Coming Back to Basic Concepts of the Context

The use of ethnographic approaches to explore innovative learning contexts places the concept of context at the centre of discussion on basic categories. Further, ethnography in Online-learning within a virtual context as well as shifts between online- and off-line contexts presents a challenge for ethnographic methodology and analysis. In this article I set out to address the challenge and reflect on the categories and models for empirical analysis. Going back to the basic concept of context and ‘text-in-context’ my aim is to discuss the ethnographic significance of the learning context thereby shedding light on the strong context markers. Examples will be adduced in relation to previous fieldwork in IT-upper secondary schools as well asin relation to current fieldwork in scholastic-, profession-oriented and academic learning contexts

Sotsiaalmeedia hariduses: sotsiaalmeediaga õpetamise kontekstualiseerimine keskhariduse tasemel

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneSotsiaalmeediast on saanud võimas internetivõrgustike loomise, suhtlemise ja teabe levitamise vahend. Need lubavused (sh kasutusmugavus) teevad võimalikuks sotsiaalmeedia rakendamise erinevates kontekstides – asjaolu, mis äratab erinevates valdkondades üha suuremat huvi. Huvi sotsiaalmeedia kasutamise vastu õppetöös on küll kasvav, kuid selle kasutamise efekt on uuringute lõikes ebaselge ega kajasta sotsiaalmeedia tunnustatud lubavusi Näiteks on sotsiaalmeedia kasutamine õppetöös potentsiaalselt õpilasekeskne ja konstruktivistlik, ent see potentsiaal ei ole praktikas veel selgelt realiseerunud. Siinse doktoritöö eesmärk on ühelt poolt aidata õpetajatel mõista ja hinnata sotsiaalmeedia regulaarse kasutamise vajadust, et saavutada kontroll selle kasutamise üle ja tajuda ka selle pedagoogiliselt väärtuslikke lubavusi. Teisalt võimaldab doktoritöö õpetajatel nende vahendite kasutust enda jaoks sõnastada, kontekstualiseerides need lubavused oma õpetamistegevustes. Doktoritöö seisukoht on, et tehnoloogia tõhusaks kasutamiseks tuleb õpetajatel liikuda operatsiooniliselt kasutuselt sisulisele kasutusele, mis tähendab sotsiaalmeedias õpetamisvõimaluste nägemist. Doktoritöö raames intervjueerisime keskkooliõpetajaid. Ühelt poolt selleks, et koguda nende mõtteid, arusaamu ja probleeme sotsiaalmeediaga õpetamisel, teisalt soovisime lasta õpetajatel näidata, kuidas nad sotsiaalmeediaga õpetavad ja õppevara ette valmistavad. Leidsime, et pedagoogilisi lubavusi kirjeldatakse läbi avatuse määra, mis tähendab, et erinevalt operatsioonilisest kasutusest ei saa sisulist kasutust eelnevalt kindlaks määrata, vaid see ilmneb õpetaja ja sotsiaalmeedia vahelises suhtes. Järelikult on väga vajalik viia uuenduslikul viisil kokku operatsioonilised oskused ja kogemused, mis pärinevad sellistest regulaarsetest suhetest. Mõistete operatsioonilised lubavused (ingl operational affordances) ja sisulised lubavused (ingl contextual affordances) kasutuselevõtt on seega samm tehnoloogia tõhusa kasutamise nüansside mõistmise suunas. Samuti näitab meie välja pakutud raamistik praktiliselt, kuidas neid mõisteid operatsionaliseerida.Social media (SM) has become a powerful tool for online networking, communication, socializing, and information dissemination. These affordances (including ease of use) give SM usage leverage in different contexts, thus attracting growing interest in diverse disciplines. While interest in the educational use of SM is growing, the outcomes and benefits are unclear across studies and do not reflect its acclaimed affordances. For example, SM use in the classroom is potentially student-centered and constructivist-driven; however, such potential has not yet clearly materialized in practice. On the one hand, this doctoral research seeks to help teachers understand and appreciate the need for regular relationships with SM tools to both gain control of its operations and perceive its pedagogical affordances. On the other hand, the research aims at enabling teachers to articulate the use of SM by contextualizing its affordances in their teaching activities. For teachers to effectively use technology, the present work states that it is important to move from operational use to contextual use, which means seeing teaching options through the lens of SM. We conducted interviews with high school teachers: firstly, to collect their thoughts, insights and problems regarding teaching with SM, and secondly, to let teachers demonstrate how they prepare and teach with SM. We found that pedagogical affordances are characterized by a degree of openness, which means that, unlike operational use, contextual use cannot be determined beforehand but emerges in a regular relationship between the teacher and SM. Consequently, it is imperative to innovatively combine operational skills with the experience that comes from such regular relationships. So, our introduction of the terms operational and contextual affordances is a step towards understanding the nuances in effectively using technology. Also, our proposed framework practically demonstrates how to operationalize these conceptshttps://www.ester.ee/record=b549313

