Gmail Motion?

Hola a todos,

For your entertainment...Watch this video or scroll down and read about the newest technology. ;-)

Online and offline social networks: Use of social networking sites by emerging adults

☆ Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Stephanie M. Reich, Natalia Waechter, Guadalupe Espinoza
(2008)

Introduction

The article Online and Offline Social Networks: Use of Social Networking Sites by Emerging Adults (Subramanian, Reich, Waechter, & Espinoza, 2008) states that social networks (e.g. Facebook) have millions of users which are mostly young adults and adolescents. The article aspires to study how young adults use social networks for communication and their link these adults online and offline activities.

Literature Review

Young adults tend to use the Internet for communication with peers more than any other population group (Clark, Frith, & Demi, 2004; Gemmill & Peterson, 2006; Jones, 2002). According to Byam (1995), McKenna & Bargh (2000), and Turkle (1995), the online environment allow users to present themselves differently than offline, but the authors propose that online and offline networks are connected, in other words they are complementary to one another. Further research shows that adolescents use instant messaging to stay in touch about school, gossip, and maintain friendships. Girls use social networks to make plans with friends where as boys tend to use these networks to meet new people or flirt online. One interesting fact is that bullies in real-life transfer into cyber bullies online. Online contexts (e.g. chats, social networks) have been reported to have adolescents reach out for advice or report concerns, in topics such as identity, sexuality, establishing intimate relationships and romantic partners. Moreover, these adolescents use blogs as an extension of their offline lives.
The studies that have been conducted of young adults demonstrate that their might also be a connection between their online and offline worlds. Research indicates that the excessive use of internet by this population may be due to establishing new relationships and shaping identity (Anderson, 2001). Further research indicates that multiple networks, such as text/talk and social networks overlap in the majority of their contacts. Social networks have become online tools for staying in touch, spreading the news, and planning events. The authors feel that two important developments that occur from adolescent to young adult are shaping of identity (e.g. career, religion, and ethnicity) and building intimacy, especially for those in western worlds. In this time period they try to build intimacy with friends, partners, and family. Of importance to this paper are non-romantic connections that help reduce stress in college students. They use online activities to reach out, although these relationships mirror their offline relationships.
Research has shown that Facebook is mostly used my young adults to maintain high school relationships, people who they have met in/out of school, and to communicate with those who are part of their current offline life."Facebook use was related to all three kinds of perceived social capital — bridging social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's weaker ties, bonding social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's more intimate ties, and maintained social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's prior ties " (p.422). Subrahmanyam et al. anticipate that young adults "would use social networking sites to promote social interaction and reinforce important offline relationships, demonstrating that for them, technology is a tool for supporting interpersonal connections" (p.422). However, they think the more intensive users of online tools would have less overlap among offline connections.

Method

The final number of participants was 110 (55 male/55 female) and they were between the ages of 18-29. These participants were from a Psychology poll at a large university in Los Angeles, CA who were of diverse and the ethnicity reflected that of the city. The subset of 81 students was used to analyze network overlap. Participant completion and subset is as follows:
Retained for laboratory survey questions
5 of 110 did not complete the online
survey
3 of 110 did not report their networks
accurately Link offline to online world
105 of 110 reported provided names of face-face friends
46 of 105 did not use instant messaging
23 of 105 did not use social networking
81 of 105 listed first and last names of online friends
A lab survey was developed a survey about demographics, use of social networks, reason of using social networks, and how they decide who to add or delete from their social network. Students with social networks pages reported how the sites affected their relationships. The participants who did not have sites were asked how they felt to not use one. For the lab survey, participants reported 10 people they have a lot of contact with in their offline activities and then they did the same for their online survey. The online survey further asked to report offline and online activities that day, including their social networking activities and interactions with via instant messaging and on social networking sites. The two surveys combined showed participants listed up to 30 people they have the most contact in online and offline contexts
Students were informed about the project and they signed a consent form. They then completed the lab survey (20-30min), and they were sent an email link for the online survey (15–20 min) to complete the same day. The researchers constructed a 2 × 2 × 2 table for each participant to calculate percentages of overlap between online and offline relationships.

Discussion

The results supported the researchers’ hypothesis that the participants social networking and offline activities overlap. By using the online sites they perceive they are maintaining interconnections and establishing intimate relationships with their contacts.

Response

This study is not in relation to language learning. The study focuses on seeing what young adults are doing online to build or maintain relationships and how this task is correlated to their offline relationships. The study showed, as the authors thought, the majority of the young adults had the same main contacts online and offline. In terms of language learning this can show us that it may be difficult to use social networks or instant messaging for students to practice a second language. It would be difficult because the students typically do this interaction with people they know and have ongoing conversations that move from the offline domain to the online domain. However, building a network of contacts in their classroom may be a way to transfer relevant relationships to an online domain. Based on the article, I think it is very important when teaching a second language through a social network or chat environment to give students guidelines and topics that make the experience relevant and useful to their real lives. Moreover, I think that cultural factors and practices may come through in online environments where students may lack access in their offline worlds.

