MSTU 4020 - Education technology predictions

1 scenario from the Facer & Stanford (2010) reading that is viable:
"World 1: trust yourself
1 ‘Informed Choice’ – a highly personalized education system structured around the individual collaborating lifelong with paid mentors and structuring education
provision from diverse sources around their needs."
Education should be individualized, but people still need to live and work together.

2 additional predictions:
A: Schools will stay. But teachers in school no longer teach students specific knowledge. Instead, they only teach students how to use different educational applications to acquire knowledge.
B: Grades will be of no use at all. Students can design their own rubrics to compare one's performance with others. Everyone can stand out in a certain way.

Research Plan Updated

I may narrow down social media I mentioned in the last post to two specific media, e.g. Instagram & Snapchat. The former one allows you to take a number of photos before you post one of them while the latter one only allows you to post the photo you take right now. These two different kinds of design may influence users' motivations accordingly. And I would try to find out how different their motivations are in the two settings.

Research Plan Updated

The original version:
a. Research question: Do we feel more obliged than willing to share on social media? And why?
b. Topics of literature review: identity construction; social aspects of cyperspaces
c. Group of people: social media users
d. Access: the online questionnaire being spread on different social media or sent via emails
e. Collect data: the online questionnaire
f. Limitations: The sample may be a little biased since my family and friends are much easier to reach than other people.
g. Implications: It will reveal people's true feeling towards social media, show how our lives are influenced somewhat unconsciously by the development of ICT, and encourage social media developers to reconsider what kind of design can be regarded as "user-friendly" nowadays.

Updated:
After last week's discussion, I found that the topic of literature review might be more about motivation of online participation than what I listed above. A reading "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions" last week and another reading "From Moodle to Facebook: Exploring students’ motivation and experiences in online communities" this week help me to think more about how to clarify my research topic and methods other than questionnaires. As the latter paper suggests, a qualitative study, e.g. individual interviews, is also a good way to know more about one's intrinsic motivation and other details, which ameliorates a limitation I did not mentioned above, i.e. the difficulty of discovering what is the genuine motivation for someone to participate in social media. It would be a question that even the person in question can hardly answer by him/herself.

Responses on Questions of the Article Critique

Thanks for such great questions on my article critique as follows! I will try my best to answer every question I received.

Q: Is there a reason why author discuss discretion besides personal data privacy issues? Does it affect author’s research object if she/he mess up with the two concepts.

A: I think confusion between discretion and privacy is common among many people when they try to determine what is private and what is not. In a sense, these two concepts always go hand in hand. If the research question is on personal privacy protection, I will not take the authors' stance as mistaken. However, what they try to discuss is how researchers of learning analytics can conduct their studies without violating privacy, so the privacy here should be treated as an objective issue that can be observed by different stakeholders rather than something totally up to the agent him/herself.

Q: I’m intrigued by the point about the dynamic definition (or not?) of privacy? Do you think we have the right to first grant access to our data and then revoke it? That seems to fit with the analogy of inviting someone to your home, but it sounds like it would make things difficult for the researchers’ planning.

A: That's true! The other critique I mentioned in my article but not the presentation is about the low feasibility of someone's right to withdraw his/her data after being collected, which is also suggested by the authors. And this kind of volatility of one's discretion is an important reason why I propose to distinguish privacy from discretion clearly. Moreover, I suggest that dynamics of privacy according to the context and time could be better taken advantage of if the authors tried to draw proper lines to differentiate private and public cyberspaces with regard to the three dynamic boundaries of digital privacy they bring up in the paper, i.e. discourse, identity and temporality.

Q: Could you explain me more about what you meant by “just because you invite people doesn’t mean house is not private?”

A: It is an analogy I use to tell the difference between discretion and privacy. As my answer to the first question shows, physical privacy in modern society can be an objective concept that is well-defined in law. Although I can walk into the host's residence by invitation this time, I am not sure if I can the same invitation or permission next time. And such uncertainty might well hinder the procedure of research if researchers merely rely on users' generosity.

Q: How could we reach a consensus of defining the boundaries of privacy, when we all come from different backgrounds?

A: It is a very good question that I expected the authors to address in their paper but they didn't. One reason accounting for it might be the difficulty of reaching a consensus among people with diverse backgrounds as you said. But in spite of the diversity, protocols signed by different online groups are likely to be a good way to define the objective boundary of digital privacy. Of course, before the agreement is reached, a large quantity of negotiation will be inevitable.

Appendix to Session 5 The Johari Window & The Bundle Theory

Questions on identity never fail to intrigue and haunt us from cradle to grave. What we discussed in class yesterday can date back to the very ancient ones, e.g. "Who am I?", "Is my mind identical to myself?", and etc. At a moment, something just flashed into my mind and delighted me to connect these new items to knowledge I obtained before. I believe it is just about the magic of a profound topic and I really want to share those inspirations with you all. Apart from an interesting article on the uselessness of time management and a famous poem I posted on this blog during the reading, here are the other two issues I would like to share. Let's enjoy the pleasure of thinking!

