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Published Online: March 1, 2015
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Abstract: This article investigates the use of screen media and digital competencies of higher education students in light of the growing focus on new media and e-learning in Australian universities. The authors argue that there is a need to resist the commonplace utopian and dystopian discourses surrounding new media technological innovation, and approach the issue of its potential roles and limitations in higher education settings with due care. The article analyses survey data collected from first-year university students to consider what screen media they currently make use of, how frequently these media are interacted with, and in what settings and for what purposes they are used. The article considers what implications the digital practices and competencies of young adults have for pedagogical programs that aim to engage them in virtual environments.
Keywords: Screen media, new media, digital competencies, higher education
This article responds to the need to interrogate assumptions around, and the realities of, the perceptions and uses of new media screen culture by students in higher education. The question of how and to what degree university institutions and teachers need to alter existing practices in light of ongoing changes in the local and global communications environments is a major issue in Australia (and elsewhere). While we do not intend to posit any solutions to such a large and complex issue here, we aim to contribute to this debate by examining the pivotal issue of how young people are actually using screen media – an issue that often seems to be overshadowed in the enthusiastic, if not hasty, conclusion that students and education will 'never be the same again.' With these developments in mind, we examine current first-year university student competencies, perceptions and interests in terms of contemporary (particularly online) screen culture and the implications of this for the growing use of new media in teaching.
The present article's overarching research question investigating the perceptions and uses of new media by first-year undergraduate students can be dissected into the following sub-sets of issues for enquiry: Have Australian students proven to be early adopters in the active creation and dissemination of digital content on vlogs (video log or video diary entry via YouTube for example) personal webpages or wikis? What digital competencies do current higher education students possess in relation to new media? What does current student engagement with new media innovation reveal about their interest in, and perceptions of, digital screen culture? And lastly, what implications does this have for the adoption of new media technologies for use in university settings? In exploring the debate over how new media innovation should be applied in and outside the classroom, we hope that this research will accomplish two things: 1) improve teaching knowledge and practice in the uses of social media and other devices for educational purposes; and 2) highlight areas of? further research in student use of communications technologies and digital competencies. Results from a survey of almost four hundred first-year university students reveal significant, and often surprising, trends in how young people understand and use new media in the present day.
Literature review
University students have similar goals to youth through the ages: the desire to express their ideas and individuality and to shape their identities, to create authentic cultural forms, to be taken seriously and to entertain themselves, to prepare for and ultimately engage in interesting post-university work. The ventures and media through which these goals, and liberal education itself, are pursued have certainly evolved. (Axelrod 2002, p. 141)
The considerable literature concerned with the role(s) of new media in tertiary education constitutes an industry in itself. The passage above from Axelrod's study, Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education, makes a key assumption common to numerous other studies in the extensive scholarship of (e-)teaching, an assumption that provides the impetus for this article. Emphasising the importance of teachers developing an understanding of the culture, values and expectations of contemporary students, and pointing to the necessity of new media having a place in the university environment, Axelrod writes that '[r]ather than belittling the interests of those who occupy their classrooms, professors should aim to know their students and whence they have come' (2002, p. 142). While we share the crucial sentiment that teachers must know their students, Axelrod's statement already presupposes what precisely students' interests and expectations are: that classroom populations hail from a tech-savvy 'generation' more interested in the virtual world and eager for their years of formal education to be permeated with information derived from, and produced through, social networks and virtual media. It is this assumption that we aim to investigate and critique.
Just as there are many (and often opposing) discourses in the mass media about the increasingly mediated nature of present day society, different ideas about new communications technologies – from the utopian to the dystopian – can be found in writings on the tertiary sector. At one end of the spectrum, David Noble (1998) condemns teaching with and through the Internet, arguing that such activities have given rise to what he calls 'digital diploma mills,' which constitute the latest form of 'commoditisation' in his dystopian view of the 'automation' of higher education. On the other hand, Jones and Issroff (2007, pp. 190-91) highlight a considerable literature that stresses the high motivational value of e-learning technologies in combating problems with student demotivation. A number of studies prioritise the 'extraordinary' or 'transformational' changes that technology is perceived to enable (Richardson 2010, p. 2), but do not consider the potential limits of this technology and the limitations of introducing it into (or out of) the classroom. The recent collection, Cutting-Edge Social Media Approaches to Business Education: Teaching with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Blogs (Wankel 2010), comprises one among many studies in which potential pedagogical obstacles and issues of student access and digital competencies are either marginalised or omitted entirely.
Noting that the vast majority of popular and academic opinion constructs an essentially optimistic vision of 'the life-changing power of digital technology,' Selwyn (2011, pp. 21, 31) contends in one of the latest studies in the area that 'we should not be seduced by promises of digital technology changing everything for the better. Questions about the future of education are far too important to be left to a blind faith in the "power" of technology.' We seek here not to build a case for either perspective on the place of new media in tertiary education, but to stress the need to understand competing discourses around new media in order to attend more fully to the key issues revolving around the perception and use of new media by students. Reflecting on the prevalent adoption of e-learning through Moodle ('Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment') in Australian high schools over a number of years, the increased emphasis on social media engagement, and the 'building' of entire virtual university campuses through Second Life, Brown writes of the importance of interrogating what premises such developments are 'founded on and what kind of implications this might have… for student learning' (2011, pp. 173-74).
Recent research from Canada has addressed the importance of questioning widespread assumptions about young people and their use of new media. Bulleen et al. (2011) critique the often uncritical use of the concept of 'generation,' which is frequently employed as a means of explaining and rationalising the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in higher education. Arguing that '[t]he idea that the generation born after 1982 is fundamentally different than [sic] previous generations has become so firmly entrenched that it is treated as a self-evident truth,' Bulleen et al. undertake a review of academic and popular literature and an empirical analysis of the interests and activities of university students. The study's results suggest that students actually used a 'limited set' of ICTs, with their use being driven by familiarity, cost, and immediacy, rather than a process of enthusiastic and active adoption/application. Significantly, Bulleen et al. point out that the common claims around a substantially 'different' population of students, whose needs and desires are drastically different from all those preceding them, 'have potentially significant and costly implications for educational institutions… as they are being urged to make significant changes to how they are organized, how they teach, and how learning technologies should be used' (Bulleen et al. 2011).
However, it is certainly the case that contemporary teenagers and young adults in the so-called Western world have grown up in what Ohler (2010, p.170) describes as the natural, human and digital 'ecosystems' – which undoubtedly has important (and often positive) implications for everyday life. We argue here that new media technologies such as the Internet afford different expectations in terms of choice, access, affordability, and functionality. Some key aspects of new media technologies that are important include: (1) the technical capacity of the medium; (2) that internet content is more than mere electronic publishing and broadcasting; and (3) a sense of the diverse global audience (Cinque, 2011:144-145).Our use of the phrase 'Generation Next' is underpinned by an acknowledgement that the diversity of student experience must always be kept in mind. In this new media age, a reasonable question has arisen about whether or not it is possible to reconfigure the relationship between teacher and student on more equal terms. New media differs from traditional media forms in that old media is one-way while new media offers many-to-many information sharing and co-creative possibilities. This has meant that what we do with media has changed and with it our needs and expectations. As a result, young people raised with access to such technologies have developed different expectations of their media (choice, access, affordability, functionality) and they have expectations that other aspects of their lives, including their educational institutions, will offer the same. Meeting students' needs is an ongoing challenge for educators in this 'new media age.'
Further, due to the fact that scholarship exploring young adults' understanding and use of communications technologies predominantly stems from research in the United States, it is important to examine whether trends identified in this context are the same as, or different from, those exhibited in Australia. Focusing on the new media practices of Australian students, Kennedy et al. discovered in a 2007 study that while they are heavy users of mobile phones, text messaging and emails, they are not readily classifiable as active participants. Following on from this, our objective is to investigate whether Australian students (in this context, first year university undergraduates) have since become early adopters in the active creation and dissemination of digital content for creating vlogs (video log or video diary entry accessible via YouTube for example) or wikis, for instance, or whether they remain 'passive' users (if, indeed, they are users at all) of social networking platforms such as Facebook. This preliminary study seeks to investigate whether or not the trend in Australia has changed in the years since Kennedy et al.'s (2007) work in order to encourage finding a way of stimulating learning that is usefully assimilated, but also enjoyed, by both the Net-Generation and the upcoming Generation Next.
The intersection of new media and assessment has also been the subject of much discussion in the scholarship of teaching. Stressing the benefits of e-assessment, Sclater et al. (2007, p. 155) note that online evaluations of learner understanding can provide richer forms of student interactivity and greater consistency in the marking process. While a number of studies explore the strategies, practices and challenges of online assessment (Palloff and Pratt 2009; Williams 2006; Hricko 2006; Howell 2005), limited attention is given to student backgrounds, perceptions and preferences. The benefits of investigating student perspectives on, and their use of, new media are further highlighted when one takes into account Brosnan's (1999) findings that computer-assisted learning and evaluation disadvantages specific groups of students who suffer from 'computer anxiety.' As Swierczek and Bechter (2010, pp. 791-92) emphasise, 'e-Learning neither eliminates cultural differences nor is it culture free,' resulting in situations that can lead to 'digital gaps.' Therefore, an investigation of trends in the use or otherwise of digital screen culture by young people is important to situate the issue of e-assessment (which is, nonetheless, invariably introduced for its cost-effectiveness in delivering courses to increasingly large cohorts rather than pedagogical considerations), in its fuller context.
This issue points to the crucial importance of being aware of students' digital competencies, which can readily be connected to the previous discussion of what discourses are used to understand technology and its use, both in teaching scholarship and more broadly. Indeed, digital competencies in relation to children and young teenagers is a growing field of research, expanding the notion of a 'digital divide' to encompass more than a group's socio-economic context alone, to include issues of education and digital literacy (Carlsson 2010; Cole and Pullen 2010; Carlsson et al. 2007). Roberts (2010, p. 94) points to the rhetorical construction of 'digital natives' as possessing the characteristics of, among others, being 'tech savvy,' 'multi-taskers,' 'information rich,' and 'connected.' It is already apparent that generalisations along these lines must be examined with a critical eye, which this article seeks to accomplish. In order to examine new media perception and use in a nuanced manner, the need to resist and critique the 'prominence of [the] utopian-dystopian controversy' (Dutton and Loader 2002, p. 20), and understand the complexities of the issues involved, remains.
In his discussion of guiding principles for innovations in online education, Dutton (2002, p. 329) stresses 'the crucial role of social, economic and political factors in shaping the design and outcomes of technical and institutional changes tied to the deployment of ICT capabilities in higher education and learning.' This is an important point. While individual academics and discipline teams always have a measure of flexibility in the adoption and deployment of new media in and outside the classroom, there are a number of other influential factors – internal and external to the university – that impact on how courses are designed and offered to students. The timing of the current research project is fortuitous for several reasons. Not only does the incremental establishment of (and the construction of discourses around) the National Broadband Network impact on the issue of digital screen culture for Australian universities and society in general, there are also several more 'local' factors that need to be taken into account for specific institutions. This is particularly the case in relation to the tertiary education sector, which is currently undergoing major ideological shifts in its approach to the issue of e-learning and 'the Cloud.'
The researchers of this project have taught at the tertiary level for several years. Throughout our experiences with both undergraduate and postgraduate student cohorts, we have found that far from validating expectations or assumptions that all or even most students are passionate about the use of new media in educational and other settings, they are often unaware of many technological developments, uninterested in their use, and/or highly judgemental (in a negative sense) of those who do use them. Therefore, one hurdle that must be overcome by teachers who desire for their students to learn about – much less use – new media in educational settings is the need to gauge and understand student attitudes towards technology. Indeed, while utopian views of new media innovation are often expressed by institutions keen to adopt the latest innovations for e-learning, many students exhibit a dystopian perspective of new media, thus pointing to an apparent rift that does not conform to (stereotypical) assumptions about the interests, desires and capabilities of 'Generation Next.'
The significance of the present research is borne out in recent developments both internal and external to the higher education landscape. University-wide curriculum review initiatives are promising a fundamental drive towards a new paradigm regarding how universities engage with their students. Heavy emphasis is directed toward programs around the adoption of Cloud Learning and new media generally. Further recent internal developments at one Melbourne university have seen a growing emphasis on the use of new media for teaching with internal administrative initiatives towards online marking. Arguably there remain important questions that need to be addressed in relation to student preferences and competencies. New media-based initiatives such as a move to e-assessment are invariably premised on the twin assumptions that 1) students prefer to work with interactive devices in the virtual world; and 2) students are competent in their use.
A 2009 report titled Perspectives on the Future of Flexible Education raises a number of issues pertinent to the research presented here. Investigating the perspectives and experiences of thirty-two Melbourne university educators via interviews, along with those of ten students in focus group sessions, the report found that student participants preferred face-to-face teaching over online learning as it motivated (or 'forced') them to stay up to date with topics of discussion. On the other hand, the small number of student participants reported that they were easily distracted when engaging with unit material in the online environment. Students' digital competencies were also a matter of interest to the study, with one academic commenting that '[t]here's been the presumption that young people are digital natives but the repertoire of their skills is quite narrow' (Institute for Teaching and Learning, 2009, p. 60). The report concluded that:
students were happy to use the basic functions of DSO [online learning] but needed guidance and assistance to learn from tools such as Facebook and YouTube despite regularly using them for socialising… facilitating the adoption of flexible education also calls for strong support in several areas. Access to technology needs to be considered carefully rather than be taken for granted. Both students' access and ability to use the technology and staff capabilities must be recognised… While ongoing support is vital, embedding new forms of technology would call for support structures that are reliable and responsive to needs. Quality support is critical to success. (2009, pp. 60 & 69)
With ambitious plans to establish a Cloud Learning Environment at the core of higher education's pedagogical future, a number of issues need to be analysed and critiqued in order to fully appreciate the dynamic nature of higher education not only from the perspective of teachers and technology developers, but from the group that developments in e-learning are primarily directed towards: the students. The following analysis of student screen media use and digital competencies seeks to address several of the issues outlined in the ITL 2009 report in order to gauge what implications student perceptions and uses of new media have for ongoing shifts in higher education more broadly.
Research methodology
This article examines current undergraduate university student competencies, perceptions and interests in terms of contemporary (particularly online) screen culture and the implications of this for the growing use of new media in teaching. Primary data was collected using the survey entitled New Media: Perceptions and Use Survey Questions developed for this research by the authors of this current work. Convenience samples comprising a total of 367 completed surveys from university students in Melbourne and Geelong studying first-year units were taken in Trimester 2, 2011, and Trimester 1, 2012, respectively. The participants comprised 367 undergraduate university students. There were 104 males and 263 females with a mean age of 18 years. Some 43 different Majors were recorded with most students coming from Media and Communication (85 cases); Public Relations (48 cases); and Education (23 cases).
Data collated from the survey's preliminary questions highlighted that 72 per cent of participants were female and 28 per cent male. Ages of the participant group, which included several mature age students, ranged from 17 to 55 years old, with 89 per cent falling into the 18-23 years old bracket. 86 per cent of participants who completed the survey reported that they were enrolled in their first-year of university study. Reflecting the diverse cohort of the first-year students sampled, a total of 45 per cent of participants surveyed were undertaking at least one major in a Communications-related discipline (Media and Communication, Public Relations, and/or Journalism) as part of their undergraduate studies. Some 15 per cent of participants, many of whom had just begun their degrees, were still undecided on the focus of their studies. The diverse range of participants highlights that the results of this research can be seen as representative of a broader student cohort than only those mainly interested in fields such as Media and Communication Studies. This is significant given that it is the often Media and Communication students who are perceived to be more interested in contemporary screen culture and new media technological innovation.
The mean results for each question requiring a quantitative response from students are summarised in Table 1 below:
Table 1. Mean results for each survey question requiring a quantitative response
|Survey question
(hours per day)
|How many hours do you spend on average per day watching television via a television set?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day do you spend watching the television set for education?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day do you spend watching television for information?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day for recreation/entertainment?
|How many hours do you spend per day using the internet?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day watching/catching up on television shows using the internet rather than the TV set?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for work related activities (from which you derive income)?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for study related activities?
|How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for recreation/entertainment related activities?
Figures 1-9 below provide a more detailed representation of findings from the survey regarding students' use of present day television and online screen culture in different settings and for different purposes. Complementing these questions were further questions seeking qualitative data. These questions focused on the various types of websites visited and software applications used by students as part of their online activities in the following categories: 1) Internet use for everyday purposes; 2) Internet use for work-related purposes; 3) Internet use for study-related purposes; and 4) Internet use for recreational/entertainment purposes. The questions were phrased broadly in order to avoid leading participants to take a particular 'approach' to the question. As a result, a comprehensive account of the highly diverse answers provided to these questions cannot be depicted here in either verbal or visual form; nonetheless, we reflect in part on these responses in the following analysis.
Figures 1-4 below focus on how much, and for what purposes, students watch television via television sets (as opposed to online viewing of television programs).
Figure 1. How many hours do you spend on average per day watching television via a television set?
Figure 2. How many hours do you spend on average per day do you spend watching the television set for education?
Figure 3. How many hours do you spend on average per day do you spend watching television for information?
Figure 4. How many hours do you spend on average per day for recreation/entertainment?
