Journal

Topic: Interaction in Learning

a)      New Insights

Adult educators in today’s world play the most significant role when it comes to interaction in learning. Educators play the role of engaging with the learner, maintaining the engagement, transferring knowledge, and helping ensure its retention. Not only that, but through the right kinds of interaction, it may spark curiosity and reflection in the learner. This may lead to further learning.

Engaging with the learner means establishing a connection in 2-way interaction. Sending a message and having the learner not just listen, but interpret and reciprocate the message back. Then, the educator would validate the learner’s reciprocation through an evaluation method. So long as the student feels engaged during this knowledge transaction, the adult educator has played their significant role, as the student will be more likely to retain and pursue that information.

b)      Trends

There are some new trends in the field of interaction. Since more learning is being done online by people with less time on their hands, eLearning is a great example of a trend that is newer, and still developing. Another trend is “Gamefication”. This involves the use of video game design elements, in a non-gaming situation.

To address the need for eLearning, I have not only purchased a few related textbooks on eLearning, but I have a degree in Interactive Technology. This has prepared me to understand and design new systems of interaction, for my passion of the purpose of learning. I try my best to continually perform research activities to better understand users and learners, and then re-iterate design strategies to help ensure the best optimal experience – in this case, learning.

For the challenge of Gamefication in today’s world, many people are learning skills through video games. I’m not too sure about the psychology of why games are so engaging (mainly because I just like being engaged in games), but maybe it’s to do with attaining a learner’s attention span in a short amount of time, and maintaining that attention span. In a world with such little time available for learning, this could be a useful medium for learning. To prepare myself for this, I used to play video games of all sorts, and used to be in the world of “hardcore gaming”. I can relate my past experience and transfer the skills into my developing academic career in teaching.

c)       Web-Conference

Working with Emma during the web conference allowed the both of us to bounce ideas off of each other, craft a learning strategy, and learn how to work around each others’ time-consuming obstacles of work and life, to get this project done. I’ve learned that she has been out of school for many years, and I have been in school recently. We were able to relate on different points, and we helped each other out in terms of applying our best skills to this project.