Beschreibung

The Beginning

The first meeting on the 19th of October was surprising for all participants. Everyone of us had surely different expectations of the seminar.

Personally, I was prepared for something else (something boring :D), so I was positively surprised with the integration exercises at the beginning. I think it is good that we could get to know each other a little bit because of the fact that we should work in groups later.

The second part of the seminar was more organizational. There are several requirements to fill if we want to get a grade, but I think it looks more difficult than it really is. It turned out that the most important part of the course is research process. Our task is to conduct a research connected to the teaching and learning cultures at an international university. It sounds interesting!

Today we also get a seminar plan.

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Making our research we should follow 7 steps presenting below:

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For the next session we should read a text "Are there cultural differences in learning style?" of Simy Joy and David A. Kolb, that should be a kind of introduction to the topic we will do a research on.

Best wishes,

Aleksandra

1. Making groups and finding topic

Our second meeting took place on 26^th October 2017. This time we first tried to define culture. It is a really difficult notion, but thanks to various models and our brainstorming it became more familiar to us. We found out that culture is a set of experiences, beliefs etc. shared by a particular group of people and that some parts of it are visible at first sight and other are invisible.

We also discuss the text we should read – “Are there cultural differences in learning style?" of Simy Joy and David A. Kolb. The main question of the text was whether culture has an impact on learning styles and which dimensions of culture play a part in shaping them. The authors of the text present two modes of grasping experience – concrete experience (CE) and abstract conceptualization (AC) – and two modes of transforming experience – reflective observation (RO) and active experimentation (AE). Besides, they differentiate 4 basic learning style types: Diverging (making more use of concrete experience and reflective observations), Assimilating (learning through reflective observation and abstract conceptualization) , Converging (using abstract conceptualization and active experimentation) and Accommodating (active experimentation and concrete experience). According to the authors culture has a significant impact on the learning style mainly in deciding persons’s preference for abstract conceptualization and concrete experience. Nevertheless area of specialization and level of education seems to have a larger effect on determining a person’s preference for concreteness or abstraction than culture. In case of developing a preference for active experimentation or reflective observation age and area of specialization had more impact than culture. To sum up culture has an impact on learning styles, but not only culture. There are also few dimensions of culture that impact learning style - collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, future orientation and gender egalitarianism.

Afterwards we built groups we will work in and made a mind maps connecting to learning and teaching culutres, which should have helped us to find a topic of our projects we will do a research on. Our group – me, Haekyoung and Ipek – are thinking about choosing input of technology into learning and/or teaching as our research topic. This idea came to us during making our mind map (you can see it below) and we were consistent that the use of technology at universities would be something that we would be interested in. The first version of our research question is “How do teaching and learning cultures change through technology at universities?”.

The tasks of the second session requiered creativity and active participation what I really like in this course.

Our mind map.jpg

Best wishes,

Aleksandra

2. Considering environment

After we - Aleksandra, Ipek and me - chose our big topic, we were concentrated on narrowing down to the specific topic. This research question we chose - “How do teaching and learning cultures change through technology at universities?”- was more about directivity so we had to make more concrete one to research what we really want to know. At first, we was about to dealing with all universities regardless of nation, but we realized it is not fit for research because of ambiguity. So we decided to narrow the all university to our university, European University Viadrina which is academic and basic environment we can easily experience.

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European University Viadrina is very globalized and humanity oriented university. About 20 percent of students are exchange and erasmus students. The important thing to us is Viadrina has three departments.

1. Law faculty

2. Social and Cultural Sciences faculty

3. Business Administration and Economics faculty

That means we can compare what is the cultural differences between these faculties. We didn't decide whether to focus on departments or not but it is still fascinating topic to search. Also we guessed Viadrina students use technology like mahara or moodle.

To conclude everything, we decided to focus on European University Viadrina because of its accessibility and certainty so that it provides good environment to research our research question.

We are really looking forward to going to the next level! :-)

Best wishes,

Haekyoung Seo

3. Dig deeper for our topic

After we decided to environment for our topic we decided meet again 11 November. In this meeting Aleksandra ,Haekyoung and me, we knew we had to dig deeper our topic because getting more specify and we had to see everything more clear about our topic. We worked with meticulously for our topic. We discussed with the the text that we had to read for session , it was 'Methods for Intercultural Communication Research' of John Oetzel, Saumya Pant, and Nagesh Rao. That article helped us very well because it was like a road map about which methods we can use for our topic and research. In addition to these articles also we talk about the articles that we found about with our research question. They were 'Tools for learning: Technology and teaching strategies.' Michelle Eady and Lori Lockyer and 'Technology in Education' by Benjamin Herold. And also we made a search from our University Library and we found few books , and we talk about that books , too.At the same time during the meeting we had thoughts about talking with expert. And we send mail to Susanne Schwarz who specializes in E-Learning at our university and started to wait for answers.

