I can’t believe I’ve had the iPhone for nearly 2yrs now (I wrote about my excitement it back in 2008), and how much I’ve come to use it so much I forget that I’m using it. Of course I can look that or this up straight away. Of course I can access my email whilst doing my grocery shopping. Of course I can send a tweet with a photo of a weird and wonderful happening. Of course I can access a restaurant’s menu and read patron’s reviews from the car park before deciding where to eat. Of course. And of course I’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to work with two outstanding groups of ICT333 students on the development of an iPhone app for ethnographic field work. The 2008 team created a project management style app at a time when the iPhone and app development was still very much a novelty and there weren’t too many models around. They called it “Jot It Down,” or “JID,” based on the idea that the ethnographer would be able to jot down notes quickly while in the field and keep them all together with voice recordings, photos and other data collected using the iPhone. The 2009 team then extended the functionality of JID to have it sync with my Omeka database (and they did a lot of work improving its user interface and help system!).
All I can say is… wow. What a great job the two teams have done! At the moment, only the “notes” function in JID syncs (well, not “sync,” it’s a one-way upload) with Omeka, and another team is needed to finish it off so that photos, audio recordings and other data can also be uploaded, but I think that we’re well on the way to having a useful app! The fact that it will also work on the upcoming iPad is exciting as well. I love the idea that an ethnographer can capture and collect data in the field, upload it to “the cloud” (securely), and get feedback from a remote supervisor at point of need. And the data can’t be lost, left on the bus, etc. And! A lot of metadata entry is carried across! Fabulous! No more manually entering the time, date, location and so forth for each individual item.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to use this app myself in the field, but its design is based on my experiences of using other iPhone apps and ICTs whilst undertaking classroom observations. Lets cross our fingers and hope for another team to take up this project, and that it might enter the app store some day soon.
This is one of my favourite video clips to share with people as they begin to explore using ICTs for learning and teaching Languages (and people who’ve been exploring for a while, too!).
One of the messages it really drives home for me is the importance of having a variety of accessible professional learning opportunities available to teachers… and having them know about them. At the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (AFMLTA) Conference last year, I gave a presentation on my work in progress and what I had discovered from two case study sites. I didn’t offer an analysis of the issues, rather I literally let the data speak for themselves, the data being my research participants. One issue that came across quite strongly was that they felt inadequately supported in developing their ICT skills. The Department of Education WA does actually offer a great deal of professional learning opportunities in the area of ICT and other facets of teachers’ work, especially to schools in the LwICT and SLwICT Projects. Teachers can also apply to attend external courses, conferences, and seminars etc. that they hear about. However, these opportunities are often general in nature, or unknown to the Language teacher who may be working across multiple sites and who is often independent, without a Head of Learning Area or departmental team. The flow of communication about professional learning opportunities just may not reach Language teachers if they are not proactive in seeking this information out.
So back to the video clip. Why is it particularly relevant to what I have discovered during my research? One of the strategies in place for teacher ICT skill development is through the Department’s portal. There are a variety of online courses available to all teachers, covering many topics and relate back to pedagogical skills and knowledge. It’s a fair offering. But, just like in the clip above, you need to have the ICT skills to be able to access those resources in the first place. And the time. None of my participants had been able to do so.
There simply need to be more (tailored) opportunities for Language teachers’ needs with time provided to engage in the learning. And it needs to be accessible. There is so much potential for learning and teaching languages with ICTs and the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is well established. It is a shame that it has not really been engaged with by most of the teachers involved in my study and, through them, their learners. This is something that needs to change.
I generated this Word Cloud at http://www.wordle.net with the tags currently being used in my research database. This does not account for the frequency of use of those tags in the database itself, but rather the frequency of the words in the list of tags as a whole. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry – I find this is still a useful way of visualising my data and themes in a different way, and for looking at what is “emerging” (or not emerging as the case may be).
I am currently (still!) analysing data collected during fieldwork for this research project. I now have renewed respect for those in the transcription business, and very much wishing I had been more organised during data collection. That would certainly help a lot now when I’m trudging through, categorising and clumping data (I’m sure there’s more technical terms!). A lot of methodology books and papers do say that “themes will emerge” and it has been the most gratifying (and relieving) feeling to see it finally happening.
One theme emerging is the idea of fun. The students talk about it, the teachers talk about it, and the literature… doesn’t talk about it (much). In fact, if you do a Google search (Scholar or not) on “fun” and “education” or “fun” and “learning,” most of the results are to do with computer games. Many others are to do with Physical Education. If you do a more refined search by learning area or discipline, you get articles related to “fun” in those areas (often because it’s in the title) but the overwhelming majority of scholarly works seem to be around games of both the virtual and physical nature. So what is meant by “fun,” then? What makes learning “fun” and why does it keep emerging in my research? And why didn’t I pick up on it sooner and ask better questions about it?
Alas, that’s the problem (beauty?) with waiting for themes to emerge rather than starting out with a testable hypothesis. It’s never straight-forward, and oft-times leaves the researcher with more questions than answers. Many of the interview questions I did ask invited participants to talk about what they “liked” or “enjoyed” in learning/teaching languages with ICTs and so it may not be surprising that “fun” came up a lot. But it came up in interesting ways. Teachers would use “fun” as a justification for a unit of work:
“It has, it has to hold some relevance to them. Why do I do festivals? Festivals because, you know, like it’s fun, it’s enjoyable stuff, it’s parades, it’s, you know, stuff that appeals to children.”
