Week 2 (2/10/21–2/17/21) — Pre-Thesis
For this week, I wanted to start to hone down on the research question that I’m interested in addressing. I took a lot of time this week to really dive into the research questions I mentioned in the previous post.
How do you make education accessible to all using technology?
How do you build collaborative, adaptive, and innovation platforms for shared learning experiences?
How can you make education impactful using technology in the classroom?
What can we learn from COVID-19’s impact on education and technologies role in addressing issues of equity with regards to learning metrics?
How can we use technology to improve innovation within education?
What does personalized learning look like? How can technology contribute to this form of learning?
I started by looking at the issues I’m aiming to address, and all of the research questions have one common theme and that is to make technology accessible within education. Through the research I’ve gathered this week and last week, and just from previous research projects I’ve completed, I’d like to note that my aim, or goal, is not to create just another app, or piece of software. Instead, I want to make sure that the problem that I’m aiming to address is narrowed down to it’s root causes. I can’t say that there aren’t other institutions, scholars, technologists looking into this issues, especially, because of COVID-19, but I do know from experience of working as a teacher, and working with teachers and students, that there are key issues when it comes to technology and accessibility with regards to the use of EdTech.
I wanted to bring point to the diagram created in class looking at the issue I’m interested in:
Within the diagram I was looking at the binary of how could something be innovative and also accessible. Through the research, I’ve noticed, at least with a lot of recent start-ups there’s a lot of emphasis in looking into addressing the issues of learning through innovative technology, particularly, virtual reality and augmented reality, better yet known as an attempt at experimental learning. There’s also been a lot of pushes for this notion of personalized learning, similar to personalized healthcare, where your content is developed from your learning gains and experiences. Of course, this technnology is interesting and innovative, but not yet accessible, in large part due to accessibility issues with the technology itself. Education is the foundation of a lot of growth for an individual, and the brick-and-mortar form of education has remained the same for a very long time. There in a sense needs to be innovation with education, because the world is changing, people are changing, and their needs are changing as well. It’s important that we address the issues of accessibility to technology, but also make sure that the design of new technology is built with that in mind so that access isn’t do disproportionately applied.
So to be completely honest, I hit a wall this week, and it’s something that’s happened before because you can’t get around this issue. The goal of the program is eventually to design something, but with regards to my goal, you can’t address the issue of accessibility to technology, unless schools have access to technology.
Still my research question goal is to improve to look into the notion of personalized learning with regards to EdTech and make that more accessible, so that communities who don’t necessarily have access to that technology initially do. But on a more broader sense, I am to look at how to address issues of equity in education with technology.