How would it be if I gave every student on DZX222 access to this blog? Or to another blog, created for the purpose? Then I could put in my musings as I go along and get student responses. It would be another source of data and a whole new use for my blog. Of course, […]
Note to self: I’ve downloaded Swan, K. and Shea, P. (2004) ‘The Development of Virtual Learning Communities’, Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks. Remember to read it when writing literature review.
Can’t work out how to link to individual entries in a blog. Anyway, if you go to http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/ and look for heatmaps, you get something about a new piece of software which you can apply to websites to see where people have clicked. The hotspots come out red, the less-clicked turn out blue. There’s an example […]
Judith Good talked on ‘Learning and motivational affordances in narrative-based game authoring’. Judith http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/judithg/index.html had written her paper with Judy Robertson http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~judyr/ They’d thought in detail about why kids enjoy programming computer games, and why they are prepared to put substantially more time and effort into this than into most school subjects. They run games design […]
John Yearwood talked about ‘Interactive narrative by thematic connection of dramatic situations’. Given his material, I think he could have come up with a more user-friendly title. He described an approach to generating interactive narrative in a computer game by using an argument-based structure to work out the next event in the language sequence. He used […]
Joseph South looked at videos for teaching students English. He showed how standard videos tend to have rather creepy people addressing each other in very formal language and showed how a story-based video showing more realistic interaction is more helpful. Relates this to situated learning: ‘knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the […]
Maarten Dolk http://www.fi.uu.nl/nl/medewerkers/medewerkers/medewerker63.html gave an interesting talk about getting student teachers to develop narratives about events as a tool to construct meaning about mathematics education and to bridge the divide between theory and practice. They showed a video clip from the classroom and asked six people to comment on it. Despite them running it several times, […]
Paul’s in KMI http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/ but his interests don’t appear to overlap with mine. What I found most interesting about his talk was his summary of a narrative plan in one of his pieces of research. First, theme introduction provides characters, props, scenery and anything else needed for the narrative. Second, Conflict Introduction introduces a problem. Third, […]
Agneta Bostom http://www.chemistrynarratives.com/research.html gave a very interesting talk on ‘How narrative from lived experience facilitate learning in chemistry’. Lots of the science students she spoke to felt there was no place for storytelling in chemistry but them told stories which explained their interest in chemistry or in certain aspects of it. Made me think of Primo […]
The next paper was produced by a student who then went off to Greece, leaving her supervisor to present it. It described a largely unsuccessful and, in many ways, misconceived piece of research. As even the writer of the paper wasn’t interested enough to come and hear it, I’m not sure why we had to […]