I’m facing the decision of whether to hyperlink to the original source or to my end-text referencing in my online writing. Becky pointed out that hyperlinking to the end text reference means that I’d be following print-text conventions whereas hyperlinking to the original source means following hypertext conventions (although these don’t seem to be written in the APA style guide!!). But what happens when I want to hyperlink my in-text citations to books? Should I link to the end-text reference, or should I link to an online source (e.g. Google Books or Amazon)?
When I first pitched the idea to develop my doctoral dissertation as a hypertext in website form, I had no idea that this request would be considered unusual. I also had no idea that it had not been done before at my institution (that we know of), nor that the librarians would be unable to find any other local examples. This surprised me because there are strong Arts, Media andte Communications, Computing, and Engineering faculties and schools at my university and at others nearby. Research in these areas surely lends towards presentation and representation of data in digital form, especially when the research itself is based on digital methods, and yet it’s just not done. The book-bound thesis is the dominant form, even when a creative or production component is part of the submission. Certainly, students must submit a digital thesis as well as a paper copy for archival purposes but this is generally an electronic copy of their printed text rather than a digital text authored with the intent of being accessed and read in digital form. In terms of style, format and binding of a thesis at Murdoch University (where I am currently studying), the Postgraduate Research Degree Regulation 28 stipulates that a thesis:
a.
may consist partly of published work;
b.
may consist predominantly of published work, provided that the thesis also includes material that provides coherence to the thesis as an integrated work;
c.
may include non-text materials, such as performances, exhibitions of works of art, musical compositions, films or videos subject to the approval of the Director of Postgraduate Studies (after consultation with the member of the Committee whose academic area is closest to that of the thesis) and to the written component constituting the major part of the thesis;
d.
may describe work done in conjunction with the supervisor or other persons, provided that the candidate’s personal share in the investigation is clearly stated, and that this statement is certified by the supervisor;
e.
must be written in clear and concise language and in English (unless the Director of Postgraduate Studies has given approval for it to be in another language);
f.
must conform to scholarly standards of presentation, citation and referencing for the discipline;
g.
must include an abstract of approximately 300 words;
h.
must include a declaration by the candidate that it is her or his own account of the research, the extent to which the work of others has been used, and (except for a resubmitted thesis) contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any University;
i.
must not exceed 100,000 words, excluding maps, diagrams and bibliography, unless otherwise approved by the Director of Postgraduate Studies on the recommendation of the supervisor;
j.
must be in double-spaced typescript; and
k.
must conform with any physical specifications approved by the Committee.
So it seems that submitting a thesis in digital form, with the intent that it be read in that form, would meet these criteria bar (j) (reading double-spaced script is very difficult on-screen!). That it must “conform with any physical specifications approved by the Committee” may also be problematic if those ‘physical specifications’ are that it must be printed and bound because I do not intend for thesis to be a print text. Instead, I envisage my thesis as a digital, online text: a website and ethnographic hypermedia environment, or EHE (Dicks et al., 2005). In this way, it would constitute an electronic thesis and dissertation or ETD:
There are two types of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) – those that are born digital and those that are scanned versions of paper originals. The former may have multimedia components such as audio or video or utilise some other digital component such as virtual reality (National Library of Australia)
The National Library archives digital theses, but the main project in Australia is the Australiasian Digital Theses Program “which is building a distributed database of digital versions of theses produced by Higher Degree by research students at participating institutions” (Murdoch University, n.d.). However, it is rare to find a ‘native’ digital thesis in these archives, as they are mainly of the second type defined above. In the United States, Virginia Tech. is a pioneer of ETDs and since 1997 all theses submitted in doctoral programs there must be in ETD form. Many other universities have followed their lead (for a good overview and history see Pavani, 2007) , and have based their rationale and definition of ETD on Virginia Tech.’s lead:
An ETD is a document that explains the research or scholarship of a graduate student. It is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and world-wide retrieval. The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It documents the author’s years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions. The ETD is different, however as it provides a technologically advanced medium for expressing your ideas (Montana State University, 2007).
I’ve been running (facilitating) a course for Languages teachers based on the 23 Thingsprogramme here at Murdoch University (which was in turn adapted from the http://macetg.wordpress.com/about-learning-20-mac/ project at McMaster University Library) for a year and a half now. In it we explore 23 ICT Things that are useful for learning/teaching Languages both in terms of classroom practice and in terms of professional learning. We look at Things like blogging, Wordle, Voki, RSS, Glogster, and so on. It’s been quite successful because teachers are introduced to these tools over a period of time and they do have time to explore them. It’s also been great for me as a facilitator because I’ve had extended contact with participants and get to hear about how they’ve gone with the Things in their classroom contexts rather than being more “fly in fly out.”