• The Johari Window

It is a cognitive psychology technique that we talked about in class. Abbey's pretty chalk drawing is attached below. According to whether one's self is known to him/herself or known to others, this "self" can be divided into four parts (i.e. windows), arena (known to self & known to others), blind spots (not known to self but known to others), hidden (known to self but not known to others), and unknown (not known to self & not known to others). This structure is useful for us to gain an insight into how one's self and identities are formed with regard to one's relationships with people around him/her. As I suggested, since this structure was put forward in 1955, more than 60 years ago, some modifications can be applied to it to make it more up-to-date. For instance, the self once hidden may now be exposed to some people online, though it is under a mask of an anonymous avatar. Also, the self once we were blind to may be easier to know with the help of some functions provided by social media, such as labels from friends and friends' impressions.

But what should be emphasized here is that "The Johari Window", strictly speaking, is not a theory or a model. It is just a technique that "help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others" (Wikipedia). "During the exercise, subjects are given a list of a few adjectives out of which they need to pick some that they feel describe their own personality. The subject's peers are then given the same list, and each pick equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These very adjectives are then inserted into a grid" (Wikipedia). Hence, it does not ensure that each one of the four windows really exist, the "unknown" grid in particular. Besides, it by itself does not tell us what are the relationships among these windows and why. If someone is interested in it, he/she can search for more resources that explain the underlying mechanism.

• The Ego Theory VS.The Bunddle Theory

These two theories I learned as an undergraduate occurred to me when our group discussed that essentialism is much more western than eastern. But how indeed do the two different cultures think about one's "self"? You are likely to find some clues below.

The first one, Ego Theory, claims that a person's continued existence over time can only be explained by the continued existence over time of an ego or a subject of experience. The reason why all my experiences are unified is because there is a single person, a single ego, that experiences them all.

The second one, Bunddle Theory, claims that there are many different series of mental events (thoughts, sensations, desires, etc.) that are unified by causal relations. It is like a bundle of pencils (mental events) tied together by a string (causal relations). So there are no persons. There are just bundles of bodies, brains, and mental events.

The bundle theory seemed to be first brought out by the Buddhist, Nagasena. He took the chariot as an analogy.

A chariot is made of five parts: a cart, two wheels, an axle, and a pole. We know that the chariot is not identical to any one of its parts, but is the chariot identical to all the parts together? Nagasen says, "no!" He takes it as a mistake to regard the chariot as an additional thing besides its five components. The word "chariot" is used simply to refer to the five parts but nothing more since all parts of a chariot are more "real" than the chariot itself, i.e. the parts of a chariot can exist even when the chariot does not. (The description of the theories above is adapted from the material in one of my undergraduate courses on philosophy taught by Daniel Lim in Renmin University of China.)

However, you may say that a human being is very different from a chariot. The existence of a self is the prerequisite of the existence of our different slices. Isn't it indisputable? Let me remind you of a famous clinical case called "the split-brain case".

Split-brain cases occur when the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, are severed. Although the patient behaves almost as a normal person after this effective surgery for refractory epilepsy, he/she will have some unusual reactions while taking the experiment shown in the picture above. The subject of the experiment is asked to pick up what he/she see on a word board with left hand and in the meantime speak it out loud. When he/she is shown a word board with "key" on the left and "ring" on the right, the subject will pick up a key while speak the word, "ring". (Please google it for more details.)

In this case, the subject has two different visual experiences. In seeing each word, he/she is not aware of seeing the other. He/she has two separate streams of consciousness and in each only one word is seen. Moreover, these two streams of consciousness are unaware of each other! Does it mean that there are two persons that share a same body?

What's more, Nagasena is not alone. There are even followers in the western world who share the similar idea on personal identity. The British philosopher, Derek Parfit, may be the most famous among them. I won't talk more about him here since it is far beyond the scope of this passage. But if you are curious about his story and theories, please search for more information online or in the library. It will certainly be a nice journey to go.

Sharing: A Poem for Us as Homozapines, "No Man is An Island"

Are we atomized and separated in this digital age? Are we even tired of just thinking to communicate with people face-to-face?

Here is a famous poem that may remind us of what it means to live as a member of a community and what we are to one another. Enjoy the poem and video^-^

No Man is An Island

written by John Donne (1573-1631), 

an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee.

Sharing: "Time management is only making our busy lives worse"

Sherry Turkle's question that "are we losing the time to take our time?" reminds me of an interesting and somewhat bluffing article -- "Time management is only making our busy lives worse".

