Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Lumosity IV - Does Lumosity actually work
Lumosity IV
Lumosity and Instructional Technology
Instructional gaming is a field that is very much open for exploration and Lumosity can contribute a great amount of information into this field based off of the way they have combined scientific research from neuroscience and psychology and integrated those experiments into games that are fun and easy-to-access, assuming the pricing isn't a factor. If instructors apply this same approach to developing educational games, that are easy-to-access, fun, and substantiated through educational and psychological research, then, in my opinion, educational gaming would inevitably produce results that effectively aide the transfer of pertinent knowledge, and provide a fun alternative learning experience to its users. I think educational gaming researchers should take a serious look at some of the thing Lumosity has done regarding their brain training program and even looking at some of the data they have compiled can provide insight into the future of educational gaming.Now lets address the "elephant in the room..."
Does Lumosity actually work?
There are large pieces of information on the internet that would say yes, and there are equally large amounts of information on the internet that would say no. In my opinion, Lumosity was very impactful to my brain and information processing abilities. According to an article, from MD Health, (and it seems they've done their homework on Lumosity's effectiveness), Lumosity is very effective. I've included a section from an article on their website, to see the full article, I will provide the link at the end of this post.
The experts have provided the following excerpt from an article on their website...
"There are several scientific studies that lead scientists to believe that the brain training activities at Lumosity do have an effect on the brain. A study at the University of Michigan found that adults that used brain training games for a regular amount of time saw an improvement in test scores for dual attention asks and memory games in multiple tests. A similar study at Brown University also saw adults exceeding expectations in brain performance after using brain training games to aid in their work. These programs were found to boost the working memory which helps users keep track of tasks they are currently performing.
The thing to remember when analyzing these results is that they came from laboratory conditions. These adults used Lumosity games for hours every day for several months. Users that do not work on a similar schedule will not see these types of results. There is a great deal of evidence that supports the idea that brain training games can help grow and develop the mind, but not necessarily any evidence that Lumosity and the brain training games available here are more effective than other training games that are on the market elsewhere. In general, keeping the mind active and challenging your mind to learn more advanced tasks and ways of thinking are healthy and can help you perform tasks more effectively, and if Lumosity helps you accomplish this, then it can be seen as a positive asset."
http://www.md-health.com/Does-Lumosity-Work.html
Lumosity III - The Neuroscience Behind the Games
Lumosity III
This post and the post following this one are, in my opinion, the reason why Lumosity offers a lot to the field of research and development and instructional technology. This post will show examples of how Lumosity integrates neurological research into fun games that train and measure our cognitive ability.I should say that this post should be "taken with a grain of salt," because I am taking examples from Lumosity.com...
**This link provides some background to this saying for those who don't know(http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/take-with-a-grain-of-salt.html)**
For each of the three following examples I will provide a brief explanation of the scientific experiment Lumosity used to create the game.
Example 1 - The Flanker Task & the Lost in Migration Game
According to Cognitive Atlas, The Flanker Task is,"A task in which participants view stimuli (typically arrows) presented one at a time and to which they must make a simple lexical response. These stimuli are surrounded by either distracting or facilitating items. Distracting items are typically associated with an opposite response ("incongruent" = pointing in opposite direction to target stimulus), whereas facilitating items are typically associated with the same response as the target stimulus ("congruent" = pointing in the same direction as the target stimulus)."
Example 2 - Thurnstone's Punched Hole Task & the Speed Check Game
I could not find a summary of Thurnstone's Punched Holes Task so, we'll have to trust Lumosity's research....
Example 3 - The Go/No Go Task - the Robot Factory Game
According to Cognitive Atlas, The Go/ No Go Task is, "A task in which stimuli are presented in a continuous stream and participants perform a binary decision on each stimulus. One of the outcomes requires participants to make a motor response (go), whereas the other requires participants to withhold a response (no-go). Accuracy and reaction time are measured for each event. Go events typically occur with higher frequency than no-go events."
Again, take it for what its worth but Lumosity seems to have created games that are foundationally (through neuroscience and psychological studies) designed to increase your brain's ability.
Sources
http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/term/Eriksen_flanker_task
www.lumosity.com
http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/task/go/no-go_task
Lumosity II - How it Works
Lumosity II
In this post, I will be discussing how Lumosity works. This includes subscribing to Lumosity (Pricing), a breakdown of the information processing Lumosity brain trainer improves, and a few other facts about how Lumosity operates.The thing that deterred me from Lumosity, is when they began to charge for their product. It is a great program, but I'll let you be the judge if it is worth that pretty penny.
Lets assume you choose to subscribed to Lumosity for argument's sake.
