Jimmy Jaldemark

Changes within the practice of higher education: participating in educational communication through distance settings

This paper is about changes within the practice of higher education. These changes relate to students and teachers participation in educational communication through distance settings. Here, this communication is analysed and described in terms of different dialogical intersections, which embrace the tools used in educational communication and the locations where students and teachers are physically situated. The Swedish practice of higher education illustrates these changes in participation in educational communication. In short, the number of intersections has increased, and the use of tools and locations has changed over the years. This is visible both in discourse and in the practice of higher education. Finally, this paper questions whether the distinction between distance, face-to-face and online education nowadays is meaningful.

Technology-mediated supervision of undergraduate students' dissertations

In Sweden, technology-mediated participation has increased in tertiary education, which has led to changing conditions for its delivery. However, one part has proven more resistant to change, technology-mediated or not: the supervision of students undergraduate dissertation work. This article presents a study that analyses technological applications to mediate supervision of students undergraduate dissertation work. It is shown that students in general find such mediated participation helpful for supervision, both one-to-one and collaboratively. Mediation by technologies and collaborative forms for the supervision of students undergraduate dissertation are, therefore, suggested as productive ways to enhance students learning.

How and why do students of higher education participate in online seminars

Online education is continuing to gain popularity in educational institutions and organizations. Hitherto, most research has occurred at aggregated levels, while few researchers have studied how and why individuals participate in online education. It is essential to examine individual perceptions and relationships in order to understand how students behave in relation to others. This paper investigates how students of higher education participate in online seminars and why they participate in certain ways. An online class that attended asynchronous and synchronous online seminars was studied. Electronic logs were used to examine how students participated and interviews were used to illustrate why they participated. It was revealed that the participation of students varied between aspects such as exchanging information, managing tasks and providing social support and the emphasis of these aspects were related to the tool they communicated through. A number of participation inhibitors were identified and it was also suggested how these inhibitors can be addressed.

Participation and genres of communication in online settings of higher education

This paper focuses on written utterances in online settings of higher education. It concerns the constitution of the initiation, turn taking and the steering of exchanges of utterances; and it describes these patterns in terms of different genres. The study also concerns participation in higher education and, specifically, participation in educational settings where students and teachers rarely meet face-to-face. Their participation is thus dependant on written utterances in online settings. Overall, this paper discusses constitutive aspects of these written utterances. The educational communication between students and teachers embraced both student- and teacher-centered genres. The distinction between these two genres relates to the functionality of the utterances, the main metaphor for learning and the responsibilities for the communication taken by students and teachers. The emergence of these genres seems to be affected by interplay between the composition of the study-groups, the structure of the task and other aspects of participation through online settings.

Boundless writing : Applying a transactional approach to design of a thesis course in higher education

Internationally, virtual world environments such as Second Life® (SL) have become accepted as platforms for innovative educational activities at many universities in recent years. One such activity ...This chapter discusses the application of a transactional approach to educational design. Its purpose is to describe how such an approach could be applied to a thesis course. To fulfill this purpose the chapter unfolds by indicating that the practice of supervision faces challenges from changes in society. Technology-enhanced participation in supervision is one answer to these challenges. Inspired by scholars such as Bakhtin, Dewey, and Vygotsky the applied transactional approach expands on ideas such as dialogues and educational settings. The implementation of these ideas into the educational design intersects within two principles, group-work, and open and public exchanges of information. The transactional approach is then illustrated with the help of a first-year undergraduate thesis course in the discipline of Education.Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching presents recent and important theoretical and practical advances in educational technology design in higher education, examining their possibilities for enhancing teaching and learning. This volume includes discussions of technologies and applications grounded in legitimate learning theories and from an ethical perspective that emphasizes mutual understanding.

Theories of participation in online learning communities: an intersectional understanding

This article deals with the question of how participation in online learning communities can be understood. Starting from the idea that participation in such communities has an intersectional character; it investigates how understanding of this character of participation relates to different rhetoric. Such rhetoric is discussed as being either interactional or transactional. The discussion links the application of rhetoric to both human beings and non-human objects such as content and technologies. The article concludes that application of a dualistic interactional rhetoric is suitable to a narrow conceptualisation and design of participation in online learning communities. However, a non-dualistic transactional rhetoric is suitable if a wider conceptualisation and design of participation in online learning communities is sought. An example from the healthcare sector is used to illustrate how the ideas discussed in the article could be applied to designing for participation in online learning communities.

Editorial introduction : Collaborative learning enhanced by mobile technologies

An introduction for the issue is presented discussing the focus of reports on collaborative learning and mobile technology.

Contexts of Learning and Challenges of Mobility: Designing for a Blur Between Formal and Informal Learning

The chapter will discuss challenges for design based on a context-dependent and complex understanding of mobile learning. The chapter elaborates on contextual aspects of learning and how these are related to mobility in terms of various issues involving physical space (locations), conceptual space (content), social space (social groups), technology, and learning dispersed over time. Through these aspects, mobile learning is emphasised as a complex social process that includes learning through communication between learners participating in multiple contexts mediated by personal, wireless, and mobile devices. Four challenges are discussed based on this complex understanding of mobile learning. Three of these challenges involve the relationship between learning and educational settings. The first challenge concerns how to learn at multiple intersections of physical locations and social groups. The second concerns the impact that personal, mobile, and wireless Internet-connected technology has on the monopoly of knowledge. The third concerns the blurring of the boundaries between formal and informal learning. To reach a coherent conceptualisation useful in designing for mobile learning, the chapter links these challenges to pragmatist and sociocultural ideas about the relationship between human beings and the surrounding context. These three challenges are embraced by a fourth challenge: to include the complexity of contextual aspects in conceptualisation and designing for learning. To meet these challenges, designing for mobile learning benefits from the deployment of concepts built from a transactional worldview. Such a worldview suggests the use of intersectional concepts that embrace several conceptual aspects of mobility in designing for learning.

Students' expressions of learning on the move: Game-based learning and mobile devices in formal outdoor educational settings

The study reported here is part of a project that draws on research from mobile learning, game-based learning and the state-of-the-art view of childhood. These three strands of the wider field of learning meet in this short papers intersection of students expressions of mobile game-based learning in formal outdoor educational settings. It built on a mobile game-based learning approach that applied a commercial off-the-shelf game included in two teachers planning of lessons in mathematics and social science. The study included students expressions of learning while playing the game Pokémon Go during an excursion. The students carried spy glasses during the recording of data implying that they were co-producers in the data-collection. The expressions were collected through five focus group interviews, each involving 3-4 students. This data helped to answer the research question: What expressions of applying mobile game-based learning in formal outdoor educational settings have students aged 11-12 years? The preliminary analysis resulted in categories based on the students expressions of various aspects related to the game Pokémon Go, the excursion lesson, using the smartphone, and how they consider learning and teaching at the school. From the preliminary results, the conclusion was that students found the lessons they participated in intriguing. The design of the lessons allowed them to have an open discussion about how learning occurs and to explore different cross-disciplinary themes that they otherwise not might have been able to explore. This conclusion is in line with results from state-of-the-art research within childhood studies. Therefore, the results from the current study suggest that mobile game-based learning in formal outdoor educational settings invited students to be co-producers of the content they were supposed to learn.