While we are so familiar with the life checking our watch or phone to keep pace with the time and schedule, the fact is that "as the historian E.P. Thompson highlighted half a century ago, before the Industrial Revolution clocks were largely irrelevant"(quoted from the same article). If you like to know how "time management" makes our lives worse, the link below will lead you to that interesting article on this issue. Enjoy reading!

Time management is only making our busy lives worse
http://qz.com/447193/time-management-is-only-making-our-busy-lives-worse/

MSTU4020: Identity: Relating the Self to the Social

I am so delighted that this time we are going to talk about our identities and  relationships to the social online.

Two weeks ago, I set down a question mark beside a line of an article in Session 3 and did the same in another article last week. I just let them alone until I read articles for this session and happen to find that both of them have something to do with this week's topic.

Let me first quote those lines from former readings for you.

Quotes:

• "Good user interface design produces accessible and universally usable applications that enable solitary reading or social interactions that meet the needs of diverse user populations (Rainie and Tancer, 2007)."

     ——Preece, J. & Shneiderman, B. (2009). The reader-to-leader framework: motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), pp. 16

• "Sharing alone is a way of interacting in social media, but whether sharing leads users to want to converse or even build relationships with each other depends on the functional objective of the social media platform."

     ——Kietzman, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 245

When I came across with these descriptions, I wondered why such an oxymoron could be possible. How do people really feel while they are networking online? And more importantly, how will they feel after that?

With new technology being released everyday and adverts bombarding us with the need to be able to do more with less, multitasking, and multhiple-use devices, Sherry Turkle worries that we may gradually lose serenity and joy while being alone, thinking in depth, or communicating with a friend face to face. As for me, I do prefer text messages to voice calls or meetings in person due to the sense of control that Turkle mentioned. There will be hardly anything out of expectations if you have a text-based communication. We will never be embarrassed and can always maintain a perfect image of ourselves though it may cost us more energy and time to do so, e.g. check a post over and over again before sending it to show a feeling of relax...(enjoy the funny video below ^-^ ).

Taking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and etc. as mediators for our communication, we defamiliarize this most common daily process and regard it seriously as a job that should be done. When every post and communication is given as a formal presentation, we are certainly more likely to gain a sense of so-called "self-esteem", which is also suggested by Amy L. Gonzales's research.

However, this short-term satisfaction is accompanied by intermittent anxiety in the long run. Being addicted to a made-perfect self in the virtual world, we might well be more afraid of appearing clumsy in the flesh. The underlying logic here is that I love my identity online so that I love those people who know me as my identity online, and therefore I would rather spend more time with those loved ones who might also enjoy being admired of their online identities by my online identity. In brief, we are obsessed with the delicate and "perfect" world we designed while gradually shrink from the "imperfect" world we live.

It sounds horrible, but is it really a problem? We should admit that human beings change over time. What looks weird today might be commonplace in the future. Is it possible that one day everyone just live as a separate unit surrounding by different equipment? Perhaps, ties among people provided through those devices, whether strong or weak, are already adequate for an individual. That humans are social animals can also be a fallible hypothesis.

Once we lived close to each other because we had to fight against the cruel environment with joint efforts. After that period of time, our domain were extended from a village to a country, from a state to around the world. Despite that it was unimaginable that someone would work tens of thousand kilometers away from his/her home hundreds of years ago, it is trivia nowadays. It was the first time that the blood tie was let go. Moreover, increasing number of people tend to be single, which reveals to some extent that the tie of marriage is let go as well. Simply, the fact is we become more and more independent. As more tasks can be handled by only one person with the assist of high-tech machines, there are reasons to believe that humans may deliberately try to get rid of those heavy relationships when they feel that they are powerful enough to face the world.

Don't be so worried. It is just the trajectory of human history. Instead of withdrawing back from industrial age to agricultural age, we entering the age of electricity. There is no doubt that we lose a lot of unsophisticated and beautiful things during that progress, but humans hate to walk backwards and thus they are expenses that we should take in order to step forward to the next era, whether good or not.

MSTU4020: Life on Line and Academic Achievement

Have you ever been worried that the selfie you post might look bad? Or have you ever been anxious to know what others comment on your new post? The positive answers to both questions will not lead to a diagnosis of "social anxiety disorder", but may reveal some common phenomena in this digital age.

Though born as a homo zappien, I am always tired of maintaining self-image online, especially when involved in more and more different social media nowadays. Concerns for others' responses, as is described above, seem inevitable, therefore we turn to post different messages and news according to different groups of people we are related to on different media, which serves as an example of what Jan H. Kietzmann puts in his paper: the identity on a social medium is often aligned with the relationship on it. I remember, in Abby's first post for this class, she also talked about the distinction between her post on Facebook and Instagram. In her words, the one on Facebook was just an ordinary "I" while the one on Instagram showed the ideal image of "I".