Classes disappearing?

Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century
This article reminded me about what we were talking the first weeks in class.  The perspective brought by The Chronicle is quite interesting. For example, if some professors don't bother taking attendance and share their power-points and recordings with their classes, what's the difference of an all online class?

Roundtable III: Developing new literacies using commercial videogames as educational tools by Pilar Lacasa, Rut Martínez, Laura Méndez

Introduction-Summary

The objective of this study by Lacasa, Martínez, & Méndez (2008) is to examine how videogames viewed as semiotic and cultural tools can support and create innovative educational settings. Using videogames in an educational setting can inspire different forms of narratives, such as oral, performed, and written. The authors use a Bakhtinian perspective to look at videogames in the classroom.  According to Lacasa et al. (2008), Bakhtin (1999) examined Dostoevsky’s novel where Dostoevsky "permits his character to speak in their own voices with a minimum of interference" (p. 86). Using a Bakhtinian perspective, the authors will analyze  how an individual's meaning and perspective of the world shapes a character. Furthermore, they use Bakhtin's contribution to analyze relationships between videogames and narratives (Aarseth, 2001; Jenkins, 2006; Ryan, 2001). The authors claim the following three objectives in Bakhtkin's work may also be applied to their study:

1) Classrooms as a polyphonic context-

The view of Bakhtinian polyphony helps us understand a way to use the diversity of a classroom's goals and voices in a pedagogical way. Bakhtin speaks of communication as means to communicate between two people as subjects not just objects. These ideas help the authors build social relationship models for the classroom.  The authors conclude that a traditional classroom model of communication is not dialogical but monologic, the teacher is the single voice. Olson(2003) relates to this monologic standards by saying educational settings need to implement individual subjectivities as they can produce many forms of leaning and development. For the authors these individual subjectivities were important when working in the context of the Tomb Raider videogame and though the game creating social relationships in the specific setting of a school and its individuals participating. This study will examine "the extent to which joint participation in playing videogames allows the individual subjectivities and goals of all participants to be aligned" (p. 87).

2) Diversity of social words, dialogue and literacy-

Bakhtin viewed Dostoevsky’s novel as having diverse voices in multiple social and cultural contexts, including discourses popular outside of a classroom. The authors agree that introducing multiple discourses in multiple contexts is important but difficult to achieve, but videogames allow you to introduce different semiotic domains for learning  in a more global system with these four processes:

• Learning new approaches to the world, using new kinds of discourses.

• Participating in a social group that shares this domain.

• Obtaining resources that prepare people for new ways of learning and solving problems.

• An active process of “critical learning”, in which the learner is situated on a meta-level that allows him/her to establish relationships among the parts of a global system(p. 88)             

The authors established this theoretical model to go beyond writing and literary content as they wanted to include meta-semiotic consciousness and present multimodal environment. Moreover the teacher required the children to create a play based on the Tomb Raider videogame to help the children use multiple discourse. The framework for theater in the classroom is based on Schonmann(2006).

3) Discourse, narrative and videogames

In this section the authors talk about how there are monologic and dialogic videogames. Based on Bakhtin, the monologic games, just like monologic characters in novels, don't leave much room to the imagination because it is all given to you. The dialogic games are more open-ended leaving gaps to be filled in multiple contexts and multiple discourse.  A game like Tomb Raider is a dialogic game that allow the player to make the decisions of the character, including feeling the emotions of the character.

There are two main approaches to games and narratives: Ludologists (prioritize rules of game) and Narratologists (consider the fiction as focus).   Jenkins (2006) connects the approaches through the following principles:

• “Not all games tell stories”; for example, graphical games such as Tetrix.

• “Many games do have narrative aspirations”; for example, they do that by tapping the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences.

• “Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive ”; that is, there is more than one privileged way to build and elaborate stories.

• “The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story”; factors which have little or nothing to do with storytelling per se are emphasized; for example, those which are highly dependent on specific communities of players.

•“If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories”; for example, the way in which TV and games tell stories are not the same. (p. 672-673)

Jenkins also includes spatiality to point out videogames are more narratives than stories. Spatiality is important to this study as the geography of the character creates the story.

