Category: 20. Learning sciences

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only good and good-er

realised i have not posted to elaborate on the philosophy of ‘good-er’ although i have used the term in a few posts in the past. so shall do it now.

yes, it’s non-existent in English and a grammatically wrong word.
but guess that made the word stands out even more, cos in the ‘good-er’ worldview, there’s no right or wrong; only good, and good-er exist. the philosophy can be interpreted as an extension of the core of the 12 principles of knowledge building (Scardamalia, 2002; Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006), i.e., improvable ideas.

often, in the ‘right vs. wrong’ world, it’s not uncommon that we hear: ‘this idea is stupid, it is wrong, it’s unacceptable’… and pple began to dismiss their own and others’ ideas and not to mention the emotional side of things, bad, sad, angry …
contrastingly, in the ‘only good and good-er’ world: ‘all ideas are good ideas!”. marrying it with kb’s principle of improvable ideas, all ideas become improvable. end result: all good ideas can and will only become good-er ideas over time.

the good-er philosophy was first instituted as part of my design/model for blended learning for CL teachers’ professional development. it was my research project between 2015-2016 when i was with the SCCL. it’s the first ‘rule’ (among three) that my community of teachers adopt: “只有好，和更好”。 so if u ever need to cite a source for the good-er theory/philosophy, you could either use this blog post (Tan, Y. H. (2024, November 9). Only good and good-er. Edublog.net. https://edublog.net/wp/2024/11/09/only-good-and-good-er/ ), or my handbook if you prefer an earlier source:

Tan, Y. H., Tan, Y. N., & Chow, F. Y. (2019). Blended learning for in-service teachers’ professional development: Handbook for new instructors. Singapore: NTU-SCCL Press.
OR
陈育焕、陈雁妮、周凤儿 (2019). 混成式在职教师培训：新手指导员手册 [Blended learning for in-service teachers’ professional development: Handbook for new instructors]。新加坡：南大-新加坡华文教研中心出版社。

Nov 7, 2024, Co-generative dialogue on educational research @RGS

towards only good and gooder!

Tan, Y. H. (2024, November 9). Only good and good-er. Edublog.net. https://edublog.net/wp/2024/11/09/only-good-and-good-er/

p.s. scan QR code for a draft of the handbook — Tan, Tan, & Chow (2019) — that documented the 2015-2016 research
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on PLC for organisational KM and knowledge creation perspective

Individuals come, individuals leave (retire, switch career, 躺平, whatever). How does an organisation ‘retains’ as much tacit institutional knowledge as possible? Documentations, guides, playbooks are some ways, but these have their limitations. Why? Becos meanings are not hard cold words, graphics, and videos, print, online, or otherwise. Humans are social beings, and meanings are socially negotiated in respective social contexts.

Communities (or societies?) are where knowledge ‘resides’, some pple would say. By forming professional learning communities (PLC; or otherwise commonly known as CoP, although the term ‘CoP’ includes various conceptions due to different interpretations of what “communities” meant), organisations create an additional avenue for retaining tacit institutional knowledge. But the value goes beyond knowledge retention (if knowledge can be ‘retained’; also note that documents, guides, playbooks stop here). Members of a PLC, through regular interactions, create new knowledge. Thus, the body of organisational knowledge continually grows and renews.

People in PLC don’t necessarily work together every day, but they are bounded by their respective activity systems at work, which may not be conducive for knowledge creation. In the PLC activity system, rules that encourage learning and creating knowledge together can be negotiated and practised by the community.

references: Engeström (1987);Wenger, McDermott, & Synder (2002)

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LLMs, chatgpt & ubi 4.0

with the blazing speed that LLMs are (or commonly known as “chatgpt”) developing, some people may be worried abt job security.

it looks more like a case of “the rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer” 贫者愈贫，富者愈富, not in the monetary sense, but the knowledge creation sense. more precisely, LLMs/chatgpt are going to make the expert-layman’s speed/efficiency gap ever bigger. layman can only (blindly, unknowingly, ‘trustingly’) copy-n-paste without understanding (cos they do not have enough prior knowledge to assess the output), while the expert can build on what LLMs/chatgpt throw out and idea-improve repeatedly with the system with further prompting and/or data input.

based on the above theory, to ensure everyone’s livelihood and well-being tmr (not limited to those who are worried abt job security), the idea of universal basic income (UBI) would probably need to upgrade to at least a 4.0:

UBI – food, water housing
UBI 2.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity
UBI 3.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity, wifi
UBI 4.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity, wifi, negotiate/prompt LLMs

so what would UBI 4.0 mean for a k-12 school teacher? oh btw, openai just released its Code Interpreter within chatgpt4 few days ago. another game changer?

and thanks ziwei for the early brain-waking convo (:

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how we learn – a neuroscientific perspective

have been dealing with how we/people learn from the (social) constructivist and cognitive perspective for a long while. recently reading Dehaene (2021)’s How We Learn.

and chapter 1 captures the seven types of learning; learning is:

