On Monday evening last week, I went up to London for ‘Hide and Speak’, a series of short talks about pervasive games organised by the fab folk from Hide and Seek.

Alex Fleetwood talked about the Playmakers project that, funded by NESTA, is making a brand new pervasive game. They are currently going through various iterations of playtesting and the whole process being filmed by ThinkPublic. You can see the first film that they have made on the project website.

The basic concept behind the game is that teams of players are given a video camera and have to film various targets to get points, while avoiding being filmed by the other teams. At the end all the films are screened simultaneously and scored, which as Alex pointed out makes sure that the game has a definite feeling of conclusion. The general idea has proved to be fun for players, but with the problem that those not controlling the camera can feel left out. It’s an interesting problem to solve, and I have to confess that I spent most of the next talk thinking about it. I must try and make it along to one of the playtests at some point too.

Another talk that made an impact on me was Gethan Dick’s about participatory art and the problem of how to make people produce good stuff. She asked us to draw a chair and discuss how the experience made us feel. She repeated this, asking us in turn to draw a specific chair she put on the table in front of us, to draw it with the hand that we don’t usually draw with and finally to also draw it without taking the pencil off the paper. Here is the end result of the final set of drawings:

Gethan talked about the importance of constraints. She didn’t specifically mention the use of constraints to reduce anxiety but I think that was one of the important lessons from the exercise she gave us. Drawing a specific chair with my left hand was certainly a far more comfortable experience than being told to just draw a chair.

I think there’s some relevance here to education and I was reminded me of some research that I read about once where giving students a choice of essay questions resulted in worse essays than if there was no choice. You can imagine that if you are designing optional online discussion activities for a course, then constraining those activities in such a way to both reduce anxiety and the paralysing effect of too much choice might make a big difference to engagement.

I also enjoyed listening to James Wallis talking about designing for the emergence of stories in games as opposed to actually putting stories into them. One of the things I have always found odd about the perennial ludology-narratology debate is the general lack of discussion of the distinction between story and fictional setting, two very different things. James talk related to this and he made the interesting point that for stories to ‘arise’ you need three elements: context, archetypes and gameplay. He also gave a quick example of how he would have changed a particular pervasive game, Journey to the End of the Night, to work better in this regard, and it was good to see how his theory might be applied in practice.

Holly Gramazio concluded the evening with a great talk on things that can go wrong when running pervasive games. Besides being extremely amusing, there were some great practical advice on everything from how to stop players looking like criminals to the problem of players leaving partway through a game. Hopefully, she will share the talk somewhere, as it’d be really useful for folk new to making games. (As an aside, because I have been reading lots of papers on patterns lately, I couldn’t help thinking that though the contents could be presented in the form of a pattern language, I’m sure they would have lost rather than gained by such a formulation).

Posted on Sunday 7 June 2009

The novelists I know are all voracious readers. The game designers constantly talk about the recent games that they have played. I am pretty sure this isn’t an accident. So it might be natural to expect that if somebody is going to be good at designing learning experiences that they’d spend lots of time going through learning experiences themselves. This has been at the back of my mind for a while, and I was reminded about by Kathy Sierra’s tweet today about these wonderful photos of where science-fiction authors write as well as by being a part-time student at the moment and the way that it is so easy to forget quite what it is like to be a student.

It’s naturally not quite as easy to take a full-blown course as it is to read a novel or play a game. The commitment is much bigger, you have to accept the power relationship involved in being a student, and you can only experience learning something for the first time once. This doesn’t mean that you won’t learn an enormous amount about designing learning experiences from being a student again (in fact I think the OU’s fee waiver scheme for staff is a really smart move in terms of improving the quality of its courses generally) but there are also going to be limits in terms of exposure to formal learning experiences at least.

I think this relates to representations of learning designs, because I suspect that one major use for them is allow people to at least get a little bit of a sense of what it is like to experience the design, to help build up that gradual bank of experiences of learning designs just slightly. In fact, when you show representations of learning designs to people, one of the most common reactions you get is a longing to see exactly what things are like from the student perspective. People want to see the exact instructions that are given to students for example and to imagine themselves doing the course.

So I think we need to bear this is mind when thinking about different types of purposes of representations of learning designs. Learning design representations don’t need to be about collaboration, reuse or inspiration but can just be a way to allow people to at least in a very partial manner, experience more learning designs than would otherwise be possible.

