Afternoon in Aveiro

I spent July  doing research on the application of simulation environments like Second Life in education, at the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. My colleague Teresa Bettencourt invited me to a conference on academic writing and I said, yes, off course. It turns out that the professor presenting the conference, doctor Désirée Motta-Roth, had been in the examining committee of my dissertation back in 2003! You know, Brazil is a very small country… She works in the south of Brazil, at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. When we met almost ten years ago, I was presenting my dissertation in the southeast of Brazil, at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Since then, after I finished my PhD, for the last four years I’ve worked as a research fellow at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili, in Tarragona, Spain… till we met again in this precious Portuguese village, Aveiro. By the way, the most astonishing thing is that professor Motta-Roth looks younger then I remembered her almost a decade ago! I do have a picture with her, but I lost the cable to take it from my camera, urrrgh!!! Sorry for that! I have pictures of my stay instead.

Campus of the Universidade de Aveiro

Professor Motta-Roth spoke for an attentive audience of about one hundred scholars about genre theory and academic writing, revisiting professor Swales founding work – read my post on his visit to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

At the end of the conference, I had the chance to speak to her and we hug each other happy for having taken the same road to Aveiro. They say “all roads lead to Rome”, but it is not true, all roads lead to Aveiro.

Something all presentations made evident is that students enjoy learning through virtual worlds. David W. Deeds and Alexander Makosz are two of the most enthusistic I’ve ever seen. They have used Segond Life and Atlantics Quest and report some very interesting appointments on the experiences. Take a look at what they say about students motivation “We literally have to drag students away when classes finish, and I do mean sometimes kicking and screaming”. Nick Zap and Jillianne Code, who made the most interesting presentation I attendend, take 3D representations as cognitive tools. As they say, “stereoscopic technologies provide educators with a tool in which to explore content, that are engaging and immersive”, but “The benefits of using such technologies have implications beyond their intended curricular applications. The implicit curriculum that emerges from students interacting with complex media has lasting impressions beyond the content of the lesson.”

Sofia Nteliopoulou and Dr. Avgoustos Tsinakos make a fine review of the literature on Second Life and present some of the virtual environment’s components quoted as facilitators of innovations in pedagogy:

• Extended or rich interactions: opportunities for social interaction between individuals and communities, human–object interaction and also intelligent interaction between artefacts

• Visualization and contextualization: the production and reproduction of inaccessible content that may be historically lost, too distant, too costly, imaginary, futuristic or impossible to see by the human eye

• Exposure to authentic content and culture

• Individual and collective identity play

• Immersion in a 3-D environment where the augmented sense of presence, through virtual embodiment in the form of an avatar and extensive modes of communication, can impact on the affective, empathic and motivational aspects of the experience

• Simulation: reproduction of contexts that can be too costly to reproduce in real life with the advantages that some physical constraints can be overcome

• Community presence: promoting a sense of belonging and purpose that coheres around groups, subcultures and geography

• Content production: opportunities for creation and ownership of the learning environment and objects within it that are both individual and owned.

The guys presenting Mind your game, game your mind! made a great presentation too introducing GeoEduc3D and reporting on a research that aims at stimulating student interest in, and deepen their understanding of, geomatic methods and technology through geomatics-enabled mobile games.

If you are interested in the field of Virtual worlds, you’ll probably like to check on these presentations too. Here is a list of papers which are worth revising:

• COLLABORATION AND COOPERATION IN ONLINE EDUCATION: FROM TEACHER EDUCATION TO NETWORK TEACHING ACTION USING METAVERSE TECHNOLOGY

• Language Learning System Realizing SLA Theories in a 3D Virtual World

• THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM, TEACHING PRACTICE AND THE TEACHING OF HISTORY: appropriations of teachers and potentialities for creation of a Virtual Museum designed for the visitor

• Enhancing Students’ Awareness of Multimodal Affordances and Constraints: The Case of the Construction of a Student-generated Virtual Museum

• Panoramic Virtual Environments for eLearning Applications

• Digital Selves: Lessons from Second Life

• Towards a problem-based training curriculum for surgical robotics: the SAFROS project

• The Use of Virtual Environments in Teacher Preparation

• Same Content, Different Context: Advancing Designs to Position Teachers as Active Agents in Gaming Environments.

That’s all folks! Have fun! =)

Let me share with you something I’ve recently got involved in and that I think is really cool. I’m participating in the organization of the III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (TIES, 2012), to be held in Barcelona, February 1st – 3rd, 2012. I think it will be a great opportunity to reflect together, in a conscientious and critical manner, on the processes related to the use of ICT in education, and what might be its role in the creation of knowledge. I invite you to join us.

Tech & Learning cartoon created to celabrate on of the 10 Most Influential People in the field of educational technology

All key note speakers are international referents in the field of technology, but I’m specially glad we will be able to count with Punya Mishra, Full Professor of Educational Technology at Michigan State University where he directs the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. He’s been recently selected by Tech & Learning among the 10 Most Influential People in the field of educational technology. I follow with great interest the developments of the model professor Mishra has developed in collaboration with Dr. M. J. Koehler, the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). I’m absolutely sure he will make an impact in this European forum for (re)thinking education in the knowledge society. See you in TIES 2012!

Throughout the syllabus of every course program, teacher educators struggle to make their students revisit, revise and expand their knowledge of the subject matter as well as their beliefs of how the new acquired information fits within the scope of their future practice. One type of course that faces particular important challenges is that related to the enhancement of pre-service teachers’ technology literacy, since technology clearly has the ability to confuse, intimidate, and frustrate learners and users. The relatively stable, specific and transparent technology of the classroom of a few years ago – such as the pencil, the microscope and the chalk board – has been replaced in many cases by digital technologies – such as computers, hand held devices and software applications- that are protean (usable in many different ways), unstable (rapidly changing) and opaque (the inner-workings are hidden from users).

In our paper, Marc and I present an empirical explaration of this theme, concentrating in the relationship between pre-service teachers’ beliefs and preconceptions regarding what a good teacher should know and their perceived technological literacy.

De Olvieira, J.M. & Romero, M. (2010). Student teachers’ perceptions of knowledge and knowledge of perception. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2010 (pp. 2351-2356). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/34967.

Check on our presentation for EdMedia 2009. You can read our paper and watch the video we have prepared:

You are welcome to leave comments too, if you like. Let us know what you think!

]]> http://learningasrepresentation.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/edmedia-2009/feed/ 0 Janaina EdMedia http://learningasrepresentation.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/media-literacy-in-the-european-parliament/ http://learningasrepresentation.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/media-literacy-in-the-european-parliament/#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:48:49 +0000 Janaina http://learningasrepresentation.wordpress.com/?p=112 ]]>

European Parliament

On December 16th 2008, the European Parliament approved a statement that should be celebrated by people like us, who believe learning and representation are inseparable. The document approved maintains that media education activities have to encompass all citizens – children, young people, adults, older people, and people with disabilities. It points out that acquiring media literacy begins in the home with learning how to select from the media services available – stressing in this regard the importance of media education for parents, who play a decisive role in the development of children’s media-use habits – and continues at school and during lifelong learning, and is strengthened by the efforts of national, governmental and regulatory authorities and the work of media professionals and institutions. The document also notes that the purpose of media literacy is to enable people to use media and their content in skilled and creative ways, critically analyse media products, understand how the media industry works, and produce media content by their own efforts. Media literacy thus denotes the ability to use individual media unaided, to understand, and bring critical assessment to bear on, the various aspects of media as such and media content, and to communicate – irrespective of the context – and create and disseminate media content. In addition that, given the many sources available, what is most important is the ability to separate out information from the new media’s flood of data and images and to categorise that information. It is evident many of us have been very much busy trying to make students acquire the abilities to produce multimodal messages typical of the digital age. We need to attend now the critical skills necessary to understand, select and such semiotic resources. I think developing a metalanguage which can be easily applied in classroom by teachers who are not semiotisians or media professionals is one of the most important tasks we have ahead of us.

Class discussion of the suject's bibliography

My students work in groups and talk about the reading assigned to every class to produce a discussion report. At the end of the class, we have an open discussion, then I take the reports home and read and comment them. In the laboratory, they are being introduced to the development of educational webpages, blogs and multimedia educational resources. This way, I try to assure the production of digital and non digital evidences of learning and to make them not only do things with technology, but also to reflect on the “why” and “how” to do it.

Introduction to web design in the laboratory

There is nothing more beautiful than seeing them work, discussing the texts read or making decisions on their web projects. Many of the students begin the subject feeling insecure of their technical abilities or not totally convinced of the subject usefulness. It is rewarding to see them making progress each week and to move away from common knowledge such as “it is important to teach with technology” to being able to express ideas which defend the integration of technology, pedagogy and the curriculum. I really have a great time with them.

Cristina Zamora, my pre-service student teacher last semester, now an in-service teacher

 All the materials created by my student teachers are available online for teachers who want to use them in their classes, in the resources section of EDUCANET. Last semester they created an educational web page, a webquest and a blog. It was a great experience because at the beginning, most students had nothing but very basic knowledge of informatics. They also were afraid of trying with new technologies. The results of their work available at EDUCANET speaks for itself. It was a very rich experience, which undoubtfully must be improved, but that has surely changed our understandings of what educating means.

Next course, I’m planning to launch an IDEAS MARKET, so that in-service teachers can demand technological pedagogical materials to my pre-service teachers. That is due to begin late January. I’ll keep you informed about it!

Cristina and I at the Science Week, Tarragona, Spain

Guess what! This summer I was on vacation in my home town, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and, guess  who was presenting a conference in the school where I took my PhD: Gunther Kress.

No way I would miss it! In the conference at the Faculdade de Letras, UFMG, Kress presented a definition for learning in which, for those of us who have been following his work, it is possible to notice theoretical moves from previous ones. In Belo Horizonte, Kress defined learning as

“The transformative engagement with an aspect of the world which is the focus of attention of an individual; on the basis of principles brought by her or him to that engagement; leading to a transformation of the individuals semiotic/conceptual resources”

Now compare to the definition I quoted in my last post. Learning can be seen as:

 “the individual’s agentive selection from, engagement with and transformation of the world according to their principals” (Kress, 2007: 37)

So, he’s added interest as a trigger for transformation, but not of any transformation, for the transformation of internal conceptions. What Kress is doing here is to semiotize cognition, that is, he’s using the same principles he applies to think about external, tangible representations to think about internal, mental ones.

 The other day I presented a seminar in the research group I’m working at, LATE, and in the audience I had people from psychology and pedagogy. My experience is that one problem some of them will experience with multimodality is that they tend to see content as something independent from its realization – as many linguists still do. We took the water cycle, for example, and someone said:

“The water cycle is the water cycle, content is content regardless the way you represent it.”

My view is that the water cycle will be one thing or another very different thing depending on the way it is represented, the semiotic modes used to do it, the media used in the process, the people who represent it and what time of history this representation is made. Some of my colleagues argued there is something the water cycle is, its truth. My point is, however, no matter how human beings try to access that truth, they will do that through representations, external or internal ones, which are always interest driven and only close to what reality is about. Besides, who knows if we really know “the truth about the water cycle”… I mean, what if tomorrow scientists find out something not known to the day… Actually, a scientist’s understanding of what the water cycle is is surely different of mine, and even if he knew everything that is possible to know about it nowadays, nobody knows what he could find out tomorrow.

I came home after the seminar thinking about so many people who did not live to send photographs instantly over their phones, to call other continents for free on their computers or to know the sea urchin and the human genome have so much in common. Maybe I misinterpret the theme, but if the content were always the content, independently of its representations, some kind of eternal truth, either it would never change or we would never have access to it. I think the option of semiotizing cognition is an interesting one. And I am aware it is what it is, an option: as interest driven and limited as any other form of representation is.