Sign in Helsinki; no relevance to this post. I just liked the white on red. I might be able to insert an awkward metaphor here about being prepared to extinguish erroneous methodologies, but I won’t bother.

So this is the third part of this methodological exploration of, well, my methodology from my thesis. I thought at least some of this would be useful for any aspiring or current PhD students out there. Or anyone trying to conduct a large-scale (kind of) qualitative study.

Please keep in mind this highly subject to change. I suspect I will be changing it considerably after a few more meetings with my supervisors and, most especially, afte the pilot which I hope to do this summer. I am sticking with guidelines I have crafted for myself in terms of what my methods and overall methodology should provide me. In short it should do the following:

• Prove consistent with the Korean cultural context of mobile technology use, i.e. is technologically localized to the Korean context of coming to know through mobile technology
• Provide evidence of informal or formal participation by graduate students in the Humanities in Korean universities, participation that oscillates between high and low transactional distances and individualized and socialized behavior (Park, 2011)
• Prove logistically feasible in terms of data collection and participant access
• Allow for the inclusion of qualitative data that is textual or multimodal

Methodological Pitfalls: Avoiding Technology Acceptance Models

Pitfalls is a strong word here, but I wanted to steer clear of methodologies that focused on technology acceptance. Mobile is a thing in Korea, an already established thing, so I don’t need to spend time (I think) on whether or not they have accepted something I know they have.

In terms of methodological characteristics to avoid, these include an avoidance of any sort of technology-driven or technologically deterministic model of data collection and analysis. As such, the methodology use for this research is willing to follow the graduate student through their process of meaning-making in a disciplinary context, whether that meaning-making occurs in mobile technology or another form of ICT. Building on this desire to avoid a technologically-driven model, this research is not concerned with a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) or any such model for measuring acceptance or quality of use of mobile environments, such as those presented in Kim, Fisher, & Fraser (1999) & Lee, Yoon, & Lee (2009). This research assumes current use of mobile technology and hopes to capitalize on existing formal and informal practices for making meaning in mobile environments. However, TAM and other acceptance models offer a potential point of later analysis, namely trying to ascertain whether graduate students would be willing to use mobile technology for ‘new’ formal practices, such as those introduced in a participatory design intervention. For the purposes of data collection itself, namely the interview schedule, it offers a cautionary tale on carefully phrasing questions to avoid making participants associate new practices strictly with new technology, or new uses of existing technology. The focus should be on the meaning being made in these environments towards disciplinary participation and the interview schedule should be structured as such. Questions from the interview schedule designed to answer research questions are structured to avoid this causation whereby new practices are linked exclusively to new technology.

At this stage of understanding meaning making mediated through mobile technology in a disciplinary context, it isn’t necessary to employ a design driven methodology for structuring this research as it assumes a fully understood, stable environment requiring an intervention, technological or otherwise. Design methodologies might be useful at later stages of this research once the community of practice and the graduate students interaction with mobile technology to participate in disciplinary activity is fully understood. If interventions designed to foster further interaction or accelerate meaning making in a mobile context are presented as warranted, then a design methodology will be evaluated for its capacity to enact such outcomes. Building on this, at this stage this research is not concerned with replicability and transferability of findings to other contexts unless the data and findings suggest such applicability to other contexts. It is assumed, in parallel with a case study approach, that the context of learning being analyzed in this research is unique to the community, practices, domains, and artifacts presented here. As such, findings will be methodologically collected, critiqued, and presented as relevant to this specific Korean context.

While not specifically a design model, the methodology chosen for this research will avoid the Task Activity Model (Frohberg, Goth, Schwabe, 2009) and instead focus observations towards context and communication (less on control). This avoidance of the Task Activity Model is not due to any methodological shortcomings of this approach, but rather its working assumption that tasks, activities, processes or workflows have been identified in the context of the Korean Humanities graduate student environment. In keeping with, but not adhering to, the emergence of grounded theory, the data collection techniques employed for this research allow for the emergence of informal and formal practices that collectively identify graduate student participation in the Humanities. Building on this focus on context, this research is less concerned with assessment and outcomes than practice and process. The research questions are designed to ascertain what graduate student participation looks like in the Humanities when mediated through mobile technology; media and other compositions will be collected as evidence of meaning making, but not specifically how the Humanities community might assess these compositions. As such, there is no methodological technique employed to look at alignment of these compositions with formalized curricula.

Methodological Adherence

The methodological techniques used for this research embrace collecting qualitative data demonstrating the following:

• Engagement through mobile technology with the graduate students’ discipline, informally or formally
• Graduate student participation across formal and informal, individualized and socialized activities of meaning making, paying particular attention to the oscillation between different states of being consistent with seamless learning. Mobility in this context, “is not an exclusive property of the technology, it also resides in the lifestyle of the learner, who in the course of everyday life moves from one context to another, switching locations, social groups, technologies and topics” (Vavoula & Sharples, 2009)
• The creation and use or potential use of multimodal artifacts for disciplinary participation

As this research is less concerned with assessment, but rather process and outcomes, it will be drawing on Vavoula & Sharples (2009) considerations for evaluating mobile learning, namely how to capture and analyze learning in context, with consideration for learner privacy. This context will be established methodologically in this research by collecting narratives of participation in a disciplinary context, as well as collecting created media artifacts for analysis. Further, this research is attempting to “look beyond measurable cognitive gains into changes in the learning process and practice” (2009). The chosen methodologies attempt to identify and theorize on these changing practices by following the graduate student across informal and formal channels as they create meaning in a disciplinary context.

Research Design and Methodology

The methods chosen for this research support a qualitative methodology for the purposes of answering the research questions on mobile technology use and graduate student participation in the Humanities. The methods for data collection are presented below, with justification as to the methods of their selection.

Narrative Interviews
Since the research questions focus on graduate student participation in the Humanities, formally or informally, it will be important to construct the narrative of what that participation looks like and the oscillations that occur within this context between formal and informal practices, and individualized and socialized activities with high and low transactional distances (Park, 2011). To coherently gauge this participation and these oscillations, it is important to provide the students a voice for establishing their identity in these movements and activities. This research does not presuppose a particular a level of receptiveness to or use of mobile technology, but rather attempts to gauge that receptiveness based on the individual transcripts and subsequent narrative analysis (Robson, 2002). The narrative interviews are designed to identify and map the processes, activities, and reflections that graduate students encounter as they move through their graduate education. They also are designed to let data emerge from the transcripts that might demonstrate the mitigating circumstances that affect participation in the Humanities, such as personal or family commitments.

Participation Self-Reflection
Further to these narrative interviews will be reflections conducted at intervals during the research process by the participating graduate students. These reflections will be requested from the participating graduate students in whatever medium is convenient to their current practices (social media, textual, or otherwise) and will attempt to gauge graduate engagement in the Humanities and the use of mobile technology to mediate that engagements. This secondary data stream will be analyzed in conjunction with the narrative interview transcripts in an attempt to extract answers to the research questions of how mobile technology is being used by graduate students in the Humanities, what is being produced there, and what participation in the Humanities looks like across all states of activity (informal, formal, individualized, etc.). For the purposes of the pilot, this will involve two reflections to triangulate the findings from the one narrative interview. These self-reflections will be paired with a further reflection which will take place exclusively through mobile. One question will be delivered to the participants asking them to reflect on one granular aspect of disciplinary practice or mobile use through their mobile technology; this question is designed to provide a less rigorous means of participation and will be employed in the pilot study to determine its use in answering the research questions. If considered useful, it will be employed at intervals throughout the larger research study.

Artifact Analysis
Participants will be asked to make available an artifact (media or otherwise) created in mobile technology to support disciplinary participation. This artifact can be mobile media, a textual composition, a dialogue-based activity, a collaboration, or otherwise. These artifacts will be collected and analyzed to answer the research question on what is being produced in mobile technology in the Humanities and what these compositions/productions might be classified as (informal, formal, individualized, socialized, high/low transactional distance evoking Park, 2011). These artifacts will be analyzed to indicate what practices are made visible through their production; further, the Task Model will reviewed to see if these artifacts represents tasks and whether this Task Model approach has merit for revealing disciplinary practices. For the purposes of the pilot, participants will be asked to make available one artifact for analysis.

These three data collection methods are designed to triangulate the findings emerging from the narrative interviews on what graduate participation looks like in the Humanities and how meaning is made there when mediated through mobile technology. Jointly, they constitute a case study approach (sort of), one scattered across multiple institutions but which encapsulates a Community of Practice (maybe). They also employ methods in keeping with an ethnographic approach, but remain sensitive to the particular Korean context in which embedding the researcher as member of the community would be logistically problematic and might skew the data collected there.

Full Disclosure

I don’t know at this stage whether these data points will provide anything that will get me closer to answering my research questions, although I suspect they will. The methods here are consistent with qualitative approaches being used by the research community I am drawing from (studying mobile practices in Korea/Asia) and so I feel confident that at least one of these methods, but maybe not all three, is the way to go.

