My journey in IST started at my first job as a research assistant. I was recruited for my background in Psychology and familiarity with statistics software to analyze online teaching and learning data, while a small part of my job is to conduct training for teachers to learn their learning management system. It provided an opportunity for me to discover how much I enjoyed being an instructor and working with teachers, helping them tackle the challenges and difficulties they encountered while using technology. I became interested in incorporating technology into classrooms in general and eager to be part of the change. 

 

Such interest developed when I later worked as an educational game designer in a start-up company to develop Coding Galaxy, a game-centered curriculum for K-12 schools to apply in their classrooms. The collaboration mode that I designed was quite an innovative move at that time, allowing students to work together as a team to solve one problem, while most apps feature a single-player mode only. We were a very small team, which gave me opportunities to serve in various roles to design the game, help with the code, build the teaching aids, develop the lesson plans, negotiate with the stakeholders, and pilot in the classrooms. It was a meaningful experience for me to be a front-line changemaker, seeing education from different facets. However, it also brought up so many “why” and “how” questions that required much longer time to answer instead of a 15-minute team meeting to make quick decisions. Simultaneously I completed my master’s degree in Information Technology in Education at the University of Hong Kong. It provided me with solid foundations in education and opportunities to engage with design-based research, write design cases, and interview participants. 

 

All the previous experiences build up the path for me to join the doctoral program in Instructional System Technology at Indiana University in 2019. Reflecting upon it, I gradually understand the complexity of education in nature, with or without technology, which enables me to appreciate the efforts we have made to unfold such complexity. One part that interests me the most is collaborative learning and the dynamic through interaction. For me, collaborative learning means a reconstruction of the classroom, yielding power to students, and allowing the uncertainty to grow. It asks students to develop a sense of agency, practice skills to work with their peers and co-construct their own knowledge. What’s also, if not more, challenging is for teachers to give up some control and take a facilitative role in the back seats. In computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), technology provides affordances for collaboration (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016). CSCL can be defined as  the activity of peers interacting with each other to reach learning goals with the support of information and communication technologies