Research – Olli Vesterinen

Twitter and Professional Learning

Professionals spend more and more time on Twitter and other social network sites. They also see that those connect with their productivity. The idea is to investigate the possible effects of social media use (like in Twitter) on professional learning and practice among teachers with online professional networks.

I have been building a research plan on teachers’ professional learning in social networks (such as Kaikkialla.fi by the OmniSchool Project). The OmniSchool Project that develops learning environments with schools has been fortunate to participate in existing networks and support emerging networks. The research plan will focus on a very crucial question in terms of the “connected teacher”: what are the effects of Twitter networking on teaching practice and teacher thinking?

Figure. Filtering research participants for interviews.

Professionals spend more and more time on Twitter and other social network sites. They also see that this connects with their productivity (Microsoft survey 2013). Twitter allows instant idea and information sharing by users to their followers. A tweet is an expression of a moment or idea packed into 140 characters. It can contain text, photos, and videos, usually through a web link. Millions of tweets are shared every day.

The idea is to investigate the possible effects of social media use (like in Twitter) on professional learning and practice. The professional networks will be analyzed through social network analysis. Among other interesting things, this will reveal the teachers who just hold an account on Twitter, or use it for other personal purposes and those teachers who are actually networking professionally (see Figure above).

The plan is to first analyze teachers’ professional connections and networks and process those into a graph. Social network analysis allows contacts and interactions to be analysed easily and fast. The special interest is in the types of online connections and networks that exist between teachers and out-of-school actors. The second part of the research plan focuses on the teachers’ practical reasoning and its relations to professional social networking (in Twitter). The possible effects on practice are analyzed on a micro level at schools. The data will be collected with the stimulated recall interview method (STR), i.e. interviews that make use of the video recordings of teacher’s lessons. The data analysis combines practical argument analysis and data-based content analysis of the interviews.

The research proposal includes a comparative element between Finland and New Zealand. A foreign research context equivalent to the OmniSchool initiative is The Mind Lab by Unitec in New Zealand. The Mind Lab is an important investment to improve teachers’ professional skills and practical knowledge related to learning in the digital age. Their model of in-service training is very different to what is traditionally used in Finland as well as the model that has been developed in the OmniSchool Project (Learning Festival, in Finnish Oppimisfestivaali). Although the research remains descriptive in nature, it will be very interesting to see whether the teachers who are professionally active online also reflect on how student learning should be organized in the digital age.

Defending PhD

I will defend my PhD at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences on April 29, 2011. What will I defend then? I think there are some important thoughts that are already presented by other (media) educationalists, too. Here are my ideas about these issues.

First, the concept of media education should not be confined any longer to ‘learning about media’ only. A wider understanding is needed and other media contextual aspects must be taken into account, too. This relates to the problem of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) in school. This area should not be left to technological examination only. The focus should be in better study processes and people’s non-institutional media use, too.

Second, media literacy is not just measurable knowledge and skills that can be acquired in institutional settings of education. With the current social media scene, media literacy is most of all about attitude, sometimes critical, towards learning and experiencing the world with and through media. Media literacy should be seen as a process of active involvement with a volition to produce, construct, share and categorize knowledge, opinions and experiences.

Third, media educational situations in school are manifold. A student is using his cell phone during the lesson and what is teacher saying to that? What if the student was using it for his learning task? It is important to gain a wider insight into the levels and aspects that are involved in suddenly emerging but typical situations that involve media educational aspects. It is crucial to understand the complexity of the circumstances as well as teachers’ thinking and reasoning involved media educational situations. This is, what I would call, Episodic Media Education. It can be seen in every situation where media content or tools are present.

The place for the public examination is Psykologia Sali 1, Siltavuorenpenger 1A. PhD summary will be published in ethesis.helsinki.fi. The PhD articles are:

Vesterinen, O., Vahtivuori-Hänninen, S., Oksanen, U., Uusitalo, A., & Kynäslahti, H. (2006). Mediakasvatus median ja kasvatuksen alueena: Deskriptiivisen mediakasvatuksen ja didaktiikan näkökulmia. Kasvatus, 37(2), 148–161.

Kynäslahti, H., Vesterinen, O., Lipponen, L., Vahtivuori-Hänninen, S., & Tella, S. (2008). Towards Volitional Media Literacy through Web 2.0. Educational Technology, 48(5), 3–9.