Trascriva: a great tool for transcription on the Mac. I don’t know what I’d do without it! Probably curse a lot more at MS Word
Blogging: You’re reading it now. My blog(s) act as an online notebook – the hub of my learning, recording, and doing!
Zotero: A reference/citation manager that runs rings around EndNote because it cuts down on data entry to the n’th degree and has an online backup system. If you haven’t checked it out, go now! Stop reading this list! Go!
Google Scholar: I thought this was a given but I’m continually surprised by how many people don’t use it, and how many lecturers tell their students not to use it! Being able to search effectively, whether that be with Google Scholar or through databases directly, is an important skill in academia. Plus you can see how many people are citing you :). Before there were track-backs there were still citations!
Twitter: If you follow celebrities, you’ll find out what they had for lunch. But if you follow people working and researching in your field you’ll find out what has their attention. And it’s likely something you’d like to attend to!
Wordle: I find this incredibly useful for visualising my writing in different ways, analysing interviews, looking at over-used and under-used words… it’s on my list not just for Languages teachers
Turnitin: I was a bit anti-Turnitin to begin with (how DARE they keep a copy of my work on file!) but as a marker, I really appreciate it. It’s not so much about catching plagiarizers (it’s often oh-so-obvious when it’s not a student’s own work), it’s about building a case against them. Previously I’d have to find the articles/essay/whatever and match it all up manually, building up the evidence that it is indeed more copying than you’d expect in an undergraduate essay. With Turnitin, it’s all there! Brilliant! And it’s a great tool for students (and researchers!) to inspect their own writing and check their paraphrasing.
Google Calendar: This calendar has replaced my diary. I don’t know what I’d do without it now. I love how it syncs to almost anything I want it to, that I can share calendars, that I can get automatic alerts for conferences, and that I can colour code everything. It just works!
Google Docs: Continuing my ode to Google, Google Docs are fabulous for collaborative work and generating quick surveys
A RSS Reader: It doesn’t really matter which one, but a way of managing RSS feeds is essential in academia. Subscribing to RSS feeds of important journals, blogs, and other news sources for the field is essential.
PHD Comics: OK, this might count more as a procrastination tool than an ICT tool, but I have absolutely loved following this comic over the course of my studies. It reminds us that we’re not alone in this “journey” and the comic hits so close to home, so often, that I wonder if the author isn’t spying on our office
Delicious: One of the best tools for managing bookmarks. Mine’s a bit of a mess at the moment (like many of these things it needs some nurturing and pruning from time to time!) but I have long since given up trying to remember website addresses or keep them bookmarked on my computer. Much easier to be able to access them from Delicious whenever I want, wherever I want! Delicious is also a great place to search for webpages that people have tagged as relevant to a topic/keyword, and not a machine.
The Book Depository: Cheap books!! Amazon may still be cheaper for some academic texts, but Book Depository with its free shipping is catching up!
Slideshare.net: A great place to publish slides so that they’re embeddable in other media (e.g. blog, wiki, etc) and also to find presentations to inform, adapt, or model on. Check out Death by PowerPoint for an absolute must-view.
Search @ CreativeCommons: For making all of those presentations! Copyright free / Creative Commons images are the way to go, and this helps you find them. And then record where you got them from using Zotero! (Thanks Kathryn for that tip!!)
The FireFox Browser: There’s just so much more you can do with FireFox than you can with other browsers. I regularly use extensions such as “Scrapbook” to archive websites, “FireFTP” to quickly transfer files, “Firebug” to find sneaky pieces of web code, and of course helpers such as LibX, Delicious, and Zotero.
Scrivener: I’ve only just begun using this but I like it so far! It seems to ‘organise’ writing the way that I like to work. We’ll see how it goes!
Skitch: A mac app for assisting with screen capture. I use this a lot to create instructions for students, to take quick snapshots of pages (or parts of pages), keep Twitter messages safe, and so on. Also a great tool when constructing PowerPoint presentations.
A program for annotating .pdf’s: Adobe Professional ($$$) and Preview (on Mac) both make annotating .pdfs easy. I mark student assignments using Preview by inserting comments and scribbling (literally) over their work. I find it far easier and more flexible (especially with the scribbles!) than using “track changes” in Word.
CoverItLive: A great tool for ‘covering’ a conference by bringing in a range of feeds and peoples to a web audience. It can be quite intensive to use (I end up focusing so much on what is really a transcription exercise that I don’t listen/engage in the same way I normally would or make my own notes and meta-notes) but it is one of my favourite tools for relaying conference presentations due to its ease of use. Plus you can always go back and re-visit what was said! Check out my EuroCALL Conference posts to see it in re-action
Freemind: An open-source mind-mapping tool. There’s other ones around, but this one is free, easy to use, and offers a range of formats.
