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.

Having got somewhat lost with regard to research topics and methods, I return to my original idea of investigating Japanese learners, their culture and the use of an online role-play course.

I feel strongly that, for me, having a definite dissertation in mind brings a specific focus to the RM course, though it is wise to be schooled in all of the methods.

What lends the project more interest for me now is the idea of designing an in-depth role-play based course that takes place in various online formats, a blend of wikis (collaborative, but in this case I aim to develop a [possibly new] combative wiki activity), blogs (private reflection, a more honest account - in role, though), and synchronous role-play (SL for example?).

Then we will evaluate the premise that Japanese learners benefit from such in-role activity - which is aided by the (relative?) anonymity of the online environment. The hope is that, should this hypothesis be confirmed, such online role-play will be validated for all learning ...but with particular merit for leaners who might express some inhibition in participating face-to-face.

Derived from the OLL course, and mental developments there, would there be value in exploring whether certain online tools are more favourable to learners of a particular learning disposition than others. For example, are wikis less appealing to 'solitary learners' than blogs?

Needs thought...

Let's get one thing clear. I've never read anything by James Newman before other than "Chapter 2: What's a videogame? Rules, puzzles and simulation" - without reading Chapter 1 or a preamble, it's hard to say where James Newman sits on the pantheon of videogame scholars.

To say that this chapter iritated and angered me beyond belief would be the understatement of the millennium. The problem starts with defining what a videogame is. The working, though quite broad, definition offered by Frasca (2001, cited in Newman, 2004, p. 27) worked quite well for me. Frasca says that a videogame is:

"any forms of computer-based entertainment software, either textual or image-based, using any electronic platform such as personal computers or consoles and involving one or multiple players in a physical or networked environment"

So why-oh-why is Newman even mentioning the likes of Furby or Sony's AIBO as being possibly thought of as a "videogame" because they are computer-based. Well, if you followed that line of thinking, you may as well chuck in the microwave and the washing machine to boot; after all, they are computer based as well you know! He then tells us about the two schools of thought on videogames, the narratologists (story telling) and the ludologists (game playing) arguing what makes a videogame what it is today. It's at this point that I lose the will to live as for me, the very nature of videogames lies in the term itself "video" (as in screen) and "game" (as in to play). This argument to define "videogame" becomes rather belaboured and futile. Even the deployment of game genres (Berens & Howard, 2001, cited in Newman, 2005, p. 12), those of:

• Action and Adventure
• Driving and Racing
• First-Person Shooter
• Platforms and Puzzles
• Roleplaying
• Strategy and Simulation
• Sports and Beat 'em-ups 

becomes belittled and not worthy of scholastic scrutiny - and that is what is at the heart of all this, dare I say it, nonsense. Making videogames a "respectable" subject discipline that is recognised for it's academic rigour and scholastic standing. I know some of my more cynical colleagues with scoff at Newman for using his book to justify is monthly salary - well I don't know about that.

The videogame and the various genres does exactly what it says on the tin - that is the nature of the beast. Alongside the videogame, sits the arcade game, the slot-machine game, the mobile device game, the text-based game, etc. as these are part of the same computer-game based continuum. It's the chain of gaming evolution that can be traced and catalogued. Upon this evolutionary scale are those who have survived and those who have become extinct; there are those that have evolved and metamorphised into some new and those that have made minor enhancements and are instantly recognisable.

Most of the reasoned arguments came from Newman's references and not Newman himself (but of course, I could have entirely missed that for being impossibly annoyed with his "scholarly" work). I put this question to my partner's two sons who are both ardent gamers. I asked them: "what is a videogame?" They said a videogame should be:

• entertaining
• challenging 
• have good characters
• have a good plot / story
• good graphics (which would suggest that it is screen based)
• good sound / music
• totally immersive (my word, not theirs, but that is what they meant)
• engaging

I've rattled off a list of characteristics that get mentioned in both Newman's and Gee's work as to what defines a videogame. To say that Newman's chapter iritated and angered me beyond belief would be the understatement of the millennium!

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. 

Newman, J. (2004). Videogames. London: Routledge.

I had a quick look at the site before going to bed last night and couldn't take in the Week 4-5 stuff at all. It wasn't *my* time of day - it's much clearer this morning.  I know this response to times of day very well now, of course - though I didn't find out I was a lark instead of an owl until well after I graduated with my first degree. But the reminder is useful for the current work, especially as we are about to go into a complex group activity.

A a great strength of e-learning is the asynchronous communication that allows people to work at their own preferred or convenient times.  The dialogue becomes a hybrid of spoken and written: faster than letter writing but slower than speech (and therefore more considered).  (I suppose that when there were messengers delivering letters within the same town, the speed of communication might have been similar to that of the discussion board, though not as potentially far reaching.)  The division of the conversation into threads means that the more considered response can still come out later, even if in speech the opportunity might have passed by.  

As well as considering it for team work, it's perhaps important to take timing into account for questionnaires and interviews.  I'm vaguely conscious of this anyway, but I do wonder whether there are any specific implications for the online environment.  Asking the same questions online asychronously, or via Skype or other synchronous medium, or phone or face-to-face could elicit different types of response.  A response can be edited or re-sequenced in some circumstances but not in others.  I've noted before that I will sometimes preview a response and then censor it - if it doesn't "look" right. 

Timing is not the only issue - presence is a big factor.  The absence/presence distinction is already there in questionnaires and interviews, but going online may introduce subtle or major differences. (We are possibly not aware of them all yet.)  How far does the medium affect the validity, reliability and quality of the data?   This is the question I'll have at the back of my mind as I read Chapter 8 of Robson.  

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.

Very interested to discuss the 'Hawthorne effect' on the discussion boards today. That in itself could be a fascinating subject for research, vis-a-vis language learning online.

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...