Ultimately though, I only know that I need a methodology to enact the pilot which let me gather data on the effectiveness of these methods. I am not married to any of it except the research questions, so I am perfectly happy to change.

Korean mobile media

So building on my previous post, we now get to mobile media and the methodologies we might employ to make that activity visible. For this post, these all exclusively focus on mobile media as it relates to informal practice; my research is concerned with mobile media and mobile use that oscillates across informal/formal, individualized/socialized, and high/low transactional distance dichotomies. As with the previous post, I am going to put the references up front for anyone interested in looking at mobile use for media practices in Korea (or Asia). The Hjorth works in particular are quite good. I will be posting a third part on what I see as the methodological pitfalls of mobile learning and the methods I actually chose to collected data; granted, it is written from my decidedly academically naive point of view, but there you have it.

References

• Goh, D. H. L., Ang, R. P., Chua, A. Y., & Lee, C. S. (2009). Why we share: A study of motivations for mobile media sharing. In Active Media Technology (pp. 195-206). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Haddon, L., & Kim, S. D. (2007). Mobile phones and web-based social networking-Emerging practices in Korea with Cyworld. JOURNAL-COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK, 6(1), 5.
• Hjorth, L. (2013). Locating the Visual: A Case Study of Gendered Location-Based Services and Camera Phone Practices in Seoul, South Korea. Television & New Media.
• Hjorth, L. (2009). Mobile media in the Asia Pacific: gender and the art of being mobile. Taylor & Francis US.
• Hjorth, L. (2008). Being Real in the Mobile Reel A Case Study on Convergent Mobile Media as Domesticated New Media in Seoul, South Korea. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), 91-104.
• Ok, H. Y. (2011). New Media Practices in Korea. International Journal of Communication, 5, 320-348.
• Ok, H. R. (2008). Screens on the Move: Media Convergence and Mobile Culture in Korea. University of Southern California.
• Squire, K. (2009). Mobile media learning: multiplicities of place. On the Horizon, 17(1), 70-80.

Mobile Media Models

The following studies have all proven useful in the construction of a methodological approach for this thesis. All in some way involve research on mobile communities or social practices in Korea; most remain or gravitate towards informal practices rather than formal disciplinary activity commiserate with university level participation. The studies presented here also ascribe to the guidelines as outlined prior in this methodological chapter. Namely, they

• Are consistent with the Korean cultural context of mobile technology use, i.e. is technologically localized to the Korean context of coming to know through mobile technology
• Provide evidence of informal or formal participation by graduate students in the Humanities in Korean universities, participation that oscillates between high and low transactional distances and individualized and socialized behavior (Park, 2011)
• Prove logistically feasible in terms of data collection and participant access
• Allow for the inclusion of qualitative data that is textual or multimodal

Emerging media methodologies, the kind being addressed in this thesis through mobile technology use in graduate students at Korean universities, attempt to identify and observe complex practices of interaction between learners and their artifacts for learning. Galloway (2013) helps establish a particular focus for constructing mobile media methodologies in this context, a focus that has partly inspired the methodology chosen for this research. In this focus, several questions were asked to frame a methodological framework, yet the following stand out as being most relevant to this thesis. Namely,

• How do anticipation and expectation of particular futures mobilize people to create them—or attempt to prevent their creation?
• How do these practices of cultural (re)production support or challenge the intentions of the designers?
• How can existing empirical research methods such as media ethnography incorporate more material and speculative elements to better reflect these subjects and objects of analysis?

In the case of the first question in the context of Humanities participation in Korean universities, a rephrased question more relevant to this thesis would be how do anticipation and expectation of particular technological and disciplinary futures mobilize participants to create them? In this rephrasing, we see evidence of two discrete, yet overlapping, activities. We see the use of mobile technology, its current practice, and future expectation and we see disciplinary practice as it stands currently and how it is expected to evolve. Both presumably would be present in qualitative data being collected from graduate students in the Humanities, how they use mobile technology, what is produced there, and what participation in the Humanities looks like when mediated through mobile technology. For the second question, we are less concerned with how practices of cultural (or disciplinary) production challenge the intentions of the designers, but rather how mobile media production supporting (informally or formally) disciplinary practice challenges the practices of the discipline itself. The third can stand as is as it reflects a broader development in methodological design in mobile media projects. For the purposes of this thesis, how would media ethnography in the Korean graduate student context be complemented by additional streams of data or observation points? The following studies push towards answering all those questions.

Haddon & Kim (2007) conducted a study exploring the practices emerging from mobile phones and web-based social networking in Korea via the aforementioned Cyworld. While this study focused exclusively on informal practices for communication, the methodology employed provides a model for this research study. Haddon & Kim used interviews with four students from an English course taught by one of the researchers. Each student was interviewed twice and additional data was collected through diaries which chronicled their activities in these social networks on a timeline. The interviews proved rich for analysis, illustrating examples of emerging practice and personal approaches to social media and demonstrating areas of divergence amongst the interviewees. Haddon & Kim complemented this study with an additional qualitative study involving 30 interviews (2007). The methodology employed in this study directly references the research questions being addressed, namely the relationship of the individual to their social community (via Cyworld), the relationship between the social community and the mobile phone in terms of new media practices (phone images), and how those practices relate to the Korean cultural context of social communication. Such a methodology could be appropriated for the purposes of this thesis with a relatively small cohort of graduate students in the Humanities being interviewed on multiple occasions and asked to provide records of their media practices supporting their disciplinary work in mobile settings (media artifacts or compositions that were, at least in part, composed in mobile technology). These artifacts could be used to triangulate, to some degree, the findings from extracted from the interviews.

Haddon & Kim are attempting to identify emerging practices in communication influenced by mobile technology, an example of a larger research trend towards identifying new practices in participation. A methodology that furthers Haddon & Kim’s approach is Goh et al (2009)’s study on why mobile users share media in terms of motivations and information needs. The methodology employed in this study mirrors Haddon & Kim’s approach: participants were asked to maintain a diary for a month that documented their media sharing activities (2009). These diaries were buttressed with data collected from post-study interviews; both these data collection methods were used to identify motivational factors in media sharing. For the purposes of this thesis, it would be necessary, in order to answer the research question on what types of mobile materials were being produced in the Humanities in South Korean universities, to supplement the diary and interview approach with some sort of artifacts or portfolio or artifacts designed to indicate the range of compositions and media being created in mobile technology.

Hjorth (2013) advances this critique of emergent media practices in mobile environments in Korea through her case study approach to gender, location-based services, and camera phone practices in Seoul, Korea. Hjorth employed a case study technique that followed participants through location-based service (LBS) applications and media sharing practices and how these applications and activities illustrated the relationship between gender and camera phone practices. This study continues an exploration begun in her 2009 study on mobile media in the Asia Pacific region and how gender influences the state of being mobile. In Hjorth’s 2013 study, The LBS environment provides the vantage point from which to construct the methodology to identify emerging practices. Hjorth used focus groups, surveys, and in-depth interviews to collect the data. Perhaps more importantly, she is attempting to make visible practice that oscillates consistently between states of being (geographical, social, personal); this is particularly relevant to this thesis as it attempts to make visible the oscillation between informal and formal, individualized and socialized states of activity all commiserate with disciplinary practice. Based on Haddon & Kim (2007), Goh et al (2009), & Hjorth (2013), it is becoming clear that in-depth interviews, along with some sort of media or compositional artifact collection, will form a significant portion of the data collection involved in this thesis’ methodology. Further studies, all exploring mobile media and geographical impact, include Squire (2009) and the aforementioned Hjorth (2009). These studies all are indicative of the “mobility turn” (Urry, 2002) in the social sciences and how the mobile phone becomes a vantage point for observing this mobility turn; while this thesis is less concerned with geographical location per se, it is concerned with mobility through these learning spaces, informal, formal or otherwise.

Hjorth (2008) further advances the relationship between mobile media and emerging practice in her study on mobile media found in artistic installments; it discusses the capacity of mobile technology (specifically, the emerging practices stemming from mobile use) to blur the distinctions between creator/artist and audience, which might prove complementary to this thesis’ attempt to follow the learner’s oscillation between informal and formal, individualized and socialized states of being. Methodologically, this study implicitly emphasizes the need for some sort of artifact analysis to complement interview or observational methodologies. As such, it proves useful for incorporating a (mobile media) artifact analysis as a means of triangulating data collected through observations or interviews.

Korea provides a rich context for observing emerging social practices in mobile environments and mobile media (Ok, 2011) and the methodologies employed by Hjorth, Haddon & Kim, & Goh et al provide a useful methodological set of approaches to observing and collecting data that might answer the research questions focused on graduate student participation in the Humanities and how that participation is mediated by mobile technology. The following section now details the methods of selection I am using in this thesis to construct a methodological approach drawn from the research referenced above.

