My name is Alejandro Heyworth and I am in the Computing in Education program. My undergrad degree is in EECS from MIT and I have spent my years since school successfully developing and applying technology in fields that I have passion for including interactive entertainment, education, and finance. I would like to compliment my tutoring and volunteer teaching experience with formal training here at TC to improve teacher (especially volunteer teacher) efficiency through innovation. I have encountered a ton of people with strong and diverse skill sets with neither the time nor energy for a full time commitment, but who are still eager to contribute. Given these human resources, I am looking to explore ways to maximize their efforts. While I am a born and bred New Yorker, I am currently living in Cambridge, MA and telecommute to work and school back in NY!
This course is my first experience with formalized bidirectional "virtual learning." I have watched and listened to many lectures, run managed simulations, read journals, publications, source code, and other resources online and have learned a great deal, but those experiences were not interactive in the way that I think this class will be. While those experiences were very technology interactive through multimedia and simulation, they were not socially so... Socially static. No participation. No human feedback.
It was only me and the machine learning things that I was already interested in and committed to learning. If I had questions, I would search for my answers elsewhere online. These efforts were successful because I learned what I wanted and needed to learn, but I don't know if the same process would work when trying to learn something that you're not interested or invested in.
I am eager to explore how virtual schooling can be used to combat distance, resource, closed thought, and scaling limitations of conventional learning environments without suffering from technoisolationism.
Great to read about your background, may I ask about EECS? What it entails? Sorry, as it is probably something familiar to most. Very interested in learning more.
ReplyDeleteAlso - I am guessing that to embed the map you simply used html tags?
Kind regards
Steve
EECS = Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
ReplyDeleteAt MIT, you take a combination of both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (course 6) courses at the beginning and then specialize in one or the other. I have always liked the immediacy of software and computer engineering (course 6-3), so I went that route. I have friends who preferred the hands-on nature of the electrical side.
The funny thing is that I went to MIT specifically to study Media Arts and Science, which would have mixed all of my creative, scientific, and engineering interests, but the major never materialized until well after I graduated.
I had to jump through too many hoops to create my own major, so EECS was the next best thing.
I just embedded the image and not the actual map. I "Copy Image Location"'ed the image and then pasted the link into the page with the embed image option.
First of all, I'm impressed with your background. I have never actually "met" anyone from MIT, so I am eager to hear more of your experiences.
ReplyDeleteI am also captivated by your goal of improving instruction through more efficient use of volunteer teachers. What exactly is a volunteer teacher?
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI chose to leave a comment for you because I admire your background. I have a BSc. CS from Northeastern, but went into finance. I believe that the key to learning is high-powered online (and maybe offline) learning is to develop very flexible and collaborative learning for students to use. In fact, I tool a design class and spent lots of time thinking about this idea. I got interested in computers at a very young age because of the puzzle aspect of writing and debugging a program (plus there we no applications available). Today's generation has a plethora of inexpensive applications available and so their puzzle energy is spent on video games. I think we need to make computer learning/simulation environments as interesting and flexible as the best video games.
Maureen,
ReplyDeleteI can get patient and social PhDs in physics to donate two hours a week for 12 weeks and physically come to an off-school location. A conference or technology room at a library or an auditorium will do. They are beyond versed in the subject matter and can teach it too!
I can also easily get 20 students to regularly attend this extracurricular physics class outside of their normal school day.
What I am interested in is maximizing those few volunteer hours that the PhDs have generously offered to service high quality education to as many students as possible. How can I get this to scale? How many kids can we add without quality dropping? Would we benefit from additional volunteers that do not know the subject matter inside and out as assistants? The PhDs are the limited resource, so I've been thinking of ways to take maximize their time.
Since I have a technology background, I think the solutions are in this domain.
I used physics as an example, but it could be any model-based subject. I am concentrating on model-based subjects such as the sciences, engineering, mathematics, economics, etc. , and not history, english, or languages because I think they lend better to interactive environments.
I have come across many very talented individuals, in many diverse fields, who want to teach and contribute in this capacity, so it would be a shame if we don't take advantage.
I guess I can't edit my comments...
ReplyDeleteAnyhow...
As for MIT, all of my professors were multi-award winning, degree hoarding, textbook writing, pioneers in their fields, but the majority of them could not and did not want to teach. This is never a good combination. Out of my ~32+ classes that I took there, I really only enjoyed 4 professors. 4? That is pretty bad. Of the four that I enjoyed, one professor left to join Sun, one became the head of the department, one left to raise her family, and another was fired for not publishing - he pioneered a field at MIT, that continues to benefit MIT, and decided that he was more interested in teaching than researching. Disappointing... 4 professors that not only knew what they were talking about, but loved to teach it as well, removed from the system.
I wouldn't trade my education for anything because the educational experience goes well beyond classroom learning, but friends of mine that went to Stanford had the complete opposite experience.
"Out of 32 courses, I didn't like maybe four professors."
Why is that? From what I gather, it might be because Stanford professors are better balanced - academics + real-life + hobbies + other influences. Sometimes it is better not be number one and take a more holistic approach to education.
It is not strictly NoCal either because I hear good things about professors at CMU. Does that professor/student dynamic produce the suns, yahoos, and googles of the world?
John,
ReplyDeleteMy love for computers grew out of coin-ops and the Atari 2600, but that was a very different time. I learned a ton on my own by inputing code listing from magazines and books and producing "games" similar to what was available. On a side note, I think there should be new a code reading movement.
Speaking to your puzzle point, I wonder if there are many kids left that think about how these games are made anymore. It seems they just accept gaming as another media to consume. I have noticed that making-of featurettes on games primarily deal with story, art, audio, and production issues, but rarely touch on any of the software engineering aspects that go into produce the title? I wonder why. I am sure they have researched their audience. Is it because those aspects are graspable by the majority? Is the thinking that even if you're not a good artist, you can still understand concept drawing and foley audio recording?
I would like to see these development studios give the audience more credit and throw in a path-finding or data-compression segment into their next making-of production.
I agree with you 100% on making computer learning environments as engaging as other media.