hi everyone this week is week five and APD 5017 and we're nearing toward the end of our set of readings and we're going to be looking at now a point or beginning to identify this point of intersection between technology play psychology and social media and so the real big ideas this week that I want you to look at and to unpack and think about is there five of them so the first one is understanding the emotional impact of Technology and playing on our development and the psychology behind social media and the technology that we use and so here we're drawing on these threads that we've been unpacking from the beginning of the course and starting to tie that together through emotional impact and beginning to understand emotions then we're asking these questions about the potential of technology and how we design various technologies we have watched now several videos talking about gamification talking about our emotions and understanding how design can actually force us to do some of our thinking in particular ways and then the culture around how we're working through various technologies and social medias how that can impact our design and how I begin to understand emotions and and what is tied to our investment in time in using these technologies we've also this week are going to come to explore the ways that integrating technology and social media into learning experiences can be relevant so understanding that there are various approaches to learning and then using that as a starting point for learning to understand how to integrate these different technologies whether it be social media sites whether it be various games into learning experiences that were thinking about then part of our latter part of our readings talk about social media and how we use it to create our identities this week you will be taking your social media biography and you'll be thinking about that in terms of how you are interacting and how you've interacted with social media and how your identity is shaped by these potential things you did a lot of thinking about this last week and so it's important to be able to understand this and to unpack and to see what your inherent biases are when moving toward an understanding of how then we can integrate into various experiences that we're creating because so much of technology and social media is wrapped up in our personal identities these days we in when working through your sort of social media biography and answering those questions that you did you are able to really start to to comb through and understand maybe how tangled and messy of a situation we've gotten ourselves into in terms of social media and the final big idea is moving towards understanding the role of social media and adolescent development there have been several studies conducted over the past decade it's ten years now since Facebook has been around and there I initial audience was university age students or were those that were in university so definitely and later adolescence but the ideas of how we are impacting adolescents and how we are trying to maybe shift our thinking about identity and adolescents and agency and adolescents what does this look like what does it look like for you personally what did it look like when you we were in undergrad there are some of us that are that are older in the course that maybe had social media later on in life or that never use social media I've personally deleted some social media accounts because it's just too much too much time too much thinking and I've more things and better things to do with my time than to get stuck in this more text of social media and how these systems are designed to keep us in there and so when you remove yourself from it you think oh wow I've freed up a lot of headspace so this is really interesting to do little experiments and thought experiments with yourself around social media use and how it can impact even your day to day lives next I'm going to be going through some of these ideas in more detail and drawing on a couple of the articles that I want you to pay attention to so one was the NPR podcast would you kill a robot and this was a really I thought interesting question interesting problem and beginning to understand what role robots have and will have in our lives is really fascinating to think about and what that means for teaching so robots can help us learn about empathy they are machines that we've now personified so you can think of the movie if you've seen it her where main character ends up falling in love with his operating system and it's funny to think but it's absolutely very relevant that's something that absolutely could happen because they know the operating system knows the little things about that individual just by combing through and it's all artificial intelligence so it's really curious a sort of curiosity that will allow us to keep digging and begin to understand the role of robots and their relationship to humans and artificial intelligence and where that is going this again that idea in the movie her this emotional connection that we make with machines but really if you take that and you translate that into understanding the potential we actually have to get to know each other more so to get to know humans better is where there is a ton of potential in the Clarke article in the 2016 meta-analysis that is a very useful paper for your final assignment because it has a really in-depth look at literature on gaming and learning so very relevant and I suggest if reading the executive summary but reading that article in depth for your final assignment would be very useful ultimately we are focusing there on exploring how we integrate and and consider gamification and different scenarios and non-gaming non gamification or no game scenarios into learning and how interpersonal learning can be improved through gaming and so they touch on characteristics motivation intellectual openness work ethic conscientiousness and self-evaluation and that ultimately and as you'll see now throughout all of the articles this week is the design of the game is as important as the medium in which it is chosen to be represented in so design is really paramount and we're learning more and more as we delve into the neuroscience and neuro psychology behind design of technologies we're really understanding how we can leverage that to enhance our learning in the turkey article they offer a perspective to allow us to purchase gap between knowing the potential of digital games and learning and then actually implementing it so what does that look like and then they give us three ways three pedagogical approaches to leverage gaming and learning and so that's using a cognitive approach focusing on the actual information being provided the actual knowledge being transferred the social approach so that interaction level and then a cultural approach so a more macro view of that impact that those games would have and I think the most important part of that article is the conclusion that provides us with