Reflecting on Mobile Education, Wearable Tech, and Forecasting the future!
This was, by far, the most memorable group project of my MET journey! When I first started the MET program, I was nervous and hesitant toward group projects, because I believed that distance communication can be challenging. However, group projects quickly became one of my favourite parts of MET, and when given the opportunity to either work alone or in a group, I generally selected a group. Throughout MET I have learned how to coordinate with people internationally through tools such as Google Hangouts, Google Documents, and website sites such as Wordpress, Google Sites, Weebly, Wix, and more!

The Recon project was created by four of us, with our locations being Vancouver, Calgary, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! 

 ETEC 565M, Mobile & Open Education is a course solely focused on mobile teaching and learning. The course focuses on analyzing existing mobile applications, and encourages students to consider what is needed in the mobile learning realm. In addition to that, most of the course and the content we viewed and created in ETEC 565M was viewable on a mobile device. This course taught me the importance of always looking forward and considering where the future of education and technology will look like. Being mindful of the future pushes us as educational technologists to think outside the box. 

As the world's technology continues to advance, and more people continue to use mobile technologies, I believe that in my experience it is important that educators stay on top of the technological trends and gain experience with developing content in varying mediums, particularly on mobile mediums, as it is estimated that 73.4% of the international online population was accessed from a mobile phone in 2013 (Pulla, 2017). That is why it was important to me to ensure that my ePortfolio is accessible and viewable on a mobile device. 

This project was a forecasting project; we were asked to "author and publish an original media property that presages a prospective future aspect or dimension of mobility - one that does not exist now, but could or should" (ETEC 565M project description, 2017). 

So, I, along with my team, created Recon. A wearable device designed to enhance social emotional competence and facilitate a movement towards authentic reconciliation. Recon is an original idea collectively developed by Aaron Lam, Joyce Kim, Edrick Lin and me. We were inspired by the potential of wearable devices. As we discuss in our project website, "consumers, especially younger customers, desire wearable technology" (Grace Collage, 2017), so that is why we chose to explore wearable tech in classrooms. 

For our project we developed a mock-up design of the Recon device, we created a video, and we created a website to house additional information and resources. 

This project encouraged us to think outside of the box. We had to be innovative as designers and educators to create something that we believe could benefit learners. 

While we would all agree that Recon ultimately would need a bit more work to be successful, it was an innovative step towards enhancing intercommunication and emotional understanding for children. Recon uses modular learning to help customize the learning experience for each student, and each module that recon offers monitors a different biological response - by designing the Recon "emotokei" it was our hope that we could increase the emotional understanding of students and their peers through light and aura interactivity. 

This project taught me the importance of designing outside of the box. While not all projects like Recon can be successful in real-world scenarios, the practice of brainstorming and creating is critical to advancing education.

Click the image below to check out sites.google.com/view/recon565m

I wrote this paper about the potential M-learning has in rural Indigenous communities in the hope of preserving community values through constructivist practice. Many Canadians are unaware that many Indigenous people have limited access to quality education on their own land. 

In Alberta, and particularly Calgary (where I am located), Indigenous reserves are close to main cities. Tsuu T'ina Nation is practically in my backyard, so until this course I was unaware of the struggles certain Indigenous people face, such as in provinces like Ontario, because in Calgary the people of Tsuu T'ina have easy access to public education. In many rural Northern Ontario Indigenous communities, youth are unable to attend High School and remain living at home. At 15 years old, many of them have to move to Thunder Bay and live with strangers in order to finish High School. Not only does this leave students at risk without parental care, but it separates them from their culture and sense of identity - which is closely connected to land 
(CBC The National, 2017). As Hare (2011) explained, “...indigenous knowledge is intimately connected to land.”

This paper helped me to brainstorm potential tools and solutions that could assist Indigenous people in being able to access education while remaining in their communities. I focused on Mobile Learning (M-Learning) as a potential solution in helping with access to education and in preserving Indigenous culture and identity. Some aspects of M-Learning that I discussed were:

• Low cost
• Active learning
• Potential elder involvement
• Constructivist attributes 
• Ease of use

Overall this paper showed me that there is potential to apply what I have learned in MET (tools, strategies, etc.) to create possible solutions and designs for challenging situations such as rural Indigenous education in Canada. However, it is important to remember that, ultimately, for these strategies and designs to have the chance at success, the communities in which we design for must be brought into the discussion. If my ideas from this paper went beyond the design stage into implementation, I would have to bring my ideas forward to the Indigenous communities. I would need to involve elders into the discussion, as they offer knowledge that I, as an outsider, will never possess - and this knowledge is critical for accomplishing educational improvement. Otherwise, we risk Indigenous perspectives being pushed into the margins, and we risk continuing the cycle of colonialism (Marker, 2006). 

As we discussed in our proposal:
On a technological activity level, podcasts offer mobility and connectivity, portability, ease of use, availability and access versatility, reusability and so on. On a pedagogical level, they offer novelty and engagement, flexibility and learner control, opportunities for learner motivation, clarity of instruction, the broadening of 'location' in which learning is situated, opportunities for engagement with and collaboration around dialogue, and opportunities for learners to get involved in the construction of learning (for themselves or for others) (Salmon & Nie, 2008; Kidd, 2012). (Cox, Handford, & Hickey, 2018).

