Mind Map - Friday 25 Sept.

PORTFOLIO ASSIGNMENT 3

Educational Technology in Egypt

ICT and Education Technology-In-Egypt from Tharwat Wasfy

Egypt is the largest country in the Middle East in terms of population, almost 100 million people, the thing that has placed several challenges in the educational systems which in turn affected the ICT development and integration into the educational system.   

From 1990 to 2000, the Egyptian government managed to increase the number of schools in the basic education stage from 11,000 to 30,000 schools in order to provide places for the new babies born and by 2015, the number of schools reached 43,000 Schools Public & Private altogether.

In the Pre-university education, the over-population challenge pushed the government to invest more in ICT infrastructure by providing hardware and technological devices such as computer labs and data show in order to facilitate learning and create a computer literate generation.

As for the university education, the challenge was beyond hardware and technological equipment, the integration of Technology Distance Training & Video Conferencing within the higher education was in itself a top priority. The struggle is still there in terms of integration aspects.

The information technology institute was established in 1993 in Egypt in order to develop further the ICT sector and to keep up with the latest advancement in field as well as to bridge the gap between the shortage of skills in the labor market and the thousands of graduates finishing their education every year looking for career opportunities, this by providing specialized training and career development.

Egyptian E-Learning University (EELU) has been established in 2008 to support in the development of training and career opportunities by providing high-quality education and training services to supply the labor-market with employees who are able to deal with the most advanced ICT world.

The education in Egypt is still facing several challenges such as implementing ICT as part of graduate student’s studies, also in terms of developing learning and training materials in order to implement technological learning as part of the educational system, hence integrating curriculum into the ICT plans.

One of the biggest challenges is that most teachers have not received proper training in ICT. As a result there is still a need for projects that are concerned with capacity building and human resource development as a basic need for achieving educational development.

So many challenges, yet so many opportunities are there for development with a huge potential to keep up with the most recent innovations in Educational Technology if there would be a national plan and well-planned strategies to comprehensively develop further. 

Portfolio Assignment 2

Paul Kirschner: Current understanding about high quality learning

Being an instructional designer myself, I have an immense passion for developing an effective design for language courses and training programs and sessions. It is very interesting to learn what constitutes a good Instructional design from a prospective of an educational cognitive psychologist like Paul. The 5 points that interest me the most are the following;  

1-  Designing A Good Instruction

A good instruction requires thinking about certain elements such as affordances, aspects and goals. The opportunities for certain things to happen in the learning process requires also considering the usability, utility and usefulness of any tool designed for instruction. Educational, Technological and Social aspects should be integrated in the good design of instruction instead of mainly focusing on the three affordances while ignoring these aspects.

2- Complexity of Tasks in Collaborative Learning

It is very interesting to learn that a complex task does not mean how difficult it is, which means that we should design environments that would allow for learning to happen, such as solving a problems, in a way that makes it complex and beneficial enough to motivate learners to work together to achieve the goals of learning. 

3- A Group is Different from A Team

Social aspects in collaborative learning is very important, it seems very realistic to think that a group is different from a team, as per his words. In peer teaching, there should be situations that encourages good students to want or needs to help the weaker ones, otherwise it will be a waste of time, efforts and scores for the good student, he described this as a ‘Positive Interdependence’. 

4- Technological Is Not Electronics

Techniques and physical environment inside a classroom is considered a technological set up for the lecture, so it is an aspect of Educational Technology. For me this is extremely essential in developing a comprehensive understanding of what technology means. I still have some questions about using the interaction between the three aspects of tools, techniques and ingredients in order to create a very effective and efficient learning environment. 

5- Self-Regulated Learning & Abstract thinking

As per what Paul said, Self-regulated learning is a technique and a good learner should be capable of thinking abstractly in order to be able to successfully plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning during the process of learning working with the tools they have available. This for me represents a domain of my previous work on self-regulated learning of foreign languages in which am interested to research further.

There are things I would like to explore in my research thesis that are related to teaching cognitive strategies which was a question to Paul by one of the audience. His answer has inspired me, he explained that we can teach knowledge but we cannot teach a skill, a skill has to be acquired by the learner themselves. This part I agree with him as we can only help learners by giving them the procedural knowledge for them to be able to carry out a strategy which is a skill in itself. Teachers can simply give the procedural knowledge, then create situations and modeling examples for learners to use in developing the skill.  

