In this essay, I present a fiction-based persona that illustrates how emerging technologies have impacted society and education in the not-so-distant future. How has technology intersected with HoYeon’s life during her first year in Canada and how has it compounded her learning? This short story is an insight into the challenges some newcomers and refugees face when trying to access services and education in Canada. How might we as educators better understand how they interact and interface with different technologies?    Case Study: HoYeon Jung  HoYeon is the daughter and only child of North Korean parents who labored as farmers on the outskirts of Kanggye City, in a province that borders China. Her parents never completed high school and there were no computers in their home. North Korean smartphones started appearing in 2020 but only for the government elite in Pyongyang. During the...

A fiction-based persona that illustrates how emerging technologies have impacted society and education in the not-so-distant future. How has technology intersected with HoYeon’s life during her first year in Canada and how has it compounded her learning? This short story is an insight into the challenges some newcomers and refugees to Canada face when trying to access services and education. How might we as educators better understand how they interact and interface with different technologies?  Case Study: HoYeon Jung HoYeon is the daughter and only child of North Korean parents who labored as farmers on the outskirts of Kanggye City in a province that boarders China. Her parents never completed high school and there were no computers in their home. North Korean smartphones had started appearing in 2020 but only for the rich. During the Great Famine of 2022, she slowly watched...

Presented by: Ashley Breton & Sam Kirk Robots and the Future of Learning Debate Participants: Hiroshi Kobayashi, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tokyo If you have any questions or comments for us, please write them in the comments section below.  Links to the references used to make this video can be found at the end of this description box.  Thank you for sharing your time with us. Want to learn more?  Check out these emerging companies in the educational robot market: Emotix (India), FANUC (Japan), Hanson Robotics (China), Photon Entertainment (Poland), Robolink (US), ROBOTIS (South Korea), and SoftBank Robotics Group (Japan). And, don’t forget to take a look at the Civil Law Rules of Robotics proposed by the European parliament to regulate the use of robots and their employment (see “License for Designers” and “License for Users” section located at the end of...

with Image courtesy of larrycuban.wordpress.com Co-authored by Ashley Breton & Sam Kirk The Great Media Debate on the link between media and learning has been going on for decades. This now-famous feud started with an article written by Richard Clark in the early ’80s titled Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media (1983), where he argues “that media do not influence learning under any conditions” (p. 445). Instead, “media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition” (Clark, 1983, p. 445). Several years later, Robert Kozma, with his Learning with Media (1991) article, challenged Clark’s claim that only instructional methods affect learning and not the medium, stating that “learning with media is a continuous, reciprocal interaction” (p. 182), between the...

  Jesse Stommel is a documentary filmmaker, professor, and founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy. Stommel’s background in English lends itself to his teaching and research interests of higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, ungrading and assessment, composition, new media, public humanities, scholarly publishing, games and game-making, horror, science fiction, and queer theory. You can find his website here.  Stommel’s work is about open education, open pedagogy, critical pedagogy , and radical pedagogy. He insists that issues of social justice and democracy are not distinct from the act of teaching and learning. His contributions shine a light on compassion and inclusion in education. He is not a fan of “best practice” or “scaffolding”. You can find some of his keynotes and lectures here.  Stommel states that ...

The last two weeks has been perfect for me to better understand the history of education and technology. This week, reading chapter 11 Connectivism, framed many changes our organization went through in the 2010’s and provided a richer context and a wider view of what was happening in the field of ESL and education. In Canada, many language schools started to see much more regulation through TESL Canada, the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks, and the Private Career Training Institutions Agency which later became the Private Training Institutions Branch under the provincial government. This meant that more stringent regulations regarding lesson delivery, content, assessment, and teacher qualifications were implemented. Looking back now it does look a little like the wild west. I was witness to the introduction of innovative technology such as smartboards as well as a push for more...