Group Project

Although our group was the only group with 4 people in 3 completely different locations - NY, Seoul, and Sao Paulo - we were finally able to put everything together. It was not easy, to say the least, but along the way, I learned a lot about online learning environment. The pro was obvious; we were allowed to communicate freely with many tools such as the Instant Messenger (for our synchronous cyber meetings) and Google Docs (collaborate). On the other hand, we had difficult agreeing on few things because our interests were different. Additionally, being in different time zones with different schedule made it that much harder to fully collaborate together. I felt that the time zone variation significantly matters more than the actual distance (a student in FL and in NY would better collaborate than one in NY and the other in Beijing).

My job was the technical or the "fun" and engaging instructional design for a subject that can be deemed boring or difficult for ESL elementary students. I think "edutainment" combined with the right curriculum has great potential. Specifically, the social network educational games, if created right with the right set of supplemental materials (e.g. e-books) would make learning more "fun" and effective for younger students who are usually turned off by traditional learning methods. These are same students accustomed to growing up with the web 2.0 tools, smartphones, SNS; for us to expect them to learn like we did is unrealistic. I'm going to continue to design a gamed-based learning system that can be used in classrooms.