1. How do faculty and graduate students in higher education in the Humanities in South Korea use mobile technology to support their learning practices?
2. What work is being produced in mobile technology in Korean higher education in the Humanities?
3. What is the nature of participation for graduate students in the Humanities in higher education in Korea?

I have about 85 more things I would like to know, ie other research questions, but my supervisors rightly drilled me down to these potentially answerable questions. In further evidence of why they are supervisors and I am a student, they also advised me to zero in on the research questions and then work the questions both ways, one way towards theory and the other way towards methodology. So something that looks like this:

After months of floundering about in the heady ether of my theory chapter, trying vainly to articulate a position amidst the tenets and twists and turns of Community of Practice and Multimodality, his sound advice was simply to stop that, look at your research questions, and to think logistically about what data could reasonably be collected to answer those. Then draft a methodology and constantly work back towards the research questions. Occasionally, stop that and work the theory back towards the research questions as well. And then everything made sense. I am bound by the logistics of data collection and shouldn’t shy away from that.

But then it left with me with the complexities of methodologies for mobile activity. A set of methods and a means to analyze the data collected from those methods. So this is what we have here. My first pass on this. Some of it is very orthodox (narrative interviews), some slightly less so (mobile prompts, media artifacts), but all of it, I hope, helps triangulate the findings. I am putting the sources up front here to save anyone from having to read through this whole thing, but I thought it might be useful for other practitioners or fellow students out there. I will post this in a few parts to break up the reading with the next part being some specific mobile media models.

References

• Bird, P., & Soreze, F. (2009). Methodological Issues in a study of Mobile Learning as a Disruptive Innovation.
• Frohberg, D.; Goth, C. & Schwabe, G. (2009). Mobile learning projects- a critical analysis of the state of the art. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25: 307-331.
• Pachler, N. (2010). Mobile learning: structures, agency, practices. Springerverlag Us.
• Pachler, N. (2007). Mobile learning: towards a research agenda. Retrieved April 10, 2013 from http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/5402/1/mobilelearning_pachler_2007.pdf.
• Traxler, J., & Bridges, N. (2005). Mobile learning–the ethical and legal challenges. Mobile learning anytime everywhere, 203.
• Vavoula, G. & Sharples, M. (2009) Meeting the Challenges in Evaluating Mobile Learning: a 3-level Evaluation Framework. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1,2, 54-75.

Methodological Issues specific to mobile learning

The overall aim of this research is to determine the particulars of graduate student participation in the Humanities in higher education in South Korea through mobile technology, how mobile technology is used as part of a larger process of ‘coming to know’, a process whereby meaning is constructed through the use and mastery of a number of different tools, technological, intellectual, and physical (Saljo, 1999). This process of ‘coming to know’ through the mastery of tools such as mobile technology presents considerable methodological difficulties in terms of data collection, observable behavior, social interaction, and disciplinary output (composition, etc.). As such, methodologies chosen to observe, collect, and analyze data related to this process of ‘coming to know” through disciplinary process must reflect the fluidity of student engagement in terms of transactional distance (Park, 2011) and oscillations between independent and socialized activity. Further, the chosen methodologies need to span the divide between formal and informal learning, acknowledging the seamless learning that occurs when students engage with mobile technology across informal and formal strands of learning and across different disciplinary contexts (Looi et al, 2009 & Sharples, 2006) and across fluid learning environments (Taylor, 2007). This is methodologically challenging. However, the theories employed in this thesis, Community of Practice theory and Multimodality, enable a vantage point for observation and analysis where disciplinary activity mediated through mobile technology is governed by community practice and where meaning-making and related outputs are socially negotiated. It is through community practice and social negotiation of meaning that activity becomes observable and analyzable.

The methodology being presented and critiqued in this section is organized according to the needs of the research questions as well as through the investigation of mobile learning research in terms of data collection and mobile media. Whenever possible, this critique is centered specifically on the mobile learning practices emerging in the Korean context, but further methodological research is presented that demonstrates the methods emerging in the mobile learning field internationally. This research, whether Korean or not, will be analyzed according to its capacity to provide a methodology for this thesis that does the following:

• Proves consistent with the Korean cultural context of mobile technology use, i.e. is technologically localized to the Korean context of coming to know through mobile technology
• Provides evidence of informal or formal participation by graduate students in the Humanities in Korean universities, participation that oscillates between high and low transactional distances and individualized and socialized behavior (Park, 2011)
• Proves logistically feasible in terms of data collection and participant access
• Allows for the inclusion of qualitative data that is textual or multimodal

Please note that these conditions are used as guidelines to analyze the following methodological approaches. Following this critique, a review of what this thesis is hoping to both embrace and avoid in terms of methodology will be presented along with my chosen methodology and justification for its inclusion.

There are several types of methodologies that have proven useful to conducting quantitative and qualitative research in mobile environments or use. However, methodologies designed or appropriated for mobile use, henceforth known as mobile methodologies, are generally difficult to conceive and construct. The first, especially apt for the purposes of this thesis, is the general translation/transportation of mobile learning into the accepted structures and practices of higher education; this proves difficult to conceptualize and hypothesize sufficiently to cover the variables being observed (Bird, Soreze, 2009). For the purposes of this thesis, mobile learning in the universities of Korea exists in a particular friction of formal top-down driven models designed to support existing practices and informal, bottom-up, often student-centered and led mobile environments designed to provide social and peer support. It is difficult, as Bird & Soreze stated, to hypothesize sufficiently broadly to encapsulate this informal/formal spectrum and equally difficult to employ methodologies to support these hypotheses. Based on how the research questions are formulated, it does not exclude the use of either quantitative, qualitative, or a mixed method approach. In fact, some have gone so far as to state that a mixed method approach is optimal as it allows for the “capturing of different perspectives of the learning experience” as well as providing some mechanisms for validating collected data (Vavoula, Sharples, 2009).

A purely qualitative approach suffer from “the accuracy of recall” syndrome in the data collected through retrospective interviews, diaries, or attitude surveys reflecting the participant’s concern in their self-projection (2009). In short, the participant will adjust reflection and participation in keeping not with the accuracy of their responses to the questions posed, but rather to their own sense of self-identity or in relation to the researcher. The accuracy of the responses will prove revealing in terms of self-projection and motivation for participation, but not always so for the questions asked directly. This can be mitigated through the collection of supplementary qualitative data, such as recorded video, audio, observation notes, and other artifacts, designed to contextualize the mobile learning in a larger context of interaction, or even within a Community of Practice. This thesis employs several of these methods in the understanding that the existing literature in the Literature Review is insufficient for revealing the complexity of participation for graduate students in the Humanities in Korean universities. Qualitative methods provide a safeguard for ensuring that themes and practices can emerge from the data collected that might not emerge from more strictly controlled methodological approaches.

Other purely quantitative approaches, some facilitated through technological data collection methods, often suffer from a lack of social, community, or motivational evidence for participation. These quantitative driven approaches, some of which are outlined below, might include technological solutions such as “mobile eye tracking or wearable interaction capture kits” or the more traditional means of collecting mobile technology use data and offering subsequent analysis based on specifically defined and controlled observation points (2009). There are several challenges involved in evaluating mobile technology use through a quantitative approach, most notably in those that oscillate between formal and informal learning (McAndrew, Taylor, Clow, 2010). The approach that McAndrew, Taylor, & Clow (2010) put forth for evaluating mobile learning in terms of both the quality of learning in technology and the nature of interaction with that technology provides evidence that a hybrid methodology is appropriate for observing such complex behavior. It indicates that methods can be appropriated and fused to observe complex phenomena. For this thesis, although useful in terms of providing evidence of a hybrid approach, it proves less applicable as this thesis is concerned with existing practices, existing participation in formal Communities of Practice, and how mobile technology provides mechanisms for new practices to emerge. We are not so much concerned with the quality of learning, but rather than the transformation of scholarly practice as a result of mobile technology. Yet, McAndrew, Taylor, & Clow provide a convincing approach that hybrid approaches are more appropriate to the mobile medium.

For mobile learning, these quantitative methods are surprisingly complementary to the qualitative ones as they provide those different perspectives on learning in mobile technology that Vavoula & Sharples (2009) deemed as optimal. As such, the methodological structure of this thesis will be evaluated upon completion of the pilot study to ascertain whether the inclusion of some quantitative methods might further contextualize participation in mobile environments for graduate students. As it stands, this thesis employs a more qualitative approach as it ‘is much better suited that a quantitative one to the task of understanding how complex, highly context-sensitive processes unfold in organizations and how they impact on those involved’ (King, 2000, p.590). The organization under observation, the university, is materialized through graduate student participation in the complex, highly sensitive process of coming to know in a disciplinary context.

