How humans learn, navigate and use technology

Effective deployment of mobile learning technology seems to require sufficient parental involvement and other sociometric support, according to the main finding of our recently submitted paper at the Stanford POMI in ED group.

Mobile technology, in particular, with its low cost and accessibility, has great potential to provide access to or supplement education in underdeveloped areas. Given that mobile learning devices could be effective in supplementing education particularly in a community with a poor educational infrastructure; this study selected 80 second-grade (7-8 years old) primary school students from an urban slum area and another 80 students in a rural village near the Mexico-USA border in the state of Baja California, Mexico. Both schools lack educational and technology resources and the general socio-economic status of the students is low. We examined whether mobile learning devices could have a differential effect in supporting students’ literacy learning skills in these two schools with their unique socio-economical strata.

Students in the experimental groups in both schools were equipped with a mobile learning device called TeacherMate with a headphone, preloaded with 18 mobile e-books (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Students helping each other with the mobile learning device

In contrast, the control groups were only participating in classroom lectures without the supplement of our mobile devices. A standard Spanish language literacy pretest assessed all students’ achievement scores in September 2008 and the same test was administered 16 weeks later in a posttest. In addition to these quantitative data, we interviewed parents and educators as well for qualitative purposes.

The findings suggest that students in the rural village have benefited substantially more from mobile technologies than urban school students (see Figure 2). These devices have contributed to better literacy scores and added an extra enrichment activity tool in class. Considering the fact that the availability of educational resources at the rural school was even less than at the urban slum school (i.e., books, computer, Internet access, etc.), the extra educational resources and learning opportunities served these children more effectively.

Figure 2. Significant difference between the Experimental posttest groups at the two schools demonstrating that students with the TeacherMate mobile learning device in the Rural school (Rural Experimental) had higher literacy achievement scores than Urban school children also using the mobile learning technology (Urban Experimental).

The interviews revealed that the rural school parents pay more attention to the education of their children. The number of answers reflected that 9 in 10 of the rural school parents were aware of the mobile learning project taking place at school, whereas only slightly more than 1 in 10 of the urban school parents knew about the project. Additionally, the rural school parental involvement in education is much higher with 5 hours a week spent with the children compared to the urban school average weakly less than 2 hours. Finally, the average combined income of the rural school is slightly higher (i.e., average $720/month) than that of the urban school (i.e., average $410/ month).

In contrast, there was no evidence of interaction with parental education levels (the overall education experience of the rural parents was less than that of the urban slum school parents), the experience of teachers or school principals (teacher in the rural school also had 2 years less teaching experiences than the teacher of the urban school), or the teacher’s perception or preparation of the technology (teacher in the rural school did not embrace technology in the classroom).

In summary, the programmable open design of our mobile learning technology (i.e., Linux, Flash) enables the development of other mobile learning activities to increase phonemic awareness skills of children at multiple levels and offer opportunities to practice reading through interesting content and entertaining activities.

Scientific studies on memory are usually focusing on how people remember things. Applied technologies are using these models to increase how much or how well we can recall about the information that surrounds us. As both theory and technology develop at an increasing speed, we see how the human mind becomes extended and embodied into its environment (Clark, 2008).

My PhD supervisor, Itiel Dror and Steven Harnad (2008) explained this process as a natural continuation of how all cognizing agents -let them be biological or artificial- are offloading their cognition into different cognitive technologies. The boundaries between the memories in my head and the ones on this blog have become fuzzy. Please, don’t think of me as a cyborg with microchips on my temporal lobe, but rather someone, who searches unfamiliar things in Wikipedia and keeps a good amount of his data in the Cloud.

A new book with the cheesy title of Total Recall, written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, two senior researchers at Microsoft, show how far this offloading can push the limits of our imagination. They present their MyLifeBits project that digitized all documents, photos, external memories of Bell so that he could truly become paperless and uncluttered ‘both in his head and on his desk’. But they went further and since 2001, Bell has also attached a SenseCam and a GPS on his body to record and log all life events, meetings, trips, emails and telephone conversations that he faces. This is his personal life’s chronicle, which he calls ‘life-logging’. Here’s a long interview video with the authors.

As I’m reading through the book, arguments are firing to convince me that being able to life-log gigabytes of information per month about my own life and smart-search it back in its exactness all that happened with me via time-place concept tags are the best things the modern human can do. To overcome our mind’s limited memory capacity and extend it into a perfect e-memory is the revolution on our doorstep. It is the deliberation of humankind from its mortal biological chains.

Why is it that it somehow makes me feel uneasy? Because it’s just new as computers or televisions were in their times? Maybe. But the first thing that I could think of was a very human psychological mechanism: forgetting. I feel blessed that I can forget and that every day I do so. Even if the research on repression and trauma is still controversial, I feel reassured that most parts of my life will disappear from myself and from other human beings. Not because I’m not happy with my life, but because in most times, I want to reconstruct and not review my own memories.

Memory reconstruction gives me integrity and a sense of who I am. I think the source of my uneasiness about Total Recall comes from a lack of trust in the SenseCam, in contrast to a self-deceitful comfort that my limited mind’s distorted camera has provided to me in the past almost thirty years.

Lastly, the anecdotal evidence which suggests that those who survived a near-death moment experienced a video of their life flickering in front of their eyes makes me suspicious that our mind is in fact not as much limited in its capacity as we thought. It may actually record everything that we encounter, but perhaps what makes us human is that we’re not capable (yet) to do a Total Recall. The real question is still : why?