1.5 Significance of the ResearchThe data for the research described in this thesis was gathered from January to July 2004. The research questions are therefore worth asking because it was during the period of the study that the cost of technologies, such as text- and picture-messaging, fell to levels which made them accessible to many students in technologically more savvy societies, such as some economies of the Pacific Rim. The adolescents in schools in Singapore today are already predisposed to using such devices. For example, an informal survey of 800 Singaporeans between the ages of 14 and 29 years, carried out by the Singapore Polytechnic in August and September 2004 found that more than half of the respondents spent most of their phone time composing text-messages, as opposed to actually talking to another party.
Kress (unpbl.) has noted that “the shift from the dominance of the book and the page to the new dominance of the screen is paralleled by a change in canonical modes of representation, away from the dominance of writing to an increasing use of image”. The ubiquity and transparency of mobile messaging technology invites investigation into how teachers might best channel these technological sources of motivation towards improving the learning process. To quote Rheingold (2003): “the emphasis on social software today ought to be a reminder that the real capabilities of augmentation lie in the thinking and communication practices these tools enable.”
As an example of such capabilities, the present research investigated the extent to which students might have their sense of spatial awareness and map-reading skills enhanced through the study, exchange, and subsequent real-time negotiation of photographs of environmental landmarks which were meaningful to the participants themselves. Specifically, the intervention represented an attempt to introduce an intermediate step into traditional pedagogies of map-skills in order to bridge the cognitive chasm between real-world three-dimensional environments and their symbolic representations on two-dimensional Cartesian coordinates (that is to say, topographic maps). This was achieved by inserting the learner into the very environment which was abstractly represented and by tasking the learner to explore, share and construct meaning about this environment with other learners.
In terms of similarities to prior and concurrent research studies by others (as described in the next chapter), the intervention which seems closest to this study is the Ambient Wood Project, first conducted by the University of Sussex in 2002. In the Ambient Wood Project, primary school students used handhelds and walkie-talkies to learn more about the natural ecological systems in the local woodland. Pairs of students explored the nearby woods, and described specimens of interest to their peers through their walkie-talkies. Background information on the specimen is subsequently transmitted to their handheld by the teacher. In this way, students are given opportunities to consolidate and reflect upon their explorations.
Where the Ambient Wood Project was founded upon serendipitous discovery and free exploration, this study was characterized by a more structured approach, in which students were explicitly tasked to analyse issues from non-congruent points-of-view.
Further, instead of using walkie-talkies as tools for social construction, text- and picture-messaging were used in this study. These not only allowed the social exchanges to be captured more readily for subsequent analyses, but the use of picture-messaging and the eventual transposing of the exchange of messages onto a map of the area for peer critique, especially allows insights into how teens perceive their local environment and communicate these perceptions to others.
Although little work has been carried out so far to investigate potential pedagogical applications of text- and picture-messaging, various authors have long recognised that there do exist fundamental differences between speech and writing, as media of expression.
For example, Short, Williams and Christie (1976) concluded a review of media studies by stating that the “absence of the visual channel reduces the possibilities for expression of socio-emotional material”. From almost the opposite perspective, however, Stein (1992) and Olson (1994) – have drawn attention to Feenberg’s (1999) assertion that writing (or, in the case of the present intervention – texting) is “not a poor substitute for physical presence and speech, but another fundamental medium of expression with its own properties and powers”. Indeed, Garrison and Anderson (2003) went so far as to assert that “writing has some inherent and demonstrable advantages over speech when engaged in critical discourse”. They elaborate, venturing that a probable explanation for these advantages is the “asynchronous nature of written communication”. The latter statement, of course, begs to be taken to issue in an age when text- and picture-messaging are commonplace.
As will be elaborated upon in Chapter Three , this study employed, as its primary pedagogical foundation, the experiential framework known as the Structured Academic Controversy (Johnson, Johnson and Smith (1997: 22)). This framework has successfully been used in social studies education, with both secondary and post-secondary cohorts (Sullivan Palincsar (1998), Maitland (2002), Mansfield (2002)). Traditionally, the Academic Controversies are structured such that participants engage in face-to-face debates. This forum of interaction is somewhat contrived and cannot accurately mirror modes of adolescent discussion and negotiation outside of the formal learning environment. In fact, students no longer have to wait till they return to school before sharing their thoughts with their peers.
The requirement, that the participants in the study had to engage in real-time collaboration while still onsite in multiple remote locations, means that the study has the potential to make the following major contributions to the yet nascent body of research on pedagogical applications of social software: first, relatively little has been researched into how young people develop their understanding of where places are – that is, into what Catling (2002) terms ‘locational knowledge learning’. One of the few workers in this field is Weeden (1996), who suggests that children need to encounter places through both direct (field visits) and indirect (map exercises) means, and that geography educators should not underestimate the value of such experiences. Weeden’s concern is primarily how young children develop problem-solving strategies in order to locate places on maps.