  1. adjusting the parameters of a mental model
  2. exploiting a combinatorial explosion
  3. minimising errors
  4. exploring the space of possibilities
  5. optimising a reward function
  6. restricting search space
  7. projecting a priori hypothesis

“our brain too is molded with assumptions of all kinds. Shortly, we will see that, at birth, babies ‘ brains are already organised and knowledgeable…… Darwinian selection, is in effect, a learning algorithm — an incredibly powerful program that has been running for hundreds of millions of years.” (p.76)

and parallels to the development of AI is drawn and described in chapter 1. more later (:

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teaching home-based (online) learning

the last post was created on 0214, and today’s 0412. on 0214, the covid-19 situation was just budding, and now on 0412 the situation has escalated worldwide. on 0214, classroom teaching was still going on as per ‘normal’; on 0412, the new norm today (which began 4 days ago) is full home-based learning (or FHBL in short). so how has learning become, from one norm to another norm?

chanced upon NUS Prof. Ben Leong’s post in which he reflected on the his FIVE(5) years of journey before achieving success in conducting full online interactive teaching. epistemologically speaking, we know learning is slow and experiential, and i thank prof leong for sharing his (giant’s) experiences for the rest of us to learn from. these are some of the ideas/statements that resonated with me (with emphasis added):

  • “the first principle of leadership is that ‘if we take care of our people, our people will take care of us.’ Similarly, ‘if the students know that the teacher cares, the students will learn.'”
  • “My hypothesis for why online teaching has not been successful in the past is that teaching is an inherently social activity. Things are different today because we are now able to replicate many social interactions using available online tools.”
  • “To make learning social, I have successfully adopted and deployed the following: (1) Interactive online teaching using Zoom; (2) Activity feeds; (3) In-platform messaging; (4) Forums – regular and video; (5) Gamification” (numbering added)
  • “Students actually have to be taught how to be online students and to interact with the online platform because lessons can be conducted. However, once the protocols are established, it can become quite natural.”
  • “… the natural approach to making online learning more social is to borrow features from social networks.”
  • “Messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger are the norm when the young people communicate with each other…These SMS-like interactions (in the LMS) provide for almost realtime and instantaneous feedback that is perhaps even more convenient than face-to-face meetings.”
  • “We have online video clips in place of lectures and we even have a specialized forum to allow students to ask questions that are tagged to a specific point on the video timeline. This allows the teaching staff to understand the context of the questions and helps us identify the parts of a recorded video that might be wanting or not sufficiently clear.”
  • Gamification, together with timely feedback, provides the students will a sense of progress and this helps to improve student motivation and engagement…….I have also emphasized that gamification is not some silver bullet that will magically make teaching better. Consider it an icing that can make a good cake even better. If a cake is bad, no amount of icing can make it a good cake.

teaching is an inherently social activity, and so is learning which inherently has a social aspect to it. that’s why many teachers, during this time, choose to adopt ‘live’ meeting/lesson via Zoom/Google Meet/any other conferencing tools to engage students. so two questions that may lead on from here: (1) how do we ‘distribute’ the screen time limit among the different subjects each day? (what we are struggling here is screen time WITH teachers; some children are glued to screens big and small in a day and may very well exceed that ‘limit’?); (2) what other means/channels have we put in place to support the social phenomenon? looking at the 5 items that contributed to the successful implementation, [2] activity feeds, [3] in-platform messaging, and [4] in-platform forums are probably missing in popular platforms teachers are currently using (incl. Google Classrooms).

students need to be taught how to be online students. these would include the various aspects of a student’s life, including but not limited to attending lesson, doing and handing up assignments, clarifying doubts with teachers, receiving feedback and seek further clarification for understanding. and some of the rules and routines i have improvised so far include:

  • attending ‘live’ lesson:
    • join lesson with real names known to the teacher
    • use the teacher greeting students routine during f2f lessons to signify the start of the lesson (improvise and adapt the 行礼 bowing part)
    • mute mics if they introduce disturbance to the air (or teacher can choose to mute all mics when the teacher is talking)
    • whenever a question is initiated, a response is expected and students can feel free to unmute themselves to answer
    • use the ‘raise’ hand /like function in Zoom to indicate completion of tasks, or simple acknowledgement to teacher’s query (hmm… how to raise hand in Meet?)
  • doing and handing up assignments:
    • where paper-n-pen work is essential, use Adobe Scan to take photos of written work, and submit it via assignment set in Google Classroom
  • clarifying doubts
    • instant messaging via WhatsApp with photos to support teacher’s understanding of queries as necessary
  • receiving feedback and further clarifying
    • read the comments provided by teacher, and WA as necessary (ownership of learning)
    • teacher may proactively check on students’ understanding of feedback via WA too

i believe the list will expand and be refined as our experiences grow. oh btw, the above list applies to my secondary school students. if you are a K-6 primary school teacher, your list will likely to be different (: now, it’s time for me to go back to my lesson designing and preparation … …

#SGUnited #TogetherWeWillImprove #TogetherWeWillOvercome

(p.s. prof leong has published a note on fb yesterday to share his thoughts on the recent Zoom bombing event and the ongoing hbl)

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