Or a reason for choosing one professional learning workshop over another:
“Penny: But you already know a lot about PowerPoint Anna: Yeh I know, but like… Penny: So why do you want to do more about PowerPoint? Anna: Yeh but, these are like, but these are like computer games. I just thought, “Fun, computer games!” I, to be honest, I looked at voki.com and flickr.com and went, “What the hell is that?”"
But the students’ conceptualisation of “fun” was different. They didn’t equate “fun” with games, parades, and “appealing stuff” alone but rather that “fun” in class was due to variety and achieving the purpose of being there, i.e. learning the language:
“Crystal : And you don’t get stuck doing the same thing, which is like really boring after a while. Kate: Yeh, you kind of get like a really big variety. Penny: OK. John: And it’s fun. Penny: It’s fun. Yeh. Jake: Yeh. Kate: Yeh. Penny: What makes it fun? Crystal: Just learning. Jake: Because um you learn different games and how to play. And, and it’s got language in it. We learn a different language.”
For the students interviewed, work was work. It didn’t really matter if it had flashy graphics or a cute cartoon character named Budi helping them along, it was still work. Some of the teacher participants, however, believed that the drill-based games such as the Language Market series or games on Languages Online were “fun” (which is why they used them), and I wonder what they based their evaluations on. These games have cutesey graphics, “motivating” sounds, and certainly “look like fun” but in my observations I noted that students were often clicking random objects and completing levels through guess-work (trial-and-error clicking) rather than actually engaging in the intended vocabulary practice and testing. Students rarely described these computer games as “fun” (although the physical games were certainly described as such!!) but rather described their enjoyment of more active tasks where they were required to produce something of their own (e.g. a video, a presentation) and interact with others. They enjoyed acting and interacting with heaps of variety – that’s what made learning “fun”.
Screen shot from The Language Market Stage A for Indonesian. http://www.thelanguagemarket.com/ This software was used by all Indonesian classes observed in this research project.
Back to the literature. What do others have to say about “fun”? Malone (1981), in his work on computer games and fun, tells us that attributes of challenge, fantasy and curiosity are key components of “fun” which in turn inform his theory of intrinsically motivating instruction. This work has been extended by other authors (Carroll 2004; Draper, 1999; MacFarlane et al., 2005), and attributes of immersion, reflection, play and flow, collaboration, learner control, curiosity, fantasy, and challenge have further been identified as key elements of “fun”. Going into these attributes is beyond the scope of this blog post (!) but I find it interesting to think about these attributes in relation to what I have observed in classrooms, what teachers and students have told me in interviews, and what they describe as “fun” and why. There certainly seems to be a divide between what the teachers percieve to be fun, and what the students do. Draper’s (1999) work in which he analyses fun as a candidate software requirement is interesting to reflect on given this:
“If you ask adult learners whether their educational learning is fun, they often hesitate, and hesitate more than if you ask whether they are enjoying it. This is because it involves more effort than most things described as “fun”, but also can be more deeply satisfying because it can engage much deeper goals. It is this deeper engagement we should be aiming for where possible” (p. 121).
And it is that deeper engagement that the students craved. Indeed, thinking about what my teacher participants said, perhaps there isn’t really a divide. They certainly craved it as well. When the teachers described for me what good learning with ICTs looks like/sounds like/feels like, it was all about that sense of engagement. It was not necessarily about “fun,” although they often talked about “fun” in relation to a rationale on using ICT in the first place.
So, what is “fun”? What makes language learning “fun”? Or should we be asking a different question? What makes language learning (with or without ICTs) immersive, reflective, playful, flowing, collaborative, personalised, curious, fantastic, and challenging? I’m going to follow the advice of some of my student participants in thinking about all of this, and “just have fun with it.”
I’ve been flat-out the past couple of weeks preparing for the EuroCALL conference. As postgraduate students, we can apply for funding to attend one overseas conference during our degree if we are accepted to present there. My proposals for a paper and a poster were accepted by EuroCALL, and so I’m off to Spain on Sunday!
This trip has been months in the planning. Years, even. I’ve always wanted to go to Europe, and this is a great opportunity. Although the university funding only partially pays for expenses, without it I’d not be going at all, so I am very grateful!
I will blog more about my paper presentation later, but it’s my Poster (with a capital ‘P’!) that has been occupying my time recently. Mimpi, my cat, has been a lot of help as you can see.
And the finished product:
In order to demonstrate the value-addedness of digital media, I’ve included an iPod with 5 audio tracks and a digital photo frame with a few photos. I had thought about attaching an iRiver with video footage, but the menu system on those cheap players is too complex for a poster. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible so that “viewers” can just press a button rather than having to scroll through layered menus.
I found constructing this poster to be a useful way of planning my methodology chapter, and visualising it in a different way. The challenge of incorporating audio-visual material alongside static, written text was also interesting. The aim, after all, is to value-add and not just to “add”. In this, I’m guided by Coffey et al. (2006, p. 19) who tell us:
“…multimodal research is not simply a mosaic, which adds together various separate forms of modes of data (including visual data). The contemporary technological environment potentially widens the opportunities for multimedia (re)presentation of data and for the emergence of new multi-semiotic forms of analysis and argument – enabling the innovative inclusion of film and video, still images, documentary materials, sound clips, online and other digital data alongside textual representations”
I constructed these slides (get it? Constructed?) to help me get my head around “social constructionism” vs “social constructivism” whilst writing my methodology chapter for my doctoral dissertation. The following presentation represents my understandings, and its value/accuracy/trustworthiness will, in turn, depended upon your own understandings.
