Normalising computer assisted language learning in the context of primary education in England

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe thesis examines the concept of normalisation of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), i.e. complete, effective integration of technology, in the context of primary Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) in England. While normalisation research is conducted predominantly in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, understanding normalisation in the primary mainstream education in England is important due to the contrast between teachers’ lack of readiness to deliver languages as part of the National Curriculum, and technology penetration in the classrooms. This thesis therefore, taking a sociocultural perspective of Activity Theory, attempts to redefine normalisation to include context specific characteristics, identify what factors contribute to and impede normalisation, and assess where primary CALL is on route to normalisation. An ethnographic approach was deemed to be most suitable to gain deep understanding of normalisation. Prolonged immersion in a primary school and the thematic analysis of observations, interviews, field notes and audio recordings revealed that factors impeding normalisation of primary CALL revolve around the following areas: attitudes, logistics, training and support and pedagogy. The issues related to the subject itself, e.g. negative attitudes toward the subject, lack of skills, impact on the achievement of normalisation to larger extent than issues related to technology. Hence in the primary context, normalisation needs to be considered from the point of view of normalisation of MFL and then the technology that is embedded into MFL. The analysis of the data allowed the researcher to create a model which serves as a form of audit of factors that need to be considered when thinking of successful technology integration into languages. Such guidance is needed for the primary MFL context having reoccurring issues, but is also relevant to primary EFL contexts in Europe where similar problems related to teaching of the subject are reported

Residents’ coping responses in collaborative housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying Bhaskar’s four-planar social being to tackle the affordability-integration-health nexus

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global health, social and housing crisis. Citylockdowns, stay-at-home and social distancing requirements were preventiverestrictions increasing residents’ loneliness in regular housing stock. Collaborative housing is an alternative community-led housing form where people live in complete apartments whilst sharing common spaces and resources, enabling socializing and mutual support. The paper reflects on the process of applying Bhaskar’s four-planar social being for designing a methodology to evaluate residents’ coping responses in collaborative housing during the pandemic. The methodology includes iterative stages such as integrative literature review, refining the conceptual framework and research questions, designing, pilot-testing and improving mixed-methods data collection tools and collecting empirical data. Data analysis focuses on (a) residents’ material transactions with the common spaces and the neighbourhood, (b) social interactions between residents in everyday life, (c) social relations with institutions and (d) the stratification of personality, which for this paper implies how residents influenced each other’s motivations, habits and agency. This approach enabled analysis at the intersection of housing affordability, social integration and health. The paper sheds light on the pros and challenges of having critical realism as a foundation for inter- and transdisciplinary mixed-methods research

Ametros: A Technogenetic Simulation Game for Professional Communication Coursework

This dissertation develops a pedagogy of professional communication for online education that provides a degree of feedback higher than that of a classroom setting. In order to construct such pedagogy, I examine professional communication from three perspectives: cognitive, technological, and rhetorical. Cognition and technology are becoming, in many senses, indistinguishable. Technology is extending and augmenting cognitive processes such as memory through databases, spatial awareness through various global positioning technologies, and especially the greater cognitive attention system via the sheer magnitude of media channels. Much of this extension and augmentation is happening beneath, or at least outside of consciousness; in most cases, we are not consciously aware of the cognitive effects of technologies such as SIM cards or databases. They are ubiquitous, deeply embedded, and routine. Katherine Hayles and Nigel Thrift designate this effect of technology on cognition as the “technological unconscious”. I term this increasingly unconscious relationship of cognition and technology as technogenetic. Following Niklas Luhmann, I argue that the autopoietic operationally closed nature of the human biological system forecloses purity; as Luhmann expresses it, “only communication communicates,” not communicators. While machines experience the pure communication of digital code, human beings must rely on cognitive processes, constrained and afforded by mental affinities. This dissertation explores research in a number of disciplines from the work of Sperber and Mercier in cognitive psychology on the argumentative nature of human reasoning to the work of Jeanne Fahnestock, Randy Allen Harris, and others on cognitive rhetoric and figural logic to conclude that argumentation in its many facets is the key rhetorical skill necessary to navigate a technogenetic world. A technogenetic rhetoric engages writing as argumentation within the extra-discursive factors created by the technological unconscious. Technogenetic rhetoric also assumes the visuospatial aspects of technologically enframed communication. As a pedagogy, technogenetic rhetoric follows a constructivist model; in this dissertation, realized by a contextually authentic online simulation game that I call Ametros: A Professional Communication Simulation Game. Ametros is a Greek word that means “without measure” that I use to represent the complexity of contemporary technogenetic systems of communication. Ametros organizes and deploys the elements of discursive, extra-discursive, and visuospatial rhetoric in a ludic environment that provides a combination of human and artificial intelligence driven feedback superior to both existing online solutions and most large classroom settings. The artificial intelligence, in turn, develops recursively through the creation and of corpora of student communication using an annotation interface based on ontologies of argumentation and figuration. These annotations will engage natural language processing algorithms that will, over time, allow the machine to provide real-time feedback on communication skills of the student. Ametros provides an experiential and ludic environment that moves pedagogy of composition, in all of its forms from one of delimited process to a procedural logic of iteration better able to navigate complex systems where audiences as assemblages of human and technological actors determine and are determined by, interactions of cognition and technology

The use of tagging to support the authoring of personalisable learning content

This research project is interested in the area of personalised and adaptable learning and in particular within an e-learning context. Brusilovsky (1996) and Santally (2005) stress the importance of adaptive systems within e-learning. Karagiannikis and Sampson et al. (2004) argue that personalised learning systems can be defined by their capability to adapt automatically to the changing attitudes of the “learning experience” which can, in turn, be defined by the individual learner characteristics, for example the type of learning material. The project evolved to cover areas including personalised learning, e-learning environments, authoring tools, tagging, learning objects, learning theories and learning styles. The main focus at the start of the project was to provide a personalised and adaptable learning environment for students based on their learning style. During the research, this led to a specific interest about how an academic can create, tag and author learning objects to provide the capability of personalised adaptable e-learning for a learner. Research undertaken was designed to gain an understanding of personalised and adaptive learning techniques, e-learning tools and learning styles. Important findings of this research showed that e-learning platforms do not offer much in the way of a personalised learning experience for a learner. Additionally, the research showed that general adaptive systems and adaptive systems incorporating learning styles are not commonly used or available due to issues with flexibility, reuse and integration. The concept of tagging was investigated during the research and it was found that tagging is underused within e-learning, although the research shows that it could be a good ‘fit’ within e-learning. This therefore led to the decision to create a general purpose discriminatory tagging methodology to allow authors to tag learning objects for personalisation and reuse. The main focus for the evaluation of this tagging methodology was the authoring side of the tagging. It was found that other research projects have evaluated the personalisation of learning content based on a learner’s learning style (see Graf and Kinshuk (2007)). It was therefore felt that there was a sufficient body of existing evidence in this area whereas there was limited research available on the authoring side. The evaluation of the discriminatory tagging methodology demonstrated that the methodology could allow for any discrimination between learners to be used. The example demonstrated within this thesis includes discriminating according to a learner’s learning style and accessibility type. This type of platform independent flexible discriminatory methodology does not exist within current e-learning platforms or other e-learning systems. Therefore, the main contribution of this thesis is therefore a platform independent general-purpose discriminatory tagging methodology