The MindCET blog has posted a post of mine about why VR seems so attractive to educational technology folks. Here’s the beginning:

By now we’re accustomed to the idea that the Internet enables us to spread education out across large physical distances. But just as spreading Nutella means thinning it, so does spreading education seem to require making the connections less substantial and real.

That’s one important reason that virtual reality and augmented reality appliances were so prevalent at Shaping the Future III. (The other reasons are that they’re very cool.) They promise to “thicken” the online experience. As Avi Warshavski pointed out in his presentation, this also helps to explain the recent increase in interest in the maker movement and the Internet of things: learners are not just brains in space, as he put it.

Miriam Reiner presented some evidence from her research that suggests…

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I’m at workshops held by the Center for Educational Technology in Tel Aviv (I’m on its advisory board) and they’ve asked me to do a brief introduction at a session on digital literacy. I plan on saying very little, especially since Renee Hobbs is there and she actually knows this topic.

I want to make only three points, all obvious.

First, obviously digital literacy is first about values and only then about mechanics. E.g., traditionally media literacy has been about making cannier individuals, which then results in a cannier society. Digital literacy — especially if we think of it as network literacy — may decide that it would prefer to grow literate networks.

Second, I personally would want to give students a lively sense of how the Internet and the Web work. This isn’t so they can grow up to be network architects or Web designers. Rather, it explicitly aims at preserving the values implicit (yes, the meaning of “implicit” here needs a lot of explicit explication) in those technologies…values at risk as that architecture becomes increasingly paved over by commercial apps.

Third, our new media literacy is not just about making us better consumers of content but is actually about shaping the medium itself. What do we want it to be? That’s never before been so directly the case.

If I were home, I’d make these points by referring to Howard Rheingold, Dan Gillmor, Renee and others.

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Walter Bender of SugarLabs begins by saying “What I’m all about is tools.” “The character of tools shapes what you can do.” He’s an advocate of “software libre” that lets the user be the shaper. That brings responsibility, which Walter wants to celebrate.

He’s going to talk about http://turtle.sugarlabs.com

He goes back to Papert and Cynthia Solomon who in the late 1960s invented Logo. Fifty years ago. Then Jobs and Gates gave us babysitting: sw was there to be used, not an environment for creating ideas. You have to be given the tools and the knowledge.

In 1971, Papert and Solomon wrote “Twenty things you can do with software.” Walter today is going to give us a sense of the breadth of things you can do with software:

• Using Turtle Blocks to draw interesting shapes, or create a paint program or paint with noise or attach pen size to time. “Once it belongs to you, you’re responsible for it it. And then it has to be cool, because who wants to be responsible for something that’s not cool?”




• Challenges and puzzles




• Add sensors, cameras, etc., create aa burglar alarm that photos the burglar




• measure gravitational acceleration




• Continent game written by a third grader




• Build a robot




• Model math




• Collaborate across the network in a multimedia chat program

You can even extend the language. You can export your program into another programming language. A child wrote an extension to the language to download maps.

Turtle Blocks tries to make the learning visible to the learner — statistics about what the learner is doing, etc.

It’s got to be easy enough that you’ll try it, but it has to be hard if you’re going to learn. Many tools have low floors to enable easy entry but they also have low ceilings.

“Debugging is the greatest oppportunity for learning in the 21st century.” (Walter ties this idea to Cynthia Solomon.)

What motivates people: autonomy, a sense of mastery, and having a sense of purpose.

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Renee Hobbs from the Harrington School of Comm and Media is giving a talk about teachers as makers.

The myth of the digital native has hurt teachers and students alike. Students come into classrooms feeling superior. Teachers think the students already know how to use tech.

The concept of literacy is changing. It means being able to go out in the world and do something. That means educators who have to learn concepts like open access, multitasking, transmediation, identity, curation, play. We have to think about who owns our data, how our community is represented, addiction, displacement, and propaganda. And there are more and more “stakeholders.”

There’s a big opportunity to connect culture and the classroom. E.g. minecraft. E.g., analyzing the news. Vital to make connections between school and the world. Popular culture is an important tool for connecting and relevancy. We need to make the “stand and deliver” method obsolete.

There is an art to creating a digital literacy learning environment. Renee has encountered several archetypes:

Teacher 2.0 helps students use media and tech to connect with and learn from others as networked digital citizens. Another teacher is a “spirit guide”: help students use media to support their social and emotional well-being.

So Renee’s group developed a “horoscope”: questions that show what sort of teacher you are, eg., trendsetter, taste-maker, watchdog. (see powerfulvoicesforkids.com), etc.

When teachers become media creators, they gain confidence. It’s important for them to learn how to use the relevant tools. E.g., a couple of teachers made a video about “how to solve a maht problem.” Another made a short video of children helping someone across the street. Another used Screencast-o-matic to capture interaction with a google doc to share a lesson plan. The teachers eventually got more playful and fun.