It is evident from these graphs that television is, for the most part, viewed daily by students, with only 8 per cent of respondents reporting zero average daily use. On the other hand, the proportion of participants who reported no television use for the purposes of education (49 per cent) and information (25 per cent) was considerably higher, reflecting the predominant use of television for recreational or entertainment purposes. Figure 3 shows that between .5 and 1 hour per day are generally spent watching television for information (which may involve, for example, news, documentary or current affairs programs). This is in contrast to the 1 to 3 hours reported television viewing for recreation purposes. Most importantly, the above graphs provide useful contrasts with Figures 5-9 below, which focus on the amount and nature of daily internet usage by students. Of consequence is the two to five hours per day spent using the internet reported by most participants (67 per cent) – although an even larger amount of online activity was reported by a significant number of students also (see Figure 5 below).
Figure 5. How many hours do you spend per day using the internet?
Figure 6. How many hours do you spend on average per day watching/catching up on television shows using the internet rather than the TV set?
The mean results of the survey, as revealed in Table 1, appear to support the commonplace hypothesis that internet use is fast replacing television viewing as a recreational past-time and even as a source of information. In the vast majority of cases, the internet is not directly 'taking over' as the means by which students are always viewing television programs (i.e. instead of using the television set); nonetheless, the 37 per cent of students who do watch television programs online is important to note. The average (mean) result of just below two hours of everyday television viewing is arguably well below what have generally been (stereo)typical assumptions regarding young people's engagement with the television set. On the other hand, one potentiality that cannot be discounted is that subjects might have the television on while using the internet, and investigation into the extent to which this occurs is warranted in future research.
In parallel with the former questions regarding how much television is viewed by students for specific purposes, Figures 7-9and Tables 2 and 3 below highlight the numbers of hours reported in relation to internet use for work, study, and entertainment.
Figure 7. How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for work related activities (from which you derive income)?
Figure 8. How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for study related activities?
As outlined below, a total of 71 different responses were provided to the question of 'which websites are used for study-related purposes'; only two respondents reported that this question was not applicable to them. A diverse range of social networking and news sites were reported by a small number of students, with the most prevalent sites reported summarised in the following Table 2:
Table 2. Most common responses to which websites are accessed by students for the purposes of study
|Most common responses to which websites are accessed by students for the purposes of study (over 15 responses)
(out of 367)
|Google Scholar
|Electronic databases
Figure 9. How many hours do you spend on average per day using the internet for recreation/ entertainment related activities?
Comparing the mean scores obtained in relation to hours of online activity at work (.53) and online activity for study purposes (1.96) with the use of the internet for recreational or entertainment (2.69) reveals a considerable increase in the latter (Table 3 below). Only two students reported that they did not use the internet for recreation purposes. Again, a diverse range of (133) websites were reported, with the most prevalent examples being summarised in Table 3 below:
Table 3. Most common websites accessed by students for the purposes of recreation/entertainment.
|Most common websites accessed by students for the purposes of recreation/entertainment (responses with over 15 responses)
(out of 367)
The relative lack of engagement with blogs, Twitter and Tumblr highlights the importance of understanding what uses of new media contemporary university students are making of new media innovation outside the classroom. In addition, it is not clear from this survey how many students are actively using these applications by creating their own content as opposed to being passive 'lurkers.'
While Figure 6 above reveals that the number of students who do not view television programs online via websites such as ABC's iView or torrent sites is relatively large (40 per cent), internet usage clearly has become a more prominent medium for young students than television in contemporary times (see Figure 5). As with the participants' reported viewing of television (between 1 and 1.5 hours per day on average), the use of the internet for recreational or entertainment purposes far outweighed the online activities relating to study and work from which students derive income. Given the far greater rates of internet usage at between 2 and 5 hours per day on average (as opposed to television viewing) overall, there was also a much greater diversity of responses regarding daily usage. However, the most significant findings of the survey are revealed in the intersections between this quantitative data and the qualitative data obtained from additional questions relating to what websites and applications students used for everyday internet activities, and specifically for the purposes work, study and recreation.
Crucial to exploring the predominance of internet activity reported by students over their use of television sets is an investigation of what uses students make of their time online. 140 different responses were given to the question of which websites were visited by students on an everyday basis, with only four of these answers noted by more than 50 participants, including Facebook (225), YouTube (108), and Google (66). While a comprehensive account of most, much less all, websites visited by participants was not – nor could be –expected from such a survey, the responses to such broad questions often suggest as much by what they do not say as what they do. Major aspects of everyday internet use that might have been expected to arise more frequently did not figure in the survey responses, such as internet banking (12 responses), eBay or other online shopping sites (24 responses), and various news sites (32 responses). Presumably, such online activities were practised by a far larger number of students; however, potentially due to the increasingly naturalised place of the virtual in everyday life, such activities take less priority over massively popular sites such as Google, which has itself become in many cases synonymous with 'the internet.'
Significantly, 246 (67 per cent of) respondents reported that the question of how they use the internet in their (non-university) workplace was not applicable to them. Such responses might be attributed to the students either being employees in industries such as hospitality, shop retail, and so on, or to not being employed at the time of the survey. The majority of those participants who did report online activity as part of their paid work highlighted email, search engines, and various entertainment sites, which were not likely in the majority of instances to have been directly related to the students' employment. Only twenty respondents (5 per cent) reported that they used intranets or websites specific to their workplace, although when this data is linked to the number of hours of online activity at work noted by these respondents, it is clear that using new media technology is seldom a crucial facet of their paid work. On the other hand, the survey results reveal that the internet is clearly a more prominent means for students to obtain information and conducting for their higher education studies.
While the exact nature of student access to Google or Wikipedia, for example, cannot be surmised, it is evident that the vast majority of students' uses of new media are limited to certain activities. The reliance (or, in some educators' minds, overreliance) on online search engines may be borne out in the responses of 41 per cent of participants who highlighted their use of Google, along with the 25 respondents who noted their use of Wikipedia (although this answer may have been minimised by student understandings of many teachers' negative perceptions of the site). Significantly, this number is identical to the number of participants who mentioned electronic databases or e-journals as aspects of their online study. In terms of computer applications that were reported as used for study purposes, the only significantly reported examples were various email programs (reported 185 times), with Microsoft Word being reported 9 times as the second most cited application.
This present investigation supports the conclusions of the earlier Australian studies of ITL (2009) and Kennedy et al (2007) that internet use in the everyday life of Generation Next has increased with a number of (new media related) activities seeming to be 'naturalised' or newly embedded within the cultural practices of the sample, but that students are still not readily classifiable as active participants. As stressed earlier, a number of problematic assumptions are frequently made regarding student access and digital competencies by both scholars of e-learning and educational institutions that seek to 'stay ahead of the game.' Utopian discourses regarding the role and potential of new media must be balanced with a realistic assessment of their limitations, whether this be in terms of student access and capabilities, or simply their desire to undertake an increasingly prominent part of their studies online. Students' clear reliance on material provided for them on university websites and straightforward (or 'blind') Google searches over the development of research skills via electronic databases and scholarly journals may also be suggestive of the trend of students 'going online' for faster and 'easier' options. Several participants who highlighted Google as a means by which students use the internet to study gave an indication of this through the particular wording of responses, including: (a)'Start off with Google, then branch off'; (b) 'Google to look for websites to study from'; or (c) 'Whatever's on Google'. An acknowledgement of the limitations of the survey data obtained for this project is crucial to this issue. The researchers found that a number of misunderstandings on the part of participants occurred as to what exactly constituted a website or an application, reinforcing the need to interrogate critically the assumptions made about the online activities and understandings of Generation Next.
Further sustained research is needed into higher education students' engagement with contemporary digital screen culture. The perpetuation of utopian discourses in society regarding technological innovation as a democratising, transformative and 'inevitable' force, and the subsequent development of organisational policies and plans that arise from these, need to be grappled with – and not only in the educational sector. We have not sought in this article to resolve the immensely complex issue of how new media innovation should be adopted and adapted in (and outside of) the classroom, but to expose and explore the issues of how young people – those of 'Generation Next' – are currently engaging with contemporary screen culture. Thus, it is imperative that educators continue to develop the most comprehensive picture of new media perceptions and uses possible.
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Richardson, W. 2010, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 3rd edn, Corwin, Thousand Oaks.
Roberts, R. M. 2010, 'The Digital Generation and Web 2.0: E-Learning Concern or Media Myth?' in Yang, H. H. and Yuen, S. C. (eds.), Handbook of Research on Practices and Outcomes of E-Learning: Issues and Trends, Information Science Reference, Hershey and New York, pp. 93-15.
Sclater, N., Conole, G. Warburton, B. and Harvey, J. 2007, 'E-assessment,' in Conole, G. and Oliver, M. (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in E-Learning Research: Themes, Methods and Impact of Practice, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 147-59.
Selwyn, N. 2011, Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates, Continuum, London and New York.
Swierczek, F. W. And Bechter, C. 2010, 'Cultural Features of e-Learning: A Euro-Asian Case Study' in Spector, J. M., Ifenthaler, D., Isafas, P., Kinshuk and Sampson (eds.), D. 2010, Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age, Springer, New York, pp. 291-308.
Tapscott, D. 2009, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Wankel, C. in collaboration with Marovich, M. and Stanaityte, J. (eds.), Cutting Edge Social Media Approaches to Business Education: Teaching with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Blogs, Information Age, Charlotte.
Williams, D., Hricko, M. and Howell, S. L. (eds.) 2006, Online Assessment, Measurement and Evaluation: Emerging Practices, Information Science Publishers, Hershey.
Biographical Statements
Toija Cinque is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Deakin University, Australia. Cinque has written widely on various aspects of internet use and her most recent book is the co-authored workCommunication, New Media and Everyday Life (2012) by Oxford University Press. She is on the editorial Board for the journal New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences. Her teaching areas include communications institutions and industries, media texts and audiences, and the new media. Cinque's main research interest lies in extending the limits of conventional media studies; exploring the intersections between social media, legacy media and communications with other studies in history, celebrity, statistics, privacy and surveillance, public policy, media law and economics. Toija Cinque's forthcoming works include Changing Media Landscapes: Visual Networking and Communication, Digital Media and Everyday Life, both for Oxford University Press in 2015, and Enchanting David Bowie (co-authored with Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond) for Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015
Contact: firstname.lastname@example.com
Adam Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Deakin University, Australia.
Contact: firstname.lastname@example.com]]>
Published Online: March 1, 2015
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Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Volume 6, Issue 4 celebrates 6 years since we first launched Digital Culture & Education (DCE), an output of a successful Australian Research Council (ARC) grant entitled 'Literacy in the Digital World of the Twenty First Century: Learning from computer games' (Beavis, C., Bradford, C., O'Mara J. and Walsh, C. S.). It has been an amazing journey and we are undoubtedly continuing to grow with 2014 being the first year we have published four issues. As a completely dedicated open-access educational journal, we are not only dependent upon our cadre of talented editorial boards members, but indebted to them for their on going pro bono work, support and dedication.
DCE's success to date has been achieved through trust, collaboration and shared endeavours, particularly through special guest edited themed issues. This year in collaboration with Tama Leaver and Michael Kent, we published 'Facebook in Education: Lessons Learnt' This special issue takes the tenth anniversary of Facebook as an opportunity to critically reflect on role of that platform in higher education, whilst simultaneously engaging with some of the larger questions about the place of education online, questions which pre-date the emergence of MOOCs by a significant number of years. Then working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and co-supported by the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), DCE published 'Innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT)'. This special issue, edited by Darrin Adams, Kent Klindera, Christopher S. Walsh and R. Cameron Wolf, celebrates and shares the timely and crucial work of frontline workers, activists, researchers and educators working in the field of HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care. It is also the follow-up to an earlier special issue from 2012, 'Prevention as a solution: Building the HIVe'. Taken together, both guest edited issues offer relevant and applicable examples of digital technologies being leveraged, positioned and practiced towards community-based and led HIV prevention and care services in a digital era.
Thinking about the future trajectory of DCE, we are not only committed to remaining open access, but also equally committed to embracing an ethos of 'slow citizenship' over a trajectory of 'fast citizenship'. In this sense, DCE hopes to continue to publish work that explores how the tools of digital culture can be used to rethink not only how we live together with each other and machines, but also how we can leverage technology to create spaces for co-creation, co-production, debate and exchange that connect the local with the global. Why slow citizenship to guide DCE? Because:
Slow citizenship would not seek to retreat from the discomforts and constraints of the physical world into the instant gratification of action in the virtual world, bit to address the lived problems and opportunities that being presented to communities by socio-technical change. Slow citizenship would seek to create space to explore and live with the new (and old) forms of diverse identity that our new socio-technical tools might offer. Slow citizenship would create a space for old and young to talk together, share expertise and insight across generations and build common response to shared problems. Slow citizenship would create conversation about the socio-technical structures we are building, and out responsibilities with in them and to each other. Slow citizenship would seek to reconnect the digital and the physical, to build bridges between the city street and the virtual world, and how these can enhance each other (p.100)
DCE embraces the vision of slow citizenship put forth by Facer at a time more defined by checking in and 'sharing' photos, than engaging in conversations and sharing aspirations for a more inclusive and democratic future. As our world wrestles with the depletion of resources, expanding wealthier and more demanding populations, economic globalisation, shifting socio-political values as fundamentalist belief comes into conflict with Western capitalism, and the reality that science and technology is transforming what is inherent to human existence (Craft, 2013), a trajectory of "fast citizenship in which digital technologies are used to ensure that everyone has a their say" (Facer, 2011, p. 99), does not challenge humans' persistent confidence in an acquisitive, marketised, global culture despite increasing indicators of its destabilisation (Craft, 2013).
DCE continues to be interested in work that problematises digital cultural spaces in ways that reconnect the digital to the physical and offer new opportunities for children, young people and adults to engage in 'possibility thinking' and experimentation that is not dependent on commercial imperatives (Craft, 2013; Facer 2011). DCE hopes to publish more work that explores educational futures that challenge 'what is' in order to imagine 'what might be', "where 'what is' is a marketized, individualised narrative for childhood, youth, society and therefore education" (Craft, 2013, p. 132). We remain committed to keeping digital culture open to scrutiny and will continue to publish ideas, work and research that builds the capabilities and conditions for slow citizenship. This is because this intentional stance tips the market balance in favour of more wise 'possibility thinking' because it has the potential to problematise the texts and narratives of fast capitalism—education, technology, money and science—that blur the reality they describe (Agger, 1989). By unveiling these narratives in fast capitalism, through embracing slow citizenship, DCE hopes to publish work that reminds us individually, collectively and communally of our ability to imagine a preferable future where we live together and care for one another with the goal of designing a better world, built on trusting relationships.
In this issue
This issue begins with 'Facilitating dialog in the game-based learning classroom: Teacher challenges reconstructing professional identity' by Yam Sam Chee, Swati Mehorta and Jing Chuan Ong. Their article explores the challenges teachers face when enacting authentic game-based learning predicated on dialogic pedagogy in the classroom. Rowan Tulloch then challenges the debate around gamification, conceptualising the concept not as a simple set of techniques and mechanics, but as a pedagogic heritage and an alternative framework for training and shaping participant behaviour that has at its core the concepts of entertainment and engagement in 'Reconceptualising gamification: Play and pedagogy'. In 'Digital ontologies of self: Two African American adolescents co-construct and negotiate identities through The Sims 2', Tisha Lewis Ellison describes how two African American adolescent male cousins become co-constructors and negotiators of identity while playing The Sims 2. Her work challenges educators to acknowledge how students participate with digital tools in communal spaces that shape how their literacy and identities are constructed, and it adds to the limited representation and investigation of African American family meaning-making and identity via digital tools. In, 'Digital Culture and neuroscience: A conversation with learning and curriculum', Kathryn Grushka, Debra Donnelly and Neville Clement outline the challenges faced by teachers as they engage in curriculum work that seeks to integrate the capabilities of our new digital culture in the design of learning experiences. It also highlights insights into human capacities for learning offered by neuroscience regarding the interplay of experience, memory, cognition, emotion and reflection in learning. Finally Robert Nelson and Phillip Dawson discuss their invention of a conversation simulator (or conversation sim) which illustrates how conversation and reading can be integrated in any Learning Management System (LMS). Their conversation sim for virtual learning demonstrates how automated educational technologies can positively contribute to the ongoing reinvention of reading and conversation through thoughtful absorption in a text and verbal interactivity over a topic. Daria Gladysheva, Jessica Verboom and Payal Arora present study investigates the phenomenon of museum communication through online video hostings, either by using YouTube or a customized platform in 'YouTube as the art commons? Strategies, perceptions and outcomes of museums' online video portals'. Interestingly, they argues that as art becomes a cultural product to be consumed online, popular video portals such as YouTube serve as an important platform to facilitate this democratizing effect, with varied implications for the art world.
Into 2015
When Digital Culture & Education was conceived in 2006, open access publishing was not receiving the attention it does today. Our motivation for publishing DCE as an open access journal was simple. We wanted to make all articles available to education practitioners—especially classroom teachers and front line workers—who might not have access to an academic library, and to scholars from institutions who are unable to fund that access. Open access was, for us, a way of disrupting the hegemony of academic publishing to intentionally reach a wider audience, particularly anyone who might find the work published in DCE useful. 2015 will see DCE continue to grow, with exciting changes. We will be recruiting a new a co-editor, updating our website and publishing our first book under a first creative commons (CC) license.
