The trouble with…
The trouble with conferences like this is that they are so bitty. It’s become the way to do tings to group together papers around a theme, but the papers are all individually produced and take no account of each other. Thus you get 20 minute snapshots of bits of research which are all interesting (though presented with varying degrees of verve and powerpointability), then you get about three minutes to discuss and just as the discussion is getting interesting, you get shunted along to the next presentation.
This morning we had a series on “Educational Research, Theories, Practice and Methodologies” – pretty wide to start with. The first was on a shift at the Far Eastern University in the Phillipines from ftf to online assessment by students of teachers. It seems the shift has been very beneficial in allowing much wider coverage of student opinion at much less cost. But we didn’t even get to ask any questions. I id find myself wondering why it’s called the Far Eastern University – it’s only Far Eastern if you’re at Greenwich. If you’re in Manila, the far east is Orlando.
Then we had an analysis by Annette Jonsson from Sweden of gender participation in online discussions, in which the author had discovered, among other things, that if there is a preponderance of males in a group the women go silent whereas the men’s behaviour does not change. Needs more work, but has interesting implications for online work. She had done some analysis of content, looking particularly for agreement, disagreement, requests for input and toning down words, but had not yet come up with significant results.
Then we had Yasemin Sert reporting on work on Turkish preservice teachers using Project Supported Education and whether that had any effect on their students thinking styles. They had not found any significant effect, but this research appears to be only at its beginning and a number of variables had not been investigated or controlled for. In particular they wondered if preservice teachers had enough capcity to develop project supported wor. The need to do something is founded partly on the fact that class sizes i Turkey are commonly around the 60 mark. The other factor that they thought would have a bearing is that the students had been taught by traditional methods and were perhaps not ready for widening their thinking or working in project based ways. Turkey changed its curriculum to a constructivist basis four years ago, and the researchers expected taht in about ten years time the results for this sort of style would be very different.
Then we had Anita Thaler and Jennifer Dahmen on an EU funded project on images of science, and particularly why girls don’t go into science and technology. Som einteresting snippets of content analysis of girl’s mags – 96% instances of SET are of products, only 3% show it as a job, and most of that is CSI which is very popular. More pics of boys with mobile phones than girls despite the stereotype that girls natter all the time. Focus groups saw chemistry as female, technology and engineering as male. Criteria for good lessons, something close to life, and fun. This often means blowing something up-, bu as we’re not allowed to, music technology makes a good substitute.
And finally Maria Traum on how language changes when German speaking students of English make presentations using Powerpoint. and particularly considering whether students could be themselves when using English to make presentations. Self and externally reported sense of changes of intonation, speed, voice and pronunciation. Despite these 20% of her students felt that they could be themselves or project themselves in this manner. They felt also that when speaking freely in a foreign language they tend to be wordy, whereas when making a structured presentation they are more focussed. This is despite her illustrations of students being far too wordy on the actual slides. She noted need to improve register, rhetorical skills andnonverbal communication (which I don’t think she made any obervations about). I made the point that everything she described was true of native English speakers as well, and that maybe it wasn’t about a foriegn language as such as about the issue of the skills of making a presentation, and, separately, the skills of using Powerpoint (as noted at the beginning of this post). It raises some very itneresting questionsin three areas, I think:
a) do learn well enough how to make presentations (as a distinct issue from that of making presentations with Powerpoint)
b) are students versed enough and flexible enough in using different discourses, which can function just like different languages – they have to be learned in the same way.
c) do we do enough to enable students to acquire or develop their own academic voice.