Frohberg, Goth, & Schwabe (2009) outline several methodological approaches for use with mobile learning, include the Review as a research method unto itself. The review involves the analysis of work done in the field to date in an attempt to discover “patterns and gaps in the research field” (2009). A review approach, while outside the scope of this thesis, is beneficial to the mobile learning research community as it provides benchmarks of activity and progress from which prospective researchers can gauge the relevancy and redundancy of their research questions. The review approach, albeit with limited scope and cursory application made evident through a Literature Review, was applied in this thesis specifically in the Korean context in an attempt to determine what, if any, mobile learning activity was taking place in higher education in the Humanities amongst graduate students, to subsequently analyze that activity, and to identify gaps in the research to determine if the research questions presented in this thesis were relevant, redundant, or otherwise. What the Literature Review made visible was the need for a methodology that provides a means of observing and analyzing behavior in mobile technology in one of those “gaps in the research field”, namely how mobile technology is being used to make meaning by graduate students in the Humanities in Korea. Seipold, Pachler, & Cook (2009, March) provide an outline of how this might be accomplished methodologically by stressing the potential methodological focus of observation on the activities of learners in the context of university and their life worlds in mobile settings. This focus on activities of learners across university and life world settings correlates adequately with the research questions’ focus on graduate student participation in the Humanities across informal/formal and individualized and socialized settings. Furthering Seipold, Pachler, & Cook’s outline, further evidence can be drawn from the resources which learners are using (“in terms of agentive and meaningful activities”); in the case of this research, this could include mobile applications specifically designed for formal university application, informal mobile applications designed for and by students, and informal media manipulation tools and social media channels. For the purposes of the chosen methodology for this research, there is an appropriation of the term potential in the phrase “potential inherent in these resources and activities” (2009, March) as meaning the potential of mobile use to transform practice and allow for meaning-making rather than a focus on the potential for structured output or formalized assessment. In short, this research is focused on practice rather than outcomes and the term potential is defined as such.

Seipold, Pachler, & Cook (2009, March) outline potential qualitative methodologies as grounded theory, individual case studies, discourse analysis, and others. These methodologies and means of analysis are useful for this research as they stress the emergent properties of learning in these mobile contexts, that is much of the subsequent framework from analysis will emerge from the data collected. This research will employ a method that adopts elements of grounded theory, but does not ascribe to a grounded approach in its entirety. Data will be collected according to its relevance to the research questions that have guided the theoretical and methodological positions of this thesis. Yet, emergent themes and properties that emerge from the pilot will evolve the research questions and methodological approach of the larger research study. Case studies are valuable for this thesis as they provide contextual evidence of mobile use for meaning-making in the Humanities; a hybrid case study approach will be adopted for the purposes of this research that focuses on how individual graduate students in the Humanities in several Korean universities use mobile technology to participate in disciplinary practice and make meaning. The case in this case study will not be one geographical location, but rather across multiple universities. The case is the larger Community of Practice that might exist that governs, directly or indirectly, graduate students’ participation in the Humanities and how their use of mobile technology influences that participation. As such, there is less focus on the dichotomies of “in school” and “outside school” that are positioned to analyze the potential of mobile learning (2009). This research assumes that the oscillation between informal and formal practice is a constant oscillation and that categorizing mobile activity according to one compartment or the other severs that mobile activity from the larger process of coming to know in the graduate student in the Humanities. It is critical for this research to position learning at the individual level within a larger disciplinary and organizational community, rather than at an organizational level with different actors in an activity system.

]]> http://michaelseangallagher.org/making-engagement-observable-developing-mlearning-methodology-part-1/feed/ 0 http://michaelseangallagher.org/perpetually-becoming-mlearning-models-for-simultaneous-activities/ http://michaelseangallagher.org/perpetually-becoming-mlearning-models-for-simultaneous-activities/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 10:17:57 +0000 Michael Gallagher http://michaelseangallagher.org/?p=17922

The river is everywhere & perpetually becoming: The Thames River as a vehicle for articulating simultaneity and presence from Michael Gallagher on Vimeo.

I suppose I am still feeding off the rush of a successful workshop conducted in Helsinki this past weekend and that energy has prompted me to continue exploring mobile learning from a standpoint of habitus. Essentially, this is what my colleague Pekka Ihanainen and I are working on in regards to our burgeoning Pedagogy of Simultaneity (PoS). We are looking for a pedagogy  that accounts for the simultaneous activities that occur in overlapping sessions of conscious and unconscious workflows. How we can be working on one learning activity consciously while subconsciously processing another. This encapsulates many of the traditional dichotomies that often unnaturally compartmentalize our thinking: here/there, then/now, intention/serendipity, formal/informal. We meander and oscillate between all of these at all times and Pekka and I are looking for models, models with organic, natural structures, that might prove useful in trying to articulate what PoS is all about.

This has direct bearing on mobile learning as it is decidedly an intersection of simultaneous activity towards a larger understanding. It is a constant emergence, structured and governed by the artifacts and intentions intersecting. I can’t see how this is a mere technological issue, but rather a cognitive/philosophical/theoretical one. Learning theory needn’t contort our cognitive processes to fit some structured process resulting in some desired outcome; we need merely to align theory with perception and practice. Align the variables in time and space intersections to create meaning.

As always, I look to the past in literature, art, history for ways in which that can be done. I have evoked Shakespeare, Dante, and even Fitzgerald. Now I turn most of my attention to Herman Hesse and his exquisite Siddhartha. It is in this context of perception, understanding, and breaking the repetitive chains of human existence and cycles of misery do I see the hallmarks of a model for mobile learning. A spiritual model. One that acknowledges impermanence, ephemerality, fluidity, shifts in time and space, shifts in perception and motivation. Water. A river. A tired metaphor, for sure, but an apt one. It is never the same twice, regardless of the vantage point (looking at or being in it). It emerges constantly. It is a myriad of meanings, a pool of endless permutations. It is the raw vessel of creativity. So I went and recorded the Thames here in London from many different vantage points. I layered those together, with the audio of the lapping waves against the rocky shores. I embedded passages like these to remind myself of what I was looking at and what it meant for perception and learning.

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. -Herman Hesse

I then moved further along the video of the Thames and referenced this passage, which proves the crux of the entire argument about emergence in learning:

They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming― Hermann Hesse

Perpetual becoming is one of the most beautiful phrases and particularly relevant to mobile learning. Step by step, we extract meaning from the chaotic assembly of circumstance and artifact. A thousand variables, all well beyond our control, that we can align or dismiss to create meaning. And this is where I feel the PoS (and other constructivist pedagogies) differs from a more scientific method approach to learning: control. With PoS, we assume none. That there is no control over the variables being rendered; there is merely alignment, a perpetual process of foregrounding and backgrounding to fit the need, purpose, or pure creative impulse. This is where mobile learning excels. We don’t transform the landscape with our captured media; we are inexorably transforming ourselves to make possible understanding. We are harmonizing ourselves with the sequences of activities occurring around us. It is a spiritual process of calming oneself to receive and articulate meaning. We don’t capture or own anything, merely articulate an understanding, a small truth, nod our heads, and move on to the next chaotic intersection of time, space, and meaning. This last passage isn’t from Hesse, but rather from Rainer Maria Rilke and it articulates a delicate, poignant approach to learning, one almost dutiful and observant, a prayer.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children― Rainer Maria Rilke

That is learning to me.

Hyde Park, London.

Helsinki mLearning: Field Activities and transforming space from Michael Gallagher on Vimeo.

I just wrapped up a weekend workshop with the good people of Otavan Opiston Osuuskunta in Helsinki, Finland exploring mobile learning and field activities. The general goals of the workshop were to collaboratively explore how mobile technology could be used to conduct learning activities outside the classroom and what those field activities might look like mediated through mobile technology. As far as I am concerned (I will let the participants confirm or deny this) it was a great success.  They were an amazing group of people from all walks of the educational sphere (including the spouse of a participant who was one of the more eager participants).  They understood the dynamics of collaboration from the very beginning of the presentation, were involved and inquisitive, and some of the most creative people I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

The Workshop

The workshop began on Day 1 with a quick introduction, my presentation and subsequent discussion, some nominal planning in groups composed of participants who shared similar interests (architectire, religion, etc.) and then they almost literally burst forth onto the streets of Helsinki to collect data (media, field notes, etc.).  I am fairly confident this group could have conducted the workshop without my assistance, but the initial discussion was critical as it positioned mobile learning differently or slightly askew from what seems to be the overriding understanding of it as a technologically-defined medium. There is a technological angle; one would be hard pressed to deny that, but it is about the meaning that is made there and the transformation of the space into a learning space, in short the transformation of habitus. We introduced and constantly circled back on this notion of habitus, how it is formed, how it is made visible, what is actually transforming. In general, the entire workshop was structured around this transformation of habitus, how this is made mobile and how that defines mobile learning (Kress, Pachler, 2007). One group even chose it is as their subject of observation: the transformation of habitus made visible in Helsinki. So we proceeded on Day One with this introduction, discussion, and data collection as a precursor to Day 2.

