Technologies, to love or to hate…

The interesting thing about technologies is that I love and hate it at the same time. I love it because it brings a cool way to get things done; I hate it because the process of getting things figured out sometimes is annoying and frustrating. Fortunately, my curiosity and eagerness always beat my frustration.

I still remember the frustration and time-consuming process to get my blog set up with little information. At work, I need to deal with the difference between a Mac and a PC. I am using both now to teach. There is a Web site where I can play audio clips in a PC, however, it doesn’t play on my Mac. Frustrating! I could easily use partial capture function on my Mac to make a tutorial while I need to do more capturing editing on a PC. Frustrating! I just learned to do movie editing using iLife software on my Mac, however, it is a different world to do the same thing on a PC.

I hope the time spent on figuring out technology can be shortened just like calling technology tech. Unfortunately, it couldn’t. Well, I do enjoy learning about new technologies. Now my Mac is equipped with a parallel system in which I can work with Windows XP platform. How exciting!

New challenges come with new technologies. However, when I accomplish one task and figure out something new, it is always worth all the frustration and time. Now I feel I love it more than I hate it.

My thoughts, here and there

Nowadays many students’ best friend is their ipods instead of backpack.  I see my students take any chance they can get during class break time to listen to it.  It becomes a habit now and I am just wondering: Can they live without it?

We hear that cows can produce more milk when listening to music, but students don’t seem to produce more work in good quality when they listen to their ipods.  While we are using ipods for education purpose, I wonder if it is good or bad.  When they get tired of ipods, do we have to use other media to stimulate their interest?  What if they cannot be stimulated any more?  Most of us grew up learning many things without any help from advanced technologies.  Now when we face new technologies, we feel excited about using them and wish we could have those in the old days.  Our students are surrounded by technologies, but in the mean time, technologies are becoming a big distraction.

Good or bad, as educators, we face the challenge how to make the best use of technologies to serve the education.

Education in the Virtual World?

第二人生 (Second Life)

Lots of people are living a second life in this world – Second Life, an internet-based virtual world. Many universities and colleges bought land for their students to complete their assignments or projects. Now, how about K-12 education in this virtual world?

I think it will be very interesting to have students engaged in their version of Second Life – virtual school. We can develop all kinds of subjects we need and then we just bring our kids into the world of knowledge. They get rewards in the virtual school whenever they use what they have learned in the subject. I teach the Chinese language, so my focus will be asking my students to speak Chinese when communicating with other residents. I, act as a random resident, try to get my students to talk with me in the virtual environment. Of course, students get to type the language. When they have learned enough, we can do IM or chatting so that everybody can hear the actual talking.

For each class, I give a focus on what students need to practice such as buying or selling things and greeting. If they achieve that goal, they get to travel further and explore more.

Maybe this is the game we have been looking for. However, we do have other questions to ask first. Can students come back to their real life? What if they just wander around in the world? There is a lot to solve before we go into the virtual school.

Maybe someday I can start my class saying, “Let’s go virtual today.”