Mobile Social Media as a Catalyst for Pedagogical ...

Mobile Social Media as a Catalyst for Pedagogical Change Thomas Cochrane Center for Learning And Teaching Auckland University of Technology New Zealand [email protected] Abstract: The ubiquitous ownership and connectivity of mobile devices (smartphones and touch-screen tablets) coupled with the collaborative affordances of social media and the contextual awareness of geolocative augmented reality provide a rich platform for creative student-directed learning experiences. However lecturers invariably default to using these new technologies within established teaching paradigms that are predominantly teacher-directed and focus upon content delivery. However, based upon our experiences of implementing over 45 mobile learning projects 2007-2013, we have developed a framework for creative pedagogies enabled by mobile social media. The framework focuses upon collaborative curriculum redesign strategies and maps the pedagogy-andragogy-heutagogy continuum onto a mashup of new pedagogical frameworks including the SAMR technology adoption framework, three levels of creativity, and ontological pedagogies focusing upon conceptual change. The talk will illustrate this framework for creative pedagogies from a selection of mobile learning projects, and the researcher's six critical success factors for mobile learning .

Introduction Mobile device ownership is approaching world wide ubiquity, with 96% of the worlds population owning a mobile phone in 2013 . This ubiquitous mobile phone ownership provides unique and innovative opportunities for education, as mobile users have access to a ubiquitous connectivity and communications device, and cameraphones and smartphones provide users with a portable multimedia production, sharing, geolocative and multisensor-enriched tool. However, mobile device ownership does not automatically translate into users’ ability to learn (or teach) with mobile devices or to associate new pedagogies with formal or informal learning environments. New wine needs new wineskins, and we argue that mobile devices provide the potential catalyst (new wineskins) for new pedagogies (new wine). But what is mobile learning (mlearning)? We believe that rather than substituting or reproducing current pedagogical activities on small screen devices (such as PODCasting lectures and other forms of content delivery) mlearning provides opportunities for new pedagogies that focus upon enabling student-generated content and student-generated learning contexts . Cook and Sharples argue that mlearning research has progressed through three phases: 1. a focus upon devices 2. a focus upon learning outside the classroom 3. a focus upon the mobility of the learner However much of the mlearning research in the literature has been characterised by a series of small-scale shortterm projects . Rushby calls for mlearning research that moves beyond small scale comparative studies towards more innovative, strategic and sustainable approaches. There is still a significant focus upon devices in many mlearning projects, without learning from the growing body of published research literature. The author’s explorations of mobile social media in education are driven by a reconception of pedagogy rather than technological determinism. We argue that in a world increasingly dominated by mobile connectivity mobile social media provide the tools for this pedagogical reconception. This refocus can be viewed as part of a

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continuum of pedagogical change enabled by new and emerging technologies, and the emergence of mobile social media in particular, illustrated in table 1. Table 1: Post Web 2.0 Continuum 1995      

Web 1.0 Teacher LMS Content delivery PowerPoint Pedagogy

2005      

Web 2.0 Student ePortfolio Student-generated Content Slideshare Andragogy

2013       

Mobile Collaboration Connectivism Creativity Student-generated Contexts Mobile Social Media Heutagogy

While the three stages of the post web 2.0 continuum are not mutually exclusive, they do represent a progression in a reconception of pedagogy from teacher-directed to student-determined . The author’s own teaching experience mirrors the timeline of the post web 2.0 continuum:  establishing a one to one student owned laptop curriculum in 1999 followed by establishing the institutions first online LMS  exploration of social media for participatory education environments  leveraging mobile social media as a basis for authentic student-generated collaboration The author’s teaching experience shares affinity with Garnett’s discussion of “heutagogy and the craft of teaching” and the concept of the pedagogy-andragogy-heutagogy (PAH) continuum . The concept of the PAH continuum (Table 2) provides a useful measure of pedagogical reconception from a teacher-directed paradigm towards a student-determined paradigm. We also believe that this mirrors the development of the types of skills that todays higher education graduates need. Table 2: The PAH Continuum Pedagogy Teacher Locus of Control Schools Education Sector Cognitive Cognition Level Subject Knowledge production understanding context