We remain committed to publishing print and digital work that takes a critical approach to the issues raised by the increasing importance of new technology in all facets of society; in particular, research that examines the uneven uptake of technology, and perspectives on new media that emphasize its materiality, production, or environmental impact. DCE has an open call for proposals for the development of guest-edited special themed issues and cover art. Guest editors and artists should send a short proposal or image to firstname.lastname@example.com for more information.
Agger, B. (1989). Fast capitalism: A critical theory of significance. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Craft, A. (2013). Childhood, possibility thinking and wise, humanising educational futures. International Journal of Educational Research, 61, 126–134.
Facer, K. (2011). Learning futures: Education, technology and social change. London and New York: Routledge.]]>
Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Abstract: The current study investigates the phenomenon of museum communication through online video hostings, either by using YouTube or a customized platform. The videos uploaded by museums present a combination of educational and entertaining content depending on their objectives, attracting users to watch art content online. While the literature on uses and gratification is highly represented in media studies, few studies exist about the specific user motivations and gratifications of new media platforms in a museum context. Three types of users were identified in this study. The first type – art-oriented users – display extrinsic motivation towards art exploration and seek for videos with educational content. The second type and the most widespread on these spaces – entertainment-oriented users – are intrinsically motivated and concentrate on the entertaining content of museum videos. Users of the last type are averse to exploring art content online, unless they are defined as non-art related. Overall, this paper argues that as art becomes a cultural product to be consumed online, popular video portals such as YouTube serve as an important platform to facilitate this democratizing effect, with varied implications for the art world.
Keywords: YouTube, art, edutainment, gratifications, museums, online videos, user motivations, Web 2.0
Since the beginning of the 80s, museums started to converge with a booming leisure industry and constitute an important part within the entertainment field (Burton & Scott, 2003). Art museums are commonly regarded as the most conservative and distant from this industry, although art and popular culture largely share a tradition in visual culture and storytelling. Since online video portals started to take off in 2005 with the launch of YouTube, videos are increasingly seen as an important tool for art museums to reach out to their audiences and fulfill their educational mission, at the same time offering a space for entertainment online.
This has raised important questions for museum managers, mainly focused on how to optimally attract users to their website through art video content online. How can museums' video portals engage users and what target groups should they cater to? In other words, how do museums engage users and what are the different motivations for consuming online art video spaces? This requires a review of strategies museums currently use in their online activity, followed by an inquiry into the nature of users' motivations to engage with these online spaces and their perceptions and gratifications from this activity. The current study applies a qualitative content analysis of three different video portals of museums with differing objectives and conducts interviews with online visitors of these spaces. Three different types of users are identified, which could further develop museums' online strategies and tactics in engaging audiences.
Overall, engagement can be a powerful tool to enable the digital sphere to be a new kind of 'art commons' where the public can consume art as a community. Online video sites such as YouTube serve as a fresh means to redefine what constitutes as effective communication strategies in the art world. This moves away from the long perceived image of museums being exclusive-oriented to one that is more open to public involvement. This paper focuses on the typology of user engagement with art based video portals, arguing that user gratification is closely aligned with community belonging, in spite of the overarching elitism in the art world. And while YouTube can stimulate a more democratic space within a much gated community of art enthusiasts, the quality of participation is challenging to administer. This situates museums in a dilemma as the current economic climate compels them to expand participation and yet, their persistent role as society's cultural gatekeepers compels them to exercise their expertise on what counts as quality art experience.
Review of Literature
Shifting Museum Landscape: From Custodial to Audience-oriented
Over the past three decades, the primary focus of museums has shifted towards the public, placing communication in a more central role. This has been a consequence of political, economic and socio-cultural changes in the museum field, such as the growing competition with other leisure activities, reductions in state funding and the advent of the Internet. Currently, museums have adopted a new social function as their mission in society, defined by the International Council Of Museums in 2007 (ICOM; affiliated to UNESCO) as follows: "A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment." [1]
Museums have thus moved from a custodial, collection-centered approach to a marketing, audience-centered approach, a move which can be divided in three development periods: a foundation period (1975-1983), a professionalization period (1988-1993) and the current entrepreneurial period (1994-now) (Gilmore & Rentschler, 2002). Whereas the foundation period of museum marketing started to stimulate visitor studies and educational research, the professionalization period marked a real cultural change with the addition of marketing departments and the distribution of power to external stakeholders. Currently, museums' accountability to society is evident in their primal function as educators of cultural heritage. Museums are expected to deliver three essential and interrelated services namely, education, accessibility and communication. Education, as the core element of museums, is focused on educating the public on the nature and range of its collection, while communication includes the nature and scope of the interaction with visitors. Accessibility is the proximity to the core product and the availabilty of museum services.
The Internet constitutes an important extension of the service industry which has changed the way of marketing and communication and increased the level of internationalization. Museums are compelled to go online, as these new platforms are seen to provide the public with added 'digital value' to their visitor experience. In addition, the museum can fundamentally benefit from an online presence as it is able to cater directly to their loyal visitors, reach a large potential public, and create new and surprising digital experiments to engage the audience with the upcoming exhibits (Lagrosen, 2003). In this latter area, American museums are at the forefront, mainly due to the long commercial tradition of its non-profit sector (Toepler & Dewees, 2005). New ICTs have inclined museums to be where their public is, and social media is becoming a preferred platform for new kinds of interactions.
For museum managers, it is not only important to educate and inform visitors, but also to stimulate discussions in order to receive feedback and ideas from the community (Arends et al., 2009). The interactive and open nature of social media applications is especially suitable for this purpose. The signficant increase of social networking sites (SNS) have ignited the need for more understanding of online user behavior and motivations (Russo et al., 2008). Besides this strategic opportunity for museums to create dialogue with their online visitors, there is also an opportunity for them to promote the museum online and generate revenues (e.g. web shops). However, against these benefits, museum management also needs to consider the potential loss of control over information and notions of quality within the democratic Web 2.0 arena of amateur knowledge (Arora & Vermeylen, 2013).
Museum's Digital Communication Strategies
Despite today's omnnipresence of the Internet in the museum sector, specific research on its adoption and reflection remain partial and limited. However, in recent years some explorative studies on the importance of online value creation have surfaced. Hausmann (2012), for example, argues that "[i]n times of a general information overflow, declining credibility of traditional communication tools and a continued shortage of resources in the cultural sector, the fact that these web-based applications can facilitate viral marketing and stimulate word-of-mouth is of special interest to arts institutions" (p. 174). This is strengthened by the fact that cultural institutions like museums usually offer an experience good whose quality can only be determined after consumption. Online word-of-mouth facilitated by social networking sites thus is an important marketing tool in creating a 'buzz' around exhibitions. However, this does require a good online communication strategy, which is usually limited by a general shortage of time and personnel within the arts sector (Hausmann, 2012).
Previous research on online strategies by Lagrosen (2003) distinguished three general strategies employed by museums: avoidance, content, and technological. The first one was an overall strategy of 'being there,' but at an absolute minimal level of effort, whereas the content strategy implied higher efforts in uploading content using simple technology. The last communication strategy is meant to gain a leadership position by uploading quality content on a technologically sophisticated platform. Interestingly, a study by Padilla-Melendez & del Áquila-Obra (2013) found similar strategies employed today, namely defender, analyser, and prospector strategies. The defender sees the online space merely as a complement and informational brochure. The analyser gladly uses the interactivity of such media as an expansion strategy, but does not take in an online leadership position like the prospector, who makes high efforts in creating high online value for visitors. Chung, Marcketti and Fiore (2014) take this art marketing literature a step further and developed three strategies for relationship marketing using SNS. The first strategy, awareness, includes placing content on as many platforms as possible in order to initiate relationships and raise awareness of exhibitions and activities among the public. The aim of the second strategy, comprehension, is to enhance visitors' knowledge of the museum mission and to strenghten existing bonds by using only a few platforms and integrating them. Finally, the third strategy, engagement, aims to create and sustain an online community by continuous conversations between visitors and museum staff. This entails a good understanding among personnel of the features of SNS.
Particularly, the popularity of YouTube (which since its start in 2005 currently takes third place on Internet traffic rankings [2]), has lured many museums. In 2006, New York's Museum of Modern Art solicited the public to weigh in via YouTube on the choice of finalists for their exhibition. This was seen as a new trend by museums to harness the popularity of online communities and cater to the new generation of art fans. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, curator Barbara London of MoMa claimed this to be iconic: "It's like Andy Warhol and his can of Campbell's soup, almost. (…) It's a brand. It's very much now. It's alive" (Lavallee, 13 October 2006). According to Yehuda (2008), the nature of video hosting allows organizations to personalize their approach towards consumers and to create a level of intimacy unbeknownst before.
This last remark is close to the argument of Burgess and Green(2013) on YouTube's participatory culture. They argue that online videos on YouTube should be understood in the context of everyday media practice. Users can now easily upload content and make sense of the world around them by narrating and communicating their (cultural) experiences. In this, uploading content on YouTube can be understood as a meaning-making process, and not merly as an attempt to work around the mighty media industry. This hits, what the writers call, the 'YouTube-ness of YouTube', or its shared culture. The authors further argue that it is not helpful to draw a sharp line between professional and amateur videos, or commercial and community practices: this industrial logic does not apply in a cultural system with its coherent cultural logic. According to Goldberg (2011), these two logics are inescapably intertwined with each other due to the economization of online participation. Whereas most new media scholars celebrate the liberating and empowering nature of Web 2.0 applications, scholars like Beer (2009) and Goldberg (2011) call for more critique of this assertions, stating that online participation places users in a network of power relations. Digital players like YouTube earn a lot of money over the backs of their users, while promoting themselves through such liberating claims as 'Broadcast Yourself'. Hence, within this new digital commons, empowerment can be deeply corportized and monetized.
Greenfield (2008) argues that museums need to address a range of issues before starting any social networking project like video hosting. These issues include security, placing software management in-house or outsourcing it, monitoring protocols for user-generated content and the assessment of the tool's success. New media professionals are furthermore faced with identifying and stating the project's mission and main objectives (Marty, 2007). When executed properly, these social media platforms can more fully engage users, promote the museum and create an online community (Kidd, 2010). In addition to functioning as an educational tool, entertainment is also recognized among scholars to be an important constituent of the online visitor experience.
The decision to open up an online video channel on platforms like YouTube is mainly based on its people-friendliness, cost-effectiveness and minimal technical demand (Greenfield, 2008). In addition, it includes a loss of control over content, which provides museums some leverage for experiment. Examples can be found where museums have passed down control to users by requesting for video contributions and limiting their role to mainly curating these videos, as for instance with the exhibition of the The Resident art group at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. On the other hand, there is also the strategy of customizing online video portals, such as that of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Their self-developed video portal ArtBabble is considered as a best practice within the field. Museum staff named several reasons for keeping control over their online video content (and those of partner institutions), which involved among others the creation of a cost-effective space for high definition videos with no advertising disturbing the view (as opposed to the highly commercial YouTube), the ability to design their own governance protocols and to build an online brand (cooperatively), and last but not least, providing a specific and unique platform for a niche community of art lovers (Stein et al., 2010).
Users of online museum videos
In the past, visitors were seen as 'zombies' mindlessly taking in what the museum host told them, but todays' online marketing by museums reflect a changing mind-set (Hooper-Greenhill, 2013). Web 2.0 platforms such as video hostings allow users to participate more fully in cultural issues, control the information they receive from these media and enable them to provide feedback. Besides being a "powerful educational and motivational tool" (Duffy, 2008: 124), online video platforms are also a significant discovery tool, where users encounter novel content.
Kidd (2010) argues that if users of museum websites and related social media find these spaces attractive, the level of users' awareness and loyalty towards museums rises. In addition, Arends et al. (2009) emphasizes the participatory attitude of users online: as online visitors are able to create art online, which can be viewed and commented on by others, these spaces can add value to the visitor experience. While these studies are helpful, there is insufficient literature in this area, particularly on the range of motivations and behaviors of users in museum studies. Hence, we adopt the enjoyment or gratifications framing of new media use to look into the user's motivations in choosing certain media, as the type of pleasure gained from media shapes individual's evaluation and perception of the larger context at hand, in this case, the museums (Ruggiero, 2000).
Gratifications are highly dependent on the needs or motivations consumers have to fulfill in their media usage and vice versa. The study by Lin et al. (2010) for example builds upon the premise that informal learning on museum websites is influenced by the emotional experience and enjoyment of these spaces. We identify three prime motivations here that lead users to discover museums' online video spaces, inspired by the model of pleasures presented by Bosshart and Macconi (1998, in Vorderer, 2001): entertainment, education and socialization.
Even though entertainment appears to be the strongest motivation behind media use, people also seek pleasures from gaining knowledge (Bryant & Vorderer, 2013). These users show a strong preference towards learning that is especially apparent within the museum context. Mediated learning is especially deemed effective when it brings enjoyment which highlights the importance of the socio-technical archicture of the media space, as argued by Lin et al. (2010). In their study of museum websites, they find that important design characteristics for encouraging informal learning are novelty, harmonization of the space, and proper facilitations.
Finally, users also seek relations with others through the mediated space, which has been facilitated by the interactive web. These new Web 2.0 communities allow users to share preferences and pleasantries, to discuss and argue, and to participate in the intellectual discourse and exchange knowledge (Jankowski, 2006). Three motives for media usage, entertainment, learning and feeling connected to a community, are interrelated to each other, as users can have different motivations at the same time. Concepts as 'edutainment' and 'infotainment' for example show that the user's experience with media is often multidimensional. After all, many scholars argue that entertainment is an important prerequisite for the processing of information (e.g. Duffy, 2008; Lin et al., 2010). However, the literature does make a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. According to Ruggiero (2000), "individuals either intentionally seek out information or ritualistically use specific communication media channels or messages" (p. 9). When people are extrinsically motivated, they show goal-directed behavior in their activity where they purposively seek out certain benefits and want to meet specific expectations. Their online activity is cognitive and the entertaining aspects of the content have a less emotional impact on them (Novak et al., 2003). On the other hand, intrinsically motivated users are more experimental and affective in their behavior, and they prefer a bottom-up approach in their 'online journey'. As Bilgram et al. (2008) articulate, "intrinstic motivation results from the activity itself conveying a feeling of enjoyment, exploration and creativity to the users and enabling them to make full use of their potential" (p.441).
To conclude, museums have recently become more commited to their visitors, and in the production of their online spaces they take account of their user's preferences and desired outcomes. Museums therefore pay much attention to the way they set up their video portals while keeping an eye on their educational function. On the other hand, in the consumption of these spaces the context of online video platforms matters. Users gain satisfaction or certain gratifications out of watching online museum videos; they are engaged in the activity, feel a positive affect in its consumption or fulfill certain needs. Usually, they are motivated by a need to be entertained, to learn something and/or to socialize with persons with the same interests, emotions or morals, and are either extrinsically or intrinsically motivated to engage with this activity. Within the design of their online video spaces, museums must take this literature on uses and grafications of both old and new media into consideration. However, museum research is still scarce in this area, especially in the area of online video platforms, while many initiatives are currently taken up by museums. Therefore, this study aims to discern the peculiar motivations and perceptions of users of online museum video hostings.
To investigate the communication strategies employed by museums on online video portals, a qualitative content analysis of three museums' video spaces was conducted. This includes an analysis of the museums' activity online, their level of control over the uploaded content, the way they react to users' feedback, and the features of their video space, and among others their use of Web 2.0 features. These case-studies were chosen because of their distinct usage of the portal, either by simply using a YouTube channel (Metmuseum [3] of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), by collaborating with YouTube (YouTube Play [4] of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York), or by making a custom video platform out of private means (ARTtube [5], initiated by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands). The different operational models of these portals allow for a comparative study between museums, while the incorporation of one Dutch museum portal enables a cross-cultural comparison with the two American museums, both situated in New York. Note that ARTtube, launched on 9 October 2009, is the Dutch equivalent of the larger and more popular ArtBabble [6], a collaborative project initiated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, U.S.A. which launched on 7 April 2009 with six partner institutions, whose experiment was set as the example for ARTtube. As of autumn 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen also cooperates with four other Dutch and Flemish museums. However, at the time this research was conducted, the museum was the sole operator of the video platform, which allows a comparison between three individual museum portals.
Moving over to the consumption-side of these video portals, the motivation of users and their perceptions of these spaces, a two-fold method was used. First, a qualitative content analysis of users' activity and perceptions of these video spaces through their comments, appraisals, and ratings was conducted. This concerns comments on 12 videos for each portal, chosing 6 top-rated and 6 top-viewed museum videos on YouTube and the 12 most commented videos on ARTtube, creating a data set of 36 videos in total. Thus, a selection was made among the most popular content, rather than a random sample. These comments were then scrutinized for patterns and compared to categories taken from the literature, most notably looking for expressions of video's entertainment, education and socialization value.
Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten users of our case-studies, who were interviewed over Skype. These ten online visitors were selected by sending out online surveys over the selected portals and their respective social media, and were randomly sampled out of the pool of respondents. The online survey was only administred for two weeks and collected data from 100 respondents. Because the survey data was too small, no significant findings could be made, though a general picture did emerge. Therefore, this data served to shape questions for the semi-structured interviews, allowing for more focused enquiries. This does not take away from the fact that the sample of ten interviewees is still too small to take definite lessons from, but the interviews did shine a light on more complex questions regarding users' attitudes, perceptions and experiences with art museums and their virtual video spaces. Interviewees were asked what features of online art videos attracted them, which videos they prefer and what they took away from watching these videos, at the same time leaving room for their personal interpretations and reflections on the subject.
