Harnessing Technology for Research Education

1. Harnessing Technology for Research Education
Professor Dr. Loc Nguyen, PhD, Postdoc
Founder of Loc Nguyen’s Academic Network, Vietnam
Email: ng_phloc@yahoo.com
Homepage: www.locnguyen.net
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ASEAN Conference on Educational Management and International Research and Development
Naga College Foundation, Inc
Universidad de Sta. Isabel, Naga City, Philippines, October 21-22 & 29, 2023

2. Paradoxes of technology
• It is undoubtful that technology helps our world to be rich and wealthy, but technology
also deepens the gap between the rich and the poor. It is not difficult to recognize this
paradox of technology, which is the price we must pay for development.
• It seems that the paradox is opposite to this topic mentioning the engineering and
technology can help us to solve the problem of inequality.
• Fortunately, besides the paradox, technology can really solve the inequality problem by an
indirect way. Such indirect way is education.
• Yes, technology can give studying chances to everyone at anywhere as well as bring
universities back to home, which change educational form in essence. When a person who
can obtain good knowledge as well as technology from such amazing education, she/he
can create more wealth besides moving up upper classes in society. We must accept that
society classification is motivation of development although we have to narrow distances
between classes.
• This is a miracle effect of technology when it causes two paradoxes about the inequality
as well as its indirect solution via educational key.
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3. Future of education
• Currently there are three supporting forms of education.
• Distance education with tools as online meeting (Zoom) and LMS.
• Artificial intelligence tools as ChatGPT.
• Virtual reality and augmented reality.
• Blended teaching is key teaching method.
• Open university is an intermediate step for home university in a long journey.
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4. Open university is also market, R&D department, and enterprise
• Open university is like market whose goods are knowledge, skills, techniques, and technologies.
Student is buyer and teacher is seller.
• Student is a strong attachment to open universities in a life-long studying when a graduated
student can join training programs at anytime and contribute back courses from her/his working
experiences [ref: similar to lifelong-study university], which means that student can become
naturally a teacher without employment. Teacher can become a student if she/he would like to
learn experiences from graduated students. In other words, student role and teach role are
exchanged mutually, which overcomes the viewpoint that student is center of education.
• Open university also has another kind of blending, which blends teaching and researching. I think
that the good ratio is 60% teaching and 40% learning.
• If open university is embedded into an enterprise, it will be R&D department of such enterprise.
If a company is embedded into open university, such company will be factory of open university
which can be considered as an enterprise.
• In home university: teacher, student, and open university are unified in the same entity – all in
one.
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5. Understanding is better than remembering
• Understanding is better than remembering and therefore, understanding is the compulsory step for
creative activities.
• Emotional feeling is as important as understanding and therefore, it is better than remembering,
which is also another compulsory step for creative activities, even though for technical innovations.
You think much and carefully about a problem for a long time and so you understood such problem,
but an innovative (also lucky) idea may happen in a very short time that may depend on your
emotion at that time. If you do not catch it, you will miss it.
• Forgetting is a powerful ability of human so that every child can develop in a unique way so as to
expend human knowledge. In this viewpoint and in this speech without pulverized analysis, artificial
intelligence (AI) may be an optical illusion about its preeminent intelligence over human. Even
though, in the general viewpoint, the total sum of human knowledge is still larger than any machine
knowledge.
• Therefore, amount of knowledge to teach may be so much and examinations may not be so
important, but how to measure how much to understand is a new and difficult problem. A minor
solution is to encourage students to self-study.
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6. A message to climate change
• Love and compassion are relative to human intelligence by some way that
that I still cannot understand exactly. However, of course, love and
compassion are necessary to modern education because the grained
viewpoint of home university may concern love and compassion not much
enough. Anyhow, love and compassion are related to ability of
understanding in studying. This vagueness may be illuminated by emotional
effects.
• Besides support of technology, educational training should include activities
returning nature. As a result, the concerning of climate change is to manifest
and understand love and compassion.
• Therefore, by going though many prisms, technology may help education to
recognize the importance of love.
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7. Jigsaw (puzzle) is as good as fusing
• There are many subjects/topics as well as many technologies. Because
they have some implicit or explicit connections, we cannot totally
separate them or put them into a big bag.
• For some related subjects, we can fuse them into a unified one, which
is an ideal case where their strong points are improved as much as
possible, and their drawbacks are decreased as much as possible.
• However, we can assemble them as jigsaw puzzle by joining many
pieces into a whole picture. As a result, Jigsaw (puzzle) can be as good
as fusing. In some cases, an amazing transformation may happen so
that its results may go beyond our started calculations.
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8. Thank you for listening and attention
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EduFuture - Naga - Loc Nguyen
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