I have a dream~~

My 7th semester in my PhD journey.

I am working on Mobile learning for my thesis. While working on this topic, I found out one thing. We, us or most of the educators or researchers, are basically working or researching on new methods for education fields. Nevertheless, many of them are working on something that might be useful for future education such as artificial intelligent, robots, games, virtual world, mobile applications, gamification and etc. But, all these technologies require few things, first, technologies, not normal technologies but advance technologies, second, advanced gadgets, and also lastly, the most important thing, money. Well, I believe in developed countries, all the mentioned above is not an issue for people or students staying there, but, how about for people in third world countries or less developed countries or even under developed countries. While researching and working on advance technologies in teaching and learning, shouldn't we also think about the less fortunate children around the word?

I mean, if, let's say, we could work on a project, using the cheapest featured phones, without internet connection, with solar charging ability,just SMS to help the children in these countries to learn? 

How? you might ask. It is simple, back to the most basic! Don't think about advanced technologies, advanced gadgets. Why? Because in these countries, they could not afford it and we could not get so much funding to support it too. In that case, back to the basic, meaning, use the cheapest and approachable resources to help them. 

If you ask me how, my idea is to use SMS, the kids can key in certain number to the server, of course, it should be free. Then they can key in that number and ask different questions with their own language, of course, there will be a databases somewhere, which the volunteers around the world, based on their skills and language abilities, to answer their questions. It might be simple questions like, how to speak certain sentences in English or else, what is the meaning of certain thing. Whatever the question is, one or two volunteer from this project will work together and provide them with answers. 

This is a dream, and idea, not that big not that small. But compared to all the robots, AI, virtual world, this little dream might be able to help lots of people who are lacking of the basic facilities to study or have financial difficulty in learning. The value of us staying in this world, of course, is to develop the countries, but at the same time, I believe, education is one important factor in order for a country to be developed!

A small dream and I hope it could be realized soon. 

Instructional Design, Information Technology, Educational Technology or crossover?

Today, after reading an article written by David Ashby on "Educational Technology: Instructional Soul or IT Backbone?" . I totally agree with what he is saying.

First of all, let's us look around, nowadays, everyone of us, the academics, the teachers, the instructors, the educational technologist or even the IT people are talking about e-learning, smart learning, mobile learning, MOOCs, PLEs and etc. However, how many success cases or studies have been published or presented to the practitioners? After a decade talking on e-learning, I think now is the time we should do some reflections on what, how, why of ICT in education progress.

If you happen to follow what I have been written in this blog, some of you might have known that I started to work as a programmer for an e-learning platform in the year of 2004. 2004! That mean by this year, 2014, it has been a decade, time do really fly!  I believe may of you are just like me, who have been working on ICT in education. However, sad to say that, even though we have been working so hard for the past 10 ++ years, still the expected positive outputs or results of this ICT in education are not significantly noticed or even presented so far. That is why to date, still a lot of people are still questioning on the same things : - Do IT really improve learning? Do all these gadgets or applications make our learners learn better? If so, how we should integrate them and use them? What are the learning outcome or learning performances after deploying ICT in education? Any solid evidences that could prove that by integrating ICT, our learners learn better?

Some schools just tend to use ICT in their teaching because of the trends, or, even worst, because the higher management or government said they want it in this 21st century. With that in their mind, the schools start to hire IT people without teaching knowledge to integrate ICT in their teaching and learning system. A person without teaching knowledge or even instructional design knowledge, how could they design and develop a system that are suitable for students? We need to remember one thing, academics are totally different from business. What is that mean? This means that, learning applications or learning system are not same with the commercial websites or system. Why is that so? First of all, we should know that, commercial sites, we will use because there is a need! A need to do something, to process something or so on. Also, learning system or applications are also not same as the social networking system. Why again? This is learning is not as fun or exciting as SNS or entertainment applications such as game application. Besides, there are so many different level of learners which we need to think of before design and develop the systems. For example, elementary, secondary and university students are all different in thinking and in learning. We need to know in details or at least what each of the different levels of students need in their learning process.

Besides, if we ask  teachers who have experience in teaching but without experience in IT to join in this ICT in education team, it won't work out too. Why? This is because they do not how complicated an IT system is and always come out with some almost impossible suggestion which IT people could never fulfill them. That is what we said the misunderstanding and the hate and love among IT people and users.

Therefore, if we quote what David said in his post, in order to successfully integrated ICT in education, we need teachers who have passion and knowledge of technology and also teaching experiences. At the same time, we need IT professionals that also have passion and knowledge of teaching and learning and of course solid knowledge of IT. If you see from these two specific requirements, you could notice that, we need a teacher with IT background and an IT professional with teaching and learning background. However, in today's world,  not many of these professionals are there.  That is why educational technology (ET) major start to bomb in. However, still, from what I see, many ET major people tend to focus more on academic side instead of IT site. What they know about IT is very limited.

Well, nothing is perfect. Some of you might say like this. Yes, but still, we need a solution in this. If you ask me how? I would said what David suggested are one way to go, however, besides that, ET department maybe should also change some of their syllabus starting from now to corp with the issues we are facing now. With the collaboration world we are in now, I believe that IT and ET or even education departments can collaborate together and or have some kind of crossover collaboration among all the mentioned departments to produce better experts or expertise for the future of teaching and learning field! At the same time, special interest group (SIG) should be organized in order for the people to share their thoughts and experience to further improve this issue.

Just my two cents.