Week 3: Guest Lecturers
This week, I lost a fight against allergies that caused me to stay at home which made me miss class. Fortunately, my allergies picked the best week to defeat me as this lecture with two special guests were recorded and posted via Breeze! Whew!
Who is Dr. Michael Mayrath? Dr. Mayrath completed his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas. "His research focuses on how innovative technologies can be used to enhance learning and assessment" (Academia.edu, 2010). Who is Priya Nihalani? Ms. Nihalani is currently working on her Ph. D. in Psychology and has worked hand-in-hand with Dr. Mayrath. Together, their forces combined to create and present the lecture entitled "Education in the 21st Century: Games, Virtual Worlds, Simulations, Mobile learning and E-Textbooks". They started out the lecture with a quote from Dr. Jackson "Our science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce is the backbone of our innovation economy and the source of our economic and national security". Dr. Jackson is the president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. To me, this quote states that these educational categories combined (science, technology, engineering, and math) will continue to be grow and be positive effect, monetary wise, throughout our American society and around the world. These are the big economic factors in our society.
With this said, why are we pushing so heavily towards STEM? Math and Science are ranked by teenagers 28th and 24th respectively and those getting engineering degrees have decreased for over 25 years. Should we continue to push these? Prior to me becoming a Master's student in IST, I would have probably stated no. I was a Biology major for undergraduate and I did it as I wanted to go to Medical School. If you looked back to high school days, I had a niche for languages, writing, and figuring out puzzles meaning, I love to experiment like in Chemistry. However, Biology was not my forte in college. I excelled in courses in Education, Spanish, and Music. I met a Ph. D. student who say that I would make a good candidate in the IST department. This student, Simmone, not only was correct, but she became my mentor. Now that I have embedded over a year in this program, I personally can answer this question as a yes. We should push for STEM. In this technology advancing society, there is almost a need for this push.
In Dr. Mayrath's and Ms. Nihalani lecture, they talked about Neomillenial Learning Styles. This basically is teaching students multi-media learning through web, e-learning, wiki's etc. In our society, this type of learning is completely necessary in this technology advancing world. It is unfortunate that more than half of the nation's schools are not placing any emphasis on media learning and more than 3/4ths of schools say they have to learn the media information by themselves meaning that they 1)could possibly learn the media incorrectly or 2)not learn the hidden concepts and fully take advantage of the media. This society will only see an increase in technology as time goes so it is best to learn technology from an early age so it is easier to embed more information as the technology continues to advance as one gets older.
Hey Elke,
ReplyDeleteThank you for pointing out the mistake in my blog, sometimes when you are video recording your self, things gets confusing a little.
About Wikibooks and e-books, I do believe that they are a very promising tool. I wonder how can we push for STEM skills in a way that utilize wikibooks and e-books. It looks to me that they would be a great improvement tool as they can foster special needs of these disciplines. As for your concerns not to learn the hidden messages, I think that when a student gets motivated enough to try out new learning tools and styles, he/she is paying enough attention to grasp most of the intended material, just a thought from previous experiences.
Abdullah
Abdullah