Innovations in Teaching

The Use of Google Sites to Develop Informational Websites for Geography Subject - "GEOSITES".

• Source: Siswa UPSI bangunkan Geo-Sites

Seramai 33 siswa Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) yang mengambil kursus Pengajaran, Penaksiran dan Teknologi 1 semester satu sesi 2017/2018 berjaya membangunkan sebuah pangkalan data dikenali sebagai Geo-Sites.

Ia menjadi sumber rujukan baru bagi mata pelajaran geografi tingkatan satu hingga lima dalam masa 14 minggu, baru-baru ini.

Geo-Sites itu turut bertujuan menyediakan pelbagai bahan pengajaran dan pembelajaran yang bermanfaat dan sesuai untuk digunakan guru dan pelajar di sekolah.

Pensyarah kursus, Dr Mohd Hafiz Md Hanif yang juga ketua projek itu berkata, medium berkenaan dapat melatih bakal guru berkongsi fikiran dan ilmu bukan saja di dalam kelas, malah guru.

Katanya, inovasi itu terhasil selepas melihat banyak laman sesawang yang kurang sistematik dari segi koordinasi penggunaannya.

“Geo-Sites memberi manfaat berikutan input yang terkandung lebih informatif, interaktif dan menarik minat pengguna.

“Pada masa sama, Geo-Sites diharapkan dapat memenuhi keperluan guru kerana inovasi dalam teknologi pendidikan ini membolehkan guru dan pelajar memperoleh rujukan dengan mudah serta percuma. Apa yang perlu dilakukan hanyalah mengakses pautan Google-Sites yang disediakan,” katanya.

Dr Mohd Hafiz berkata, penuntut akan menyiapkan pelbagai jenis rujukan tambahan untuk dimasukkan dalam setiap ruangan Geo-Sites itu mengikut peringkat tingkatan yang ditetapkan diikuti semakan hasil kerja di dalam Geo-Sites yang dibuat setiap minggu.

Ia bagi memastikan maklumat atau nota yang disediakan penuntut sesuai dan bertepatan mengikut corak pendidikan abad ke-21 kini.

Katanya, sepanjang projek Geo-Sites selama 14 minggu, siswa juga berkesempatan menerokai dan mengenali lebih dekat penggunaan Google-Sites menerusi mata pelajaran geografi, selain hanya mengakses saja rujukan yang lain.

Penuntut, Faiz Sudin, 22, berkata, Geo-Sites yang dibangunkan itu membantu dirinya lebih mengenali kaedah dalam menggunakan Google-Sites sebagai alat bantu mengajar termasuk teknik pengajaran dan pembelajaran berkesan dan mudah untuk digunakan ketika latihan mengajar di sekolah nanti.

Sebelum ini, siswa semester lima Ijazah Sarjana Muda Pendidikan (Geografi) dan rakannya merujuk laman sesawang lain untuk mendapatkan maklumat penggunaan latihan dan nota bagi membuat perancangan pembelajaran yang diletakkan di dalam Rancangan Pengajaran Harian (RPH).

“Selain dapat membangunkan Geo-Sites yang memberi sumbangan penting kepada guru dan pelajar, kemahiran serta pengalaman ini cukup berharga untuk membantu kami dalam alam kerjaya sebagai seorang pendidik satu hari nanti,” katanya.

PALANTIR - Visualising 'Ba': The Design and Development of an Online Social Learning Platform.

• Won Bronze Medal in IUCEL 2017 in USIM.

• Abstract : Link

Introduction

Participation has long been the ‘Achilles heel’ of online learning (see McLure Wasko & Faraj, 2000; Ardichvili, Page, & Wentling, 2003; McLinden, McCall, Hinton, & Weston, 2006; Borzillo, 2007; Guldberg & Mackness, 2009). Instructors often resort to allocating certain percentage of marks to students’ participation in order to encourage interaction, which might lead to artificial responses and shallow reviews. In contrast, there are online communities which reportedly received high volume of participation, without obvious returns/rewards e.g. marks to drive the participation. Sites like StackOverflow, Flickr, Github, and Wikipedia are examples of such sites, but too little is known about the mediating elements for participation found in those sites. Scholars have long been developing concepts and frameworks in attempt to address this issue. Concepts such as ‘social presence’ (see Mehrabian, 1971; Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997), and sense of community (see Preece 2001; Rovai 2002) were coined and provided a guidance in understanding the problem of participation in mediated environment.

Nevertheless, these concepts were not instructive to adequately address the problem (To be fair, these concepts were not necessarily written to provide instructions as to how to address the problem of participation in online environment, but other scholars have adopted the concepts, with inconsistent results). Hanif & Hammond (2016) proposed a more actionable idea to address this issue. They have identified ‘help’ and ‘helping behaviour’ as central to the community that they have studied. By helping others, members of the community created a ‘vortex’ of participation, in which members who had been helped before, returned to the community in order to help others, with the intention to ‘payback’ or ‘pay-it-forward’. This and other similar findings (see Wasko & Faraj, 2000) highlighted the social, and the crowd-sourcing dimension that online participation has gravitated to.

The missing puzzle piece now is to see how this working idea of participation fits in educational environment, particularly in online learning environment. SECI (Nonaka et al, 2000) provides a working model on how to capture knowledge creation in communities and organisations. This model outlined four spiral steps to knowledge creation i.e. socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation. Socialisation is a process of converting tacit knowledge through shared experience. Since tacit knowledge is difficult to conceptualise, often people would have to experience it in order to understand the knowledge. This includes experiencing doing the task together, living with an expert, etc. Externalisation is a process of converting the tacit knowledge into explicit, often through conversations and sharing of experience. Combination includes the merging of the explicit knowledge to form other complex explicit knowledge, to be shared among other people in the community or organisation. Internalisation is a process of accepting the explicit knowledge to be part of ones’ own knowledge. With that, socialisation is seen as the catalyst to kick-start the knowledge creation processes.

Content

The platform, dubbed ‘Palantir v1.0’, is an online social learning platform, built from ground-up, as an alternative to the readily available MyGuru online learning platform in Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). Palantir is designed to address several issues that exist in MyGuru, mainly on the lack of conversation-centric design. The design process started with the analysis of existing online learning platforms, in terms of its layouts and application structures. This enables the visualisation of styles and concepts that the industry is practicing. This becomes the base and a point of reference. In terms of the requirements of the learning platform, Palantir is designed in lieu with the four processes of SECI i.e. socialisation through the discussion that happens in newsfeed and timeline; externalisation through the features such as the ability to write and share stories, upload materials, and asking for assistance/help; combination through the commenting features enabled; and internalisation through students’ profile and dashboard analytics.

Palantir is designed with conversation and collective problem solving in mind. It places conversation as central to the application, and to an extent, the community. By placing the idea of learning as social actions instead of a checklist of tasks that the students need to perform in order to learn, it provides a seamless learning experience for the students. It is hoped that by approaching the issue of participation in online learning environment from this 399 perspective, it can be resolved and that the participation from the students will truly be driven by interests, knowledge-seeking, and possibly altruism. This, in turn, will promote a higher quality of work, and education.

Palantir is highly marketable, due to its simple architecture and cross-platform capability. Palantir has been developed based on an open-source isomorphic Javascript web framework that can be deployed to multiple devices and platforms such as web, Android, iOS, Windows, and on both mobile and desktop.