Andragogy Learner

Heutagogy Learner

Adult education

Doctoral research Epistemic

Meta-cognitive Process negotiation

Context shaping

Today’s higher education learners need to become graduates who are creative life-long learners with a wide range of digital literacies enabling them to become active members of global professional communities. In their contribution to the 2013 European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS) call for vision papers for higher education, Ihanainen and Gallagher call for “metaphors to articulate, frameworks to bound, and pedagogies to employ” new learning experiences for learners that are appropriate for the future. Metaphors and frameworks provide the bridge between educational researchers and practitioners to collaborate on implementing new pedagogies. Laurillard calls for interdisciplinary collaboration in curriculum design, and this is the approach the author has taken as an academic advisor working with



lecturers from a variety of higher education contexts. Rather than disengaging lecturers with educational theory, we have developed a framework for creative pedagogies based upon the implementation of over 45 mobile social media projects from 2006 to 2013.

Communities of Practice Essentially a social learning theory , the concept of communities of practice (COP) has developed into a useful framework for education in general . We have found that supporting pedagogical transformation can be achieved through the establishment and nurturing of interdisciplinary communities of practice of lecturers and educational technologists (or technology stewards as defined by Wenger et al., ). These sustained partnerships yield more demonstrable curriculum impact than a traditional workshop model of professional lecturer development . The domain or shared interest that sustains these COPs is an exploration of the potential of mobile social media to redefine pedagogical practice and activities within a variety of educational contexts. The goal is to draw in peripheral participants – both other interested lecturers and associated course students – into active participation within these COPs to form learning communities that model real world experiences and facilitate a move towards student-determined learning as we explore collaborative curriculum redesign to achieve these goals. Many of our mlearning research project COPs have been sustained over several years and represent several iterations of implementation and evaluation , providing the basis for strategy building and learning from our mistakes .

Six Critical Success Factors Through an iterative series of implementing and evaluating over 45 mobile social media projects between 2006 and 2013 we have identified six critical success factors for implementing mobile social media projects that result in significant pedagogical change . 1. The pedagogical integration of the technology into the course and assessment. 2. Lecturer modeling of the pedagogical use of the tools. 3. Creating a supportive learning community. 4. Appropriate choice of mobile devices and social media. 5. Technological and pedagogical support. 6. Creating sustained interaction that facilitates the development of ontological shifts, both for the lecturers and the students. Our mobile social media framework is an attempt to mitigate our identified six critical success factors, resulting in a reconception of mobile social media from a merely social activity to a powerful educational tool, and reconceptualizing the role of the teacher and the learner.

A Mobile Social Media Framework for Creative Pedagogies There are three key elements of our developing framework: modeling a community of practice, redefining pedagogy, and designing an appropriate technology support infrastructure. The theoretical framework is essentially a blend of associated new pedagogies aligned with the PAH continuum. These include: Puentedura’s Subsitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition (SAMR) framework of technology adoption, Sternberg et al’s conception of three levels of creativity (reproduction, incrementation, and reinitiation), and supporting ontological pedagogies that move beyond knowledge construction towards reconceptualizing learners as active members of their chosen field. Kukulska-Hulme argues that mlearning provides a powerful catalyst for new forms of learning, and Laurillard emphasizes the critical role of lecturers in designing new learning experiences enabled by mobile devices. Hockly argues that mlearning provides a vehicle for redefining learning activities in a heutagogical paradigm, and we illustrate examples of what this means in practice in Table 3, outlining our mobile social media framework for creative pedagogies. Table 3. A mobile social media framework for creative pedagogies (modified from Luckin et al., 2010)