Posted on Sunday 31 May 2009

The last two weeks of this block were on the topic of ethnography and its use in virtual settings. Week 13 had two readings:  Hammersley, M. (2006) ‘Ethnography: problems and prospects’, Ethnography and Education, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3–1 and Wittel, A. (2000) ‘Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet’. These two papers covered many of the same themes so I shall discuss them together.

The obvious place to start is with the debate on the meaning of the term ethnography. For Hammersley, the key dimensions of ethnography are (a) the emphasis on firsthand study and (b) the tension between participant and analytic perspectives. Wittel offers a slightly different view with the notion that as well as ethnography being about the presence of the researcher, that ethnography is about revealing context and complexity via looking at people in their natural environment. He uses Geertz’s term ‘thick description’ when talking about this.

It is difficult to discuss ethnograpy without talking about its roots in anthropology. For anthropologists, ethnography usually refers to going to a specific geographical location and studying the culture of the society there. However, as Wittel points out, cultural boundaries have become less simple with networks based on ‘political locations’ and ‘virtual locations’ now being places where culture can exist. This has implications on how a researcher divides their time and on negotiating access. One thing I am not clear about is the extent to which ethnography is intrinsically about understanding culture or whether one can use it as a means to investigate different types of research questions. Hammersley also contrasts sociological and anthropological approaches to ethnography in terms of level and duration of contact. Possible problems with lower contact levels and shorter durations for research can mean a failure to notice temporal changes and cycles as well as false assumptions being made about the relevance of context outside that being studied.

This naturally leads us into the issue of the context that you should locate your research in. Do you take a very local micro-ethnographic approach or try to look at things more holistically taking wider society into account? If you aim for the latter, then you face the various thorny questions discussed in Hammersley’s paper relating to how you decide on and study the context to consider. Defining the appropriate context as that which the participants think is relevant relies on participants being able to analyse their context in a detached and analytic way, but when you try and study the overall social context, you find yourself having to pick a social theory to use thus throwing away the theoretical neutrality of ethnography. To say that the choice of context is necessarily arbitrary is also unsatisfactory as it suggests that trying to understanding the impact of context is a futile activity, rather at odds to the idea of doing research. My own view is that it is the job of the researcher to try and figure out what context is important and what is not, present an appropriate argument for their decision and to allow people to critique that and provide evidence to the contrary.

Hammersley also talks about the role of interviews in ethnography, discussing the ‘radical critique’ of interviews - that what people say in interviews always ‘socio-discursively constructed in a context-sensitive fashion’. I think this means that what people say fundamentally depends on their social context. The problem I have with this type of view is that taken to its logical extreme, you deny the possibility of ever trying to understand the world better because you can never know anything for absolute certain. Hammersley discusses the fact that this view leads you in one of two directions - either relying totally on observational data or essentially just conducting discourse analysis on interview transcripts, removing the idea of the genuine participant perspective so crucial to ethnography.

All of this leads on to discussing virtual ethnography and the question of whether ethnography depends on the physical presence of the researcher. This is clearly related to the former ideas about what context is important for an ethnographer to study. So for example, both Hammersley and Wittel put forward the argument that it is hard to validate information about the real life of people online.

I have to admit that I don’t have any problems with idea of virtual ethnography - if a culture exists almost entirely online, then you will probably learn much about it by studying it solely online. However, I also think that observing or talking to participants in real-life too may enable you to glean much that you wouldn’t otherwise. It seemed odd to me that both authors appeared to assume that this was an impossibility.

The real danger I think is in thinking that the boundaries between the online and real are clear-cut. Even online, things are often more complex that you might at first think. There’s a lovely description of this in T.L. Taylor’s book ‘Play Between Worlds’ for anybody who hasn’t experienced this firsthand. Wittel also mentions the problem briefly in his paper. I somehow, perhaps falsely (and it may just be datedness), got the impression that both authors had a rather simplistic view of people’s online lives, without a real appreciation for how rich and ‘life-like’ they can be. I have just been reading Chapter 2 (‘Choose your own ethnography’ of danah boyd’s PhD thesis ‘Taken out of context’ and although I am still taking it all in, it was interesting to read about the issues in approaching such ethnography from a more practical perspective.