You will then have to select your training program. To reiterate, Lumosity targets five of the brain's information processing abilities (Memory, Attention, Problem Solving, Speed, and Flexibility). Each of these categories are broken into four parts and prompts the user to select what they want to improve. See the memory example below (adopted from Business Insider, 2014).
After you personalize you training program to fit your needs. Lumosity will take you through three games to get a baseline and develop a Brain Performance Index (BPI). This BPI is a comprehensive measurement of how you perform on the games and is recorded to show improvement in different areas and it gives you the ability to compare your BPI to other Lumosity users.
This is a very general introduction into how Lumosity works but you can find more information view the complete Business Insider review of how Lumosity works. Follow this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/lumosity-review-2014-2?op=1
Lumosity I - Introduction
Lumosity
Introduction
I would not be as much of a believer in the power of Lumosity if I was not a member that reaped the benefits of the Lumosity brain training games. For two years (2012 and 2013) I played Lumosity games on my iPhone between 10 and 15 minutes a day at least 4 days a week. Before I delve into this Lumosity phenomenon, watch this quick promotional video that really represents the vision of Lumosity...More about Lumosity
As you can see from the video above, Lumosity is a brain training software that uses scientific research to develop games that try to increase your mind's ability process, store, and organize information if you play them. According to Lumosity, they are a personal trainer for the brain and have created over 40 games (42 clinically tested games and 15 games in progress) that target important brain processes like attention, memory, problem solving, and more. We will be looking more in-depth at these brain training games in future posts, but, first, lets look at another facet of Lumosity.Lumosity's Cognitive Training Research
Along with being the best brain training software available, Lumosity also is at the forefront of the neuroscience behind brain training. Currently, they have over 3 billion cognitive task completions recorded, partnerships with qualified researchers from 40 universities, ongoing research about cognitive processes regarding physical exercise, sleep and more, and they have a prestigious network of researchers through their Human Cognition Project. The image below that details Lumosity's Human Cognition Project is adopted from Lumosity.com, along with most of the information provided above.
Hold your horses before you subscribe to Lumosity. There are some things that you should consider before buying Lumosity, and I will discuss some of those things in future posts. As for now, most of the information above comes from Lumosity's website which can be found at www.lumosity.com
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Why did I choose Anti-Plagiarism and what is the next topic of discussion?
Why did I choose Anti-Plagiarism?
For me choosing anti-plagiarism was a chance to provide some information about the seriousness of plagiarism and I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to provide some resources for students so that they don't experience plagiarism. As a learner, a researcher, and a future instructor, I think intellectual property is something that is extremely important, this being said, it is often stolen or used without permission from the original owner. This is an unfair fact of our changing society and people should make an effort to credit the proper owner of an idea if it is not them. Choosing anti-plagiarism was a way to understand the methods, advantages, and disadvantages of using anti-plagiarism software.Where will this blog be headed with its future posts?
Being an avid video-gamer, coupled with my love for learning, and my ever-growing curiosity about the brain and all of its capabilities, the next posts will discuss a software that produces games that trains the brain's ability to process information. Lumosity was developed in 2007 and is based out of San Francisco, CA. Lumosity also does neuroscience research.
Preventing Plagiarism II - Reference and Citation Managers (Brief Overview)
Reference and Citation Managers
So, understanding plagiarism and how software like Turnitin can spot plagiarism, I think it is important to talk about references and citations to some extent so that you can give credit to the proper person when referencing his or her work. This post will discuss some different citation managers like RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley. I will even provide a resource where, if you choose to manually manage your references, will help you make sure the reference is in the proper format.What is a citation manager?
A citation manager is a software that helps you keep track of articles and books when you come across them during your research. It allows you to group them by paper, project, or year, and easily produces bibliographies in the proper formatting a paper may require. These services are not free but are often provided to students for free by most universities through their library subscriptions.How do they work?
Using RefWorks as an example, I cannot imagine the other three major software being too different, I will try to show you how these citation managers work. Sometimes, if you've never used it, you will need to download a plug-in to make sure the citation will be able to export directly into your RefWorks account. Once this is done, you will login to your account and leave it in the background, while you peruse the internet for whatever you are researching. Most scholarly resources, that are found through journals or Google scholar, have the ability to export a citation to RefWorks as soon as you look at the source. In these cases, you will export the citation and the source will be uploaded directly to your RefWorks account. If this option isn't available, then you also have the ability to enter information from a given source into RefWorks and it even provides details on how to enter the information so the bibliography will be able to be formatted into the desired format. There are some free citation managers like EasyBib but you must be careful as those managers have been criticized for producing citations in the wrong format.If you choose to manually enter citations, the following link will provide very in-depth details about how to cite, in text and bibliography style, in many different writing forms. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/
For a more thorough explanation of these citation managers and a breakdown of all the major citation managers please visit http://www.library.wisc.edu/services/citation-managers/comparison-chart/
I have used both of these methods and I'll say that once I used RefWorks to manage my citations, I have never used the manual form or any other form of citation management since.