Locus Control

Pedagogy of Teacher

Andragogy Learner

Heutagogy Learner

Activity Types

Content delivery Digital assessment Teacher delivered content Teacher defined projects

Teacher as guide Digital identity Student-generated content Student negotiated teams

Teacher co-learner Digital presence Student-generated contexts Student negotiated projects

Cognition Level

Cognitive

Meta-cognitive

Epistemic

Substitution & Augmentation Modification: Redefinition: SAMR (Puentedura, Portfolio to eportfolio Reflection as VODCast In situ reflections 2006) PowerPoint on iPad Prezi on iPad Presentations as dialogue with Focus on productivity New forms of collaboration source material Mobile device as personal Mobile device as content Community building digital assistant and creation and curation tool Mobile device as collaborative consumption tool tool Creativity (Sternberg et al., 2002)

Reproduction

Incrementation

Reinitiation

Subject understanding: lecturers Process negotiation: students Context shaping: students create introduce and model the use of negotiate a choice of mobile project teams that investigate a range of mobile social media social media tools to establish and critique user-generated tools appropriate to the learning an eportfolio based upon user- content within the context of context generated content their discipline. These are then shared, curated, and peerreviewed in an authentic COP Enabling induction into a Enabling user-generated content Enabling collaboration across Mobile social media supportive learning community and active participation within user-generated contexts, and affordances an authentic COP of leaners active participation within a global COP about: Reconceptualising the role of Learning to become: Ontological Learning shift Reconceptualising mobile social the teacher Reconceptualising the role of (Danvers, media: from a social to an the learner 2003) educational domain Knowledge production context

Implementation Examples While we have previously explored the impact of mobile social media on the pedagogical paradigms of specific courses recently we have begun exploring strategies for transferring our framework across a wide variety of higher education contexts in different institutions both nationally and internationally . In each case we begin by establishing a community of practice around each project of an interdisciplinary group of lecturers and educational technologists who are primarily interested in exploring pedagogical change in higher education. We find a qualitative research methodology the best match to our goals, while using mixed methodologies to gather and analyse participant activity and feedback data we use action research to inform iterative development of the



implementation of our mobile social media framework with the goal of developing transferable strategies and design principles. Therefore our research questions are: 1. 2.

Based upon our emergent framework for creative pedagogies, how can mobile social media be used as a catalyst to introduce new pedagogies and assessment strategies within a variety of higher education contexts? What generic BYOD strategies and design principles can we identify from a variety of institutional contexts?

The data gathered is a collection of participant feedback via reflective blog posts, and curation of participant social media activity via hashtags from YouTube videos, Twitter, Google Plus, Vine and Instagram videos. Analysis of the curated social media outputs utilizes tools such as TAGSExplorer and tagboard (For example http://tagboard.com/moco360). We illustrate this approach with three developing mobile social media projects:  iCollab – a global COP with participants from New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Spain, UK and Ireland, begun in 2011 and continuing in its fourth iteration in 2014 .  MoCo360 – a global COP with participants from New Zealand, Colombia, France, and the UK, born out of a previous collaborative mobile film making project, MoCo360 was established in 2014.  DP4BYOD, Design Principles for BYOD – a national COP of three institutes of technology and three universities in New Zealand 2014 to 2015 (http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/learner-mobile-devices). In this paper we focus upon illustrating our mobile social media framework within the context of the MoCo360 project. MoCo360 is a non funded international group of like minded educators exploring the potential of mobile social media – and in particular mobile film making, for collaborative design of transformative student learning experiences. MoCo360 was established by inviting several mobile learning researchers and practitioners across the globe to form a community of practice focused upon exploring new forms of student collaborative projects, giving their students an authentic experience of collaborating on mobile film production. This COP was formed out of a re-envisioning of a prior collaborative project , and based upon our newly developed framework for creative pedagogies. Currently participants are drawn from: New Zealand, Colombia, France, and the United Kingdom http://goo.gl/maps/mlXEV (Figure 1). Figure 1: Google Map of #moco360 lecturers