The reading for Week 14, Browne, E. (2003) ‘Conversations in cyberspace: a study of online learning’, Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 245–59, illustrated an ethnographic approach to studying twelve studying for an online Master in Education. This course used a VLE-like system and the study involved observing the online discussion, interviewing the staff involved in the course and questionnaire. The paper then used Laurillard’s four categories of interactivity, adapativity, discussion and reflexivity for analysis. I must admit I have reservations about whether the approach is genuinely ethnographic, but I have to write about this paper for our next assignment, so I will save my energy discussing that for then.

I think I do need to go away and look at more ethnographic work of a virtual or digital nature to decide exactly what I think - in particular I must see if there are any good ethnographic studies of World of Warcraft or open source communities. Overall, I do find ethnographic approaches interesting. I think you can capture things through them that you would otherwise easily miss, but that it might be too easy to do ethnographic work that lacks insight but to feel that you should share it because of the effort involved (and with hard-to-access societies I can see there might be some point of this).

However objective you attempt to remain, immersion is going to divorce you from the possibilities of seeing things through the eyes of somebody who hasn’t been immersed in a culture. I can’t for example imagine trying to do an ethnographic study of this course and claim real objectivity - the emotional aspects of doing the course, especially when it comes to assessment, get in the way too much. However, I could probably say richer and more interesting things about it than somebody who say interviewed a few of the students on the course. So I suspect there is a trade-off and I think the sacrifice involved in ethnographic research is probably one often worth making. I would compare it to reading a novel to interviewing people who have read the novel for instance.

There do seem to be practical issues though. The time involved in ethnographic studies is not very compatible with the way the pace of this area of academia, and there is also the question of acceptablity - I get the impression that ethnographic studies are still rare in educational technology. That’s a big investment to make if you are not sure that people are going to appreciate the results.

Posted on Saturday 23 May 2009

Two more papers to read this week, this time about observing and recording online activity. The first was Davies, J. and Graff, M. (2005) ‘Performance in e-learning: online participation and student grades’, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 657–63. This examined the question of whether online interaction leads to better grades by looking at the performance of first year business studies students and their quantity of VLE activity according to the VLE logs. Their results could very roughly be summarised as finding little difference in usage between students with high and medium grades, but a more marked difference between students with high/medium grades and those with low/failing grades.

However, part of our next assignment is to critique this paper, so as I shall have to write at length about it for that, I am going to concentrate on the second paper here. This was Cox, R. (2007) ‘Technology-enhanced research: educational ICT systems as research instruments’, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 337–56. The focus of this paper was to argue for a process-analytic approach to researching learning using fine-grained recordings of students’ behaviour as the basis.

The paper illustrated this approach with three case studies:

1. switchER - software to help teach analytic reasoning skills of the type tested by GRE questions in the US. The package provided support for constructing representations of such problems, allowing the user to switch between different representations. Screen recording software was used here to discover that there were two different types of representations switching performed by students, referred to as ‘thrashing’ and ‘judicious switching’ by the authors respectively. The information obtained was used to improve the software by giving feedback on the accuracy of representations and suggesting the student switch representations when appropriate.
2. Hyperproof - software for teaching first-order logic. By keeping detailed interaction logs with two groups of students attending a ten-week course using the software, the researchers discovered two different learning styles, both apparently equally effective. Some students were ‘translators’ using the software to translate between its two different modalities (graphical and sentential) while others were ‘unimodal’ with a strong preference for one of the modes.
3. PATSy - software for case-studied based disciplines especially in the health sciences, enabling students to consult the multimedia database and conduct virtual tests on the patients. In this case the researchers studied pairs of students taking part in ‘task-directed discussion exercises’. Data included software logs, videos of the pairs of students, screen capture and students responses to text-answer questions in the case studies which were added to the logs. Again, this data was used to improve the software, monitoring the interactions of students and intervening if appropriate.

I enjoyed reading about the studies, but I’m not quite sure exactly what to take away from this paper, other than a reminder that such techniques can be powerful and are worth considering when developing. It brings to mind usability testing of websites and the work I did on processing Moodle logs to make it easier to see the paths that students have taken through the site.  There were a couple of references in this paper though that I think might be worth following up - one by Chi on a method for analysing qualitative data objectively, and the work of Anderson on modelling student behaviour.

