7.5 The Role of Messaging in Augmenting Environmental Understanding The final research question was “how can messaging technologies augment the semiotic processes of making and sharing meaning about place?” This is particularly relevant to investigate, given the recent interest in mixed reality environments. Blending both offline and online interaction through the exchange of messaging, these activities are founded upon the participants’ attainment of various goals within their respective spatial environments (both real and virtual). Typically the messages exchanged between the participants of mixed reality environments take the form of emails, real-time chat, and text messages. For example, in the ‘I like Frank’ activity which took place in Adelaide in 2003, the online players were tasked to explore a virtual map of the city, and had to enlist the help of the street players to track down actual objects (such as postcards) located in physical space. The online and street players communicated with each other via text messages.
While the intervention described in the present study did not share strict design similarities with mixed reality environments, one of the primary unifying elements is of course the centrality of messaging to a learning task grounded upon the exploration of one’s local environment. Thus, one finding from the study, mentioned in Chapter Four, was that being a member of a ‘follow’ pair during the orienteering task was in fact preparing them cognitively for the tests of spatial intelligence that would comprise the post-test. This finding is particularly interesting because the orienteering task and the post-tests had only a very loose relationship, from a design point-of-view. That is, the former required successful deduction and navigation of an unknown route within a given period of time, while the latter tested one’s ability to mentally rotate objects and panoramic photographs. The common factor linking both was the requirement to observe, interpret, and remember details in one’s local environment. The fact that there was a transfer of this nexus of learning from a real-world application to a classroom-based scenario should encourage all teachers of geography.
In fact, bearing in mind that of the top ten most-improved performers between the pre- and post-tests eight had participated in the orienteering exercise as members of following-pairs (and indeed that thirteen of the top twenty most-improved performers had been members of following-pairs), the study does suggest that participation in fieldwork which has its theoretical roots in Rogoff’s (1995) guided participation and participatory appropriation, can have a positive effect on students’ spatial intelligence (and, by extension (Catling, 2005), on their map-reading skills).
In terms of activity theory, this finding confirms the relevance of Wells’s (2002) representation of the theory (as applied to discourse) to conceptualizing the interactions in the orienteering task, as depicted in Figure 1 earlier in this chapter. It suggests that while the power-relations in such activities are portrayed in the figure as skewed in favour of the so-called ‘experts’, the ‘novices’ can certainly benefit from such discourse-based interactions, given the appropriate artifacts and rule-systems, and provided that the jointly-constructed outcome is seen as meaningful to both parties.
The second half of the intervention, complementary to the orienteering task, was the perspectives task. The primary finding from this part of the study was that the Structured Academic Controversy format can indeed be successfully applied in an online environment in which participants are not necessarily co-located. In my review of the literature, this had not been attempted before. In fact, as mentioned in previous chapters, the very structure of the format provides an ideal conduit for encouraging (or possibly, enforcing) participants in an online discussion to deepen their investigation by moving on from what Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001) term the ‘exploration’ phase, to the important ‘integration’ phase, in which explicit attempts are made to analyse, critique and build upon whatever information has been put forward to that point.
The use of the Structured Academic Controversy format to conduct an exploration of a given neighbourhood during the perspectives task of the intervention has yielded results which compare favourably to similar studies of online collaboration and debate. The proportion of messages exchanged during each phase of the Structured Academic Controversy exercises was similar to what other workers, such as Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001) and Fahy (2002) have surfaced in their examinations of online conferencing, computer-mediated communication and e-learning in general.
For example, as mentioned in Chapter Four , 60 percent of a total of 803 messages sent during the Structured Academic Controversy tasks were sent during what Garrison, Anderson and Archer term the exploration phase. This compares well with 63 percent obtained by Garrison et al’s own work in 2001. Fahy’s study a year later was also consistent with this, with a figure of 62 percent.
In particular, the proportion of messages sent by participants in the present study during the so-called integration phase of Garrison et al’s model of practical inquiry was 30 percent. This figure is higher than in either Garrison et al’s own study (19 percent) or Fahy’s 2002 study (14 percent). This finding is all the more encouraging when it is considered that Garrison et al specifically point out that integration is “more challenging than exploration” for learners, and as a consequence, learners are often more comfortable “remaining in a continous exploration mode”, rather than proceeding on to the more cognitively demanding integration and resolution phases.
In Wells’s landmark paper of 2002, he leveled a critique against traditional conceptions of activity theory in that it had “not been used to any great extent to address issues of classroom learning and teaching, in which the object is the understanding of concepts and theoretical relationships, and the mediational means are the descriptions, narratives, and explanations through which this understanding is achieved” (Wells, 2002: 1). He elaborated by using his observations from a second-grade classroom (Wells, 2000) and from a class of sixth-graders (Haneda and Wells, 2000). Of note is the fact that these two studies were carried out in face-to-face learning environments. A significant contribution of this thesis, therefore, is the finding that the very structure from which the Structured Academic Controversy format derives its name is well capable of scaffolding a ZPD, even when the zone is constructed such that its operators are not spatially co-present. This represents a major extension of the relevance of Wells’s earlier work to various iterations of e-learning which characterize many learning environments today.
Indeed, the data from the preceding paragraphs supports the view that this mode of intervention results in at least a 150 percent increase in the proportion of interactional exchanges at the critical and most challenging phase known as integration, over less structured forms of e-learning and online conferencing. This has been borne out through the consistently successful use of the format over twenty iterations in the present study. Further, the exchange of text- and picture-messages can make a significant contribution to the collaborative making and sharing meaning about place, especially when carried out in a highly structured format of communication, such as the Structured Academic Controversy.
<- 7.4 Adolescent Communication of Navigational Information -> 7.6 Limitations and Areas for Further Research |
