Constraints and benefits of different technology

1 a) Requirement: An understanding of the constraints and benefits of different technology

Reflection / Description

I have used many different types of technology in teaching, but in this section I will focus on those which I think have been most significant from the point of view of exploring new ideas, and validating these through empirical research processes. One of the main aspects of learning technology that I have focused on for the last ten years or so has been mobile learning. When I first began researching in this area, it was a niche research theme, and the devices that could be used for mobile learning were expensive and of limited utility. My interest had begun from a technical perspective. In the early 2000s I was working in London for an IT consultancy and we started developing some mobile applications as a pilot project, using Java Micro Edition. This led to some subsequent work with Vodafone when I moved to New Zealand, delivering some internal training on the potential of mobile applications. Ian Lyall, who was then Sales Academy Leader at Vodafone, and a great supporter of our collaboration, gave me copy of a short report paper by Elizabeth Valentine from the World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, a conference series at which I have subsequently become a regular attender. This report (no longer available, though Valentine (2004) covers similar material) was the link for me between mobile technology and learning. The first research article that inspired me to look at the true potential for learning in this area was 'Wireless Coyote' (Grant, 1993). Although this used archaic equipment, it opened up the possibilities for mobile learning experiences that combined collaborative research, situated cognition and mobile constructive learning activities. Reading the work of other pioneers in this field such as Mike Sharples and John Traxler reinforced the idea there was great potential for using mobile devices in teaching and learning. Subsequent research gave me a much broader and deeper understanding of this field of research which, as the following timeline (which I created in Timetoast) indicates, has been developing over a long period of time.

Since those early realisations about the power of mobile learning, along with a number of colleagues (in particular Professor Hokyoung Ryu, who has been one of my closest research collaborators), I have explored how mobile devices can be used for contextualised activities, including game based learning. In the early days, one of the main challenges for mobile learning projects was sustainability and scalability. Now that mobile devices are in common use, the challenge is more one of affordances. That is, to what extent can we design teaching and learning activities that truly benefit from the affordances of mobility? It is a question that I have had to address somewhat critically in the classes I currently run with postgraduate teachers. Many of the tools we want to use work best on laptops. Tablets and smartphones have particular values for learning but only if we can find ways of really leveraging their affordances in the classroom.

I have not, however, limited my interest in learning technologies to mobile learning alone. Another area that I worked on extensively for a while was the use of virtual worlds for education. I began by exploring public virtual worlds such as Second Life, and having encountered a number of issues, including usability, privacy, age-appropriateness and value for money, I moved on to explore the use of privately hosted virtual worlds using open source tools. These unfortunately bring their own problems such as having to run your own infrastructure and the unpredictability of open source development. After extensive work in this area I concluded that virtual worlds were not yet suitable for regular teaching and learning, but could be valuable for individual specialist activities such as the agile design world that we created in Open Wonderland. Although I am not currently active in this area of research. I remain a member of Sue Gregory's Virtual Worlds Working Group, and recently contributed to the editorial process for a book to be published by that group.

A more recent focus of my research has been the role of digital devices in the classroom, particularly Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) projects in the context of the New Zealand Ultra Fast Broadband rollout and its associated school-focused innovations such as the recently completed School Network Upgrade Project and Network 4 Learning. Through a series of studies involving interviews, observations and surveys, I have come to understand both the benefits and constraints of transforming the classroom with digital and teaching and learning using BYOD policies. Whist I have seen many innovative approaches in the classroom using digital tools, and noticed how teachers effectively tailor their approach depending on the subject area that is being taught, I have also become aware of a number of constraints, including a range of emerging digital divides, changes in interpersonal dynamics both in the classroom and in the family, and technological issues that can impede progress if not anticipated and handled carefully.

Like most other contemporary educators, I have harnessed the power of social media to share ideas and communicate with other teachers and learners. I have been blogging for several years on my Wordpress blog, occasional reflections on information technology and academia, a process that I find very helpful as a kind of eportfolio of things that are in particular focus at various times. I also maintain a Twitter account, dave_parsons, which these days I mostly use to share the activities of students in the classroom. There is also the growing trend for academic and professional social media, which has become an increasingly useful way of sharing research and networking with others. As a result I maintain accounts on Slideshare, Facebook (for the journal that I edit), LinkedIn, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, DBLP Computer Science Bibliography and ORCiD, as well as maintaining my own academic web site

Examples

Evidence of my work in the various aspects of technology discussed above is represented by the selected publications listed here.