Same thing with attitude, meaning that there are certain skills required to develop a certain attitude, also tools, techniques that can help learners develop a certain attitude but we cannot teach an attitude. 

Another area I would like to explore is the skills required by learners in collaborative learning such as communication skills, social skills…etc. Paul raised an interesting point to answer Essi question that it is the job of the instructional designer to create certain situations to promote effective learning.

Essi Vuopala: Innovating pedagogy

Moocs, Seemless Learning, Crowd learning and Gamification can succeed in coming to formal education yet without replacing the traditional approaches of learning by any means but in way that complement rather than replace. There are no future signs showing that traditional teaching will disappear, and I hold same opinion.  

Moocs are massive open online courses that provide open access to everybody without constrains on the number of participants, lasting for few weeks, can support informal education and career development of professionals. I have participated in an example of Moocs courses myself and I experienced the lack of collaboration which is not always available when there is a huge number of participants as it is difficult to get teachers support in terms of individualized feedback for all participants.  

Seamless Learning which is combining formal and informal education by connecting learners in all kinds of technologies such as mobile phones seems very interesting yet how can we see that as a separate Learning style?

It is also interesting for me to know that Wikipedia is an example of Crowd Learning which is trusting the wisdom of crowd, giving them responsibility and the chance to contribute to their own learning. I could not understand how Ispot and forvo online are good examples of crowd wisdom? They seem to me more or less social sites.

Indeed Educator’s role has changed and resulted in bigger challenges to coordinate and support learners in these communities.

Gaming and learning share certain similarities, goals, tools, strategies as a way of supporting traditional learning but still there is a long way to explore their use in formal education. There are a number of challenges to using the tools and environments of gamifications in university education and primary schools.

The discussion about the game ‘SecondLife’ as an example of virtual world by Essi and the participants is somehow intimidating from a prospective of an educator who is struggling to integrate the use ICT into a good instructional design without compromising on social aspects of learning. 

A Sweet Girl - The Sweetest There

OULU, Autumn 2015 

On Friday 25th September 2015, I woke up with a feeling of love that gave birth to this poem, it was like a song that I was pregnant with till I woke up & wrote it. It took 30 minutes to write it down but one month worth of inspiration living in Oulu.

A Sweet Girl ... The Sweetest There ... So Sweet I Swear :)
                 
                   I am not touching or else melting like a chocolate ....

Far away on my way .... My heart is singing!

                                        Far away on my way .... My heart is singing!

OULU  Wait a Second!!!  I Shall Say! 

                                                        

                                            OULU  Just Wait a Second!!!  

My Heart Could Tell ... My Mind Can Fly ... But Wait a Second!!!  

I have not finished, this is not a lie !!! 

You Girl ... What you did?!! NOT been said ... But I Shall Say: 

You Shall Never ... Return Forever ...  From My Heart! :) 

You Did What You Did & I Said What I've Said ... 

You Shall Never ... Return Forever ...  From My Heart! :) 

But Wait a Second!!!  

I have not finished, I shall dare ...

When you are there in the sky, nothing else could make me shy!!!

A Sweet Girl ... The Sweetest There ... So Sweet I Swear :)

This is not fair, cause no other girl could have or share...

What you've got!!! 

My Heart Is There ...

A Sweet Girl ... The Sweetest There ... So Sweet I Swear :)

By: Tharwat Wasfy 
Occasion: Inspirational Autumn in Oulu. 
Topic: Love, Romance.

To be completed at a later time ... 

My Fourth Week in Oulu - Setting up My Studio

My Fourth week in Oulu, being supper excited about setting up my professional studio for e-learning Course Production.

For me to start developing digital tutorials, such as video & audio lessons, I need to use professional equipment to get the best quality possible.

My Third Week in Oulu

I can not express how happy I felt after seeing these scenes from my window for the very bright rainbows that showed on Sunday 20 September afternoon!

Can you imagine this autumn beauty in Oulu?