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During the meeting we decided to many things about our research project. We added many matters for our mind map and our mind map expanded with this we started to see our research road very clear. And finally we made that mind map you can see above during the class.

Best Wishes,

Ipek Ongan

4. Research question

We thought several weeks about our research question till we found a good one.

The first idea was “How do teaching and learning cultures change through technology at universities?”, but we weren’t completely happy with it. We weren’t sure if this question is specific enough. We started to think about the environment we would like to do a research on and decided that the best idea is to analyze changes connected to technology in teaching and learning cultures no at universities in general but at our university. In result, we changed our research question to “How do teaching and learning cultures change through technology at the Viadrina University?”. Then we consider questions that are linked to that question and are interesting for us:

Is technology use different depending on faculty?
Are students more efficient when they use technology?
Are teachers happy with the development of technology?

However, it was still too much information for one research. We finally decided that the differences regarding technology use between faculties at Viadrina university is the most interesting part for us, so we want to concentrate on students from different faculties and not on teachers.

So our final research question is: “How does the use of technology make students of different faculties at the Viadrina University more efficient?”

Next step we are working on is to get an access to our target group and make a questionnaire. We hope we will get some interesting results!

Best wishes,

Aleksandra

5. Research design

After much quiet contemplation, we finally had our big research question; How does the use of technology make student of different faculties at the Viadrina University more efficient? in last post. All we going to do right now is making a portrait of our real research. It is called 'Research Design'.

First, we have to choose the type of research. There are two types of big world view and each inside of this world view has one or two specific designs.

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In our first decision was to choose 'why is going on' because it will be interesting to see and easy to catch the using technological devices differences of each part of faculties. However we found out Interpretative thing is too explanatory so that it would have capacity to be ambigious.

So we finally focused on 'what is going on', so called 'Social Science'. For concentrating on one topic and clear results, we automatically decided to use 'Questionnaire' after choosing the big world view. And after few times of debate, we realized face-to-face questionnaire would not provide proper cases to analyze, so we decided to use online questionnaire, 'Google' platform.

We are very happy that we are eventually drawing a half of our art. This drawing needed so many thinking, erasing and fixing, but it was not that bad rather fun and exciting for our group because we gathered our mind and just do our best! Next is the very Online questionnaire! I'm looking forward to making the questions right now!

Best wishes,

Haekyoung Seo

6.Research

The thinking and making research process about our research question keep going very efficient. We learn too many things when we are at class and we are making some exercise for our group work. We learn how we can make research project but at the same time we learn how we can work as a group, how we can share our ideas and how we can apply to our research. During that time we made a practice at class. The practice's name is ' Comfort zone'. According to that pratice we had three circle and that circles names are comfort zone, learning zone and panic zone. we have to think our research process and according to that which steps are in comfort zone , learning zone or panic zone.When we thinking as a group , during that process all step for us in mostly in comfort zone. And that is like a proof for our group because anymore we sure about we are in right way in research process.

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<<comfort zone>>

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<<examples graphics from our results>>

After we decided our method for research, we choosed online questionnare and after our questions ready for answering, we posted on facebook groups of our university. We posted to all faculties facebook pages. After one week later we had anymore results. 22 people answered our question and we had results from each one of faculties . This important point for us because we wanted to see is there any differences between faculties. We look every detail in results and seperate acoording to faculties. We took help from our results graphics. We finally feel relax and happy about our research process because we learned every step of research process very well and we glad for our results.

Best Wishes

Ipek Ongan

7. Reflection

After 3 months of our research process we can say it was a really interesting experience. Every week we met in groups so we learned how to work in team. Besides, it was the first time for us that we were doing a real research. Some things were easier, some more difficult. Finding an expert and conducting an online questionnaire were quite challanging, because we never did this before. After all it wasn't that bad. Our expert Susanne Schwarz was really kind and it was not a problem for her to answer a few questions. We were thinking a lot about questions for our online questionnaire and maybe if we would have a chance to work further on our research, we would change a few things. We don't really know. What we learned is also that the very important part of research is to find a good research question that should be interesting for you and not to general/specific enough. You should know what you ask and what you want to achieve with your research.

I think it was a good time. We had fun working together and improved abilities we can use in the future.

Best wishes,

Aleksandra Zieminska

Our way to learn how to do a research: Aleksandra, Haekyoung, Ipek This page is part of the collection 'Managing Teaching and Learning Cultures'.

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