Data collection and analysis

The study took place in a Spanish public school multimedia workshop on seven occasions of two-hours each. The participants were 3rd graders between the ages of 8-9 years old, 11 boy and 10 girls. Lacasa et al. (2008) describe their study is based on a qualitative analytical perspective on narrative and ethnographic approaches that include a micro-ethnographic analysis of multimodal discourses. The authors were participant observers who used various methods for data collection. The methods are field/work diary, photography, compilation of class work, audio and video recordings, digitalization of recording and computer programs used (p.90). The analysis of the data was in several phases based on 1) the unit of analysis were organized by social and cultural processes, 2) to analyze patterns they treated each contribution as mutually dependent on their context.

Objective

"The goal of this paper has been to explore how videogames as semiotic and cultural tools support the creation of innovative educational settings and contribute in the growth of oral, performed, and written narratives in the classroom" (p.102).

Conclusions

1.     The role of videogames as educational tools relates to the importance of considering the perspectives and roles that children, teachers and investigators assume as participants in the institutional setting of their classroom

a.     teacher, students and researchers joint efforts to unite their own subjectivities by joining their voices together, which is a hard task

b.    the game took a new meaning to the students when introduced in the classroom context, creating difficulties in goals

c.     teacher and researcher also had problems interpreting the goals the same way

2.      The use of media such as digital games complements the use of other written or audiovisual methods and permits the development of multiple literacies in the classroom.

a.     scripting and performing the Lara Croft play

b.    publishing their own experiences on a web page

c.     children learned how to control multiple ways of talking, writing, understanding and producing images and sounds to communicate with other people

3.     It was possible to construct narratives using Tomb Raider

a.     work like fairy tales which children heard from adults and then learn to retell in specific contexts and with other members of their communities

b.    the children began to construct an oral story, with spatial exploration over plot development

c.     children constructed planning and production of their web page with adults using multiple codes, texts and images

4.     Meta-cognitive process involved in their learning activities when they related to the videogame content during the workshop

a.     children became conscious of elements of the game that were part of its narrative

b.    they were conscious of specific social problems related to violence, and of the moral dimensions of Lara Croft’s activities (p. 102-103)

Response

The topic of using videogames for the development of literacy is interesting and needed. I think the study shows that commercial videogames can be used in class to develop literacy through narratives. The context videogames provide is full of multiple possibilities for creative writing in different forms. Videogames can act as multiple tools for students pedagogical needs.  What the researchers demonstrate is that there has to be a clear plan of how the game is going to act as a medium for learning. The children, teacher(s), and researchers need to be able to know what the goal is going to be in order to achieve the objective. Spatiality also seems to play a big part of the success of the videogame for narratives. I think more about spatiality could have been included in the literature review. Although I really liked this study, the paper was difficult for me to follow.  The sections could have been ordered in a more transitional form. I had to re-read multiple times to see how the article connected  the study to the theoretical framework.  I did not get clarification of what they were really looking to answer until the conclusions. However, I think the study itself is a great model for future studies of commercial videogames implementations in classrooms.

NY Times Magazine-Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom

Hola compañeros y compañeras,


Here is an article I came across last semester where the lesson is not so much a lesson but a quest. These middle school students are learning through game design. Its kinda long but you can skim through it if it doesn't catch your attention so much. Click here if interested. Here is a video that accompanies the article Games Theory.


You might notice the ASK THE EXPERT featuring James Gee on the side, here is Gee on video games for learning. Part I and Part II.


Nos vemos pronto :-)

Roundtable II:

TANDEM LANGUAGE LEARNING THROUGH A CROSS-CULTURAL KEYPAL PROJECT 
By K. Kabata & Y. Edasawa, Language Learning & Technology

February 2011, Volume 15, Number 1. pp.104-121

INTRODUCTION

This communication project involves tandem learning and presents an opportunity for incidental learning to occur. In order to understand this study the authors provide excellent definitions of these two concepts. Tandem language learning is defined as "a form of open learning in which two people [or groups] with different mother tongues work together in order to learn one another's language."(Little & Brammerts 1996,p.10)The authors define their study as "concerned with learning language as a by-product of a meaning-focused bilingual communication project, whereby students are engaged in discussion on common inquiry topics."(p.105)In other words, incidental learning which focuses more on meaning of language than its form (Hulstijn, 2003)." Although many studies have been conducted in regards to tandem learning, not many have focused on incidental learning or error correction. The tandem learning projects which do show use of incidental learning usually involve the acqusition of vocabulary. Moreover, much of the studies completed have studied monolingual discussion boards, with the use of second language learners and native speakers of the target language. The study conducted by Kabata & Edasawa is based on a program that has been implemented for a few years at their universities and every year they look to better the communication project. 

SUMMARY OF STUDY

The University of Alberta(UA), Canada and the Doshisha Women's College (DWC), Japan created a language exchange for students in UA learning Japanese and students in DCW learning English. The students of the UA-DWC project were divided in 4-5 member groups, which included 2-3 UA students and 2-3 DWC students, based on topics created by the DCW students. Through an asynchronous discussion board these students were to post questions in their second language (L2) and answer their group members questions in their native language, for example a UA student would post a question in English but would respond to a Japanese question in Japanese and vice versa. 

