ICEduTech Conference
Taipei, Taiwan
10-12 December, 2014

In mid-December I was able to spend 3 days at the ICEduTech Conference at Tamkang University in New Taipei City, Taiwan, which drew together educational technology specialists from around Asia and the world. A spread of expertise from a variety of areas ensured that a range of issues surfaced which went somewhat beyond those typically discussed at educational technology conferences.

In his opening plenary, Cloud Classroom: The Next Generation, Chun-Yen Chang pointed out that Taiwanese students do very well in international tests like PISA and TIMMS, but they do not have interest or confidence in science. On the other hand, the younger generation makes extensive use of mobile devices. Chang demonstrated the Cloud Classroom software, an HTML5 platform accessible on mobile devices (devx.ccr.tw). It is designed to facilitate interaction between teachers and students in the form of polling exercises, where teachers can see all of the students’ responses – which, Chang suggested, is important in Chinese classrooms. Polls may require multiple choice or open-ended answers. The software can also facilitate group work, with students being grouped, for instance, according to their poll answers. Students can also take on the role of teachers and ask questions of other students. The software can be used to engage students in discussions about scientific issues such as climate change. Some research has been done on older clicker systems, but smartphone-based systems open up new possibilities for research. In a study conducted with the Cloud Classroom software, it has been found that students using the software can learn to better engage in argumentation and debate. The vision is to find a good fit between the teacher as facilitator, the technology, and the learner.

In the second plenary, From Slate to Tablet: The Development of New Media for Learning in Taiwan, David Tawei Ku outlined the history of engagement with new technologies in Taiwanese higher education. He spoke in some detail about Gartner’s predictions for the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015 as they apply to Taiwan specifically, as well as more generally:

• Computing everywhere
• The internet of things
• 3D printing
• Advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics
• Context-rich systems
• Smart machines
• Cloud/client computing
• Software-defined applications and infrastructure
• Web-scale IT
• Risk-based security and self-protection

He went on to point out that there is considerable overlap with the key trends accelerating higher education technology adoption as outlined in the 2014 Higher Education Horizon Report, and indeed in the 2012 and 2013 reports. Ultimately, he suggested, new technology trends build on, and represent new inflections of, developments which began long ago.

In the third plenary, Empathy, Empathic Information Systems and New Directions for Learning, Pedro Isaias spoke about empathic information systems which react to and can give feedback to users. He outlined the evolution from MDS (Mobile, Dexterous, Social) robots to DragonBots (see the video). The ultimate goal is a more organic relationship between humans and technology. He went on to describe the EU Empathic Products project, which ‘aims to achieve better user experience by applying affective computing technologies to understand and respond to user intentions and emotions’. The expected results (as detailed on the project website) include:

• Methodology to create empathic (intentional , emotion enabled) applications and services
• Toolbox of validated emotion & intention enabling technologies including UX measurement
• A huge number of validated proofs of concept
• New business models for exploiting intention and emotion awareness

Some of the project scenarios include conceptual e-learning projects like Emerge (involving the Umniverse platform) and the 3D World MOOC.

In her paper, Designing Participatory Learning, Henriikka Vartiainen reported on design principles drawn from her recently published dissertation. Outside the classroom, she suggested, knowledge has moved into networks. Older pedagogical practices have boundaries that make it difficult for learners to access knowledge networks and move across the learning landscape. Design-oriented pedagogy, anchored in Vygotsky’s sociocultural work, aims to build bridges between schools and environments outside schools. Students need a chance to participate in knowledge-creating activities and to become confident designers, where ‘design’ is defined as  participation in cultural practices by developing them. Students should engage in open, collaborative tasks within a design-oriented learning process. She concluded with a video example of work by Finnish students produced within such an approach.

In her paper, Assessing Critical Thinking Performance of Postgraduate Students in Threaded Discussions (co-written with Cheng-Lee Tan), Lee Luan Ng described the use of the Newman et al’s (1995) content analysis scheme to analyse students’ threaded online discussions. It was found that students engage somewhat in critical discussion, though one class (on language acquisition) did so more than another class (on research methodology). This may be because of the nature of the topics and students’ past experience with the topics. It seems that including relevant outside materials in the threaded discussions is crucial to support participants’ critical thinking. In short, critical thinking can be cultivated through threaded discussion; good task design and past experience of the topics are important.