Preventing Plagiarism I - Anti-Plagiarism Software Students Can Use
Anti-Plagiarism Resources for Students
In the previous post, I introduced you to the Robocop that is programmed to detect plagiarism in its many different forms. Well, if you are unfamiliar with those two faces up top, that is Starsky and Hutch, two undercover cops, that symbolize anti-plagiarism software that can be used by students to detect plagiarism in their own writing. There are a lot of programs that can be used, in fact Turnitin has a program called WriteCheck, that not only checks for plagiarism, but will also check for grammatical errors and professional tutoring services that will give you feedback on your work.
Like Turnitin, WriteCheck is very pricy and probably wouldn't fit the budget of most high school and college students. That being said this list of Top 10 Free Anti-Plagiarism Software, adopted from Michael Pappas (2013), eLearning Industry (current as of October 2015), can be helpful to you while you are in the final revision phases of writing your research papers.
Top 10 Free Anti-Plagiarism Software Students Can Use
- DupliChecker
- Pros:
- 100% free.
- Extremely easy to use.
- Has the options of copy-pasting the text, entering the URL of the content destination required to be checked, or uploading a text file.
- Registered users can perform 50 searches per day.
- Cons:
- Unregistered users can perform only 1 search per day.
- Paid Version:
- Not available.
- CopyLeaks
- Pros:
- Offers entire website plagiarism scan.
- Finds content duplication in more that 60 trillion pages over the internet.
- Support of multiple file formats in any language.
- CopyLeaks API allows you to integrate CopyLeaks service and include it as part of your product.
- Cons:
- Only for online content.
- You need to create an account to use it.
- Paid Version:
- Free of charge at the moment, will soon add premium subscription to the service.
- PaperRater
- Pros:
- Offers 3 tools: Grammar checking, plagiarism detection, and writing suggestions.
- It is developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students.
- Readability statistics.
- Title validation.
- Cons:
- Cannot save reports.
- Paid version:
- Accepts longer documents (up to 6000 words).
- Faster processing.
- No banner ads.
- Ability to upload documents.
- $7.95/mo (with annual payment).
- Plagiarisma
- Pros:
- Offers a free download of plagiarism software for Windows.
- 190+ languages supported.
- Searches website content from a URL.
- Cons:
- The report is for exact matches only.
- The Synonymizer tool (rewrites sentences with synonyms to generate unique text) facilitates plagiarism.
- Even when registered you cannot scan documents for more than 3 times per day.
- Paid version:
- Unlimited plagiarism checker with task scheduler.
- Starts at $5.00 per month.
- PlagiarismChecker
- Pros:
- 100% free.
- Easy and detailed instructions.
- Ideal for educators to check whether a student's paper has been copied from the internet.
- The "Author" option allows for checking if others have plagiarized your work online.
- Does not require any download or installation.
- Cons:
- It searches phrases separately, which means that you need to hit "Enter" after each phrase.
- Paid Version:
- Not available.
- Plagium
- Pros:
- Very easy to use (via copy paste).
- Scans up to 5,000 words at a time.
- Perfect for a quick search on the web or social media.
- Cons:
- Free features are limited (e.g. you need to pay to upload files).
- Paid Version:
- From $0.004 to $0.08 USD by 1,000 characters for Quick search, Deep search, File search, or Alert.
- PlagScan
- Pros:
- Updates you about the progress continuously.
- Does not require any download or installation.
- Cons:
- Scan is limited to 1000 at a time.
- Rather complicated interface.
- Paid Version:
- Variable plans for private users, schools, universities, and companies.
- PlagTracker
- Pros:
- Very quick to scan more than 20 million academic works for any plagiarized copy.
- Clear instructions on how to use it.
- Offers report with details about your work.
- Cons:
- Not 100% accurate; you may need to use an extra plagiarism detection tool to make sure your content is authentic (note: Never check through only one service anyhow).
- Paid Version:
- Checks a larger database of documents.
- Grammar check.
- $14.99 USD per month.
- Quetext
- Pros:
- 100% free.
- Easy to use interface.
- Unlimited usage without having to create an account or download software.
- Cons:
- You cannot upload files, only copy and paste text.
- Paid Version:
- Not available.