I will leave you to comment on this :)

ICT workshop assignment

After reading the article ‘Typology of Web 2.0 Learning Technologies’ by Matt Bower (2015) I decided to choose the video as a topic for my theme ‘Educational Technologist’ since this is the tool that most interests me in designing and developing technology-enhanced course materials and educational programs that are learner & knowledge centered. 

Last week and this weekend, I was mostly surfing the internet to collect materials about this topic in order for me to create a public collection of these materials to be able to learn and develop my skills in creating, editing and sharing video-based lessons and later on to create a design for course materials package that can be used to help other educators learn how to produce, share and use this tool in teaching.

In summer 2014, I was very much interested in learning how to create e-learning lessons in Business English & other language skills which I have been teaching over the past seven years, yet among all the web 2.0 tools available I was mainly interested and focused on learning how to create and share video lessons for language courses.  

I spent the whole summer last year researching and developing my skills in video production, it took me hundreds of hours standing and speaking in front of my ‘HD Sony Handycam HDR-CX260’ camera learning how to present information for education purposes acting in a professional body language while simultaneously learning voice over techniques and training my voice to be able to record professional audio and video lessons for course development.  

It was the toughest period in my self-regulated learning life, yet I cannot deny the joy and fulfillment I felt once I received professional feedback on my video production skills from e-learning consultants who are experts in the field that my skills qualify for professional course video-production.

While adding different layers to my videos, I came across the Chroma key compositing as a special effect in post-production techniques for creating videos so I decided to learn how to work with this technique. Surprisingly enough, winter 2014 and spring 2015 were very fruitful for me in terms of Chroma keying practice where I managed to build my own home studio for video production working with green screen and Chroma keying effects.

As a result, in summer 2015 I published on my youtube channel two of my videos for Arabic lessons that were recorded and edited by myself using the post production effects mentioned previously. Examples of some of my youtube videos are:

Greetings lesson in Egyptian Arabic 

The Response to the Greetings in Arabic

For this reason I have chosen the most challenging theme ‘Educational Technologist’ since I have already made huge efforts over the past year in learning this technology and for me to be able to utilize the skills I have developed in designing, developing and sharing e-learning lessons using video tools.  

PORTFOLIO ASSIGNMENT 1 - Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology

Technology-Enhanced Learning

Technology and learning is a very trendy topic that interests a number of professionals and educators across different parts of the world, the advancement in ICT world has changed the characteristics of our age in almost every aspect of our life, hence learning as well. The discussion or debate about technology-enhanced learning can be a topic of a whole dedicated book, yet this article will focus mainly on the role of technology in enhancing learning activities, environments, goals and outcomes while overcoming certain barriers such as time and distance.

The most important aspect of technology-enhanced learning is being specific on the role that technology can play in the learning process so that it does not become the focus of education but rather a tool that can be used effectively in supporting learners’ engagement, creating effective learning environment as well as aiding in defining learning goals and outcomes.

To clarify this matter, let’s imagine a learner living in South Africa and he or she would like to learn Japanese with a native Japanese teacher. The major challenges in this situation would be, apart from the language level of difficulty, finding the effective resources such as; a native language teacher and native speakers to interact and practice with, besides time and place constrains if that learner is unable to travel to Japan to accomplish this mission, or unable to find and make Japanese friends in his/her home country.

Technology in such situations can dramatically change the process of learning; the leaner can simply find online schools, virtual classrooms, interact with Japanese native speakers through social media sites which can support in finding practice-peers and making international friends, let alone the time and distance factors.     

Looking at learning outcomes and goals, a language learner can use a variety of software or online tools to organize and plan their learning process and outcomes while developing their own strategies and techniques in overcoming the language difficulty and other related-language issues. Finding specialized forums that have common interest in such situation can add a big value for learners in supporting and inspiring each other while having same goals and outcomes in mind as an online community.

Teachers, on the other hand, can easily provide synchronous as well as asynchronous support in the form of feedback and comments on students’ progress and accomplishments during the whole process of learning using same online technology and community tools which learners use to support one another. 

I would be glad to read your comments over here regarding this topic, perhaps you can also subscribe to get updates on my recent posts and inspire each other.