Research posts in English
JoMiTE poster in EARLI conference.
A great poster session in EARLI conference.
A lot of good and critical feedback too. The attention was a big surprise to me.
The poster titled ‘An Analysis of Teacher Competence Descriptions in Eight European Countries’ can be viewed and downloaded here.
see also jomite.eu
Presentation @ Junior Researchers of EARLI conference (JURE)
First time in Junior Researchers of EARLI conference (JURE). I have a round-table presentation on Monday. The title is ‘Media Education in School Context.’
>> vesterinen_JURE2009_handout
Should be nice and warm in Amsterdam – a lovely city altogether. Expecting a lot from this week.
(photo from the previous trip to Amsterdam)
Last year I was gathering data from a school in eastern part of Helsinki. I visited two parallel classes whenever they had some media related activities. In my research sense, the class projects I followed were in three topics:
I video recorded the lessons and gathered other prompt material (such as recorded processes of concept map creation and finished digital stories) for stimulated recall interviews which took place later that same day. In the interview, teacher and I went through the lesson and media education related topics with the cues from the video and other prompt material.
I’ve been hearing and reading fairly long time about the problem in Finnish (and other countries’) media education: teachers, schools and teacher education. I am interested in learning what teachers and schools suggest is the reasoning around the school-based media education and the absence of all the things that media educationalists cry out for. From my perspective the meaningfulness of our school system doesn’t seem to be in the up-to-date fashionable roles and topics but in the continuity of something which still remains strong in our (citizens’, parents’, school administratives’, etc.) minds, i.e. school institution and its social practices.
As I’m starting to analyse the interview data, I’m trying to find following types of arguments.
We’ll see if I’ll find those.
Kolmas Mediakasvatus.nyt-seminaari järjestettiin tällä kertaa Jyväskylässä. Järjestäjinä Mediakasvatusseura, JAMK, HUMAK ja JY. Pidin tutkimustyöpajassa esityksen Stimulated recall -tutkimusmenetelmän käytöstä opettajan mediakasvatuksellisten ratkaisujen ja perustelujen tutkimuksessa.
Greetings from Odense, Denmark! (photo: Albani brewery’s artistic smokestack)
Several great keynote speakers – some with more to say, some with a bit less to say.
I had two presentations:
>> Stimulated Recall in Media Education Research
>> The Characteristics of Volition in Media Literacy
The latter had some extra kick from the latest issue of Educational Technology where our article was published.
Kynäslahti, H., Vesterinen, O., Lipponen, L., Vahtivuori-Hänninen, S. & Tella, S. (2008). Towards Volitional Media Literacy through Web 2.0. Educational Technology, 48(5), pp. 3–9.
(image from s2art)
We – children, parents, students, teachers, adults, schools, society – would need more and better media education. The problems emerge when it comes to discussing about resources and attitudes. The field of media education is also dispersed and people find it difficult to discuss about same questions.
However, many other fields of education face the same problems. What I find particular to media education – and public debate around it – is mixing the goals, context and level of education. Nobody is actually wrong but somewhere there is confusion about roles where an educator and the one who should be educated are placed.
>> see figure ‘the roles of an educator and the one to be educated‘
The educational interface is a challenging one because we tend to place actors to certain roles, which might not be natural ones. Still, all the roles are somehow present in the media educational interface. One or two just come first. In a public debate the fruitfulness of the discussion decreases if one sees school children as small journalists and another one as children to protect from dubious content in media.
As long as the educational interface is crossed vertically straight, no huge problems occur. As soon as e.g. in a school context an educator is merely seen as an artistic manager, we are facing a problem. The experience gained in our school-based media education research project (i.e. my PhD project) is that the school context is not easily changed to a context which supports all the other roles in the figure above. That explains why e.g. schools’ afternoon club activities have a lot to offer in media education. The curriculum-driven teacher–pupil interaction can be switched to more mentor–learner or even political interaction, which in a classroom usually takes second place to teacher–class interaction.
Tallinn University, Estonian Union for Child Welfare and Finnish Society of Media Education organised ‘Meediaõpetus Eestis 2008’ seminar. My presentation is available here for download.
Two new publications include contributions by me and my colleagues.
Kynäslahti, H., Vesterinen, O. & Tella, S. 2007. Mediakasvatuksen näkökulma informaatiolukutaitoon (Information Literacy from the Perspective of Media Education). In A. Nevgi (Ed.) Informaatiolukutaito yliopisto-opetuksessa. (Information Literacy in Higher Education.) Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 71–80.
>> orders bookplus.fi
The other one is available online.
Vesterinen, O. 2007. Mediakasvatus oppilaitosinstituution yhte(nä)isenä alueena. (Media Education as a Shared/Wholistic Area of School Institution.) In H. Kynäslahti, R. Kupiainen & M. Lehtonen (Eds.) Näkökulmia mediakasvatukseen (Points of View of Media Education). The Finnish Society on Media Education, 73–85.
www.mediaeducation.fi/publications/
Pidimme yhteisesityksen Mediakasvatuksen teemaryhmässä Kasvatustieteen päivillä Vaasassa 22.11.2007.
Esitys on Helsingin yliopiston Mediakasvatuskeskuksen tutkimuksesta, jossa mediakasvatuksen opiskelijoilta kysyttiin web 2.0:aan liittyviä asioita, opiskelijoiden aktiivisuutta web 2.0 -palvelujen käyttäjinä ja web 2.0:n vaikutuksista medialukutaitoon ja sen opettamiseen.
Stimulated Recall Method (Str) has been used to investigate teacher’s pedagogical thinking. Method is used to revive memories after the lesson in order to determine the thoughts which occurred during the lesson. The idea is that an interviewee “may be enabled to relive an original situation with vividness and accuracy if he [or she] is presented with a large number of the cues or stimuli which occurred during the original situation” (Bloom, 1953, p. 161).
These cues can be e.g. books used or a video recording of the lesson. In media education reseach there is a need for summoning up the virtual elements of a class too. E.g. in our MedSt@r Project the class was using CmapTools. After the lesson, we have used CmapTools recorder function with the teacher to follow step by step how each pupil has created his/her cmap (i.e. a concept map file).
The project in whole investigates
a) features of using Stimulated Recall Method in media education research, and
b) on a meta-level – what decisions researcher does and how is s/he reasoning those.
>> to cmaps of my presentation in a post-graduate seminar Oct 29th (in Finnish).