Day 2 (Saturday, mind you) began with a a few hours of taking stock of the data collected (media or otherwise), and collaboratively assembling that data into some sort of composition using tools we had discussed the dat before as well as from the participants own toolkit (which greatly expanded my toolkit). Once these were collected and composed, each group presented their composition and discussed what we trying to learn about Helsinki through our mobile activities. I was in awe of these compositions, composed more or less on the fly, with minimal time for group congealing (many of the participants knew each other, but there were a few new faces) and logistically planning the data collection. If this is Finland in a nutshell, I am most impressed. They immediately understood the nature of collaboration, immediately proceeded to tackle the discussion and activities, and convincingly brought all these elements together in a composition.

We finished with a brief review of findings, some discussion on what could have gone better, assessment, etc. and then we all exchanged social media contacts. I am not naming them by name in case they prefer to remain anonymous, but they are free to jump in here with discussion or clarification if I get anything wrong.

The Discussions and Findings

There were some surprising findings from the data collection and surprising elements to the compositions.  So we should list them first to give a sense of the breadth of what we were trying to do (in more or less an hour of field work).

Group 1: Architecture in Helsinki

This group explored the architecture of Helsinki and how that governed human behavior in some way. Their composition was truly awe-inspiring as it captured the emotional affect of structure,  how “buildings spoke to the other buildings” through shared electricity wires or streets and how all of that affected how we perceive and act within this space. Amazing. And they did use one of the songs from Architecture in Helsinki to drive it home.

Group 2: Religion of Helsinki

This group (with an impressive journalistic pedigree) chose to focus on religious iconography in Helsinki and to see if they could capture imagery from the world’s major religions. They were able to find, in the course of about 5-6 blocks imagery/symbols representing Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and various other religions or denominations. They then mapped this as their composition to demonstrate that Helsinki is full of diversity in religious beliefs if one is attuned to perceiving that.

Group 3: Helsinki Tram Sound Map

This group was wildly creative in their focus, methods, execution, and presentation. They chose to capture the sounds of the tram that ran from downtown Helsinki (the site of the workshop) to their respective homes at the end of the tramline. They recorded audio at three different stations, alighting (I live in London now so I say things like alight) at these stations to record audio without imagery. This was coupled with another 30-60 seconds of one of the participants who had closed their eyes the whole time describing what they had heard.  They also took some imagery as well to represent the location. It was a remarkable exercise in perception and how what we hear varies dramatically from person to person.

Group 4: Habitus 

I participated in this group and we wanted to discover whether we could observe the transformation of habitus in mobile learners, to make it visible in practice. So our objective was to scour the parks of downtown Helsinki mostly to observe how people used their mobile technologies to make sense of their surroundings. This quickly evolved into an exploration of how mobile technology had changed social practice, how people interacted with each other and their world. We began to realize we ourselves were the subject of transformation. We spent time collecting imagery, noticing how the young people in the parks weren’t using mobile technology when with their friends, only when seemingly isolated, using their mobile technology as a lifeline/connection to a larger sphere of social activity. It was a gateway to social understanding and it brought here to there and there to here. Yet this was occurring in ourselves. We walked and discussed and captured data and discussed and sat and had a beer and discussed all under the bright sunshine of a beautiful spring Helsinki day. We arrived at understanding, branched out, collaborated through dialogue. Heady stuff. It reminded me (again) of the flaneur as learning type, meandering and making meaning as if on a summer stroll. I pulled this Hjorth and De Souza e Silva (2009) quote to modernize it a bit in line with what we were trying to do:

“Within the domain of play, we can characterize the flâneur—and its transformation into the phoneur—as the ludic character by excellence. Unlike the flâneur that was ordered by the visual, the phoneur is structured by the information city’s ambience, whereby modes such as haptic and aural override the dominance of visual.

One hundred years on from the time of the flâneur, the spirit of modernity has dramatically transformed while still haunted by the specters of the spectacle. Although the contradictions of everyday are still palpable, the cityscape and its mediations have changed. The city, as with notions of work and leisure, has dramatically altered course, epitomized by the mobile phone’s “hyper” and “micro” coordination (Ling, 2004) of social, temporal, and spatial configurations. Mobile technologies have further embodied the contradictions inherent within everyday urbanity, becoming the conduit for the phenomenon of “full-time intimate communities” (Nakajima, Himeno, &Yoshii, 1999).”

e Silva, A. D. S., & Hjorth, L. (2009). Playful Urban Spaces A Historical Approach to Mobile Games. Simulation & Gaming, 40(5), 602-625.

I like that idea of full-time intimate communities.

The Compositions

This discussion would be half a post without the actual compositions. I don’t have all of them, but I am able to produce three of them. Most are montages are mashups of some sort, but all are amazing revealing about the place, the time, and our understanding as we pass through it.

Group 1: Architecture in Helsinki

Architecture walking in Helsinki; click the image to see the interactive version.

Group 2: Helsinki Tram Sound Map

Group 3: Habitus

Habitus transformation; click the image to see the full multimedia version

The People

Every person who has ever conducted a workshop has always had this to say, even when it wasn’t necessarily true. Some presentations go better than others; some workshops are more potent than others in terms of learning. This I can honestly say was the greatest group I have ever presented to and worked with. Such clearly articulated creativity, such curiosity, such fearlessness, such a desire to learn. As I said before, if this is Finland, what a marvelous place.

I want to thank my friend and colleague Pekka for arranging this for me as well as to Otavan Opiston Osuuskunta (especially Tiina Airaksinen!) for the marvelous organization and willingness to try anything. I was honored to be there, honored to have worked with those people, and sincerely hope we can collaborate on more in the future.

I leave with a quote I was literally reading on the plane back to London. It is by way of the tireless Pekka from John Shotter (2006) and it is particularly apt for what we were trying to do on our little adventures in Helsinki.

Dare to grope around, dare to be tentative, to hesitate, to try different ways of expressing the ‘it’ that seems to be ‘there’, awaiting our further creative development of it within our  lives together. Dare to creatively stumble around in words (p. 122).

Until next time.

I feel it necessary to start with the fact that I used to work for ITHAKA, the non-profit organization that counts JSTOR as its largest service. I worked there relatively happily from 2006-2012, the last four being more or less directly associated with the JSTOR service. I enjoyed my time there and enjoyed the enthusiasm of my colleagues, all of whom, to some degree or another, were convinced that they were doing good. I stand firm in my conviction that we were doing good and that ITHAKA has value to provide to higher education and academic publishing, the least of which being that they are one of the few organizations on the outside, i.e. outside higher education, willing (indeed, almost eager at times) to discuss the trend towards greater access in general and open access publishing more specifically. I thought that they took heat in a few news cycles and throughout some vocal social media circles for their paywalls and the perceived notion of being an exclusively closed service. I don’t deny that some significant aspects of the service are gated in some way, but I felt the vitriol of the criticism was rather unwarranted. I didn’t then and I still don’t see this as a black and white issue and I feel that higher education should be more nuanced in their approaches to open access. Test as many models as possible to see which one sticks, because rest assured the long-term evolution of academic publishing will result in something that looks very little like what it does today.

All that being said, I had a few brief points mostly in response/addition to Steve Wheeler’s post  and another article from Inside Higher Education discussing Duke University’s decision to opt-out of an elearning consortia offering credits. I found both these articles enlightening for different reasons and I wanted to briefly to address how.

Open Access

I believe in open access and I support academics like Steve Wheeler taking the plunge and choosing to not publish any research going forward in paywalled journals. Having noted academic like this will improve the perceived quality of open access journals and trigger more academics to follow suit. It might be a trickle of activity on this front, but it will come with time. Although most certainly not a noted academic, I have chosen, albeit almost accidentally, to publish in open access journals as I wanted as large a readership as possible. Also, I co-author a lot of papers and the likelihood of their being at least one open access type in a gaggle of elearning and open learning academics is fairly high. I suspect that the percentage of authors trending towards open access publications spikes considerably in particular disciplines (education and elearning seem to be fairly vocal about it). I support these trends as I do believe it is in the long-term interests of the research itself and the research community.

My support for open access, as I see it, in no way contradicts my support of ITHAKA’s mission, both then and now. All parties to this discussion are in the business of getting the research in the most hands as possible, but all are using different economic models to get there. And this is where I would like to see more discussion from the higher education community. Economic models. I have seen very convincing evidence that open access increases readership and impact (and I believe this to be absolutely true). I have seen evidence from academics analyzing the costs of academic publishing. I am encouraged by the experimentation from the UK on open access publishing (despite the Gold vs. Green debate which I believe is actually a healthy discussion). I think foisting publishing costs onto the authors is short-sighted and altogether unconvincing. If forced to pay to publish my work, then rest assured my work will stay here on my blog. Paying to publish is not something I would consider, career advancement or not.