The notes for this week also included more discussion on the different types of way that new technology can change how research is done, and went onto to discuss the concept of objectivity, which the notes pointed out is not as clearly defined as you might think. I rather liked the following quote by Phillips included in the notes:

It turns out, then, that what is crucial for the objectivity of any inquiry – whether it is qualitative or quantitative – is the critical spirit in which it has been carried out. And, of course, this suggests that there can be degrees; for the pursuit of criticism and refutation obviously can be carried out more or less seriously. ‘Objectivity’ is the label – the ‘stamp of approval’ – that is used for inquiries that are at one end of the continuum.

Posted on Sunday 17 May 2009

Last week we started the third and final block of H809 on research methods, and in particular ‘new’ research methods.

The notes for Week 11 categorised research methods into four groups: observation, documents, interview and experiment. These fall on a spectrum based on how interventionist they are in nature. Very few research methods are new in the sense of not belonging to one of these categories, but may use for instance new communication media to interview people or new technology to observe people in ways not previously possible.

I enjoyed the two podcasts this week. The first of these was  which was a conversation between Alan Woodley and Adam Joinson. This concentrated on the differences between paper and web-based surveys. There were lots of interesting points mentioned. People score lower on social desirability measures (and seemingly higher on anxiety measures) on web-based surveys than the paper equivalent. However it’s not clear whether this is due to the impact of the media or differences in sample. Although web-based samples will obviously have biases, the samples for many papers surveys are often questionable being based on students handed surveys in lectures: Adam pointed out that psychology is sometimes known as the ‘science of the sophomore’.

There was also discussion about shifts in how candid people are in online surveys. Ten or so years ago, people were more candid online, but there seems to be a shift here as people have begun to realise that online survey data, though possibly confidential, is not necessarily anonymous. The other issue raised was that of response rates to surveys, which have apparently been dropping universally. This may be the result of increased privacy concerns, but could also be cause by a change in attitude regarding the idea of completing surveys being something one does for the public good.  The podcast went on to cover how researchers might enable participants more participation in the research process and the balance that needs to be struck between humanising the research process in a bid to increase response rates and the resultant possible biases such an an increase in socially desirable responses.

We were given two readings this week. The first was Bos, N., Olson, J., Gergle, D., Olson, G. and Wright, Z. (2002) ‘Effects of four computer-mediated communications channels on trust development’ in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Changing Our World, Changing Ourselves, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2002, New York, NY, ACM. This described a lab experiment comparing groups using different communication media playing a social dilemma game called Daytrader (a Prisoner’s Dilemma type game). The four types of media were face-to-face, video conference, phone conference and instant messaging. The biggest gap in terms of trust as measured by the game and questionnaires was between the instant messaging group and the others. However the trust in the video conference and audio conference groups appeared more delayed and more fragile than that in the face-to-face groups.

The second paper was Joinson, A. and Reips, U-D. (2007) ‘Personalized salutation, power of sender and response rates to Web-based surveys’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 1372–83. This looked at the impact of the salutation on e-mail survey panel invites on response rates, and also on the impact of the status of the person who the invite was from. Three separate studies were carried out based on mailings to large numbers of Open University students. One interesting part was experimenting with the invites to leave the panel to see if the change in salutation just made a difference to whether the e-mail was read or the actual behaviour in terms of participation.

The next topic covered was the distinction between validity and reliability. Whereas reliability is about whether you can consistently achieve the same results using methods, validity is about whether your methods tell you what you claim they do. There’s quite a nice article here on the difference and on the different types of validity. Essentially ‘conclusion validity’ is about whether your results actually show there is some relationship between two variables, ‘internal validity’ is about whether the relationship is causal rather than just a correlation, ‘external validity’ is about how well the results generalise to other contexts and ‘construct validity’ is whether your results actually tell you what you are claiming they do (so in the Bos et al paper for instance, do the results of the social dilemma game actually tell us anything about the concept of trust?)

We were also asked to find out about the Hawthorne Effect, related to the idea that research participants behave differently because they know they are being studied. We were referred to quite an illuminating article by Olsen (Olson, R., Hogan, L. and Santos, L. (2006) ‘Illuminating the history of psychology: tips for teaching students about the Hawthorne studies’, Psychology Learning and Teaching, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 110–18) discussing the actual Hawthorne studies and how the results of them have commonly been misinterpreted.