Results and discussion
First, the strategies employed by museums on their online video portals are investigated by analyzing video and social activity, and the characteristics of these three portals. This leads to a general understanding of uses of video platforms from the perspective of museums and museum communication. In the second section, the gratification users get out of viewing art videos online are further investigated through interviews with users. Lastly, we try to grasp the motivations behind user's behavior as they explore the Web for videos of their interest; we conclude by arriving at three types of users on these spaces. This classification will be especially useful for museums that want to get (more) visibility on the Internet for their art videos.
Museum strategies for online video platforms
Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art (popularly called the Met) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum build their online web presence on the popular video hosting site YouTube. The main difference between the two museums lies in their web strategy. Whereas the Met simply took an account on a video channel on YouTube, the Guggenheim set up a joint video project in collaboration with YouTube, HP and Intel, their main purpose being to organize a biennial of creative (amateur) videos. Out of more than 23,000 videos submitted to the YouTube Play channel, 25 videos were selected by a jury and were highlighted in the museum and on the channel. In this undertaking, the Guggenheim played out a collaboration strategy with commercial parties as opposed to the broadcasting strategy of the Met. This is similar to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's strategy of adopting a more experimental approach by designing a custom online video space, ARTtube. The objective behind ARTtube is to provide videos about art and design, the museum and its collection which are made by professional filmmakers. Dutch museums like Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen are for a large part funded by the government, either local or national (or both). However, for the ARTtube project, the museum received a generous contribution from the VSBfund, which is a donation fund.
In their YouTube Play project, the Guggenheim focused on the desire of users to create and share their content with others, with YouTube being a popular platform for such endeavors. Bernstein (2008) explains this notion by describing a similar museum project: "(…) the more we thought about YouTube, the more we came to believe that content created by the museum might not be as engaging as content created by others. Asking for visitor-created content seemed to be more in sync with the YouTube community." In the case of YouTube Play this indeed turned out to be a success, with over twenty-thousand creative videos from amateurs being sent to the channel. However, the number of total views lag behind the number of channel views, indicating that the project was more popular for its creativity and experiment than its actual content consumption.
While the Guggenheim only produced some videos concerning their project and the organization of the biennial, the Met was more concerned with producing videos about their art collection for educational purposes, which is in line with their mission statement: "The mission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards" [7]. The museum thus adheres to its image of an authoritative and expert institution, while also wanting to expand their audience reach through the popular and entertaining video platform of YouTube. And indeed, the number of views indicates that a considerable number of online users are reached.
ARTtube takes in a different position here, not only because its art videos are both in English and Dutch, with mostly English subtitling when Dutch is spoken. First of all, the navigation of the site is somewhat dissimilar to YouTube: although there is an overview of the latest videos and different playlists just like on YouTube, ARTtube also features news specific to the platform and allows for jumping to the next scenes in the video as pre-given by the producers. In a sense, the platform allows the museum to display professional videos in a fine-tuned socio-technical context for optimal information transfer. To this end, there is one specific feature that clearly distinguishes the platform from YouTube, namely its option to download videos from the site. In the Web 2.0 era, this is regarded among digital literati as a basic requirement that YouTube does not meet (Ito, 2006). On the other hand, ARTtube misses social statistics as likes (although videos can be shared).
With regard to content, the videos uploaded on YouTube Play are primarily for entertainment reasons, the Met almost exclusively presents educational content (e.g. with 'talking heads' of experts), while ARTtube shows a mix of educational and informational content and entertaining audio-visual effects, i.e. displays videos for 'edutainment'. This has some clear consequences in terms of interactivity and participation, although it is deemed common to have few comments on these museum video spaces (Mancini & Carreras, 2010). As expected, online traffic is more considerable when their participation is directly requested, as in the case of YouTube Play. This namely answers to the five main features of today's participatory culture: 1) low entry barriers, 2) support for creativity, 3) informal mentorship, 4) evaluation of users' activity, and 5) community building (Jenkins, 2006). The desire to create user-generated content (UGC) mainly lies in "connecting with peers, achieving certain level of fame, notoriety or prestige, and self-expression" (OECD, 2007: 4).
However, just as the other two platforms in our sample, little dialogue could be found within the comment sections. Users do provide feedback, but museums do not actively engage in responsive dialogue on video platforms, limiting receiver control (McMillan, 2006). One exception is a special series on ARTtube, the 'Peanut-Butter Post'. This highly interactive section was initiated for the duration of an exhibition of the 'Peanutbutterfloor' (just as the name says) by Wim T. Schippers. Visitors could sit down for a webcam and ask any question concerning the art work which would later be answered by the artist. In this case, specific efforts were made to stimulate mutual discourse on the video space, and also quite succesfully (during the exhibition, which lasted from March 5, 2011 to May 29, 2011, 675 questions were posed, and about 90% were answered at the time of the content analysis).
To sum up, the Guggenheim engaged in a commercial enterprise with YouTube Play, using a bottom-up approach while highlighting its authoritative position by composing a jury for its biennial. In contrast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art uses YouTube in a top-down strategy, taking control over the production of its videos. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen does the same with ARTtube, although its custom design allows for a more attractive and audience-centric context.
User engagment on museums' online video portals
From the interviews, some main features of museums' video hostings to attract visitors to these spaces could be extracted, namely the ease of access, entertaining and educative content, and the social platform it offers to users. These features can be connected to Bosshart and Macconi's model of pleasures (see Figure 1). Interviewees for example indicated that online museum videos induced them to pay a real visit to the museum, enjoying the "use of physical abilities" and eliciting a "pleasure of the senses" (Vorderer, 2001: 251). This is supported by several studies, such as in the explorative study by Bakshi and Throsby (2010).
Figure 1. User gratifications from watching online museum videos
The interviewees most notably showed a desire to be entertained by museum videos, which is surprising considering the strong association of museums with learning. These important entertaining features of art videos connect well to Bosshart and Macconi's notion of the pleasure of (ego-)emotions and is characterized by Green et al. (2004) as an immersion into a narrative world. When looking at the motives given in the interviews, five types of entertaining motives can be distinguished. First, users derive aesthetic pleasure from viewing museum videos, indicating for example that videos are beautiful, stylish, well-designed and have amazing visual effects. One interviewee responded on the YouTube Play channel from the Guggenheim museum in the following way: "I've got a visual pleasure through watching some fo the users' videos, they were produced in a very creative way." Visual characteristics of online museum videos thus have an important influence on users' affective perception of these spaces.
Secondly, there is the immersive component; people indicated that they lost their sense of time while watching museum videos, i.e. felt immersed into the activity. As one respondent formulated it: "What I mean by being entertained by the video… is when I am fully absorbed in it." A third motive was the empathy component; Users at times identified with the author or the main character of the video, for example in having the same ideas as him/her, or because of feeling connected with the author: "I watched that one-hour-video only because of Pogo, I was so excited and nervous about him" (about a participant of the YouTube Play Biennial). Fourthly, all interviewees indicated that they watched videos for the sake of escaping reality, for example boredom, seeking distraction from everyday activities, or to "explore something different from my life". Lastly, interviewees also mentioned a desire to manage their mood (cfr. Zillmann, 1988), to feel better or just to feel serene. One respondent even advised that: "(…) even serious videos, such as museum videos, should involve some humor (…) Humor makes it easy to watch, and it also raises your mood".
Although feeling mainly attracted to the entertaining content of museums' online videos, interviewees also recognized the educational function of these videos. They felt a desire to learn something new or to find more depth: "Of course I'm not watching these videos only because they are entertaining. I am interested in art and I want to know more about my favorite periods of art or special artists (…) I also feel self-confident when I know more about the art issues I am interested in." This provides them with a pleasure of personal wit and knowledge as found in other studies on cultural consumption online (Bryant & Vorderer, 2013). Moreover, some of the interviewees argued that they were more involved in the activity of watching museum videos online and remembered more information when videos were interesting and well-produced. Education thus works better when museum videos also have entertaining characteristics, or as Schweibenz (1998) argues, museum audiences seek both content and context and therefore museums should provide their visitors with 'edutainment' or opportunities for 'playful learning' (Resnick, 2004) in order to attract and engage them to a higher degree.
Basically, a key motivational factor for users is enhancing their socio-emotional state, i.e. the pleasure that users get from feeling affiliated to a community. Many studies have shown that visiting a museum is a largely social and group-based activity, which is engaged in collaboration with different subjects, such as family or friends. Spending leisure time on the Internet is no different, although it appears as a highly individual activity: relations are based here on virtual connections. Several motivations behind joining a virtual community can be mentioned, such as a desire to share information, to get social recognition for exchanging this information and to belong to a certain group. Interviewees in our sample for example indicated that they want to be viewed as an authority figure, and that they will only "write comments (…) when I'm sure somebody will read it. Otherwise there is no sense in it." Respondents describe this feeling of belonging to a community as a desire to communicate with people who share the same interests: "I also follow this art channel and participate in discussions, because I like most of the other participants there. Sometimes I share my point of view and it seems like other users care about what I am saying". Users thus seem to look for and place comments on those online museum platforms whose users will most likely share their interest in art. This opens up future avenues for research regarding the nuanced relationship between cultural capital, community and art consumption online.
User motivations for online art exploration
Having looked into the type of gratifications users seek when they engage with online museum videos and having distinguished the main characteristics of three museum video hostings with distinct strategies, we can progress by comparing both these consumption and production features in order to arrive at the peculiar motivations of users to visit and seek for content on these platforms.
Regarding the comments section, in YouTube Play, users mainly communicate their personal opinion about the video, the producer or its context, with few comments relating to art or museum issues. Many comments concern users' delight with the way the video is produced or the soundtrack is chosen and the modern visual effects that are used. In effect, users act as jury members on this platform, although their comments are mainly limited to providing positive feedback and wondering how the video was made and what is the story behind it. A significant difference was found in comparing the six top-viewed and six top-rated videos on this channel, as comments on top-viewed videos showed a lot of spam and 'trolling' and top-rated videos mainly provoked appreciative comments. This can be explained by the fact that top-viewed videos are displayed on the main page of the video site, hence are watched and commented by everybody who conciously or unconciously encounters the channel on YouTube. On the contrary, top-rated videos are placed 'deeper' into the site, and are thus found by those people that are interested in its content.
Due to the popular and highly commercial strategy of YouTube Play, which was clearly advertised on the YouTube main page, the channel pulled in a lot of online traffic which far exceeds that of the other two platforms and thus contains more comments. However, both the Met and ARTtube attracted a considerable (niche) community onto their video channels. The accessible YouTube channel of the Met provides a free and open space for discussions about art, which happens to a far higher degree than on the YouTube Play channel. Remarkably though, no spam was found on the channel of the Met, which may either indicate a high level of 'radical trust' in the online community (Russo et al., 2008), or strict moderation from museum staff. Furthermore, top-viewed videos on the Met channel showed more comments expressing personal opinions, whereas top-rated videos were more topical, specific, and served more as an exchange of information. Comments on the ARTtube channel are scarce, which may be explained by the fact that (at the time) the site requires registration for placing comments. This may have refrained users from spamming, but also from commenting. The videos that received the most comments predominantly show positive opinions about the video content and enthusiasm for its entertaining and educational content.
The differing nature of users' comments on the three video portals shows that different users seek different gratifications and are thus highly selective in their online viewing activity. Especially on YouTube Play many users weren't expecting to see art videos; comments show that they were annoyed and irritated by this discovery. Upon reading these comments, different types of users can be distinguished, which are either pleased or appalled by the educational content of museum video spaces, or are mainly attracted by its entertaining content (see Table 1).
Art-oriented users. These users are mainly interested in exploring art and their online activity is directed towards this end. They are usually looking for art videos on museum video portals and are mostly interested in its learning content, although they are also attracted by its entertaining features. In this sense, these users are highly extrinsically motivated because their activities are "instrumental to achieving a valued outcome" (Hoffman & Novak, 1996: 61), i.e. aimed at discovering new or in-depth information about art. Their involvement is highly cognitive and their online attitude is mainly positive. Art-oriented users can be found on all platforms, although their participation on YouTube Play is less obvious than on the other two portals.
Types of users
Interest in
Presence on
YouTube Play
Met museum
|Interesting, educational content that contains knowledge
|Navigation-al choice
|Entertaining content, interactivity
|Non art-related content
Table 1. Types of users on museums' video portals
Entertainment-oriented users. This type of user pays a lot of attention to the entertaining features of museum videos, and are rarely looking for art-related videos directly. They are most likely to be overrepresented on museum video portals and mainly look for attractive visuals, opportunities to escape reality and to immerse themselves into the narrative of these videos. Because they accidentally come across art videos that they deem entertaining, the educational value is of less importance to them. They are intrinsically motivated, i.e. their viewing activity is performed for the sake of the experience of the activity, not for any apparent aim. These users browse the web for hedonic values such as enjoyment and their online behavior is highly experimental. If they like what they see, they will be more likely to come back. This may have positive outcomes for museums who want to increase their visitor numbers, also because this type of user is highly sensitive to commercial and bottom-up projects such as YouTube Play.
Art-averse users. This final type of users is mainly found on platforms such as the YouTube Play channel, leaving comments expressing their annoyance and dissatisfaction upon discovering art-related content during their online browsing activity ("Why YouTube decided I wanna know it??"). Just like entertainment-oriented users, they are highly intrinsically motivated with the difference that they like to be in control over the information they receive. They avoid spaces such as the Met channel and ARTtube altogether because they dislike their formal top-down approach. Although they are averse to art content, when videos are presented as displaying creativity they don't mind watching them. However, they are also highly critical of these videos and do not refrain from providing negative feedback. In this sense, they put on their YouTube glasses and approach these videos as typical of this site: "YouTube formula #1. Take a DULL boring video… introduce "rapid cut" editing and cheap animation…and end up with… a BORING video with RAPID CUT EDITING and CHEAP animation" (one commenter on a video on YouTube Play).
In this day and age of Web 2.0, museums have a high stake in attracting and engaging their audiences online and thereby, museum management would benefit from more knowledge about the perceptions of users and outcomes of this type of digital commons. Considering the growing popularity of online video portals such as YouTube, this paper addresses the question of how museums can engage their users through online art video content. These digital spaces are seen as promising grounds for opening up the much gated art world and birthing new forms of public engagement. It is found that while art consumers online have individual differences in their gratifications and motivations, they do seek membership to virtual art communities and their consumption is affected by this collective participation. Even though these users consume art online, it is seen that they are first and foremost media users. Users bring with them well-schooled media practices, expectations and perceptions of digital spaces to these museum video domains. While contemporary museum video portals such as ArtTube, the Met Channel and YouTube Play are architected for democratic participation, the nuanced differences in their customized features give rise to diverse relations between these museum and their audiences. Other factors that influence user engagements within these novel art spheres are institutional funding and management strategies, commercial collaborations and institutional worldview on their role as experts and gatekeepers in this new media age.
Furthermore, this paper reveals three types of users with differing gratifications and motivations, namely, art-oriented, entertainment-oriented and art-averse users. So which type of users should museums attract on their online video platforms? Although entertainment-oriented users are by far the largest group encountered on these portals, museum management should make a choice between privilaging entertainment to meet the desires of this large group of users and their formal mission to serve art-oriented users who are looking for more in-depth knowledge of art. Platforms like ARTtube demonstrate that it can do both, provide 'edutainment' without being tainted by the commercial nature of YouTube and be recognized as a legitimate platform by a loyal art community. The balance between these two realms is an ongoing challenge as entertainment and education come with a long history of conflict in how we learn and engage as communities. Future research should explore the trade-offs that ensue in quality and expertise as popularization serves as an easier path to art markting in this difficult financial climate.
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Biographical statements:
Daria Gladysheva MA received a Master of Arts in media studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She is currently a Communications officer at DSM in Delft, the Netherlands.
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Jessica Verboom MA received a Master of Arts in media studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She is currently working at the Marketing, Communication and Commercial Department of Het Nieuwe Instituut, institute for architecture, design, e-culture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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Payal Arora PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She is the author of 'Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas' (Ashgate, 2010) on internet practices in rural India. Her second book, 'The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0' won the EUR Fellowship Award in 2011 and her paper on digitization of healthcare information won the 2010 Best Paper in Social Informatics Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
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Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Despite widespread interest in the use of digital games to engage students and enhance the quality of student learning, the teacher's perspective has been less extensively studied. The challenges that teachers face when enacting authentic game-based learning predicated on dialogic pedagogy in the classroom offer powerful opportunities for professional learning despite potentially engendering stressful experiences. In this paper, we draw on the conceptual frame of dilemmatic spaces to theorise and document challenges teachers encounter when learning to enact dialogic facilitation in a game-based learning curriculum. Based on coded interview data drawn from nine teachers, our findings suggest that teachers wrestle with tensions engendered by habituated modes of classroom teaching and the need to redefine power relations with students. They experience a gap between their existing professional practice when they embark on the curriculum—their being—and striving to perform the role of an effective dialogic teacher—their becoming. The (re)construction of teacher identity that emerges is contingent on how teachers respond to continuing professional development as well as how they deal with challenges they face in the classroom.