QuickTime: I do a lot of video editing in my research work and the new version of QuickTime with its “trim” functionality has dramatically reduced the number of steps and time it takes to edit clips!
So there you have it. My favourite web/computer-based Things. Of course, I use a lot more than this (I hardly mentioned productivity/presentation tools like Word, PowerPoint, iMovie, etc.) but in a 23 Things programme, I think these would make the list.
I had this conversation with students from Yarridale Senior High School during a focus group interview and it has really stayed with me:
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Penny:
So when you think of “ICTs”, what do you think of? What comes to mind?
Christy:
Computers.
Penny:
Computers? What else?
Alistair:
A lot of big work.
Penny:
Big work? What do you mean?
Alistair:
A lot, like piles on ya? Like you got these really big essays and… all sorts of things to do. It’s not like one page or anything anymoreit’s like, a mini book or something.
Penny:
Ahhh.
Courtney:
Ten pages.
Alistair:
Like ten pages.
Penny:
That’s interesting. So when you think of technologies, you think of limitless scope.
Alistair:
Yeh.
Christy:
Like lots and lots and lots and lots of work.
This sentiment was shared with other students in the other three case-study schools. Although the teachers may associate “fun” with ICTs (see my previous post on the topic), students thought “more work.” And I can see where they’re coming from! It is true, the work assigned when using ICTs is often project work. This may be due to logistical reasons (the heavily booked computer lab being reserved far in advance) or simply because the task lends itself to particular ICTs or vice versa such as creating a digital story, video recording a profile, writing an extended text and so on. These are all tasks that are made easier with ICTs and so tend to be popular. But in prioritising ICT use for such ‘”big work” and not (having the opportunity to?) normalise it in everyday learning the students saw ICTs in the classroom as not necessarily being “Other” but as being “big work” and lots of it. Work was work was work to them – no matter whether it be with pen’n'paper, mp3 player or DVD player – but with ICTs it was often more work.
I find this sentiment (experience?) interesting, and one to keep in mind when exploring the issue of “fun”. Just because I’m writing this post on an online blog doesn’t make it more “fun” than writing it in my paper journal. Having the privilege of using a word processor to write a journal article (or thesis!) doesn’t make that task more “fun.” And as Tom Johnson recently blogged, pencils aren’t always fun either. What changes with using ICTs (and the fun part for me!) is the prospective/potential audience and the ease of editing, publishing and revis(it)ing. But it’s still big work (especially the thesis!), and there’s certainly lots of it.
There must be something more interesting for social scientists to do with their computers than coding data.
Mason & Dicks, 2001, p. 441.
And I certainly agree! I gave a “Friday Morning Seminar” presentation to the faculty of Education a couple of weeks ago in which I described how I am using technologies to research technologies.
When I first started this research “journey,” I was highly influenced by what I read in the Horizon Report. I knew that working and researching in the field of educational technologies would mean that my work would be quickly outdated unless I was very forward thinking. My “contribution to knowledge” may be obsolete before I could even start writing! In this goal of forward-thinking, the Horizon Report was of great help. The Horizon Project, for which the report is produced, “charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry.” And so in writing my research proposal, I paid close attention to the ideas and technologies the report charted for 3-5 years time (now!). I was particularly interested in the ideas of “The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication” and, of course, the many tools that would (could) be used for and in research.
Cue a few technological developments that occurred as I engaged field work, in a very short amount of time. Digital still cameras became far cheaper and accessible, often with video capture; netbooks (sub notebooks) were released and again, were cheap and accessible; USB digital video cameras became the norm rather than tape-based cameras; WiFi became widespread not just in libraries but also in cafes and many schools; wireless broadband coverage increased and became a viable option; and finally the iPhone was released. Online video (YouTube, for instance), blogging, and data storage in “the cloud” also became a part of many web users’ vocabularies. I experimented using all of these tools during my field work to capture, collect, collate and re-present data. With traditions of ethnography in mind, I was looking and seeing (ala Harry Wolcott) technology in classroom case-studies using technology to do so, and now I am evaluating its use. What happened? How? Why? Was there any (perceived) benefit to using ICTs when more ‘traditional’ methods may have sufficed? But my biggest question -
How do we ensure that looking with technology (in ethnographic fieldwork) is good looking?
Stay tuned – this is what I’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. But first, the nitty gritty of the methodology chapter!
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.”
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