Finally, the second podcast for this week featured Alan Woodley and John Richardson discussing the peer review process. Having reviewed papers and having been surrounded by the academic world for a good deal of my life, I felt fairly familiar with the peer review process. Nonetheless it was still great to have a rare chance to hear about it from somebody who has far much more experience of it than I do.

Posted on Sunday 10 May 2009

Lead Blizzard Dev outlines 9 WoW quest problems

Lots of these observations on quest design in World of Warcraft are really relevant to education. More on Jeffrey Kaplan’s GDC talk on WoW Insider too.

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London

Wow - looks like you’ll soon be able to buy any book you want from certain bookshops. Amazed this didn’t get more publicity.

Crowdsourced Usability Testing

Really interesting idea, crowdsourcing Drupal 7 usability by providing suggesting scripts to use.

What went wrong? Learning from postmortems

Brandon Sheffield has trawled through all the Gamasutra postmortems from the last three years to find the most common mistakes.

Tricki now fully live

More collaboration in the world of mathematics from Tim Gowers.

Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad?

New Scientist article suggesting that problems with sleep may cause mental problems not the other way round, possibly providing a route to treating disorders such as depression.

Generalizing from one example

I remember that point that it hit me that my friends couldn’t be typical. It was when I was at university and I noticed that none of my friends smoked. But some people don’t have mental images? Woah.

Anthropology - The Art of Building a Successful Social Site

Article about the design of StackOverflow

Why isn’t money points?

Raph Koster on game design and the fact that we value things we can’t make choices about.

Games Studies Download 4.0

Annual summary of games research that might be useful for developers.

Richard Bartle’s IMGDC Keynote (PDF)

On designing MMOGs

What if scientists didn’t compete?

Heartening tale.

The World’s New Numbers

It hadn’t sunk in for me quite what impact changes in demographics can have on history and society

How will the think tanks work?

Estonia is a country to watch.

Turn Off the Radio, Turn on the Lights

Managing the LiveJournal community

Tweenbots

Awwww!

Peter Molyneux: The Essence of Interaction

Interview with Peter Molyneux about Lionhead’s approach to making games.

Posted on Sunday 10 May 2009

This should be last H809 blog post for a while!

Week 9 had just one reading that I rather enjoyed: Jonassen, D. and Rohrer-Murphy, L. (1999) ‘Activity theory as a framework for designing constructivist learning environments’, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 61–79.

The paper started with a long summary of activity theory, discussing how it is based on the assumption that there is a ‘unity of consciousness and activity’ or ‘a dynamic relationship between consciousness and activity’ so that conscious learning emerges from activity rather than leading to it. I am struggling to figure out exactly what this means. For starters, I don’t think the paper makes it clear what counts as an activity. Is reading a book or solving a mathematical problem in your head an activity? I am also wondering if it is actually trying to say that the only sensible way to define consciousness is as the activity of thinking? Or maybe that we only learn when we strive to attain goals? And does it imply that knowledge states do not exist or just that we shouldn’t try and study them because there is no sensible way to?

Nevertheless, I think activity theory is still useful even if we ignore the assumptions that it is based on. It essentially says that to do research, you should study activities and their context. Activities consist of a hierarchy of actions which in turn are chains of operations. Activities become actions and then operations as they become more automatic. We can then examine the context of an activity by looking at the following factors and the relationships between them, usually illustrated in a triangular diagram:

• Subject - who is engaged in the activity, this can be a group
• Object  - the physical or mental product that the activity seeks to achieve
• Goal - what the activity seeks to achieve
• Tools - anything that mediates the production of the object, this can be physical or mental
• Rules - rules and customs negotiated by the community
• Community -  the community in which the activity takes place
• Division of Labour - assignment of people to activities

Together all of these are known as an activity system. I see the factors as things that you should make sure that you look at if you want to understand the context in which an activity happens, and that if you haven’t examined each of these, you probably haven’t grasped the context properly. As well as these factors, there is also an emphasis in activity theory on understanding the history of the situation and how it has evolved over time. I think activity theory can perhaps be seen as an extension of social-cultural theory from the previous week which essentially treated the subject and tools as the sole object of study.

