7.3 Adolescent Communication of Environmental Understanding The second research question was “how are such understandings of three-dimensional environments communicated, through text and pictures, with their peers?” Participants, for the most part, chose not to send video clips as multimedia messages, even though this was technologically feasible and within the rules of both the orienteering and perspectives tasks. During the pre-fieldtrip briefing, participants were made aware of the time-lag inherent in multimedia messaging (for both pictures and video) given current network limitations. This was done by giving them the opportunity to send test multimedia messages to each other, so that they could experience the network lag for themselves and make their own judgments as to the extent to use multimedia messaging during the actual tasks. The small screen size (although the particular model of phone used in the study was specifically chosen for its relatively larger screen, as compared to cheaper, more commonplace phones) and the relatively poor viewable contrast given the generally bright ambient lighting conditions (fieldwork was generally conducted in the early afternoons) also meant that viewing amateurishly captured shaky video clips of a few seconds’ duration was both nauseating and not very helpful.
Notwithstanding the above, this question of the communication of environmental understanding can only become increasingly pertinent as existing technologies improve and new media of self-expression are introduced, and find their way into the everyday toolsets of adolescents, if not into their classrooms. For example, online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace, free audio-visual telephony services such as Skype, and photo-sharing facilities from Flickr, all provide an immediate and ready means of sharing not only one’s worldview (as this can already be achieved through the publishing of blogs and podcasts), but, of more relevance to the present discussion, of one’s local environment. Already, the term ‘hyperlocal journalism’ has been coined to describe ‘news coverage of community-level events usually overlooked by mainstream media’ (Retrieved December 12, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlocal_journalism/ ).
Taking this idea further into the future, research is proceeding apace at the University of Tokyo (for example, Ueoka (2005)) on how the various data-types accumulated by ‘life-logging’ technologies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s ‘LifeLog’ and Nokia’s ‘LifeBlog’ could be made more accessible and indexable. The present state-of-the-art permits such technologies to create a multi-sensory record of a slice of time in a person’s life. This is achieved through the use of wearable computers and video-cameras, as well as through Global Positioning Satellite receivers and sensors monitoring various biophysiological parameters. Such wearable computers have been used, for example, to build a narrative record of the physiological responses of rescue workers in the aftermath of natural disasters, such as earthquakes.
A creative tension is arising between, on the one hand, geographers such as Abler who wrote – just as the worldwide web was being popularized – that “despite widespread belief to the contrary, information technologies cannot repeal the fundamental laws of economic geography. In communications technologies, frictions of distance remain” (1996), and, on the other, pundits such as Friedman (2005) who have put it to us that “the world is flat”. Interestingly, non-geographers such as Aronica and Ramdoo (2006) are also beginning to question Friedman’s assertion. Flat world or no, If educators are to design effective learning tasks which will eventually permit the use of multimodal tools in the development of a range of literacy skills, the ways in which adolescent learners prefer to use these tools need to be investigated and understood.
Bearing in mind the preceding discussion, the data in Tables 22 and 23 suggest a gender difference that, with regards participants’ usage patterns of text and pictures in messaging. For example, a comparison of the twenty-one pairs of female students and the twenty-three pairs of male students reveals that the former sent, on average, one picture-messages for every 5.0 text-messages, whereas the latter sent one for every 4.0 text-messages. This preference for text-based, as opposed to picture-based, communication among female students is corroborated by Figure 14 in Chapter Five, which presents an entirely text-based ‘sketch map’ of the neighbourhood and orienteering route produced by an all-female team of students. Put another way, the data suggests that differential functional loads are placed upon text and pictures by the sexes.
Chapter Two has described previous work (for example, Grön et al (2000), and Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002)) which has pointed to differences in how the sexes perceive space and their propensity towards either textual or pictorial communication – is a picture really worth a thousand words, and if so, to whom? Data from the present study tends to corroborate the earlier work of others, for example, for both the pre- and post-tests, male students scored significantly better in matching the rendered objects. With regards the functional loads placed by males and females on text and pictures in communication, the data is less conclusive, although generally trending towards males favouring the use of pictures.