What I would like to see more from the academic community is a convincing model for what open access might look like en masse, i.e. a model that accounts for all research going forward and all research from the past. Without this, open access will precede in fits and starts and eventually get to where it wants to be, but it will take a long, long time. A convincing model, as far as I can tell, would include:

1. Models for perpetual storage-one should not doubt for a moment that archiving is expensive and this extends well beyond server costs. Information degrades over time and needs constant upgrading over time to stay accessible.
2. Models for perpetual access- if it is open access, then this is more than merely making it available. It means making it available forever. This is how JSTOR more or less got started in the first place. E-research was appearing and then disappearing and research was being, or was in danger of being, lost. This leads to redundancy and a diminished or nonexistent impact. I have seen this firsthand and it is demoralizing to the extreme. Making things available, retrievable, and usable is an expensive proposition.
3. Models for participation and transparency- I am not willing to trade one anachronistic, dysfunctional system for another. If there is to be open access, it is to be of a transparent kind, one that encourages participation from all members of the research community. I am speaking especially here about developing nations’ researchers, who are proactively experimenting with different models, but who routinely are, whether intentional or not, shut out of these discussions in terms of technological capacity or through a general weighting of the system against their chosen research subjects.
4. Models for distributed intelligence and retrieval-there is much work, much useful work, to be done here with a distributed system, an Internet of academic research. There is no reason it needs to sit in one spot, be hosted on one farm of servers, or even be ignored when sitting on a personal space (blog or site). As long as its long-term availability is assured, the retrieval mechanisms for actually finding it should be easier than they are. We are getting into the realm of authority and peer-review and perceived quality here, a thorny issue indeed, but not an insurmountable one. Have it out in the open, float a few different models, and perhaps reinvigorate the university commons methods of depositing research from faculty there. It would be easy to retrieve from there into a larger index.

Until such a model is proposed, prototyped, or exists, then we will move forward with open access in fits and starts. A greater percentage of the newer research will be open access, a significant accomplishment, but not all of it and certainly not the older stuff.

Survival

I see this playing out again and again and it is a legitimate dialogue. People, faculty, publishers, or otherwise, are worried about becoming obsolete, losing their jobs, or being on the outside looking in. But mostly this is about survival. An individual and an organization’s first and foremost responsibility is to survive. This is as true for universities as it is for publishers or individuals or organizations. With this comes the truth that very few organizations or individuals will choose self-extinction in the face of the greater good. And this is a stumbling block in this discussion, one that the private sector is much more comfortable in dealing with via creative destruction. To make way for new orders of organization or distribution or dissemination, structures that supported the older order need to adapt or be washed away. Higher education and all their attached service industries are now feeling this transition and it is neither good nor bad. It just is. One can engage the change circling all around us and make it better, or one can ignore most of it, deflect some of it, and correctly critique parts of it (which is part of the process of making it better). But it can’t be postposed indefinitely.

This leads me a bit back to my thoughts on the Duke University decision. I think the critique was correct, that quality couldn’t be assured and in turn it would lessen the overall quality or perception of quality of a Duke University education. I think taking the occasional pause and evaluating is a positive move, but it is a temporary respite. If Duke decides to re-engage with this online experiment (not MOOCs mind you, these were controlled courses in terms of numbers of students), then more power to them for their discretion in critiquing in the first place. If they use this as an excuse to stay out of the game altogether, then the brand is already diminished. This process will be playing out in all the universities that have embraced or experimented with MOOCs once the blowback cycle begins (and it already has). Some have experimented openly and are better for the experience (looking at you, University of Edinburgh); some went headlong into the experiment for other reasons, financial or otheriwse. More power to them and I applaud their experimentation.

All that being said, as someone who has spent a lifetime on the outside of this discussion and now finds himself as a doctoral student slightly immersed in it (although only logistically as I don’t make any decisions whatsoever that directly affect The University of London), I want to make clear that I feel this discussion around new systems and experimentation is healthy and logical and worthwhile. But it is also an expression of survival. It is the survival of the university/higher education as an entity unto itself and not as one that directly serves the learner. Often the intentions of the learner and the university coincide, but sometimes they don’t. In short, the average leaner couldn’t and shouldn’t care less about the health of higher education. That is not their area of expertise, or concern, or even interest. Some in my position will finish their PhD and enter academia and some will not. I stand on the fence willing and eager to follow the greatest work (not necessarily organization) towards the greatest research that positively impacts the greatest number of people. I will be flexible in my approach on how and where that takes place. I generally feel that higher education is the best show in town in terms of reaching and educating the most people and facilitating the most scholarship but if a different model appeared that proved more fruitful I would follow that. All of us in this professional realm of intellect and logic and inquiry need to be willing to do the same.

So I am not only speaking about open access and open learning here. That is a great first step. I am talking about open research and open work and open impact. A world of open research where all are willing to follow the action. That is, ultimately, the end goal (for me). Higher education is and will continue to evolve to meet these needs for open societies. If they don’t, then so be it. Something will in its stead. Sometimes higher education demonizes private enterprise rushing into the cracks and fissures of the ivory towers forgetting the fact that we let them in. We can build from here, but universities (and their related service industries) need to be wary about positioning themselves in the us (higher education) vs. them (corporate/private enterprise) dichotomy. The learner sometimes does, but shouldn’t really care all that much who delivers their learning. They are finding workarounds all the time to make do and more power to them. I certainly have. And will continue to be open about the process.

PS: I love universities. I love higher education. I love all of it. I am just more in love with the demands that logic and service have on my actions; I view higher education as a collection of those types of people rather than a series of revered institutions.

A door in Tunisia. This isn’t directly related to the post but it is blue and I like blue things.

This post builds on yesterday’s post about defining mobile learning as both a material and mental mobility via the vantage point of habitus. This is another section of my thesis that precedes the defining mobile learning part that I posted about yesterday. This tries to position mobile learning as the use of a tool to make meaning, this coming to know process. This use of tools (in this case, mobile technology) has a cyclical effect. The tools help the learner create meaning and understanding, the understanding in turn effects the context in which the activity is taking place, the context in turn ripples throughout the disciplinary practice (in my case, the Humanities), and transforms community. This transformed community then cycles back to the tool (mobile technology or anything else, really) with newer ideas of how it can be used to push further. An important takeaway is that mobile technology follows an established tradition in every community of using tools for making meaning. Another critical takeaway is that context is not an independent environment; it emerges from the interaction that takes place within it. I find it hard to believe one can separate the activity from the context and be left with anything at all, but I am open to contradiction on that one.  Apologies for the writing being kind of Literature Review-y, ie a bit stunted.

Focus: Coming to Know

My thesis explicitly attempts to link mobile activity amongst graduate students in the Humanities in higher education in South Korea to a larger process of coming to know, a process whereby meaning is constructed through the use and mastery of a number of different tools, technological, intellectual, and physical (Saljo, 1999). Mobile activity in this context is related to making meaning in the larger context of Humanities activity, both formal and informal. It is less concerned with formalized outputs or assessment, but rather with the processes being mediated by mobile technology that generate meaning for the Humanities learner. One such example is composition, how composing (in text, media, dialogue, etc.) in mobile technology generates meaning. However, mobile learning as such represents one space, process, or tool in a larger environment of context (which includes sociocultural communication, technology, formalized practice, and informal modes of communication, etc.). Therefore, this Literature Review is designed to introduce elements of that larger environment of context in terms of pedagogy and process (u-learning, elearning, smart learning, disciplinary practice), organizations (universities, research organizations), modes of communication (informal and formal), and artifacts and tools (mobile applications, environments) that in aggregation form a larger environment of content, of coming to know.

Changing Practice

Within this context and these fluid oscillations between states of knowing and coming to know, it is important to foreground the understanding that learning occurs in and subsequently produces context in a fluid cycle (Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G., 2007). This produced context routinely evolves disciplinary practice as made evident in this thesis in terms of the multimodal works being produced in mobile technology in higher education in Korea. The process of creating new understanding in the Humanities irrevocably evolves the practices in the Humanities that helped generate that understanding. This is a fluid, dynamic landscape of learning and one that presupposes change. Change in practice, in context, in the use of tools, mobile or otherwise.

Changes in context are given considerable attention in this thesis. This research presupposes that disciplinary activity in the Humanities mediated through mobile technology is a constant series of oscillations between informal and formal learning, between learning with high and low transactional distance (Park, 2011) and with highly socialized and isolated pockets of activity. These oscillations are reflected in seamless learning (Looi et al, 2009 & Sharples, 2006), which can be defined as learning across a continuum of contexts mediated through a range of technologies. Seamless learning assumes that learning takes place “through individual learning in private learning spaces, collaborative learning in public learning spaces, and cognitive artefacts created across time and physical or virtual spaces mediated by technology within a context” (2009). We have evidence of these aspects of seamless learning in mobile technology supporting Humanities activity in South Korea which will be discussed later in this thesis, but it is important to remember that seamless learning emphasizes a continuum of meaning-making across contexts and traditional dichotomies of informal and formal, public and private, individual and social.