As the title mentions, the aim of the study is to "determine the patterns of students' language learning in a cross-cultural project."(p.107)with the focus on the learners of Japanese response to the input from their keypals. The authors further claim that the results are not to examine what was learned by learners but  how the learners of UA perceive the input received from the DCW students. In order to keep constant participation, students were also required to do other assignments related to the exchange, such as presentations, learning logs, individual essays, and individual research topics based on their groups discussion board. All together depending on their university it ranged anywhere from 32-60% of their final grade.

The assignment was 8 weeks in length and involved 40 UA students (16 male and 24 female), in their first semester of their third year Japanes, and 35 female DWC students of English. The total number of groups were 16. The messages posted in WebCT were used for the final analysis. More importantly the four required learning logs submitted by UA students were analyzed to see what students were reporting they learned every two weeks. The logs voluntarily submitted by DWC were used to see what errors DWC students felt their UA group members were committing in Japanese. Table 1 below shows you the areas used to analyze students learning and reporting logs. Table 2 and 4 show the outcomes of the logs.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

What kinds of linguistic items were learned through the keypal project?

• Language learning opportunities occurred in all aspects (vocabulary, kanji, grammar, and phrase/sentential expressions)
• Overall Vocabulary items were the most frequent
• Kanji spelling and reading were the least frequent.

Do students recognize and learn from keypals’ corrective input differently when they are presented explicitly as opposed to when they are presented implicitly without overt indication?

• UA students’ logs yielded 117 entries(LS-1learning from overt corrections,)19 (LS-II noticing own errors without overt corrections), explicit learning may be more helpful in learning. 
• Zero implicit corrections given and reported by DWC students were acknowledged or reported by UA students.
• 18 of 29 explicit corrections provided and reported by the DWC students were acknowledged and/or reported.
• However, UA students’ log data indicated that, when noticed, implicit corrections and corrections through negotiations seemed to lead to a better understanding of their own errors. 
• Support: Gass (1988, 1999), who emphasizes the importance of students’ recognition of their own errors and the process of negotiation. 

• Students may not have quite understood the grammatical corrections unless clear explanations were given.

What kind of incidental learning if any is observed?

• Yes, through explicit and implicit error corrections, or through exposure to authentic texts provided by their keypals 
• Vocabulary most frequent item learned without explicit corrections
• Students do not pay much attention to grammatical features when reading keypals’ messages.
• infrequency of grammatical learning without corrective input might be the proficiency level of the learners. UA students were in the first term of the third-year Japanese classes, many of them might not have been proficient enough to pay attention to and recognize grammatical items that were presented by their keypals 
• 21 entries  reported grammatical learning in LS-II and LS-IV categories, indicating that certain types of grammatical features might be easier to notice.
• Present study may have directed students’ learning towards greater intentionality, while the focus of the students’ task during the keypal project was on meaning
• Only the DWC students were asked to keep logs about their keypals’ (erroneous) language use, and it is possible that the level of awareness about linguistic issues may have been different had both groups of students been given the same requirements

COMMENTS

I found this study quiet interesting for the field of language exchanges.  I do agree with the authors that a different form of data collection or an addition of the observation of both learner groups for erroneous material would be beneficial for incidental learning. I think in cases like these triangulation is important. I also think an interview with the students would be helpful to see if there is something they did not mention in their logs, or to get closer to their perceptions. The analysis of the weeks messages is also an important form of analysis they did not pay too much attention too. I appreciated the thoroughness conducted by the authors in presenting the literature review and the study.  The definition of terms such as tandem learning, incidental and intentional learning, and implicit and explicit learning is important in this paper, especially to not forget that the focus is incidental learning.  At times, I thought they would use their data to analyze errors. In a way they did, but to analyze if corrections were noticed or not, and if students acknowledged them.  I like the topic and I find it easy to adapt this type of study. Incidental learning, like intake or perception is hard to account for, therefore the more methods of feedback for the study the better chance of understanding what students really perceive.

Intercultural Competence, we can always use more :-)

The Cultura Project is amazing because it exposes students to other perspectives around the world.  It gives them topics to discuss that may without interaction of residents/citizens of that country be left without actual attitudes and meaning.  I like that in a way it helps open students mind to understand the misscommunications based on different cultural aspects or even life experience.  We all have different traits depending on race, socioeconomic status, where we grew up, who we grew up with, our families, etc.  Even among two sisters that grew up around the same "everything" there may be, for example, different political views.  Now when you change the different aspects you have, such as a new culture, you are most likely to get more differences. I like how this project allows students to view this first hand, without having to leave their country, or even their classroom.