hangyodon

So, for this week’s module, we learnt about design principles that make for effective media. We got to play with WAVE, Canva, and Text-to-speech.

My Canva Experience and Poster

I want to firstly talk about the Canva poster I made. I decided to make a poster on a topic I learnt from PSYC351D (biopsychology) since I have always loved biology posters, and that was the most recent biology-related class I took. For the poster, I decided to make it on the unit of the neural basis of sleep, hence why the poster is called that. While I know there seems to be a lot of information on the poster, much of the material has actually been minimized.

For this poster, I wanted to implement contrast, hierarchy, and proximity.

• For contrast, I placed titles and important in this deep red colour, which would allow the words to pop against the beige-white background. For the more important areas of the brain, the word was placed on a red background, and the text was in white; this allowed for a higher contrast. Adding the circles behind the brains also allowed for better contrast between the two different kinds of sleep and allowed for better distinction between the two brains.
• For hierarchy, the labelling and the steps for rem sleep are shown in top-to-bottom order. This helps explain the REM sleep section since it would be easier to recall since the poster is labelled in that order.
• For proximity, all the information related to that kind of sleep was placed closer together. This allows for a better idea as to which information goes with which kind of sleep.

Initially, when creating this, I did try to use a template. However, I didn’t find a template that had all the elements that I wanted on my infographic so, I did end up spending a lot of time creating this infographic from almost scratch. Since this was my first time actually using Canva, using a template made it easier to know what I could and could not do. I initially did not know that I could curve text or add things behind other elements. Luckily, I actually use to create infographics but by hand. So, I would say I have had lots of experience creating these (and they were also all for biology haha). However, if I was new to this, I think using a template could really limit me and I might even get frustrated since I wouldn’t be able to find a “perfect template” that matched the one I wanted to create.

My Thoughts About Inclusivity and How to Make Things More Inclusive

I really enjoyed this unit since graphic design/UIUX is the line of work I would like to go into. I enjoy talks about accessibility — in fact, it is a topic of concern for one of my projects for my human-computer interaction class. I think something that could be useful for those with visual impairment would be a universal zoom function. Some sites don’t have a zoom; some have a zoom that does not work and some zoom makes the infographic weird. This does limit functionality for those who are visually impaired and by having a universal zoom, it allows for better functionality. Audio feedback is also really useful for an inclusive learning environment! Another feature that should be implemented would be for those who are colour blind. The idea I’m thinking about is like the ability to inverse colours on Apple devices. If theres an ability that changes the colours of say an infographic, that would increase it’s inclusivity.

My Thoughts on Text-to-Speech

Text-to-speech is a tool I don’t utilize often. I tried to use it during English class in junior high since I found reading a dread, but I ended up falling asleep (hahaha). Even with things like podcasts, I find myself not paying attention to the audio much. Granted, I normally listen to podcasts to fall asleep, but if a video is available, I’d rather play a video than just audio. For this unit, I played with text-to-speech, but I just can’t seem to focus. Whenever I’m listening to something like a podcast, it is more about filling the space with sound than really listening to something. I can focus in class and I can focus on music but, something about podcasts and speech-to-text makes it really hard for me to focus. Changing the voices didn’t make it much better for me, but it was a nice feature to have. I think those who have a preference for a kind of voice would really like that feature.

My Experience with Running WAVE

I ran WAVE on my blog, and I found it funny that the things that were bad were all things we couldn’t control. I think this information would be really useful for the developers of WordPress. I kind of expected a better grade from WAVE, but I’m glad most of the things that were of concern were not in my control (haha).

Link to my comments:

This week we learnt about the process of a backward design, Merrill’s Five Principles of Instruction, and the difference between active and passive learning. We were also introduced to H5P which allows for interactive content.

Bloom’s Taxonomy and A Life Story

Throughout this module, the topics of Bloom’s taxonomy and active verses passive learning really resonated with me. As a kid, I would say I was quite smart. I normally ranked quite high in terms of performance. A moment of learning I think back onto quite often is when I finally learned to apply my knowledge. This was back in grade 8 science class during the electricity unit. We had a lab report to do for a lab that involved lighting a light bulb with lemons and the last question of the write up was “how does this lab relate to the real world?” This question took me a few days to think about and it stumped a lot of my other classmates as well because truly how does lemons being able to light a lightbulb have anything to do with the world. I decided to take a leap of faith and talked about supply and demand. While I don’t 100% remember the relationship I made between the two concepts, I remember thinking to myself well if the lemon doesn’t have enough juice for the lightbulb, the lightbulb will always be in demand for more juice whereas if the lemon had more than enough juice, the lightbulb will only take as much as it needs. Thinking back on this, it is quite a naïve thought since depending on the demand, some people will take more than they need to make a profit. But, to a younger me, this was like finding gold. In fact, I was the only student that got a 100% on the lab report and I remember feeling so smart and capable. To relate this back to this week’s module, this lab report reminded me of Bloom’s taxonomy because I was able to analyze bigger themes of this lab outside of the science aspect and I was able to create connections to other non related topics.