Keywords: dialog, dilemma, game-based learning, performance, identity, becoming
I Must Not Prepare!
Relax. Breathe. Be yourself.
This time I went unprepared. Or so I managed to convince myself. I didn't go through any readings this time, didn't run through how the discussion should go in my head but merely decided on an anchor for the discussion.
These were some points raised during the discussion; "Money can buy everything", "the teacher betrayed us", "everyone started to attack us", "we need to build up resources", "we need to be prepared". Each time a point was raised, my mind went into overdrive thinking of ways to bring the discussion "back on track". Turned out, it was a rather weak attempt to "yank" the discussion back to where I'd wanted it to go. The discussion became disjointed and in my opinion, had failed rather miserably again. Instead of being a point of reference, the anchor became the yoke.
(Teacher's blog entry, reflecting on a game-based learning lesson)
The teacher's blog entry conveys a palpable sense of heart-wrenching angst. It was authored by a schoolteacher, in the context of teacher professional development, while learning to support game-based learning in a Singapore classroom. Torn between the habituated practice of executing teacher-directed lessons and facilitating student-generated dialog on social studies issues fostered by game play, the teacher ruminated over a real dilemma: get her students to converse about issues that comprised her lesson agenda or allow her students to talk about what was meaningful to them based on their experience of game play?
This paper addresses the challenges teachers face when learning to master the pedagogy of dialogic teaching in conjunction with the use of authentic digital games. Teacher education programs in Singapore (at the time of writing) do not address dialogic pedagogy in any significant way. Dialogism is grounded in values different from conventional instructional objectives that revolve around teaching "content and skills." Consequently, transitioning to this new practice does not come readily.
In earlier lesson reflection sessions with the teacher, research team members had suggested that the teacher prepare for the lesson rather than construct a predetermined lesson plan for subsequent classroom execution. She could do so by reviewing the most recent in-game events and considering their significance for issues related to the social studies curriculum. Titling her blog entry "I Must Not Prepare!" illuminates the slippery terrain of negotiating change in the teacher's practice. She wrote about not preparing—"This time I went unprepared"—when we actually encouraged her not to plan the lesson (in the customary rigid manner). Furthermore, the teacher kept referring to the classroom activity as a "discussion" in spite of our efforts to contrast the concept of discussion, which connotes a convergent conversation whose trajectory tends to summative closure, with that of dialog, which connotes an expansive conversation that encourages and accommodates multiple voices and viewpoints (Bakhtin, 1981). As the teacher reviewed the topical ideas that arose during the class session, she reflected on feeling challenged knowing how to respond to students' ideas as they spontaneously emerged, causing her mind to go into "overdrive." The tension between fulfilling her classroom discussion agenda and that of genuinely facilitating dialog surfaced issues of lesson control, manifested in the reference to yanking the discussion to where she wanted it to go. Unfortunately, the teacher's metaphorical "anchor", an intended stabilising device, morphed into a burdensome "yoke" accompanied by a sense of failure.
The cited example makes evident the serious dislocation that teachers may experience when attempting to harness the power of authentic digital games for learning in the classroom. Unlike "serious games" (Abt, 1970) that tend to focus on the mastery of content and simple skills, "games-to-learn" (Chee, in press) challenge teachers' conventional instructional practices and invite reconstruction of their professional identity. In this paper, we identify and explicate challenges that teachers experience when learning to enact authentic game-based learning in the classroom.
In the next section of the paper, we identify relevant literature and key concepts to situate our research problem. We then establish our research context and specific research goals. The next section articulates the research methodology. It is followed by our data analysis and findings. We discuss the implications of our work before concluding the paper.
Situating the research problem
Research on game-based learning adheres to different ideologies. We can identify two distinct orientations. In the first orientation, members of the research community accept dominant schooling practices "as is" while looking to games to strengthen student motivation in learning (Miller, Chang, Wang, Beier, & Klisch, 2011; Papastergiou, 2009). Members of this community appear not to see or feel the need to interrogate why students are increasingly disengaged and unmotivated in the classroom. Instead, they remain preoccupied with the discourse of technology integration. In the second orientation, members of the alternate community express increasing alarm over how schools are failing to prepare our children and youth for the realities of the 21st century and suggest ways to frame and address the challenge (Craft, 2013; Facer, 2011). Friedman (2013), in particular, argues that K–12 and college tracks are not consistently adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace and preparing students to be innovation ready.
For members of the alternate research community, authentic digital games of the kind studied by Gee (2007) offer the potential to transform educational practices in ways that respond to the demands for 21st century learning and educational reform. Gee (2012) argues that good games are a model of 21st century learning because they are about doing, making decisions, solving problems, and interacting, rather than being about content. Content in a game facilitates and serves acting, deciding, problem solving, and interaction. Game worlds, Halverson (2012) notes, are the referential totalities of tools, practices, traditions, and routines in which actors make meaning of actions and interactions. Consequently, games are excellent tools for driving inquiry and meaning making processes. Good games develop situational know-how: the capacity to act in contextually appropriate and informed ways. The value of such learning far exceeds the "possession" of knowledge or its mere profession (Chee, 2011b). What can be learned with good games is "performance excellence" (Friedman, 2013).
The construct of performance is central to the work of the authors (Chee, 2011a, 2013). It is predicated on three key characteristics: (1) patterned behavior, the doing and redoing of meaningful repertoires of behavior (including acting and speaking), (2) reflexivity, an evoked self-consciousness of the doing and redoing on the part of the performer, and (3) double consciousness, a critical self-assessment of actual performance against an ideal or standard that provides the basis for further improving one's performance (Carlson, 2004). Based on the first author's theoretical construction, performance constitutes the lived manifestation of personal identity. Identity, in turn, is constituted by a person's knowing–doing–being–valuing manifested through engagement in situated action and participation in discursive practices (see Figure 1). It is helpful to think of knowing–doing–being as a three-colored, tightly interwoven braid wrapped around a central axial cable that represents valuing. The theoretical framing asserts the inseparability of knowing, doing, and being because they are co-constitutive. Furthermore, knowing, doing, and being are necessarily embedded within a larger sociocultural context of axiology because they are inherently value-laden activities (Ferré, 1996, 1998). Consequently, valuational dispositions ground personal biases, preferences, and choices (Dewey, 1938/2008). A performance-centric theorisation of human learning frames learning as a process of becoming (Semetsky, 2006) that progresses from a current state of being. It applies not only to students in schools and universities but also to schoolteachers, in relation to their ongoing development of professional practice to become better teachers. This theoretical framing helps us to better understand the challenges teachers face when enacting authentic game-based learning in the classroom.
Figure 1. The constituents of identity manifested through performance
There is limited published work on the professional challenges teachers face when attempting to enact pedagogical innovation with authentic digital games. There are two main reasons. First, published work in the tradition of classroom use of "serious games" largely conforms to the model of games to teach content and limited skills. This approach aligns with Prensky's (2001) definition of digital game-based learning as the combination of computer and video games with educational content to achieve as good or better results compared with traditional learning methods. It reduces educational games to an ICT resource directed toward conventional schooling and its associated goals. Innovative research on games and virtual worlds, such as Quest Atlantis (Barab et al., 2009) and River City (Ketelhut, 2006), focus on science education of a constrained, school-based kind. Such environments over-structure and over-simplify science education at the expense of the kind of inquiry advanced by Dewey (1938/1991).
Second, institutional and parental resistance has largely kept innovative use of games for learning out of the classroom. Consequently, most innovative work has taken place in situational contexts where teachers have less direct involvement, often participating in only a peripheral way. In the United States, for example, it is often the researchers who play a central role in non-formal, out-of-classroom learning settings (for example, Kafai, Peppler, & Chapman, 2009).
A notable exception is the research of Hanghøj that seeks to directly examine how teachers perceive, approach, and use COTS-like games in Danish and Belgian classrooms. This line of work is based almost exclusively on the Global Conflicts series of games. Hanghøj, however, consistently uses the terms "teaching with games" (Hanghøj & Brund, 2010) and "game-based teaching" (Bourgonjon & Hanghøj, 2011), lending a teacher-centric, instructional connotation to his writing. He also prefers to passively observe what teachers do with games in the classroom as part of naturalistic observation. Consequently, no professional development or active form of support is offered to the observed teachers.
While games have the potential to offer an inquiry-based, constructivist approach that allows learners to engage with material in an authentic yet safe environment (Becker, 2007), the pertinent question that arises is who will scaffold the teachers to teach differently so as to achieve this potential? Given the limited research on this topic, it appears that there is a real need to support teachers, via professional development, so that they may realise the power of authentic game-based learning.
As a construct, the term "dilemmas" was introduced into the educational literature by Cuban (1992) when he drew attention to messy situations in professional life that grant no simple "right" answer because they embed deep value conflicts. Denicolo (1996) argues that dilemmas are unavoidable given "the relativism of knowledge, different notions of what constitutes the 'truth' for the teachers themselves, for their pupils, and for those who set and examine the curriculum" (p. 60). Consequently, the commitments of mutual parties are not always in harmony. Because there are no inherently "right" answers to dilemmas, they tend to leave "a residue of guilt" or a "remainder of regret" whatever the course of action taken.
Similarly, Honig (1996) holds that dilemmas pose the question of difference and the ineradicability of conflict in specific and ordinarily familiar settings. Difference, she asserts, "is what identity perpetually seeks (and fails) to expunge, fix, or hold in place" (p. 258). Honig proposes the theoretical construct of dilemmatic spaces: the conceptual space within which moral subjects are positioned on multiple, conflictual axes of identity such that the subject's agency is constituted and enabled by dilemmatic choices and negotiations. Thus conceived, socialised human beings, as moral beings, inhabit dilemmatic spaces as a matter of course. From this there is no escape.
Fransson and Grannäs (2013) extend Honig's construct of dilemmatic space by inflecting space as a relational category associated with the concept of dilemma. Consequently, dilemmas are not conceptual entities but social constructions resulting from structural conditions and relational aspects in everyday practices, enacted through the execution of positioning and negotiation maneuvers based on personal values. Thus, a dilemmatic space also establishes a relation between human subjects and the negotiation, construction, and deconstruction of professional and personal identities. This theoretical framing of dilemmatic spaces furnishes us with a powerful conceptual tool with which to understand the challenges that teachers face when enacting game-based learning as a pedagogical innovation in the classroom. Much is at stake for teachers who engage in bona fide game-based learning in the classroom because a teacher's professional practice is firmly and inextricably located within an intricate web of epistemological, ideological, professional, social, and power relations in the workplace.
Research context and goals
Our research takes place in the context of fostering teacher capacity to enact authentic game-based learning in the classroom using the Statecraft X curriculum. This curriculum, designed for social studies taken by 15-year-olds, is based on the Statecraft X mobile game. It is played on Apple iPhones (see Figure 2). The Statecraft X curriculum addresses the topic "principles of governance," representing one of four key topics in the social studies curriculum for students in Secondary 3. In our school-based research, each student is loaned an iPhone with a supporting data plan for the duration of the curriculum. Details of this curriculum can be found in Chee, Gwee, and Tan (2011) and Chee, Mehrotra, and Liu (2013). Both papers reported on the efficacy of the curriculum for student learning in relation to citizenship and governance.
Figure 2. The town map of the Statecraft X mobile game
Our earlier work revealed that teachers found the process of learning to facilitate student dialog (Roth, 2009) in the game-based learning classroom difficult. In the present project, teachers had the benefit of professional and moral support from their school leaders in addition to an initial two-day professional development workshop that oriented them conceptually to ideas associated with game-based learning supported by dialogic learning. Like learning to swim, enacting an unfamiliar pedagogical role in the classroom constitutes a performance of teaching. The challenge is not about knowing what to do but being actually able to do it (as suggested by the blog piece that opened this paper). Thus, learning some subject domain, Y, is not equivalent to learning about Y (just as learning swimming is not equivalent to learning about swimming). Consequently, no amount of lecturing, questioning, discussion, or self-study can adequately prepare a teacher for enacting game-based dialogic facilitation in front of, and with, students. A teacher's capacity develops with practice over time. Representational modes of learning, based predominantly on language, lead to passive and inert outcomes. They cannot deliver what teachers need: the capacity for enactive performance.
In the research reported here, we worked with teachers to foster their capacity for dialogic facilitation in conjunction with the use of Statecraft X. The game-based learning curriculum is predicated on the pedagogy of performance, play, and dialog (Chee, 2011a). With respect to student learning, we seek to foster their dispositions and capacities to become active and responsible citizens—a performance capacity—because it makes little sense for students to merely learn about citizenship and excel in written tests. Consequently, with Statecraft X, students play the game in their own time, outside of classroom hours. Game play can take place anywhere—in school, in the shopping mall, at home, etc.—given the provision of wireless network connectivity. Scheduled social studies lessons are used by teachers to engage students in dialog directed toward making meaning of events and processes experienced during game play. Teachers interrogate the actions taken by students in the game and surface the values underlying students' actions. They also encourage students to reflect on the consequences of their in-game actions as governors of virtual towns in the game and to evaluate their own actions to foster the disposition of reflexivity. We refer to these classroom conversations as dialogic sessions. Given a typical class size of 40 students, we divide each class into two independent game instances of 20 students each. Consequently, two teachers participate in each research intervention, with each teacher engaging in dialogic facilitation with approximately 20 students. Given that the pedagogy is oriented toward dialogic inquiry and sense making rather than to teaching content, it is imperative for teachers to be able to elicit and build on student contributions in a manner productive for deep interrogation and reflection.
The next section of the paper articulates our research methodology.
Research methodology
Our research is based on a collective case study (Patton, 2002). Our data is drawn from nine individual case studies, representing the nine teachers with whom we collaborated. Our empirical work in schools took place between January 2012 and February 2013. Each cycle of the Statecraft X curriculum intervention lasted three weeks.
Our research participants were nine government secondary school teachers, of whom six were female and three were male. They taught social studies to 15-year-old students in Secondary 3. The teachers were recruited via a talk for school leaders and teachers organised by the local Academy of Singapore Teachers. Five teachers were "beginning teachers" who had less than three years of teaching experience. Two were experienced teachers with more than three years of teaching experience. The remaining two teachers were "mid-career switch" teachers. They entered the teaching profession as a second career. One teacher had taught for less than three years while the other had taught for over three years. The nine teachers came from five separate schools. Five teachers enacted the Statecraft X curriculum twice with different classes. The remaining four teachers enacted the curriculum once. As part of the requirement for ethics clearance, the teachers were given a detailed briefing on the objectives of the project and what was expected of them as participants. We secured written agreement for their participation. The teachers consented to having their classes observed and being interviewed after each class except the first.
The teachers were familiar with the Statecraft X mobile game. They were introduced to the game as part of the professional development workshop held before they commenced participation in the research project. This introduction required them to play the game, as a student would, for a period of about five consecutive days. The five-day duration represents a compressed version of game play, as the typical duration of game play by students lasts approximately 16 days. As part of in-class teaching activity, the teachers periodically used the game's web-based "Teacher Administration Tool" to share two graphs with their students: the Economic Wealth graph and the Citizen Happiness graph. These graphs furnish feedback to students on how the in-game faction (analogous to a political party) they belonged to was performing vis-à-vis other factions. Teachers were familiar with these graphs and how to interpret them in relation to emerging patterns of game play. The tool also provided teachers with detailed information about each faction (e.g. amount of gold, wood, ore; population size of various towns; inter-racial harmony; etc.).
Each curriculum intervention cycle ran over three consecutive weeks. There were six social studies lessons in each cycle, given that schools typically scheduled two social studies lessons per week. The duration of each lesson varied between schools. The range was between 45 and 60 minutes. Teachers were interviewed prior to commencement of the in-class research. They were further interviewed after each of sessions 2 to 6. Session 1 was exceptional in that class time was used to introduce the curriculum and game to the students. The researchers presented this session. The iPhones, funded by the research project, were also loaned to the students at the end of this session.
Post-lesson interviews with teachers were positioned as lesson debriefs and professional development conversations. They were conducted informally and directed toward engaging teachers in reflection on their just-concluded lesson and to address any difficulties encountered. The interview sessions usually lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. These sessions were audio recorded.
Data analysis
We collected approximately 40 hours of teacher interview data. Two coders carefully transcribed these interviews. One coder was a research assistant with a degree in sociology. The other coder was a schoolteacher seconded to the research project from the Ministry of Education. The transcripts were crosschecked in instances of ambiguity. The text transcripts were systematically organised and labeled to facilitate ready identification of teacher and interview session.
We employed a form of coding akin to grounded theory (Birks & Mills, 2011) in order to distill, categorise, and establish themes that appropriately and fairly reflect the teachers' articulations of challenges they faced while enacting their classroom lessons. We stress that it was not our intention to perform a grounded theory study in the full sense that may be implied by this term. As Corbin and Strauss (2008) point out, "[i]f the researcher is building upon a program of research or wants to develop middle-range theory, a previously identified theoretical framework can provide insight, direction, and a useful list of initial concepts" (p. 40). Our work is not oriented toward developing a complete bottom-up grounded theory from the data collected. Rather, it is located in the context of fostering teacher capacity to enact game-based dialogic facilitation with a view to encouraging the take-up of such teaching practice. Consequently, our analysis of data is oriented toward addressing this goal. Our findings may be colored because we embarked on the research process with an "appropriation model of innovation uptake" derived from a review of the relevant literature and used as a basis for securing research funding.
