My ePortfolio showcases select course projects, extracurricular projects, and written work I created over the last two semesters and one summer of my studies in the LDT Program. As part of my statement of purpose and at the beginning of the program, I identified several objectives I wished to accomplish, namely honing my technical skills and working on discipline-specific education. My ePortfolio shows the extent to which I achieved these objectives. It features work that touches on creativity and technology, and is also responsive to our year’s zeitgeist: learning amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition to a short bio, the homepage features a project gallery and articles. These are a combination of course projects and reflections, and extracurricular projects, the majority of which are digital, and which addressed my first objective, to learn and hone my technical skills. These projects include two online games, a mobile web app, and my work on online course design. Two projects in particular are in response to the pandemic. The Covid-19 PH App, a personal project, is an online platform that addresses the high volume of information and resources that emerged from the response to the pandemic in the Philippines. Meanwhile, as part of the course Game, Design, and Education, I developed the Whola online game to encourage online interaction and social presence, especially among first-year students who would not be able to meet their classmates in person due to higher education institutions’ decision to opt for virtual learning in compliance with rules on social distancing. This game, in return, was a recommendation I identified from the final paper I wrote for the core course, University as a Design Problem.
Learning outside the classroom
The project EdX @ Georgetown, despite being part of my duties as a Graduate Associate (GA) at CNDLS, merits inclusion in the project gallery. It is through this project and other GA responsibilities that I gained skills in edtech and course design. This valuable work opportunity allowed me to directly implement my new skills and apply concepts and reflect on learning from my core courses in the program. Learning and design concepts lend themselves intuitively to building courses on Canvas and EdX. The history of technology and innovation encourages me to be insightful and critical of the platforms and edtech I encounter at work. I keep in mind how a course’s design achieves learning outcomes and feedback through curriculum mapping and formulating evaluation reports for Georgetown SCS summer courses. I’m reminded of the qualification purpose of education when I help design and build online courses. Lastly, I’m able to regularly interact with faculty through workshops and provide them with advice during office-hour consultations, and learn about their struggles and challenges with technology and transitioning from in-person to virtual teaching.
Through the New York Academy of Sciences, I participated in an extracurricular public education activity in New York City. The science communication workshop and field experience at Photoville 2019 exposed me to the creative design process and interacting with people in public in a fun and playful environment.
Words matter
My interests also changed during the course of the program. Whereas I had planned to acquire technology-oriented skills such as computer programming and user experience design, I found myself gravitating toward linguistics. In an introductory course on linguistics, I pursued my interest in languages and acquired concepts for analyzing language. I was able to connect this to my program by developing a preliminary research proposal on language variability between speakers of English as a native language and a second language. I followed this with an introductory course on natural language processing, which also partly meets my objective to learn computer programming.
Particular to the introductory linguistics course, one of the more unique learning activities I undertook was to create a linguistic landscape, where students had to take photos of signages in a defined geographic area to understand linguistic vitality. This was an especially enjoyable exercise, which combined my interests in languages and urban areas, and encouraged me to step out and view my neighborhood through a linguistic lens. Because we were holding the class remotely due to the pandemic, it also gave students the opportunity to choose and use signs where they live or in places we have visited, which added to the diversity of our work and discussions. It was also in this class where I thought a lot about course design and social presence even beyond the duration of the course. I observed that our discussion board was very active, perhaps partly due to the textual nature of the course, and the class schedule. Our class met via Zoom on Mondays and Wednesdays, and were assigned readings and reflections on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This alternating synchronous and asynchronous design of classes might be a good design for online intensive courses to allow screen-break, especially when Zoom fatigue has been reported among students.
Given my background in project and program evaluation in my previous career, part of my interest is measuring success in learning. In addition to the projects contained in this ePortfolio, I also engaged in another final project and course activity worth noting. In the Blockchain in Education elective I took in the Spring 2020, the class was asked to write a press release for a fictional yet feasible product that could fill a gap in education. Writing the project required a good understanding of the technology and knowledge of transactions that exist in the education sector.
Experience and exploration
The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted higher education, effectively setting me up to experience virtual learning first-hand through the eyes of both a learner and designer for half the duration of my program. It opened up spaces and ideas for experimenting, and opportunities to adapt and learn at an accelerated pace.
In my desire to learn computer programming, I learned more about linguistics that has always piqued my interest. In my pursuit of the latest learning technologies, I became more conscious of considerations of inclusion and accessibility, not only through my own courses but also through my work. On the surface, my ePortfolio maps a series of projects that signals my specific interests in learning: technology, design, and playfulness. However, my body of work also promotes inclusion and accessibility to tools and spaces for in-person and virtual learning, empathy and student engagement, and the judicious creation and use of learning tools and technology.
I set out to acquire or complement my knowledge and skills on learning and technology with the goal of changing professions, and the past year and a half has been an opportune time to create and recreate.