Active and Passive Learning

Active and passive learning also really stuck to me since I have experienced it first hand with my classes. I notice when I am actively engaging with material during lecture, I remember the material better. One of my favourite professors, Professor Jhotisha Mugon, once told me she can tell what I can remember based off of my participation in her classes. She’s not wrong, I can tell too. During exams, I always think back to her classes. I find psychology quite engaging so, it’s not hard for me to engage. I love asking questions that relate to current events or to things I experience. During her exams, I know the answer to a question because I can envision when I connected that topic to. However, for classes I find really hard to relate to, I struggle a lot more with. Those classes normally for me are computer science classes. I have no connection to the material so, I tend to space out during lecture and nothing sticks in my brain. While, in this module we learnt more about ways to actively and passively teach, this topic resonated with me since, as learners, we actively and passively review and study too.

Balancing Active and Passive Learning

For this course, I have found the best balance by using AI to help me. While reading is a very passive study method, I found if I tell AI to make me a quiz based off of the material within the module, I found myself engaging more with the material. By quizzing myself, I am able to spot holes in my knowledge and understanding. I also quiz some friends within the course so we both actively engage with the material. While I still don’t have the balance for computer science classes, I found my best balance for psychology classes is to just attend. I find psychology classes so fun, in fact, they normally make my day if its about a topic I enjoy learning. For example, I am in a relationship psychology class and I just love going. I find it so interesting and it’s quite easy for me to engage with the material since I often find myself trying to apply my learning to couples I see on reality TV or even my own relationship. I think if you were to look at my transcript, it is quite easy to tell which classes were passively taken and which were actively taken. You would also be able to see the switch when I started to actively learn.

K-12 Classroom Reading and Life Application

In the reading with K-12 classrooms, I found myself resonnating with the author’s story. I think so many teachers still teach like the way the kid at the beginning of the blog was describing– reading off a Powerpoint and then testing students. Those kind of teachers are always the ones with a bad reputation and the general consensous is normally that they don’t care. While that may be true for some teachers, I believe not all teachers were taught to teach. The same way how many students were never taught to study. I don’t think the idea of teaching actively or even studying actively is intuitive. I think active learning isn’t used in the classroom because students are learning about autonomy. Some students just don’t want to be there, some want to test the idea of authority. It’s hard to get students to do what teachers want. This comes before the issues of underfunding and extremely full classrooms.

Professor Mugon, I believe, is also a teaching director for the psychology department. So, she often applies a lot of the techniques mentioned in the blog post to her classes. I have had her for first, second, and third year classes so, I have experienced alot of learning techniques. Her matieral is organized by category which allows for easier revision and is full of diagrams. She often brings in stuff for us whether that’d be for positive reinforcement or for a small break. For example, she gave those that attended a review session chocolate and she brought in taste strips when we were discussing taste and super tasters. There are tons of discussion time in her classes. Overall, I feel as if the majority of my psychology classes apply the techniques discussed in the blog.

For the lesson plan, I decided to make one based off of a topic discussed in my relationship psychology class.

Link to my comment:

Having a Computer Science background means that AI is not new to me. In fact, I am in an AI class right now! I have also taken classes that explain AI in a different way. I have used AI many times, Grammarly also uses AI and Grammarly is something I use almost daily. I am no stranger to AI and although I am aware of its incorrectness at times, sometimes, I still use it when I am feeling confused and have no desire to go to office hours. During this module, I truly felt the wrath of AI’s incorrectness. I have used AI to explain quizzes to me before (with permission from the professor) and they are blatantly wrong but, they always sound super right. So, I appreciate during this module that the false sense of correctness was pushed. Generative AI is so tempting but, clearly being told that AI is not always right will hopefully make me rely on it less.

I asked Gemini to create a SAMR for ChatGPT, and I found the answer to be very interesting. I read the prompt incorrectly and thought I was supposed to ask our generative AI of choice to create a SAMR for itself. After asking the correct question, I realized GEMINI gave me the same answer twice but replaced the name of the models. I found this interesting because plagiarism is a huge problem in academia and if two separate students handed this in, they would probably be accused of plagiarism of each other.

I found that using generative AI, in general and not just limited to ChatGPT, the hardest information to assess is validity. ChatGPT would just say stuff and if you corrected it, it kinda felt like giving a slap on the wrist. I haven’t fully used GEMINI the way I have used ChatGPT but, I like that you can just “Google it” and they have the ability to be like “hey if you want to see more about this topic, heres a hyperlink.” I think that feature would be really useful when generating ideas. I showed how that was displayed with some screenshots below. GEMINI told me about ChatGPT is more budget friendly, has a greater variety in terms of task ability, and is better at human like conversation. When talking about the task variety, GEMINI didn’t disclose that ChatGPT is not always right. So, this lack of disclaimer might mean people might think ChatGPT is more right.

