Hi everyone My name is Dan Richardson –I’m currently
finishing my PhD at Open Lab, Newcastle University. My work is around how mobile learning technologies
can better capitalise on the learning resources that can be found in local communities, and
today I’m going to walk through some of the work we did in 2019.
This series of studies directly follows on from our previous publication, which reports
on the design, development and evaluation of a mobile learning platform originally called
‘ParkLearn’, now titled ‘OurPlace’.
OurPlace is a mobile learning platform, consisting of Android, iOS and web applications. It allows
all users to create their own bespoke, interactive mobile learning activities for themselves
or others. You can also complete activities that others have chosen to share.
These activities are made up of smaller tasks, focussed around a single interaction. One
improvement over the previous version is that activity authors can also add follow-up tasks
to appear once a given task has been completed.
Given the fairly wide range of task types available, this means you can very easily
create fairly complex interactions.
For example, the location hunt task type asks the user to find a given GPS coordinate by
using their current distance from it, and beeps faster as they get closer. This means
that an activity creator can ask the user to go to a specific location, and using follow-up
tasks ask them to then listen to an audio clip about the place they’re currently standing.
The learner might then also be asked to take photos or videos in the location, or reflect
on the audio by recording their own clip.
In the previous set of studies we had great success with teachers and community members
creating their own activities, and found that the application supported teachers in running
engagements across multiple learning contexts, the creative aspects of the app supported
greater engagement from students, and we found that mobile learning technologies could be
effective gateways towards encouraging active engagement with civic spaces and communities.
These were all elements we wanted to explore further, and we thought that having students
be the activity creators would be an interesting way to do this. However, our previous school
engagements were a bit sporadic, so we wanted a more structured delivery method which could
be reliably implemented in schools.
A pedagogy which seemed particularly well suited to this was project based
learning, or “PBL”.
PBL presents learners with a given ‘problem’ or task, requiring them to investigate and
work on a given subject over a longer period of time. These projects will usually result
in the creation of an artefact in response to the problem, such as videos, reports or
artworks. Previous research has argued that PBL can offer greater levels of student autonomy,
and that it can build bridges between classroom activities and real-life experiences.
In this case, we wanted students to investigate an element of local heritage, and, using their
findings, create their own mobile learning content for others to use. There’s been
a lot of work around the use of technology-enhanced learning within PBL (including research and
data collection, knowledge sharing and artefact creation), and many of these could be done
with mobile learning technologies. However, there’s little field-tested, generalisable
guidance on how mobile learning technologies could be used in this way within real-world
PBL contexts.
In response, we decided to develop a generalisable framework for using mobile learning technologies
to create a public entity during PBL. This project-based mobile learning framework (PBML)
asks students to create a mobile-learning artefact as a final public entity, following
a series of PBL engagements in response to their teacher’s chosen topic.
This first version of the PBML framework was created with the essential elements of PBL
in mind, those being: a challenging problem or question; sustained inquiry; an element
of authenticity; a degree of student control; reflection; critique and revision; and a final
public product.
This framework would be evaluated and refined over the course of several studies, using
a design-based research approach.
The framework’s real-world performance was assessed within school contexts by holding
studies across three different schools and a summer school of Travelling Showmen.
Our first study was with a secondary school in a fairly affluent area. A year 8 class’s
history teacher (Teacher 1) was assigned to work with us by the school’s upper management.
Due to pressures around formal assessments, we only got two hour-long classroom sessions
with the students.
Teacher 1 decided that having the students create a digital history trail of the school’s
village using OurPlace would be a good short project.
Teacher 1 already had given the students a significant number of resources about the
local village prior to us joining, and so believed the class would be well prepared
in terms of trail content, saying:
“The students should already have ideas of what they want to do. The issue is what
the software can do and whether it can easily tied in with the plans they have made already”
So in this case, the researching the domain took place before the other stages. As we
had a very limited amount of time with the class, Teacher 1 suggested that the students
create the Activities in pairs during their free time, between sessions.