Vesterinen, O., Toom, A., & Patrikainen, S. (2010). The stimulated recall method and ICTs in research on the reasoning of teachers. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 33(2), 183–197.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2010.484605

Vesterinen, O, Kynäslahti, H., & Tella, S. (2010). Media educational situations and two primary school teachers’ practical reasoning. International Journal of Learning and Media, 2(2–3), 123–139.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00047

Stimulated recall method and ICTs

Data gathering methods such as interview and video observation are employed a lot in research on teaching. Stimulated recall interview method (which is widely used at the University of Helsinki Department of Teacher Education, e.g. Toom 2006) combines video and interview so that when interviewing a teacher, a video of her/his lesson is displayed for closer focus on teacher’s actions during the teaching. However, there is a risk of concentrating too much on teacher and forgetting the most important aspect of all classroom activities – the student learning. Therefore, in addition to video-stimuli, another valuable cue for interview situation can be screenshots from the student desktops.

In a computer lab environment (as partly in my PhD project), some practical advices for data gathering with stimulated recall method were spotted:

The video recording of the lesson gives a good overview of the classroom situations but does not necessarily highlight the students’ learning processes.
Where students are using ICTs, there is special screenshot software (e.g. InstantShot! for Mac) for capturing all the events on the computer screens. However, integrating that data into the interview situation might need quite a lot of data processing on the computer before the data are in a sensible format for stimulated recall purposes.
When the software that students are using, has a playback or recorder function as in CmapTools software, the process is very easy to recall by opening the file saved by the student and playing the recorded steps of the process. With the recorder function, both interviewer and interviewee can ‘play’, ‘pause’, or navigate to particular steps in the recording using the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons.
During the interview, the actual interplay between video and concept map recordings takes place as ‘diving’ into a student’s learning process. The concept map recordings are used to get closer to the student’s learning process when the student is on the video or the interviewed teacher is recalling something from the lesson related to that student.

>> An example of (fast forwarded) CmapTools playback of student’s concept map process.

Vesterinen, O., Toom, A. & Patrikainen, S. (2010). The stimulated recall method and ICTs in research on the reasoning of teachers. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 33(2), pp. 183–197.

http://bit.ly/c1RFJ7

JURE conference in Amsterdam

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.

Biking in Amsterdam

(photo from the previous trip to Amsterdam)

An update on my PhD research

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:

Analysing a movie and creating digital stories
Reading newspapers and writing an own issue
Analysing and constructing conceptions and knowledge with collaborative concept mapping software (CmapTools)

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.

>> see figure

We’ll see if I’ll find those.

Where does media education go wrong

(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.

MedSt@r – Media Education Research Using Stimulated Recall Method

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).

Media Education X Y Z

Media education can be seen moving in three different dimensions. This entry is trying to give a quick introduction to this thinking.

First dimension (X axis) relates to discussion about media seen either as something to analyse or something to use. In the other end of the dimension we can find the analysing of media presentations and in the other end the use of media i.e. information and communication technologies (ICTs). Suoranta and Ylä-Kotola (2000) has divided media education into two different orientations. First one is object theoretical orientation and another one is instrumental-practical orientation. The former is related to the analysis of the media presentations and the latter to the use of ICT.

Second dimension (Y axis) is about differencies between modern and postmodern education (Bagnall 1994; Poikela 1999; Tella 2003). In one end of this dimension is competency-based education where education is seen as an ideology. In the other end we will find continuing education which would be the opposite to the competency-based education.

Third dimension (Z axis) makes the figure three-dimensional. This holds the very common ideas of media education as a protectionism or as an emancipation of an individual. The first end of this dimension is influenced by the conservative political views, whereas the other end would be influenced by the liberal political views.

This presentation is part of the theorising of the hard core media education. The earlier visual argumentations have had the same idea of dualism. All of these are in fact trying to reach the theory of media education needed for my own reseach. I simply believe that somewhere between the “media” and the “education” we are able to find this theory

References

Bagnall, R. 1994. Pluralising continuing education and training in a postmodern world: Whither competence? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Vocational Education Research 2 (2), 18-39.

Poikela, E. 1999. Kontekstuaalinen oppiminen: oppimisen organisoituminen ja vaikuttava koulutus. Tampereen yliopisto, Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 675. Tampere. [http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/951-44-5954-7.pdf]

Suoranta, J. & Ylä-Kotola, M. 2000. Mediakasvatus simulaatiokulttuurissa. Porvoo: WSOY.

Tella, S. 2003. M-learning-Cybertextual Traveling or a Herald of Post-Modern Education? in Mobile Learning, H. Kynäslahti, & P. Seppälä, (Eds.), Helsinki: IT Press, 7–21.