- Viper
- Pros:
- 100% free.
- Scans your document through more than 10 billion resources such as academic essays and other online sources.
- Offers side-by-side comparisons for plagiarism.
- Scans against essays on your computer.
- Cons:
- Requires a download.
- Is available to Microsoft Windows users only.
- Paid Version:
- Not available.
In the next post, I will discuss some tools that are extremely helpful in managing resources and citations....
Turnitin - Advantages and Disadvantages
Turnitin
A more detailed look into this system...
Just doing a quick recap, so far, we have looked at what plagiarism is, some facts and statistics to show that we are talking about something that is important, and in the last post we introduced what anti-plagiarism software is and we briefly discussed a few details about Turnitin. In this post, I will be assessing the advantages and disadvantages of using Turnitin. Before I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Turnitin, I will first discuss how it works.How does Turnitin work?
Schools, high schools and universities, subscribe to Turnitin services as a resource that instructors can use to evaluate work. It is used in courses that have a lot of written assignments, like writing, history, philosophy, etc. When Turnitin is used in a class, students will submit their papers to a Turnitin link through blackboard, or sites similar to blackboard. Turnitin will then give the paper a score based off of the amount of identical phrases that match with articles in their database.Advantages
The advantages that are listed comes from the view of someone who would purchase Turnitin services (an institution, instructor, or student). It should also be noted that these advantages were found in two articles produced by Turnitin. Nonetheless, these advantages include, but are not limited to the following:- It makes spotting plagiarism easy
- It has an ever-growing database
- It reduces grading time
- It increases student engagement
- It improves the quality of feedback
- It provides other services like PeerCheck, GradeCheck, and WriteChek which help give more meaningful feedback on papers
- It provides free training on how to use its software
Disadvantages
There has been a lot of unease and legal issues regarding Turnitin. The legal issues stem from Turnitin saving the student paper's that are submitted to it, regardless of having the rights to it or not. The disadvantages were found in an article by Luke Arnott (2009) and Bensal, Miraflores, and Tan (2013). These disadvantages include:- Essays receiving high plagiarism rating, with proper citation, due to long quotes.
- It cannot prompt students to cite information that needs credibility
- It cannot check citation styles (APA, MLA, etc.)
- It confuses some original thoughts that are similar to thoughts in its database and labels it as plagiarism
In the next two posts, I will be posting things that will help students avoid plagiarizing any of their work. Specifically, I will discuss anti-plagiarism software that students can use to detect plagiarism in their own works, and I will provide a brief introduction into how to manage references and some tools to help do this.
SOURCES
https://suite.io/luke-arnott/1pzb20r (Arnott, 2009)http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/421-general/2034-survey-finds-turnitin-saves-time-and-improves-feedback
7 Things Educators Should Know About Turnitin
Plagiarism: Should we Turnitin? (Bensal, Miraflores, and Tan, 2013)
Anti-Plagairism Software, Robocop, and Turnitin
Anti-Plagiarism
Being the great humanitarian that I am, I am going to begin posting about some things we, as students, can do to avoid those awful punishments and I'll even be discussing some citation tools that will manage all of your resources when writing papers and will even produce a bibliography or reference page in the format that you need! Those posts will be a little later, but this post will discuss anti-plagiarism and some anti-plagiarism software.
First, it should be noted that anti-plagiarism software can be your best friend or your worst enemy as a student. so, what is anti-plagiarism software? According to PcMag anti-plagiarism software is, "Software that searches the Web for duplicate textual content. It may be a stand-alone program installed in the user's computer or a function of a Web site, such as www.turnitin.com. Universities increasingly use anti-plagiarism software to determine if students have copied someone else's prose, and writers use it to see if others are using their copyrighted work in full or in part."
This is a comprehensive definition of anti-plagiarism and it even introduced the first anti-plagiarism software that we will discuss, Turnitin.
Turnitin is like the Robocop of anti-plagiarism software and can detect plagiarism in most forms. (Get this: The creator of plagiarism.org, the site that provided the plagiarism facts and stats in the last post, is a co-founder of Turnitin. His name is John Barrie) They're so specific that they even have broken down plagiarizers into 10 different categories and sell products to high schools and universities to detect plagiarism, according to information on their website (www.turnitin.com). Their plagiarism department, called originality check, runs papers through a massive database that includes over 24 billion webpages, 250 million student archived papers, and 120 million articles from journals, periodicals and books. Turnitin also provides paper reviewing service through GradeMark and PeerMark. For this information and more, please visit this brilliant article that gives you the skinny on Turnitin and how it works http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/spring2013_special_issue/Vie/history.html
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