Transcript Generating New Learning Contexts: Novel Forms of Reuse and

Appropriation of mobile
phones for learning
John Cook
London Metropolitan University
Norbert Pachler
Institute of Education, London
Claire Bradley
London Metropolitan University
http://www.londonmobilelearning.net/
Structure
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Introduction
Why?
Our definition of appropriation
Notions of appropriation
Stages of appropriation
Typology of appropriation
Example of appropriation and implications for
education
• Conclusion
• Questions
Introduction
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Definitional base for appropriation.
Typology.
Stages of development.
Conceptual frame for understanding
literacy practices of learners outside
and inside educational settings.
• We provide an update on the paper in
proceedings
Health warnings!
NOT taking
about
misappropriation
YES texting can
damage your health!!
As always there is
more to it than that.
NOT about criminal
appropriation, as in
‘your nicked’!
• Notion of ‘life worlds’ of users (Edmund Husserl
and Martin Heidegger) rooted in
phenomenology.
• Focus is on making technology your own for and
through
– identity formation
– social interaction
– meaning-making
– entertainment
• Focus on personal uses and identity.
• Recent research (JISC, 2007; Conole et al,
2008) suggests that students place greater
value on technologies they have discovered
themselves
“In a time of drastic change it is the learners
who inherit the future. The learned usually
find themselves equipped to live in a world
that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human
Condition, 1973.
• I would also add that I am not hostile to
the academy and the learned, and happily
count myself a member of it. I would
certainly not want to bite the hand that
feeds me!
• As Hoffer puts it: "People who bite the
hand that feeds them usually lick the boot
that kicks them."
Why?
• Definition, typology and stages could be used to
plan the means for bringing the life worlds of
learners who are at a distance to school and
society closer to educational systems.
• Form a useful checklist when designing for and
analysing emerging practices.
• Importance of developing an ontology, i.e. “a
community-mediated and accepted description
of the kinds of entities … in a domain”
• As part of our emerging ontology the typology
can also provide a useful basis for community
debate about the types we identify.
• We consider personal ownership as key: an
exploration of these issues seems desirable
given that 3.3 billion people, more than half the
world’s population, now subscribe to a mobilephone service (The Economist, 2008, p.3).
• Significant implications of fact that learners own
the mobile devices
– Motivational and affective factors
– Identity building
– Learning process
• Also, we foreground the importance of learner
agency, their action on tools and through it on
socio-cultural practices
Structures: media
convergence,
applications, media
literacy
Agency:
appropriation as
internalisation and
externalisation in
relation to media
use and learning
habitus
Cultural
practices: linking
informal and
formal learning
Figure 1: Key components of a cultural ecological approach to mobile learning
Simplified definition of
appropriation
• the processes attendant to the development of personal
practices with mobile devices; we consider these
processes in the main to be:
– interaction,
– assimilation and accommodation as well as
– change
• making technological devices one’s own and harnessing
their functionalities, make them fit for their personal,
interpersonal and social requirements (rather than
necessarily use them in line with the designed-in
functionalities or anticipated uses or accessorising them)
We draw on:
• Dourish (2004)
– context of appropriation is emergent and not
predetermined by events
– centrality is placed on practice
– learner’s engagement with particular settings
– context becomes ‘embodied interaction’
• Piaget (1955) learning and perception
– Constant effort to adapt to the environment in
terms of assimilation and accommodation
– Assimilation means that a learner takes
something unknown into her existing cognitive
structures
– Accommodation refers to the changing of
cognitive structure to make sense of the
environment
Notions of appropriation
• Socio-cultural and technological perspectives of
appropriation.
• Key questions for us are:
– What are the key characteristics of appropriation?
– To what extent is the effective use of technology
premised on the ability of the individual and/or their
life world as well as their worlds of work/school to
envision possible uses?
– Within what socio-cultural traditions, values and
codes of behaviour is appropriation situated and how
is it constrained and/or enabled?
– Through what stages, if any, does appropriation
develop?
