Reading Response 5

In this chapter, Vicente emphasize the human factor on a team coordination level. He indicates that human behave a lot more different when they act as a team compared to an individual task. “When you bring two people together you get a new emergent phenomenon- in fact, a new system – that is made up of more than the sum of its parts.” (P155) I agree with Vicente. When people accomplish a task individually, the person himself is the only component within the operation progress; hence, he or she can fully take charge of the task. But a person’s competence of achieving a task is limited. Without communication and idea sharing, his/her brain, to a degree, is working isolated. Consequently, he or she may fulfill the task but not reaching for a best outcome. On contrast, when people working as a team, with communication and idea sharing, the mind will be more activated and when progress come to a bottleneck, the team can solve the problem out together instead of stucking in a dilemma. So to speak, team work magnifies individual competence.

However, when people accomplish a task as a team, the situation is different. People working as a team, any individual is not the charging role within this operating system. “When you have a team, key factors such as communication, authority, responsibility and priority-setting must all be taken care of, otherwise the team members won’t be able to coordinate their respective actions.” (P156) In a psychology aspect, people tend to depend on each other in a team. When problem comes out, anyone in a team will have the same idea that “maybe someone else will take care of it, not me”. As a result, actually no one is taking care of the problem. The consequence will be fetal if situation like this happen in a touch-and-go circumstance, for example, the cockpit conjuncture. That’s why it is so important to have effective communication, clear authority, firm responsibility and once again crystal clear priority-setting. People need to know what is their exact role and responsibility in a task, especially in a high pressure situation. With effective communication, there is a maximum chance to solve out the problem, especially in a split seconded situation.

After bringing up the team work problems, Vicente introduces us the “Cockpit Resource Management”. In a flight simulator, pilots are trained how to response properly in crisis and how to communicate with each other. In the CRM system, every action and every words of the pilot can be record. They can review their performance to discuss the possible operation and communication errors so that they can learn from it without losing their lives. “They learn it in a tangible, personal, and therefore memorable way.”(P167) I think this is one point that educator should take in mind. Students who have difficulties in remembering what their teacher had taught them because they are not engaged in the class. They are not the center role of the class and they do not experience. Without engaging and experiencing in the class, students become passive and not motivated. However, it is always the main issue of instructional design that how to make students a active role in the classroom.

Reading Response 4

The video above was recorded from CCTV.  It is one particular example demonstrate that how people react to a frustrating computer. (A digression: It seems that people tend to attack the monitor whereas the fault actually goes to the HOST COMPUTER. Poor innocent monitor.)

After reading Norman’s Chapter 5: People, Places, and Things. The “computer rage” images cannot get out of my mind. It is such a common phenomenon that office people have witnessed. Even I am not at work yet, how many times I saw my father banging the mouse when he is viewing the stock market trend and the computer seems dead and unresponsive. I know my father is pretty much a quiet “computer rager” when compared to the person in the video or those more extreme ones. Why people have such ridiculous behavior toward an inanimate objects. Norman demonstrates it in an insightful way and indeed gives thought to designer in whatever fields.

He indicates that human being has a tendency to read emotional responses into anything, animate or not and biologically prepared to interact with others (human being, animate objects or inanimate objects). Actually this ability to read and interact with people and things around us has become one of our instincts or biological heritage that we lose a clear view to examine how does this happen. People are born to react, response to the things around them and interact with it. This is how a society works as a organism.

As a designer, whatever type of designer he/she is, should note that, on one hand, if things work smoothly, fulfilling expectations, the affective system responds positively, bringing pleasure to the user, people will like it or even love it; on the other hand, when the things work frustratingly, the operating systems appears to be troublesome and annoying, people will show hatred towards it. What a conspicuous and logical principle. Somehow sometimes designers just simply forget it or ignore it. For example, a piece of oral language practicing software I used when I was in Junior high. It operates as a responsive partner that keeps on a conversation, so we can practice our oral language and develop a sense of western-thinking pattern in every communicating situation. It seems an amazing tool that help students enhance their English oral language but it turns out that did not work at all because it cannot recognize students’ verbal words and keep popping up “ERROR” windows. Does the designer forget students as English Language Learner has different accents? And just simply forget the fact that even the best English oral language speaking student at class might not speak standard English that the broadcast expertise have? If they just take a little thinking of this problem when developing this piece of software may not result in totally failure. As the consequence of the failure, on one hand the learning goal is failed, and on the other hand students’ have negative feelings for similar technology.

This comes to an issue of TRUST in technology. Norman stated that emotional attachment is based on trust that comes from experience. That means in our experience of using things (objects or technologies), we will develop a sense of trust when it performs exactly what we expected time after time and hence we will like it or even love it . I think it is another guideline for designers. Remember that people will definitely have a particular expectation to the product when it comes out. This kind of expectation comes from the advertisements and recommendations that can be interpret as a promise to the customers. Can the product fulfill the promise is essential to the manufacturer as it directly lead to the answer that customers like your product or not. If the manufacturer fails to fulfill their promise, they lose customer’s trust. “Trust has to be earned.”------Norman.

