Rebecca's Research Blog

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 sit through it. (Though, I must say, her supervisor was a very good presenter and managed to shape a fairly pointless paper into an interesting talk).

The research was on an interactive enviornment. Could it be used to encourage imaginative writing? The short answer was no. But, to investigate this, primary school children were split into three groups. The first stayed inthe classroom as a control group and did imaginative writing as pr usual. The second went to the research centre, where they had pretty much the same lesson as in the classroom. The third went to the research centre, had the interactive experience and then did the imaginative writing. To prevent the other groups getting jealous, this group was sworn to secrecy about what they had been doing. How ethical is that?

Also, the interactive envioronment made one of the kids throw up. Probably a fitting response to the whole project.

Lisa Gjedde talked on ‘capturing the meaning in interactive storytelling’. There were elements of the project which appealed to me, particularly the thinking of a personal question, then casting the electronic runes and interpreting the resulting video in the light of your own question. However, I won’t be going to any papers by Lisa again.

Spent the morning on a really fun activity. We met up at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in John Know House on the Royal Mile. I was expecting the centre to be a backroom somewhere but it’s an entire, well resourced building about midway up the Royal Mile. Seeing as storytelling in England tends to be confined to the upstairs rooms in pubs or to one-off events, this is even more impressive.

Anyway, we split into three groups and went for storytelling walks along the Royal Mile, taking digital photos as we went. Then we returned to base, shared stories and impressions and made a collage of the experience.

This seemed to tie in very well with Gill’s mobile learning. You can see the possibility for creating a really rich resource about the Royal Mile with different histories and stories and perspectives available at every point. Layer upon layer of different perspectives.

Also it made me think about why some stories/narratives endure. If a major role of narrative in education is to help us to remember things, then which stories help us to remember best? Which elements are the most important? Do we tend to remember things which make us uneasy?

Kirsten Price talked on ‘Narratives in New Zealand schools: a radical experiment’. She introduced an interesting DVD but the links with narratives felt tenuous.

Harry Brenton is at Imperial and talked about ‘teaching dynamic medical processes using medical representations’ which was good but out of my field. Did make me think about how we understand and process information in different ways depending on how it is presented.

Rose Luckin’s paper was ‘When the NINF came home: guiding parents and children in the co-construction of narratives linking home and school learning’. This is based on a project where tablet PCs moved between home and school, giving parents a better idea of what was going on in school. I must say I didn’t warm to it as a project. Perhpas because I’m not convinced of the virtues of getting primary school kids to schlep tablet PCs round with them. Perhaps because I found the interface too irritating, perhaps because it’s pushing the school into the home. I think when you’re at primary school you should be able to switch off and play when you get home, not spend hours going through your day with your parents.

I found it amusing that most of the conference was in the St Trinneans Room at the halls of residence. Turns out it was the real St Trinians on which the cartoons and the films were based! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Trinians

Getting round to blogging more about the NILE conference. Paul Hazel from Swansea asked ‘are we justified in using narrative as a pedagogical tool?’ Paul seemed to be getting at the heart of what the conference was all about. He was one of the few people to define narrative and to consider what that definition meant.

‘Narrative is the primary means of comprehension and expression for our experience of events changing over time. Narrative time is subjective, not objective; elastic not metronomic.’

Polkinghorne (1988) defines narrative as ‘the fundamental scheme for linking individual human actions and events into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite.’

Narrative is a fundamental mode of thought. It is one of our most important means of encoding long-term memory. The organisation entailed in narratives reduces cognitive load. The additional processing necessary may generate new meaning. Narratives allow more efficient retrieval of memories. Narrative is crucial in the establishment and maintenance of personal identity. We use narratives to describe who we are, to describe the past and to predicta nd plan the future.

facts only have meaning in relation to others. They must be contextualised. So all learning relies on narratives.

I took the ipaq out and took a lot of photos. Not necessarily good photos, but photos with a GPS fix. It may be good at latitude and longitude, but it’s lousy at altitude. For some reason, it thinks that this picture was taken at an altitude of 71 metres. It may be a small and blurry picture, but you can see sea level, and it’s definitely not 71 metres down. 

http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/rmy/rmichaelyoung/Home.html

‘Leveraging many models to build interactive learning environments’. Must say I wasn’t too hopeful about this, as the title seemed nonsensical. Seems that leveraging is a word that Americans use far more than Brits, and it seems to mean something like ‘utlilising’ or ’employing’. Can’t find a better definition than that.

Anyway, Michael Young, seriously good speaker and the only person I’ve ever known to successfully integrate video clips within a Powerpoint presentation. I’d go and hear a paper from him again any time.

He was looking at how you can create convincing computer-operated characters within a game environment. Not just ciphers, who have the treasure if you give them the green key, and not just characters which bumble around a limited area, saying the same thing all the time, but characters which are convincing and act convincingly.

He had a way of doing it, but I’d have thought, even with supercomputers at hand to work on it, the amount of decision making required would make anything more than a game lasting a few minutes an impossibility.

Anyway, he illustrated his theory with clips from Star Wars, which were very successful and which clearly demonstrated the workings of an underlying narrative structure. He separated out the story from the discourse, the fantasy and imagination from the technical bits which make it happen. The world in the stoy from the world in which the story is told.

Oh, and apparently, if you’re enough of a Star Wars geek, you know that light sabres are powered by batteries. Who knew?

You can see them in action at http://www.palindrome.de/

We had two performances by this group, who use motion tracking software and a host of other gadgetry to foreground the ways in which human conversation involves a host of other things beside words. Eye motions, body position, movement, they’re all involved.

So sound and dance and movement and visuals are all brought together. And it looks good. On paper.

Can’t say I took much from it, except a reinforced consciousness of how many real world cues are lost when you move online. On the other hand, they’re probably replaced by a host of other cues. There’s a paper in there somewhere about the myriad social cues available in an online conference.

I’m going to create a new blog category – papers that could be written and I’ll never get round to…

Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments conference in Edinburgh 8-11 August 2006. Finally, I get round to blogging about my first academic conference as a research student.

It must be said that this wasn’t the most obvious choice, even though interactive learning environments are my subject area. Narratives is a bit left field for me, but it looked fun, and it was in Edinburgh when the festival was on, and it happened to be in a week when I already had childcare sorted. Also, it looked kind of quirky, which appealed to me.

General thoughts? Should have taken the laptop, then I could have blogged as the conference went on. Kept thinking of things I wanted to blog, and I’ve ended up saving them for a couple of weeks till I’m back at the computer at work. Must take the password for this blog home with me 🙂

Great idea to go to Edinburgh during festival week, though it would have been more sensible to arrange to stay for a couple more days and get the benefit – we kept rushing past exciting events without ever really connecting.

Narratives. Not really my thing. They seem to be all over the place and very few people had bothered to define them. I think there’ more to narratives than linking a few things together, but obviously other people disagree.

Giving papers. Always give a paper at a conference. Unless, you’re so well known that everyone knows who you are and what you’re working on. Otherwise you have to explain your work umpteen times, and keep wearing the name badge.

Networking. Met a lot of interesting people, but it would have been more useful to meet a few who were roughly in the same ball park as me.