Much has happened since last I wrote… Hugo has grown incredibly fast and it’s amazing to follow his development!

Together with my family, I have also left Umeå for Linköping, and we are trying to adjust to life in southern Sweden. When I get back from maternity leave, I will finish my thesis at a distance from here.

Apart from delivering this general update, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this year’s EUROCALL conference is to take place next week. Similar to last year, there will be a Virtual Strand to the conference. Since I’m on maternity leave, I won’t blog (which I did last year), but I will try to participate at a distance instead. Read more on the conference website and hope to see you there!

In the next few weeks I have a quite busy schedule. On Thursday next week I’ll be giving a seminar at the Design school where I hope to initiate discussions concerning cross-disciplinary collaboration. I’m really excited to get a chance to present my linguistic research on conversational structures and communicative patterns to an audience of interaction designers, who might have (further) suggestions for practical applications of my results.

The week after I will present a paper together with my colleague Maria Lindgren at a local conference on university pedagogy, where we will discuss advantages and drawbacks of net-based learning, building on our experiences from our English courses. I will focus on social presence and real-time interaction, which is in line with what I’ll talk about later that week when I’ll be teaching a practical/theoretical course in HUMlab on different platforms for real-time interaction in distance education.

On top of this, I am also planning for my final observations. A lot to do, but it’s all very exciting!

There is still time to submit proposals for a conference here in Umeå on “Identity and Power in the Language Classroom”, co-organized by some colleagues at the Modern Languages Department. One of the suggested themes concerns the relationship between identity, language and medium, which should interest some of the readers of this blog. What a wonderful opportunity to visit Umeå and get a glimpse of the midnight sun (the conference is on June 11-12)! You better hurry, though – deadline for submission of abstracts is in two days… Read more here.

My presentation in the PC Minitrack was in a section on Conversation at Work, where all papers dealt with multitasking in one way or another. For example, Peter Scupelli presented an experimental study where it was investigated how interactional behaviour changed when using a modified version of IM with more awareness cues added (PVIM). What they found was that increased awareness of other participants’ task-related activities made work processes more effective in that participants more easily could focus on the task. The question of awareness is a relevant issue also in my research. For example, the design considerations that my study has resulted in suggest that the individual involved in conversational multitasking should have the opportunity to set the level of intrusiveness for different types of communicative alerts, and, importantly, the other interlocutors should be made aware of his/her chosen settings. This would give them an indication as to how soon a reply could be expected.

Another presentation dealing with awareness strategies was given by Tony Bergstrom and focused on the “conversational clock“. This is an innovative solution where participants in face-to-face conversation can see their participation visualized in real-time in the shape of a clock on the table in front of them. This presentation caused much discussion concerning practical applications. As the results showed, people preferred looking at each other over staring at the table in front of them… Further, it was discussed what the effects might be of receiving this type of information. Will it make participants more hesitant to speak and conversations more stilted?

From a language learning perspective, I have found the visualizations provided by the FlashMeeting videoconferencing platform quite intriguing. They clearly show participation rates, and who is contributing the most in the different modes. I have considered showing the visualizations to the students to make them aware of this – active participation is after all a prerequisite for language learning – but so far I have hesitated to do so. Maybe I should give it a try?

The Department for Interactive Media and Learning at our university had many representatives at the NetLearning conference in Ronneby earlier this year. One of the papers which especially caught my attention is written by Peter Bergström and deals with student interactions in web based video conferencing. He has used Fahy et al.’s Transcript Analysis Tool (TAT) for his analysis, which, as far as I can make out, is a model for analysis, and not a specific software. In line with this model, utterances have been categorized as “questioning, statements, reflections, or interpersonal coaching and scaffolding” (English terminology borrowed from Fahy). Peter has followed two small groups and compared their interactions, and he has found variation in the types of utterances produced in the different groups. For example, one group used more “vertical” (closed) questions, which on the surface would indicate that they were less successful at creating dialogue. However, closer analysis reveals that these questions were often accompanied by reflections which might add a sense of openness. Peter claims that his findings are influenced for example by the medium and whether participants have used it previously, by differences in previous contacts between group members, as well as by group size. In both groups, he concludes, dialogue was achieved.

For the article I’m currently working on (at least in theory), I want to look at the form and function of feedback in student interaction online, but I will have to consider whether including information about other types of utterances would also be relevant.

If you know Swedish, you should check Peter’s paper out.

My friends and colleagues from Oslo, Kathryn Hermansen and Ninian Millar, have recently launched a resource page for creating dialogue in the online classroom, including, for example, useful ideas concerning how to create nearness among distance students and information about different tools. They have also linked a blog to their site in order to encourage dialogue among the readers. Do check this out!

Today’s seminar went quite well, and I got some good feedback afterwards. I also know that at least 5 people were following the live stream, and even more will be able to watch and comment once the seminar has been archived (link will be posted here later), so I hope to receive some more feedback also from these people.

One of the discussions after the seminar related to the effects of multitasking on learning. Two of the participants came up to me and we had a chat about what this behaviour might lead to in the long run. I pointed out that my research is not about judging how multitasking affects productivity and learning, which explains my perhaps somewhat uncritical position in the presentation. However, I do think we should take studies like this one seriously and consider how we might best foster deep level learning in a context filled with interruptions, and how we can motivate students to take on bigger tasks which do not offer external stimuli all the time. For example, we should be able to demand from our students that they read full-length books, and not only excerpts.

Nevertheless, I also think we need to accept the fact that this is the reality which surrounds many of our students today… Maybe we could try to find ways of making use of their ability to multitask in class? One example which I came to think of during our discussion concerns the use of multimodal interfaces, which for instance can be used in distance learning, where you have access to video, audio, shared text chat, shared whiteboard etc. These platforms have some important advantages in educational settings, in that, for example, they allow students to contribute to discussions via the mode with which they feel most comfortable, thus supporting more equal participation patterns than if only using one mode. Being used to multitasking will certainly be an advantage when working with these types of tools, since it will make it easier to keep track of all the different simultaneous activities.

Over at Polyglot Conspiracy, Squires has commented on a recent article in Columbus Dispatch (link to article unfortunately appears to be broken) where it was argued that people communicating online don’t find this type of interaction less authentic than face-to-face interaction. As Squires points out, this comes as no surprise to some of us. The article also discussed how some feel much more at ease communicating via text than face-to-face, which is not very surprising either. My experience from working with voice-enabled 3D interaction is quite similar. Some of our students have reported on normally being shy, but have stepped up and taken on a very active role in the online discussions, where they have been able to hide behind the masks that the avatars provide.

Squires then raises a highly relevant question: does this ease of interaction online make it easier to communicate also offline? This is a tricky question, but at least when it comes to language learning, I think much is gained. By taking a more active part in the language learning situation, you get to practice speaking in the target language more than you would in a traditional classroom, and hopefully you should also feel more comfortable speaking it in other contexts as well.

Today my colleague Maria Lindgren and I gave a didactics seminar at our department where we reported from the EUROCALL conference and initiated discussions concerning how we want to use technology in our classes – both on campus and online. We also took the opportunity to give a summary of the presentation we gave in Granada on overcoming the challenges of completely web-based language education.

(Oh there is more…)

I’ve recently come across two blogs written by people connected to my university: Poducation: Get poducated (in Swedish) and FREPA.BLOG: On e-learning and learning technology (in English and Swedish). Well worth to check out!