The paper goes on to describe an approach to building constructivist learning environments based on activity theory. The rough idea is that you base the environment on an authentic activity system in which the goal relates to what you want the students to learn. You then analyse that authentic activity in six stages - clarifying the purpose of the activity system, analysing the activity system using each of the factors above apart from tools, analysing the activity structure as activities/actions/operations, analysing the tools and mediators, analysing contextual bounds and finally analysing activity system dynamics (i.e. how the components affect eachother). For each of these stages, the paper gives the type of questions that you are trying to answer and the outcomes that you might expect. The authors emphasise that this is a slow process!

Once you have this information, you design your learning environment with the following components:

• Problem-Project Space: the presentation of the goal from the activity system (which should be authentic, engaging and ill-structured) and the context in terms of the tools, object, community, rules and division of labour. The idea here is to replicate or simulate the natural context.
• Related Cases, to try and replicate the experiences that experts might draw on
• Relevant Information Resources
• Cognitive Tools: a replication the information tools in the activity system e.g. visualisation or modelling tools
• Conversation and Collaboration Tools: means of online communication with other learners

I think this is quite an interesting approach to designing the learning environment, with the caveat that I don’t see it working in all contexts.

For instance, trying to think how you would apply this to pure mathematics, your first major challenge would be to pick a suitable problem. Your bigger goals as a mathematician are things like ‘advance knowledge in a particular area of mathematics’, ‘get more publications’ or ‘find a good research problem’ and I’m not convinced that problems like that will work because they are so difficult. A more precise problem that nobody has managed to solve yet isn’t likely to get you far, whereas if you give students an already-solved problem, they will stumble on the solution as they research the area.

The other major issue is that the information resources would be massive and take you several years and lots of support to work through. Although if you are willing to assume that your students already have a high level of mathematical knowledge and ability, and don’t mind if most folk get nowhere with the problems (which might be difficult if you need to assess the students in some way), then this type of approach might be possible. I had two summer jobs as a student at different institutions after my second and third years as an undergraduate, and both threw me into trying to do genuine pure mathematics research.

Posted on Wednesday 8 April 2009

Again we had two readings in Week 8 and the issue of context rearing its head again.

The first reading was Tolmie, A. (2001) ‘Examining learning in relation to the contexts of use of ICT’, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 235–41. This paper makes the argument that the introduction of technology rarely has a straightforward impact and calls for more context-sensitivity in research. Three examples of the effect of context was given:

1. A study of secondary school pupils working in pairs with a physics simulation. The type of dialogue between the pairs appeared to depend largely on the gender combination of the pairing, plausibly the result of previously established patterns of gender interaction
2. A comparison of two groups of postgraduate Educational Psychology students collaborating on joint seminar papers on the same course. The extent and way in which the two groups used technology differed, at least in part because one group had concerns about the reliability of the online conferencing system based on previous experiences of it.
3. An activity in which children provided with a certain type of support during a scientific investigation did better at ‘on-task performance’ but equally well in a pre-test/post-test comparison. The suggestion was made that the task provided implicit cues that helped the students without the support in the post-test.

Tolmie also remarked that context should not be regarded as ‘noise’ to be controlled since emergent uses of technology from particular contexts may be of value. He also argues that as no single software design will satisfy all contexts, the purpose of context-sensitive evaluations should be not to inform developers of software but to help provide guidelines for users of the software as to how to take context into account. Unfortunately he doesn’t say anything about what should alternatively inform developers!

The treatment of context by the second paper, Crook, C. and Dymott, R. (2005) ‘ICT and the literacy practices of student writing’ in Monteith, M. (ed.) Teaching Secondary School Literacies with ICT, Maidenhead, Open University Press, was rather different. This was a paper was about the relationship between undergraduate writing and technology. The authors emphasised the complex nature of writing as a system of activities and the idea that writing should be regarded as a cultural practive.

Crook and Dymott put forward the view that we should be studying the use of technology in authentic contexts, with authentic goals and motivations, and that we need to consider the ‘individual-acting-with-mediational-means’ as the unit of study and examine processes not outcomes. In particular, we should resist the temptation to isolate elements of context as independent variables in an experimental manner. It does not make sense to try to understand the ‘effect of technology on writing’  and we should not expect to be able to generalise in that way.

