Re: education, technology & chat (goofballing and hawthornes)

["Peg Griffin" <Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net>]

Hi,
How about having sessions early on during which there is an extra camera
that the kids are in charge of manipulating?  That way the adults can try to
"be on the kid's side" -- just pushing with them rather than pulling from an
oppositional stance (learned from a brilliant ED group).
I've done this in primary classrooms and we did it in the early 5th D's.
Just have some cameras located in a "researchers' areas" that researchers
are in charge of and the other one outside those areas that are for
students' use.  In my experience, kids get into "production" and production
value and they are disdainful or bored with the camera stuff we were doing.
Peg
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Chappell" <phil_chappell@access.inet.co.th>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 7:58 AM
Subject: Re: education, technology & chat


> Hmm. Mediational results of research tools; tools which are so often
> unproblematically included. Thanks, Bill, for foregrounding this.
Depending
> on how important discourse is to your project (and mine, which it is, he
> sneaks in), I wonder what technologies might avoid goofballing and
> hawthornes? I haven't yet found an "ethical " way to do this with adult
> language learners. Anyone have any ideas?
>
> Sorry to get too practical in this wonderful discussion that is
illuminating
> Davydovian theory in a most concrete sense. Thanks to bb for sharing.
>
> Phil
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Barowy" <xmcageek@comcast.net>
> And recording group audio in a noisy classroom is not easy.  There's a
whole
> lot of hawthorne effect that equipment has on kids this age.  While I can
> stand and observe and write my brains out and the kids htink nothing of
this
> except occasionally to ask what i'm writing, a video camera turns them
into
> total goofballs.  We have a decoy camera (one that no longer works) that
we
> leave on the camera mount  whenever we are not videoing with the real
camera
> so a camera is always there to see.
>
>