Category Archives: Context

Rumpus research

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Research question: ‘In what ways is the Covid-19 pandemic changing understandings of the relationships between learning and fun?’

A limited case study of a research group in a UK university. We expect our findings to have implications beyond that group.

Data collection using epistolary interviews (via email – one question per email, enabling thoughtful responses that can build over time) with everyone in the research group who wants to take part. Participation is voluntary and participants can drop out at any time.

Questions for epistolary interviews:

  • What have been your main experiences of learning and teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • What have been your main experiences of fun during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • How has learning and teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How have you experienced fun changing (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How has your understanding of the relationship between fun and learning/teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • In what ways (if any) do you think the relationship between learning and fun will change after the Covid-19 pandemic?

Method:

According to Yin (who I like following for case study research because he has a clear structure to work to) there are five important components of case study design.

  1. Five components of a case-study research design are particularly important
  2. Its questions (see above)
  3. Its propositions, if any (Prop 1- there is a relationship between learning and fun. Prop 2 – this relationship will be highlighted during the pandemic Prop 3- this relationship may be changed by the pandemic and some of these changes can be foreseen)
  4. Its unit(s) of analysis (individual members of the research group)
  5. The logic linking the data to the propositions (data are collected from people who have reflected on the relationship between learning and fun and who have thought deeply by what is meant by fun and by learning. Also we engage in fun and learning. Also we are influenced by the pandemic)
  6. The criteria for interpreting the findings (thematic analysis to support explanation building, themes drawn from the data but also compared with existing frameworks of fun that were covered in our frameworks of fun paper. Interpretations are originally drawn together by one or two of us but are checked against the understandings of all participants. This is a reflexive case study and this phase of comparing understandings will enrich the analysis)

 

A PhD is more than a thesis

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Inspired by a Tweet I read recently about the distinction between a thesis and a PhD, I have been thinking about the difference between the two.

The university really focuses on the thesis, which must :

  • be of good presentation and style
  • be a significant contribution to knowledge and/or to understanding
  • demonstrate capacity to pursue further research without supervision
  • contain a significant amount of material worthy of publication or public presentation.

What else? Well, our university specifies you must be a registered student, you must live in the UK, you must pass your probationary period, you must spend a minimum amount of time as a registered student, you must make satisfactory progress, you must have a viva, you must make any specified corrections and you must present your thesis according to the guidelines.

All very thesis focused.

Vitae has a Researcher Development Framework that covers knowledge and intellectual abilities;  personal effectiveness;  research governance and organisation; engagement, influence and impact. The university encourages students to engage with this but, apart from reporting satisfactory progress at probationary review, it isn’t enforced or assessed.

Typically, students are assessment focused. They learn what they will be assessed on. It’s not surprising, then, that many doctoral students focus their entire attention on the thesis. That is the centre of their activity – everything else that takes place at the university is a distraction and has lower priority. In extreme cases, they only visit the university for supervision sessions, talk to nobody but their supervisors about their research, and focus totally on putting their thesis together and passing their viva.

But what then? A PhD is one line in a CV – perhaps five or six if you bulk it out with a description of your research. Permanent academic jobs in the UK and in many other countries may not be as rare as hens’ teeth, but they come pretty close. Even fixed-term contracts are difficult to get.

For employers, the PhD is not just one line in a CV, it’s also one line in a long job specification.

Academic employers want to know that you can publish papers, put together grant proposals, attract funding, increase impact via social media, create course materials, teach, mentor, work as part of a team, initiate projects, provide connections to a wider academic community and work on several projects at the same time.

The people getting the academic jobs are the people who can produce evidence that they can do all those things, and that they have already done those things. The people who treated their PhD as a period of academic apprenticeship, when the thesis is just one activity among many. The people struggling to get a toehold in the academic sector are the ones who have simply written a thesis.

Scrum management framework

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With its scrums, sprints and stories, Scrum Management always sounds intriguing. I’ve been involved with several teams who have either used this system knowingly, or have employed elements from it. However, I’ve never seen the process formalised until I spotted it in the January 2015 edition of Wired magazine (where they had compressed a version of Jeff Sutherland’s book). Wikipedia tells me that this style of software development emerged in 1986 – so I guess I’ve been slow in investigating the approach.