In mobile learning, there have been a number of publications examining the use of mobile learning in game-like contextual activities. This is one example, which was used with university students in New Zealand

Parsons. D., Petrova, K. & Ryu, H. (2012). Designing Mobile Games for Engagement and Learning. 2011 ICITA Journal of Information Technology and Applications 41-46.

More recently, I have been engaged in the development of a Maori language learning mobile game for school children, with my Master's student, Tyne Crow.

Crow, T. & Parsons D. (2015). A Mobile Game World for Māori Language Learning. In T. Brown, H. van der Merwe & J. Herman (Eds.), Proceedings of The Mobile Learning Voyage - From Small Ripples to Massive Open Waters - 14th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2015)(pp. 84-98). Springer.

From a more theoretical perspective, I have been looking at how mobile learning really works in terms of higher level thinking. This paper reflects work I did with a Korean colleague and some of his postgraduate students while teaching in Seoul.

Lee, H., Parsons, D., Kwon, G., Kim, J., Petrova, K., Jeong, E. & Ryu, H. (2016). Cooperation Begins: Encouraging Critical Thinking Skills through Cooperative Reciprocity using a Mobile Learning Game. Computers & Education, 97, 97-115. DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2016.03.006

My work on virtual worlds covers two main areas. One was the use of Second Life with a first year undergraduate class:

Parsons, D., Stockdale, R., Bowles, J. & Kamble, V. (2008). If We Build It Will They Come? Creating a Virtual Classroom in Second Life. Proceedings of 19th Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Christchurch, New Zealand, 3-5 December 2008.

Later, I worked extensively with Open Wonderland, an open source virtual world that we hosted on our own server to create a specialist learning environment for agile software design, used with a class of postgraduate students:

Parsons, D. & Stockdale, R. (2014). The Agile Hour in a Virtual World: Teaching Agile Methods with Open Wonderland. In M. Thomas (Ed.), Pedagogical Considerations and Opportunities for Teaching and Learning on the Web (pp. 196-215). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. 

My work looking at BYOD has been published in various studies. The following two papers are probably the most relevant. The first addresses survey-based research over three years and analyses data from teachers. students and parents about the benefits and constraints of a BYOD programme in a New Zealand secondary school.

Parsons, D. & Adhikari, J. (2016). Bring Your Own Device to Secondary School: The Perceptions of Teachers, Students and Parents. Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 14, 67-81.

This earlier paper focuses more on the teacher view and is primarily based on published data from the school about classroom activities in the BYOD environment

Parsons, D. (2013). Jam Today – Embedding BYOD into Classroom Practice. Proceedings of 12th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2013), Doha, Qatar, 21-24 October 2013

I have also looked at BYOD as part of the wider context of mobile learning policy, looking at how international guidelines reflect practice in new Zealand.

Parsons, D. (2014). Pathways to a Better World: Assessing Mobile Learning Policy against UNESCO Guidelines in a New Zealand Case Study. In M. Kalz, Y. Bayyurt & M. Specht (Eds.), Mobile as Mainstream – Towards Future Challenges in Mobile Learning (pp. 182-196). Proceedings of 13th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning. Communications in Computer and Information Science 479, Springer.

My work on the affordances of mobile learning includes the following conference paper.

Parsons, D., Wishart, J. & Thomas, H. (2016). Exploring Mobile Affordances in the Digital Classroom. In I. Arnedillo-Sanchez & P. Isaias (Eds.), Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Mobile Learning (Mobile Learning 2016) (pp. 43-50). IADIS.

Perhaps the most useful summary of my views on the constraints and benefits of learning technologies is encapsulated in this book chapter, which tries to provide an overview of the potentials for mobile learning in the future.

Parsons, D. (2014). The future of mobile learning and implications for education and training. In M. Ally & A. Tsinakos (Eds.), Increasing Access through Mobile Learning (pp. 217-229). Commonwealth of Learning Press.

References

Grant, W. C. (1993). Wireless coyote: A computer-supported field trip. Communications of the ACM, 36(5), 57-59.

Valentine, E. (2004). Paradigm shifts relating to M-Learning. Unpublished paper.