– And, what are the implications for learning with mobile
devices?
• Cultural tradition plays a considerable part
in conceptions of technology and how they
are being used (Stald, 2008).
• Bachmair (2007), for example, powerfully
demonstrates media preferences
according to social milieu.
• Agency is central (see e.g. Bachmair,
Pachler and Cook, forthcoming).
• Bakardjieva (2005) and Dourish (2004) both
point out that people often find ways of using
technology that are unexpected or
unanticipated.
• Jones and Issroff (2007) have reviewed recent
work on technology appropriation, which they
define in terms of user agency as follows: “the
process by which technology or particular
technological artefacts are adopted and shaped
in use”.
• Different approaches to mobile phone
appropriation are discussed by Carroll et al.
(2002) and Waycott (2004, 2005).
• Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) provide another
interesting examination of the appropriation of
mobile technology.
• Stald (2008) series of empirical studies of 15-24
year-old Danes and their mobile phone use
illuminates the personal and interpersonal levels
of the socio-cultural arena.
Stages of appropriation
•
•
Carroll et al.’s (2002) appropriation
model: attractors; criteria e.g. lifestyle
organiser, add value?; reinforcement,
power and identity.
Our proposal is to conceive of three
stages
1. exploration
2. adaptation, accommodation and assimilation
3. change
Typology of appropriation
• Emerging ontology.
• Provide useful basis for community debate.
• Typology systematic classification of mobile
learning appropriation ‘types’ that have
characteristics in common.
• Three types:
– socio-cultural
– interpersonal
– personal
Example of appropriation and
implications for education
• The case of Cyrill
– (Bachmair, Pachler and Cook, forthcoming)
– describes a young man who is at distance to
society and school
• But someone who has developed
expertise within media convergence
– he uses mobile phones to capture content
and is engaged in advanced media literacy
practices
• On the interpersonal level, with notions of
learner-generated contexts, Cyrill is clearly very
active in this and other aspects of our typology.
• A key part of appropriation is that learners are
evolving practices and meanings through their
interaction.
• In Cyrill’s case, the evolving practice was
engendered through personal, interpersonal and
socio-cultural interaction.
• For example, he is heavily active on
various discussion lists using different
identities
– On one list he engages with fellow
‘underdogs’ via the internet
– elsewhere he is featured on a men’s fashion
website as someone who is ‘cool’
• Cyril is also being pursued by the police
because of the nature of some of the material he
has uploaded onto YouTube (i.e. on the sociocultural level he as transgressed social norms in
terms of acceptable behaviour).
• Because of the situated character of
appropriation of the mobile and informal learning
as meaning-making, one could recommend in
school the creation of learning situations, which
integrate mobile practices and expertise of the
students.
• Perhaps it would be possible to
reconceptualise Cyrill within the school
context as
– a software expert or blog expert for peers?
– Writing about fringe life style will probably
attract him
– As his Maths teacher, for example, one could
think about the possibility of tasking Cyrill with
creating a ‘mobile site’ for the class or the
school
Conclusion
• The learner in two examples examined in
this paper (Stald, 2008; the case of Cyrill)
are actively engaged in forming their
identity.
• The mobile phone is a cultural resource in
that it comes with culturally formed ways
of usage, the way in which the learner has
in the past internalised this usage is also
achieved in response to cultural factors.
• By examining a learner’s appropriation in terms
of our definition, typology and their traversal of
the stages we have enumerated, it should be
possible to include in formal learning activities
and elements of the media literacy skills that
learners gain informally outside the school or
educational organisation.
• Our brief exploration of the Cyrill case was
illustrative of this potential.
• And, it is this particular aspect of our work on
appropriation that we consider to be an
important aspect of future research: in what
ways are users/learners making technology their
own in formal (as well informal) learning
situations?
• Also, how do the stages of appropriation we
delineated play out in this context and, how can
they be supported and underpinned
pedagogically in order to support emerging
learning processes that may be distributed
across several contexts?
Thank you
Questions?