This meant the first session could be used to “Demonstrate the medium”, and the second
one could be used to go through the students’ work with them—albeit in the classroom,
not the authentic learning context.
The first session was spent demonstrating the medium. We prepared an activity for the
students to go through on the school grounds, which utilised all of the app’s interaction
types and introduced follow-up tasks.
Upon return to the classroom, we also ran the students through the activity creation
process (more information about them is in the paper). By the end of the session, all
of the students said they understood how to make their own activities, and were asked
to produce their trail for the next session, three weeks later.
Unfortunately most of the activities were shallow, only having a few tasks each which
often concentrated more on the interaction with the technology than the actual content.
This surprised teacher 1, who had thought that the resources given to the students would
have supported deeper content, and the lack of time with the app would result in less
confidence in using it.
Teacher 1 believed that giving the process greater degrees of structure and scaffolding
would help the students develop stronger content.
In response, we added a new step in the PBML framework: prototyping. In this stage, students
would create a low-fidelity version of their final public entity, using non-technological
mediums such as pen and paper.
Doing this means students don’t require access to mobile hardware;
it lets students design without having to also having to learn the technology’s authoring
interface; and as teacher 1 wanted, emphasises the learning
focus as being on the content, rather than the technology.
Finally, it allows for the introduction of visual learning and tangible interactions,
and more easily supports collaboration between students.
It’s likely that each type of mobile-learning public entity would require it’s own form
of prototype – for a video app, it could be storyboards. For location-based apps, you
could print out and label maps.
For prototyping OurPlace activities, we design a “jigsaw” method.
Each piece of the jigsaw represented a task, and students could write the tasks’ instructions
onto the pieces directly. A task’s interaction type could be designated
with smaller task type pieces. And tasks could be interconnected in different
directions, allowing for follow-up tasks to be planned out.
We assessed this updated version of the framework in three further studies.
Because we’re tight on time, I’ll quickly cover what happened in each, and then talk
about the overall findings afterwards.
The next study took place in a tiny rural primary school. We worked with the entire
Year 4 year group, which consisted of only 7 children.
Because we had much more time to work with the class than with School 1, Teacher 2 suggested
we make two activities: a practice one, and one which engaged with the village’s history.
As before, we demonstrated the app through the use of a pre-made activity which the children
could complete on the school grounds.
The students initially struggled with the jigsaws due to them being a bit abstract,
but after a few minutes they understood the links between the puzzle pieces and the structure
of the app.
The students decided to create ‘adventures’ for the first set of activities, using the
app to set riddles and challenges for the younger students. After sharing them with
the younger students, the Year 4s hosted a school assembly where they talked about their
activity designs.
For the second set, each student picked a different historical structure in the village
to research and produce an activity about. After researching using the teacher’s materials,
they elected to skip the prototyping stage and go straight to activity authoring. The
Year 4 students helped guide the younger students around the village, helping them complete
the activities.
School 3 was an inner-city primary school. We connected with a teacher whose class had
campaigned for the installation of a nearby commemorative plaque for a slavery abolitionist.
When approached, the teacher was very interested in having their class create OurPlace activities
for the other plaques in the area.
As before, we demonstrated the app through the use of a pre-made activity which the children
could complete on the school grounds.
After the demo, the Year 4 and Year 6 classes combined for the study, and worked in groups
to research their chosen historical local figure. By the second engagement, the groups
had each collected several pages of notes, which they used to create their jigsaw prototypes.
The third session saw the students create their activities in OurPlace, and visiting
the sites to collect photographs and accurate GPS locations.
During the final session, the groups visited the sites and swapped activities with each
other. Some of the created tasks asked students to complete quizzes, listen to audio narrations
and roleplay as historical figures during video interviews.
After our engagements with School 3, Teacher 4 had suggested that it would be interesting
to get different schools or communities to use tools like OurPlace to exchange life experiences.
Teacher 3 suggested that we do a couple of sessions with a summer school she helps run
for Travelling Showmen – a community of Travellers who run seasonal fairs and events
around the UK.
We arranged for Teacher 3’s class to visit the fair, and for the Showchildren to share
their ways of life with the class.