The authors go on to describe their findings on the relationship between technology and undergraduate writing (using research methods such as diaries, interviews and analysis of computer logs) by looking at writing from the various angles:

1. Text on the screen e.g. looking at how students manipulate documents on-screen and on paper and how students make notes on text sources

2. Text on the network e.g. looking at the temporal elements of writing, student multitasking and use of online resources, and the relationship between technology and the location of writing

3. Text as electronic traffic e.g. looking how students converse about their writing during the process of writing

4. Text and the website: e.g. looking at how students share their writing and the relationship between technology and audience

The course notes contrast the two papers in terms of the idea of where learning is situated. In the Tolmie paper, there is the implicit idea that learning is situated in the individual surrounded by a context that has an effect on them.  On the other hand the Crook and Dymott paper takes the stance that writing and technology are intertwined and that it is wrong to try and look for causes and effects.

The course notes also discuss socio-cultural theory. This considers learning to be

• mediated i.e. all learning is mediated by cultural artefacts (which include mental representations)
• distributed i.e. defined as participation in a mediated activity, not as a private mental process or ‘learning outcome’, so learning is distributed over the mediating artefacts
• situated i.e. will differ depending on the cultural mediating artefacts available

Like much of the course at the moment, I am still trying to clarify my thoughts here. I agree that learning should ideally be researched in authentic contexts and that if we want to understand learning we need to look at the processes not just at the outcomes. I think too that socio-cultural theory may be useful in terms of making us consider whether mental representations for instance might be cultural in nature.

I am worried though that some of the other distinctions might more linguistic than semantic. Is a private mental process just the same thing as ‘mental activity mediated by cultural mental representations’? What does it mean for learning to be located somewhere? What is the difference between something having an effect on something else and having a relationship with it? I don’t feel that I can satisfactorily answer these questions yet. The whole idea of totally ignoring the outcome of learning also niggles me. For example, there’s a difference between being able to ride a bicycle and not being able to ride a bicycle. It’s not a totally binary difference but it’s near enough. If we want to help people learn to ride a bicycle then not distinguishing between these two eventual outcomes is going to make it a bit difficult I would have thought.

I am also not sure that I completely understand the different in research approach in say the situation with groups in the Tolmie course compared with the approach in the Crook and Dymott paper. Both are authentic and looking at processes, so is it just how the research findings are described or is it more than that? If Crook and Dymott were to research the same groups in the same course, how would they have done it differently?

Posted on Tuesday 7 April 2009

The second reading for Week 7 of H809 was Jones, A. and Preece, J. (2006) ‘Online communities for teachers and lifelong learners: a framework for comparing similarities and identifying differences in communities of practice and communities of interest’, International Journal of Learning Technology, vol. 2, no. 2–3, pp. 112–37.

A comment by my colleague Chris Douce on my last post made me postulate that there might be essentially two types of theories related to educational research:

1. Frameworks. These are theories that could be considered tools to help researchers by giving them a language to use to discuss their research or lenses through which to look at educational activities and contexts to help them conceptualise or analyse them.
2. Learning theories. These actually tell us something about the nature of learning or help us design contexts for learning.

The latter might inform the former, but probably not the other way round. A theoretical perspective for a researcher would be their choice of framework, whereas for a teacher, it would be their choice of learning theory.

All this is a precursor to the fact that the paper above describes a framework to help researchers by providing a set of angles from which to examine online communities (or blended communities with face-to-face as well as online interaction).  The authors explain the framework with two case studies: a bulletin board for knee injury patients and an EU-funded community of Dublin science teachers who meet regularly face-to-face.

The term online community is defined in the paper as ‘a group of people who come together for a particular purpose or to satisfy particular needs; they are guided by formal and/or informal policies and supported by computing technology‘. The distinction is also made between a community of interest and a community of practice, with a community of interest being based around a broad interest and generally being more inorganic, informal and open than a community of practice.

The proposed framework relates to Preece’s ’sociability and usability framework’ although I am not sure of the exact relation as I have still to unearth a copy of the book by Preece in which it is described, so it may be identical or an elaboration of that framework. The term sociability ‘is concerned with the social interaction that community members have with each other via computing technology’ and the focus of the paper was on the sociability rather than usability side as evidence from previous research had shown that unlike usability needs, sociability needs differ across communities.

