November 2009 Archives

The Joint Information Systems Committee blog JISC describes a technology called Wireless Interactive Lecture Demonstrator (WILD) that allows students to use their mobile devices and laptops to to annotate and pose questions on a presenter's slides while the presentation is being delivered. Among other things, this allows the learners to change what is typically a monologic channel into a dialogic one. One of the professors who's using this technology, Dr. James Mundy, explains how this positions the learner as a "pro-sumer" -- an information producer as well as consumer. This harkens back to Reigeluth's distinction between Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Users. Another advantage is that it gives students who are shy about raising their hands another way to pose questions and offer comments.

My initial reflection on this generates a few couple of questions

• How many presenters (e.g., professors) would be willing to accommodate this more disruptive type of technology?
• Would presenters field questions that arrive through this backchannel as they surface, wait until the presentation was concluded, or decide on-the-fly?
• How willing would students be willing to participate in this backchannel communication?

One of the four dimensions Bielaczyc discusses is the Socio-Techno-Spatial. In this section, she discusses student-teacher-cyberspace configurations. What's interesting to me in this particular section is the degree to which a learning space is public or private. The reason I find this interesting is because of how it might suggest an individual's (or learner's) willingness to participate in that digital space.

There's a lot of research out there that's looking at social networks and using those sorts of models to design vibrant, rich learning communities (formal classroom environments and otherwise). However, as we all know, this can be a challenging goal to achieve offline as well as online. How does an online community space encourage people to engage in discussions, share resources, and return on a regular basis? Indeed, the Hydrology curriculum site that Priya shared with us is an example of these design challenges. How can instructional designers design for interaction (e.g., Saffer)?

Returning to Bielaczyc, ... while she doesn't spend a lot of time focusing specifically on student-teacher-cyberspace configurations, at least within the context of this paper, I think it deserves further investigation because of the potential to provide clues into such broad questions regarding levels of participation in an online learning space.

One of my left-field speculations is that part of this might be explained with questions related to privacy, or as Bielaczyc might put it, participant-public-webspace configuration. For example, if we apply one of Bielaczyc's questions,

Is online work visible and/or accessible to all, or do students have private work areas in cyberspace?

then, how might the level of visibility correspond to an individual's level of participation? If it is visible to everyone on the web, does that discourage them from posting anything because s/he is worried that it might be criticized or not considered as good as the content posted by other participants? As we discussed last week, what role does culture play and, more importantly, how do designers accommodate for that? Should visibility be stratified where certain layers of communication are more visible than others? Do avatars offer a solution?

If we use the MOCHA site as a test case and assume that one of the goals is to build an active, vibrant community of users, then one line of investigation that a designer might want to follow is the proportional relationship between a prospective participant's interest in participation and his or her privacy concerns.

Since we were talking about Twitter in our last class session ...

Mashable reports on Purdue University's development of their own customized application (Hotseat) that combines both Twitter and Facebook. After looking at the intro video [scroll to the bottom of the post to see it], they've configured it with the same 140-character limit, but have added a voting feature. So, for example, a professor could see how voting patterns identify specific content areas that need further elaboration. In theory, this would help faculty more quickly get a read on confusion. Another possible advantage is that unlike clickers, the language and terms of the communication is being determined directly by the students.

What's interesting from a research standpoint is how this isn't a story of one early-adopter faculty who has a techie-fondness for Twitter, but rather one of a school and its broader, more systematic effort to see if this technology actually resonates with students.

I was thinking of our work on our respective Design Documents when I read this grad student's blog post in which he informally outlines the chief components of a learning activity designed for a Norwegian secondary school audience. Essentially, the lesson aims to foster cultural competence through film, music, paintings, or film. In reading through it, one part that stands out for me is what could be considered Gagne's first event of instruction, namely, Gaining Attention. In this secondary school lesson plan, he analyzes the learners and considers the central lesson details (cultural and intercultural competence), and opts for a music video from the popular American singer, Jay Z and the the Sri Lankan/British artist M.I.A.

Although, I'm not familiar with the Norwegian secondary school audience, it seems plausible, given the wide reach that both these artists have (e.g., YouTube) coupled with stereotypical teen interests (e.g., rap/pop singers), that this would be an effective way to activate their attention. At the same time, though, Smith & Ragan raise an important cautionary flag on designs such as this. They note that sometimes the attention-activating device can be so powerful that it diverts the students' focus away from the learning objective(s).

A major concern of designers is that they include enough stimulation in this event to draw students' attention to the learning taks, but not so much stimulation that students' attention is directed only towards the attention-directing device and distracted from the learning task. (Instructional Design p. 132)

So in this case, will the students' rapt attention with the music encourage them to ignore the words/lyrics he wants them to analyze for achieving the learning objective?

In the Saffer reading, I like the diagram that plots the flow of observations into structured insights (e.g., ideation, principles). Also interesting in this diagram is how it accommodates divergence (of thoughts and opinions) -- a dynamic necessary for any good design. Lastly, I think it's also worth noting that the ultimate artifact or deliverable, namely the prototype, sits at the bottom of the diagram, whereas the strategy is positioned at the top. I'm definitely no graphing expert, but it seems to me that a frequent convention is that the final output is placed at the top.

Beyond the diagram, other pointers that I want to include in my virtual design notebook include:

• Hunt statements - these encourage you to carefully think about what exactly it is you're looking for, or the main purpose for your research; needless to say, a lot of valuable time can be wasted by only having a haphazard idea of what you're looking for
• Screeners - a good cautionary statement on avoiding participants who are only in it for the money
• Moderator Scripts - this emphasizes that there is a real art to writing good, strategic questions and the frequent propensity of the interviewee to give you the answer that s/he thinks you want rather than information that gets at what is actually occurring in the context being observed and studied
• Cost justification - this appears to be a persistent challenge for those engaged in work where the Return-On-Investment isn't immediately apparent. In the related field of Usability (e.g., User Experience; Interaction Design Experience), there have been numerous articles and blog postings on this very challenge. One of the more popular ones comes from User Interface Engineering, in which the value of usability research was connected to The $300 Million Button

I was glad to see Saffer added to our reading list as I've read some of his work previously (e.g., his blog posts when he worked Adaptive Path and now). On the lighter side of things, Dan Saffer has a satiric presentation titled, How to Lie with Design Research. It's nice to be able to learn and laugh at the same time.

Dan Saffer - "How to Lie with Design Research" Part 1/2 at URF 08 from bolt peters on Vimeo.