As teachers became more comfortable as media creators, they were better able to connect to students as creators.

“The same way that music is not in the piano, learning is not in the device.”

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Jeremy Roschelle is at Stanford Research leading the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (Circlcenter.org) is going to talk about cyber-learning. But first he asks to take a deep breath and reimagine learning.

He shows images of places of learning. “What tech we think is good for leaning depends on what we think learning looks like.” Therefore, we need to imagine learning, not tech.

To advance education we need to advance both the science of deep learning and tech.

Jeremy studied with and was inspired by Seymour Pappert.

Learning sciences teach us some principles:

• Learning is social, and we must design supports for collaboration




• Learning is multi-representational: it’s important to onnect stories and pictures, and connect the everyday and the symbolic, and enable children to see the meaning among these




• Learning is in a situation: Take advantage of the setting, the people, the physical world, not only the tech

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Categories: education, tech Tagged with: ed • liveblog • tech Date: June 3rd, 2015 dw

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Ronen Sofer from Intel shows a video that is in favor of education.

How do we connect tech and people? [He gives a post-ironic spiel, mocking typical industry pitches.] But the real challenge in “going beyond the screen.”

So far, the screen has been an interactive text book. Very structured. Visually rich. How to get closer to personal tutoring.

Barriers: 1. Sensing, recognizing and understanding me; 2. Reacting and reasoning

What Intel can offer:

• Perceptual computing




• RealSense enable detection of faces, expressions, sentiment, etc.




• PerC Avatars: avatars that mimic your expressions




• Physical activity context – fitbit-ish




• understanding of time: when is the optimal time for studying




• Makerspace stuff




• Natural language, cognitive computing, connected classroom, KNO content management for ed




• RealSense + Scratch (RealScratch)

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Categories: education, liveblog Date: June 3rd, 2015 dw

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Yoram Yaacovi from Microsoft talks about Hololens and shows an awesome video. Maybe this one.

Imagine, he says, being at home but seeing the people next to you in the classroom. Also: collaboratie prototyping. Interactive whiteboards. Expanded user interfaces. Design for Reparability.

He shows a supercool video of an educational use.

He doesn’t know when it will be available.

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Todd Revolt is worth Meta. It has 70 people. It’s shipping a Meta 1 developer kit. You use common hand gestures to manipulate virtual things.

He shows a video of people wearing Oculus Rifts in the real world and failing to navigate. Instead, Meta wants you to be together with people in the real world.

With augmented reality, he says, people know how to work it without training. Examples:

Fourth largest cause of death in the US: medical error. But with AR we can do more useful simulations. You can see the vital signs and the next steps in the procedures.

Princess Leia standing on your clipboard.

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Miriam Reiner is giving a talk on virtual reality. Her lab collects info about brain activity under VR to create a model of optimal learning.

Her lab lets them provide sensory experiences virtually: you can feel water, etc. New haptic interfaces. There’s a kickstarter project for an Oculus Rift that lets you smell and feel a breeze and temperature.

They also do augmented reality, overlaying the virtual onto the real.

A robot she worked with last year suffers from the uncanny valley. Face to face is important. “Only 10% of information is conveyed through words.”

In an experiment, they re-created a student virtually and had her teach another student how to use a blood pressure machine.

VR can help us understand what learning is. And enhance it.

Exxample: A human wears electrodes. As she plays a VR game, her brain activity is recorded. They measured response times to light, auditory, and haptic signals, Auditory was fastest. But if you put all three together, the response time goes down dramatically. What does this mean for learning? We should find out. It looks like multi-modal sensation increases learning.

If you learn something in the morning, and they test you over the next few days, your memory of it will be best after sleep. Sleep consolidates memory. If you can use neuro-feedback perhaps we can teach people to do that consolidation immediately after learning. Her research suggests this is possible.

“The advantage of vVR is not just in creating worlds that do not exist. For the first time we have a mthod to organize and enhance learning.”

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Avi Warshavski begins with a stock image of young people smiling at a computer screen. He points out that they’re all smiling, as if in an ad. There’s racial and gender balance. And they’re all looking at a screen. Having one object on whih we all focus is an old idea. He shows an old Roman frieze. Everyone is looking at a scroll.

Now we are in physical spaces, he says, not just brains that sit and learn: Maker movement, Internet of Things, Oculus Rift (which isn’t physical space, of course)…

He cites HD Thoreau saying that it’s great that everyone in the country can now communicate “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” We now have forms of communication that go beyond text on a screen. E.g., drones began with DIY makers who created open source software. Mary Meeker last week showed the incredibly steep growth in the drone market.

During the two day hackathon, a producer created a video of it, using one of the drones. (He shows a video of the hackathon — impressive job, especially given that it was done overnight.)

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