We used NVivo as the computer-based tool to assist in data management and manipulation, the coding process, and the subsequent distillation of code descriptors. This process was highly iterative, and it involved all research team members in dialog directed toward making emergent sense of the data and stabilising a collective interpretation that felt grounded and defensible. The coding work was the primary responsibility of the third author.
In this section, we present our findings of classroom challenges that teachers faced when enacting the Statecraft X curriculum. In the excerpts cited below, our collaborating teachers are not equally represented for two reasons. First, some teachers conveyed keener insights into their circumstance than others. Second, some teachers were more reflexive than their peers. We seek to share the voices of teachers as faithfully as possible. The cited instances convey how teachers wrestle with the process of change in professional practice. It is hoped that readers will not only read the excerpts but also feel the emotions that underlie them.
Classroom challenges that arise from reconstructing teaching practice
Facilitating game-based dialogic learning in the classroom constitutes a performance enacted by a teacher (and by her students as well). It entails more than simply having a requisite set of "knowledge and skills." Akin to learning how to swim, the first attempt is always the most difficult. In this subsection, we exemplify the quandaries of teachers as they attempt a new pedagogical practice. The challenges articulated here are not merely professional "problems" (see Section 2) that would find natural resolution with extended opportunities to practice dialogic facilitation. Dilemmas arise when teachers feel they are "letting their students down" because they are unable to rise quickly to the standard of professional performance needed, as exemplified in the opening teacher's blog entry. The moral dilemma is always: "what do I do now, in the present situation?"
Learning to think and act "on one's feet." Adele (all teachers names are pseudonyms) expressed her professional learning challenge in the following terms:
I totally forgot about the refugee arrival! . . . And that was actually what I had planned, as in like in my head, thinking of the refugee arrival and to link it to migration. . . . That was what I had in mind before I step into the lesson. . . . But during the lesson, as it was going on, yeah, then I sort of got lost in the things that they were saying.
Adele had made due lesson preparation prior to her class. Based on her understanding of the game and how game play was evolving, she was aware that the in-game event of refugees arriving in the towns governed by her students provided the perfect springboard for conversing about issues related to migration and immigration policies. However, Adele felt overwhelmed by what students had to say in class, leading her to "get lost" in the things that they were saying. Brenda expressed this idea succinctly when she said, "to me as a Statecraft X teacher, you really need to think on your feet at all times." As a teacher with less than three years of teaching experience and accustomed to teaching within the safe confines of a predetermined lesson plan, Adele had not needed to "think on her feet" very much before. Consequently, she found doing so challenging and felt disappointed being unable to keep track of multiple conversational threads effectively despite the availability of a whiteboard.
Pauline expressed the difficulty she experienced in terms of the need to be adept at multitasking. She said:
. . . most of the time when we go to the classroom it is just the screen and the board. But now I have the screen, the board, and then I got . . . I'm like thinking I've got to show the results but then I want to refer to my notes. The unfortunate thing is that our printers are not working well, so most of the time we would have printed out all these things as reference . . .
The "results" that Pauline referred to were the Web-based graphs of the game's economic wealth and citizen happiness scores. These representations allow teachers to convey to their students how various player factions are performing relative to one another. While teachers are used to working with just the projector screen and the whiteboard in a linear fashion, they can feel overwhelmed when they also need to pull up Web-based graphs and refer to their personal notes in a more contingent way. In this regard, Pauline added that knowing the members of the class very well would be a big help "[b]ecause having . . . you know your brain like . . . having to do so many things – you've got to think and then you got to know who's that and then . . . It . . . it does tax you a little bit."
Overcoming old teaching habits. When asked about the challenges she faced enacting the Statecraft X curriculum, Adele spoke of the difficulty "of really being a facilitator rather than the traditional 'imparting of knowledge'" that she was accustomed to. She added, "I think I am still used to the habit of talking and talking and talking and talking. Yeah."
In a more reflective moment, Pauline also shared:
And in fact sometimes because you are so used to doing things a certain way, and then you are very comfortable yet you are confident in that . . . it is what you are good at but because of that, it hinders you and then you have certain blind spots.
Later, Pauline added:
Yeah we are always prepared with PowerPoint slides and we are . . . And even if there is a discussion we know where to always go back to. And I think being used to that. That is a hindrance that I need to get rid of.
Pauline appeared conscious that her ingrained habits that made her feel "comfortable" and "confident" in her traditional mode of teaching and which she had become "good at" could lead to blind spots and hinder the take up of a new pedagogical practice. She also began to view the practice of instructing with PowerPoint slides, which facilitates returning to a point of departure following an unplanned digression, as a "hindrance" to the development of dialogic practice.
Maintaining flow and coherence in dialog. Teachers often struggled with the challenge of maintaining a natural conversation flow becoming of a dialogic classroom. Fiona spoke of this as "about being seamless – about just going into the virtual world and then back to S~ uh . . . you know, to Singapore, and then the real world." (The tilde character is used to denote interrupted speech.) As part of dialogic pedagogy, teachers were encouraged to draw connections between events and processes in the game world (referred to here by the teacher as the "virtual world"), in Singapore, and in the real world beyond Singapore. This art of expansive and relational conversation was initially challenging for most teachers until they got the "hang" of it. In a later interview, Fiona added:
. . . it's also pressurising because things may not go well. . . . Things may not flow well, you know and then there are moments where some . . . I guess in the beginning with 3R1, sometimes when I felt like "okay, oh no we are stuck. What should we do now?"
The excerpt above was uttered during the teacher's second intervention cycle. 3R1 refers to the class taught during her first intervention cycle. The sense of feeling pressured and of "being stuck" is palpable: what should we do now?
Teachers also wrestled with maintaining the coherence of conversational flow in the classroom. During her first intervention cycle, Pauline said:
But the low point was that I couldn't pick up y'know enough on these things and I felt like the session didn't . . . I felt like there wasn't a flow. I just felt like it was here and there.
In the subsequent interview, Pauline also referred to the ideas as being "disconnected." Fiona expressed her difficulty as: "I felt that there was a bit of a jump." These utterances illustrate the challenge teachers experience in orchestrating and managing the smooth flow of dialog so that the classroom conversation does not feel patchy and like being "here and there."
Dropping points and missing opportunities to interrogate ideas. When asked to identify a low point after one of her classes, Pauline said:
Lowest point, the first one would be the dropping of points. Because, yeah, I think as a teacher you always look out for teachable moments. It could be the teaching of values, I mean, um, so I thought you know when the students said "I don't really care about the people" you know, I thought . . . yeap that was one – why do you not care, that is so obvious that people would be one of the most crucial, because without people then you will not have the town, you know.
Pauline regretted failing to seize the opportunity to foreground a pertinent point about a government's attitude—not caring—toward its people. Consequently, a "teachable moment" was lost, and a "point was dropped," much to her distress. Fiona shared a similar sentiment:
. . . one of the difficulties would be as you said, really thinking on the spot and trying to link IMMEDIATELY whatever the students say to a concept or to a learning point. And . . . yeah. That I still find difficult. And I think that it takes quite a lot of time to get the hang of it. [Word in uppercase denotes speech emphasis.]
The excerpts above illustrate teacher frustration with letting slip some powerful opportunities for learning that their students' utterances offered as they wrestled with the challenges of a new teaching practice.
Teachers also experienced uncertainty over what they should or should not say. For example, Pauline shared:
. . . when I was in intervention 1, we were carrying that out, I was afraid to share my thoughts because I didn't know whether I would give the game away or give anything away. So I wasn't quite sure of the balance.
In this instance, we had sensitised teachers to avoid "teaching content as content." In the process of making meaning of this statement, teachers sometimes interpreted the statement to mean that they should not share their own thinking with the students. Fortunately, as part of the interview sessions, we were able to clarify that facilitating student dialog did not imply that they were precluded from sharing their own thinking with their students.
Classroom culture and the need to redefine relations with students
It is difficult to develop a dialogic classroom culture if teachers are accustomed to an authority position with respect to subject matter. Several teachers expressed the importance of developing rapport with students for dialogic facilitation to be effective. Noreen, for example, said that "rapport must be built very strongly such that uh the students are feel comfortable enough to really talk and verbalise their opinion." Stephen further illuminated this issue:
. . . yeah I'll just be very painfully honest. Okay. I mean after communicating with my students today, I think I really got to understand them on a deeper level. . . . Okay. These sessions like that do help. But then I realized that many of them actually really have a fear of speaking up. A deep-seated fear of speaking up and a fear of being judged.
Stephen was referring to the 22 students (half the intervention class) whose dialogic sessions he was facilitating and for whom he was their regular social studies teacher. Things had not been going well during his first intervention cycle. His students were unresponsive to his attempts to open up conversations. The students were top academic scorers and belonged to the best class in their cohort. They were known amongst schoolteachers as "high performers." It was an epiphanic moment for Stephen when he shared "in painful honesty" that these students, based on conventional classroom culture, had a "deep-seated fear of speaking up and a fear of being judged."
Brenda, who was from a different school, had a different experience:
I did fairly well in the sense that um, I guess that I have an added advantage because I taught quite a number of them last year. So I already had a rapport with a few of them, so I get their respect and the kind of cordial relationship. So the students are very open mmm with me, I don't think anybody was reserved in asking questions.
As researchers, we sensed a deeper factor at work. While Stephen and Brenda appeared satisfied and comfortable framing the issue as one of student rapport, Brenda, we believe, got closer to the crux of the matter when she said:
I am more to the side where uh I prefer to be closer to students. A bit more pally, rather than the other end of the continuum, because I believe that um if I have a good relationship with the students and things like that, the respect that they give me could be easily earned and uh . . . support from them is very um easily garnered. I don't have to be authoritative or authoritarian to earn their respect. But I earn respect by . . . by showing an example myself that when one person speaks I listen.
In an interview toward the end of her second intervention cycle, she added:
. . . initially as I you know, started as a fresh beginning teacher, it's really like okay, a teacher um doing the teaching. And um . . . it's more of top down because I'm the one having all the subject knowledge content. I have all the information and I know that . . . I clearly know that my students do not have access to all these. So I feel that I have an advantage over my students. . . . So I feel I have the upper hand. But you know as I do this um Statecraft X project, I find that it is . . . Okay, I [laughingly with emphasis:] descend to be of the same level as the student whereby I find myself learning a lot from the students and they are definitely in the capacity to teach me. And in fact, some of them they might even know more than me. And from a teacher, I become a facilitator. And at the same time, I am also a learner. So I'm of the same level as the students . . .
Brenda manifested an ability to reduce the culturally enforced power relation between teachers and students in Singapore schools and a genuine willingness to bring herself down to the level of her students. She expressly shied away from being "authoritative or authoritarian," preferring to be "pally" with her students. She acknowledged feeling that she had "the upper hand" over her students because she had content knowledge that they did not possess. But, most importantly, she declared that her involvement in the Statecraft X project led her to "descend to be of the same level" as her students "so I'm of the same level" as them. She also found herself "learning a lot from the students and they are definitely in the capacity to teach me." This attitude represents a significant shift in the relation typical between teachers and students in Singapore. It is also a significant marker of Teacher B's personal growth and of the development of her professional identity.
As Brenda professed, she is a mid-career switch teacher with limited teaching experience. Perhaps the years spent working outside the school sector contributed to the seeming ease with which she changed her attitude toward her students. Being relatively new to the teaching profession, she appears not to have been much influenced by deeply rooted classroom norms that sway teachers toward imposing and maintaining a power distance between themselves and their students.
From the foregoing, it becomes evident that established cultural norms can strongly influence how readily dialogic learning is assimilated into classroom practice. While conventional cognitivistic analyses of student learning processes and outcomes exclude consideration of power relations in the classroom, a sociocultural analysis necessitates it. Opening up analysis to the consideration of power relations suggests that it is important for teachers to be able to redefine their relationship with students. Reducing the power gap encourages students to articulate their ideas and make their voices heard so that productive learning can take place. Teachers who feel that their professional identity demands the maintenance of high power distance, especially in Asian cultures, wrestle with the dilemma of striking a practical balance between school norms and pedagogical requirements.
Our findings suggest that the challenges associated with shifting teaching practice gives rise to dilemmas in the professional life of teachers. From the perspective of theory, Fransson and Grannäs's construction of dilemmatic spaces, extended from Honig's original idea, possesses considerable theoretical merit. Unlike Honig and Denicolo who suggest that dilemmas are characterised by having no "right" answer, we propose that there may be situations where a "right" or inherently "preferred" answer may exist. However, the situation may still constitute a dilemma because the "right" answer remains out of reach to a teacher who has neither the means nor the power to attain that "right" answer. Consequently, a "remainder of regret" may be left as a situational residue. Teachers continually find themselves inhabiting a dilemmatic space when lessons do not go the way intended due to their still-developing dialogic facilitation skills. They may then either abort attempting to enhance their pedagogical practice (and feel a twinge of guilt about that) or try to master the practice and feel poorly about not succeeding. Either way, the outcome leaves some "residue of guilt."
As suggested by Denicolo, however, dilemmas can trigger deep reflection and lead to emancipatory outcomes through transformative professional growth. Brenda, for example, felt more confident that she could facilitate her students' development of 21st century competencies after she enacted two cycles of the Statecraft X curriculum. As she reflected on her learning journey, Pauline said, "you know I've really see how um, it has changed me." During her second intervention cycle, she shared that she was already adopting a dialogic approach in her teaching of another subject with a different class. She spoke of how the professional support offered "help[ed] me change the way I see my kids" (referring to her students) and of a newly found "openness to really hear and accept what the kids are saying." She also spoke of "my identity as a teacher, as well as a Statecraft X teacher, is that um the way I teach is different." She further emphasised, "I definitely take greater ownership toward the curriculum." These utterances are reflective of deep professional change. They illuminate the impact that enacting the game-based curriculum had on the teacher. When Pauline's colleagues suggested that taking up Statecraft X "seems like a lot of work," she responded, "I said 'sounds like it, but actually . . . I don't prepare!'" (cf. opening blog excerpt). Pauline's identity shifted significantly, and her professional growth was evident for all to see. With reference to Figure 1, Pauline's engagement in situated action, both in and out of the classroom, and her manner of participation in discursive practice helped her reconstruct her identity, as encapsulated by the knowing–doing–being–valuing of her reconstructed practice. Through learning as becoming, Pauline's identity evolved. She likened her journey of transformation to how a pearl is formed. Beginning with a small piece of dirt that gets into an oyster and irritates its very being, the process of dealing with that triggering event, albeit painful and difficult, ultimately yields an outcome of great value.
From the perspective of teacher professional development, our findings point to a crucial need to approach teacher professional development as intensive person-oriented work. One-off teaching practice seminars and two-day professional workshops cannot yield the kind of deep change needed to transform teachers' knowing–doing–being–valuing (Chee & Mehrotra, 2012; Flint, Zisook, & Fisher, 2011). The provision of continuing professional development is vital for teachers to build the capacities required for 21st century education and for them to be active agents of school improvement. For teacher identity to be impacted and for there to be sustainable professional growth, teachers must also begin to value learning outcomes vastly different from those that adequately met the needs of the 20th century and respond to the needs of a changing world. Change intervention and change management processes need to be instituted by policy makers to provide for greater teacher agency, participation, and voice in teachers' professional lives so that teachers feel empowered to create their professional future and contribute their expertise and talent.
Institutional systems, such as that of school, entrench structures and processes for self-perpetuation. If teachers feel compelled to comply with the system's bidding because their own work appraisal is tied to that of their students scoring high marks on tests and examinations, they are caught in a double bind. Such an environment leads to teachers resisting innovation, teaching to the test, and being unwilling to deviate from "proven success formulas." The ensuing institutional culture is one of risk aversion. To counter this culture, education leaders need to develop an environment that teachers perceive to be safe and an institutional culture that welcomes and rewards pedagogical innovation. Teachers need considerable support, in terms of resources and moral support, to step outside of their comfort zone and take carefully considered professional risks. Deep change to practice moves in tandem with development of teacher identity. Apart from time and space needed to experiment with new pedagogies, teachers also require ample opportunity to practice new ways of teaching because it is practice that makes practice (Britzman, 2003).
Working with nine teachers on this research project, we observed a spread of teacher responses to the challenges they encountered when enacting the Statecraft X curriculum. While some teachers learned quickly, others were more challenged due to a host of complex interdependent factors. Apart from institutional and situational factors, teacher identity also influenced the outcome of teachers' professional learning. We witnessed momentous transformational growth and emancipation on the part of teachers who adapted well to the demands of a new classroom practice. But we also witnessed teachers who experienced difficulty because they had limited control over system constraints that were, for them, fixed and non-negotiable. Consequently, entrenched systems, with their mandated rules, cultural norms, and assessment procedures, can stubbornly resist teachers' best attempts to enhance practice.