Mobile technology in particular encapsulates that continuum by allowing for constant shifts between informal and formal states of learning. This thesis presupposes that mobile learning when viewed broadly is inherently seamless, especially as it applies to disciplinary activity. A discussion started in a face to face classroom is carried on through social media, learning artifacts are created through mobile media, and knowledge is disseminated back through the learning community through mobile technology. Much of these mobile ’spaces, social media et al, are informal environments which have been appropriated for formal disciplinary use. Formal discussions around disciplinary content are brought to these informal spaces, discussed, socially negotiated, reflected, assembled, and disseminated. Learners engage through social activities and disengage to participate in individual ones. These discussions, compositions, and content are learning resources, “online data and information, teacher-created materials, student artefacts, students’ online interaction” that are circulated through the community in an evolving process of coming to know (Wong, 2012). These resources interact with and are interacted on by learners in a process of coming to know; they, along with the learners, evolve as they are understood and made use of to create meaning in a specific context, a context mediated and partially constructed through mobile technology. This continuum of activity is mediated through mobile technology and represents a process of coming to know in a disciplinary context.

Mobile technology also foregrounds the understanding that context and practice are irrevocably linked. Practice, disciplinary or otherwise, assumes the manipulation of context for meaning. Context, in turn, assumes a level of engagement with it (what is context if nothing is actually happening there?). So, contextuality “is a relational property that holds between objects and activities” and is specific to a particular activity being performed by the individual or the learning community (Dourish, 2004). Context becomes an interactional rather than a representational issue (2004), one that assumes an active process of meaning-making occurring in a dynamic environment. Disciplinary activity mediated through mobile technology encapsulates these hallmarks of interactional context; it has dialogue, composition, mediation, dissemination, review, reflection, the learning resources of disciplinary activity. More importantly, context, according to Dourish, emerges (or ‘arises’) from activity; it is “actively produced, maintained and enacted in the course of the activity at hand” (2004). This thesis is drafted presupposing this to be true, that disciplinary activity in the Humanities in South Korea generates the context in which the activity takes place and that this activity is governed by community practice. In short, that learning in mobile technology in the Humanities is an interactional rather than a representational issue.

Sources

Dourish, P. (2004). What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal and ubiquitous computing, 8(1), 19-30.

Looi, C. K., Seow, P., Zhang, B., So, H. J., Chen, W., & Wong, L. H. (2010). Leveraging mobile technology for sustainable seamless learning: a research agenda. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(2), 154-169.

Park, Y. (2011). A pedagogical framework for mobile learning: Categorizing educational applications of mobile technologies into four types. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(2), 78-102.

Saljo, R. (1999), chapter: Learning as the use of tools. Littleton, K., & Light, P. (Eds.). (1999). Learning with computers: Analysing productive interaction. Psychology Press.

Sharples, M., Milrad, M., Sánchez, I. A., & Vavoula, G. (2007). Mobile learning: Small devices, big issues, in ‘Technology Enhanced Learning: Principles and Products’.

Wong, L. H. (2012). A learner‐centric view of mobile seamless learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(1), E19-E23.

A view from my walk in London this morning. I think best on these walks and take notes (via audio) as I walk.

I was revisiting some of the Literature Review sections of my thesis and found the section dedicated to contextualizing the discussion on mobile learning to be lacking. This was not a sudden epiphany on my part but rather an apt suggestion from my supervisors (well played, you two). Either way, I had originally intended not to labor too long over a definition of mobile learning as I felt some of that is still emerging and some of that, frankly, is a tired train of thought. We do need to define the boundaries of what we are observing and analyzing, but we need to do so holistically away from the confines of technological determinism (mlearning=learning through mobile technology), or as an extension of elearning, or the anytime/anyplace rhetoric (although these are all valid to some degree). I find myself longing for a broader definition that sees mobility as both a material and cognitive application. So here is the definition as I see it, one that embraces the mobility of mind and material. I will post something later today that builds on this based on a larger context of Saljo’s coming to know. I cut parts of the following as I didn’t think it necessary to rehash too much of the other definitions of mobile learning, although more of that is in the actual thesis. Curious to hear what people think on this.

Mobile Learning Defined: Mobility of Material and Mind

The definitions of mobile learning are almost as numerous as the mobile devices they are looking to represent contextually, but a brief presentation of a few will help establish a working definition of mobile learning that will be employed throughout this thesis. Before plunging headlong into these evolving definitions, we must be clear that these definitions are evolving with the experimentation and variability of the use of mobile technology for learning. It is an evolving process of coming to know for the research community as well as the community being researched. Earlier definitions of mobile learning were generally technologically-oriented or deterministic (Kukulska-Hulme et al. (2005), or even positioning mobile learning as an extension of e-learning (Quinn, 2000 & Traxler, 2005). These proved insufficient for the evolving context and practices of mobile learning as they emphasized the technology or the location and not the fluid social practices emerging from these contexts (Roschelle, 2003).

A more useful definition of mobile learning for this thesis is presented by Sharples (2007); in this definition, mobile learning is positioned as “the private and public processes of coming to know through exploration and conversation across multiple contexts, amongst people and interactive technologies.” It is this movement through multiple contexts that the mobility of mobile learning emerges. As Sharples et al suggest, “we learn across time, by revisiting knowledge that was gained earlier in a different context, and more broadly, through ideas and strategies gained in early years…we move from topic to topic, managing a range of personal learning projects, rather than following a single curriculum” (2007). In this definition, the mobility in mobile learning can be both material and cognitive.

This cognitive mobility is encapsulated in Kress and Pachler’s (2007) notion of habitus. Habitus refers to the “the life world of the individual framed both as challenge and as an environment and a potential resource for learning” (2007). In viewing learning through habitus, every space has the potential to be a learning space when viewed appropriately. Within this transformation of space to learning space, we witness the mobility in mobile learning. In other words,”that which is mobile is not knowledge or information, but the learner’s habitus” (2007). I would qualify this statement by stating that which is mobile is not exclusively information or knowledge, but also the learner’s habitus, context, and modes of engagement, technologically or otherwise.

Kress & Pachler would argue that habitus is being transformed constantly and therefore has left the learner “constantly mobile, which does not refer, necessarily, to a physical mobility at all but to a constant expectancy, a state of contingency, of incompletion, of moving toward completion, of waiting to be met and ‘made full’. The answer to ‘who is mobile?’ is therefore ‘everyone who inhabits the new habitus’”. Mobile learning, when defined as a learning state of expectation, contingency, and approaching (but never reaching) completion, is useful for exploring the material and cognitive movements through context that this thesis attempts to do. This positions mobile technology as a tool in the larger process of coming to know across multiple contexts. It provides a foundation from which to observe engagement and interaction across mobile spaces and how that mobile activity is then siphoned back into other learning spaces. It is a fluid process of engagement across multiple contexts, some being materially and all being cognitively mobile. Without this broader definition of mobile learning, it would be difficult for this thesis to establish how meaning is made in the Humanities in South Korea across the contexts of (mobile) technology, disciplinary activity, formal/informal spaces, and individualized and socialized interaction. This thesis works under the assumption that the mobility in mobile learning is both a cognitive and material state of being.

Sources

Kress, G. & Pachler, N. (Eds) (2007).  Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda (2007). WLE Centre, Occasional Papers in Work-based Learning 1.

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Evans, D. and Traxler, J. (2005), Landscape study in wireless and mobile learning in the post-16 sector. JISC Technology and Standards Watch. Retrieved April 24, 2013 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearninginnovation/landscape.aspx.

Sharples, M., Milrad, M., Sánchez, I. A., & Vavoula, G. (2007). Mobile learning: Small devices, big issues, in ‘Technology Enhanced Learning: Principles and Products’.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. – Jack Kerouac

This post is no doubt partially inspired by my upcoming journey back to London to complete this first year of my PhD, then off to Korea in the summer for another go around there. So the electricity of motion is beginning to swell around me a bit and it generates this line of thinking. Today’s post is about travel, motion, and all that, and how learning and understanding emerge from both experience and structured thought. There are some quotes scattered throughout that relate to travel from writers who have articulated their thoughts on travel well.

Before launching into this, I wanted to briefly say that travel is different for everyone, yet it holds such a grip on our collective imagination. It is everyone’s ‘dream’ even when it really isn’t. I know people that find travel to be more fatiguing than enriching, more hassle than its worth. As a society, we should be alright with this. It needn’t be everyone’s dream, but knowing the journey from the destination (and the importance of the former over the latter) should be an organizing philosophy for all. For me, it was everything.

