Annika Lantz-Andersson

Crossing boundaries in Facebook: Students’ framing of language learning activities as extended spaces

Young people’s interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for educational language teaching and learning practices. Analytically, the study departs from a sociocultural perspective on learning, and adopts conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. The results based on ethnographic data from a Facebook group in English-learning classes, with 60 students aged between 13 and 16 from Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan indicate that there is a possibility for boundary crossing, which could generate extended spaces for collaborative language-learning activities in educational contexts where students combine their school subject of learning language and their communicative use of language in their everyday life. Such extended spaces are, however, difficult to maintain and have to be recurrently negotiated. To take advantage of young people’s various dynamic communicative uses of language in their everyday life in social media, the implementation of such media for educational purposes has to be deliberately, collaboratively and dynamically negotiated by educators and students to form a new language-learning space with its own potentials and constraints.

Electronic Exaggerations and Virtual Worries: Mapping Research of Computer Games Relevant to the Understanding of Children's Game Play

There can be no doubt that computer games are artefacts with an increasing importance for our culture. Game design is one of the prime movers for the development of information technology and is leading the way for other sectors. Computer games have brought us cultural activities that were technically impossible before. We now have the possibility to manipulate and interact with people from all over the world in a virtual game space constituted of realistic photographic images. These new activities have created some uneasiness among educators, researchers, designers and parents who have raised a variety of arguments about the effects of computer games on childhood. Many have strong beliefs that the use of computer games can contribute to different aspects of childrens development. On the other hand, there is an even stronger anxiety that computer games have negative social and cognitive effects on children. Even though this means that there is a clear need for research on the issue of computer games as a part of contemporary childhood, academic study in this area has been divided, with fragments of knowledge scattered over a wide field of different discourses and traditions. In this article, the authors seek to summarise and discuss some of the studies and theoretical arguments about children and computer games. In order to do this, they outline and sketch some of the different empirical findings and research traditions that they find relevant for the understanding of computer games as a part of childhood. The purpose of this is to contribute with an overview that can be utilised as a resource for educators, parents, designers and others who deal with matters concerning children and computer games.

ICT tools in environmental education: reviewing two newcomers to schools

United Nations of Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO’s) founding statements about environmental education (EE) in the 1970s positioned it as a multidisciplinary field of inquiry. When enacted as such, it challenges traditional ways of organising secondary school education by academic subject areas. Equally, according to UNESCO, EE requires various forms of integrated and project-based teaching and learning approaches. These can involve hands-on experimentation alongside the retrieval and critical analysis of information from diverse sources and perspectives, and with different qualities and statuses. Multidisciplinary and knowledge engagement challenges are key considerations for an EE curriculum designed to harness information and communication technologies (ICT) to support and enhance student learning, which also challenge traditional instructional priorities that for example are largely based on textbooks. This review summarises research that has sought to integrate ICT and digital tools in EE. A key finding is that while there is a rich variety of such tools and applications available, there is far less research on their fit with and implications for student learning. The review calls for further studies that will provide models of productive forms of teaching and learning that harness ICT resources, particularly in developing the goals and methodologies of EE in the twenty-first century.

‘Once upon a time there was a mouse’: children's technology-mediated storytelling in preschool class

With the current expansion of digital tools, the media used for narration is changing, challenging traditional literacies in educational settings. The present study explores what kind of activities emerge when six-year-old children in a preschool class write a digital story, using a word processor and speech-synthesised feedback computer software. Empirical material was collected in a primary school that participates in a larger community project on writing with digital technology. The focus of the study is on how the storytelling activity is mediated by the technologies and the participants (teacher and children). The results show that the digital tools used, in part, directed the children away from narrating, instead turning their attention to negotiations of division of labour and literate conventions. The latter were also at the forefront of the teachers contributions to the childrens activity. Despite these circumstances, the children succeed in accomplishing the instructed task of collaboratively composing a story.

The Power of Natural Frameworks: Technology and the Question of Agency in CSCL Settings.

Students frame activities in school in specific ways which are fundamental for their learning and problem solving. The introduction of digital technology and multimedia applications leads to additional aspects to consider, creating a need for research on interaction and activities in relation to new tools. The aim of this study is to analyze how students frame computer-supported collaborative learning situations. The analytic agenda is based on sociocultural assumptions of learning. Data have been collected through video documentation of secondary school students’ interactions with educational software in mathematics. The results show that when the students work with task solving in educational software and “get stuck”, they negotiate how to understand the activity; sometimes they search for the answer in their own actions, and sometimes they consider the answer to be within the technology. Goffman’s concept of frameworks can be applied to understand this alternative as a continuous shift between employing social frameworks where the students themselves are playing an active role in the understanding of the task, and employing natural frameworks, where their difficulties are understood to be, in Goffman’s words, due to natural determinants, that is, to the design of the technology. The main conclusion is that, in interactional activities using digital technology, there is a possibility that the participants’ activities are framed in such a way that they do not consider themselves as being accountable for the lack of understanding of the educational content.