There are three components and six factors in the framework, which the authors contend are useful for researchers to examine in relation to sociability.

The three components are:

• people
• purpose
• policies

and the six factors are:

• participation, non-participation and reciprocity
• empathy and trust
• etiquette
• social presence
• communication and common ground
• collaboration and competition

The paper did not really make a case why these components and factors were chosen, although the authors do say that the list is not necessarily exhaustive. One can see that they are all things that might vary from community to community and the online thing that I can think instantly that might be missing is identity formation as a factor.

The illustrative application of the framework seems to be to that by showing how the two communities differ in terms of it, we can see that not all successful communities function in the same way. This made me wonder how one might characterise a successful online community as I think I could recognise one but I am not sure how. I think too that what really interests me is why some communities are more successful than others. Would this framework be useful in researching that? You might have to delve deeper into some elements than the paper does in the case study, but that it could be a good starting point.

Posted on Monday 6 April 2009

The second part of Week 7 was two readings. The first of these was Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J. (2004) ‘Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design’, Computers & Education, vol. 43, nos. 1–2, pp. 17–33.

The aim of this paper was to simplify the multitude of different learning theories to a level where they are more useful for informing practitioners in their teaching.

The technique proposed was to classify different theories by eight criteria:

• individual
• social
• reflection
• non-reflection
• information
• experience

Although these fall naturally into pairs, illustrated on the vertices of an octahedron, these criteria were not regarded as exclusive, so a theory could for example be both individual and social. Examples were given of how various influential theories, ranging from Kolb’s experiential learning to Laurillard’s conversation model would be categorised using this framework. Of course, as the authors freely admit, you lose something in this ‘flattening out’. For example, to turn ‘communities of practice’ into ‘information, experience, social, reflection’ misses much of what the notion of communities of practice are about.

The paper then went on talk about the use of the octahedron in the Media Advisor toolkit as a way for for teachers to see which of these eight different angles they had considered. I have to admit that I was curious to know how the teachers reacted to this - I’ll have to see if I can find out.

One part of the paper that I especially liked was where different approaches to an activity type were given (e.g. different approaches to brainstorming might be a seminar, online discussion, online chat or using a concept map) with an illustration of how each of the approaches fell in a different place on the octahedron, with a subtle switch here to using the octahedron as a set of three axes rather than an eight independent blobs.

This paper made me think about what exactly we mean by a learning theory. Is a learning theory essentially just a way of describing how learning can occur or does a learning theory alternatively need to say something about how best to create a context for learning to occur? Also what exactly is the relevance of learning theories to the practice of teachers and do we know for certain why many teachers ignore the various learning theories out there?

Even without answering these questions, the taxonomy is an interesting one I believe. I think that instead of categorising learning theories what it might actually be doing is categorising types of learning based on the theories that exist. I wondered in particular if the model’s combinatorial nature could ‘predict’ new theories by looking at different combinations. I am also intrigued by the comment in the course notes that ‘The framework is not derived from extensive theoretical argumentation or empirical work and is untested’. What would a theoretical basis or empirical work that would validate the framework look like?

It is an interesting exercise however to try and work out how you would categorise types of learning. I think to start with I would probably divide learning into behavioural learning and conceptual learning, thinking of the latter as the recognition and memory of patterns. Conceptual learning then feeds into behavioural learning when you apply concepts you have learned to your behaviours. Subconscious behavioural learning is also possible and repeated application of a concept to behaviour might eventually make that behaviour subconscious.

I might then divide conceptual learning into:

• Recognition and memory of new patterns via environmental interaction
• Recognition and memory of new patterns via mental activity (e.g. reflection, logical deduction).
• Recognition and memory of new patterns via social interaction (i.e. somebody gives you information)

By adapting your interaction with the environment, your mental activity, and your social interaction you can influence the patterns you recognise and remember. This could be something you do quite actively and deliberately, for instance when you are trying to resolve conflicts between two different patterns.

This adaption is the interesting part where ‘meta-learning’ comes in. Other people can help you adapt these three pattern recognition behaviours and you can think of the constructivist view as helping people other people adapt these behaviours in useful ways (rather than actually telling them that patterns exist). Socially situated learning and ideas such as communities of practice also fit in here in terms of the way that these behaviours are adapted by social contexts.

Posted on Sunday 5 April 2009