7: Math

ccolgan — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:34:43 +0000

The Zhang article made me wonder how students’ interactions with online math games have changed in the age of YouTube. From Ashley’s talk last week, we learned that kids are no longer using Google to search for content. In the article, from November 2012-October 2013, 6% of traffic to coolmath-games came from social media sites including YouTube. A higher percentage of traffic is likely coming from YouTube today.

I downloaded the YouTube Kids app and searched for “Cool Math Games.” Unsurprisingly, most of the content that came back were videos of kids playing the games on the Cool Math Games website. This peculiar “watching” phenomenon is so huge, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some way to leverage watching videos of gameplay into a learning experience.

Based on the data from Zhang’s research, the kids that are searching for this content are among the lowest performing. Is there a way to connect them with the help they need? Perhaps a new study (based on the data that YouTube has on its users) could link those interested in coolmath-games with a program to encourage families working together on math problems at home, the very beneficial practice discussed in the Berkowitz et al. article, and could compare the achievement of those with and without this intervention.