Wired describes it as a seven-step process:

1. Small  teams. These should include the product owner, who has the vision and decides on the order in which things should be done, and the scrum master who facilitates communication and removes obstacles.

2. Tell stories. Each new features should be associated with a short story about the user and why the feature will add value for the user.

3. Assign effort points. Compare the stories and give them points for effort involved (or T-shirt sizes: small, medium, large and extra large).

4. Prioritise features. Each sprint should end with something that can be demoed, so make the chunks of work small enough to fit into a sprint.

5. Sprint. A sprint should be 1-4 weeks long – long enough to deal with a set amount of effort points.

6. Scrum. A 15-minute meeting every morning, standing up, so you’re not tempted to settle in. Three questions. What did you do yesterday to help finish the sprint? What will you do today to help finish the sprint? What obstacles need to be overcome?

7. Sprint review. At the end of the sprint the team meets to discuss what has been achieved, and to improve working practices for the next sprint.

 

Personal environments for learning

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Philippe distinguishes between a personal information environment and a personal learning environment. [I know that in this case a personal learning environment isn’t just everything around me when I’m learning, but is a personalised form of a VLE. In that case, what is a personal information environment? Is it all the sources from which I gain information? In which case it seems to me the same as my learning network.]

Personal information environment = learning network?

Twitter supports a read/write loop. It shows us what we have done and what we can do next. The function of a re-tweet is to spread information to another community. When we retweet, are we spreading the information or are we aiming at reducing the information gap in our own community? [I’m not sure what an information gap is. Also, I think this view assumes a particular type of Twitter user, who has selected and weeded both the people they follow and their followers. Other Twitter users have different models – they follow everyone who follows them, or they try to collect as many followers as possible. One function of a retweet is to spread the information, another is to establish yourself as a good source of information, another is to open up the possibility of new ties between your readers and the writer you are retweeting).

(MUPPLE seminar – Philippe Dessus, Grenoble)

Augmented history

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The Civil War app changes in real time and plays out over four and a half years, producing a daily casualty count. This has been criticised as being too immersive – uncomfortable for many people.

The Iraq War Memorial app superimposes a war memorial on a real scence

http://gamesalfresco.com/2011/02/21/augmented-reality-u-s-iraq-war-memorial/

The war memorial app, brings a virtual representation into the physical world. Street Museum brings the past of the physical world into the present by syuperimposing pictures of London’s past over London’s present. For example, it shows pictures of London during the Blitz.

Suchtweetsorrow.com presents a modern retelling and reworking of the story of Romeo and Juliet

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyhayes/5778206030/ looks at the building blocks of experiential media – including the physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual experiential building blocks. The spiritual level involves the experience prompting those involved to change their belief system.

(Notes from Creating Second Lives in Bangor 2011)

Learning in context

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Learning occurs in contexts – it also creates contexts.

Context is not fixed – it is an emergent property of interaction.

The challenge is to go beyond modeling human activity in context, in order to augment it.

(Take-away from Liz FitzGerald technology coffee morning, 19 October)

Now time is personal

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Mobile devices allow us to shift and personalise time. They allow us to visit places before we arrive and to remain in places after we have left. We renegotiate our time on the fly, and schedule soft meetings with flexible boundaries.

They allow us to fill what would previously have been dead time.

We dignify an occasion by switching off our mobile devices to devote our time to the present.

(Take-away from John Traxler seminar on mobile learning, 13 October)

Designing for Immersive Mixed Reality Learning Environments

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Different partners are likely to be part of different activity systems, with different objectives, different motivations and different tools.

Shared situational objects can be a turning point in negotiations between such partners – reflecting their different perspectives on the same themes. These shared objects sit between the activity systems and offer the potential to bring them together.

Space can act as one of these shared objects, if partners share the same space and have to negotiate its division.

(Notes from the 2011 ReLive conference)

Resurrection

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I thought it made sense to end this blog about being a research student with my graduation ceremony.

And I started other blogs. Lots of other blogs. (Partly because I was working on a blogging project that involved setting up lots of blogs for other people.)

But the official blog is too official, and the joint blog is too focused, and the analytics blog has a set purpose, and the enquiry blogs are project-oriented and usually not my own and I’m using my Tumblr to support a one-screenshot-a-day project. So my notes on conferences and workshops languish in Word documents on my desktop, no use to me or to anyone.

So I’m returning to this first blog, to find out if there’s still life in it.