The present study also showed a disproportionate number of female students as members of successful ‘leading’ pairs – the figure was fifteen pairs out of twenty-six. This can be contrasted with a study by Axup, Bidwell and Viller (2004), in which it was noted that of the four participants who were tasked to deductively orienteer a route purely from photographic evidence alone, the participant who made the largest deviations was the sole female. Admittedly their sample was small, yet notwithstanding that it might be postulated that the large deviations arose at least in some part due to the fact that the participant had no recourse to textual or verbal cues and had to rely on deducing the spatial clues from pictures only. These crucial differences between Axup, Bidwell and Viller’s study and the present research – namely that the orienteering task was asynchronously one-way in the former and synchronously two-way (or ‘duplex’, in the jargon) in the latter, and that the latter permitted both textual and pictorial exchanges while the former did not, inform an understanding of the apparently contradictory findings with respect to the performance of females in orienteering tasks.
Applying the lens of Engeström’s (1983) representation of activity theory to the work of Axup, Bidwell and Viller (2004) helps us to understand more clearly the significant differences between (and therefore the contributions made by) the present study and their work. Unlike the present intervention, the research of Axup, Bidwell and Viller involved, at any given instance, a single human subject acting towards an object through a finite and fixed set of secondary artifacts (in this case, photographs). In contrast, the intervention described in this thesis is better conceptualized through Wells’s (2002) interpretation of activity theory (discussed in Chapter Two), as represented in Figure 1. 
Wells’s representation ably describes the present intervention, in that it depicts multiple subjects operating within an unequal dynamic to shape and negotiate on the fly a common shared object (be it a route or a more thorough understanding of geographic issues pertaining to the neighbourhood). As a result, the mediational artifacts in the present study were neither finite nor fixed, but were instead evolving and emerging in real-time – through text, photographs and occasionally videos – as the activity progressed. As such, the central role of dialogue in shaping the dynamic of the activity system is thrown into greater relief.
Therefore, contributions of the present study to Wells’s model are the reminder not only of the multimodal nature of much modern-day discourse, but also that even ‘traditional’ demographic factors, such as gender, can influence the dynamics within the model in new and unexpected ways, at least insofar as males and females might have different preferred modalities of communication. Case Two in Chapter Five is a clear example of this, in which the reader is reminded that a team of four female students chose to represent their orienteering route solely in textual form, as reproduced in Figure 14 in that chapter. Further as discussed in Case Two, the pair of girls who constituted the ‘following pair’ sent only one picture-message during the entire 76 minutes of the orienteering activity. Partially as a consequence of this, the first thirty-two minutes of the activity was characterized by a failure to both communicate accurately and deduce the route. The argument is suggested here that this preference for uni-modal communication further skewed the ‘expert / novice’ dynamic represented in Figure 1 against the ‘novices’ (that is, the ‘following pairs’ of the orienteering activity).
A question which could be explored in subsequent research could be the extent to which shared understandings and co-constructions of the common objects of activity systems are influenced by the nature of the modality of the discourse – whether such modalities are enforced by design, or engaged in by user preference. In other words, how does the symmetry of Wells’s model – the ‘balance of power’, so to speak – vary as the subjects of the system communicate with each other through a variety of textual and non-textual cues?
Further, regardless of one’s reading of the work of Axup, Bidwell and Viller (2004), as well as the present study, the implication for teachers is clear – that one should be cognizant of differences in learning styles and predispositions with regards the functional loads of text and pictures, when designing curricular materials. This is especially so in an ostensibly inherently pictorial and graphical discipline as geography.
<- 7.2 Adolescent Explorations and Understandings of Local Environments -> 7.4 Adolescent Communication of Navigational Information |