Both the theory and our daily experience unveil the core element, identities, that distinguish our life online and offline. In the physical world, although we have to play different roles under different circumstances, the bound of space and time acts as a string that bunches all those "beads" to be a rosary. However, the possibility of multitasking provided by the virtual world breaks this congruity by presenting scattered scenes on various platforms, which results in our life online being fragmented and sometimes duplicated through presenting a lot of "I"s on different channels.

From my perspective, the current situation seems far from stable since the entropy and duplication of information we create is the symbol of the uneconomical use of computing capacity. As the phrase "social media ecology" used by Jan H. Kietzmann, will those social media merge together in a more unified form to enhance the resilience of this "eco-system" by taking better advantage of all the resources? I will wait and see.


No matter what the future holds, our attention is bound to be spared for keeping our voice on so many media. Hence, despite the dispute between Karpinski and Pasek over methods to study the correlation between Facebook usage and academic achievement, I always find that we will shut down our phones if we are rushing for the deadline. Moreover, it is definitely a cognitive interference if we try to check Facebook while doing homework since they both need to occupy the our visual channel. Thus, a trivial conclusion here is that irrelevant Facebook usage will negatively influence our work if we try to manage the two at the same time.

Whereas academic achivement is not just an one-off output. If we take Facebook usage as a broad term, apart from following the leader of an acedemic field or paying attention to the page of a research centre, even a relationship that is maintained on the Facebook may play a key role in our academic achievement one day, which is hard to be quantified and measured.

To be honest, I am not so interested in such a big topic on the correlation between Facebook usage and academic achievement for all people. Obviously, it is almost impossible to come to a general conclusion that everyone will agree on as people are so miscellaneous and so are the ways to use facebook. Maybe the best answer to this question would be two words, "it depends".

Appendix to Session 3 "The Diffusion of Innovations"

FYI, I pasted the curve of the old model, "the diffusion of innovations", I mentioned last time and the link to wikipedia below. While the model was first published in 1962 by Everett Rogers with regard to agricultural technology, it has already been adapted to its modern version to help us gain an in sight of how innovations permeate the society from "geeks" to "grannies".

Personally speaking, I am very fond of the theory like this that can lead us to think more about micro-mechanisms("capillaries rather than arteries") of how technologies affect our life day after day. Even a tremendous revolution cannot change people's ways of thinking and acting in a sudden. Neither will a burst of new technologies manage it. Hope to learn more about how those changes take place step by step since it will fuel my confidence in making a difference to the world we live in small ways that I can afford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations#History

MSTU4020: The Information Society

Having finished the readings for this session, I had a feeling that the world online was not much different from the world offline. It is human beings that matter rather than technologies themselves.

Although it seems a new challenge for us to engage and organize people in the cyberspace with the help of social media and websites, the underlying tactics and theories are rooted deeply in our attributes as social beings. For instance, the principle of Porter's Funnel does not only work offline but also shows its validity online through a variant of Funnel as the reader-to-leader framework in Preece and Shneiderman's paper.

What's more, there is no certain virtue or essence of the internet and other ICTs, despite the hope they have brought us of creating a communal area that endorses freedom and sharing. Just as Preece and Shneiderman put it, power of these technologies will also be taken by "hate groups, terrorists organizations, and deceptive corporations" with "malicious intent". Slander and libel will get their chance to spread at the same time when we improve our design to promote sharing of good ideas. The paper assigned last week, "technology as social practice", shared the same view in this aspect -- "technologies and social practices are mutually constituted".

Even if many disciplines culminates because of the increasing ability of analyzing big data, it is not sufficient to give evidence for "technological determinism" we discussed. As the slides, "six provocations for big data", present, the acceleration of data processing capability never automatically provides us with the right way to use it. Data do not necessarily entail accuracy and "bigger" is not equivalent to "better". It is still mankind that determines which model should be applied and how to interpret the outcome.

Therefore, it is us that consider our relationship with technology and change it if we want but not vice versus. Also, the introduction of new technologies never reforms the human nature as much as we imagine. 

MSTU4020: A Response to A Question in Class

In last class, we were asked to discuss a question whether the machine was using us or not. Some said yes, some said no. But I had a feeling that this question seemed to be too rough to be answered. Neither "yes" nor "no" can express my complex attitude towards the question.

What is "us"? Apparently, there are at least two groups, creators and users, that have different relationships with the machine. Mostly, we regard ourselves as users when facing this question, therefore those high-tech machines are like black boxes to us. According to this presupposition, we are kind of afraid of machines because we have seldom ideas about how they work, just as the saying goes, "Fear is the by-product of the unknown." However, things will be much different from creators' aspect. They surely know mechanisms of gadgets they produce and will just take them as utensils for human.

Hence, I tend to think that the worry shown in the short video will fade away when we become more and more informed of the mechanism of the machine. (Just imagine the fear of lightning when people know nothing about electricity.)