Playing a game with GEMINI

I decided to play with Google’s GEMINI, and we played a Shark Tank style game. The output GEMINI was giving me truly sounded like the show. It was as if Shark Tank was a book. I could hear the narrator and I truly thought GEMINI nailed the tone of the narrator. I think for the most part it is quite up to date with the time period. I don’t really watch Shark Tank but, I know the main original investors and I believe that was what the game used as investors. The tone of all of the investors was also spot on so, colour me impressed. GEMINI was quite successful in creating a successful game. It truly brought me into the world of Shark Tank. Funnily enough, I didn’t really think of what I was going to be presenting to the sharks. So, the stuff I presented kinda sucks and it wasn’t great but, the responses, in my opinion, were realistic. I included a small snippet of the conversation from the game. I would like to place a disclaimer that The Little Potato Co is a real company that sells potatoes and is not affiliated with the fake company of Little Potato Co.

Ethical Concerns

Some ethical concerns I have would be how we know about the facts of some things being generated. I checked by asking Gemini about the new Wicked movie coming out and surprisingly, Gemini gave me options to further dig into some of the claims it was making. Granted, what I asked Gemini wasn’t super serious and wasn’t for a paper I need to hand in. I wonder, and I would probably test it out some time soon, if it could site stuff from scientific papers and not just wikipedia.

Accuracy Evaluation

When I used generative AI before to explain certain questions for a Computer Science quiz, I noticed that the explanations were often wrong. Although, to me, they sounded super convincing. Whenever I asked a friend to explain the question, she would often point out that the AI explanations were very wrong and would point where in the lecture the topic would be explained. However, I have had fairly correct and in depth responses from generative AI when it came to explaining topics in psychology and biopsychology. I noticed that if I asked clarification on a topic, generative AI has been quite successful in doing so but, once I ask it do solve some quiz questions, its often wrong and the logic doesn’t always follow for the most part. Also, I noticed sometimes when I try to generate code and I give it a new thing to tweak, it doesn’t always do so. Granted, sometimes I am asking for the world in a piece of code but, I found that generative AI to be stubborn at times.

Citations

“create an SAMR analysis of the use of ChatGPT for learning” prompt. Gemini Google, 1.5 Flash, 10 Oct. 2024, https://gemini.google.com/app/178b7fd0dc0ee892.

“create an SAMR analysis of the use of GEMINI” prompt. Gemini Google, 1.5 Flash, 10 Oct. 2024, https://gemini.google.com/app/178b7fd0dc0ee892.

“Hello everyone! we have these little growers that allow everyone to have fresh grown potatoes during the whole year! I am looking for 1 million dollars for 50% of my company” follow-up prompt. Gemini Google, 1.5 Flash, 10 Oct. 2024, https://gemini.google.com/app/178b7fd0dc0ee892.

“Tell me about the new wicked movie coming out” prompt. Gemini Google, 1.5 Flash, 10 Oct. 2024, https://gemini.google.com/app/178b7fd0dc0ee892.

“The name of my company is little potato co and the product is an at home potato grower ecosystem so that you have free potatoes during the whole year. I am looking for 1 million dollars for 50% of my company.” prompt. Gemini Google, 1.5 Flash, 10 Oct. 2024, https://gemini.google.com/app/178b7fd0dc0ee892.

Link to my comments:

Hi everyone! For this screencast, I decided to use my 10 years of music traing to teach everyone how to read off of the treble cleff. While I personally no longer practise music, music is still something I am very pasionate about and love. I also wanted to make sure my years of experience don’t go to waste (hahaha).

For this module, I decided to use a mixture of google slides, the screen recording feature on my iPad, and iMovie. I use to also have an interest in video editing so, the editing part was not to hard part. The hard part of this assignment was the voice over. This was my first time doing a voice over for any of my videos and I honestly found it a little bit challenging and slightly annoying to do. Going without a script was probably not the smartest idea since, I rerecorded over 10 times just to get it right.

During the module, all theories were rather intuitive to me since I had learn about all the theories mentioned before throughout my psychology journey and my personal favourite professor actually teaches about how we learn. However, if I were to think back to when I first learnt these theories, I would say the most intuitive one for me would be segmenting. I use to have a great love for biology and whenever I rewrote my notes (not a great study method btw), I would use segmenting. This was espcially helpful when we revisited old topics that I forgot about. The one that surprised me the most would be the redundancy principle. However, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me since the redundancy principle is what differentiates a good presentation from a bad one.

When creating my screencast, I was thinking about the kids that have never touched music. I imagined this was their first time encountering a treble cleff and they are just starting out in their music journey. Knowing this, I decided to keep my video extremely simple. While I understand this video may not be the most visually intriguing video, it is concise and straightforward. I also tried to present some ways to remember the notes since, those were tools I used when I did music. Even after many years, I would still verbally says “F-A-C-E” when reading my notes.

While I know the video is not a lot, I still hope everyone learnt something if this is new to you. If this isn’t, I hope it reminded you of when you first started to learn how to read music. 😀

Link to my comments:

Hi there! I am Natasha and I am a fourth-year Computer Science Psychology major! Outside of class, I love watching Korean dramas, cooking, and playing games. A new game I’ve picked up is ‘Cult of the Lambs’. I decided to take this class since I was interested in the front end of web pages. Fun fact, I switched to my current major after falling in love with CSC130 which is a web design class. I thought since I know how to code a webpage, it would be nice to know how to utilize a webpage as well! I can’t wait to learn more in this class! 😀