1.1 Methodology

The study explores how mobile phones can be used as tools for collaborative learning around two geographical tasks designed to give insights into how adolescents perceive their local environment.  After piloting the intervention with fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds from one school, it was carried out in three other schools, which were selected on the basis that the socio-economic and academic profiles of their students were similar.

The first task required pairs of students to help their peers navigate unfamiliar environments, using only text- and picture-messaging.  Through an analysis of which aspects of these environments students find meaningful, teachers would be in a better position to translate geographical concepts from the textbooks into terms and metaphors to which teens can more easily relate.

In the second task, teams of students explored a bounded area, looking for pieces of evidence which they could use to support non-congruent points-of-view.  They recorded these pieces of evidence pictorially, using the phones, and exchanged these pictures in real time while still in the field, physically separated from each other.  This kind of task was only feasible given the affordances of the present generation of camera phones.  Students used the evidence to explore given geographical issues regarding the bounded area, in the format of a Structured Academic Controversy.  By analyzing the pictorial exchange, teachers may be able to better understand which particular aspects of their local environments teens perceive to be relevant to the given geographic themes.  

The data obtained from these two tasks is discussed in Chapters Four to Six of this thesis.  Specifically, Chapters Five and Six elaborate upon the performance of three of these student-teams – as three cases – in detail.  Such a case-based approach was chosen over alternative qualitative research methodologies (such as ethnography and grounded theory (Cresswell, 1994: 143)) because it represented the most appropriate way of investigating the research questions of this study, which are presented later in this chapter.

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