questions to consider when integrating games into instruction that's on page 15 of that article and it's it's quite important when it comes to the TED talk that we watch on designing and developing various technologies it's very obvious at this point that design being paramount we have made some mistakes in order to get to where we are but we are now beginning to unpack them and hopefully try to reverse them and so we know that the way we design technologies can keep us completely engaged and can put us into flow without us even recognizing it and having to set up some sort of an environment for us to get into flow our smartphones have become our portal for finding flow in not necessarily a positive or constructive context so it's fascinating to think about all these things and how they sort of come together he proposes three sort of radical when he considers radical changes to technology and to our society and those are that we are persuadable so how do we begin to acknowledge that and design for that we have to design new models and new accountability systems for individuals and then that we're entering this sort of design Renaissance and we're protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing so we don't want to be on Facebook forever and the thoughts that we don't want happening so we don't necessarily want only positivity or only finding sources that are curated for us that meet our level of agreement so we don't just want to be agree with what's in our feeds we want to be able to have something that's constructive that allows us to advance our thinking and advance our interactions with each other but also through this design Renaissance empowering us to live out what we want so get what we want out of our information streams and be able to use that in a way that is constructive so he then mentions this idea about directing our attention to create a superhuman ability to focus on real problems that need solving and this is absolutely true many of you if you took 1294 or in some other tech courses you've probably seen Jane McGonigal's video on gaming to save the world and how gaming can save our world that's an older video by now but it's absolutely relevant same types of ideas so how can we channel all this energy and all this thinking that we've been doing somewhat mindlessly and some and sometimes not for the good of anything and and take that and hone that and leverage that for the for the greater good and this last big idea in terms of identity as performance and social media and so we have in Boyds work these ideas about how teens adapt their social media profiles to fit their needs so it's not just a matter of what is provided to you in the various forms or in the various functionalities but being able to give your own information that's not necessarily there and finding ways to do that then there's this idea of highlighting the importance of creating an actual social identity that is by default and networked it to others and you don't necessarily understand the implications of that and how privacy choices made may impact how you are perceived or how others can use that data find that data that you're putting into social media and what that works what that looks like so there are different ideas of identity and different ways to manage your friends and they say to know to get to know someone you should also look at their friends as well well on Facebook this can be somewhat problematic especially if you friend people and new friend people you just meet that don't really know you and then Facebook a few years ago implemented the different categorizations of your friends so are they acquaintances are they family and are they close individuals to you outside a family but close friends so it's interesting to think about these ways and how systems Facebook being the real predominant one here and our willingness to give them all of that information then how does that get used and how does that get interpreted but ultimately it begins to allow us to understand how we are impacted by each other and how this network that we opt to join in allows people to create different identities for us and then us recognizing that then do we put on a performance do we set the stage for that and the NPR podcast on the shed and Facebook with the story of rachel is also really interesting and tying this idea together is that identity as performance is absolutely true Rachel was trying to keep up with things and this whole idea of negativity being taboo in social media is a really interesting one and so there are some big questions that I want you to take away and think about as you're coming through this course and working through towards the end and you're thinking about your final projects so if you had a robot in your classroom what would you want to have it help you with and learning about your students would you want to learn about their trigger points about because it does robots can teach us about empathy so teach us about their emotional states how would you use that what type of thinking would be useful for you as a professional in the teaching field for a robot to figure out as a researcher I want you to consider what gaps you would want to address in the areas of Technology play in social media whether it's at its intersection point or in one of these strands where do you think there's missing information because we have pieces of the story but we don't have the whole story and so we are trying to build some continuity and to draw some themes together but there are gaps what do you think are the most important ones to think about then there's this question about curating and so how do we curate technologies or social media content to enhance adolescent development to support them through adolescence what does that look like and how does our awareness of these technologies and their potential lend itself to supporting them through this very difficult and continuously changing evolution of themselves to begin to understand them at a deeper level how they learn and just to allow them to get a better sense of who they are and finally this is a really interesting question because as I mentioned I've deleted a few social media accounts but is my data ever destroyed no probably not and so doesn't knowing that our digital footprint can never be truly erased impact how you interact with the technology or social media just because facebook allows you to categorize your friends in particular ways but your divulging all of this information that you might not know the relevance of it now and maybe Facebook will never use that type of data for anything but maybe they will and maybe it would have an impact on this later so we don't necessarily know but does this idea of what we input and not being able to ever sort of take it back impact what you post and how you interact with those technologies so thank you very much and I will see you all online in the collaborative notes this week and if you have any questions about your final assignments do let me know Thanks