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I must apologise for the lengthy absence; I finally know what the PGDE curriculum @ NIE in full swing feels like! Nevertheless, I will try to cover lost ground in the next few posts.

This post will concentrate mainly on the activities we carried out in Sessions Six and Seven, and will be a summation of what happened and my thoughts on the sessions.

These two sessions saw Demo Groups C – F demonstrating the use of various tools, all of which I found very enlightening in terms of creating awareness. I must say that I very much like the idea of these demo groups – one invariably will never be able to learn as much as one wants to on one’s own, so these demo groups help in sharing information and in knowledge building.

The latter portion of both sessions also saw us carrying on with learning about Educational Gaming by trying out the different games on offer. I found some games slightly tough e.g. Trauma Center (I don’t have the patience or dexterity to move the Wii remote in a straight line, so I ended up killing the patients half the time!) but I also saw the immense potential the games had; for example, the Flash games about Darfur and McDonald’s definitely provided an opening for teachers to discuss issues of much importance with students – topics like ethics, morality, globalisation/localisation/glocalisation are all very much applicable, and I can see the possibility in using these games in G.P. or even Literature lessons.

To conclude, I am starting to enjoy this class the most. It’s not just for the games, mind you. I really feel an immense sense of fulfillment at the end of each class because of the educational value that each lesson has for me. I look forward to each class every week and this is something I want to be able to instill in my students in the future – the desire to want to go to class because of the thirst for knowledge and the enjoyment in quenching that thirst, and not just having to feel like they’re going to class for the sake of fulfilling an obligation.

• K: What I already KNOW about this week’s topic.
  I’ve always believed that for teaching to be applicable to students in this day and age, teachers have to move rapidly away from paradigms of the past e.g. video games are bad and learn to embrace practices of the present e.g. the increasing popularity of video games and how to incorporate it into classroom teaching. I guess this article has helped to articulate some of my thoughts and has exposed me to new ideas too, such as those detailed in the ‘L’ section.
  
  
• W: What I WANT TO LEARN.
  I’ve long recognised that video gaming does teach certain skillsets that are relevant to anyone in the ‘real’ world; I dabble in a bit of multi-player gaming myself, so I’ve encountered situations of conflict caused by a lack of communication, and I’ve also learnt the idea of scarcity and trade-offs from role-playing games, where using a game character with certain strengths also means that the character will have certain inherent weaknesses that are correlated to its strengths. Nevertheless, what I want to learn are the specific and general skillsets needed in English Literature and English Language – my teaching subjects – and games which also provide that fit. So far, I’ve thought about the idea of narrative in Warcraft, and how it might be applicable to teaching composition writing to fans of the game series. But beyond that?
  

• L: What I LEARNED this week.
  I’ve learnt that I’m not alone in my beliefs with regards to the idea that “Education has been remarkably resistant to change for [the last] 100 years“! Personally I think it’s possible to move faster, in terms of embracing the technologies of tomorrow for lessons today.

  Also, I’ve realised from this:

  …the fact that they don’t think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player’s behavior patterns and worldview. (Brown and Thomas, 2006)

  that it’d be good to start thinking about how to get students to similarly stop thinking about curriculum lessons as ‘training’, but rather, as something they enjoy, much like ‘gameplay’, in order that they may also learn at the same rate as game players.




• Q: What QUESTIONS I still have.
  My most fundamental question is this: how do we get everyone on the same boat? That is, how does one convince others who are resolutely resistant to change that technology really is the way to go in teaching pedagogies of the future?
  

Following on from my comment on Dr Tan’s blog, I feel very fulfilled after completing the readings and tasks, but I wonder if it is possible to split the tasks into separate weeks.

In my opinion, knowledge is infinite, so no matter how much one is able to absorb and learn (n, if the amount can be quantified in algebraic terms), there will always be a bit more information to absorb and learn – in other words, n + 1.

For the purposes of classroom lessons, however, time is finite – there are only two hours in a teaching period, and 168 hours in a week. This means that teaching and learning time must be used as effectively as possible to ensure learners learn at an optimal capacity.

Nevertheless, ‘optimal’ is always a grey area because of its inherent subjectivity; one person’s bread may well be another person’s poison, so what may be just the right amount of assignments for one person may be too little for another.

Then again, this could also mean that if a student finds the workload too ‘slack’, s/he could very well engage on independent research or learning in order to add-on to what s/he already has learnt.

Thus, Dr Tan could consider either working on my suggestion or aggregating the feedback he has received and will receive from various students in terms of the e-learning workload so as to find the right balance for everyone.

In any case, it’s a win/win situation for all

To sum up my reflections for this week, I think I better understand the need for this portion of the module: when I was younger, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (LOL), my secondary school was part of the pilot programme to test out IT infrastructure in Singapore schools.

Back then, the only form of Cyberwellness we had came in the guise of “DON’T TOUCH THE DAMN THING, THE DAMN THING CAN’T WORK. OKAY?” – when our teacher tried to gently explain to us that he had kindly locked our keyboards and mice using a centralised system while he went through the finer points of ourl very boring lesson package, so that we wouldn’t surf the net and be led astray by unsavoury influences.

Because it was the year 1996, and the Internet was a new and exciting thing that no one really knew much about. Thankfully, though, we weren’t led astray but nevertheless, I think there could’ve been a better way to guide us along our learning journey.

Hence, I do agree that it is necessary for teachers to be educated on the issues that arise from ICT-mediated lessons, either face-to-face or online, along with the strategies to cope with said issues if they do occur.

With that, here’s looking to tomorrow’s class, where we share with everyone why Google Reader rocks!

• K: What I already KNOW about this week’s topic.
  This week’s topic was something that was completely new to me – while I vaguely understood that teachers also had to practice ‘customer service’ and focus on giving their customers (i.e. their students) what they wanted, I never knew about the practice of Engaged Learning, and that it was a formalised set of rules/procedures on how to provide that form of ‘customer service’ to students, in terms of “student-centred learning”. I’m glad for this week’s lesson, as it definitely gave me something new to think about and reflect on.
  
  
• W: What I WANT TO LEARN.
  I want to learn about – you guessed it – Engaged Learning, as it’s a topic that I sorely need to gain a greater sense of awareness about. Specifically, I want to know how to better translate the methodologies of engaged learning into lessons that are relevant, entertaining and educational for students.
  

• L: What I LEARNED this week.
  I learnt that Engaged Learning, together with the use of ICT, possess opportunities for providing:

• Collaboration, where users are able to interact with one another,
• Authentic contexts/environment, where users are situated within real-life examples in their learning journey,
• Scaffolding, where users are given adequate support structures to make meaning of what they are learning
• Evaluation (real, meaningful, formative), where users have a chance to reflect upon what they have learnt in order to internalise their newfound knowledge.


In order for these four factors to work, we must also recognise the roles of: the student, the teacher and ICT in this process.

• Q: What QUESTIONS I still have.
  There is much theory behind ‘Engaged Learning’, and it seems very workable. I do not doubt its effectiveness, but one question I have is: will ‘Engaged Learning’ be able to meet the needs of all students in all schools? What if, for example, we have a segment of the student population that is still IT-illiterate? What happens then? I pose this question to my fellow classmates in order to also stimulate some discussion on the topic.