Travel: Experience as Disparate Bits of Binary

So in this life, we are incessant motion, a form of micro-travel that generates endless streams of data (or experience, to use a more human term) and this data is processed or discarded or both and melded into something (if useful) that already exists, a structure, thought, or line of thinking. In short, we experience things and understanding emerges from that experience only when filtered through some other structured thinking (a philosophy, religion, learning theory, what have you). This is a good, practical application of philosophical and logical education, quite literally using logic to interpret input.

This, in my opinion, is how most of my evolving sense of self and cognitive capacity has been bolstered by my travel. I use these disparate streams of data and sequence them through the filter of some philosophy, theory, or desire and make something new, something useful.

…Like sheep
of whose hair is made
blankets and coats, I want
to force from this fierce sturdy
rampant love some useful thing.-Marge Piercy

This, as I see it, is learning as construction. Taking artifacts and forging them into tools, painting, building, articulating based on some predefined filter and some set of data, however disparate. But there is another kind, one that cannot be entirely spliced out. Michelangelo said it very well, this purpose-driven activity of making meaning and structuring experience to thought:

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Central Park Mosaic, composites of Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Walt Whitman informing my interpretation of the space.

Travel: Emergence and Understanding

The second kind of learning is as equally transformative and emerges from our labor, our activity, merely doing. It is learning from ceaseless motion, from fidgeting, tinkering, playing. It is composed of ‘stuff’ and our interaction with this ‘stuff. It emerges from a general lack of objective or purpose, just an overall sense of being. It is quite literally, the learning that emerges from the journey and not the destination. This is an amazingly transformative process, this comprehension through emergence. It is like the Grounded Theory of life, where our structures emerge from observation and interaction rather than some pre-existing notion of being.

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. – Henry Miller

This is also the type of understanding that emerges from (travel or other) experience that is hardest to enact or even articulate. It is almost impossible to concoct as it presupposes a receptiveness to experience that is rare. But it is the goal and the purpose of travel (as far as I see it); it is the surrender to circumstance and a cultivation of the self (to receive this circumstance). Travel, if done right, is philosophy enacted.

So, on a personal level, with or without travel, we can acknowledge both types of learning can occur, the intentional and the serendipitous. As teachers and learners or those who design and enact learning, we can build and structure both of these types of learning. To do so requires education that prepares the self for embrace of the unintentional or seemingly circumstantial, and the agility to apply logic and structure to disparate events. One is emerging, the other is intentionally structured. Both are complementary.

Articulating the Understanding of Travel: Containers and Composition

I have written a bit about this before, but I am always looking for ‘containers’ for expressing this meaning that might be applicable to formal education. We have generally relied on the linearity of text-based essays (and these have proven quite robust) to express knowledge. We need more tools in the arsenal to express the complexity of disparate activity (however chronologically it is received), tools that complement the linearity and authority of text. I have discussed before montage, mosaic, collage, and other aggregations that are useful to this pursuit and some examples are provided here in this post. Mosaics composed of aggregations of thinkers and artists who have influenced my understanding of space, place and purpose (Whitman, Baudelaire, Emerson, Henry Miller, Descartes) and scientists  who have articulated the structure of motion convincingly (Newton, Einstein, etc.).

These aggregations are most useful learning constructs for students of any age range. They are the beginnings of a larger workflow of structured thought and activity. They are a conceptual reflection on what is relevant and what isn’t, what makes sense of this disparate activity and what doesn’t. They are the visual language of meaning-making. They are incredibly complementary to the linear articulation  of text.

So mosaics, montages, remixes, aggregations, multimodal compositions, these are the places where intention and serendipity collide. As in the video above, occasionally I am not freeing an angel from marble like Michelangelo, but watching one emerge from the static of chaotic activity. Only in the end do I ‘see’ what is being made, or emerging from the activity. My intention couples with serendipity merely by being open to the experience. Learning is profound in these spaces as it aligned with the natural order of the world, and an alignment of logic and emotion, of the heart and the head. Yes, mobile technology can stimulate this alignment. It is almost intentionally designed to do so.

Why We Travel

But this isn’t why we travel. For some, it is an incessant need, a hunger that can’t be satiated (me) or for others a perpetual curiosity about what is out there, over there, far away (also me). It is a search for the spirituality of experience, a search for profundity amidst all the perceived banality (travel taught me that nothing is banal). A Romantic compulsion, an artistic flair, or even a scientific observation. These are reasons we profess to travel, but I am not sure this gets at the heart of it. As I see it, as humans we are completely engineered to move, always. We are engineered to extract meaning from experience, from our hands, from our senses. At heart, we are restless creatures driven by curiosity. I close with Robert Louis Stevenson

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

That is about as good as it can said.

Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, Mosaic: Learning from Serendipity. Flight was cancelled for the day, no hotel to stay yet, afternoon spent napping and people watching in the Gardens. It was one of the happiest days of my life and it was completely unintentional.

Yesterday the Digital Public Library of America (@dpla) launched and it is a good site with some great, intuitive navigation choices. It is responsive and user-friendly and a real departure from some academic/public research sites that can range anywhere from good to abysmal in terms of aesthetics and navigation. So good on them. If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a try. It reminds me when I used to work more directly with the (digital and physical) library side of the equation and primary sources in general. I love this stuff more than I can articulate here. So much so that I wanted to relate a few of the gems that I discovered in my initial searches. I am predictable in that I first searched for my hometown (Youngstown, Ohio) followed by Pittsburgh (sort of my second hometown) followed by Seoul, Korea. These are some of the gems that I found from the Korea search, in particular.

I don’t have any great commentary to go along with these aside from the fact that archival materials are incredibly relevant to our modern learning, especially ones that are as openly available as these. We can build our understanding of place from our past, from the history of that place. I hope people begin (if they haven’t already) adding these to HistoryPin or creating their own digital landscapes of a place, a city, or a neighborhood, complete with this media laced in, images of people who lived and worked and learned there as well. A truly representative (time and space) presentation of place. I am saving these all for a day when my digital capacity is at a point when Seoul will come alive with its past and present in one big mashup of meaning.

An old Korean man takes a rest on the street in front of destroyed buildings, in Seoul., 08/20/1951

An old Korean man takes a rest on the street in front of destroyed buildings, in Seoul., 08/20/1951 available from the National Archives at http://research.archives.gov/description/530637. Koreans have a phrase that escapes me that basically means his eyes are smiling (maybe 눈웃음을 치다) and this gentleman certainly has that, amidst all the devastation of the War behind him. 

KOREAN ELECTIONS, SEOUL, KOREA, 05/10/1948

This is the only one that really requires a bit of context. Korea was freed from Japanese rule in 1945 at the end of World War II. The Americans liberated Korea from the South to the 38th Parallel (north of Seoul) and the Soviet Union liberated Korea from North to the 38th Parallel (Pyongyang et al). The country was then supposed to be handed back to the Koreans once they had set up a government. The Soviet Union and the US encouraged the development of governments more in line with theirs (Communist, Democratic) and the country began to split. The split was made official in 1948 when both the North and South held elections for their respective areas of the country. This footage is from Election Day in Seoul in 1948. Priceless footage, but one, in hindsight, marking the beginning of a split Korea that still haunts us today. The footage was edited slightly for time, but the original can be found care of the National Archive at http://research.archives.gov/description/20894.

CHRISTMAS, KOREA ; REFUGEES, SEOUL ; LABORERS ; GEN MILBURN, SEOUL ; CHRISTMAS TREE, SEOUL ; TWO MEN…

This one I include because some of the footage of Korean citizens making their way through a cold Korea’s wintertime is revealing, especially the poignancy of the characters at the end of the footage, rough but noble. And the baby being drawn around on a sled is adorable. The footage was edited slightly for time, but the original can be found care of the National Archive at http://research.archives.gov/description/22396

INOCULATION AND DUSTING PHASE, SEOUL, KOREA, 03/28/1952

Anyone that has been in Seoul or anywhere in Korea will recognize this ‘dusting’ as it is a rite of summer. Korea’s winters are brutal (see previous footage) and the summers are humid and sticky, perfect breeding grounds for very aggressive mosquitos. This was quite an issue in Korea (up until relatively recently) and it was dealt with in this manner, ie the ‘dusting’. The modern ritual is enacted by a man on a very loud track spewing cloudy insecticide in every neighborhood of Seoul. He is referred to as the Mogi (모기) Man, ie the Mosquito Man. Every expat is invariably unnerved by their first encounter with the Mogi Man, but grows to accept, or at least ignore, them. This video shows the 1952 equivalent to the Mogi Man, a handheld device that literally blows some sort of insecticide all over the person, including down their pants and in the fronts of their shirts. The reaction of the woman to this treatment towards the end of the footage is wonderful.

The footage was edited slightly for time, but the original can be found care of the National Archive at http://research.archives.gov/description/25320