​I have been interested in the potential that podcasting has for education for most of my MET journey, so it was great that I had the opportunity to explore this topic thoroughly in this project. Lynn, Katie, and I not only researched and summarized literature on podcasting, we also developed our own podcasts as well as tutorial videos to help potential students get started making their own podcasts. It was our hope that we would be able to create an environment that fosters constructivist learning. We wanted to allow learners to build their own knowledge through the exploration of our learning hub, as well as through podcast development and sharing through discourse in the learning hub's forum, as "a social constructivist view of learning emphasizes the role and nature of interaction with others to challenge what is known, enhance connections with existing knowledge and build new pathways for additional ideas" (Brooks & Brooks, 2001 as cited in Bryant & Bates, 2015). There is still a lot to be discovered about podcast use in education, and that is why our focus on constructivist learning and learner discourse is important, to have learners explore the possibilities first-hand. 

For more information, you can read our curriculum guide below: 

Overall this project showed me the potential for podcasting in corporate learning through "Learning by Making" (Brown, 2009). Without immersing ourselves into the actual processes of podcasting, we would never have learned as much as we did. In reflecting back on our learning, I am reminded of what Tim Brown (2009) discussed; how "instead of thinking what to build, building in order to think." While planning and research is important, sometimes it is important to try different tools and strategies out to see what works first-hand. While as educational technologists we stress the importance of active learning, I believe, after completing this project, that it is important that we, as the educators, also engage in active learning. 

It's interesting how gifs, even though they are not new to the digital world, have become more prevalent in the last few years. This is why I chose to focus on gifs for my project, as I believe that they are changing digital communication, and, as well, I think that there is potential for their use within education to help with visual representation of our emotions in often text-heavy online courses. Gifs can offer some comic relief in sometimes very tense learning environments. You can learn more about my thoughts on this topic by viewing my Pecha Kucha style presentation above. 

Since mobility was a large aspect of this course, I not only wanted to create a project that was viewable on a mobile device, but I also wanted to create it on a mobile device. Thanks to the updates that came from Apple with IOS 11, I was able to find gifs online, save them to my camera roll, and record both my phone screen and audio without having to download any additional applications. I had to edit my final draft in iMovie to add in music, but I believe that eventually we will be able to create projects like this fully on a mobile device. 

This project encouraged me to think outside of the box and take risks. Mobile education or "M-Learning" is relatively new, but I believe that we will begin to see more mobile learning options in the future, particularly with the affordances from mobile system software like IOS 11, as well as applications such as iTunes U (iTunes University). M-learning can enhance constructivist active learning, as learners are “encouraged to interact and participate in learning to construct, transfer, and share knowledge effectively” (Thinley, et al., 2014, p. 293). 

Finally, this course and project taught me that new technology requires risks. As instructional designers we need to recognize new technology for the new innovations it brings to learning, and not for how it can be molded to pre-existing techniques. 

Click on the link below to view my project website:
https://sites.google.com/view/gifsineducation

Using Blendspace challenged us to carefully strategize our content layout, as Blendspace is primarily built for condensing information into small "bite-sized" segments. In reflecting back on using Blendspace, I found that it encouraged what information architects would refer to as "chunking," where information is divided into clear modules and subsections for ease of viewing and learning (Carter et al., 2001). Chunking can also help to improve memory, which is relevant to the process of memory retention. This is explained in the theory of information processing (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968, p. 116).  Chunking can be a useful tool in improving long-term memory as it helps to sequence and break up information while avoiding information congestion (Miller, 1956).

Blendspace is a really interesting tool to try out, as it encourages, the instructional designer to move away from the typical instructional design strategies, and encourages the designer to highlight the most important information for learners. As well, Blendspace makes it easy to implement varying learning mediums (videos, PDFs, webpages, etc) as their own sections. 

We designed our course in a way that gives students a choice in how they chose to interact with the learning modules. Blendspace makes it possible for students to jump around to varying modules without becoming lost within the course.   

I included this within the designing category of my ePortfolio, as this project pushed me to look beyond "typical" course design and use my evolving knowledge of user experience to explore modular and visual learning. 

Joyce and I chose to create a Pecha Kucha style presentation. The Pecha Kucha medium was created by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in 2003.

This is the second Pecha Kucha story that I have created within my MET courses. While Pecha Kucha presentations seem similar to PowerPoint presentations, they are more strategic in their use of imagery and the timing of voice overs. Pecha Kucha is a proven effective storytelling technique (Beyer, 2011), and they are typically six minutes long - with 20 images, each with 20 seconds of audio. 

The Pecha Kucha style of storytelling proved to be very effective for Joyce and I to complete from separate locations. Joyce lives in Vancouver, I live in Calgary, and we found that Pecha Kucha was a storytelling technique that we could fully collaborate on, while not being overly time consuming. We were effectively able to brainstorm over Google Hangouts as well as write our script and choose our images through collaboration on Google Documents. Then, we were able to synchronously record our audio together over Hangouts, and then piece the audio together with our images and soundtrack in iMovie. 

This project solidified my opinion of online collaborative work that I have built throughout MET - that is is not only possible, but it is also extremely rewarding. We have so many digital tools available now that distance collaboration is something we should continue to strive towards. This is why I chose to place this project under design, to highlight the fact that digital collaboration is not simply for analysis and discussion, it can generate creatively designed projects as well. 

As part of our class discussion and reflection in ETEC 565A about Digital Stories, Joyce and I also recorded a synchronous video reflection where we share our thoughts and challenges on generating this digital story. You can view it below:

Overall this Moodle project challenged Joyce and me to exhibit diverse and creative activities in an environment that can feel very limiting. We explored varying learning and communication applications including Padlet, Flipgrid, and Wiki pages, and we worked hard to implement technology that complimented the pedagogical theories we focused on in our course development. This project is a great example of TPCK in practice, as Joyce and I had to work diligently to harmonize the the connection between the course content and instructional goals with the technological activities we utilized. In general, 565A was a good course to take in concluding my MET journey, as it challenged me to put my understanding of TPCK into action. 

You can read more about our learning in our collective reflection below: