Some problems coming to mind re. potential dissertation topic: it would be necessary to compare 2 sets of learning, 1 in an online role-play and 1 in a face-to-face role-play. This presents some difficulty, not insurmountable, in being able to observe both sets of learners. But... much more importantly, there are simply too many variables in this project, as it stands at present: let's say that the online participants are more active than the F2F learners. This could tell you about:

• their personality
• the strength of the teacher
• the time they take their lesson
• etc etc etc

So... the project will not be explanatory. If it still runs, it needs to be exploratory, and would simply measure participation in the online role-play.

Bigger problem still: when I taught in Japan, despite the reputation of Japanese learners for being afraid of making mistakes, I had few significant problems in getting learners involved in F2F role-plays. This came down to skill of teacher and sensitivity too.

The dissertation could be significantly scaled down so that it focuses only on wiki role-play (my idea from the OLL course). A new question would be required, and very probably the (ill-conceived) Japanese culture idea should be scrapped.

Reading this week's papers from Pat Kane (2005) amd Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) were a sheer joy and delight compared to the James Newman chapter the other week. I think the issue between these three writers is one of how an argument is being presented to the reader. We start with Sutton-Smith (1997) who sets that scene by explaining that the meaning or definition of "play" is fraught with ambiguity with various philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, etc. describing the essence of "play" in different ways that relate to their particular disciplines.

It's astonishing to learn that for such a "simple" concept of "play", or at least perceived by many to be a "simple" concept, has academics from a multitude of disciplines trying to place "play" within some framework or other - indeed, I don't recall any of the theorists mentioned by Sutton-Smith taking an holistic and all-encompassing view of "play"; this is something that Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 6) sees as a weakness and Kane (2005, p. 40) also picks up on when he talks about the "third culture" or polymathism ("Homo Universalis") before the arts and sciences had a parting of the ways. I was also intrigued by Sutton-Smith's view that play "has temporal diversity as well as spatial diversity" when he talks about the likes of the World Cup and the Olympics. Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 9) offers "seven rhetorics", which Kane (2005, p.39) describes as:

"...ways of thinking and talking about play that express a certain vision of human nature and culture, and which can be deployed by everyone from teachers to generals, hackers to CEOs ... [which] imply both a very modern and a very ancient vision of humanity."

The "seven rhetorics" are:

1. The rhetoric of play as progress
2. The rhetoric of play as fate
3. The rhetoric of play as power
4. The rhetoric of play as identity
5. The rhetoric of play as the imaginary
6. The rhetoric of play as the self
7. The rhetoric of play as frivolous

Kane (2005, p. 48) makes an interesting statement whereby he says "the moment of play is identified as a generator of originality, energy and new development" that made me think of Google's European offices in Zurich and the "Homo Ludens" that occupy it.

 

Kane's "manifesto" is about a lifestyle, an attitude, a state of mind, a way at looking at the world and the people and artifacts in it that strips away the rigidity and drudgery that has been hampered by a mechanistic, industrial mindset of the Victorian age. Education is still built around this hidden curriculum of "preparing people for the workforce".

There's this wonderful allusion to Jean-Dominique Bauby's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" where Kane (2005, p. 46) quotes surrealist Luis Bunuel: "Somewhere between chance and mystery lies the imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom". Bauby suffered a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome (the diving bell) and would use his imagination (the butterfly) to escape his biological prison.

Both Sutton-Smith and Kane position play not as a "trivial, frivolous, silly" waste of time; but as a powerful, natural human asset for learning and discovery through highly creative and imaginative interactions with the world and the people who live in it. Whilst the games industry has shown how people can become immersed in the world of games and are developing skills through experimentation, practice and from other players, so now Education needs to look at this phenomena and translate this into practical, everyday use fit for a classroom be it real or virtual.

Update

Have just learnt that Pat Kane is one half of the late 1980s, early 1990s pop duo Hue and Cry and maintains a blog called "The Play Ethic" and is using Twitter to share his thoughts and resources around his concept of the play ethic.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kane, P. (2005). The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a different way of living. London: Pan.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

I'm a little bit behind with my reading for work as well as this course.  Coming to this blog is probably displacement activity (along the lines of it's not worth starting the reading now as I have to go for the train in 15 minutes).  However, I think it's worth recording how I feel about stats before I start doing them.  The fact that I only loaded my software yesterday (noting that I should have done it before the end of January) suggests some reluctance. 

I haven't done any statistics for a long time, but I can see that one of the things I'm reading for work contains some.  I don't think I'm phobic about statistics - I just worry about their use and the claims attached to them.  But it's actually better to know something about it all if people are likely to misuse statistics, especially if they are making spurious claims based on accurate statistics (but false premises). 

I did use numbers even in my very qualitative autoethnographic study - I created a concordance file in Word which helped me count my references to particular themes and thus see what a student "noticed" more frequently than other things.  It was a starting point when I had a lot of data and didn't know what to do next - it helped me to create categories and also a useful index.  It was of more interest to my examiners than I thought it would be - part of the argument about how you claim your data are data.

So I'll keep that in mind when I'm number crunching!  I've more to say on this but my time's up. 

Carrying out a Masters dissertation research project is basically a learning exercise, preparing one to go on with research in the future (Hamish - discussions board).

Don't necessarily plan to conduct any further research in the future. Is doing the dissertation worthwhile for me? Perhaps not.

Moving closer to a question, possibly, with an inversion of the starting point question. So 'what is the effect of cultural factors on Japanese online language learning?' or some such thing becomes:

How does online role-play overcome cultural barriers to language learning?

...which pleasingly allows for analysis of the course design vis-a-vis the cultural factors. 

The strange, overwhelming feeling fades; I feel freshly motivated.

It's official: I am a slow reader / thick.   But all is not lost. I'm dusting off some skimming first, and then scanning, reading skills that I learnt about many years ago. I also have had to develop a genius highlighting system. It means, however, that I won't be able to resell my copy of Robson! Perhaps I'll need it again after the MSc is over. Perhaps I'll make a magnificent fire with it in the back garden.

I wish I'd done a research methods course before; I'm enjoying the reactions from different perspectives and the possibilities opened up by the range of potential angles on a topic.  I've been thinking that it would have helped me in my previous big study to have had some appropriate signposts.  I had to find them myself (which is good I suppose).  I am probably coming at the issue of research with the benefits of a piece of work to test against what I'm reading. 

Actually, just writing that has made me think that I did have an advantage in not having too many signposts - it made my observations more intuitive and natural.  When I just went into a college to be a student and see what I noticed without any preconceptions (other than a feeling that there was more to it than deep and surface learning), I suppose I was engaged in a sort of grounded theory.  This was suggested to me at the time, in a casual conversation with a colleague.  When I looked into grounded theory, I decided it wasn't for me, particularly as the internal debates could have sidetracked me from my own debates with phenomenography.  It also seemed to demand a particular approach to data analysis that I wasn't sure about. But I still might have been doing something that could usefully be described as grounded theory.  In fact, the links that Robson makes between ethnography, case study and grounded theory (Page 190) might have reassured me.

It was very late in the day before I realised the significance of activity theory for my research (dangerously late!) And because of a reluctance to tell the story out of sequence, this meant that the role of "action" wasn't highlighted upfront early enough for the reader.  An earlier orientation to different approaches to inquiry and theoretical perspectives might have helped with this.

So perhaps I can now try a different type of study but with some similar themes to my last one.  I'm starting to think about taking myself out of the picture (as far as possible - but I'm not convinced that any researcher can do this totally!) I could use one or more of my earlier conclusions as a hypothesis and find a way of seeing what differences there might be online and face to face.  Perhaps I'd like to explore something around "learning outcomes" - and the relationships between intended, perceived, actual, additional and unintentional outcomes (and there'll be others perhaps).

Before I launch into my (recent and past) experiences with Pac-Man, the arcade game developed by Namco, I would like to say something about this week's reading, Chapter 7: "Video Games" from Greenfield (1984). Greenfield (ibid, p. 88) makes an important statement by saying that "children with a television background develoop a preference for dynamic visual imagery" before going to say that "visual action is an important factor in attracting the attention of young children to the television screen"; from this statement Greenfield goes on to suggest that "moving visual images" in arcade / video games is one such reason for the genres popularity - more so than those of text-based or "still visual image" games.

Greenfield (ibid, p. 89) goes on to suggest that children pick up and assimilate a lot of audio-visual information from the action sequences depicted on the TV screen. This is an important statement in that it suggests that children weaned on TV have the potential to be better at video games that those "generations socialised with the verbal media of print and radio". A couple of thoughts struck me here: Firstly, children are surrounded by movement and colour in real life, what is depicted on the screen could be construed as being an extension of that - am I stating the obvious here? Secondly, could we possibly hypothesize that children "socialised with the verbal media of print and radio" might have an overly developed imagination? People talk of imagining how characters and scenes from a book that they are reading are "played over in their head".

Greenfield goes on to suggest that other aspects that contribute towards the popularity of video / arcade games include:

• an active participatory role;
• a sense of active control;
• presence of a goal / task;
• automatic scorekeeping;
• audio effects;
• randomness;
• importance of speed.

Although Greenfield doesn't explicitly express this, but we can see affective elements come into play with games such as sound (ambience) and visuals (information). The other element that Greenfield alludes to, which has been expressed by the psychologist Eric Erickson (Gee, 2007, p. 59) is the notion of "psychosocial moratorium" or a safe environment in which the user can take risks where the real-world consequences are minimal.

I'd like to think that I am one of Greenfield's generation of TV kids as I was pretty much glued to that cathode ray tube during the 1970s and 1980s. However, I was also a very voracious reader during the 1980s, eschewing my paperback companion to that of the "idiot's lantern". It came as a surprise to me to read that Pac-Man was a lot more complex and nuanced than I first imagined. The game, superficially at least, requires the player to move around the maze, avoiding the ghosts and eating up everything in it's path. What is not so obvious to the player is that Pac-Man operates on a number of "hidden rules" that can only be deduced from observing what is going on in the game; such as: each "ghost" has a particular characteristic behaviour and certain sections of the maze has a particular behaviour that could enhance or impede Pac-Man's progress.

Despite playing this game on and off for a number of years, I didn't realise that there was more to the game than meets the eye. I have always said that I couldn't "read signs" - so this could be a cognitive dysfunction on my part? Or is it because, I prefer the medium of print to that of televisuals?

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Greenfield, P.M. (1984). Mind and media : the effects of television, video games, and computers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Investigating learning styles. Apart from Kolb-derived theories, this website - http://www.learning-styles-online.com/ - is interesting. It's a slight expansion on the more common visual-aural-kinaesthetic take. One idea for a research project might involve focussing on one learning style (if they exist!!...), say Aural, and investigating how well an online course catered for the Aural learners, perhaps as compared to other styles.

Saw a reference to Autogenics, which is recommended particularly for those who learn well in physical mode. It involves progressive relaxation (like in yoga) and was used by Russian athletes.

The whole field makes me focus in on the kind of area I would enjoy researching: how people learn / can learn more effectively, self-reflection / emotion in learning, and so on...

This morning I'm being sidetracked by other people's blogs - and I've still got loads of them to explore.  I've followed up a link in Wayne's blog to transliteracy, which has got me enthused and opened up all sorts of other things to read and a video to watch.  I'm now torn; I need to get on with some tasks (I haven't done the group task adequately) but want to go off and explore a perspective that might have some bearing on what I do later for my dissertation. 

This is how it should be: an insight from someone else coming at just the right time for one of my own interests - and, I hope, stimulating me to write something that in turn motivates someone else to explore.  

On the other hand, the enthusiasm that's tempting me away from my tasks may need to be reined in. I'm now mentally reviewing my long career as a student and wondering if I hadn't been such a dilettante, I might have achieved more.  I think that students are constantly faced with such dilemmas. 

What's important is to add some proper thought to the enthusiasm.  For my next entry, i should give reasons for transliteracy being worth pursuing in my own context - or not, if that turns out to be the case.