David Parsons spoke on behalf of his team.
Does mobile learning really mean social learning? mentioned by Savannah (2004)
What triggers collaboration (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)
In order for people to get into the zone there has to be a balance between the skills they are using, with the challenge they are up to.
We try to go beyond the Zone.
From gaming experience we have observed that these games are all about working with other people and from those experiences they begin to learn.
What we have been looking at is looking at literature outside Learning: Cohen et al., 2009: recent biological evidence suggests that team-play allows individuals to take on more risks and challenges (rise above the pain).
Social flow
Walker's 'social flow' (2010) indicate that is doing it together gets you to do more.
collaborative physical activity was rated as being more enjoyable when collaborating (overcome more barriers, so more social flow).
Social flow in mobile learning
Activity theory and desing frameworks, can we show a collaborative working to come to social flow with mLearning.
Research method: simulated campus security training
three situated learning settings (solitary mobile learning, immediate mLearning collaboration, time delayed mLearning collaboration). Dividing the groups was done at random (in total: 45 students).
Apparatus enables
talking to one another, exchange ideas,
instructions about what they are supposed to learn
...
Design and measures? (look at the paper, time was limited so from here on David was speaking ever quicker)
Procedure: two days of activities.
collaborative activities
sharing observations,
sharing photographs
structured debate with scaffolding words (problem, theory, agreement, disagreement, suggestion) to get some kind of qualitative idea.
Results
The unvisited personal places were significantly different within the groups.
a lot more negotiation within the face-to-face group, time delay group. From a qualitative perspective: the interaction was smoother when happening all the time.
collaborative was much higher when going on whole the time.
significant difference in cognitive curiosity and intrinsic interest and risk-taking.
Lessons learned
positive self-improvement opportunities
opportunities might be reciprocal
future work
the communication channel: would richer communication be better for collaboration?
level of social bond: would close friends meet the challenges better?
the types of collaboration: would the be able to co-develop challenging tasks.