Reading Response 3

With the significant growth of technology in 20^th century, there is truly a new generation emerged. With the emergence of this generation, also known as the “Net Gen” or “Digital Natives”, numerous problems that related to education arise. This generation is surrounded by various technologies such as computers, PSP, Wii, Ipad even before they have developed a sense of right or wrong. So what should parents and teachers do about them? Do they just simply prevent these kids from touching any of those technologies until they grow to a certain age? Or parents and teachers should guide them to use technologies in a positive way? Those questions are worth to study. Once we develop an appropriate way to introduce technology to these young kids, I believe there will be a significant change in education and this generation will become the most productive and well-informed genius that brings benefits to our society.

In Andy Guess’s review of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives”, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s words indeed trigger me to deeper thinking.

“Technology is never a panacea. And technology on its own can do nothing; it's just a tool for teachers and students to put to work in support of how they want to teach and to learn. A realistic expectation is that technology may be able to help support your pedagogical goals, but it's not going to (nor should it) do anything on its own.” ----John Palfrey. With the new generation, their learning method differs from us when we only have teacher as a dominant role in the classroom and only material books for reference with homework. The children nowadays can access to internet way before they started school and they always can turn to internet for help if they need information for homework. So the teaching pedagogic needs to be changed. John Palfrey’s statement indicated that teacher should perceive technology in a whole new perspective to know the fact that technology cannot functions to reach a certain goal by itself and that teacher and technology should be integrated in class to help students comprehend learning contents. In a word, teacher should know how to combine technology to their teaching to help students yield maximum amount information from class.

To my understanding, educators and parents, the older generation, have a need to change their attitude and perspective of technology. Discarding the perception that technology is harmful in most learning environment or regards it as a distraction. They must face the fact that the new generation is growing up in a world dominated by internet and varying technologies and the issue should focus on how we guide them to use online information in ethically sound and lawful ways, to use technologies in a positive way to kindle and maintain their interest in learning and creative thinking, instead of preventing them from access to any of those technologies. As long as educators and parents have a correct view to technology, they will have a better understand of relations between education and technology and hence become a more instrumental guider to the Digital Natives.

Reading Response2

In Norman’s Chapter 4: Fun and Games, many intrigued examples are used to illustrate his major point of view: Why not have information displayed in a pleasant, comfortable way? (P101)

                            

There are so many data and information surround us via various forms or channels at present day. Can we grasp all of them? Or can we just take a glimpse at one of them? I would say no at this point and don’t mention that we can remember several pieces of them. People have an intention to just listen or remember what they need and leaves out all the others. It seems ok to do so, but what if we bring this subject to education? From my perspective as a student, I would unconsciously be absence-minded when I am having chemistry class or geography class (Especially when teacher putting their effort on telling us how to remember the topography in Africa. I mean, what is the point for deliberately remembering this? I might never set foot on this continent!). So what would teachers do? From those who are at undergraduate or graduate studies may know exactly what information or knowledge they want in certain courses due to their fully developed sense of studying. But how about those one who are in younger age? How should the teacher make sure that their students have absorbed what they need? (Or maybe this “What they need” it is an question itself.)

I might wander too far to the subject but it is a concern that first comes to my mind…

However, this chapter did catch my attention. When Norman describes the table tennis, he said: “Is this a good way to play table tennis? No, but that’s not what it’s about: it’s about fun, delight, the pleasure of the experience. (P100) The statement once remind me the Iphone App “ IdragPaper”. Here is the game description from official website: “Have you ever had the impulse to drag the whole roll of toilet paper at one go? Now you can realize your evil idea just in iDragPaper!” What is the point for this game? It’s not a motion game that makes you feel satisfied when you kill all the bad guys and save the princes at last and it’s not a wii tennis that exercise your body. There is no intellectual or physical objective in this game. But it definitely entertains people and they have fun!! I remember the boys are roaring to struggle pulling out the whole roll of toilet paper and the girls are screaming when I showed my friends this purposeless game. This game is definitely a ice-breaker when you have new friends sitting together not having conversation but stare at each other awkwardly. Maybe…Maybe this is the purpose of this game. The purpose is not what you get from the game but what it gives to you. Apparently this game lit up the awkward atmosphere and act as a conversation starter.

In this chapter he also put forward a question that how can we maintain excitement, interest, and aesthetic pleasure for a lifetime?(P110) If we pay attention to the world surround us, indeed we can find numerous examples that maintain excitement, interest, and aesthetic pleasure for a lifetime. In the field of Architecture, from ancient to present, we have Great Wall in China, Eiffel Tower from France, London Eye from England, Burj Al Arab Hotel from Dubai, etc. For music, there are Blue Danube, Clair De Lune from Debussy, etc. There fascinating architecture and enchanting music are imprinted in our hearts from generation to generation. At this point, the long lasting art trigger me to think of a question that can technology(website, application, device) related to education can do the same? I believe this question will bring myself to a dilemma because on one hand the education technology should maintain excitement, interest and aesthetic pleasure for its users in terms of knowledge acquisition, but at the other hand, knowing that teaching methods and the way students how to learn is ever-changing, it is hard to develop a classic software that influence people from generation to generation. I might not taking Norman’s question in a wrong way as I am not digging to much in educational field. But I think what we could do is continuously study students’ needs and keep improving the educational technology. I think that’s the purpose for inquiring in this field. The educational technology itself is a process of “discovery-learn—improve-solve-discovery…”.