Digital kids, analogue students : a mixed methods study of students' engagement with a school-based Web 2.0 learning innovation

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys’ school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.

Is the world their oyster? The global imagination of pre-service teachers

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study with eleven pre-service primary teachers in Queensland about their career plans exploring whether and how a global imagination motivates this next generation of teachers. The study is framed within sociological theory of globalisation, with regard to the growing possibilities for international mobility for work purposes, and the new life circumstances which make this imaginable. Teaching as a profession has changed and teachers are no longer as entangled with specific systems or geographical locations anymore. International recruitment campaigns are shown to pursue these pre-service teachers during their university preparation. The analysis of the interview data reveals the kind of impact these possibilities make on how pre-service teachers imagine their career, and what other considerations enhance or limit their global imagination. The findings are used to reflect on the highly localised governance of pre-service teacher preparation and the limited state-bound imaginaries to which these pre-service teachers are unnecessarily confined in their preparation.

Developing teamwork assessment : satisfying solutions for the real world

While the need for teamwork skills consistently appears in job advertisements across all sectors, the development of these skills for many university students (and some academic staff) remains one of the most painful and often complained about experiences. This presentation introduces the final phase of a project that has investigated and analysed the design of teamwork assessment across all discipline areas in order to provide a university-wide protocol for this important graduate capability. The protocol concentrates best practice guidelines and resources across a range of approaches to team assessment and includes an online diagnostic tool for evaluating the quality of assessment design. Guide-lines are provided for all aspects of the design process such as the development of real-world relevance; choosing the ideal team structure; planning for intervention and conflict resolution; and selecting appropriate marking options. While still allowing academic staff to exercise creativity in assessment design; the guidelines increase the possibility of students’ experiencing a consistent and explicit approach to teamwork throughout their course. If implementation of the protocol is successful, the project team predicts that the resulting consistency and explicitness in approaches to teamwork will lead to more coherent skill development across units, more realistic expectations for students and staff and better communication between all those participating in the process.

Creating and sustaining a basis for life-long learning in tertiary dancer training

This paper acknowledges the influences that a generation Y population brings to dance training methodologies and examines this impact in a tertiary context. Over the last 4 years, Queensland University of Technology has been modifying their curriculum for new students transitioning from the private dance studio into the prevocational university environment. An intensive training program was designed to empower the student creating effective entry points for common understandings in the learning and teaching of dance techniques with improved and accelerated learning outcomes. This paper shares these philosophies and practices in training for life-long learning that prepare the young dancer for longevity in the industry.

SCAPE sustainable urban design simulation

SCAPE is an interactive simulation that allows teachers and students to experiment with sustainable urban design. The project is based on the Kelvin Grove Urban Village, Brisbane. Groups of students role play as political, retail, elderly, student, council and builder characters to negotiate on game decisions around land use, density, housing types and transport in order to design a sustainable urban community. As they do so, the 3D simulation reacts in real time to illustrate what the village would look like as well as provide statistical information about the community they are creating. SCAPE brings together education, urban professional and technology expertise, helping it achieve educational outcomes, reflect real-world scenarios and include sophisticated logic and decision making processes and effects.---------- The research methodology was primarily practice led underpinned by action research methods resulting in innovative approaches and techniques in adapting digital games and simulation technologies to create dynamic and engaging experiences in pedagogical contexts. It also illustrates the possibilities for urban designers to engage a variety of communities in the processes, complexities and possibilities of urban development and sustainability.

Enhancing learning in dance technique through on-line-mediated reflective practice

‘Practice makes perfect’ expresses the common misconception that repetitive practice without appropriate feed-back will deliver improvement in tasks being practised. This paper explores the implementation of a student-driven feed-back mechanism and shows how functional and aesthetic understanding can be progressively enhanced through reflective practice. More efficient practice of clearly understood tasks will enhance dance training outcomes. We were looking for ways to improve teaching efficiency, effectiveness of the students’ practice in the studio and application of safe dance practices. We devised a web-based on-line format, ‘Performing Reflective Practice’, designed to augment and refine studio practice. Only perfect practice makes perfect!

The economics of the FIFA Football World Cup

The expansion of economics to ‘non-market topics’ has received increased attention in recent years. The economics of sports (football) is such a sub-field. This paper reports empirical evidence of team and referee performances in the FIFA World Cup 2002. The results reveal that being a hosting nation has a significant impact on the probability of winning a game. Furthermore, the strength of a team measured with the FIFA World Ranking does not play the important role presumed, which indicates that the element of uncertainty is working. The findings also indicate that the influence of a referee on the game result should not be neglected. Finally, the previous World Cup experiences seem to have the strongest impact on referees' performances during the game.

How can we exploit mobile data to customise learning based on a student’s environmental surroundings?

User-Based intelligent systems are already commonplace in a student’s online digital life. Each time they browse, search, buy, join, comment, play, travel, upload, download, a system collects, analyses and processes data in an effort to customise content and further improve services. This panel session will explore how intelligent systems, particularly those that gather data from mobile devices, can offer new possibilities to assist in the delivery of customised, personal and engaging learning experiences. The value of intelligent systems for education lies in their ability to formulate authentic and complex learner profiles that bring together and systematically integrate a student’s personal world with a formal curriculum framework. As we well know, a mobile device can collect data relating to a student’s interests (gathered from search history, applications and communications), location, surroundings and proximity to others (GPS, Bluetooth). However, what has been less explored is the opportunity for a mobile device to map the movements and activities of a student from moment to moment and over time. This longitudinal data provides a holistic profile of a student, their state and surroundings. Analysing this data may allow us to identify patterns that reveal a student’s learning processes; when and where they work best and for how long. Through revealing a student’s state and surroundings outside of schools hour, this longitudinal data may also highlight opportunities to transform a student’s everyday world into an inventory for learning, punctuating their surroundings with learning recommendations. This would in turn lead to new ways to acknowledge and validate and foster informal learning, making it legitimate within a formal curriculum.

Psychosocial predictors of the use of enhanced podcasting in student learning

The current study examined the influence of psychosocial constructs, from a theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective, to predict university students’ (N = 159) use of a newly offered on-line learning tool, enhanced podcasts. Pre-semester, students completed questionnaires assessing the TPB predictors (attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control) related to intended enhanced podcast use until the middle of semester. Mid-semester, students completed similar items relating to podcast use until the end of semester. Self-report measures of podcast use were obtained at the middle and end of semester. At both time points, students’ attitudes predicted their intentions and, at the initial time point, subjective norm also predicted intended podcast use. An examination of the beliefs underlying attitudes, the only construct to predict intentions at both time points, revealed differences between those students higher, rather than lower on intentions to use the podcasts, especially for the perceived educational benefits of podcast use later in the semester. Intentions to use enhanced podcasting only predicted self-reported use in the second half of the semester. Overall, this study identified some of the determinants which should be considered by those aiming to encourage student use of novel on-line educational tools.