In the paper, Training Pre-Service Chinese Language Teachers to Create Instructional Video to Enhance Classroom Instruction (co-authored with Ming-Chian Ken Wang), Lih-Ching Chen Wang spoke about the advantages of teachers creating their own video instructional materials for teaching Chinese in a multimodal format. She showed several examples of such videos created by her pre-service teachers.

In her paper, Using Project-Based Learning and Google Docs to Support Diversity, Amy Leh described a project-based learning approach to help the integration of international students with American students in a US university, using tools including: wikis for forming groups, Google Docs for paper construction, Google Forms for data collection, Skype for group discussions, tracked changes for editing, and discussion boards. When surveyed, students said they had increased knowledge and appreciation of other cultures, were better able to communicate with people from diverse backgrounds,  had greater confidence in working with people from different countries and, perhaps most interestingly, had a better appreciation of their own cultures and backgrounds.

In our own paper, Digital Storytelling Across Cultures: Connecting Chinese and Australian Schools (co-written with Cher Ping Lim, Xi Bei Xiong and Hanbing Yan), Grace Oakley and I described what we have learned from running a cross-cultural collaborative project, funded by the Australia-China Council, to enable Chinese and Australian students to learn more about each other’s language and culture through creating, exchanging and responding to each other’s digital stories.

In her paper, Building Better Discipline Strategies for Schools by Fuzzy Logic (co-written with Dian-Fu Chang and Ya-Yun Juan), Wen-Ching Chou explained the use of fuzzy logic to determine opinions about the acceptability and effectiveness of non-corporal discipline strategies in schools in Taiwan. There were six strategies perceived by teachers to have high acceptability and high effectiveness, most in the domain of positive discipline.

In the paper, Building of a Disaster Recovery Framework for E-learning Environment Using Private Cloud Collaboration (co-written with Kazuhide Kanenishi), Satoshi Togawa spoke about the centrality of learning and data systems to education, and the importance of disaster recovery procedures, for example in the situation of an earthquake. Specifically, he discussed a private cloud collaboration framework where live migration of data into the cloud is triggered by an earthquake alert.

One strand of the conference focused on new technologies in health and medicine, with a key theme being the importance of linking and making sense of data – a theme which has parallels in the work currently being carried out on learning analytics in the educational sector. In the presentation, Using Mobile Technologies to Carry Out Tertiary Medical Services in Central America and the Caribbean (co-written with Angela Cruciano, Eric Diep and Shikha Gupta), Ajay Gupta described a Medical Mission Data Tracking Software System created for developing countries. Patient information can be stored on a laptop  and later synchronised to the central system when an internet connection is available. Access to this information improves efficiency and co-ordination between patients, doctors and pharmacists. Data can also be mined to produce heat maps of diseases and monitor changing patterns. In the presentation, Augmented Reality-Assisted Rehabilitation of Activities of Daily Living, Mengyu Zhao, Soh Khim Ong and Andrew Nee described a two-phase training system where stroke patients begin by manipulating virtual objects – such as turning on a faucet or placing books on a bookshelf – before going on to manipulate real objects. Survey results indicated patients felt that the virtual object training phase helped them perform better in the real object training phase. In the presentation, Customer Service System of Advanced Physical Examination for Hospitals (co-written with Yung-Fu Chen and Hsuan-Hung Lin), Tserentogtokh Tselmegmaa explained an integrated system consisting of a patient native mobile app (which can allow push notifications) and hospital staff web application, allowing better co-ordination and management of health information. Patients can receive messages and results from the hospital, make reservations, and track their vital signs. In the presentation, The Importance of ICT in the Preparation of Telehealth Public Policy Regional Protocols in Latin America, Humberto Alves, presenting on behalf of a team of researchers, spoke of the sharing of experiences between Latin American countries in order to develop effective approaches to telehealth.

All in all, having access to such a broad range of topics and perspectives was a good way to enrich our understanding of the possibilities of e-learning and mobile learning.