Working across three timezones makes the use of asynchronous social media very relevant for communication, event scheduling and sharing of ideas. A Google Plus Community http://bit.ly/1fZPnUd is used as a hub to coordinate the activity and resources of the participating lecturers, who meet weekly via a Google Plus Hangout to brainstorm ideas and curriculum activities. The cross-platform Google Plus mobile App and the Hangouts App enabled participants to connect and collaborate from a variety of locations and from different institutions independently of the restrictions such as creating guest logins to each others institutionally hosted Learning Management Systems (LMS). The G+ community was made public, but contribution is allowed by invited users only. This was important to allow peripheral participation by interested people around the world, while allowing moderation of content by the core group of researchers and wider invited participants for feedback and input. A Google Plus Community also allows customisation and branding that is usually restricted within an LMS, and integrates into the Google suite of tools that are also mobile accessible such as Google Drive, Gmail, Picasaweb, and YouTube. Figure 2: MoCo360 Google Plus Community



A public face to the project is maintained via a Wordpress blog with all of the lecturers as authors and editors http://moco360.wordpress.com. Twitter is used extensively for asynchronous communication and sharing across the different geographic timeones, and activity and mobile social media resources are collated via a common hashtag #moco360. Utilizing a common hashtag enables automatic visual analysis of communication and collaboration via tools such as Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer Twitter analysis: http://bit.ly/1bwBNog (Figure 3). Figure 3: MoCo360 TAGSExplorer Twitter analysis



Figure 3 shows a graphical view of Twitter conversations using the project hashtag #moco360 at the end of the first iteration of the project in April 2014. Top Twitter conversationalists within the project are indicated by the relative size of the username node. The most significant nodes are the lecturers, followed by a group of ten students who also became significant mediators of the project and thus highly active participants of the project COP. TAGSExplorer also indicates that there are many peripheral participants to the project who while not being significantly active on Twitter themselves are still linked within the sphere of the projects conversations. TAGSExplorer is also used to export geotagged #moco360 Tweets to a Google Map providing a geographic view of the collaboration at http://bit.ly/1nfFhE2. Adding a geographical context to COP mobile social media participation via Google Maps provides another powerful visual model for students to conceptualize virtual participation within a global community of practice (Figure 4). Figure 4: MoCo360 Twitter Map April 2014



Figure 4 indicates that the French students were by far the most active in the sharing of geotagged mobile social media. The MoCo360 project began with the lecturers participating in the COP collaborating on designing several shared activities and assessments for their students (timetabled via a shared Google Docs spreadsheet http://bit.ly/Rqq2gi, and outlined in a Google Doc http://bit.ly/1qMlDAn). These included sharing six second Vine videos, using Vyclone to introduce each student group, and a combined synchronous Google Plus Hangout of all the participants. Figure 5: The MoCo360 great Google Hangout



Scheduling a synchronous Google Plus Hangout required a fair amount of flexibility and commitment from students to participate early in the morning (NZ), midday (Colombia), and late evening (UK and France), with the author joining while on the Train to work via the Google Plus mobile Hangout App. The great Google Hangout event was useful as a way of putting a face to the over two hundred participants in the project. The MoCo360 lecturers also collaborated with mobile social media App developers Vyclone to enable their App to collate video clips using the #moco360 hashtag, resulting in an international Vyclone movie megamix http://youtu.be/JhSUzTY_ezE. Another tool used for curation and community building includes Tagboard which collates Twitter, Vine, Google Plus, Instagram and WhatsApp activity https://tagboard.com/moco360/155769. These initial teacher-defined activities were then developed into brokering student-generated collaborative projects between the participating student groups using a project FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/MoCo360/ (Figure 6). Figure 6: Student MoCo360 collaborative projects page





