Classroom visit

Today was definitely one of the most interesting and motivating days I’ve had in a long while working on my research project. I sat in on the Strategic Political Communication class and took a bunch of field notes, so I felt like a real researcher on the job. But more than anything I had a real sense of what my interviews were going to be like by seeing the students first hand. They are an interesting bunch from a lot of different places. Very talkative and informed about media and communications, so I think the simulation would work well with them.

One of the most interesting things that came up was actually that the students recognised that there was a technical problem with the system allowing them to see things ahead of time. This potentially breaks down the authentic feeling of the simulation — or does it? I was really interested to see that they knew it was a problem but were not necessarily going in and checking out stuff that they shouldn’t. Virtually the whole class knew there was a problem. The other main thing this brings up is the importance of things such as chronological order to a simulation of this kind, and the potential therefore of the system to add a great deal of confusion when it malfunctions. I think this is a theme I need to write something about in my discussion and the whole story about just what happened when this did crop up should make wonderful reading. The students basically lead the discussion, showing the lecturer exactly what the technical problem was and how to subvert the system. Excellent stuff.

The other thing I was paying a lot of attention to in the class was the ways in which the roles were reinforced by the way that people addressed each other face to face. At a number of stages the students were referred to as Journalists or Advisors. There wasn’t any real first person “role-playing” going on at all, though. No side-jokes with students pretending to hate/like each other or anything of that nature. It was all very much as though they viewed the exercise as something to ponder and reflect on rather than “live”. I want to know whether that illusion of living in the shoes of an Advisor or Journalist is any more real in the online exercises.

How to win a contest

Here’s a lesson plan I developed for troupe.

Learning Objectives:

1. Enhance competition and performance skills.

2. Improve dancing to fast music.

3. Develop use of phrases.

Activities

Round 1
Two or three couples are partnered up randomly and must dance for 2 phrases each to a medium tempo song.

3 of the dancers act as judges while the others dance the song. Judges use criteria provided under 5 headings: Musicality, Balance, Innovation, Connection, and Entertainment. Each judge must rank each couple.(5 mins)

The 3 judges then swap in and repeat the exercise with 3 new judges. (5 mins)

Feedback
A simulated judge’s conference: each judge must justify his/her choice for the top couple based on the criteria. The Facilitator moderates the discussion. (5 mins)

All Skate
Partners rotate. Each dancer attempts to put into practice at least 2 tips they got from the Feedback session. Medium tempo song. (5 mins)

Round 2
Two or three couples are partnered up randomly and must dance for 2 phrases each to a fast tempo song.

3 of the dancers act as judges while the others dance the song. Judges use criteria provided under 5 headings: Musicality, Balance, Innovation, Connection, and Entertainment. Each judge must rank each couple.(5 mins)

The 3 judges then swap in and repeat the exercise with 3 new judges. (5 mins)

Feedback
A simulated judge’s conference: each judge must justify his/her choice for the top couple based on the criteria. The Facilitator moderates the discussion. (5 mins)

All Skate
Partners rotate. Each dancer attempts to put into practice at least 2 tips they got from the Feedback session. Medium tempo song. (5 mins)

Active Learning

Here’s an interesting theory on how to introduce a new element to higher education. Why not have an impromptu Lecture Musical? Oh, and no need to let the lecturer know in advance.

Improvisation and Choreography

Today I finally wrote down in words an idea on Improvisation and Choreography that I have had in mind for a workshop plan. The act of writing it down made me revise my ideas, which is always good, and I looked around a bit (i.e. Googled) for some resources that have to do with learning objectives in the area. I found a few things that were useful and seemed to validate the idea I had in mind. The plan I came up with is below.

Improvisation and Choreography

Learning Objectives:

1. Increase understanding of choreographic principles, processes, and structures.

2. Improve improvisation skills in partnered dancing.

3. Develop cooperative skills in improvisation and choreography.

Activities

Impro Challenge # 1: Use three basic movements — twisting, stretching, and bending Dancers improvise movements with these ideas on their own (to music). (3 mins)

Partner work. Partners stay in couples for this activitiy without rotating. Dancers take it in turns to incorporate twisting, stretching and bending movements into their dancing. Follows improvise for about 1 minute while leaders dance basics and observe. Leaders improvise while followers observe for about 1 minute. Then try to incorporate these movements (together) into regular social dancing for 2 minutes. Try to remember 3 of the movements your partner did during the improv. (5 mins)

Revision. Partners change. Each person should demonstrate their 3 favourite movements that your previous partner did during the improv (they don’t have to be 1 twist, 1 stretch and 1 bend). (5 mins)

For the next song, the new partners should incorporate the learnt movements into their dancing. (3 mins)

Impro Challenge # 2: use 3 dynamics — high vs low, use space vs be stingy with space, move with vs against music.

