Rebecca's Research Blog

Research process is hotting up. First of all, the DZX222 help conference went live yesterday, and there’s already a lot of activity as the students get involved. There are now 701 students on this presentation, which just keeps on growing.

And I’m starting my two student pilot interviews, so that’s an important part of my research underway.

I’d feel happier if the course team had definitely said I could go ahead. I’ve emailed Kathy about that today, so hopefully she’ll get back to me soon.

And I have got SRPP approval, so that’s a move in the right direction.

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, I’d have to be really careful about referring to data in order to protect anonymity. And if students could access my research, would it affect how they act? Would that matter? Would I be seen as interfering with the learning and teaching? Would I have to write myself some specific blogging ethical guidelines before I got going?

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 of the OU library’s homepage heat map.

Can’t actually think what I’d do with it, but it does seem like a useful tool for web page designers, and gives a very clear picture of how people are getting around.

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 workshops using Neverwinter Nights. In fact, they put together a very rudeimentary game on the spot: desert scene, populated by a penguin. Player’s character goes up to the penguin and says ‘hello’, penguin says ‘I’m hot’. I told Jacob about this simple scenario and he was fascinated, so much som that I’ve had to go and buy Neverwinter Nights, so that he can have a go. I think he wants to program a game about a turtle.

Anyway, they come up with lots of reasons why games design appeals: immediate feedback, gradual learning curve, immediate results. Worth following up some of their earlier research, I think.

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 Polti’s 36 dramatic situations to help with  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations In brief, Polti’s situations are a more detailed version of the view that there are only six plots in the world. One of his situations, for example, is the Daring Enterprise, which requires a bold leader, an object and an adversary.

I was interested in how many times this idea of codifying the narrative format came up during the conference and also in how often this conference seemed to focus on gaming.

After this, Rui Figueiredo talked about an interactive video developed as part of an anti-bullying project. Seemed an immense amount of programming work for very little reward.

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 activity, context and culture in which it is developed and used.’ ‘Language makes little real sense if you don’t understand how it interacts with the culture in which it is inevitably embedded.’

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, people still disagreed on what was physically happening (was that child counting in fives or was he really counting in tens) and what the children were doing (building a tower of Unifix cubes or measuring a desk). One story, many interpretations.

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, Conflict Resolution presents attempts to solve the conflict, the last of which is successful. Fourth, Post Completion, wraps up the narrative. A fifth, Comic, section, can be inserted pretty much anywhere.

This structured look at narrative tied in with what Michael Young had been saying the previous day. It’s interesting to see narrative formalised in this way, to see the skeleton around which so many stories are built. It also tied win with the work on the Royal Mile where I was wondering what makes a narrative memorable. Does it need to contain conflict to be memorable?

Why the weird picture at the top of this posting? Paul was researching ‘Tiny Planets’ and looking at narrative structure within episodes.

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 Levi’s ‘Periodic Table’, a book of stories related to chemical elements.

Laura Korte http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0235396/ talked about how students learn about programming by designing games. Did seem a fun way of learning.