Rebecca's Research Blog

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)

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)

Picking up the theme of gaming, Marian Petre found teenagers using readily available Internet resources to engage in playful navigation and reuse of the information space. Examples:

• Pseudo-Friend – create a person in Facebook and see how many friends they can attract
• Brimstone Rhetoric – justify any position of argument using biblical quotes
• Degrees of Separation – How many links it takes to get from one concept or another
• Way Finding – Navigate to a designated destination using only the most-zoomed view on Google Maps
• Tower of Babel – Use online translators in order to hold conversations in a language you don’t know.

Such games are creative inventive or imaginative. They require, or help develop critical thinking, problem solving or some computational nous. They tend to be mischievous, mildly rebellious or satirical.

Can we bring mischief to the aid of education? Part of intelligent play is that it crossed boundaries and breaks a few rules. Is there a way to bring this into education and still make it compelling?

Petre, M. (2011) Intelligent games. ACM Inroads, (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), 2 (2).  ISSN 2153-2184.

Literacy is ‘The ability to understand information however it is presented’ (Lanham 1995 in The Electronic Word)

Lankshear and Knobel (2003) proposed that it has three dimensions:

1. Operational – skills and techniques
2. Cultural – development of shared meanings
3. Critical – all literacies are socially constructed and selective, reflecting certain values, rules and perspectives, so individuals need to develop a critical stance

Reading on screen is profoundly different to reading print. We need to understand how meaning is constructed in different modes and which elements are most salient in different modes. A key part of gaming literacy, for example, is being able to anticipate what will appear on the screen next.

We teach literacy because it is the information medium. The need to read and write and compose texts remains very important,

(Notes from the OU Workshop on Digital Literacies – 20 May 2011)

Games are important when building communities. They help to develop trust and an understanding of each other’s skills and personalities.

In terms of language, wordplay helps us to establish register – to work out what we mean and double mean when we use language. Can we create online community without the use of word games?

Note to self – this begins to pull together work on humour within Schome Park and the work on cohesive ties and register in the same setting. Humour is a way of testing out meanings, and of establishing shared reference points.

It’s usually acceptable to have lurkers within a community – it’s never acceptable to have lurkers within a team.

(Retrieved from my notes on the Virtual Doctoral School back in 2007)

I must admit, I don’t remember ever hearing the word metalepsis before. And when I google its meaning, I then have to google the meaning of the words used to define it. ‘Trope’ and ‘extradiagetic’ aren’t part of my day-to-day vocabulary – though they might have been if I’d stuck with language and literature instead of veering off towards educational technology.

This definition ‘any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […]’ is fairly typical. The diegetic universe is the fictional universe – Narnia and Discworld are clear examples, but most works of art and fiction present their own world. The extradiegetic universe is one that is different from the fictional one. So metalepsis takes place when a story’s author intrudes their comments within the story, or when the artist’s hand suddenly appears in a comic strip in The Beano transgressing the boundary between the narrative world and the physical world.

Master of the Revels: Magritte

This Magritte painting is an example of taking it further – the movement between fictional worlds and different realities.

At the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference, Astrid Ensslin began to explore the connections of metalepsis with the conference theme of ‘Blurring the Boundaries’.

Lots of ideas – too many for me to note down during the presentation. They include ‘participatory metalepsis’such as cosplay and fan fiction, and the ‘avatar as a metaleptic vehicle’ that takes us into a different world.

Two themes emerging for me – one about paratexts (the texts that arise around digital media, such as walkthroughs, cheat guides and fan fiction) and about ‘parapractices’ (a term I’ve just invented to cover cosplay — I’m sure there are more examples). Also the theme of the wish to move between the worlds – to bring our avatar into real life, or to move with our avatar into the virtual world (see Liberate Your Avatar for an example of this).

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.

My husband and I at my graduation ceremony in Milton Keynes: 22 June 2010.

You can download my thesis  ‘The Construction of Shared Knowledge through Asynchronous Dialogue’ at http://oro.open.ac.uk/19908/

Or just read the abstract…

This thesis investigates how groups of learners use asynchronous dialogue to build shared knowledge together over time. To do this, it takes a sociocultural approach, with a situated focus on learners’ social and temporal settings as well as on the tools they employ. It utilises concepts developed to support understanding of knowledge co-construction in face- to-face environments, particularly the social modes of thinking identified by Mercer and his colleagues (Mercer, 1995, 2000, 2002; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer & Wegerif, 1999) and the improvable objects described by Wells (1999).

Analysis shows that, over short periods of time, groups of learners construct shared vocabulary, history and understanding slowly through the use of a series of discursive devices including those identified here as ‘constructive synthesis’, the ‘proposal pattern’ and ‘powerful synthesis’. Over longer periods they may engage in ‘attached dialogue’, a form of asynchronous dialogue that is mediated by improvable objects. The development of these improvable objects involves learners engaging in exploratory dialogue that builds into progressive discourse, a coordinated form of co-reasoning in language. While doing this, they actively work to avoid unproductive interaction by consistently shifting responsibility from the individual to the group.

Previous studies have suggested that asynchronous dialogue may act to limit learners to cumulative exchanges (Littleton & Whitelock, 2005; Wegerif, 1998). The analysis over time presented here shows that asynchronous exchanges are enriched by the use of textual affordances that are not available in speech. In the case of attached dialogue, groups of learners are prompted to share knowledge, challenge ideas, justify opinions, evaluate evidence and consider options in a reasoned and equitable way. They do this more successfully when their co-construction of knowledge is not solely task-focused but also focuses on tool use and on the development of social knowledge about the group.

Sometimes it seems there is no endpoint to a doctorate, it just slowly runs into the sand.

Now that the university has approved the award of my degree, I have to wait until next month to have the degree and title conferred, and then another couple of months until the ceremony…