Portfolio 6 - Personalised Learning

In recent years, there are more people showing appreciation toward “personalized learning”, in which instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs. Personal learning approaches range from modules that students can master at their own pace to computer programs designed to match the way it presents content with a learner’s personality.

Generally, different learners have different characteristics, for example, some learners are highly self-motivated and self-driven, learning best by exploring on their own or at least with very little guidance. On the other hand, some learners prefer coaching and a more structured approach, such that they are typically self-motivated when the subject matter appeals to their interests. There is another type that is often motivated by external rewards and may learn best with step-by-step instruction. Some may resist learning altogether and have little motivation or interest in achieving goals established by the tutors. These general categorizations provide a basis for developing personalized instruction. Among all the projects that attempted to meet the personalized education, the most welcome learning system is the web-based education systems. This system guides individual learning using resources found on internet and adjusts the learning pace according to the learner’s request. There are still ongoing researches and surveys to improve and customize the current education system. Given the diversity of individual preferences, and the complexity of each human brain, developing teaching methods that maximize learning is a major challenge for the software engineers in the future.

Most of the time, engineers will have to understand these complex problems and return feasible solutions, which will contributions to the people and society. Learning could be more reliable when familiarities the learning process in more advanced software. In future, there might be something like immediate knowledge acquisition.

References:

Advance personalized learning. (n.d.). Retrieved October 13, 2008, from http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9127.aspx

Portfolio 5 - A computer that read our mind

With the advancement in the technology, the computer can now read our mind. There are new researches that show humans' mind can be read using computational modeling technology. This technology uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect and locate brain activity when a person thinks about a particular word. The computational model enables a computer to determine the correct word that a research subject is thinking about by analyzing brain scan data. This technology may have applications in the study of autism, disorders of thought such as paranoid schizophrenia, and semantic dementias such as Pick's disease. However, several ethical issues are predicted to arise when the technology is fully developed and made available to the public. We shall discuss the potential risks with the technology and ways to minimize them.

First, we have to determine the authorized people who can use the technology. This is to minimize the misuse of this technology in the wrong group of people. In the case of misuse, other people’s privacy may be affected. Secondly, we need to set up certain rules and regulations to ensure that the technology is use in a reasonable situation with the correct ethic. Lastly, we will have made sure that the technology is fully secured so that no other people will be able to access this technology. The security of the computer is very extremely important because the computer contains confidential information and also involves in privacy issues. In the case of being hacked, the hackers may enter the computer systems to retrieve information for own use. Therefore, the strong security of the computer system must be maintained. In conclusion, I think that the technology can provide us with more benefits than risks if the rules and security is maintained properly.