The present study extends this by investigating how adolescents make the transpositions between maps and the local environments in which they find themselves. Because students have to ask their peers for directions, and because their peers have to try to direct them precisely (using only text and photo(s), this study gives insight into how teens perceive issues of space and place in an urban environment. This very insight is important because of Kong’s (1999) reminder not to ignore what Hart (1984) terms the ‘geographies of children’. Instead, she exhorts a focus on how children and youths experience their environment.
Second, the intervention encourages students to empathise with, and defend, different points-of-view. Through this debate, students gained an appreciation of the issues pertaining to the geography (such as competing land use, or environmental conservation) around the school, or of other significant parts of Singapore. The quality of the debate was a function of their powers of observation, and this again gave the investigators an insight into what teens perceive as meaningful in their environment.
In this way, it is hoped that a counterpoint may be offered to Myerson’s (2001) assertion that ‘messages are very different from meanings’, in that ‘a message is an expression with a purpose, but without reason’. In other words, taking Habermas’s (1981) premise that ‘to communicate is to engage with meanings [and thus with the reasons behind what is expressed], in the hope of achieving a shared understanding of the world’, this study seeks to investigate the extent to which the messaging technologies of the mobile internet can yet be fraught with meaning.
Indeed, to quote Myerson again, ‘communication is rational only when it has this element of debate’. In his critique of how mobile telephony is changing the nature of communication, Myerson draws a contrast between Heidegger’s (1927) view of communication, in which the latter is ‘good when an answering voice arises proximally to the initial utterance’ (in which ‘proximally’ is defined by Myerson as being ‘not far in human understanding’), and ‘mobilised communication’, in which communication is good when ‘the response comes as swiftly as possible’. This dichotomy allows Myerson to conclude that ‘the contrast is really about space and time. For Heidegger, the metaphor is spatial’. I would dispute this rather neat conclusion, for I believe that Heidegger’s paradigm was closer to a semantico-cognitive metaphor.
Yet I would go further to add that there is indeed a place for a third, truly spatial, axis of communication theory – it is one that manifests itself especially in the technologies of the internet (mobile and otherwise). In other words, to what extent does the quality of communication decay over space? While this question is too unwieldy to attempt a thorough answer here, it is believed that this study would be one of few which seek to contribute equally to all three axes of communication – temporal, cognitive, and spatial.
To take issue with Myerson again (and, to an extent, with Garrison and Anderson’s generalisation with regards text-based communication), mobile messaging has evolved beyond the point which ‘the process of data acquisition is precisely the stage which is minimized by the mobile’. The caveat is that while this may no longer necessarily be the case, the few existing applications to education of handheld technologies in general, and mobile telephony in particular, are still structured to discount this new affordance.
For example, work on spatial discourse in general, and route description in particular (Denis, Pazzaglia, Cornoldi and Bertolo, 1999; Tom and Denis, 2004), has typically focused on designing more effective human-computer interfaces for use in in-car navigation systems. Those which have involved only human subjects have been conducted in open, campus-like, environments (Bidwell, 2004). In contrast, this study places at its heart the issue of how learners in urbanized environments might use the particular affordances of the technology in authentic discourse, rather than to view the technology as merely another means of asynchronous, aspatial, data delivery and response.
Third, by marrying the use of social software to the collaborative learning framework of the Structured Academic Controversy, the study attempts to explore the extent to which social software might be given a degree of academic legitimacy as a pedagogic tool, as opposed to merely being relegated to the realm of technological curiosity.
By analysing the discourse resulting from the Structured Academic Controversy through the lenses of a framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001) , the study will cast light upon the extent to which this so-called model of practical inquiry, which was originally developed with respect to e-learning and computer-mediated communication, might be applicable to the technological context of mobile telephony. Similarly, through this afore-mentioned marriage of technology and pedagogy, the study represents an attempt to redefine the traditional parameters of the Structured Academic Controversy against the more contemporary context of the hyper-connected, ‘always-on’, world of the teenager.
Fourth, the sharing of their worldviews with their peers back in school, through the composition of a pictorial tableaux, and the opportunities which their schoolmates were given to react to and critique these worldviews, goes some way towards addressing Tufte’s (1990) conundrum that “even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions… the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen”. While a pictorial tableau per se would not seem to enable its viewers to ‘escape flatland’, the fact that the students’ real-time interpretations of their environment through textual exchange is captured and subsequently located in place on that same tableau might tentatively be argued to do just that.
Finally, the study not only explores translations between two- and three-dimensional spaces, but also extends Halliday’s (1977) conception that meaners (those “who mean”) create the environment and transmit it across generations, into a transmission of socially-constructed environments across space as well. <- 1.4 Limitations of Study -> 1.6 Social Software and Communities of Inquiry |