Students’ frame shifting – resonances of social media in schooling

This case study explores how Swedish upper secondary students communicate in English as part of second language learning, in a blog shared with Thai students. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective on learning, the notions of Goffmans frame shifting and Bakhtins concept of carnival are employed to analyse two specific students’ negotiations and co-construction of postings in relation to authorship and audience. The findings show that when encountering a task introduced as part of schooling but contextualized in social media, the two students struggle to come to grips with how to frame the task. Initially, they frame the activity in relation to what counts as conventional language-learning practices but shift framing as they discover that other classmates’ postings are framed more in line with social media contexts, distinguished by a carnivalesque spontaneous writing. Thus, for the two specific students who author the postings, the local audience consisting of their classmates plays the most significant role.

Language Play in a Second Language: Social Media as Contexts for Emerging Sociopragmatic Competence.

The aim of this study is to gain insights into students’ language use on social media as part of the specific linguistic activities of second language (L2) learning, including development of sociopragmatic competence. Two Facebook groups were introduced in different English-as-L2 classes that were part of an international collaborative project comprising secondary schools in Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan. The study is theoretically grounded in sociocultural perspectives on learning, and the methods involve logging the students’ linguistic interactions in the social media groups. The analysis of the empirical material explored how the students framed the activities by different types of keying in their choice of linguistic repertoires. The findings show that the social media context offered a casual space for communication in which the students, by attentively attuning to the local coordinated framing, used diverse linguistic repertoires to play with the language. In instances of upkeyed framings, the language play was not only used with pragmatic intentions, but also as a means for various socializing purposes. In conclusion, it is suggested that language play on social media can be seen as a valuable activity in developing sociopragmatic competence to prepare students for L2 use outside of school.

The Carbon Footprint as a Mediating Tool in Students’ Online Reasoning about Climate Change

The year 2013 marked the release of the fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report judged it extremely likely that human activity is the predominant cause of recent climate change due to an increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (IPCC, 2013).

Significant Structuring Resources in the Reading Practices of a Digital Classroom.

Since reading and writing digitally demand partially different competencies, there is a change in some of the premises of related educational practices. This study aims to contribute to the knowledge of educational reading practices by scrutinizing how literacy events evolve in a digital classroom where each student has a personal digital device (1:1), iPads in this study. Our study is grounded in sociocultural theories of learning and focuses on the structuring resources utilized by students, namely the notion of multiple ongoing activities and the ways in which specific resources take precedence in shaping these activities. One class of 13–14 year-old students was studied for a week across several subjects through video-recordings and observations. The findings imply that the students moved among vast array of reading practices. However, the main structuring resource is a strong focus on task-solving and the practice of schooling, which mainly builds on principles emanating from traditional text. It is only occasionally that structuring resources that also include the opportunities associated with digital technology are utilized. This indicates the importance of further studies on how educational practices could be organized to scaffold the basis of traditional reading comprehension as well as other approaches required in digital environments.

Higher education dominance and siloed knowledge: a systematic review of flipped classroom research

This structured review examined (academic) publications on flipped or inverted classrooms based on all Scopus database (n = 530) references available until mid-June 2016. The flipped or inverted classroom approach has gained widespread attention during the latest decade and is based on the idea of improving student learning by prepared self-studies via technology-based resources (‘flips’) followed by high-quality, in-class teaching and learning activities. However, only a few attempts have been made to review the knowledge of the field of interest more systematically. This article seeks to address this problem and investigates what constitutes the research on flipped classrooms and, in particular, to examine the knowledge contributions with the field so far in relation to the wider research topic of educational technology. This review found that the current state of flipped classrooms as a field of interest is growing fast, with a slight conference preference and a focus on higher education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) area contributions, with the US as the predominant geographical context. It is concluded that studies on flipped classrooms are dominated by studies in higher education sector and are relatively local in character. The research tends not to interact beyond the two clusters of general education/educational technology and subject-specific areas. This implies that knowledge contributions related to the flipped classroom approach are relatively siloed and fragmented and have yet to stabilise. Academically and socially, the research is quite scattered, and only local evidence and experiences are available. The knowledge contributions within this field of interest seem to be anecdotal rather than systematically researched. To a large extent, the research lacks anchoring in, for example, learning theory or instructional design known from educational technology traditions and which would have helped much of the flipped classroom research to examine aspects of the flipped classroom approach more fully.