Wayfinding localized research practices through mobile technology

This dissertation presents wayfinding—the process of orienting oneself amid the myriad users, technologies, and digital spaces impacting any writing work—as a research methodology for contextualizing writing in mobile environments. Central to web design and non-web service design, wayfinding is an important addition to rhetoric and writing studies. First, it is descriptive: it observes and records first, showing how people go about tasks, and revealing relationships among people and their environments. Second, it helps when people get lost and then found. It records traces of the mental work people do to get unlost. Finding themselves, peoples’ maps help them both narrate the experience of finding their way as well as to recover their process by “reading over the map,” a process central to chapter 4. Third, wayfinding informs the scholarly representation of method, allowing for discussions of research to be grounded in a contextual, reflexive methodology of practice. We find ourselves, as scholars, amid the stories we tell to make sense of the fields of study we pursue and chapter 5 includes articulations of our scholarly wayfinding conversations. These stories describe how being self-conscious about using the design language of wayfinding will help keep rhetorical methodology in the forefront of our conversations about mobile writing and research practices

Technology in the College Classroom: Crisis and Opportunity

The 21st century classroom is large, diverse, underfunded, and populated by students weaned on digital devices espousing a consumer mentality looking for a good return on investment (ROI) on their education. These students, the so-called millennials, and the coming Generation Z, who have grown up in the digital age, are more pragmatic than previous generations of students and are less amenable to traditional teaching approaches. While some lament this crisis in education, it can be seen as an opportunity. As digital natives, students are immersed in the newer technologies both as consumers and producers and anticipate remaining plugged in during college and beyond. Harnessing this interest and expertise and effectively integrating these newer technologies into the classroom can help solve this crisis. Technology enhanced teaching has the potential to transform learning, deepen student engagement, and connect with the more varied and numerous student cohorts. This article explores how effective use of ePortfolios can be aligned with learning goals to create meaningful, engaging, and innovative assignments that transform the classroom from a site of prescriptive learning, where information is unilaterally transmitted, to one of distributed expertise, where knowledge is jointly created, and digitally literate students are equipped to become the life-long, tech-savvy, self-directed learners that this new century demands. But there are no guarantees. This article concludes by acknowledging tensions in the tech-laden classroom, fears that technology is driving pedagogy, poor understanding of key affordances, and misalignment between instructional goals, learning outcomes, and students\u27 understandings

The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work

A framework for design engineering education in a global context

This paper presents a framework for teaching design engineering in a global context using innovative technologies to enable distributed teams to work together effectively across international and cultural boundaries. The DIDET Framework represents the findings of a 5-year project conducted by the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University and Olin College which enhanced student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, directly experiencing different cultural contexts and accessing a variety of digital information sources via a range of innovative technology. The use of innovative technology enabled the formalization of design knowledge within international student teams as did the methods that were developed for students to store, share and reuse information. Coaching methods were used by teaching staff to support distributed teams and evaluation work on relevant classes was carried out regularly to allow ongoing improvement of learning and teaching and show improvements in student learning. Major findings of the 5 year project include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful eLearning implementations. The DIDET Framework encapsulates all the conclusions relating to design engineering in a global context. Each of the principles for effective distributed design learning is shown along with relevant findings and suggested metrics. The findings detailed in the paper were reached through a series of interventions in design engineering education at the collaborating institutions. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the pedagogical and the technological approaches

Digital Technology and the End of Social Studies Education

In Fall 2000, when "Theory and Research in Social Education" (TRSE) first dedicated an issue to technologies in social studies education, Neil Postman contributed a View Point piece to this issue. Postman, who died in 2003, was an interesting choice because he was an outspoken critic of educational technology who believed that, as he said at the time, "the new technologies both in and out of the classroom are a distraction and an irrelevance." Taking his cue from Postman, the author addresses the issue of digital technology in social studies education by telling a story of his own. He offers a wandering narrative -- and an old-fashioned one at that -- common in the religious stories that Postman saw as the prototype for all cultural stories: the narrative of faith, tested by doubt, emerging reaffirmed. He also discusses two elements that he believes need to be far more present in social studies education, at the pre-service and K-12 level: (1) Clearer disciplinary perspectives; and (2) easier ways of working with data within these perspectives. Technologies, if carefully designed, can be helpful in both areas

Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts

Blogging to Foster Critical Reading.

122 Páginas.Este estudio de investigación acción usando un blog de clase para promover la lectura crítica del inglés como lengua extranjera, fue realizado con un grupo de quince estudiantes de séptimo grado del colegio San Bartolomé La Merced en Bogotá. Este estudio se centró en la promoción de estrategias para desarrollar la lectura crítica a través del uso de un blog. La investigación se realizó con la implementación de un blog que contenía lecturas y actividades de pre-, durante y después de lectura y la implementación de preguntas para fomentar la lectura crítica. Todas las actividades de pre-lectura fueron desarrolladas en clase y las demás se asignaron como trabajo personal para la casa. Los resultados de este estudio mostraron las numerosas ventajas del uso de blogs, para desarrollar las estrategias de lectura crítica de pre visualización, contextualización y reflexión de creencias personales y sociales. De otra parte, los participantes de éste estudio mejoraron sus procesos de lectura y mostraron una actitud positiva hacia el uso de blogs para desarrollar lectura. Estudios futuros en esta área podrían incluir el uso de blogs para promover lectura intensiva y pensamiento crítico