In this paper, we addressed the issue of challenges teachers face when learning to facilitate dialog to support authentic game-based learning. Grounded in our work on helping teachers enact the Statecraft X curriculum in social studies, our findings suggest that the key challenges teachers face are not technology centric but practice centric. At its core, the overriding issue rests on competing visions of why students should go to school today. Entrenched schooling practices carried over from the industrial era of mass production work against pedagogical innovation needed to move 21st century learning forward. Caught in the vortex of currents that pull backward to maintain the status quo and currents that pull forward to reform practice, teachers inhabit a dilemmatic space that requires them to respond to situations where the "right" course of action either does not exist or is unattainable to them when situated in the dilemma. Our data suggest that such dilemmas engender stress in the professional lives of teachers. Depending on how teachers respond, these situations may contain the seeds of transformational professional growth or they may hinder teachers from strengthening their professional practice. Challenges engendered by the need to change classroom practice and to redefine relationships with students create obstacles to building capacity for dialogic facilitation. For authentic game-based learning to find traction in classroom teaching and learning, questions concerning the assumptions and purposes of schooling need to be revisited by policy makers and education stakeholders. Will the crust of institutional and social convention continue to engender resistance to change or will insight concerning challenges to teachers' professional growth surfaced in this paper contribute to foresight for social good? Only time will tell.
This work was funded by the Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education, Singapore, under grant OER 02/11 CYS. Views expressed are strictly those of the authors only.
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Biographical statements
Yam San Chee is an Associate Professor in learning sciences and technologies at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research interests are in educational philosophy and game-based learning. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer Mediated Simulations.
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Website: http://cheeyamsan.info
Swati Mehrotra was a Research Fellow in the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, India. Her research interests are in teacher professional development, socio-cultural perspectives of learning, and game-based learning.
Jing Chuan Ong worked as a Research Assistant at the National Institute of Education, having graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Social Sciences, specializing in sociology. Her interests relate to youth and education.]]>
Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Published Online: December 15, 2014
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Published Online: December 15, 2014
Full Text: HTML, PDF
Abstract: Multimedia digital technologies mirror neural processes and capacities and their proliferation introduce new possibilities for learning. Not only does the new digital media have the capacity to instantly record and communicate lifeworld experiences unimpeded by the distance or size of the targeted audience, but offers the means to construct virtual reality environments which were previously beyond human experience. This finds the teacher confronted with a new array of modes and an extended concept of literacy through which to engage the student in learning and meaning making. Digital culture and its multiliteracies now present challenges for the curriculum work of teachers, both in terms of the integration of appropriate technologies and the capitalization of the sensory and memory capacities of students. This article outlines the challenges faced by teachers as they engage in curriculum work that seeks to integrate the capabilities of our new digital culture in the design of learning experiences. It also highlights insights into human capacities for learning offered by neuroscience regarding the interplay of experience, memory, cognition, emotion and reflection in learning. By aligning these strands, teachers can develop curriculum that align with the capabilities of new digital technologies with the capacities of students.
Keywords digital culture and learning, multiliteracies; neuroscience, digital technologies, curriculum, experiential and affective learning
New digital technologies, with their multimedia capabilities, are now our social reality. These multimodal devices now shape the ways in which contemporary society makes meaning and communicates. This poses challenges for our conventional understanding of "literacy" as we attempt to incorporate them into curriculum design and practice. In addition, neuroscience provides educators with new insights regarding the role of learning in the formation of brain structures and the role of the classroom experience (Szűcs and Goswami, 2007). Together, these challenges and new discoveries will require the re-examination of curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge.
Not only does new media have the capacity to instantly record and communicate lifeworld experiences unimpeded by the distance or size of the targeted audience, it offers the means to construct virtual reality environments which were previously beyond human experience. Communication, entertainment and availability of information, the emergence of techno-social objects or multi-media devices within communicative practice make possible the emergence of the 'low-tech cyborg' (Escobar et al., 1994). The cyborg is defined as 'hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality' (Haraway, 1991, p. 141), and student cyborg learning is firmly located in the lived social reality of the learners' life world and is increasingly gaining a presence in the classroom. The popularity of these multimedia devices has profound implications for our understanding of experience, learning and literacy because of the new possibilities presented by this digital culture. Any expansion in the repertoire of modes and their 'affordances' are active in representation practices and shape 'knowledge' (see Kress, 2009). This presents new challenges for curriculum design in a digital culture.
Concurrent with this burgeoning of digital culture is the enhanced understanding of the nature of human perception learning and memory provided by the availability neuro-scanning technology. This expanded knowledge of brain functioning provides a further resource on which educators can draw in designing curriculum (Clement & Lovat, 2012; Lovat & Smith, 2003). Of particular interest, in light of the ubiquity of new media with its multimodal capacities, is that human perception and memory are multimodal with memory being a composite "of the sensory and motor activities related to the interaction between the organism and the object during a certain period of time" (Damasio, 2012, p. 133). This reinforces the notion that curriculum work is more than just selecting content to be taught and learned, but entails the careful and intentional design of learning experiences (Lovat & Smith, 2013). Given the nature and reality of an expanding digital culture in learning, this paper explores challenges presented for teachers enacting curriculum as they grapple with the impacts and implication for digital literacy, the emergence of concepts such as edusemiotics (Danesi, 2010) and their impact on teaching and learning. Through an examination of associated literature, it challenges normative assumptions as to what now needs to be regarded as "literacy" in the wake of current technological innovations and capabilities.
Digital technologies and curriculum
The availability and widespread use of small digital devices like smart phones and computer tablets raises issues for teachers designing curriculum as this technology is a new sociocultural phenomenon, able "to combine the material, the social and the symbolic in an associative web" (Budka, 2011, p. 4). Digitization has meant that image, sound and text are now processed similarly by a computer chip. This is unlike the previous analogue systems where each different mode required different rendering processes as in the case of printed text and images (Cope & Kalantzis, 2004) or even other media types as in the case of sound. Jewitt (2008b) proposes that this altered relationship between production and dissemination disrupts the conventions of the relationship between audience and author, as different types of texts proliferate and multiple literacies or different semiotic systems come into play. Furthermore, Jewitt points out that the corollary of these multiliteracies is the multimodal nature of social communication (see Kress, 2013) and argues that communication and meaning making call on a diversity of modes including sound, movement and image, each with its own repertoire of semiotics.
Given the increasing presence and use of multimedia communication devices, literacy is presented as more than learning to read and write in the traditional sense, and now extends to the manipulation, mastery and use of multimedia technologies (Mills, 2010). In addition, these different modes of communication are shaping new sensory capabilities and operate as a personal meaning making apparatus (Buckingham, 2012). As a result, there is an urgent need for teachers to understand how the different perceptual modalities function in relation to learning and memory and how each modality is socially and culturally represented.
Concurrently, technological innovation has seen the development of sophisticated neuroimaging technologies that afford unprecedented knowledge of the architecture and functioning of the brain coinciding with the proliferation of multimedia devices. For example, Gross (2008) points to the coevolution of neuroimaging and the increasing need to draw on the semiotic language of images to create and communicate meaning. Digital imaging technologies now allow opportunities to examine and understand the role and functioning of the sensory modalities in relation to perception and the processing and storage of data at the neuronal level. Any new insights provided by neuroscience regarding the nature of learning, memory and recall have important repercussions for curriculum design in the new digital world. Thus, a trilogy of elements will need to be taken into account to achieve authentic curriculum design for the contemporary educational context, particularly in relation to literacy. The elements include: multimodal media; the expanded repertoire of semiotics potentiated in the use of multimedia; and insights into human perception, learning and memory made possible by neuroscience in dialogue with cognitive science. Using new media in curriculum practice is therefore more than replacing one set of technologies with another. It involves understanding the capacities of the new technologies and matching them to the learner.
New media and curriculum problematized
The evolution of digital literacy curriculum for the 21st century and the incorporation of new media and multiliteracies into curriculum design is a complex task and not just a process of substituting redundant technology with the more recent, for example the replacement of the typewriter with the keypad. Rather teachers' curriculum planning needs to take account of a divergent range of possibilities introduced by the new technologies and the new knowledge provided by neuroscience. A further problematic presented for curriculum development is the little known influence of the experience of using mobile digital devices on the cognitive development of individual students (See Mann, 2006).
As Lovat and Smith (2003) propose, a curriculum comprises a particular selection of knowledge, activities and experiences chosen and blended by the teacher in order to advance the learning of students. Curriculum development necessarily involves teachers in "selecting, sequencing, organizing and structuring knowledge, resources and activities" (p. 26). According to Lovat and Smith, this process of choosing and combining knowledge, resources and activities in a meaningful way is curriculum work or action and is informed by curriculum theory. Curriculum theory serves as a "linchpin" between the foundational educational disciplines such as psychology, sociology and philosophy, and curriculum practice. Curriculum theory, then, is a synthesis of knowledge derived from the foundational educational disciplines and experience of curriculum in practice as applied in actual learning and teaching situations. Experiences encountered in the practical implementation of teaching may provoke reflection on the adequacy of curriculum theory, which in turn asks questions of the educational disciplines.
New digital technologies challenge the manner in which curriculum work has been done in the recent past. Several key challenges include:
It was Vygotsky (1978) who observed that humans employ a range of tools to support and extend cognition and memory. Now the capacity of multimedia digital devices to extend human cognitive and memory capacities is beginning to be understood and potentiated. Mills (2010) argues that students generally learn to use multimedia devices in informal situations, but they can benefit from expert scaffolding in their mastery of the media that will extend their knowledge and understanding of "multimodal practice". It may then be possible to consider how the long-term use of these technologies alters and adapts the mind as part of the very being of the user (Mann, 2006), or builds their preferences and skills in some semiotic systems over others, such as animation over writing.
The dissonance introduced into curriculum work for teachers by the new digital technologies is further informed by the rise of neuroeducation (the considered application of the findings of neuroscience to education, see Geake[2009] and Goswami [2008]). There are several ways in which the influence of neuroscience might be brought to bear on curriculum theory and practice (Clement & Lovat, 2012). One is that neuroscience contributes to the understanding in disciplines like developmental, social and cognitive psychology (e.g., Cacioppo, Berntson, & Decety, 2010; Hruby, 2011; Willingham & Lloyd, 2007) and thereby indirectly contributes to curriculum theory. Another consideration is that neuroscience can be used to inform and modify the cognitive models which are adapted in theories of learning, and so contribute to the interpretation of behavioural data (e.g., Bruer, 2008; De Smedt et al., 2011; De Smedt et al., 2010; Hruby, 2011). Szűcs and Goswami (2007) believe that "mental representations can best be understood by combining behavioural and mental measures" (p. 120). In turn, these cognitive models or mental representations inform curriculum theory and this leads to modified curriculum practice (Butterworth & Laurillard, 2010). This dynamic interdisciplinary interaction portrayed by Butterworth & Laurillard renders the process of delineating the individual contribution of each discipline to curriculum work difficult, if not impossible.
Moreover, the interaction between experience and the neuroplasticity of the brain is of particular interest for curriculum work. Neuroscience has demonstrated that the plasticity of the brain continues throughout the course of a person's life and that all learning involves, and is made possible through changes in the brain's neuronal structure (Blakemore & Frith, 2005; Doige, 2008). Willis (2010) describes plasticity as "the ability of neural networks to extend, prune, reorganize, correct or strengthen themselves based on acquiring new information, obtaining corrective feedback, and recognizing associations between new and prior knowledge" (p. 55). It is this adaptability of the brain that makes learning and teaching possible. Neuroeducationalist, John Geake (2009) comments: "Our brains did not evolve to go to school" (p. 12). Furthermore, Goswami (2008) points out that the ability to read is a constructed rather than an innate capacity. Therefore, learning is actuated because of the plasticity of the brain and this is "experience induced" (Diamond & Amso, 2008, p. 136). Neuroplasticity underlies both development (which is experience expectant, where certain experiences are endemic to typical development) and learning (which is experience dependant, Galván, 2010). Thus, memory formation is a function of neuroplasticity.
Having outlined the challenges for curriculum work to teachers presented by (a) the emergence of new multiliteracies, a phenomenon accompanying the proliferation of digital technologies, and (b) the insights into the functioning of the human brain provided by neuroscience, attention now shifts to consider ways by which these challenges are being met in teachers' curriculum work. What follows is the argument for the need to re-evaluate the nature of teaching and learning given that new media learning experiences and how the student brain has now been significantly shaped by the use of digital devices, and their preferences for and engagement with particular kinds of multimodal learning. This discussion now considers three aspects related to the incorporation of multiliteracies into curriculum work: the evolution of multiliteracies in the current century with the attendant implications for semiotics and knowing; the foregrounding and limitations of attempts to embed technology in curriculum design; and the insights offered by neuroscience into the experiential nature of learning.
The evolution of digital literacy curriculum for the 21st century
Digital technologies and contemporary cultural behaviours have shifted the notion of literacy and expanded the concept beyond the printed text. Added to competency in reading and writing paper text is a set of technological and semiotic understandings and skills (Anstey & Bull, 2004; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Kress & Van Leeuween, 2001; Moore, 2011). The term "multiliteracies" conveys the notion that today's literacy calls for functionality across multiple forms of knowledge and discernment to identify the appropriate social context. As individuals are now deluged with vast quantities of information, an understanding of the constructed nature of texts has become vital as a broad range of platforms need to be evaluated in terms of veracity and reliability (Cazden, Cope, Fairclough, & Gee, 1996). The multiliterate student is able to seamlessly navigate between paper, electronic and live texts and their semiotic systems (Anstey & Bull, 2006; Kress, 2003; Luke, 2003) and they decode, communicate and collaborate to create across platforms.
Print-based models of literacy have been adapted to models of multiliteracies that have merit in that they provide a framework for analysis. However, the approach is a traditional one that sees the learner as interpreting and analysing rather than creating new meanings through new media. A consideration of Four Resource Model (Anstey & Bull, 2006; Muspratt, Luke, & Freebody, 1997) is useful here to illustrate the process is one of decoding, critical and semiotic image analysis as opposed to encoding, or creating new meaning through text production. This model proposes a continuum of four interdependent skills – code breaker, meaning maker, text user and text analysis. Code breaking, is defined as the ability to identify and use the semiotic systems of the electronic, print and live texts and understand how they collaborate. The reader then brings the broad range of literary, cultural, social and technological experiences to interpret and understand the text. The meaning making skill is not the creation of new meaning, but understanding the possible levels of meaning. The text user is able to transfer these skills to real-life situations. By understanding the structure, intent and meaning of texts the text analyst can make judgements about the reliability of the text and come to an understanding of it. This model is a demonstration of the essential initial stage of multiteracies, that of understanding and evaluating text. However, as a model of multiliteracies it is caught in the "physical-industrial mindset" (Gibbons, 2012; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2004), one that views the contemporary world as much the same as the past, except for the addition of technology. This view constructs learning as teacher-directed and "curricular," that is the learning is pre-determined and officially sanctioned, and learner as consumer rather than producer. As observed by Carrington and Marsh (2005), digitextual practices are blurring these traditional distinctions between writer, reader, producer and consumer and require a complex and sophisticated range of skills, knowledge and understanding. Lankshear and Knobel (2004, p. 16) have defined this "new literacies" as skills of accessing and using technology on various platforms "using and constructing hyperlinks between documents and/or images, sounds, movies, semiotic languages…producing non-linear texts, navigating three-dimensional works online and so on." New literacies, they argue, require "new learning," and a "post-physical and post-industrial mindset," which acknowledges that cyberspace operates on a basis of different assumptions and values from physical space. The student as cyborg employs external prosthetic devices or techno-social objects to communicate with other users on a network of information exchange centred on connectivity (Escobar et al., 1994).
Literacy, and what is to be literate has now become a dynamic concept in the 21st century. It challenges educational systems and teachers to remain relevant to their clients (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Provenzo, Goodwin, & Lipsk, 2011). Kalantzis (2006) has extended the pedagogy of multiliteracies while calling for a reflective epistemology in which agency is re-balanced to empower the learner and teacher/student relationships. This learning is re-configured to construct learning as "a dialogue of difference" (Kalantzis, 2006, p. 31). A transformative approach, where learning is negotiated and co-constructed in a "bottom up" methodology, centred on an enquiry based learning model. Knowledge is understood to be contested, complex and negotiated and values the personalization of learning journey (Deakin Crick, 2009). It encourages critical and self-reflectively understandings achieved through historical, cultural and personal insights. Learners require interactive thinking skills, material experiences and performative practices. "Each meaning maker designs the world afresh…then leaves a representational trace to be found by others and transformed once again" (Kalantzis, 2006, p. 20).
New media and curriculum design
Incorporating new media into curriculum design and practice ushers in a changed paradigm as traditional written texts are now in battle for dominance with the possibilities afforded by new media. The conceptualization of curriculum and literacy as a top down or the reproduction model in western curriculum is no longer appropriate. The living reality is that we have an altered range of semiotic communicative practices and these practices are fluid, co-constructed, mobile, and transnational. They range across epistemological fields and herald the brink of initiating new creative futures where students can initiate authentic learning opportunities that can respond to this new extra-linguistic field of semiotics or edusemiotics (Danesi, 2010). This field includes sign signification, such as aesthetic products, visual communication, new media, advertising, narratives, material culture, film and gaming or other performance based acts such as dance, body movement or drama, anything that is underpinned by sign based activity.
Jewitt (2008a, 2008b) has identified that the representation of knowledge as well as the mode and media are integral to learning. The New Media Consortium (2005) has placed emphasis on the development of 21st century literacy as, "a set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap … the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognise and use that power to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively and to easily adapt them to new forms" (p. 2). This will require the development of a much wider range of ways of thinking by teachers about: how students learn; how student brains have already been shaped by new media learning and the significance and power of their individual communication prostheses which equip every student with the capacity to represent meaning using multiple representational forms.