Using these ideas, and working in partners, take 5 mins to improvise. Start with trying out all 3 ideas. Choose your favourite and select any 3 movements you like that come out of the improv. (5 mins)

Choreography: Spend the next song coming up with a sequence of 3 or 4 steps that you will teach the rest of the group. (3 mins)

Review: Each couple spends 3 mins teaching the group their sequence of 3 or 4 steps (12 mins)

Incorporate: Partners change and incorporate their favourite sequences into their dancing (3 mins)

Authentic Learning Activities

‘Authentic Learning Activities’ is the first major topic (of 5 or 6) that I intend to cover in my Literature Review. Over the past couple of weeks I have been tracing this theory, and even though the concepts are very familiar to me it’s been useful and intersting. Collins, Brown and Duiguid (1989) is the article that everyone seems to reference — an article on Situated Cognition. I found a really interesting article by Carl Bereiter called ‘Situated Cogniton and How to Overcome It’ — a title I couldn’t easily go past. It talks about the history of the concept of situated cognition, referring to Vygotsky of course but also to a lot of rat-experiment type psychology that I hadn’t really thought about. The main point: that the situation being referred to is really environmental (with rats) rather than social. Rats learn well in their little mazes but if you take them out of them they are lost. So it’s abstract knowledge that is not easily obtained through situated cognition. It got me thinking that this would be a good criticism of the arguments for situated cognition in tertiary education — after all, if you consider it to be a panacea you are likely to be very disappointed. Adult learning is all about constructing abstract knowledge, and being reflective. So these things have to go further than maze-training.

Narrowing the focus

My aim this week has been to start to narrow the focus of my work. After speaking with Martin at our first meeting, I wanted to pick one of the themes and really take a good look at it with a view to framing my research question as clearly as I can. At the same time two things happened. Firstly the talk by Horvat mentioned in my last entry, and secondly Sam Carroll put me onto this article by Papacharissi building on Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in EveryDay Life to look at the web. I found it interesting not so much because of the (fairly dry) discussion but because of the way her questions were framed:
RQ1: What are Web page characteristics through which virtual actors pursue self presentation online?
RQ2: How are the characteristics of personal home pages related?
Now, her methodology was quantitative and (in my opinion) a little limited because of it, but it did get me thinking about the notion of self as being central to what I’m really interested in. So I started re-reading some of Goffman on presentation, and thinking about the destinction between the classical (Cartesian) notion of the stable self and more recent ideas about fractured/constructed selves (e.g. Dennett), Goffman’s ideas about self-presentation, and Althusser’s stuff about interpellation. I finally tracked down the one copy of Althusser’s Lenin And Philosophy in the ECOM library and read his famous ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ article. Interesting — it reminded me of a lot of political science stuff I read as an undergrad.

Althusser is on about individuals (selves) being always-already subjects. He says “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concreate subjects”. So for example when a police officer says ‘Hey, you there!’ and someone turns around, the fact that they know that it is really them who is being referred to means that they are a subject, and that they know it. The other example he gives is Christian ideology, which addresses individuals in order to transform them into subjects.

Castells is similarly coming from a political science perspective. I remember reading his stuff when I was doing International Relations. He has a bit to say about ‘self in the informational society’, saying that the net is actually completely at odds with the ‘self’, and even quoting Alaine Touraine “in post-industrial society, in which cultural services have replaced material goods at the core of production, it is the defense of the subject, in its personality and in its culture, against the logic of apparatuses and markets, that replaces the idea of class struggle”. This stuff is definitely up my alley with my politics background and pretty interesting in the light of my topic.

I decided that there would probably be enough just in the notion of the self to investigate with respect to DRALE too. How do these budding lawyers establish their identity as lawyers? What characteristics of the system interpellate them as lawyers? How do they employ this system, and how and to what extent are they defined by it? I can think of a lot of examples within the design of DRALE to look at — for example the agency provided by the letterheads for each of the teams. The authentication of students by typing in their name and password. The counter-signature process. The system as an actor/actors, the roles of the staff involved, and so on.

Small steps

Today I decided to give the University’s Link Generator a try. I decided that if I am going to try to collect together useful articles, along with bibliographic information, I need to settle on a method of organising things pretty early. The Link Generator does a good job of storing links to articles in one place, and if it works, it makes more sense for me to collect article links there than try to duplicate them here. On the other hand, I sort of like the idea of having my own links here (for searchability and integration with other stuff) so it’s an open question right now.

I started with a search on ProQuest — no particular reason other than I had heard of it before. I used the terms role and playing and online to see what it would turn up. Around 217 hits. I went through and marked anything that looked like it related to higher education or something more general that was of interest, and got it down to 27 articles. Unfortunately on closer inspection almost all of these have very little to do with computer-based or online role-plays at all, so I will either need to improve my searching skills if I’m not going to waste a fair bit of time.

I decided I should look closely at a few higher education journals and search them for online role-play stuff too. All of this is just to get a background picture of what’s going on with online role-plays rather than looking at the more central theoretical issues, but I feel as though it’s time I went back and did some basic literature stuff like this, if only just to get back into the habit of reading. It’s also giving me a chance to test out things like the Link Generator and this blog, so I think it’s worth it.