Technology Conference

I attended a Technology Conference at Grand Valley’s Pew Campus. Since I wasn’t able to attend the Bright Ideas Conference, I shall write about that.

The Keynote, given by Dr. Peter Doolittle, was quite a good introduction to the conference. The speaker had many things to say about how technology could be implemented in education. The most useful thing I gained from it was learning about the Hype Cycle. This is the path that hype for new technologies and their possibilities seem to take. It starts out having a huge spike due to large expectations and then falls into a “Trough of Disillusionment” when the limitations of the technology are discovered. The hype then increases again as we learn to use it and eventually plateaus at the level of the technology’s actual usefulness. I thought this was quite a good image. I think it is a good lesson not to get caught up too much in the inflated expectations and also not to give up just because of the “trough of disillusionment.” This speaker also brought up the potential for Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. I will come back to this point later.

A break-out session that I found interesting was titled “iPod + iTunes + iPodagogy: The iPodification of Education” also by Dr. Peter Doolittle. The information from this could be quite useful in my teaching career. I plan on being first a German teacher and second an English teacher, so my thoughts on implementing this technology are centered on the obvious potential for language uses. Podcasts can help students learn to hear and interpret language quite well. The more you listen to a language you are learning, the more skilled you become at understanding it when it is spoken to you. It would also be quite useful to have students create Podcasts in order to test their pronunciation and speaking skills. Overall I find Podcasts to be quite useful for language instruction.

The thing that most inspired me at the conference was the exhibition entitled “The Thoughtcrime Project: A Literary World within Second life” by Robert Rozema. He described all of the potential applications of the program Second Life for teaching literature. All of the possibilities with having meetings, classes, presentations and such all in this online program got me thinking about other applications of video games to teaching. I remembered the massively multiplayer possibilities mentioned before and thought of the potential application to language learning. If a Massively Multiplayer online Roleplaying Game (mmorpg) were created with the main point being on entertaining gamers while also teaching them new languages, could it possibly be successful. I began thinking about ways to implement this and so far haven’t come up with much. The only thing I have is that it could be an mmorpg similar to World of Warcraft or Everquest but where different regions use different real languages and so more experienced players must learn or pick up some of that language in order to be more successfully able to navigate these areas. I have not figured out how to encourage using those languages in player to player speech but everything else in those regions could be in those languages. I’ll have to try and refine this idea and see what comes of it. Overall I gained a lot from attending the conference.