Due to the short-lived nature of the fair, we only had one session to introduce the technology
and have the children create activities. To save time, we decided to try going straight
to the prototyping stage, rather than introduce the medium. While the transition from the
jigsaws into the technology was fairly smooth, the children didn’t fully grasp some of
the more complicated features of the technology, such as follow-up tasks, and some of the Showchildren
were disappointed when they realised they missed out on using them.
We identified three themes from the results of these four studies:
Configuration and Compromise
Harnessing Students’ Desire for Independence
and Leveraging Place through PBML
The first theme, configuration and compromise, recognises that in these studies it was necessary
to adapt the framework in response to each teaching context’s limitations—usually
based in time restrictions.
We argue that teaching contexts are rarely ideal, and so approaches to working within
them should be adaptable and open to compromise--hence why we implemented the framework in various
real-world contexts.
However, it was clear that compromising on different parts of the framework had different
results. For example, we believe that skipping the prototyping stage in School 1 contributed
towards the lack of engagement with the domain and put the students’ main focus on the
technology itself. Similarly, the lack of meaningful demonstration of the medium meant
that some of the Summer School children were left disappointed in their activities. The
studies also highlighted the value of students sharing their creations with their classmates
and the wider community as a way of boosting the perceived value of the final creations
as public entities.
Researchers and practitioners should weigh-up these compromises when configuring the framework
according to what they want the focus of the project to be on---either the utilisation
of the technology, the children’s understanding and application of domain knowledge, them
sharing their creations in authentic contexts, or through a significant time investment,
all three.
The first theme, configuration and compromise, recognises that in these studies it was necessary
to adapt the framework in response to each teaching context’s limitations—usually
based in time restrictions.
We argue that teaching contexts are rarely ideal, and so approaches to working within
them should be adaptable and open to compromise--hence why we implemented the framework in various
real-world contexts.
However, it was clear that compromising on different parts of the framework had different
results. For example, we believe that skipping the prototyping stage in School 1 contributed
towards the lack of engagement with the domain and put the students’ main focus on the
technology itself. Similarly, the lack of meaningful demonstration of the medium meant
that some of the Summer School children were left disappointed in their activities. The
studies also highlighted the value of students sharing their creations with their classmates
and the wider community as a way of boosting the perceived value of the final creations
as public entities.
Researchers and practitioners should weigh-up these compromises when configuring the framework
according to what they want the focus of the project to be on---either the utilisation
of the technology, the children’s understanding and application of domain knowledge, them
sharing their creations in authentic contexts, or through a significant time investment,
all three.
We found that this project-based mobile learning structure also helped harness the students’
desire for independence by giving them large degrees of control and autonomy over their
work.
It also supported them putting in personal touches, as demonstrated by some students’
inclusion of jokes, custom artwork and even recordings of them singing.
When sharing their Activities with their peers, the students were clearly proud of their creations
and enjoyed taking a ‘teaching role’—the School 2 teachers recognised this, and played
up to the students’ desire for perceived maturity. The younger students took this as
something to aspire towards, and the older students took on a mentor-style role.
We suggest that future mobile learning designs can harness student’s desires for independence
as a motivational force by granting them opportunities for autonomy and personal flourishes, as well
as platforms through which to share these personal creations.
The final theme relates to how the PBML process supported the schools in leveraging place
as learning resources.
The teachers noted that the framework offered new opportunities for engaging with local
heritage. This was in part due to the nature of working towards the creation of a public
entity – which gave the students a justification and motivation for researching each subject.
Something covered in further detail in the paper is how the school students’ preconceptions
of the Travelling Showmen, and how they changed following technology-mediated personal interactions
with the community and their lived experiences.
We argue that mobile learning technologies are uniquely well suited to take advantage
of these kind of learning resources, as through this kind of framework, technology can support
not only classroom-based project-based learning, but also situated learning in authentic space
and place.
Unfortunately that’s all I’ve got time for. Thank you for watching!
If you found this interesting, I’d encourage you to check out the open access paper, which
features much more detail.