March 8, 2014

The Invasive Valley of Personalization

About 9 months ago, I gave a presentation at the World Future Society Conference called The Promise and Perils of Personalization.

After thinking, reading, discussing, and musing about personalization for about a year, I realized that there is a fine line between useful personalization and creepy personalization. It reminded me of the “uncanny valley” in human robotics. So I plotted the same kind of curves on two axes: Access to Data as the horizontal axis, and Perceived Helpfulness on the vertical axis.  For technology to get vast access to data AND make it past the invasive valley, it would have to be perceived as very high on the perceived helpfulness scale.

I remember the first time I saw Google Now deployed on my phone. It told me that my commute to work would take 16 minutes if I left right now. I had never told Google Now where I worked, I had not told Google Now the route I drove to work, nor had not asked it to calculate my commute time.  While it was slightly creepy that it knew all this information by analyzing my daily patterns, it was also useful, and the trip over the invasive valley was short. Of course, since I now work remotely from home, Google Now thinks I work at the LDS church across the street from my house now. I’m surprised it hasn’t figured out my gym patterns and started reminding me when to leave for yoga.

I think Google Glass is getting a bad rap simply because it is stuck in the invasive valley. The general population really doesn’t see it as providing useful technology for everyday life. Sure, you can snap a picture from your glasses, but if that’s it then you’re just sneaking into the privacy of others. If, en masse, we viewed Google glass as an incredibly helpful tool, I think it would successfully navigate itself up the steep slope to redemption.

Facebook wanders in and out of the invasive valley depending on the news and the latest release cycle of their apps and privacy statements. When the latest Facebook app demanded access to all my texts, I questioned the helpfulness of the feature it claimed to need these things for – account verification for some users. The idea that Facebook would read all my texts simply to add this one feature for some users slid it back down into the invasive valley for me. This feature is not helpful enough to warrant access to all that data.

In describing the “Invasive Valley” of data access and personalization my husband looked at me and said “Forget Big Brother, wait till you meet Big Mother!” and I think that is where we’re headed. Personalization is going to become our new life nagging companion:

Maybe you should walk now? You’ve only got 2,100 steps so far today.

You have symphony tickets on Saturday night, have you made a dinner reservation yet?

I can see that you’ve eaten yogurt for 4 mornings now, should we should add yogurt to your grocery list?

You’ve only gotten an average of 6 hours of sleep a night for 5 nights, I think you should take an early bedtime tonight.

Clearly enough data is being collected about me that Google Now could do any of these (if it had access to my FitBit and Smith’s card). Don’t these all seem like things your mother would remind you of?

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Filed Under: Edge of Learning, Personalization, Personalized Learning
March 8, 2014

Full version of Algeboats is out!

In case you’ve been waiting, the full version of Algeboats is out in the iPad store for $4.99.

You can see some of the gameplay for the Lite version of Algeboats on Youtube.

The game is designed to teach students about what algebraic variables mean and to begin to understand equations. It’s clever because the students don’t see equations to solve, but in the process of finding crate values that “make” the flags, they begin working backwards and thus solving the equations created by boat=flag. I’ve seen learners as young as 5 be absolutely delighted by the game (and the fact that they are doing algebra). Parents, of course, will be delighted as well.

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Filed Under: Good Learning Games, Math Video Games, Play and Learn
March 8, 2014

The 1-9-90 Rule and Observations of a Classroom Experience

I’ve referenced Vilma Mesa‘s Classroom Mapping for a while now, and want to give this some more thoughtful due diligence.

You can see examples of Vilma’s Classroom mapping in this Slideshow (the images are shared with her permission and you may reshare them by sharing the slideshow).

The 1-9-90 rule is a rule of thumb governing interaction in collaborative environment: 1% of the participants are creators, 9% are contributors (they comment, like and share things), and 90% lurk. While it is applied mostly to collaboration and networking in digital environments, I was struck by how it also plays out in classrooms. If you click through the slides, you’ll see the same ratio play out over and over.
The instructor (one person) creates the content. Roughly 3-4 students ask and answer questions. The rest of the class? They lurk, probably hoping to just watch it all play out without having to participate.
If this is the natural norm of collaborative environments, this gave me a couple questions to ponder. First, should we even try to shift the norm by mandating more participation by the lurkers? I think that classroom environments are a good place to try to engage students in more active learning. Even if a students’ natural tendency is to lurk, she/he has to learn to participate actively even when it is not desirable (they will have to face an employer eventually that will require this of them). So I think that we should try to increase the participation by the 90%, but just be mindful of this natural social breakdown in collaborative settings (translation: there will be pushback).
The second point to ponder is this: typically online instructors do “force” the lurkers to participate in activities like discussion boards. But often the same instructor will have no such type of participation requirement for a face-to-face classroom. Clearly one reason is the time that would take too much time to let everyone in the class have a say in every discussion, not to mention that the discussion would quite quickly become a lot of rephrasing of what other people said. Oh wait … that is what required online discussions are like. If you teach both online and face-to-face, give this some good thought – I think it is our goal to create the most high-value learning experience we can, and while the environment should impact the design of the experience, be mindful of creating dull experiences just because everyone “has to” participate.

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Filed Under: Classroom Life, Learning Design, TALDA (Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age)
March 8, 2014

Surviving (and Thriving) in the Age of Technology-Enhanced Teaching

I’ve been giving versions of this presentation at several events lately: AlaMATYC, SXSWEdu, STEAM3, and Elgin CC’s Distance Learning Conference. I said I would post the slides, and so here they are in one version.

To see the video of students in the math classroom, here are some links to the YouTube videos:

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Filed Under: Classroom Technology, Learning Design, TALDA (Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age)
March 4, 2014

4 Predictions about the Age of Technology-Enhanced Learning

I’ve been thinking about the Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Anyone who can be replaced by a computer should be.” and this led me to do some deep thinking about the consequences of technology for education.

Based on the principles of capitalism and the pressures to educate more students with better results, I arrive at the following four predictions about the marriage between technology and learning.

Please pay attention to the bolded words. They are important.

(1) Learning that involves information transfer will be replaced by technology.

(2) Any repetitive assessment or learning task that can be replicated by a computer will be.

(3)  Any computerized course that is cheaper and results in equal or better learning outcomes¹ for students will be delivered that way.

(4) The only technology that will improve learning outcomes for the majority of students is that the technology that begins to mimic a tutor-student relationship.²

¹Learning outcomes is the results/objectives-oriented part, not the learning experience. I think it will be a long time before technology can provide equal or better learning experiences, nor do we really measure this aspect of learning, though we should.

²Why? See Bloom 2-sigma problem.

What does that leave for the institution and the instructor? I posit that the role of an educator should shift from instructor to learning coach. A learning coach would focus time and energy on communicating, encouraging, monitoring, setting achievable (but challenging) goals, providing accountability to those goals, and guiding learners to see new insights for connecting concepts. In other words, educators should work with technology to (a) eliminate the repetitive tasks and (b) focus on the relationship-oriented things that improve the learning experience.

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Filed Under: Edge of Learning, Future of Learning
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