The power of personal mobile digital devices or learning prostheses corresponds to the call for learner-centred pedagogies that move beyond offering simply new technologies. It requires pedagogies that offer students greater levels of agency, social connectedness and autonomy driven by each student's access and experience of digital technologies. Students as knowledge producers take their digital prostheses into the rich world of daily experience and have already developed knowledge of working in digital communities of inquiry well before formal school. It therefore flows they will reject the learning metaphor of acquisition, as they have already gained insight into the richness of learning through participation, collaboration and/or production (Lloyd, 2013). Curriculum design will need to be underpinned by a range of transformative pedagogies that draw across different disciplines, modes and media to harness the existing multimodal brain development of students. These pedagogies will need to see a focus on creative inquiry and performance; learner-designed learning; inductive and creative modes of reasoning and collaborative problem solving through the iterative stages of inquiry, analysis, production and presentation.
Modern technology tools are driving teaching and learning to an understanding that the generation of new knowledge is grounded in the development of the brain and its inherent plasticity, its cognitive tools and imaginative endeavours. These have added a significant re-emphasis on "trans-disciplinary creativity". This rethinking of the relationship between technology and creativity (Mishra, 2012) shifts to a more intuitive engagement when learning. Mishra has identified a contradiction in thinking that creative problem solving occurs in-discipline. She argues that having the capacity to work creatively across varied domains implies multimodal learning and will require students to deal with contradictory knowledge and diverse semiotic systems and to develop the skill to break through these boundaries when learning.
With rapid advances and the uptake of the new digital technology the vision of curriculum has lagged (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Buckingham (2012) argues that teaching and learning has remained relatively untouched by technology while the lives of young people have increasingly become filled with digital devices, asking us to consider a re-emphasis on the significance of situated cognition. In situated cognition, the learning context is perceived as meaningful to the learner and the inquiry is grounded in their lived experiences. Buckingham (2012) advocates for a learning-technology-by-design approach, where the emphasis is placed on becoming a technological practitioner through creating artefacts. This approach applies both to the teacher designer and to the student designer. Creating through design involves critical reflection, problem solving, dialogue, application of technological processes and iterative creative acts. Both teachers and students need to learn through creative use of the technology (Mishra & Yadav, 2013) rather than be just trained in the technologies. As multimodal practitioners, students wishing to work with visual technologies require a repertoire of visual language and related visual digital technologies in addition to the knowledge of how images and other modalities work together in contemporary communication. The complexity of this new learning space may benefit from neuroscience insights.
Experience, learning and multimodality
Neuroscience has extended insights into the processes by which human knowledge is distilled from sensory experience received via the different sensory modalities. Neuroscience has contributed to the understanding of the innate capacities of the learner, the role of reflection in learning, the understanding of memory and the role of emotion in learning. From birth, children have the ability to extract patterns from the environment in their learning of causation and language (Meltzoff, Kuhl, Movellan, & Sejnowski, 2009; also Goswami, 2008). Hence, learning is not simply the reproduction of what is perceived through the senses, but humans come with the capacity to extract concepts from the world they experience. Furthermore, constructive learning involves an alternating pattern between independent states of external focus where information is taken from the external environment, and "constructive internal reflection" where the personal significance of learning, or meaning making emerges (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, & Singh, 2012). The implication is that facilitation of learning by the teacher requires recognition of the need for students to alternate between engagement with the external world where the focus is on the information and the internal processes of reflection and meaning making. Curriculum needs to be designed to provide opportunities for critical and reflective thought when using digital technologies and so connect to the lifeworld of the learner.
As Squire and Stark (2008) comment, learning is a process by which neural systems are modified by experience: "Learning is the process by which new information is acquired about the world and memory is the process by which this information can persist across time." (p. 242). Likewise Sah (2013) observes that:
All learning results from the observation, manipulation and storage of information, and the long-term impact of any learning clearly depends on the efficacy and accuracy of recall. (p. 113)
Additionally, Sah (2013) observes that memory formation is affected by the internal emotional state of an individual as well as the environment in which a person is located. Memory, like perception, is multimodal, rather than being amodal or unimodal (Arnold, 2013; Barsalou, Kyle Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003; Butler & James, 2011). Moreover, as important as cognition is for learning, it does not function in isolation from emotional and social supports:
Modern biology reveals humans to be fundamentally emotional and social creatures. And yet those of us in the field of education often fail to consider that the high-level cognitive skills taught in schools, including reasoning, decision making, and processes related to language, reading and mathematics do not function as rational, disembodied systems, somehow influenced by but detached from emotion and the body. (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007, p. 3)
According to Arnold (2013) memory is exhibited in two types: affective memory, which is to do with appraisal of good or bad experiences, and modality specific memory such as visual, auditory, sensory and motor memory. Additionally, Arnold explains that conceptual memory, or semantic memory, has to do with meaning, origin, usage and naming of experiences and supplements the other types of memory. Concepts formation is dependent on the other types of memory and is not found in a separate location of the brain, apart from modality specific stored memory. Moreover, as Duncan and Barrett (2007) explain, the separation of affective and cognitive phenomena has no basis on ontological grounds because the psychological distinction between cognition and affect is not reflected in brain architecture. Cognition can regulate and instantiate affect, and in turn, affect participates in cognition. Sensory processes are modulated by "core affect" which "plays a crucial role in all levels of cognitive processing, determining what people are conscious of, how they use and understand language, and what content is encoded and retrieved in memory" (p. 1186). Additionally, it is argued that confidence in facts regarding "the validity of experience… is rooted in core affect" (p. 1023, see also Storbeck & Clore, 2007).
The findings of neuroscience provide insight into the underlying neural structures that support human perception, the way in which experience is coded and stored for future recall and the capacity to assimilate new experience and learning into memory. Furthermore, the work of researchers such as Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), Duncan and Barrett (2007) and Sah (2013) emphasise that cognition and memory are not phenomena that can be isolated from affect and the social context. Additionally, both perception and memory are multimodal (Arnold, 2013; Barsalou et al., 2003; Butler & James, 2011). Memory recall involves both content and context and therefore includes the accompanying sensory and motor experiences (Damasio, 2012). It follows that the particular modalities foregrounded by multimedia will shape learner experiences and learner preferences, such as film or the moving image over written text.
Multimodality, then, is part of the way that humans perceive, make meaning from and store and recall knowledge relating to their experience and action in the world. Multiliteracies present a corollary to these aspects of human nature by asking how formal learning might be advanced by incorporating into curriculum practice the presentation of information in a variety of modes (to use the distinction between mode [the form of presentation] and modality [the senses that receive the information]) as proposed by Moreno and Mayer (2007). Hence, there are two aspects of multiliteracies relevant to the discussion of their use in a new digitally focused education. One is the appropriate and effective use of multiliteracies, that is, the combining of two or more modes of experiences in order to advance student knowledge in curriculum work (Moreno & Mayer, 2007). The other is to do with encouraging student agency by advancing their understanding and competence in their ability to deconstruct their everyday encounters with multimedia, and, in turn, increase their understanding, proficiency and creativity in their use of multimedia (Albers & Harste, 2007).
Issues raised by the ever increasing presence of digital culture and multimedia literacies in education invite questions around the role of experience in education and the representation of knowledge, and such questions are by no means new. In 1938, Dewey published Experience and Education in which he argued that the quality of the design of learning experiences by teachers has implications for the quality of learning on the part of students. Dewey's argument was that high quality learning was most likely to occur when students intentionally interacted with their environment and were able to deconstruct, reconstruct and reflect upon what they encountered and observed (see also, Dewey, 1933).
High quality learning finds the active student engaging in experimenting with problem-solving strategies increasingly accessed via digital communication, rather than being a passive consumer of information. For Dewey, high-level cognitive engagement and motivation to learn could only arise from appropriately structured learning environments where the student was recognized as an active learner and meaning maker. Knowledge of the type that would underpin purposive action could not be gained though second-hand transmission. When Dewey spoke of experiential learning he had in mind a certain quality of learning experience, whether formal or informal, that becomes grist for learning. In other words, students are active learners and that learning is an active response to the digital culture with which they interact. As Mishra (2012) points out, technology must facilitate and not encumber the learning process.
Dewey's insights were the product of his own observation and reflection of learning behaviour, and are remarkably perceptive especially in the light of recent advances in neuroscience that have observed the impact of the environment (both physical and social) on brain plasticity and development (Diamond, 2007, 2009; Diamond & Amso, 2008; Goswami, 2008). Work such as that of Diamond (2007, 2009; Diamond & Amso, 2008) emphasizes the reality of the gene-environment interaction in human development. The role of experience in learning and subsequently the multisensory nature of learning is reiterated by the neuroeducationalist Usha Goswami (2008). Szűcs and Goswami (2007) go so far as to suggest that: "education involves the shaping of individual brains via targeted experience in the classroom ('teaching')" (p.114). This insight accentuates the importance of teachers' work in designing curriculum that will be the reality encountered by students in their formal education (see Lovat & Smith, 2003). In line with Lovat and Smith teachers/educators need to be cognizant of the increasingly digital culture of the classroom, the complex nature of curriculum work and the need to factor in the innate and developed capacities of their cyborg students.
This article has sought to identify and explore issues related to the increasing pervasiveness of digital culture and the virtual world manifested through the increasing availability of multimedia technologies in small digital devices. It attempts to advance the discussion of the implications of these technologies and the use of multimedia in teachers' enactment of curriculum. Framing the curriculum implications is Lovat and Smith's (2003) notion of curriculum work which typifies it as a series of decisions that teachers/educators make regarding the content, processes and resources to be coalesced to produce engaging learning experiences. This requires teachers to have a level of mastery of the technology (Mishra, 2012) and to have an awareness of student capacities, interests and capabilities (Lovat & Smith, 2003) to aid student learning rather than these being solely used for entertainment purposes.
Curriculum design is not about the foregrounding of digital technologies but the pedagogical decisions about the interaction between modes, instructional method and sensory modalities in relation to solving problems, building concepts and selecting representational forms with which to communicate. The above can only be effective in action if there is acknowledgment of the role of the affect in cognition and in deconstructing and reconstructing ideas and information. This becomes increasingly more challenging when working with the digitally active and virtually stimulated learner who responds with the speed and complexity afforded by the digital experience. In the past these decisions have come second to content and teacher selected technologies. Furthermore, creativity and technology must be taught together and not in isolation, because creativity cannot function apart from mastery of the medium through which creativity finds expression (Mishra, 2012; Mishra & Yadav, 2013). Mishra (2012), citing the work of Root-Bernstein (1996), points out that although creativity is manifested within the discipline areas, the thinking or cognitive skills that underlie creative thinking are similar across disciplines. According to Root-Bernstein (1996) creativity is at the basis of cross-discipline thinking, with imaginative thinkers being able to translate ideas from one discipline to another. Additionally, recent psychological and neurological research affirms the place of creativity in education and its essential role in the preservation of future generations. Creativity underpins the capacities of individuals to adapt and invent for survival and the enrichment of our cultures and society (Zeki, 2001). The new digital and multimedia technologies present challenges to conventional boundaries between the various discipline areas and point to the fact that knowledge is seamless and transcends artificial boundaries. Hence, the question is raised: What influences do these prosthetic devices have on cognitive development, memory systems and mind modification (Mann, 2006) as well as personal meaning making?
Coinciding with the challenge accompanying the emergence of contemporary multimedia technology is the exponential increase in the knowledge of and understanding of the functioning of the human brain. In particular, brain plasticity and its inherent ability to restructure itself in development and learning. This restructuring is in response to experience, the synergy between cognition and emotion, and the nature and functioning of memory. All of the above are of interest because they add to the understanding of the use of multiliteracies and multimedia as they are applied in curriculum.
Curriculum work needs to be cognizant of an array of factors in relation to the design of learning environments and experiences. Teachers need to design lessons being aware of the interaction of modes or media, the instructional method and multimodality (Moreno, 2006; Moreno & Mayer, 2007). Multimodal learning is not a recent phenomenon but is used by civilizations both ancient and modern; however the media or mode of presentation varies according to the technologies used (Spivey, 2005). Moreover, it is obvious from Spivey's commentary that these multimodal presentations, regardless of the technology involved, engage multiple senses, perception, affect, memory, problem solving, communicative purpose and performative acts. The benefits of an expanding digital learning culture and multimodal learning is that it strengthens the neural fibres between the different areas of the brain and stimulus of a single modality activates stored information of multiple modalities, but further research is needed to establish whether this represents "stronger learning" (Goswami, 2008, p. 390). Nevertheless, the evidence Goswami cites indicates that multimodal learning does influence brain structure, strengthening connections between various areas of the brain. Further research will need to address the impact of the digital memory prosthesis on the brain development of the learner. Consequently, if multimodal learning stimulates brain plasticity in different ways, then, what are the implications for curriculum?
Motivation, engagement and learning are dependent on the interplay between affect and cognition. The fine line between real world digital practices, entertainment, engagement and active constructed learning is present in the decision making of all teachers. To reduce the function of multimedia in curriculum work to that of entertainment is to miss the observation of Dewey (1938/1963) that learning requires the active engagement of learners in problem solving. One question that teachers need to hold in mind in curriculum design is: How do we actively design problem creating and problem solving learning in a digitally driven curriculum? Research needs to be carried out into the epistemological outcomes of working across modalities. In addition, are there benefits for learners when they engage in problem-solving and production via their preferred modality?
Given the nature and reality of digital culture with new media pervading daily life, this paper has explored some of the challenges presented for teachers' designing and enacting curriculum as they grapple with the impacts and implications for digital literacy and hence teaching and learning in contemporary educational settings. It has plotted the trilogy of elements that need to be taken into account in curriculum design. Learning in a digital culture with and through new multiliteracies requires: multimodal media; the expanded repertoire of semiotics that accompany the new digital devices; and insights into human perception, learning and memory afforded by cognitive science and neuroscience. Additionally, it has argued that curriculum design is not about the foregrounding of technologies but the pedagogical decisions about the interaction between modes, instructional method and sensory modalities in relation to solving problems, building concepts and selecting representational forms with which to communicate. This is affirmed by the research that clearly articulates that human perception is multisensory as is the encoding, storage and recall of this experience. In other words, human perception and memory are by their very nature multimodal and digital prostheses replicate human functioning.
Multimedia technologies continue to have uptake across all generations and proliferate society. They have become more intuitive, sophisticated and developed in ways that mirror the neural processes and capacities that constitute learning. Hence, the teacher is confronted with a new array of modes through which to engage the student in learning and meaning making. Learners require interactive thinking skills, material experiences and performative practices (Kalantzis, 2006; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). This interactive thinking encourages critical and self-reflective understandings achieved through historical, cultural and personal insights. Creating through digital design is a student-centred learning by doing approach. Such an approach supports the constructivist ideas about learning and communicating knowledge over the traditional transmission model. It concludes that pedagogies that have the most chance of success are those that take into account the synergy between cognition and affect, and are aware of the strengths, limitations of the complex nature of memory. The research favours attention to the affective and collaborative aspects of learning, capacities scaffolded by digital devices. In the classroom this would see students orientating their inquiry from a personal perspective, sharing and collaborating with others in order to discover the relational aspects of the learning and selecting and building fluency in a range of semiotic systems. In the end, engaging students through multimodal learning comes back to the teacher's depth of discipline knowledge, and their expertise, creativity and fluency in the use of media devices to represent knowledge and the ability to explicitly teach these skills and insights to their students. Furthermore, the teachers' ability to utilize their adaptive capacity to shift their pedagogies for their learners and scaffold skill development in new technologies through observation of student skills and interests is important to successful learning.
Contemporary learning situations see teachers faced with the question of how to deal with the rapid shift to a digital learning culture and the creation and implementation of curriculum that harnesses and incorporates the potential of the new technologies. A conversation with neuroscience regarding the interplay of experience, memory, cognition, emotion and reflection in learning may support the development of curriculum that matches the capabilities of the new technologies with the capacities of students.
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Biographical Statements
Dr Kathryn Grushka is a nationally recognised Visual Arts & Design Educator, visual art education researcher, curriculum writer and artist. Kathryn is known especially for her work on the performative role of artmaking, imaginative becoming, reflective practice, adaptive knowledge and transformative learning. In teaching and learning Kathryn's research is centred on ensuring the most explicit links between research insights into cognition, embodied visual knowing and subjectivity insights and has led to a growing interest in digital learning and visual cognition, critical and performative pedagogies, knowledge as visual representations. Kathryn currently sits on international and national editorial teams for art and teacher education journals.
Contact: email@example.com
Dr Debra Donnelly is a history educator in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia, lecturing and co-ordinating undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Dr Donnelly's research interests centre on the role of the visual and media in the development of historical and global consciousness in an age of ever-increasing access through modern technology. This has led to the current interest in the impact of digital culture on teaching and curriculum and the role of image making in the exploration, communication and disruption of knowledge.
Dr Neville Clement is a researcher working in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is current research interests are in values in education, epistemic cognition and the implications of neuroscience for education. Articles he has co-authored have appeared in the Oxford Review of Education, the Cambridge, Journal of Education, the Australian Journal of Teacher Education, and Curriculum Inquiry. Also, he has co-edited International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing (Springer, 2010) and co-authored Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement (Springer, 2011).]]>