This one is about the current/future state of higher education (CFHE 2012) and again spending those first moments trying to figure out the lay of the land. But the organizers are very communicative, which only helps and generates my curiosity.
Reading novels can change your life
Changing Beliefs and Behaviour Through Experience-Taking
G.F. Kaufman & L.K. Libby
Finally, some research to support what every fiction-fan knows, that readers will live vicariously through the narratives of well-developed lead characters.
“This immersive phenomenon of simulating the mindset and persona of a protagonist is what we refer to as experience-taking. Through experience-taking, readers lose themselves and assume the identity of the character, adopting the character’s thoughts , emotions, goals, traits, and actions and experiencing the narrative as though they were that character.”
Brecht knew that and didn’t like it, inventing Epic Theatre as a way to prevent audience identification with the bourgeois values of theatre and to be able to engage critically with topics and themes (ie. agendas) rather than characters. Muriel Spark knew it too, adopting a distancing technique that makes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie all the more deliciously wicked.
But for teaching, where we are trying to manipulate and change in our ‘safe’ environments, it’s good to be able to point to research that supports simple but well crafted narratives as a means to affect change. As I continue to work on digital storytelling learning objects with single narratives told in the first person, I feel as though I have to defend myself and my prudent approach in the onslaught of data-, labour- and bandwidth-intensive ‘interactive digital storytelling‘ where every possible choice the reader (user?) makes needs to be pre-programmed under the illusion of reader(user?)-driven experiences.
Kaufman GF, Libby LK. Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking. Journal of Personality and Socical Psychology. 2012 Mar 26. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 22448888.
Overview & Critiques of Design-based Research
from Terry Anderson and Julie Shattuck in Educational Researcher
They chart the cycle of design-based research methodology to date, from initial articulation, to proselytizing, to, most recently, practice.
DBR always involve a learning intervention as part of its methodology and most involve multiple iterations of assess/design/develop/deliver/evaluate.
…Unlike quantitative studies, most DBR studies do not produce measurable effect sizes that demonstrate “what works.” However, they provide rich descriptions of the contexts in which the studies occurred, the challenges of implementation, the development processes involved in creating and administrating the interventions, and the design principles that emerged…
…one of the challenges of DBR is knowing when, if ever, the research project is completed,….
…DBR seems have been used to make a difference—but mostly at the level of small-scale interventions and in the lives of individual teachers and schools. It is interesting to speculate if the methodology could and will be used by researchers to investigate today’s disruptive innovations such as massive open online courses, tuition-free universities (e.g., People’s University), open educational resources, and other networked learning innovations.