An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

Hello, I am once again blogging about my foray into the world of data and data visualization. This time, however, I will mostly be discussing the work I am doing rather than committing half of my post to a bit of a rant about a particularly biased set of data I found on Kaggle. If you haven’t read and that post and are now curious, here it is . 

For our latest project we have to find a data set, explore the data set, pose and answer questions based on that data, create a visualization of said data, and finally post about the experience. Currently, I have yet to even find a dataset let alone do all the other tasks. The problem arises from a difficulty in finding data that involves a topic I care about, appears reliable, is updated enough where I feel that the data is still relevant, and is accessible enough to my humanities centered brain that I can formulate questions about it. Why are you writing a post then, I hear some of you ask, well read on and find out!

          Thank you to all of my ever so patient loyal readers who have waited with bated breath for the second part of my experience with educational subreddits narrative!   [ 1 ] As I stated in part 1 , I had planned on using this second week to focus on two larger subreddits, r/teaching and r/Teachers as well as a small discipline specific subreddit, r/ELAteachers.

         Over the last three or so weeks my classmates have created, edited, tested, and perfected a series of learning activities centered around the four computational thinking (CT) concepts: abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and pattern recognition. You can find the post detailing the fraught journey I went through to create my own activities here . Part of the process included giving feedback to, and then testing out a.k.a. playtesting, our classmates’ creations. For a variety of reasons, I have given feedback to everyone but have yet to playtest and post about any of them. The lucky winner   [ 1 ] of my extended purview and review is a learning activity that focuses on algorithmic thinking by Monique! 

  Writing is hard. A bit on the nose to be sure, but I find that sometimes the longer I wait to start writing something—e.g. this post—the harder it seems to get my thoughts to travel from my head to the tips of my fingers and onto this digital page. Frustratingly, I tend to monologue to myself the perfectly pithy and entertaining introduction whenever I have neither access to the proper technology nor the freedom with which to obtain said access, like when I’m driving. I suppose I could always verbalize aforementioned monologue and then transcribe it later, but that’d be making my life too easy, wouldn’t it? Even though I know that no one is a harsher critic of myself or my writing than I am, and that no one is likely to really care if one or even multiple posts are not up to par writing-wise with previous ones, I still get the paralyzing anxiety of not making myself properly or adequately understood. That’s more of a philosophical question than this blog I created for my class ...

         Last week we were tasked to begin looking into educators’ use of social media platforms; Bret Staudt Willet, a Ph.D candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, kicked off our assignment with a easily digestible and engaging presentation on his work in relation to this very topic. In preparation for Willet’s presentation we read an article that he co-wrote on identifying learning spaces within a teacher-focused Twitter hashtag. I was certainly surprised to learn how Twitter was repurposed as a community for educators. I was even more surprised, however, when Willet told my class that he has since started researching educators on the social media platform, Reddit . 

         At the start of this computational thinking (CT) learning activity assignment, I’ll admit that I thought four for each concept   [ 1 ] was a bit overkill. At the time, I felt like I could hardly come up with one activity let alone four for each concept with the additional caveat that two are plugged and two are unplugged. Now that the process is over,   [ 2 ] while I can’t say I enjoyed the assignment, I do think it forced me to better understand each concept. The following summarization of how I completed the assignment will be short and sweet because, unlike Turtle Blocks, there isn’t an easy way to either show my progress or explain it since a lot was done in my head or internet research which isn’t easy to screen shot. When I first embarked on this harrowing journey, I thought I could go at it by myself, with perhaps a few questions   [ 3 ] sent my professor’s way. Alas, after some indefinite time of brainstorming with ...

Imagine, there I was trying to think of a less complex activity that taught students about the computational thinking skill of abstraction (a longer, in-depth post about that process soon to follow), when I stumbled upon a really awesome game! 

  Whew boy, this will be either be a ridiculously long post or I’ll split it up into different posts because I did a lot (or at least it felt like I did!) and I took plenty of screenshots. Whether or not I’ll be kind to my readers by not making them go through scrolling hell to read of my Turtle Blocks exploits really depends on how much energy I have left in me. EDIT AS OF 9/28 AT 9 PM: I am sorry my loyal readers, my energy is failing thereby forcing you to endure the perpetual scrolling.