Examples of student collaborative mobile social media activity include:  A UK student-initiated project illustrating forced perspective http://theforcedperspectiveproject.wordpress.com/  A collaborative movie of a virtual tour of Manchester and Bogota (initiated by CO students) http://youtu.be/gr7mbqw2SWM  A virtual global ball catch (initiated by UK students)  A movie of participants spinning (initiated by NZ students) http://elvsstamara.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/mobile-collaboration-info-for-you/  A movie about the beat inside all of us (initiated by NZ students) http://spmoco360.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/the-beat-inside-us-all.html  A movie of hands around the world (initiated by UK students) http://1khzhands.wordpress.com/  A series of Vine videos shared by the French students http://vinebox.com/tag/moco360

Key Issues We have identified three key elements of our developing framework: modeling a community of practice, redefining pedagogy, and designing an appropriate technology support infrastructure.

Modeling a community of practice Using Google Plus Communities has provided a visually powerful way of framing the various groups of participants’ interactions as a community of practice, and provides a tangible and simple way for lecturers to broker this concept to their students. Comparing snapshots of how the TAGSExploerer visual Twitter analysis graphs between the start of a project and after a project has developed illustrates how the communities around a project develop initially around the core participants and widen to include the movement of peripheral participants into active participation within the community. This is brokered by the modeling of the appropriate use of these tools by the participating lecturers to their student cohorts, and also between these cohorts. Initially the activity of the moco360 project was predominantly around the core group of lecturers, while Figure 3 shows several students becoming significant nodes of conversation as the project progressed.

Redefining pedagogy Each of the framework implementations has focused upon redefining teaching and learning activities and assessment practices around the unique affordances of mobile social media. In the case of the Moco360 project this involved reframing collaboration around a series of short-form fast production mobile video mini projects. These experiences gave the students a conceptual understanding of the types of collaborative projects that they could broker to one another. While we were reluctant to use FaceBook as an ‘official’ teaching and learning space within the MoCo360 project, the MoCo360 FaceBook page became an effective space for students to broker their own ideas to one another. For the participating lecturers the project enabled collaborative curriculum design with input from a group of like-minded creative educators, rather than the usual solo activity approach. This also required significant flexibility in the scheduling of course activities and assessment deadlines as the project was relatively fluid, taking shape as we saw what types of collaborative activity were appropriated by the students. For example, the French students became prolific users of Vine and sharing of geotagged photos, but were reticent to have any involvement in the project FaceBook page.

Designing an appropriate technology support infrastructure



By using mobile social media much of the projects reliance upon institutional systems is minimised. However, implementing the framework is predicated upon a robust institutional wifi network empowering connectivity and enabling lecturer and student small screen mobile devices to become collaborative tools via wireless screenmirroring. This requires working with an institutions IT department to enable wireless screen mirroring via the institutions’ wifi networks using Apple Airplay, Google Chromecast, and Microsoft’s WiDi mobile protocols. As part of our framework development we have designed and built low-cost Mobile Airplay Screens (MOAs) that facilitate student teamwork via their personal mobile devices . These MOAs can be wheeled into any space that has wireless network coverage and a power point for students to turn into a collaborative space (Figure 6). Figure 6: Mobile Airplay Screen

We have also worked with our IT department to enable classroom presentation systems to provide wireless mirroring access from lecturer and student mobile devices. As we partner with other institutions in developing our mobile social media framework for creative pedagogies we are also able to share how we have enabled infrastructure changes to support the implementation of this framework, including the custom designed MOAs. Each participating institution has unique infrastructure limitations, but by sharing experiences of how each mitigates these helps the development of creative solutions.



Conclusions We have introduced and illustrated our framework for using mobile social media as a catalyst for creative pedagogies. The goal of the framework is to enable a move from traditional teacher-directed pedagogies towards student-determined pedagogies. As we apply this framework within a variety of different contexts (iCollab, MoCo360, and DP4BYOD) we will gain a better understanding of its transferability. There are three key elements to the implementation of our developing framework: modeling a community of practice, redefining pedagogy, and designing an appropriate technology support infrastructure.

References
